Peter Heller - Celine

“I see,” she said. “Can you tell me why?”

“I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Hinton picked a pencil off the blotter and shaved the lead with a thumbnail.

“You’re pregnant,” she said finally. The girl’s eyes widened with surprise, then instant fury.

“Dr. Watt called you.”

Mrs. Hinton shook her head. “No, he did not. Though he is required to do so. I have been doing this a long time. I knew the moment you walked through the door.” She reached a hand out to Celine who hesitated and took it. Mercifully, Mrs. Hinton gave it one reassuring squeeze and let it go. Celine thought it was like the handshake the captains of opposing sports teams give each other before a match, to show that it was nothing personal.

“I will be very, very sorry to lose you. Do you wish to call your mother? I’ll ask Loreen to go out and fetch the mail and you can use the phone in her office. When you’re done you can tell your mother that I’ll be calling her this afternoon.”

Celine did not quiver or cry once during the entire visit. She called Baboo who took the news with surprisingly brisk pragmatism, the kind you’d expect from a mother who had once run a household with seven servants and raised three daughters in the shadow of a Nazi invasion, and who was the lover of a married fleet admiral. Celine took great strength from her mother’s response and was immensely relieved. She understood for the first time in her young life what mothers were really made for. When Celine told her that Mrs. Hinton had expressed real disappointment in having to expel her, Baboo snapped.

“You are not going anywhere young lady. She threw all of you boys and girls together and assured us that it was tout à fait bien. This mess is her responsibility more than yours and she will clean it up. Now please tell her to come to the phone. I will not be available later, I plan to be busy this afternoon.” Celine wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. With wonder at her mother’s moral authority. Well, she would certainly not shed tears in the presence of the headmistress, not after her mother’s display of regal sang-froid. She handed the phone to the one other truly strong woman she had ever known and waited for the fireworks.

There weren’t any. Celine heard Mrs. Hinton say, “I see. I understand that you feel that way and I am sympathetic, I truly am, but that is our policy… Yes, yes, I understand… No. No, well… I would be happy to talk… No. Tomorrow afternoon? Well… I… Well. I see. Mrs. Watkins?… Yes… Okay, I look forward to it.”

Did the ruddy-cheeked Carmelita Hinton look slightly pale when she hung up? Celine thought so. The headmistress rested the phone on the cradle and said, “Your mother is driving up to see us tomorrow.”

On April 19, 1948, Barbara Cheney Watkins was driven from East Sixty-Eighth Street to Putney, Vermont, by William F. Halsey’s driver, and she was accompanied by the admiral. Admiral Bill may have thought that he was about to witness one last epic engagement. The man told Baboo more than once that his life’s greatest sorrow was having to sail away from sinking ships and leave his men drowning in the burning slicks and drifting in their Mae West lifejackets, terrified and abandoned while sharks circled. A horror that never ceased to haunt his dreams. And so he can be excused if he took Celine’s hand while her mother met with Mrs. Hinton, and walked with her slowly, in his suit, up a dirt road muddy with snowmelt and seemed to be thinking of distant things.

Celine would never know what was said in Mrs. Hinton’s office, but Baboo emerged in her long sable coat that gleamed and ruffled in the cold April wind, and Celine could tell by her bearing that if she chose, she could return one day to the Putney School.

Aside from Celine, the only one alive who knew this story was Hank, and it came to him in pieces. Celine told him some: how she had been expelled for one single day from the Putney School for fraternizing with a boy. The image he always had—and it may have been, of course, because he was her son, and the imagination of a son will only go so far when it comes to a mother—of “fraternizing” was her climbing trees with a fellow student. Birch trees, probably. He saw the two of them perched in a leafy canopy sharing a cigarette and a kiss. Certainly grounds for expulsion in the old days.

Celine told him how the sentence had lasted only as long as it took for Baboo to drive up to the school and give Mrs. Hinton an earful. Hank loved that. To him, Baboo had always seemed august and he loved to imagine her words in that office: “My dear Headmistress Hinton, what did you think was going to happen when you threw a hundred hormone-addled adolescent boys together with a hundred unchaperoned young girls? On a farm ? I’ve never heard of such a thing…” Baboo had the authority of someone with immense personal discipline who adhered rigorously, unwaveringly, to how things ought to be done. She was also adored by her many grandchildren because it was clear to even the youngest that she had seen almost everything in her long life and understood how complicated and many layered people were, and it was obvious, above all, how much she loved them, an adoration beyond reckoning, and sometimes she could give the wink and tolerate a bit of foolishness because, Lord knows, she had been foolish enough at times.

Baboo told Hank some of Celine’s story, inadvertently. She said something once after they both had had several cocktails and were sitting on her porch that overlooked the little marsh above her beach. It was right after he graduated from high school. Moths batted at the porch light and herons croaked from the cattails, and frogs boomed, and the tiny intermittent lanterns of the fireflies blinked. She said that she was glad he had had such a fun and easy time at Putney, because she had been terribly afraid after Celine took most of her sophomore year off that she would never graduate.

Hank said, “She took most of the year off? She never told me that. Why?”

Baboo rattled the ice in her vodka tonic. She glanced over quickly and pursed her lips. “Well, they tried to expel her.”

“I know. And you stormed up there in a sable coat like Anna Karenina. Mom told me.”

Baboo laughed. “I’m not sure Anna Karenina had a sable coat. It seems to me that that awful anemic husband of hers was very cheap, wasn’t he? Karenin? I will never forget the description of the blue veins in his pale hands.” She shuddered dramatically. Baboo always amazed him. She was Catholic in temperament and seemed to have read everything. He knew that she had attended Vassar for a year over the objections of her father, Charles Cheney, who felt that girls from good families should not attend college, and he knew that she left halfway through when she married Harry Watkins. She sipped her drink. “No, your mother had decisions to make and she was as obstinate as a camel.”

That expression. Had she said “mule” it would have glided by unremarked like any hackneyed turn of phrase, but leading in a camel with his hump had the effect of inviting a certain association and he may have nearly jumped out of his seat. Somehow he saw the camel with its oddly swelling back and he saw young Celine standing beside it with her swelling belly and decisions to make. It was the first time he was certain that his mother had gotten pregnant, and this revelation was followed immediately by the certainty that she had taken time away from school because she had stubbornly decided to take her baby to term.