“I know, darling.”
“I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s get some sleep.”
On the card to my father, I wrote:
Dear Dad,
I miss you. I wish I were home with you.
Love and kisses.
Your daughter,
P. S. A hundred million hugs and kisses.
I love you.
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...”