So I nodded, and almost knocked my chair over when I got up.
His name was Henri Jacques.
Mr. Stenner later told me the boy was probably a famous American writer, since his name translated from the French as Henry James.
He was only thirteen. He told me that he lived in the town where Joan of Arc lifted the year-long English siege in 1429. He said if I ever came to France, I should look him up. He told me his father was the manager of a bank in Orleans. Then he asked me what my father did.
“He’s an architect,” I said.
“Ah?” he said.
“And a photographer,” I said.
“Ah,” he said.
“In Italy, he’s mostly a photographer.”
“Ah,” he said.
“Though in France once, he was an architect.”
I was telling the truth.
Sort of.
After dinner, Mom and Mr. Stenner chatted with his parents, while Henri Jacques and I swung on the glider overlooking the river. The same man was down there fishing. He was always there in his boat whenever we came back from the city, sitting there all alone — boat, fisherman, and fishing pole reflecting in the water.
He never caught a fish all the while we were at that hotel.
“How old are you?” Henri Jacques asked.
“I’ll be twelve next month.” I said. “He’s getting me a present that begins with an F,” I said. “When we get to Rome. He hasn’t found it yet.”
“Something that begins with an F,” Henry Jacques said.
“Mm,” I said.
“Perhaps he buys you a Fiat,” he said.
“What’s a Fiat?” I said.
“An automobile,” Henri Jacques said.
“I don’t know how to drive,” I said.
“You must learn, non?” Henri Jacques said, and shrugged.
13.
When we got to Rome, Mr. Stenner told us he wanted to spend a few hours alone on the Via Condotti, and I immediately asked, “Are you going out to look for it?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What is it? A Fiat?”
“A Fiat? That’s an automobile,” he said.
“Sure, I know. Are you buying me a car for my birthday?”
“Who’d drive it for you?” he asked, smiling.
“I thought maybe you could get me a chauffeur, too,” I said, and giggled.
It was three days to my birthday.
When he got back to the hotel, he was whistling.
“You got it, didn’t you?” I said.
“I got it,” he said.
“What is it?”
He shook his head, and smiled, but I wouldn’t give up. I kept poking and prodding and guessing and pleading, and on the day before my birthday, I finally found out what he’d bought me. We were on our way to the Villa Borghese. Mr. Stenner was driving the rented car, Mom was sitting beside him, and I was in the back.
“Is it a fake something?” I asked. “Is that what the F stands for? Like a fake diamond, or a fake...”
“No, it’s very real,” Mr. Stenner said. “And listen, Ab, I don’t want to answer any more questions about it, okay? You’ll find out tomorrow.”
“Is it a fan? I saw some pretty fans in one of the shops yesterday.”
“I’m not even going to answer you,” he said. “Really, Ab. Even if you do guess what it is, I won’t tell you.”
“Well, is it a fan?”
“No, it’s not a fan.”
“Then is it a fife?”
“Abby,” he said, “if you ask me one more question about that damn bracelet...”
He cut himself short.
He had said it. He had told me what it was.
There was a stunned moment of silence; he was realizing he’d told me, and I was realizing I’d spoiled my own surprise.
“A bracelet,” I said.
He said nothing.
“But that doesn’t start with a... oh, I get it,” I said. “A forever.”
He still said nothing.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Stenner,” I said.
“I’m the one who should be sorry,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have kept pestering you that way.”
“I shouldn’t have slipped.”
Mom looked first at him and then at me, and then she sighed.
When I woke up the next morning, there were 12s stuck to the ceiling all around my bed. Big 12s. They’d been made out of Italian newspapers, he’d cut up newspapers into 12s and Scotch-taped them to the ceiling like a canopy. There was a mild breeze coming through the window, the 12s flapped lazily. I was twelve years old. I shrieked in delight when I saw all those black-and-white 12s, and then I ran into the room next door without knocking and threw my arms around his neck and kissed him and said, “You made all those twelves, didn’t you?”
“Not me,” he said. “Must’ve been the concierge.”
“The hall porter, you mean.”
“Right, right, I keep forgetting what you call that guy downstairs. Did you see what’s on the dresser?”
An envelope was propped up against a small box wrapped in gold paper. I knew what was in the box, of course. A bracelet. That much of it I’d managed to spoil. The card was in Italian. There was a little girl skipping rope on the front of it, and the words Buon Compleanno, Mia Figlia. I studied the card for a long time, trying to make out the Italian. Then at last, I said, “What does it say?”
“It says, ‘Happy Birthday, Daughter.’ ”
I put the card down. I unwrapped the small package. The bracelet had three slender strands of something dark that looked like leather. They were fastened with thin gold strips to a thicker gold band behind them. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.
“It’s elephant hair,” Mr. Stenner said. “It’s supposed to bring good luck.”
“Like a forever,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” I said. I went to Mom’s little traveling kit and took the scissors from it, and carried it back to the bed where Mr. Stenner was sitting up against the pillow. I held out my wrist. I didn’t have to say anything, he knew right off, same as I’d known when he was taking pictures of people taking pictures. He cut off the forever that I was wearing, and then slipped the new forever onto my wrist.
It meant something.
I was shaking.
It all began going beautifully after that.
The plan was to spend six days at Porto Santo Stefano, a peninsula off the coast, some ninety minutes north of Rome. Then we would drive back to Rome on the night before our departure, check in the rented car, spend the night in a hotel there, and taxi to the airport early the next morning. The hotel in Porto Santo Stefano was one Mr. Stenner had stayed at before. On the day we arrived, we were sitting near the pool, Mom and Mr. Stenner drinking whisky-sodas, me drinking a silvery confection that looked like liquid mercury — when a woman suddenly said, “Peter?”
Mr. Stenner looked at her, and then jumped out of his chair. “Wenefride!” he said, and hugged the woman to him, and then kissed her on the cheek, and asked immediately, “Where’s Emile? Is he here with you?”
“But of course he’s here with me,” the woman said, and laughed. She was in her early fifties, older than Mr. Stenner, and she glanced at Mom now with open curiosity.
“Wenefride,” Mr. Stenner said, “let me introduce you to my wife and my daughter. Lillith, this is Wenefride Gastuche. Wenefride — Lillith and Abigail.”
“How do you do?” Wenefride said, and extended her hand first to Mom and then to me. “Come, let’s find Emile! He will be so happy to see you again.”
The Gastuches were Belgians Mr. Stenner had met on his last trip to Italy. They didn’t seem at all surprised that he and the former Mrs. Stenner were now divorced. (“I could sense it coming even then,” Wenefride said to him.) I liked Wenefride a lot. You should have seen the stuff she had with her. She was only going to be away from home for two weeks, but she’d taken with her enough clothes to last eight months! That very afternoon, she showed me all the gowns and wigs and jewelry she’d brought, and it was like being in the best department store in the world. Her husband Emile was a little baldheaded man who was the director of a bank in Brussels. When he saw Mr. Stenner, he threw his arms around him and hugged him like a bear. In a minute, they were making plans. Emile said he had found a wonderful place to go swimming, and he told us to be ready at seven p.m. sharp, at which time he would personally drive us all there.