Peter Heller: Celine

“Sometimes I had to pull and drag him out of bed. He would resist and moan and then when he woke up and his bleary eyes focused I would see that he was awake and that he was seeing me and he would stare. Not like at me, Gabriela, his daughter, but like down a long street where he would find me and search my face, at first desperately, then with some kind of relief, then with growing anguish, and I knew he was not seeing me but the face of my mother.

“I cannot describe the effect this had on me. It made me feel both desperate to be consoled and also like a ghost. I would tell him that I was hungry, and often there was nothing in the fridge or pantry and he would take my hand and, still wearing the same clothes he had the night before, he would walk me down the hill on Clayton. He’d take me to the bakery on Haight and buy me a blueberry Danish and a carton of milk and then walk me to the French American School. That was the year of the Summer of Love, which of course I didn’t know then, but I remember the colorful clothes, and all the smells of what must have been pot and patchouli and sweat, and people playing guitars and all kinds of drums, and handing out food. There was this one kid with beautiful blond hair to his waist who handed out apples. It was his thing. He gave me an apple almost every day. Sometimes we took the streetcar on Divisadero for a few blocks just for fun. I didn’t care that Pop was unshaven and rumpled. I would cling to his hand. He was a very handsome man, even with a three-day beard, and I could see the way the young mothers looked at him and talked to him when he dropped me off, a mixture of maternal pity and lust. I could not name it then but I felt it—that he was desirable. I could see the way women, even my teachers, lit up, the way they changed when they talked to him.

“Well, he was a National Geographic photographer and an adventurer and just so handsome and he had just lost his beautiful wife.”

Celine closed her eyes. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year Hank had started at Saint Ann’s, which had recently opened. There was no Summer of Love in Brooklyn Heights, but it was a wonderful, exciting time. They were living on Grace Court and her own marriage was still strong—she would not have felt the pull of the dashing photojournalist. Everything with Wilson would not unravel until Hank was at boarding school. That’s when the drinking started. A few years she would rather forget.

“In the afternoon it was the same,” Gabriela wrote. “He often forgot to pick me up. There was often no dinner. When he came out of his reverie and realized that an eight-year-old girl can’t live on vodka the way he did, he would rouse himself and off we would go to the Mediterranean restaurant on Haight, or the Japanese place on Cole that’s gone now and I would eat nothing but tempura. God, I would have been roly-poly but for all the meals I missed.”

Celine paused again. She could see it—there was something ascetic in the beauty of the young woman, and now she knew where it had come from: deprivation.

She continued reading: “Did I ask him about Mom? I don’t remember ever asking. Is that crazy? Maybe not. There was a hole there, it spoke for itself. I didn’t want any other explanation, I guess, anything at all that would get the Absence vibrating any more than it was, because the Absence was an utter ache, a black ball sitting very still in the middle of my chest. I knew that if it moved too much—that the vibrations of questions and half answers would tear me apart, cell from cell. I intuited this.

“That was third grade, with Miss Lough. I remember it was on the second floor of the new building on Grove.” Celine had heard of the French American International School. It was a very progressive private school that started about the same time as Saint Ann’s, and like Hank’s school it began with just a few kids. “She was very tender with me. Sometimes when Pop forgot to pick me up she would wait with me outside, and then she would glance at her watch and try not to look too sad. She was very kind. Then she would whistle out a sigh and take my hand and say, ‘What shall we sing while we walk?’ It was lucky she had a boyfriend in the Haight. I took it all in stride. When you’re that little you don’t know any better. I don’t even think I was unhappy, I don’t remember that as a particularly bad year. I missed Amana terribly. Jackson, too. As far as I was concerned this was the way life went when you were seven or eight. Sometimes your mother didn’t come home for good, forever. Sometimes your father forgot stuff, sometimes you went hungry.

“And then one evening, at the end of our year with Miss Lough, Pop came home with a loud buxom cigarette-smoking nurse named Danette and they got married at city hall and she cleaned him up and put food in the cupboards. Not long after that she caught him looking at me across the dinner plates and she went and plucked up the picture of Amana on the hall table—she’s on the deck of some ferry, smiling into the wind with the hair blowing across her face—I loved that picture so much—and Danette stomped back and held it up to my own face and practically spit at Pop, ‘Every time you look at her you see her,’ and jabbed her finger at Mom. I felt as if she were jabbing it into my own chest, I winced and started to cry.

“‘That’s enough!’ she said. ‘I can’t live like this. You’—she aimed her finger at Pop and her chest heaved, she was wearing a low-cut V-neck thing with no bra and there was a lot of chest to heave—‘you figure out how this is going to work!’ and she slammed out the front door.

“The next week they put me in my own apartment downstairs. With my own key and my own food. I was eight.”

Celine set down the page. “You lived in your own apartment in third grade?” she murmured to no one. She drained her coffee cup and refilled it from the carafe Pete had brought with the tray. “You’re kidding.”

Why didn’t her teachers know that? she thought. They should have. Well. Gabriela’s words didn’t feel like an indictment of her teachers or her family, but Celine might have taken them that way. Gabriela must have realized it, because the next line read: “Maybe I didn’t know how screwed up that was. Pop told me the building was one big house and I was going to have a special treat usually reserved for older girls, I was going to have my own big room and even my own kitchen. You know, I could always tell when he was lying. Especially to himself. Sometimes I felt that way when he talked about his travels.”

She thought about the young woman she had met the other night. Gabriela had a remoteness and a self-reliance that might make her unapproachable. And a sadness, she realized now. Very quiet, underneath it all.

Celine continued: “Pop was often in Ecuador shooting for the Smithsonian, or in Guatemala for National Geographic. He loved to ski in the Andes. The other parents had a heroic picture of him, I could tell. He spent a lot of time in South America and someone later told me that the rumor was that he worked for the CIA. Ha. What people always thought about someone who had a life that was just a little interesting or exotic. And when they saw him—this was later, after the first months of sodden grief—in his tight black T-shirts with his strong arms and clean jawline and his hair like James Dean’s with the swept-up wave in front, his easy laugh, and especially with the air of having just been somewhere exotic and dangerous—it was like a breeze that came off him, you could smell it—everyone was charmed by Pop.”

I bet, Celine thought. She always thought it was interesting that the most charming people—if you scratched the surface—were often the saddest. Celine topped her cup to warm it up and found her place at the bottom of the page.