“Did he say that the lake sounded like a bird and the mountain was a king?” Celine asked.
Sitka flinched as if burned and looked up quickly. “Yes,” she said. “Like that. Just what he said.” Celine doubted he had told her that over the sanded wood of the plank bar. Across a pillow more like. Or from the warm plain of her own stomach.
“He said he would take me there. A day’s drive. He never did, did he? That it?” she said. “I better get back.”
“Yes, thank you.” Celine touched the woman’s forearm. “Thank you.” She was going to beg her to stop smoking, but thought better of it.
“Any time. The club soda’s on the house.” She sucked in one last long breath of night air and flung the door open and dove back in.
TWENTY-FOUR
They walked back to the motel. They’d try to locate the artist Fernanda Muños first, and then call Gabriela who, in San Francisco, was an hour behind. No one shot at them and Celine had a feeling no one would. That had been a warning, stark as the clanging of a buoy in the sound.
The buoy. That had tolled each night through the screen of her open window at Las Armas. Singing out the temper of the sea. The thought of that relentless and lovely bell buoy gave her an immediate ache. Of nostalgia and also grief. How many nights had she gone to sleep to its angelus? Feeling that a hole had been torn inside her? She felt again what it was to miss a father. What if someone could have waved a magic wand for her? So that they were together again, always?
Celine did not see her father much in the years she attended Brearley. The three sisters went to his apartment on East Seventy-Fourth Street on Christmas afternoons. He sent a driver in a black sedan to their building off Lexington and the sisters piled in the back with their bags of presents. They were not coerced into it, they wanted badly to see their father on Christmas day and they shopped for months to find him the perfect gift. He received a drawersful of ties and tiepins and silver golf-ball markers and cashmere scarves and even wool sweaters over the years. His daughters wanted him to be warm and play great golf, and they wanted him to love them, which he did. He just wasn’t very good at showing it.
He was a principled man, which people sensed from the moment he shook their hands, which is one of the reasons he had been so successful in banking. He was also a natural athlete, a superb golfer, a legendary Montauk fisherman. A man’s man in every respect. But not much of a little girls’ man. He was awkward around his daughters, and they could see the relief coming over him when he said goodbye to them at the town car that took them home. But they also sensed, because they were those kind of girls, that his awkwardness stemmed from deep love, and deep embarrassment that he had abandoned them in their tender childhoods. He could never accept the less than half—far less than half—presence, and he punished himself for not being a complete father, and in doing so, without meaning to, he punished them.
He saw them at Christmas. And he took each one out on their birthdays—took off from work in the afternoon and took them out to the park, the Met, the circus, ice-skating, and then always to a Broadway show in the evening, followed by a very late dinner at Sardi’s. At which the girls invariably fell asleep at the table. There were other weekend days scattered here and there, and an occasional trip out to Montauk to go fishing, which Celine adored. Even with such a limited apprenticeship, she and Bobby got pretty good at surf casting.
Celine missed her father. She missed him with an ache that she could feel in her growing bones. She knew, she knew, how much he loved her, knew that in a parallel universe he was at home every night and would sweep her up in his arms every time he came through the door, and would teach her again to fly cast in the park, and to sail on Fishers—she’d a million times rather have Harry teach her than the gorgeous Gustav—and she saw him in this parallel life even help her with her math homework and teach her to be a banker. She railed against the circumstances that prevented this from occurring and sometimes cried into her pillow, but she stopped at some point blaming Baboo. She knew in her bones as she knew the other things that Baboo had not been the cause of her bereft childhood.
One day, when she was fourteen, right before she went off to boarding school, Harry took her to lunch at Mortimer’s on Lex. It was the first week of September, still hot and summery but with the longer light gleaming nostalgically off the locusts and maples the way it never does in July; she was due to take Amtrak up to Vermont in a few days, for her first term at Putney. They sat on opposite sides of the little table by the front window and talked sparingly and watched the passersby. She was digging into a Dusty Miller with sprinkles and he was watching her with real pleasure, and she was just happy to be soaking up his approval and attention. He was extremely handsome, and she noticed the effect he had on the elegant maître d’ and the younger waitresses. He had the bearing of an athlete, and the wonderful Watkins jaw, which Celine inherited, and also the strong hawk’s nose that many blue bloods shared. She had inherited that, too. She was not unaware, happily devouring her sundae, that the two looked exactly like father and daughter. And this made her exceedingly proud. They were playing a slow game of How About That One? One of them would point a spoon at an oncoming pedestrian and they would guess 1) what the person did, 2) whether he or she were married or unmarried, and 3) one eccentricity or attribute or achievement. They had developed the game over the years and Celine thought it was a testament to Harry’s integrity and his aversion to ever taking the path of least resistance that he didn’t seem to play the same game with her sisters.
She slurped an extravagant mix of melted ice cream and chocolate and marshmallow, and pointed her spoon at a woman coming down the sidewalk. The woman was tall—taller in her showy strapped sandals with very high heels—and she walked with the rhythmic hip swing of a metronome, and her nylon or silk summer dress clung lovingly to her flat belly. She was pretty, too, with wonderful auburn hair that spilled in curls to her shoulders, and a wide sensuous mouth. “That one!” she said. Celine had her own opinion, she thought she must be an actress, maybe even a movie star. “How about that one?”
Harry turned in his chair and as he did the woman glanced over into the big picture window and their eyes met and her father’s face tightened as she’d never seen it tighten before—with alertness, ears coming forward and eyes sharpening exactly like a wolf when it smells prey—and she thought she actually felt a pulse of heat on the air, and the woman’s mouth opened in an O, and her eyes widened, and she turned into the front door. A second later she was overwhelming the elegant maître d’ with charm, and a second after that the severely dressed hostess was leading the beauty to their table. Celine thought with delight that it looked like a handsome blackbird leading a brilliant tanager. She turned to her father who was not so amused. She had never seen him at a loss. The wolf on the hunt had gone into a defensive crouch. He was master enough of himself that no one but his daughter would have seen it, for his bearing was the same, his uprightness in the chair, his chiseled, reserved expression, the light of recognition in his blue-gray eyes. But there was something. And then the woman thanked the maître d’ and chattered out a big “Hello” and leaned down to kiss his cheek and covered his face with her bountiful locks and the whole table with her rich perfume, and she effused that it was so nice to see him, and “Oh, this must be your daughter. Which one is it? Barbara? I should say Bobby? How utterly lovely! What a beauty she is going to be when she grows into those legs, wow! Why don’t you call me, you big lunk? It’s been, what? At least a week. The show is running into the second month, it’s ghastly, I’m practically worn out. I could use some entertainment of my own!”