Evan Hunter - Me and Mr. Stenner

At the dinner table, he’d talk all the time. You could hardly get a word in edgewise. He’d tell you all about his day — a model bit him one day, right on the second joint of his index finger! He came home with the finger in a bandage, and he told us all about this crazy model who, because he was pointing to a spot he wanted her to focus her gaze on, bit him on the finger! He showed me her picture in a magazine, she looked so sweet butter wouldn’t melt. But she’d bit his finger almost clear to the bone. He told Mom he would have crowned her with his camera except that it was such an expensive instrument and he was afraid it would smash to pieces on her hard head.

He had a great sense of outrage and indignation. I really liked that about him, too. Remember I told you about the horses, about the road being a quagmire because people kept horses and wouldn’t allow other people to get it paved? Well, that was an example of the kind of thing that infuriated him and of course started him yelling around the house. People being oblivious to other people’s needs. If, for example, we were picking up something at the tailor shop and a lady just came through the door, barging into us without apologizing, practically without even seeing us, Mr. Stenner would roll his eyes and say, “Oh, Blivious!” Meaning “oblivious.” Meaning the lady was oblivious to anyone but herself. He also had a way of breaking words in half so that it sounded as if he were using a person’s name.

He would, for example, say, “What’s the troub, Bill?”

Or, “Pass the sher, Bert.”

Or, “They buried him in the semmer, Terry.”

Or, “I’m the host, Tess.”

Or he’d come over to me — this was a different word game — and he’d say, “Hi, Abby. Jeet?” And I was supposed to answer, “No, joo?” and he would then say, “Squeet.” Jeet, joo, squeet — which translated into:

“Did you eat?”

“Did you?”

“Let’s go eat.”

Jeet, joo, squeet.

He told me some peachy stories. He used to make them up as he went along, and most of them were about me though he tried to disguise them by saying they were about a whale in the ocean or a star in the sky, or whatever. One night, he really broke me up. I was begging him to tell me a story, and he was telling me it was already a quarter to ten, fifteen minutes past my bedtime (we were pretty much living by the Rules List, and I’ll tell you the truth, it wasn’t so bad), but I kept begging, and finally he said, “Okay, but it’ll be a very short story.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Once upon a time, there was this very short bear.” Then he leaned over the bed and kissed me on the cheek and said, “Good night, Abby, sleep well.”

“Hey!” I said. “That isn’t fair.”

But I was smiling.

Spring was here!

Mr. Stenner was going out to take pictures of things budding!

And he had a camera for me to use!

It was one of his old cameras, but in perfectly good condition, and not a baby camera at all. You had to load the film yourself, and you had to focus, and set the exposure, and the speed — it was a pretty complicated instrument to handle but Mr. Stenner was very patient, and never once lost his temper even when I was fussing about with all those dials and gadgets.

With my camera around my neck like Mr. Stenner, I waved to Mom, and both of us went tramping off into the woods in search of budding things.

He had a great eye.

He could spot something two miles away, I mean it.

“Shhhh,” he’d say, as if the plant were a living thing that could hear us and go scurrying off into the bushes. Then we would tiptoe through the woods, and he would motion for me to be very still, and he would part some leaves, and there it was, a sweet white violet, or a beautiful red columbine or yellow lady’s slipper. He knew the name of every wild flower in the woods, he was absolutely fantastic when it came to reeling them off. They sounded like poetry. Yellow clintonia and star grass and trailing arbutus and Dutchman’s-breeches (that one made me laugh), and wild sarsaparilla and false spikenard and Pipsissewa and Queen Anne’s lace — oh, God, we had such fun that day!

He was, you know, alive.

When we had Field Day at Hadley-Co, I was on red team, and I asked Mr. Stenner to come to school with Mom that afternoon. I also asked him to bring his camera. At Hadley-Co, the most important clique was led by a girl named Sarah Prentiss, and I’d tried to make friends with her by telling her my stepfather was a famous fashion photographer. He wasn’t exactly famous, but he was a professional photographer and he did photograph famous models like the one who’d almost bit off his finger. Sarah said she wanted to see some of the pictures he’d taken, and I went home and asked Mr. Stenner for some magazines and brought them in with me the next day. Sarah looked at the magazines. Then, surrounded by all her friends in the clique, she said, “Even I can take better pictures than that.”

So at Field Day, I introduced Sarah to Mr. Stenner.

“This is my stepfather,” I said. “This is Sarah Prentiss.”

“Hi,” Sarah said.

“Hi,” Mr. Stenner said.

“And this is my mother.”

“Hi.”

“Sarah says she can take better pictures than you,” I said.

Sarah blinked.

“She probably can,” Mr. Stenner said, and smiled. “Why don’t both of you stand there like silly grinning little girls and I’ll take a picture of you together?”

“Okay,” Sarah said.

He took a picture of us looking like silly grinning little girls. It came out very nice, as a matter of fact, and he had a print blown up for Sarah, who later said it was probably only the best picture anybody ever took of her, and who also mentioned that it was taken by Peter Stenner, the famous fashion photographer.

Red team lost every event, and also the tug-of-war.

I ate four hot dogs.

Mr. Stenner took three rolls of pictures, thirty-six pictures on each roll. In color.

Every time I looked around, there he was with the camera to his eye.

I couldn’t wait to show the pictures to Daddy.

At a Tuesday meeting in the merry, merry month of May, much to Arthur Randolph Knowles’s “utter astonishment,” Mrs. Stenner’s lawyer proposed satisfactory settlement terms, and Mr. Knowles immediately called Mr. Stenner to recommend acceptance. The case of Stenner v. Stenner seemed resolved at last, and a jubilant Mr. Knowles called again later in the afternoon to say that the separation agreement would be drawn at once. As soon as the papers were signed, Mr. Stenner would be free to fly to Haiti or the Dominican Republic for a divorce similar to the quickie Mom had got in January.

At the dinner table that night, Mr. Stenner did an imitation of Mr. Knowles saying, “I told you it would take a little patience, didn’t I, m’boy?”

“I’m glad it’s resolved,” Mom said, in what was perhaps the understatement of the year.

Did I tell you about the bronze cats?

I guess not.

It’s funny how things that are really important can slip your mind.

Mr. Stenner tried so hard to make pancakes a tradition with us, but failed. Instead, without his having to try so very hard at all, the bronze cats did become a tradition. He gave me the first one on Christmas Day — the day Dad gave me the tape recorder and I was opening all my gifts and telling Dad what they were, which I now realize was a very cruel thing to do. I did what may seem like a cruel thing on their wedding day, too, but maybe if you understand what was going on in my head you won’t think it was so cruel. Anyway, the only person I was really cruel to was myself. Both days.