Allan Stein. Matthew Stadler

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СКАЧАТЬ mean in addition to the stipend. But you’re going to have to start this—what is it you have here?—this term, or semester.”

      “Block.” We both stared at the boy. “You know, seven blocks, five interims, plus the optional summer block?”

      “Right. This block, which must be coming up soon, since there are so many of them. The work can go on however long you like, but we need to get started on it very soon.” The boy’s absent, cheerful face gave no clue what he was thinking. He might have been a genius or the victim of some experimental surgery. “You did tell me you were a big—what was it, fan—of Gertrude Stein, didn’t you?”

      “Oh, yeah.” He perked up at her mention. “Big-time fan.”

      “Well, this is your chance to put that expertise to work—I mean, not much work, it’s really very easy, but your enthusiasm for Stein will be an asset.”

      “Terrific.”

      “I have a sheaf of family letters, amazing stuff, mostly from her nephew and sister-in-law, which are just a joy to read.”

      “It sounds completely fascinating.”

      “Was he gay?” I interrupted, hoping to steer us, at last, toward the shoals of the Tristan question.

      “‘He’? Who ‘he’?” Herbert’s sour tone and grimace swatted at me, like hands chasing away some buzzing insect. “Gertrude Stein was gay, everyone knows that. You don’t mean ‘she,’ do you?”

      “He.” I strained. “The nephew.”

      “Oh, I don’t know. He was certainly miserable enough.” Herbert turned his very broad and cold shoulder toward me. “Anyway, Tristan won’t be concerned with all that. He’ll be too busy going after these missing drawings. We’ll probably have to send someone off to Paris to get them.”

      “Cool.” It was me, interrupting before the boy could get this word in edgewise. In fact Tristan never used the word, nor was he about to use any word, because duty had called him away. “Super cool.”

      “Thank you very much for frightening the boy.”

      “What, with the word ‘gay’?”

      “With your rudeness. Why do you have to make a wreck of every conversation I have with anyone else?”

      “I asked one question.”

      “You derailed the conversation.”

      “The question was in earnest. I didn’t even know she had a nephew.”

      “‘Was he gay?’ What on earth does it matter?”

      “I was just curious. Do you know him?”

      “Do I know him? How could I know him, he’s been dead for forty years. More.”

      “Was he cute?”

      “Oh, God.” Herbert left the table, and I fiddled with my glass. Outside the day had become grand and chaotic. Enormous sweeps of sun dragged down the boulevard, chasing sheets of rain (bright/dark/bright again) and transforming into glitter windblown accumulations of trash and prized trifles, after which schoolboys scattered in their slickers and boots. There was snow at a certain elevation (not high—it obscured the carnivorous pigeons in their third-story roosts), and large hail whomped down at one point as if released from some humiliating television game-show contraption, so that everyone looked up, and by the time they looked up it was sunny again.

      Spring is always so marvelous here (our city sits smack dab at the northernmost reach of the American West Coast), and it stretches from February to July. The other season is fall, which begins at the end of spring and lasts through January. At some point, every year, shortly after spring has ended and before the first gray showers of fall have come, there appear, as suddenly as sleep, two weeks of honey-warm days stretching to near-Laplandian lengths, the noontime parkland trails burnished in gold, when our hilly metropolis is saturated with the big yellow sun—a fat baker’s dozen of rich green days spent lolling on picnic blankets beside the child-strewn beach or drowsing with a book on one of the floating rafts. So sudden and delirious are these days, their memory is quickly buried under fall’s gray return, alongside our more private night dreams, until the city is ambushed again the next year, when these days reemerge precisely where we had left them.

      Regarding the weather of childhood, a harmless possum lived under the front porch of our fourth house—my favorite—which (belied by its trees, languor, and possum) was in a busy neighborhood near the city’s downtown. It was our house for two years (ages ten to twelve), the house in which my mother and I were happiest. The trees, the languor, low-to-zero rent (the landlord died partway through our tenancy and no one noticed us for a year), plus my emergence into the age of reason and dinnertime conviviality, conspired to make of this place a brief heaven. The possum—I named him Larry—scratched at our door whenever it was going to rain. Louise called him our prognosticator. He wanted to come in, I think, because it got wet under the porch when it rained. We never let him (the only discord of these halcyon years) and I stopped arguing with Louise when she told me that possums love, more than anything, the spittle of sleep, and that Larry would find me at night and lick the saliva from my lips, from my tongue even, thrusting his ratty little mouth into mine, defenseless while I dreamt, to sip the sweet nectar of my boyhood mastications directly from its source, should we ever let him in the door. Later, when puberty began, this scenario became a fantasy of mine, the most horrible and forbidden of many imagined scenes and therefore (on a few intensely private occasions, of which I will spare you the details) the climactic one.

      Why a fourth house? Why no father, siblings, or proper account of the scarring events of a troubled youth, etc., etc.? That is the part that bores me, all the psychiatrist’s carefully hoarded trivia of “damage,” gathered in his great pockets like loose change, grimy coins that he can then count out against the final bill, the great tabulation of failed dreams and dysfunctions he must balance against the purchases of a childhood. I can only tell what I remember, and what I remember is growing up. My father was gone, along with three half-siblings he enjoyed with another woman, and my mother didn’t like him and neither did I. His absence was as meaningful to me as the fact that I lacked an elephant. There are times when a boy could benefit from the company of an elephant, and it’s too bad if he doesn’t have one. However, I was so involved with what I did have, the missing parts of the “normal” went unnoticed, until everyone started asking me about them—which was early, age six or seven, when a virtual forest of adult faces began pestering me with questions about Dad, etc. Had the world turned its immensely caring eyes toward me and asked, sotto voce, “But, little boy, where is your elephant?” I would have burst into tears more sincere than any I have shed about my father. There is so much in this world that does not love a child it never seemed terribly important to single him out.

      Herbert returned. He settled in, casting a disappointed glance at the empty scotch glass. “Where is that boy?” We surveyed the room brusquely, but Tristan was nowhere in sight. “So, what happened while I was gone?”

      “Nothing, really. Tell me more about this Stein nephew.”

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      Allan Daniel Stein was born November 7, 1895, in San Francisco, the only child of Michael and Sarah Stein. СКАЧАТЬ