Me and Mr. Stenner

10.

The thing Mom forgot to do was get her name changed in her passport.

At the last minute, she remembered that in her passport she was still Lillith O’Neill. So Mr. Stenner had a photocopy made of their marriage certificate, and he stapled that into the back of her passport — “Not that it’ll make any difference,” he said.

The way he explained it, in Italy there were so many complications with forms and papers that the average Italian always figured there’d been some error and simply shrugged it off. My passport read Abigail O’Neill. Mom’s passport read Lillith O’Neill. When Mr. Stenner registered us in the Milan hotel as “Mr. and Mrs. Peter Stenner, and daughter,” the clerk didn’t look at all surprised. The different names on the passports didn’t necessarily mean the Stenners, or the O’Neills, or whoever, were not a family. An error in the papers, no doubt. They looked like a family, they’d registered as a family, so perhaps that made them a family. Or at least, that’s the way Mr. Stenner explained the Italian attitude, and I think he was right.

The first thing I did in the lobby was go over to where they had a rack of postcards. I bought four postcards from my Italian allowance. In Italy, I was supposed to get the equivalent in Italian money of five dollars a week to spend on myself and on souvenirs.

I bought the postcards for Dad, of course.

To send to Dad.

Mr. Stenner was still at the desk, signing in, and asking the clerk whether it was necessary to leave his camera in the hotel vault. The clerk, in perfect English, said that it might be a good idea, if it would not inconvenience the signore. The signore was Mr. Stenner. In Italy, the word for “mister” or “sir” was signore and the word for “Mrs.” or “madam” was signora. But the plural of signore was signori, and the plural of signora was signore. So you had to be careful when you went to the toilet, otherwise you could walk into the wrong place. In France, when I was there with my mother and my father, we went to some towns where the men and women used the same bathroom, would you believe it? I was washing my hands at the sink in one of those bathrooms — this was in the Loire Valley, when we were looking at all the castles — and a man came out of one of the stalls! I almost dropped dead right on the spot. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said to me, and smiled, and proceeded to wash his hands at the sink next to mine.

In France, when I took the trip with Mom and Dad, I slept in the same room with them wherever we stayed. I wanted to do that in Italy, too, with Mom and Mr. Stenner, but he said absolutely not.

“Why not?” I said.

“Because we all need privacy,” he said.

“It’s cheaper with just one room.”

“We can afford two rooms,” he said.

“Then they have to be right alongside each other, and there has to be a door between them, okay?” I said.

“We’ll ask for connecting rooms. If we can get them, fine. If not, we’ll have to take what we can get.”

“Well, I don’t want to be on a different floor.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’d be afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That somebody would kidnap me.”

“If somebody kidnaps you, just yell and I’ll come rescue you,” he said, and smiled.

That’s what I was really worried about, you see. That he wouldn’t come rescue me. Because he wasn’t my real father. I knew my real father would throw himself in front of a bus for me, but Mr. Stenner was only my stepfather. With your natural father you could assume that he and your mother wanted to have a baby, and got together, you know, and had one nine months later. But with your stepfather, you had to assume that what he wanted was to marry your mother. Period. The rest came along with the deal. If he wanted to marry Mom, well — you see, there was this gorgeous little eleven-year-old brat who was part of the bargain. You took one, you automatically got the other.

So why should he worry if anybody kidnapped me?

Why should he come to the rescue?

He was still at the desk when I walked over from the postcard rack. In the middle of what he was saying, I asked, “Are they connecting?”

“Just a minute, Abby,” he said. To the clerk, he said, “Is someone always here at the desk?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” the clerk said.

“Mr. Stenner? Are they...”

“Then perhaps I could just leave the camera in my box,” he said. “Instead of going through the business of opening the vault each time.”

“As you wish, signore,” the clerk said.

“Mr. Stenner, are they connecting?”

“Yes,” he said. “They’re connecting, Abby.”

He was silent all the way up in the elevator. The rooms were really terrific. I wanted the biggest one, which had a little balcony outside the window, but Mom said the other one was mine.

“How come you get the best one?” I said.

“In this case, second best is only magnificent,” Mom said.

“Yeah, but...”

“When you take your daughter to Italy,” Mr. Stenner said, “you and your husband can have the biggest room for yourselves, okay? Meanwhile, Abby, let me tell you something about this trip, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “What?”

I didn’t know he was about to yell at me. In fact, he didn’t yell at me. That is, he didn’t raise his voice. But there was no question about the fact that I was being bawled out for something I didn’t even know I’d done. Flabbergasted, I listened to him.

“I told you before we left home,” he said, “that we’d requested connecting rooms in all the hotels. I also told you we’d take whatever was available because we’d made our plans late, and this was the height of the tourist season. Now, Abby, when I’m talking to a desk clerk, I want you to keep out of it. I don’t want you hanging around the registration desk while I’m giving the man our passports, and filling out cards, and what-have-you. And I especially don’t want you interrupting with stupid questions about whether or not the rooms are connecting.”

“I don’t think that’s a stupid question,” I said. “It happens to be very important to me. Whether or not the rooms are connecting.”

“I understand that. It’s important to us, too. I can only tell you that the first question I asked the clerk was whether or not the rooms were connecting, and he assured me they were. If he’d told me they weren’t, I would have asked whether or not it was possible to get connecting rooms, and if not, I would have asked for at least adjoining rooms. And if I couldn’t have got any of those, only then would I have settled for a room down the hall or, as a last resort, on another floor of the hotel. The point is I can handle it myself, Abby, I don’t need any assistance from an eleven-year-old girl. From now on, keep out of it. I am perfectly capable of registering my own family.”

“Nobody was trying to help you register,” I said. “And I didn’t know you’d asked the clerk about connecting rooms because, if you didn’t notice, I was buying some postcards.”

“I did notice,” Mr. Stenner said. “And I’m also noticing the look on your face right this minute, and I’m hearing the tone of your voice, and I can’t say I appreciate either. Mom and I told you this vacation was important to us. We’ve been through a lot in the past several months, and now we want to relax. Italy is a beautiful country, the people here are marvelous, the food is delicious. All I want is for us to enjoy ourselves. We’re not going to enjoy ourselves if you try to run the show.”

“I wasn’t trying to run the show.”

“You didn’t trust me,” he said.

“I trusted you,” I said.

That was a lie, of course. I hadn’t trusted him. I just didn’t think he cared whether the rooms were connecting, or adjoining, or across the hall from each other, or down the hall, or three floors apart, or separated by the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. I just didn’t think he gave a damn.

“You can trust me,” he said.

“I can trust you to yell at me for nothing,” I said.

“Let’s all take a nap now,” he said. “We’re exhausted, we’re...”

“I’m not exhausted,” I said. “I want to write some cards to Dad.”

“Fine,” he said, and went into his own room, and closed and locked the door behind him. Through the closed door, I could hear him and Mom talking.

“Was I too rough on her?” he asked.

“No,” Mom said.

“I just wanted to get it straight from the beginning, Lil.”

“You did the right thing.”

“It is a hassle coming into a hotel, and when she stands around sniping...”

“I know, darling.”

“I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

On the card to my father, I wrote:

At about five o’clock that afternoon, Mr. Stenner popped into the room and cheerfully said, “Everybody up, time to get up!”

I opened my eyes and blinked at him.

“Let’s go, Abby, time to see Milan!”

“I don’t want to see Milan,” I said.

“You don’t? You came all the way to Italy, and you don’t want to see Milan?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well, Milan wants to see you,” he said, and grinned, and looked at his watch, and said, “It’s almost five past five. I’ll give you ten minutes to get up, and wash your face, and put on a pretty dress, and then off we go to the Galleria for an early evening drink and a stroll.”

“What’s the Galleria?” I asked.

“It’s an arcade enclosed entirely in glass, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in your life, you cutie pie! So pop out of bed and let’s get going!”

“Is Mom out of bed yet?”

“Mom is out of bed and at this very moment soaking in the bathtub. Mom has in fact been in the bathtub for the past ten minutes, and I’m about to hustle her out.” He looked at his watch again. “You have exactly nine minutes and ten seconds.”

“Mr. Stenner?” I said.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry about what happened in the lobby.”

“That’s ancient history,” he said. “But do you understand why I yelled at you, Abby?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Okay, let’s move it!” he said, and grinned again, and went out of the room.

The Galleria was absolutely fantastic.

He was right.

I’d never seen anything like it in my life. What it was, they had built this structure in the shape of a cross and then covered it over with glass so that the sun shone down onto the tiled floors. A lot of things in Italy are tiled, but I didn’t know that when we first got to Milan. All I knew was that I was inside this marvelous arcade lined with restaurants and shops, and the sun was shining down on us from above, and breezes were blowing through from the various entrances at the four ends of the cross.

We sat at a table and watched the people go by. The trouble hadn’t started yet, we were so far having a pretty good time, despite what had happened in the lobby and the little bawling-out I’d got afterward. Mr. Stenner was staring at my wrist. Or, to be more exact, he was staring at the ragged piece of yarn I’d knotted around it.

“What’s that?” he said.

“It’s a forever.”

“What’s a forever?”

“It’s a thing you tie around your wrist and you keep wearing it forever.”

“Forever?”

“Well, until it falls off. It’s supposed to bring good luck.”

“Mm,” he said, and kept staring at it very thoughtfully.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said, “nothing,” and shrugged and smiled, and asked if I felt like trying a little game he and the boys used to play when they were small and he’d taken them to Europe. I said, “Sure, what’s the game?” and he explained that all we had to do was look at the people passing by and — before we heard them talking — try to guess what nationality they were. He said it wasn’t as easy as I thought it might be because people from foreign countries often bought clothes in the country they were visiting, and looked exactly like the citizens of that country.

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 stepfather!”

“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.