Matthew Stadler - Allan Stein

Spring is always so marvelous here (our city sits smack dab at the northernmost reach of the American West Coast), and it stretches from February to July. The other season is fall, which begins at the end of spring and lasts through January. At some point, every year, shortly after spring has ended and before the first gray showers of fall have come, there appear, as suddenly as sleep, two weeks of honey-warm days stretching to near-Laplandian lengths, the noontime parkland trails burnished in gold, when our hilly metropolis is saturated with the big yellow sun—a fat baker’s dozen of rich green days spent lolling on picnic blankets beside the child-strewn beach or drowsing with a book on one of the floating rafts. So sudden and delirious are these days, their memory is quickly buried under fall’s gray return, alongside our more private night dreams, until the city is ambushed again the next year, when these days reemerge precisely where we had left them.

Regarding the weather of childhood, a harmless possum lived under the front porch of our fourth house—my favorite—which (belied by its trees, languor, and possum) was in a busy neighborhood near the city’s downtown. It was our house for two years (ages ten to twelve), the house in which my mother and I were happiest. The trees, the languor, low-to-zero rent (the landlord died partway through our tenancy and no one noticed us for a year), plus my emergence into the age of reason and dinnertime conviviality, conspired to make of this place a brief heaven. The possum—I named him Larry—scratched at our door whenever it was going to rain. Louise called him our prognosticator. He wanted to come in, I think, because it got wet under the porch when it rained. We never let him (the only discord of these halcyon years) and I stopped arguing with Louise when she told me that possums love, more than anything, the spittle of sleep, and that Larry would find me at night and lick the saliva from my lips, from my tongue even, thrusting his ratty little mouth into mine, defenseless while I dreamt, to sip the sweet nectar of my boyhood mastications directly from its source, should we ever let him in the door. Later, when puberty began, this scenario became a fantasy of mine, the most horrible and forbidden of many imagined scenes and therefore (on a few intensely private occasions, of which I will spare you the details) the climactic one.

Why a fourth house? Why no father, siblings, or proper account of the scarring events of a troubled youth, etc., etc.? That is the part that bores me, all the psychiatrist’s carefully hoarded trivia of “damage,” gathered in his great pockets like loose change, grimy coins that he can then count out against the final bill, the great tabulation of failed dreams and dysfunctions he must balance against the purchases of a childhood. I can only tell what I remember, and what I remember is growing up. My father was gone, along with three half-siblings he enjoyed with another woman, and my mother didn’t like him and neither did I. His absence was as meaningful to me as the fact that I lacked an elephant. There are times when a boy could benefit from the company of an elephant, and it’s too bad if he doesn’t have one. However, I was so involved with what I did have, the missing parts of the “normal” went unnoticed, until everyone started asking me about them—which was early, age six or seven, when a virtual forest of adult faces began pestering me with questions about Dad, etc. Had the world turned its immensely caring eyes toward me and asked, sotto voce, “But, little boy, where is your elephant?” I would have burst into tears more sincere than any I have shed about my father. There is so much in this world that does not love a child it never seemed terribly important to single him out.

Herbert returned. He settled in, casting a disappointed glance at the empty scotch glass. “Where is that boy?” We surveyed the room brusquely, but Tristan was nowhere in sight. “So, what happened while I was gone?”

“Nothing, really. Tell me more about this Stein nephew.”

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