Evan Hunter - Me and Mr. Stenner

“Yes?”

“Well, the waiter understood English, and he heard me calling you ‘Mr. Stenner,’ and I could tell he was puzzled. You see, he knew you and Mommy were married because he could see you were both wearing the same wedding bands, so if you were married and here’s a girl traveling with you, then the girl ought to be your daughter, right? So why was I calling you ‘Mr. Stenner’? That’s what the waiter must’ve been wondering.”

“Probably.”

“What are you going to buy me in Rome?” I said. “A fencing thing?”

“What’s a fencing thing?” he asked.

“What you fence with,” I said. “What the kids on the fencing team at school fence with.”

“A foil, do you mean?”

“Right! That begins with an F, doesn’t it? Is it a foil?”

“Nope. And it’s not a fedora, either.”

“What’s a fedora?”

“A hat.”

“Well, you already told me you weren’t going to buy a hat. What is it, I’m dying to know. Is it a fig?”

“You had a fig at lunch today.”

“I know, but are you buying me another fig? As a joke?”

“Would I joke about your twelfth birthday?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, and shrugged again. “I love the sound of the ocean, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Let’s have a drink every night, okay? While we’re waiting for Mommy to get dressed.”

“Only if we’re ready before she is,” he said.

“Yes, only if we’re ready, okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Is it a fiddle?” I asked. “Are you going to buy me a fiddle?”

“No,” he said.

“Then what? A fire engine?”

It was nice there on the terrace.

The hotel in Florence was about five minutes outside the city itself, perched on the edge of the Arno River. It had windows overlooking gardens and a pool on one side, and on the other an awninged outdoor restaurant and the river below. In the lobby of the hotel, Mr. Stenner translated for me an Italian sign that indicated how high the water had risen during the flood several years back. I looked at the mark on the sign and said, “You mean right here in the lobby?”

“That’s right,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Wow!” I said. “Aren’t you glad we weren’t here then?”

“I was here just the year before that,” he said.

“This same place?”

“Yes.”

“With the boys?”

“Yes.”

“And with Mrs. Stenner?”

“Right,” he said.

“Wrong!” I said, and grinned. “Mommy’s Mrs. Stenner. The other Mrs. Stenner isn’t Mrs. Stenner anymore.” I paused. “Is she?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

I found it difficult to make friends.

I don’t think it had anything to do with the divorce. I think I was just kind of shy. Not so much with grown-ups, but definitely with kids. We would come back from the city of Florence, and I’d mope around the pool, listening to the kids splashing at the other end of it, and wishing I could join them. The pool was about fifteen feet long — it was almost impossible to avoid making friends with any other kids who were in the pool, but I sure managed. Until Mr. Stenner popped into the water one day. Popped in? He jumped right into the middle of a game a girl and her brother were playing.

Here were these two kids splashing around and yelling at each other, the girl about seven and the boy about ten. And all of a sudden this big gangling oaf landed right in the middle of what they were doing, and disappeared under the surface of the water, and then came up an instant later squirting water out of his mouth like a fountain and looking stupid as could be.

“Hi, kids,” he said. “I’m Peter Stenner.”

“Hi,” the girl said.

“Hi,” the boy said.

They weren’t used to grown-ups being so dumb, you could tell that. But they were smiling. They liked his trying to be friendly with them.

“What’s your name?” he asked the girl.

“Marlene,” she said.

“Yeah?” he said. “Hi, Marlene. And what’s your name?” he asked the boy.

“Tommy,” the boy said.

“You guys met Abby yet? Abby, come meet Tommy and Marlene.”

“Hi,” I mumbled.

“Hi,” Marlene said.

“Hi,” Tommy said.

“What’s that game you’re playing?” Mr. Stenner asked.

“It’s a game we made up,” Tommy said. “It’s you have to swim to that side and touch it with both hands, and then you have to turn around, and kick off, and come back to this side and touch it with both hands, too.”

“Who wins?” Mr. Stenner asked.

“Nobody wins,” Tommy said. “It’s just a game we made up.”

“Mind if Abby and I play it with you?”

“Come on,” Marlene said. “But you have to touch the sides with both hands.”

“It’s not as easy as it looks, you know,” Tommy said gravely.

That’s how I got to meet Tommy and Marlene.

At dinner that night, when I saw Mr. Stenner raise his glass, I knew he was about to propose a toast, and I lifted my glass too. In Italy, they allowed me to have a little wine with dinner, it’s really a quite civilized country. I mean, not only did Mom and Mr. Stenner allow me to have wine, but the people running the restaurants never objected to it, in fact seemed to encourage it.

“Will la ragazzina have a little wine, too, signore?” the waiter always asked, and then set a sparkling wineglass on the table before me. In America, you just try to sneak a little glass of wine to your daughter without her showing an ID card and a birth certificate and a driver’s license and a passport and a vaccination mark — wow! People pop out of the kitchen, the manager runs over to the table, the headwaiter takes a fit, the FBI comes through the door with drawn pistols and automatic machine guns... forget it.

“I’d like to say,” Mr. Stenner said, “that I love being here in this time and in this place with these two people. Lil,” he said, and clinked his glass against hers, and then said, “Abby,” and clinked his glass against mine. “It’s good,” he said, and nodded, but he hadn’t sipped the wine yet, and I knew he wasn’t talking about that.

The Ponte Vecchio was packed with tourists, of course, and all of them had cameras. Whatever their nationality, they had cameras. Big cameras, little cameras, simple cameras, complicated cameras, cheap cameras, expensive cameras. They all had cameras, and they were all taking pictures. Pictures of wives, husbands, children, friends, aunts, uncles. Mr. Stenner was sure the family albums of the world were full of bad snapshots of people posing uncomfortably in front of statues of men whose names they couldn’t pronounce, smiling stiffly and squinting into the sun. “You must always take a picture with the sun over your left shoulder,” his uncle used to tell him when he was a boy. His uncle was an accountant, but no matter — “Always over the left shoulder, Peter.”

In Florence, on the Ponte Vecchio, Mr. Stenner’s idea was to take pictures of people taking pictures.

He took the first of these at the end of the street, where the barricades were set up. A fat woman in a flowered dress was kneeling, one knee on the sidewalk, taking a picture of her small son or grandson who was eating a chocolate ice-cream cone and spilling half of it down his shirt front. As Mr. Stenner took the picture, I said, “What are you doing?” and he whispered, “Shhh,” and I immediately got the idea. He was taking a picture of a person taking a picture. In that minute, I became a scout for him.

By the end of the day, he’d shot a full roll — thirty-six exposures — of people taking pictures. Of those thirty-six, I scouted at least twenty for him, tugging at his sleeve, glancing to where somebody was about to click a shutter — a man taking a picture of his wife holding their baby up against a burst of balloons; a woman in her seventies snapping a picture of her eighty-year-old husband imitating the statue behind him; an American girl in blue jeans taking a picture of another American girl in blue jeans. Anybody and everybody, so long as they were taking a picture of somebody else. I felt like a Russian spy.