Celine

FOUR

It has almost never happened that a grizzly bear kills more than one man. Or woman. If they do, it’s usually in the same incident, a mama bear’s rampage protecting cubs or, as in the terribly sad incident featured in Herzog’s movie Grizzly Man, a furious attack on a couple in their camp by what was probably a gaunt and desperate boar arriving at the end of the salmon run and wild with hunger. The history books are not replete with serial grizzly man-eaters. Pete checked it out after listening closely to Celine tell Gabriela’s story. There was the famous vengeful Old Two Toes, who killed and partially ate at least three men in Montana, and was probably responsible for two more deaths, but that was in 1912. In Alaska, in 1995, a pissed-off boar grizzly attacked and killed one hiker, then his friend, but the incident was a response to being surprised on a moose carcass—a crime of passion so to speak. The incidents of premeditated, or habitual, serial assaults were very rare. No: Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet.

Once, in northwest Montana, up near Glacier National Park, Pete had flown into the Bob Marshall Wilderness for a three-week backpacking trip with a legendary backcountry pilot named Dave Hoerner. Hoerner had told him how a very large boar griz had been disrupting camps on the Middle Fork of the Flathead, and had been shot with a tranquilizer gun and captured. It was Hoerner’s job to move the bear from a mountain airstrip called Schafer Meadows. Hoerner flew a Cessna 185 single-engine workhorse, and the tranquilized bear was so big that when the Forest Service crew loaded it into the back of the plane it stretched through most of the airframe and the huge head lay against Dave’s right hip where he sat in the pilot seat. In his lap was his .44 Magnum. Hoerner taxied back to the downwind end of the strip and was ticking off his run-up checklist when he looked down and saw the monster griz’s mouth twitch. Holy crap. He pulled back to idle, set the brakes, ran around, threw up the cargo door, and hauled on the bear’s legs and paws with all his might. The bear hit the grass with a thud and got to his feet and wobbled. By then Hoerner was back in his seat and throttling forward and the last he saw of the animal it was glaring back at him and striding toward the woods. Damn. Imagine if all that had happened five minutes later at two thousand feet above the ground. Mayhem.

Pete got a kick out of that story. But the fact remained that grizzly bears, like most predators, were smart enough to know that tangling with humans in any way was a bad idea. It was very hard to believe that one bear might have killed and vanished three people over a fifteen-year span. But not impossible. One thing Pete had learned over the years as a participant in so many disparate cultures, and as a family historian, is that almost nothing that can be imagined is impossible, and that, in fact, most of those things, in one form or another, have occurred. Scary, really.

He and Celine talked about Gabriela’s case over several nights, and Celine wondered if she had the strength. The last year had taken its toll. Pete was more concerned than she was. When she was upset she struggled to breathe, and he watched her with concealed alarm. One night over Wicked-Good Green Chili—her name, not his—he reached across the café table and put his hand on her arm. “Maybe this is one to let lie,” he said. “We’d have to travel, probably for more than a few days.” Her lips compressed. She was annoyed. She picked a piece of broccoli out of her stew. What was broccoli doing in chili? He was always trying to sneak something in.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “The reasonable thing is not usually the right thing. Why is that?”

Pete had not fallen in love with Celine Watkins for her timidity. He dutifully picked up the discarded broccoli and ate it.

There was something in the case she could not relinquish, and the more she mulled it over, and the more she thought about Gabriela’s shadowed life, the more energized she became.

On September 19th, Celine called Gabriela in San Francisco and told her that she would try to find her father. Or confirm that he had died. Gabriela would have to prepare herself. The young woman answered as Celine knew she would: with relief. She had money, she said, and insisted on paying expenses and the going rate of New York PIs. Celine could tell this was nonnegotiable and she did not object.

Next Celine called Hank in Denver and asked if they could borrow his truck and camper for maybe three weeks; could they fly out to Denver in a few days to pick it up?

“And Hank,” she said, “the little Glock 26 I gave you for your birthday that time? Can I borrow it, too? I’d rather not fly with mine. I have to declare it and everyone can see, and I’m always terrified it will get stolen by some baggage handler. Like that time Bruce Willis made such a fuss.”

She made Hank laugh. That time was a family legend. She had been struggling with her bags through LaGuardia when a hand had joined hers on the handle of the carry-on and a voice had said, “Allow me, ma’am,” and it was the movie star himself. He eased away the roller bag, too.

That was good enough for a good story. But then they had arrived at the check-in counter together and she had pulled the little lockbox out of her checked bag and declared the Glock, and Mr. Willis had cracked his signature smile—the warm one, not the one before he blows you away—and he’d become enamored with Hank’s mom. It was a few weeks before the New York City Police Department was to switch over from revolvers to the Glock, and so several curious airport cops came over, too, and autographs were signed, and when Willis heard Mom was a PI he gave her his personal card with an assistant’s phone number. He said, “I wish you were my mom,” which always made Hank a little jealous. Willis said that if she and her husband were ever in L.A. to please look him up. Maybe he thought her story would make a good movie.

Anyway, when she arrived in Maine to solve the case of Penobscot Paul, which became another favorite story, her treasured Glock was missing from her luggage. She always attributed it to the fuss and bother famous people leave in their wake. She considered fame to be a terrible and irresistible trap. Once she told Hank, “Hank, if you are going to do something—say, writing—do your very best, and if it happens that you also become the best in the world, that’s wonderful, but try not to let too many people know about it.”

But what made Hank happier when she called him was to hear the new tone in her voice. There was vigor there, a contained excitement he hadn’t heard in a while. And he knew that it was because she had committed again to do the work she was born for. He told her she could borrow both the truck and the gun.

Celine hadn’t ever really needed to carry a gun. The type of investigative work she did rarely involved dangerous perps. She had tried that and didn’t like it. After working for a detective agency that mostly handled domestic matters—yuck—and learning her trade and getting her PI license, she was almost immediately contacted by the FBI. The bureau, it seemed, did not have many agents who were comfortable moving in the milieu of the investment banker–Fishers Island crowd. Well, Celine had spent every summer there for most of her life. The bureau needed an associate who could call someone in the Connecticut Blue Book and ask delicate questions, and who would be trusted—the two families might even know each other, perhaps they were even second or third cousins. They were going after a man who had perpetrated a very large fraud on the Bank of New York, and they thought he might be in the environs of his family in Old Greenwich or Darien.

No one realizes the power or extent of the aristocracy in America; it exists and holds enormous sway despite the inroads of all the techy, sneaker-wearing New Money. Celine was born into it. Fourteen of the governors of the Plymouth Colony were her ancestors, and their families had continued to consolidate and expand their power for more than three centuries. They summered on Nantucket and Fishers and Islesboro, Maine; their sons and daughters attended Ivy League colleges and had careers with Big Banks and Big Oil and the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve; and the most daring and radical of their children became artists and filmmakers or worked for the Nature Conservancy, and these were everyone’s favorite cousins and nieces and were endowed with a certain mystical reverence—they were not so much the black sheep of the family as special children who were indulged like the shamans of other cultures who only walk backward. Celine was one of these. Perhaps even farther afield than most. She was not exactly an outcast, but she had deliberately stepped out of the fold, and so she could see it with an outsider’s perspicuity.

It had begun with her mother, Barbara. She had done something unheard of in her society during the war: Soon after returning to New York from Paris just before its occupation, she had set in motion the divorce from her husband, Harry, who was the father of her three daughters. And then almost as soon as the Japanese surrendered, she had taken up with Fleet Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey Jr., the five-star admiral who had commanded the Pacific’s Third Fleet and is considered by some to be the greatest fighting admiral America has ever had. They became lovers while he was still married—horrors!—and though Halsey’s wife was committed for life into what was then called an insane asylum, he would never divorce her. He visited her once a month until his death.

Complicated. Her children called Barbara “Mummy,” but Hank and everyone else called her Baboo. WASPs have these names. Every year Baboo brought her three daughters to Fishers Island for a long summer season. Admiral Bill joined them. He was there, ostensibly, to visit his daughter who also had a house on the island, and he always kept a room at the club to keep up appearances, but everyone knew. Three and a half months, early June through the middle of September, and they repeated this sojourn for the next fourteen years, until his death. It was a longer stretch of summer than almost anyone else ever took, and it was because the island was a partial sanctuary, away from the more codified strictures of New York. On the island, in the summer, with the sound of waves heard through the screens of almost any house, and the weather sweeping in from the Atlantic with winds that flattened the dune grass and dusty miller, and thrashed the bayberry and squalled rain against the cedar shingles of the roofs, well. Certain allowances were made for the unpredictability of nature, both human and maritime, and people were generally more forgiving and relaxed. It didn’t hurt, either, that Baboo was almost universally adored. She had been the wild sister, the heavenly dancer, the legendary waltzer, the mischievous joker, the girl who had swum from Simmons Point to Ty Whitney’s dock, around the Race. Her father, Charles Cheney, had founded the Fishers Island Country Club for God’s sake. But. Well. Baboo’s domestic realignments were more than the idiosyncratic decisions of a well-bred young woman who had always been seen as warm-blooded. (Her mother, Mary Bell, was from California, after all, Santa Barbara, and had Spanish ancestry mixed with those flinty Scots.) Baboo’s decisions were more than peccadilloes; they were tectonic transgressions: She had initiated a divorce while her husband was still in Paris trying to safeguard Morgan Bank’s assets from the advancing Nazis. And then only five years later she took up with a professional soldier. Well, he was a five-star admiral, one of the towering commanders of the Pacific fleet, who stood beside General MacArthur on the USS Missouri at the Japanese surrender. Celine had the famous photo signed by Admiral Nimitz and the others. But Halsey was a bit rough-hewn and Not Our Class, Dear. NOCD, the mildly uttered and searing brand, always casually tossed off, one of the most vicious and eviscerating curses most people have never heard of. A final judgment of relative inferiority that no store of accomplishments or merit or even wealth can ever wipe away. Ludicrous. Halsey had the inborn class and dignity one would expect of a great commander, and he had more courage and native intelligence than almost any man alive.

Baboo was still invited to the parties and the clam bakes, still brought her famous fried chicken and deviled eggs to the beach picnics, was still held in certain awe: She was the scion of the family that had founded the club and had lived a life abroad that was so dazzling and glamorous not even Hollywood could have done it justice. She was still adored, but from a certain distance now, as one would a colorful fish behind glass. She continued to command the devotion of friends who would never forsake her—Ginnie Ackerman, Ty Whitney, Penny Williams. But a subtle coolness overtook her, an almost imperceptible shouldering to the colder outer edges of the inner circle in which she had grown up. No one on earth is better at death by a thousand slights than the WASP aristocracy of the East Coast. Or death by very gradual hypothermia. It can be delivered in the most nuanced tone of voice: the barest lift into the next octave when speaking of personal matters, of, say, the troubles of someone else’s family—most listeners wouldn’t notice it. But it means the loss of the most natural and intimate lower register, the one reserved for only the most trusted cohort. The omission—Oh dear, how could I have forgotten?—of an invitation to a daughter’s wedding in Delaware. It was, it could feel like, the most devastating fall from grace. A woman of lesser character might have quietly killed herself, or worse, become bitter and vengeful. Baboo carried her changing status with a dignity and grace that made her more regal in the eyes of her children and, later, her grandchildren. She was the great love of our greatest admiral; she had skied the Streif at Hahnenkamm in one fell swoop; she spoke beautiful French and could compose an occasional poem of great wit and bawdy humor; her ancestors had founded this country. But she had the mildest sadness, like the faint scent of honeysuckle or the fluttering shadow of a bird at dusk, and it felt to Hank, as a child, noble and trustworthy, like the sadness of an exiled queen. Of course as a child he had no idea where it came from, but somehow it made her laughter more rich, her delight in him more poignant. And to her three true friends, it gave them access to a friendship and a loyalty that was more real than anything they might have found in their unforgiving society.

The costs to Celine and her two sisters are hard to assess. They all attended Brearley, that very fancy private girls’ school on the Upper East Side, and they had no dearth of friends. It was as if the children of Barbara Cheney and Harry Watkins were offered conditional reprieve—after all, he had done nothing but be the youngest partner in the history of Morgan’s and escape Paris at the last possible second, on a bicycle he traded for his gorgeous Hispano Suiza when he realized the roads were too clogged with cars to get out in time—and he was too handsome for words, and a spectacular natural athlete—no, the children should be put on an indeterminate probation, the unspoken terms of which would be lifted when… well… when they were lifted. Probably when they married some up-and-coming banker from Williams.

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?”

Hank stared at her.

“And an orange hunting vest. And a hat, too. Do you have one of those funny neon-orange ones with flaps?”

He stared at her.

“Second thought,” she said, “we may still be up there in a month. I better take your .308, too. I always felt more comfortable with high-powered rifles.”

He stared at her. Celine ruffled his hair.

“Hunters go everywhere. They get lost. They tromp across anyone’s land, traipse right past anyone’s front windows, apologize later. It’s also a very good reason to be in a place. Perfect guise.” Her eyes crinkled. “Furthermore, hunters are well armed. Always a plus, I’ve found.”

When they drove away that afternoon Hank was minus a duffel full of hunting clothes, two turkey calls, and more than half his armory.