Evan Hunter - Me and Mr. Stenner

We started playing the game.

I said, “Here come two Americans,” but when they got closer, the man and the woman were speaking a language even I knew was German. Mom guessed that the next people coming toward us were French — a man, his wife, and their son and daughter. As it turned out, she was right. I recognized the language as soon as they came close. When Mr. Stenner asked her how she’d known, she said it was because Frenchmen always knotted the sleeves of their sweaters around their waists or their necks. He said he hadn’t noticed that before, and then he spotted a man coming along with his sweater sleeves knotted around his waist, and he guessed the man was French, but the man greeted another man in fluent Italian, so that was that. I saw an Oriental man and woman coming along, and I whispered, “They’re Japanese. Or Chinese.” But as they passed the table, we heard them talking in English about San Francisco.

It really was a difficult game.

Mr. Stenner had ordered for me what he called “an Italian Shirley Temple,” a drink that was tall and green and frothy and floating with lemon slices. He got up from the table now, and began taking pictures of me as I nibbled at the lemon slices, my mouth puckered, clearing out the pulp until I was holding only a pair of miniature rind wheels, which I held up alongside my face.

Click , the camera shutter went.

“Can we send copies of these to Daddy?” I asked, and I saw Mr. Stenner’s face fall. He sat down quickly, closed the cover on his camera case, and ordered a double Scotch on the rocks.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“All I said...”

“I heard what you said.”

“Well, what’s so wrong about that? All I want is some copies for Daddy. If you’re worried about how much they’ll cost, I’ll pay for them from my allowance.”

Mr. Stenner said nothing. Mom watched him.

“Well?” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“These are our pictures,” he said.

“Nobody said they weren’t.”

“Exclusively ours,” he said.

“What’s exclusively?”

“For our album. Our family album. I don’t want to send prints to your father, okay?”

“Then I don’t want to be in the album, okay?” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“And don’t take any more pictures of me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” I said.

On the roof of II Duomo, he took pictures of Mom coming through a stone archway, a blue-hooded telescope in the foreground. He took a picture of her standing alongside a column with winged angels on it, and another of her against a background of scaffolding that seemed starkly modern in contrast to the gingerbread statuary. He took pictures of the black-and-white-tiled square below. He even took pictures of the parking lot across the street from the cathedral, shooting down at the red, and blue, and white cars that from above looked like miniature toys.

At the Cenacolo Vinciano, where we went to see Leonardo’s fresco, he took a picture of Mom sitting on one of the high wooden benches, the rubbed walnut glowing behind her. And in the park later, he took pictures of some kids watching an outdoor Punch-and-Judy show, and pictures of some men studying a gambler who was playing a shell game, and even pictures of goldfish in a pond. But he did not take any more pictures of me.

Lying awake in bed that night, I heard them whispering next door.

“I’m not trying to punish her, Lil,” he said.

“I know that.”

“It makes me angry, though...”

“The way she...”

“Her constant little reminders that I’m not her father. I know I’m not her father! All I’m trying to be is her step father!”

“You’re very good with her, Peter. I couldn’t have asked for...”

“Oh, the hell with that, Lillith. Who cares how good I am with her? She doesn’t care, that’s for sure.”

“She does, Peter. It’s just...”

“It’s just she’s afraid I’m going to steal her from her precious Daddy. She’d like to pretend the divorce never happened and the wedding never happened, and everything is just the same as... and what was that supposed to be, would you please tell me? How could she have missed the wedding? I saw you going in there to get her, she couldn’t have missed the wedding unless she wanted to miss it.”

“I suppose she did want to miss it,” Mom said.

“And why did he have to.call the house just as we were leaving for the airport?” Mr. Stenner asked. “He’d said good-bye to her the night before, hadn’t he? So why’d he have to call again in the morning? We weren’t taking her to a Siberian prison camp, we were taking her to Italy for a vacation! Did you hear her on the telephone? She sounded like Camille on her deathbed. I think half of it is phony, Lil. I think she puts on a big act for him and a bigger act for us.”

“No, I think she’s genuinely unhappy,” Mom said.

“Why should she be? I’ve tried every damn...”

“Have you ever tried loving her?”

“I’m not sure I do love her.”

“Sometimes, Peter, you sound as if you hate her,” Mom said.

“Sometimes I do,” he said.

On the train to Venice, he hardly said a word to me. He was sitting there reading his Italian grammars for half the trip, and then he put the books aside with a sigh, and stared out the window. In a little while, he got up from his seat and went down the aisle, to the toilet I supposed. I turned to Mom and said, “What’s the matter with him this morning?” I knew what was the matter with him, of course; I’d overheard their conversation the night before. He hated me because I loved my father, that’s what was the matter with him.

“Who,” Mom said, spacing the words evenly, “is him?”

“Him,” I said. “Mr. Stenner.”

“Nothing is the matter with Mr. Stenner,” Mom said. “Mr. Stenner is fine.”

When he came back to his seat, I said, “Do you know what the concierge said to me this morning?”

“The hall porter,” Mr. Stenner corrected. “In France, he’s the concierge. In Italy, he’s...”

“Daddy told me I should call him the concierge.”

“Oh? When did he tell you that?”

“Before we left.”

“Is that why he phoned the house that morning? To make sure you knew what to call the concierge?”

“No, he phoned to say good-bye. But before that...”

“Anyway, he’s not called a concierge, he’s called a hall porter.”

“That’s not what Daddy said.”

“Has Daddy ever been to Italy?”

“No, but...”

“Then tell Daddy not to tell me what the hall porter is called in Italy, okay? As a matter of fact, tell Daddy to mind his own business, and we’ll all get along much...”

“I am Daddy’s business,” I said.

“Fine,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Anyway, would you like to hear what he said to me? The concierge or the hall porter or whatever you...”

“It’s the hall porter.”

“All right , it’s the hall porter, all right? He asked me where my father was.”

“Did you tell him your father was home in the United States, pining for his darling daughter?”

“He meant you,” I said.

“I’m not your father,” he said. “We all know that.”

“But you are my stepfather. I felt sort of dumb. I didn’t know what to say to him.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I said you were upstairs in the room.”

In Venice, he began taking pictures of me again.

There were pigeons strutting all over the square, flying in the sky overhead, lofting in the spires of the church and in the arched windows above the arcades. For a hundred lire, you could buy a rolled newspaper cone filled with feed, and I bought a coneful now with money Mr. Stenner had given me. He was wearing a leather cap he’d bought in Milan, which he said made him feel more Italian, and which was sort of tilted over one eye. I walked out into the middle of the square and tried to tempt some pigeons into accepting food from the palm of my hand.