Me and Mr. Stenner

7.

Whenever a kid from school was visiting, I used to introduce Mr. Stenner as my stepfather, even though he wasn’t yet. I think I was embarrassed about Mom and him living together without being married.

I’d say, “This is my stepfather,” and they’d say, “Hi.”

Simple as that.

But not so simple.

I didn’t want him to be my stepfather.

I used to take my mother aside and casually say, “Are you really going to marry him?”

“Yes,” she would say. She was having a lot of trouble right then with a lawyer named Arthur Randolph Knowles, who was Mr. Stenner’s attorney. He had, in fact, been Mr. Stenner’s attorney for years, and had insisted that his firm handle the divorce, even though there were no divorce specialists in his office. At least, that’s what Mom said. The only time she and Mr. Stenner came close to having an argument, in fact, was when they were discussing Arthur Randolph Knowles.

It seemed to me, though, that he wanted exactly the same thing I wanted. He wanted Mr. Stenner to go back to his wife and children, and the hell with Mommy and me. But even if there was nothing I d have liked better than for Mr. Stenner to have shaken hands with Mom and sailed off into the sunset, I still didn’t like Arthur Randolph Knowles. He was a pompous little man who always stood in front of the fireplace with his hands on his little potbelly, toasting his backside. Every time he opened his mouth, I expected dusty butterflies to come out. He always talked about the divorce in front of me, probably because he was one of those people who thought children didn’t exist. This is what he sounded like:

“As you know, Peter, the present status of your marital problem is that you have reduced Joan’s support payments, and have cut off all her charge accounts, credit cards, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Et cetera, et cetera” is precisely what Arthur Randolph Knowles used to say. Joan, by the way, was Mr. Stenner’s wife. Whenever they talked about her, I tried to remember what she looked like. I recalled a blue-eyed woman with dark brown hair. Once, when I was visiting Dad on a weekend, he pointed a woman out to me and said, “There’s Mrs. Stenner,” but she was getting into an automobile, and I didn’t get a good look at her.

“I am sure,” Mr. Knowles said, “that Joan must be bitterly unhappy with the present arrangement, which is so financially favorable to you, Peter, and so the next move is up to her and her lawyer.”

“Arthur,” Mr. Stenner said, “all I want to know is what options are open to us, that’s all. That’s why I asked you to come here tonight. Lillith and I...”

“Yes, I quite understand.”

“That’s what we’d like to know.”

“Yes. I’m coming to that, Peter. Patience, m’boy.”

Every time he said “Patience, m’boy,” Mom winced.

“Because it’s been almost seven months now, and there’s no sign...”

“What would you like, Peter? Would you like Joan to sue for divorce? I assure you there are grounds freely available to her,” Mr. Knowles said, and began ticking off the grounds on his fingers. “Abandonment, infidelity, failure to provide adequately for her support, et cetera, et cetera. But do you really want her to sue for divorce?”

“Arthur, you’re the lawyer, why are you asking me for advice?” Mr. Stenner said.

“The question was rhetorical,” Mr. Knowles said, “and the answer is ‘Of course not!’ Were she to sue for divorce, she would make immediate application for temporary alimony and counsel fees in substantial amounts. Moreover, were she even to sue for a legal separation...”

He went on and on, lawyers really are full of it. The gist of what he said each and every time was that without the cooperation of Mr. Stenner s wife, it was of course enormously difficult to obtain an equitable separation agreement. Mrs. Stenner did not want a divorce. Therefore...

Arthur Randolph Knowles shrugged, and smiled, and looked at my mother. The smile seemed to be advising her to forget the entire matter, let the man go back to his wife and children, eh? Then Mr. Knowles turned to Mr. Stenner and said, “As I’ve told you many times, Peter, marital problems of this sort can be most time-consuming, but in the long run, we always find a way to work them out, one way or the other. I strongly counsel your patience and forbearance. This too shall pass.”

Later that night, after Mr. Knowles had left, Mom said, “I despise the way that man expresses himself. Why does he always use language that sounds so medieval?”

“Bitterly unhappy,” Mr. Stenner quoted.

“Patience and forbearance.”

“This too shall pass.”

There was more snow in February and March than I could remember seeing ever in my life. Snow meant clogged roads. Clogged roads meant Dad having trouble picking me up on weekends. I was always waiting for something, it seemed. Waiting for Dad to come get me, or waiting for the divorce, or the wedding, or something, I don’t know what. Something terribly dramatic, I guess. A knock at the door. A lightning bolt zigzagging through the window and hitting the portrait of the cavalry officer. Anything. In the meantime, the three of us moved through that house like actors who’d already spoken our lines and gone to where we were supposed to go onstage, and were — well, waiting.

Just waiting.

I didn’t want Mr. Stenner to get his divorce, I didn’t want him and Mom to get married, and yet I did. I hated him, you see. But I also liked him a lot. He was a very comical man. And noisy. God, was he noisy. Once he had to go to Philadelphia to take some pictures there for a magazine, and he was gone only overnight, but I remember going into the living room where Mom was reading and saying to her, “Boy, it’s quiet around here.”

He was always making noise, if you know what I mean.

If a song he liked started playing on the radio, he’d just sing along with it at the top of his lungs. He had the world’s worst voice, he sang off key. I’d say, “That’s not the way it goes, Mr. Stenner,” and he’d say, “Quiet, Abby, that’s the way it goes.” And I’d try to teach him the right tune and he’d listen and then try to repeat it and get it all wrong again, a true tin ear, worse than Mom’s, which was also pretty tinny. Or he’d start dancing in what he considered rock style, shaking his fanny around the living room and wagging his hands in the air. A song would come on, and he’d just jump up off the couch and start dancing to beat the band! He wasn’t showing off or anything, he’d do it even if he was alone in the room, you’d suddenly feel the walls shaking, you knew Mr. Stenner was in there dancing all by himself, shaking his behind and wagging his hands.

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.