“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.
11.
On the train to Venice, he hardly said a word to me. He was sitting there reading his Italian grammars for half the trip, and then he put the books aside with a sigh, and stared out the window. In a little while, he got up from his seat and went down the aisle, to the toilet I supposed. I turned to Mom and said, “What’s the matter with him this morning?” I knew what was the matter with him, of course; I’d overheard their conversation the night before. He hated me because I loved my father, that’s what was the matter with him.
“Who,” Mom said, spacing the words evenly, “is him?”
“Him,” I said. “Mr. Stenner.”
“Nothing is the matter with Mr. Stenner,” Mom said. “Mr. Stenner is fine.”
When he came back to his seat, I said, “Do you know what the concierge said to me this morning?”
“The hall porter,” Mr. Stenner corrected. “In France, he’s the concierge. In Italy, he’s...”
“Daddy told me I should call him the concierge.”
“Oh? When did he tell you that?”
“Before we left.”
“Is that why he phoned the house that morning? To make sure you knew what to call the concierge?”
“No, he phoned to say good-bye. But before that...”
“Anyway, he’s not called a concierge, he’s called a hall porter.”
“That’s not what Daddy said.”
“Has Daddy ever been to Italy?”
“No, but...”
“Then tell Daddy not to tell me what the hall porter is called in Italy, okay? As a matter of fact, tell Daddy to mind his own business, and we’ll all get along much...”
“I am Daddy’s business,” I said.
“Fine,” Mr. Stenner said.
“Anyway, would you like to hear what he said to me? The concierge or the hall porter or whatever you...”
“It’s the hall porter.”
“All right, it’s the hall porter, all right? He asked me where my father was.”
“Did you tell him your father was home in the United States, pining for his darling daughter?”
“He meant you,” I said.
“I’m not your father,” he said. “We all know that.”
“But you are my stepfather. I felt sort of dumb. I didn’t know what to say to him.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I said you were upstairs in the room.”
In Venice, he began taking pictures of me again.
There were pigeons strutting all over the square, flying in the sky overhead, lofting in the spires of the church and in the arched windows above the arcades. For a hundred lire, you could buy a rolled newspaper cone filled with feed, and I bought a coneful now with money Mr. Stenner had given me. He was wearing a leather cap he’d bought in Milan, which he said made him feel more Italian, and which was sort of tilted over one eye. I walked out into the middle of the square and tried to tempt some pigeons into accepting food from the palm of my hand.
Piazza San Marco means “St. Mark’s Square” in Italian, and it’s this huge square, I would guess about the size of a football field. Or if it isn’t that big it certainly feels that big. And there are outdoor tables on the two long sides of the square — it isn’t really a square, it’s a rectangle — and there I was in the middle of it trying to feed the pigeons, and none of them would eat anything. So I went back to the table just as the waiter was bringing the drinks Mr. Stenner had ordered for all of us. I sipped a little of my Coke, and said, “It’s hot out there, Mr. Stenner. Do you think I could borrow your hat? To keep the sun off?”
“Sure,” he said, and took the cap from his head, and handed it to me. The cap was made of the softest glove leather, with a wide curving bill and a puffed crown. It was maybe three sizes too large for me, but I pulled it over my hair anyway, and went out to try with the pigeons again. Mr. Stenner was sipping at his drink and watching me as I stalked a bird across the square. Then I dropped to one knee, and shook some feed into the palm of my right hand, and held the feed out to the bird. The bird watched me, but didn’t come anywhere near. Patiently, I crouched and waited for him to come to my outstretched hand.
Mr. Stenner later told me it was only his own sense of professionalism that caused him to rise so suddenly; the combination of blond little me with the beige cap pulled down over my long, straight hair, and the gray pigeon waddling toward the feed on my open palm — these were irresistible to his photographer’s eye. I didn’t even see him approaching. I was still crouched, one knee on the ground, the other knee supporting my extended arm. A little Italian girl with close-cropped black hair, wearing a blouse embroidered with a flower design, and a red-and-white-check skirt, and white knee socks, and black high-topped shoes, stopped beside me and watched me and the bird.
The pigeon took two small steps toward my hand, examined the dried green peas and yellow triangles of corn on my palm, and took a timid peck at the feed. I was totally unaware of Mr. Stenner crouched not five feet away from me, his shutter clicking frantically as two, and then three pigeons waddled over to share in the loot. I got to my feet to pour more feed from the rolled newspaper into my hand, and the birds fluttered up toward the cone, one of them perching on its rim, another perching on my shoulder, a third perching on top of my head. I opened my eyes wide in astonishment, and then I began giggling.
The way Mom tells it, she was watching the whole episode from where she sat at the little round table across the square. She saw Mr. Stenner circling me, constantly cocking the shutter, pressing the shutter release, cocking it again, focusing, snapping. In those brief intervals when the camera momentarily left his eye, Mom saw that he was smiling. I was surrounded by a cloud of fluttering, flapping pigeons and grinning from ear to ear when I finally realized he was taking pictures of me. Mom says I turned away in embarrassment and started to say, “Oh, Da...” and cut myself short.
But my excited voice had carried clear across the square to where she was sitting.
I guess the reason he thought we were starting to be such good friends was his hat. I simply refused to take off his hat. He asked me if he might have it back, but I pleaded and begged and cajoled until he promised I could continue wearing it — but only till we got to Rome.