Peter Heller - Celine

Celine did not get the memo.

She begged to be sent away to a boarding school in Vermont where her beloved first cousin Rodney was a sophomore, and so Baboo relented and sent a scrawny fourteen-year-old girl off to Putney. The school had been started by an avowed sympathizer of the China experiment and was one of the first New England boarding schools to admit boys and girls in equal numbers. Not many: two hundred students on a dairy farm, on top of the most picturesque southern Vermont hill, with a view to folded ridges quilted with orchards, fields, sugar bush. The students, mostly from the New York and Boston elite, were required to do barn chores and cut firewood, which was a novelty they learned to relish.

Celine rose at five a.m. in the winter dark with the ice chips of stars deeply set in the patterns of constellations for which she did not know the names but that were starting to seem like friends—the billion stars that breathed a faint luminosity onto the snowy hill, the snow so cold it squeaked underfoot as she walked to the big barn whose lights already burned. The clank of stanchions and scrape of shovels and shouts already drifted across the field; she entered the barn and was hit, then enveloped in the warm heavy scents of cows and manure and lime, rotting sweet silage and dusty hay and sawdust. Celine was converted. The Putney School did not have to emulate the precepts of the new Chinese collectives—of Communism—to be subversive: It was enough to take a girl from the Upper East Side and give her a silage fork and a wheelbarrow and ask her to sweat in a crowded barn with her friends as steam came off the cows and a below-zero North Country dawn doused the stars and washed the wooded hills in a tide of blue-gray and burning rose. That was enough.

And then at ten a.m., after the first two classes, they put her on a wood bench in a creaky oak and pinewood hall and had her sing: Bach and Handel, hymns and four-part rounds. Not just for the glory of God but for life. For the joy of it. For being all together and creating music.

It was more powerful than any church. And better than any pamphlet or soap box at throwing an unflinching light on the values of patrician society. Poor Celine. Whatever wariness she aroused by simply being the offspring of Barbara Cheney Watkins, she compounded by returning to Manhattan for Thanksgiving break with an ax sticking out of her rucksack.

And then she did the unthinkable. She missed her period.

Then a second.

She had just turned fifteen. And she was pregnant.

Hank picked Pete and his mother up at Denver International Airport on the morning of September 22nd. On the way into town Celine asked Hank about his marriage, his poetry, his diet, all of which she thought would eventually come around. Pete sat in back, reassuring everyone with his dependable reserve. Hank had huge affection for his cryptic second dad. His first, who left for New Mexico when Hank was about to enter college, was the antithesis to Pete in almost every respect: Hank’s father was a gregarious storyteller, a great wit, he could do accents. He adored Edith Wharton and a good old-fashioned, and he didn’t know the first thing about building a boat. Hank loved him fiercely. It was almost like having two fathers from two different species. Hank appreciated the diversity.

He turned off the highway and drove up into his neighborhood on the edge of the lake. Celine said, “The young woman, Gabriela, whose case we’re taking—her stepmother put her in her own apartment when she was eight. And then when she was in college her father went missing in Yellowstone. Presumed dead.”

Hank passed a truck loaded with crates of live chickens. “And?” he said. He was interested.

“She grew up and raised a son mostly on her own and became quite a good fine-arts photographer. A single mom.”

Hank laughed, he couldn’t help it. His mother was a truly wily investigator, but when it came to trying to disguise a message to her own son she was hopeless. He knew that she wanted to be a grandmother more than anything on earth.

“Wow,” he said simply. “She devoted her life to her art and decided to go ahead and have a kid.”

“I know,” Celine said. She patted his knee.

The tour of the camper was perfunctory. Hank pulled the Tacoma long-bed pickup around to the front of the house. Celine always thought it was a wonderful spot, with a big view to the west of water and mountains, and it was five minutes from downtown’s Union Station and the Tattered Cover Book Store. Until the spring he had lived in the house with his wife, Kim, but she was gone now in a trial separation—partly, she said, because she was sick of trying to be married to someone who was away half the time on assignment. Well.

The camper was one of those that fitted in the bed of the truck and extended over the cab. Hank unlocked the little back door and invited his mother and Pa in at a crouch and showed them how to unlock the latches and pop the top. He’d installed pressurized struts so it didn’t take much more than a gentle push to lift the roof about three feet. Now they could all stand and light poured in through the lemon canvas. Celine uttered a happy cry. “Oh, look,” she said. “I thought we’d have to crouch like when we lived in a shoe.”

“When did we live in a shoe?” Pete said. Hank stared at him in wonder: He speaks!

“That time we slept in the back of the hearse. When we found Jerry, the Elvis impersonator.”

“Ahh,” said Pete.

Pete wore a tweed newsboy cap, the kind worn by Welsh Mountaineers and the guys driving the butcher trucks in movies about 1940s New York. His bushy gray hair stuck out around it so that it looked a little like a life raft riding a choppy sea of furry whitecaps. He also wore a corded charcoal wool vest, the kind loggers and trappers used to wear. Hank never stopped being intrigued by the man he could never get used to calling his stepfather. He thought Pete wore the cap in solidarity with the proletariat who no longer seemed to exist. Or maybe it was simply water resistant and warm and kept the sun out of his eyes. Pete stood back holding a steno pad and took notes on the operations of the camper. He was a very fine woodworker, and he had been a small-boat builder growing up on North Haven; Hank could see his appreciation of how all the storage and utility compartments in the camper fit together—the cabin was like a small yacht.

Celine politely listened as Hank explained the propane shutoff for the two-burner stove and little furnace and fridge, the operation of the hot water heater and outdoor shower—“It’s already getting chilly up there,” Hank said, “I doubt you’ll use the shower. But anyhow, here.” Celine glanced at Pete, and Hank saw the slightest smile pass between them. What does he know? We come from northern people, they seemed to say. They were still in love, that was always so clear. With a pang, he thought of his own wife. He quickly banished her image, along with the image of his mother and Pete prancing around the Montana woods naked.

“Hank, what season is it up there?” Celine said, running a hand over the quilt on the cab-over bunk above her. Hank had given them his moose and bear quilt, to get them in the mood.

He looked at her, puzzled. “It’s—it’s early fall, Mom, same as here.”

“No, I mean is it deer and elk season yet? Or what?”

“Ah, that wouldn’t be for, like, another month. Probably archery now, and upland game birds—grouse, turkey, partridge.”

She bit her lower lip. “A bow is so cumbersome. Okay, can I borrow your twelve-gauge?”