“But I guess they’ll begin to like us after a while,” I said.
“I hope so,” he said.
When we went back for the photograph, it was the laugh riot of the century. Even the photographer laughed. I begged Mr. Stenner to have another picture taken, but he thought this one was priceless and insisted that he would use it in his passport. The picture made him look like a punch-drunk fighter. He had this scraggly beard on his face, and the photographer snapped the picture just as he was blinking his eyes, so that he looked as if he was coming out of his corner for the tenth round. On the way back to the courthouse, I asked him why he hadn’t taken his own picture for the passport, and Mr. Stenner said, “Bad subject.”
“What do you mean?”
“I blink a lot.”
Then he did something that embarrassed me to death.
“Bong!” he said, and immediately put up his fists like a fighter and came out of his corner bobbing and weaving and ducking his head and jabbing at an imaginary opponent, except that he wasn’t in a prizefight ring — he was on the main street of White Plains with people walking everywhere around us and thinking he had gone totally bananas. When he gave the picture to the clerk in the passport office, she looked up at him and said, “That’s a winner, all right.”
Driving back home from White Plains, I asked him something that had been bothering me for a while. “Mr. Stenner,” I said, “what’s the difference between a stepbrother and a halfbrother?”
“Well, if Mommy and I were to have a baby, a little boy, he’d be your half brother. Because you’d both have had the same mother but different fathers.”
“Are you going to have a baby?” I asked immediately.
“We haven’t really discussed it,” Mr. Stenner said.
“But when you discuss it. Then will you have a baby?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t want you to have a baby,” I said.
“It’s not something we vote on,” Mr. Stenner said.
It was a good joke. I laughed at it.
If you encouraged him, he did outrageous things. In a restaurant, for example, he would order wine, and when the wine steward came and pulled the cork and poured a little of the wine into his glass to taste, Mr. Stenner would lift the glass to his lips, and take a sip of the wine, and roll it around on his tongue, and then pretend he’d been poisoned, clutching his throat and gasping for breath. Then he’d suddenly look up at the startled waiter, and smile, and say, “That’s very nice, thank you.”
Maria Victoria Valdez, on the other hand, had no sense of humor whatever. I told her a riddle I’d made up. The riddle was this: What did one fish say to the other fish after there’d been a long drought?
Maria looked at me and said, “What?”
“Long time no sea,” I said.
Maria kept looking at me.
“Long time no sea,” I said again.
She was still looking at me.
“Sea,” I said. “S-E-A.”
“Oh, it’s a play on words, eh?” Maria said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s very funny, Ah-bee,” she said, but she didn’t crack a smile.
“I guess it loses something in the translation,” I said. That was one of Mr. Stenner’s favorite lines. He’d say something he thought was hilariously funny, and if I didn’t laugh he’d say, “I guess it loses something in the translation.” Sometimes, just to tease him, I tried not to laugh at something that was really funny. Once, I almost wet my pants holding back the laughter. But Maria Victoria Valdez wasn’t wetting her pants holding back any laughter. She just didn’t find anything funny about “Long time no sea.”
“Where will you be going on your trip, Ah-bee?” she asked.
She was making conversation. She didn’t really care where I was going on my trip. All she cared about was the fact that I was going. Four weeks in Europe. Four weeks alone with Frank O’Neill. No bratty little daughter around telling incomprehensible riddles.
“We’re going to Italy,” I said.
“For four weeks?”
“Yes.”
“All four weeks in Italy?”
“Yes. Mr. Stenner says there’s lots to see in Italy. He says four weeks isn’t enough time to see it all.”
“This is a honeymoon?” Maria asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“They are taking you on their honeymoon?”
“Well, they were living together for a long time before they got married, you know, it isn’t as if this is such a big deal,” I said.
My father looked up from where he was mixing Maria a drink. Maria tried a weak smile.
“Well, it’s the truth,” I said. “And anyway, they’re married now. So what difference does it make?”
“Abby,” my father said, “let’s talk about something else, okay?”
“It was Maria who asked me about the trip.”
“Yes, but not about the living arrangements of the past God knows how many months,” my father said.
“What’s wrong with the living arrangements?” I said. “The living arrangements are fine. I’ve got two rooms. I’ll only have one room in the new house.”
“When will you be moving into the new house?” Maria asked.
“When we get back from the honeymoon.”
“In the fall?”
“Yeah, in September.”
“What’s the new house like?” my father asked.
“It’s nice,” I said. He was always doing that. First he would tell me not to talk about things, and then he would ask me questions about the very thing he had asked me not to talk about. Like our living arrangements.
“How many rooms are there?” he asked.
“Well, what difference does it make?” I said.
“Well, I’m an architect, I’m interested in houses,” he said, and smiled at Maria. I was sure the smile meant something, but I didn’t know what. I felt suddenly left out of things. Why was my father smiling at this strange person, this Chiquita Banana from Brazil, as if he was sharing the secrets of the world with her, when I was his daughter? Me! Abigail O’Neill! I was the one he should have been sharing the secrets with, whatever those secrets were.
“Are you going to sell this house or something?” I asked suddenly.
“No, no,” my father said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Well, why’d you just smile at Maria?”
“That had nothing to do with houses.”
“What did it have to do with?”
“A private joke,” my father said.
“What’s the joke?” I said.
“You wouldn’t understand it,” my father said.
“Try me,” I said, quoting Mr. Stenner.
“I’d rather not,” my father said.
“Where in Italy will you be going?” Maria asked.
“I don’t know where. Venice, I know, but the other cities... Rome, I think, is one of them.”
“Venice is beautiful,” Maria said. “Have you been to Venice, Frank?”
“Never,” my father said.
“Perhaps we will go one day,” Maria said.
“Will you take me?” I said.
“Ah, but you are going now,” Maria said. “No?”
I hated her.
I have to admit there were a lot of changes after the wedding. I mean, in addition to Mr. Stenner’s dumb beard.
“Hey, look at this, will you?” he’d say. “It’s got red hairs in it, will you look at it?”
“Those are blond.”
“Red! Look at them, Abby!”
“Mr. Stenner... shave it off, okay?”
The changes took place in all of us. They were subtle changes, maybe, but they were also very important ones. For example, Mom seeing her name on her own stationery made a difference: Lillith Stenner, and under it, the address of the new house we’d bought. It wasn’t just that the house we were moving into had been bought rather than rented, it was that we had bought it. Not just Mr. Stenner. Us. All of us. We all had a stake in it. In the same way that we all knew the house we’d been living in was not ours — the cavalry officer on the wall never allowed us to forget that simple fact — we also knew that the house we’d be moving to in the fall was ours. Mom and Mr. Stenner had shown me the deed, it had both their names on it: “Peter and Lillith Stenner, husband and wife.” Seeing the deed made me sort of wish my name was Abigail Stenner instead of Abigail O’Neill.