Celine

NINE

We have all seen the posters and prints of the bends of the Snake River curling beneath the sharp granite towers of the Grand Tetons. The water is black and the peaks are dusted with new snow and the cottonwoods along the banks are yellow, their smoldering ranks throwing the scale of the mountains into perspective. Because the tall trees look tiny running along the bottom of the picture. It may be morning and the river is covered in mist that moves over the water like smoke, and there may be one man fishing, his fly rod bent back mid-cast. If he is there, it is only to remind us that the grandeur and shocking beauty are not of human scale. That the most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind.

Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness.

Those were Celine’s thoughts as she drove along the river on just such a morning. The mist smoked and rose, the peaks towered, the cottonwoods caught the sun from the south and blazed and flamed. It was almost too grand. It could not be real.

“Look, Pete,” she said. “There’s a man fishing down there in the fog. It looks just like that poster of Hank’s.”

“Aye-yup.” Pa was speaking Maine this morning. Clearly the Washakie waitress in her reticence had reminded him of his first language.

They drove out into the open grass valley where a herd of elk in their hundreds grazed head down unafraid of bow hunters. “That’s the National Elk Refuge,” said Celine, pointing. “I remember all this. I took Mimi skiing here for her thirtieth birthday. I remember we rode a big cable car to the top—that mountain there, can you see it?—and once we got above the fog it was bright sun and blue blue sky, and as we neared the summit an announcement in the gondola said something about ‘If you are not an expert ride back down.’ It was glorious skiing up there, all those steep chutes. And down below the whole valley obscured by a layer of clouds. When we took our long run all the way to the bottom for lunch we skied right through that floor of clouds, right into mist and snow! We were like two little airplanes!”

“Mmm,” Pete hummed.

“You’re not listening to a thing I say this morning!” Celine cried, though she knew, of course, that this was not true.

“Hmph.”

“Hmph is right. We have good cell reception. When we get to town, I’m going to call Gabriela again.”

“Good idea.”

Suddenly they were at the edge of it, the bustling town. They wound past the rec center, the first ski shops and cafés, and entered the flow of traffic around the central square. The town was packed. Trucks loaded with kayaks and bikes, campers with fly-rod vaults on the roof. Everybody seemed to be on the way to Fun. A sunny cool September morning, bracing for real fall but unwilling to let go of summer, the kind of autumn day that can only occur a couple of weeks a year. Tourists posed for pictures at the corners of the square, beneath tall arches made of elk antlers, their big smiles not at all fake.

“You’d think it was Fourth of July,” Celine exclaimed. “Gracious! Don’t any of these people have jobs?”

“Hard to say.”

“Let’s pull over.” As soon as she said it, an SUV carrying a canoe began backing out of one of the prized parking spots. Right in front of them. Pete did not comment. This was another of his wife’s talents: She had Parking Angels.

They got out, stretched, walked slowly on stiff knees across the street to one of the antlered arches.

“Pete, wait a sec. Let me catch my breath here. It’s all the sitting. Can you please post this letter for me. It’s to Hank. There’s a box there.” What a nuisance, emphysema. She thought she was a long way from having to carry oxygen, but higher altitudes could make things difficult, especially when she was tired, which she was. Her sleep had been troubled after seeing that truck vanish into the mist. She hadn’t imagined it, and she was sure that whoever was driving the vehicle had been scouting them. God knows why.

Pete rejoined her and she glanced over her head at the gate of antlers. “Come the True Dreams through Gates of Horn,” she said.

Pete held her hand, barely. Moral support. “And False through the Gates of Ivory.” He looked up. “Definitely qualify as horn,” he said.

“Hmm. We’ll take it as a sign. Old Penelope was even wiser than her husband, don’t you think? Women usually are.” She gave Pete’s hand a squeeze, a sign that he could release her. “Let’s sit on that bench in the shade.” They did. Celine wore a small leather belt pack at her waist and she pried from it her flip phone. She called Gabriela, let it ring. Just before she thought it would go to voice mail the young woman picked up. Celine thought she had deliberated—Pick up or not pick up?—she could hear it in the sound of her “Hello?”

“Gabriela, hi, this is Celine. We are in Jackson on the way to Yellowstone. Are you well?”

“Fairly well. Yes.”

“And your son?”

“He’s—he’s at school. Yes.” She sounded nervous.

“Good. Before we get to Cooke City I’d like to know if you can locate your research file now. You know, it will be tremendously helpful.”

The conversation began in fits and starts, which was another clue. Celine pressed about the file. How on earth could she misplace it? What did that mean, anyway? Gabriela at first was evasive. She tried to sound upbeat and clueless—“God, I have no idea. I wonder if I left it in the coffee shop at the corner, I was going over it, trying to organize it before I copied it to send to you, I just don’t know. I’ve been by the place half a dozen times!”—and the more hapless she acted, the more seriously distraught she sounded.

“Just a sec,” Celine said. She stopped the girl in her tracks. She had no patience for a bad liar. A good liar, on the other hand, was someone to learn from. She dug back into her belt pack, pulled out a red plastic inhaler, and sprayed herself one, then two full doses and held them in her lungs. Pheeeeew she let them out through pursed lips. “There. Better.” She breathed two lungfuls of mountain air. “Now. I am an old woman, who knows how much time I have left. I certainly don’t have enough of the stuff to tolerate deceit from the ones who should be telling me the truth. Gabriela, can you tell me what in God’s name is really going on?”

Gabriela said she honestly didn’t know. That rang true.

“Okay, tell me,” Celine said.

“I—I don’t know if I can. Or should.”

“You are scared.”

“A little, yes.”

It was hard for Celine to imagine the intrepid bundle of energy she had met on the dock, the one with the clear laugh and the scent of blossoms, as frightened. Even the sadness that softened her seemed devoid of fear. “Well.” Celine waited. One beat, then two. “Is it that we are on the phone?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

Celine thought for a second. “You know,” she said finally, “there is probably nothing you can tell me now, about the file, that Whom It May Concern doesn’t already know.”

Gabriela laughed, nervously, but it relieved the tension. “Yes, I guess that’s true. Well, I put it on the coffee table in my apartment a week ago. To review, as I said. I went down to the athletic club on Mission for a yoga class and when I came back I couldn’t find it anywhere. I went out of my mind. I was sure I’d left it there. And—”

“Yes?”

“My picture of Amana was knocked over. The one on the ferry. It is never knocked over. It sits on its own shelf. Nick can’t even reach it. And in the kitchen, the silverware tray was over on the right side of the big drawer. I keep it on the left. And—”

“Go on.”

“That passport was gone.”

The phone was on speaker so that Pete could listen in. He had taken off his tweed cap and leaned his head in close, the side with the hearing aid. At twenty-two he had enlisted before he could be drafted for Korea, and though the war ended before he was ever shipped out, he went almost deaf on his right side from firing an M1C sniper rifle. He had been trained as a sniper, which was an odd specialty for a man with Pete’s gentle nature, but maybe not so odd when one takes into account his boyhood growing up on a Maine island and plinking groundhogs from impressive distances with a .22. Pete’s range instructors would have noticed it right away. His brother told Celine once that Pete could hit a flying chunk of two-by-four with a .22 just as if he were using a shotgun. A talent he never mentioned, which was not surprising as he never mentioned much.

Celine considered. If the file had been stolen, which sounded like the case, then this investigation had just become much more interesting. And they had barely started. A frisson of excitement went through her.

Celine’s close friends had long ago determined that she was not constructed like other people. Where others might shrink or panic she seemed to get larger, to become more focused. Perhaps it was her years with Admiral Halsey, Baboo’s longtime companion, who was known and feared for going straight into the teeth of battle. It was a trait his critics dissected with relish. But what they often missed in their analyses of battles and tactics was a streak of imagination and creativity that came straight out of a zest for boyhood mischief. Celine must have told Hank the story half a dozen times: When Halsey was an upperclassman at Annapolis he was given command of a patrol frigate during a live-ammo battle exercise on the Chesapeake. There were two teams. There was also heavy fog. The live ammo were rubber torpedoes. Halsey used his enemy’s convoy as radar cover—they just assumed the blip was theirs as no enemy in his right mind would fall into the fleet like a duckling—and he maneuvered undetected so close to a Farragut-class destroyer—feet not yards—that when he loosed his rubber torpedo he put a hole in the hull of the brand-new ship. He was reprimanded and commended by the same commander—who had a distinct twinkle in his eye as he gave the cadet his dressing-down.

Hank, who loved to think about character, sometimes wondered if that spirit in the face of long odds, and the unorthodox approach, may have rubbed off on Celine when she was a child. He thought of the two of them walking up that dirt road together in mud season in Vermont, the distraught girl holding the old admiral’s hand, the cold wind through the bare woods blowing her hair so that it covered her tear-stained face, the aged sailor barely noticing, his wandering mind maybe coming at last to focus on his young charge, this current mission: To console and protect. To educate. To love. Which he did. He adored Celine—Baboo had said so. He may have seen in the skinny girl—in her courage and mettle and imagination—a little of himself. What he might have said to her that afternoon: something about when we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.

One of Hank’s favorite stories of Celine was years after Admiral Bill died. She was in her forties. One of her cousins, the curator Rodney’s younger brother Billy, was dying of pancreatic cancer at St. Luke’s up in Harlem. She went to say goodbye. They had grown up together and shared many summers on Fishers Island and he was enduring probably his last day on earth and she stayed late and did not let herself fall apart in his room. And she lost track of time. It was two a.m. when she finally kissed his cheek and said, “I’ll be seeing you, Billy,” and went out into the November night. It was windy and cold, much like that day with Admiral Bill years ago. She was lost to memories of childhood as she made her way down a deserted Amsterdam Avenue. This was back when that part of the city was much more dangerous than it is today. She had a vague thought that she might catch a cab at 110th Street. Litter blew across the street. The heels of her pumps clicked on the pavement and her bracelets jingled. Suddenly two large men leapt out from a doorway and loomed in front of her. They were very rough. Without thought Celine said, “Oh! You must be freezing!” Addressing the larger of the two, she said, “You’ll catch your death of cold. Your shirt is all ripped. Let me see if I have a safety pin.” With that, she opened up her purse and began rifling through it.

The men stared. They were dumbfounded. “Here, found one!” she said and pulled it out and reached up and deftly folded back the edge of the rip, smoothing it carefully so that it made a neat edge the pin could catch, and she did the same on the other side of the tear, and with wonderful concentration pushed the pin through both sides and secured it. She patted it neatly down. “There,” she said. “You’ll be much warmer.” The men stared. When they could speak they told her that this, ah, neighborhood was really really dangerous and what was she doing out here all alone?

“Saying goodbye to someone at the hospital who has been very special to me.”

They insisted on walking her to the corner and waiting with her for a cab. Hank could see the two towering men in tatters, and little Celine in her long wool coat and beret and gold earrings. Of course no cab would stop, the men were too formidable. So she finally turned to them and said, “You two were on your way to doing something, why don’t you go do it. I’ll be fine. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.” And as soon as they left she hailed a taxi.

She had not been in command of a frigate that night, and her motive was not a vanquishing of any kind, but the instinct to go straight ahead where others wouldn’t dream to go seems in sympathy with her surrogate father.

Now she covered the phone in her lap for a second and was on the verge of speaking to Pete when she picked it up again and said, “I’ll call you back in just a minute. I promise. Pete is right here and we need to talk it over,” and she hung up.