Allan Stein (20 page)

"Not very many," he said. Miriam tried pushing the boy's fallen hair from his face, but he swatted her hand away and scowled. "Our practice is at Kellermann, where the gymnasium is very new. There are glass backboards."

"Hmm."

"The shooting here is very difficult." He gestured to the score. Miriam took a brush from her bag and stood behind the boy, arranging his hair in a ponytail, brushing it for some time, and he accepted this.

"Lousy backboards?"

"All the equipment is below the standard. The floor does not grip." A basketball bounced against my leg and I heaved it at the far basket, where it went in. The amazed boy stared at me, at my dumb luck, awestruck. I thought it might be worth tacking some pithy lesson onto this completely random event, but no serviceable ones came to mind. I just grinned and the boy stared with a new look, something like total admiration.

When the game ended Stéphane and I rode our bicycles on a long route home. He led and I followed, keeping silent so the glow of my famous basket would not be diminished by any of the usually stupid things I might say. The boy seemed to like the silence. He was at ease. We coasted along the rue Pascal and the air was soft, perfumed with exhaust and flowers, as on the first evening when I
arrived and saw him in the garden. I watched his strong legs, his slim back and shoulders, and saw everything I could ever love contained within the encyclopedic completeness of this solemn angel leading me into the evening traffic. The boy was a portal, capacious and transporting, so that with him I had no sense of loss. I missed no one, not even myself, my real name.

♦12  
♦

A
llan's son sent a second letter:

"In response to your reply, l believe my father died at the Grand Hotel (near the Opera) where he had been living for months (maybe years . . . I don't really know). He was buried at P
ère
Lachaise cemetery.

"Where he went to and when he left his parents' home I know nothing about."

A few incomplete anecdotes followed, and the letter closed, "I doubt very much whether this can lead you anywhere today. Yet it is all I can dig up from long-buried impressions."

I went to P
ère
Lachaise with Denis on Wednesday, a bright, sunny, cold morning. We met at the Café Bobillot, which Denis thought was charming. "So typical," he said, as we hurried through a plastic sheet the barman hung to keep cold air from coming through the door. The place was empty and we sat at a table by the heater, a clattering toasterlike box with a jet-engine whine, which glowed and shook. The barman was not impressed with us. He fiddled with his syrups while we sat for a while.

"
So typical," Denis repeated.

"I like it here. I bring my work here sometimes."

"The Beaubourg would be much more interesting for you, Herbert, the Café Beaubourg."

"The Bobillot is so close. Stéphane , you know, comes home this way, when he takes the bus."

"Ah, the boy."

"Mmm."

"Your life is very simple in Paris, Herbert, very clear. I could never be so focused as you are."

"My work is simple."

"I am impressed with your dedication, your discipline."

The barman polished the last of his syrups and shuffled to our table. Denis dispatched him with a swift sentence, and he returned with bread, twin sealed plastic tubs of jam, and two large bowls of hot chocolate to warm us.

"The widow wants to meet you, George has said. But she will only speak in French, and George worries that won't be suitable."

"What would I talk to her about anyway? She hasn't found the drawings." Denis sipped his chocolate and said nothing. "How long will I need to stay for this, Denis?"

He shugged and looked bored with me. "How long would you like to stay?"

I had no answer, but blew on my chocolate for a while. "I don't see why George is devoting so much attention to Mrs. Stein, except that he obviously enjoys it. He should refuse to see her until she coughs something up."

"With some people, Herbert, there is a great deal of socializing to make possible a very little business. George has good reasons to indulge her. He would like to be her confidante."

"My mother did that, I mean with a man." This bright aside puzzled Denis as much as it intrigued him. "She was sort of an art consultant to him."

"Was she with your museum?" Museum?

"No, she didn't actually know anything about art, but she had impeccable taste, certainly better taste than he did. This man's car
was hideous. He had it lined with this plush fake fur, hair really, petroleum hair that turned into molten plastic droplets if you set fire to it. I always got tossed in the backseat with the purchases so I burned a lot of the hair while they laughed and drank in the front. Louise knew I did it and she kind of like it. She liked keeping secrets with me, especially from her boyfriends."

"Louise?"

"My mother. I always called her Louise."

A bum spare-changing by the entrance to Père Lachaise said he'd guide us to all the famous graves if we paid him (two francs per grave). We didn't answer and he turned to the next man.

The bright sun lit bunched flowers laid on tables up and down the sidewalk so the street was garish and carnivalesque. Denis loaned me his gloves, which were warm and too big for my hands. He smoked the way a habitual walker might savor the fresh air, sucking it down in great greedy mouthfuls, smiling broadly and saying nothing as we strode through the gate to the guardhouse.

"I will say you are the grandnephew of Allan."

"Why?"

"It is easier. They will show anything to the family, but possibly the records are not open to a stranger who has walked in." The walls of the guardhouse were drab, cracked plaster whitewashed and stained beige by cigarettes. Chill air spilled through the open door. The guards had disappeared, but Denis was content waiting. He was so big and elegant, so commanding, that when the guard finally came we had no trouble getting what we wanted. Allan's name was entered in a massive hard-bound ledger, which the guard dragged from an upper shelf. The entry in loopy ink was smudged so that it read
Alloon Stair
, with the number of the plot in some difficult code. (97, 9-2-77).

Along the potholed walk, between boxy gray mausoleums littered with garbage and dead flowers, the city's bright green
dumpsters caught my eye, gay and spotless where the sun shone on them. The Dumpsters were big as graves. Black plastic wheels made them portable. I thought if someone snuck in at night they could hide there, if need be, and I told this to Denis, who wasn't listening.

"Do you know how he died?" Denis asked, strolling past the uninteresting Dumpster.

"Overeating, I think. He had some kind of intestinal problem. He died alone in the Grand Hotel, near the Opéra."

"I adore the Grand Hotel."

"Mmm. I think it is very sad, don't you? His children barely knew him. I think two marriages had failed. His parents hardly spoke to him, I mean, they even took his ex-wife in as a kind of permanent house guest."

"He must've looked awful. He was fat, wasn't he?" The bushes beside us shook and rattled. Birds maybe.

"Yes, probably." Denis's distaste annoyed me. What did it matter if he was fat? "I understand he was quite handsome, fat. Josephine Baker pursued him, I believe."

"I wonder how they dressed him?" Denis smiled and took my arm. "I would like a sleeping gown for burial, a very expensive cotton or silk."

"What an idea." Hippies struggled from the bushes and staggered past us, drinking wine from a bottle, laughing.

"It is my mother's idea."

"You buried your mother in her nightgown?"

"Not yet. She would like to be buried that way." We started along the path again, which emptied when the hippies turned downhill, away from us. Beyond the next grave, a great carved marble dog had sunk into the ruins of a collapsed tomb. His head and fore-paws could be seen, but the rest had fallen in with the roof. "What a peculiar day." Denis sucked the air in, marveling at the broad blue sky and the trees against it. I felt weightless, knowing the ground
was full of bodies. The graves were pretty, dappled with cold sunshine, overgrown but contained by the paths and avenues. Louise inscribed on a tomb caught my eye, but moss obscured the family name and dates. Two collapsed trees by the tomb left a hole where the blue sky looked empty, as if something were missing from it.

"You're leaving Paris soon?" Denis asked. I didn't answer him.

Allan's grave was awful, an overgrown plot of weeds atop a shallow marble box. I didn't think it was his because the names were misleading: ALEXANIAN HAIGAZIAN STEIN. Was this his given name? Apparently the widow buried her other relatives in the grave with Allan. I presumed she meant to join them someday, making at least four in a small plot. Allan and his in-laws must have been cremated first, or somehow reduced. Herbert had told me that Allan's hair is kept locked in the vaults of the Beinecke Library at Yale, a thick golden curl from 1899, when the boy was four. Gertrude had kept it all her life and passed it along to the Beinecke with her letters. This particular library is a monument of twentieth-century architecture, a great translucent marble cube, fully four stories high, enclosing a glass chamber that seals its treasures in a vacuum (in case of fire). Allan's hair rests in acid-proof paper, curled like a fetus in the bed of its own impression, and can be inspected by anyone requesting it. Guards patrol the vault. A receptionist transmits requests to messengers, and the hair is retrieved. Surveillance cameras cover the room where the hair can be inspected. Why should Allan's childhood curls be treated with such greater pomp and care than the remains of his tired dead body?

A
t home I sat in the garden alone. Per called but I didn't answer. I might have slept or drifted; in any case, time passed. It became dark and I sat on the bench beneath the plum tree. The stone wall stayed warm a long time. Serge had watered the flower beds, so the garden smelled like rain. There was no moon, and the garden was lit
by the buildings around us. I was still on the bench when the light in Stéphane's room was turned off and replaced with the flicker of candles. Someone—Miriam—opened the window, and I could hear their voices. I was cold enough to feel sleepy, as after a long hike when it's pouring rain and the fire can't be started, but I sat up and watched the shadows on his ceiling.

The walls of the garden kept the street noise out. Stéphane spoke and Miriam went to the window and closed it again. I couldn't see them, which frustrated me, so I climbed partway up a tree near the window. There was a branch near the top of the wall, and I sat there and watched. Stéphane lay in bed with no shirt. Miriam leaned over him, massaging his back and sides. His hair fell in tangles around his face, which was pressed into the pillow. His arms were stretched out, over his head, and hung off the edge of the bed. Miriam put oil on her hands and rubbed them together to make the oil warm before touching him. She put her hands on his shoulders and moved them in circles; then she ran her palms, flat, along his spine to his hips. Moving her hands out from his spine, she traced his ribs with her fingers spread and then pushed her hands under him, under his hips, to rock his body back and forth. Because I'd seen his stomach and hips bare in the garden when he stood watching birds and I knew the skin and the shape of the bones where she held him, I could feel his hips and the weight of him in her hands. Stéphane turned his head on the pillow and Miriam kissed the nape of his neck. She reached under him, below his stomach, and he laughed some; then she pulled his pants off by the legs. His boxers got pulled down too and the waistband turned under halfway down his butt, which was lighter than the skin of his back. Miriam leaned over him, blew the candles out, and went upstairs.
"Bonne nuit,"
she said from the door as she left. Stéphane didn't answer.

I thought of climbing through the window, or knocking on it somehow, but I wasn't supposed to be out here sitting in a tree
watching. I wanted to flip him over and have the other side to myself. I went inside the house. Miriam lay on the couch in the living room, above the sleeping boy, with a book and a pillow tucked up to her chest. I sat by her feet and she just smiled and kept reading. A magazine beside me had pictures of Germany, and I flipped through them for a while. I yawned and stretched, making a grimace as I rolled my shoulders a little. Miriam did nothing. I rolled the shoulders again and then turned my neck and cringed, so that she looked up.

"Are you all right, Herbert?" she asked, noticing my theatrics. "You seem discontent."

"I'm just very sore. In my neck and shoulders mostly." I made a show of my pain, then sighed and looked out the window. Miriam pouted to show her sympathy, then returned to her book. "I think I turned too suddenly. I suppose it's nothing."

"It can't be nothing."

"I mean nothing terribly important. I'm sure I'll be fine if I can relax enough to get some sleep." I looked at Miriam purposefully, and she looked back for a prolonged moment with an amused smile.

"Eat the bananas; they are very good for the electrolytes that help sore muscles. I think a little wine is a good idea too."

"Wine and bananas?"

"Mmm. And Serge can give you his heating pad."

"That must be a very good book you're reading."

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"It is Nescio, a Dutch. He reminds me of my grandmother's street in Amsterdam. I read him every year, the same story." She handed the slim book to me and I looked, but it was in Dutch and I understood nothing. I got up from the couch, took a few bananas from the kitchen table, and went to my room.

♦13  
♦

                                                        I
n September, 1913, Sylvia Salinger sailed to America and Allan went back to school, impatient to be done with it. The following summer, the Steins returned to Agay, alone with Allan. They'd booked rooms in the same hotel, for the same months as they'd spent before with the group. Sylvia's absence was everywhere in the small village: on the terrace where Allan had sprawled at her feet, on the empty clay tennis court, along the path by the river where they had walked and seen the horses. This summer, for Allan, was a last good-bye to a romance that had failed and a childhood that was ending. He arrived in July of 1914, impatient to get on to his final year of school and move forward into life.

     Allan had brought some of his books, and Mike was still game for adventure, but mostly Allan did what he'd done with the group the previous year, only now alone: he swam, lay about on the terrace, took the same walks into the hills, and waited for summer to end. In August, with only a few weeks left before school, news began to circulate around Europe, the import of which was reflected in Mike's letters back to Gertrude.

     
August 8, 1914: "My dear girls,

     
"How are you and where are you? We are here and shall remain for the present as the train service to Paris is irregular and dif
ficult, 48 hours at least. I have not heard from you or Leo. Please answer. Mike."

     
August 21, 1914: "My dear Gertrude,

     
"Just got yours of the 15th. Strange you did not hear from me, I wrote twice. We are very comfortable here. I have not heard from Leo or Claribel, have you? I guess the only way is to draft postals frequently, as the mails are so irregular. Love from all, Mike."

     
September 8, 1914: "My dear Gertrude,

     
"In the
NY Herald
of the 4th there was an announcement from U.S. Ambassador Myron T. Herrick, 5 rue de Chaillot, asking all Americans having apartments or houses in Paris to register their residence, whether occupied by them or not, with view to issuance by the embassy of proper certificates to safeguard their property. I notified him of our apartments and you might want to do the same. With love from Mike."

     
War broke out in Europe, and Mike Stein felt his family had no choice but to stay on at the small hotel in Agay.

     
December 23, 1914: "My dear Gertrude,

     
"Enclosed you will find a check for 1,000 ff. When you cash it, will you please ask them how much more I am entitled to according to the terms of the moratorium, and I will then send you another check when you let me know what answer they give you. We are thinking some of coming to Paris after the New Year.

     
"I'm rather glad to get to see for myself what it is like here in the winter, as I had often thought of breaking the winter with a trip down here. The nights are cool but the days are sunny and we take long walks and bicycle rides. I see the sunrise every morning from my bed, and the cloud effect at sunset surpasses anything I have ever seen. We practically own the hotel. Someone drifts in for a while and then another, but we are practically alone and the landlady caters for us
en famille
. Her son is at the front and her husband is in barracks at Antibes. The troop trains all stop here as do the Red 
Cross trains, as the engines all have to take water from the rivi
è
re d'Agay.

     
"We sent to Paris for the books for Allan's school, so he has been able to keep at his studies. I guess that's all. Affectionately, Mike."

     
Mike's attempts to get back to Paris, or to get his family out of Europe altogether, were halfhearted and unsuccessful. The family remained in limbo, always poised to leave Agay but never leaving.

     
January 4, 1915: "My dear Gertrude,

     
"We expect to arrive in Paris Saturday the 9th at 4:15 A.M. We are having lots of rain here at present but had a homey Christmas and New Year with a wreck thrown in. A little schooner was thrown on the rocks, and the men came here drenched and chattering and we fixed them up. Claribel is still in Munich. Chilly mornings and evenings. We had a log fire in our room. Affectionately, Mike."

     
January 5, 1915: "My dear Gertrude,

     
"No we are not coming this week. After staying through all the storms, now that radiant sunshine has come, I could not pull myself away and decided to see for myself what the wonderful January was like on the Riviera. Enclosed please find a check for 1,000 ff. Love from all, Mike."

     
Mike, Sarah, and Allan settled in for a long stay. Allan pursued his schoolwork alone in the deserted hotel. In Paris, Gertrude tried to put things in order, though she was deeply reliant on Mike for advice and finances. Eventually she left with Alice Toklas to Spain.

     
February 12, 1915: "My dear Gertrude,

     
"Enclosed you will find a draft for 2,000—will send you the other 2,000 in the early part of March. For the present the pictures had better remain at your place, as it's covered by your policy. Should you want to leave earlier, let me know and I'll send the sec
ond draft to you in Spain. Do you plan to leave your Cezannes in your studio when you leave? If not, put the
Femme au Chapeau
with them. Yours affectionately, Mike."

     
March 23, 1915: "My dear Gertrude,

     
"Here is your sheet to fill out for income tax. I got a couple of sheets at the Mairie at Cannes and am enclosing a sample filled out for you to copy onto the real sheet, which M. Dursonoy sent me from Paris. Then you want to mail it at once registered mail to:
M. le Controleur des Contributions directes à la Mairie du 6ième arrondissement, Paris, France.
The joint is that should by any chance the sheet not reach them, you can prove by your register tag that you had sent it within the prescribed time. We're now having the equinoctial showers here and it has rained more or less for a month, but it is not cold. The traveling to America seems to be getting worse instead of better, but it may change soon, let us hope so. My love to Alice, Mickey."

     
Another year passed, and the war got worse.

     
May 17, 1916: "My dear Gertrude,

     
"We shall surely be here until Allan's exams are over, the last part of July; then it will depend on the conditions of ocean travel. I have written for your insurance bill. I guess that's all, Mike."

     
June 17, 1916: "My dear Gertrude,

     
"So you are back again. Well, Allan's exams take until the middle of July, and then we may come up and begin packing. Here all is quiet and one day is like another. Au revoir, Mike."

     
July 24, 1916: "My dear Alice,

     
"The magazines came. Thanks. Allan came back from Aix with his degree after a very serious cram. With love, Mike."

     
Allan had passed his exams, a year late and hundreds of miles away from his classmates. He went on to Paris and joined the U.S. Army, adrift now in the world. Somewhere in this last prolonged stay 
in the hotel at Agay, Allan Stein's only real life drifted away. His boyhood disappeared and he emerged as an inconsequential man, a man whose family preferred their amusing stories about his childhood to the stubborn, dissolute adult he had become, a man who would be eclipsed by famous paintings made of the boy he had once been. The track forward from his youth disappeared in Agay, and by the time his adulthood spun out of control in Paris he was a lost, untraceable soul. The final thirty years were little more than the working out of a failed equation. Alice Toklas said, "He was the natural reaction of an exaggeratedly cultivated home—quite an abnormal atmosphere for a child who had no proper childhood."

I
went with Stéphane to see
Nostalgia
. The movie theater was in a deceptively small-looking café with enough black walls and mirrors to make its real size inestimable. Stéphane and I sat at a glorified picnic table, somewhere midcenter, by a mirrored wall that had cracked across the middle so that a line went through him when I watched him there. I could see a half-dozen views of Stéphane , because of the mirrors, and these occupied me for a while. He flipped through a newspaper. Rain pestered the windows, reminding me of home and Shackles.

     
The simplicity was starting to wear me down. The boy. My desire. The gap between us. Our knees touched beneath the table. "What is the film about?" I asked, but he was taken with something in the paper. I went to the bar and got a mint soda, bright green, plus a Coke for the boy. At least Shackles had decor, even if it was fake. The ticket girl sat near the front, smoking, reading a dog-eared play. There was nothing on the walls, I guessed so they could clean by just hosing the place down. The air was blue with cigarette smoke. Tiny spotlights clamped to metal tracks on the ceiling made pools of light on the tables, and my soda shone green as a Christmas lamp when I set it down there.

     
"What's the film about?" I asked again. The boy returned his knee to mine beneath the table, though it probably meant nothing to him. His hair was wet from the rain and he'd slicked it back, which made him look about twelve and very handsome.

     
"Serge said it's very beautiful. I think it is a man and a woman in Italy. They're looking at paintings."

     
I pushed my leg forward a little. "Would you go somewhere with me?"

     
"The movie starts soon, in a few minutes."

     
"No, on a trip."

     
The boy stared. "Why?"

     
"I don't know. I need to see Agay, the Côte d'Azur." A crowd poured into the room from downstairs; the movie had let out.

     
"What is there?"

     
"Oh, it's hot as Spain, I'm told. You know, beaches." He smiled like a boy with a Coca-Cola. "My French is so poor, I need someone. You know."

     
"I would miss school."

     
"Of course you would miss school."

     
"I could do that." Here he stared again, as if adding up figures. "If you want to."

     
If I want to. The phrase echoed somewhere in me. The boy got in line for the tickets, and I finished his Coke and my soda. It was never clear what he knew. Making him talk about sex was out of the question, more absurd than actually having sex with him. The boy got the tickets and beckoned for me to follow him, and we filed downstairs into the theater, where we settled with our wet coats piled on the seats beside us; then the room became dark.

     
There was a valley with a path leading down it past trees and a pole and a horse. The people who walked away into the valley kept turning to look at us, which was disturbing. The film made shadows over Stéphane's wrist and the bend of his arm on the chair 
beside mine. His arm was bare and I stared for a moment, but, strangely, the film was more beautiful. I put my arm across Stéphane's shoulders and he let me.

     
The film moved slowly, laterally or sometimes away. I couldn't tell if the valley was real or the construction of a set designer. The woman and the man drove across an empty pasture in a Volkswagen. When the woman's face appeared in close-up, Stéphane sighed and shifted his body. Did he find her beautiful? She looked like the women in the paintings of Botticelli. The picture had the hollowness of a painting. Stéphane fell asleep when the veiled women entered a shrine bearing a statue of the Virgin on a bier of wood. His head was on my shoulder. They knelt before the Virgin and prayed while candles filled the wall behind her. The candles flickered, and I saw them reflected on Stéphane's mouth, which had opened while he slept. One woman bent forward and parted the gowns of the Virgin. Birds, hundreds of tiny birds, poured from the gash in her dress and filled the air above the praying women. Their noise was tremendous. My heart raced, probably from fright at the birds. Stéphane stayed sleeping and his hand dropped to his belly. The light and sound of the birds filled both rooms, both the vault of the shrine and the darkened room of seats, of folded coats, and people hiding from the afternoon rain, where I sat with the boy.

     
How could he keep sleeping? Noise and shadow cascaded over him. I watched his face and arms in the dim light. The light was beautiful, and I brushed my fingers across his cheek to feel it. He was soft, like water. I slipped lower into my chair and let my head rest against his. I turned my face toward him so I could smell his hair, and he slept beside me like that. I reached again but did not touch him. The film was empty and beguiling, like a series of paintings inside of which photographs moved.

     
There was a pleasant scene of rain in bottles. The poet was deserted by his translator. He drank vodka in a ruined church filled 
with water from a fresh spring and trees in which birds nested. He told stories in Russian to a little girl who looked like the woman painted on the wall. In the end the man fell asleep by the fire, and the book he'd been reading caught flame and burned. Stéphane turned closer to me and let his hand lie against mine on my lap. He might have been sleeping. His hair smelled like rain. Nothing startled me after the birds, except a terrible event at the close of the film when a madman made a speech and then burned to death.