Allan Stein. Matthew Stadler
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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.”
Allan Daniel Stein was born November 7, 1895, in San Francisco, the only child of Michael and Sarah Stein. Mike, the older brother of Leo and Gertrude, sold a streetcar business in 1903 and moved with Sarah and Allan to Paris. Gertrude and Leo had preceded them. Therese Jelencko, Allan’s teenage nanny and piano teacher, went with them:
“Among my parents’ most intimate friends at the turn of the century were Michael and Sally Stein. I was a so-called child prodigy but hadn’t a good piano. So it was arranged that I practiced on their Steinway every morning. Their little son, Allan, four or five years of age, began to study with me. And a celebrated musician of the time, Oscar Weil, heard him play and was so enthusiastic that he begged to give him theory and harmony lessons and congratulated his parents on choosing ‘such a marvelous teacher,’ etc. I didn’t realize then what a compliment it was, but the Steins made up their minds that when they went to Europe they couldn’t dream of going without me. Of course I was then all of about fifteen years old, fifteen or sixteen.
“This was my first trip to Europe. Actually I never expected to be able to get to Europe, certainly not at that age, and there was great excitement. I left with Mike and Sally Stein and their little boy in December 1903, and arrived at Cherbourg and was met by Mr. Stein’s younger sister and brother, Leo and Gertrude Stein. No, Gertrude wasn’t along; I’m mistaken there. It was just Leo. We actually arrived at Cherbourg about three o’clock in the morning, and I was thrilled and fascinated. I knew no French but was absolutely charmed. Leo took us to the old hotel; oh, dear, I’ve forgotten the name of it. The Hotel Fayot. It was the famous hotel in the Latin Quarter, facing the Luxembourg Gardens, where the Senators have their lunch; it was celebrated for its great restaurant. And that was an exciting night. I don’t think anybody slept a wink.
“We finally found an apartment on the rue de Fleurus, 1 rue de Fleurus, which was the same street as Leo and Gertrude Stein, who lived at 27 rue de Fleurus. I remember ours was an apartment three flights up. There was no such thing as an elevator, and of course it had no bath. We had to go up the street to Gertrude’s. They had a bath and were unique. I think in the whole street perhaps there was only one other bath. And the baths used to come around by cart. Pipes would be hoisted from the street into your apartment, the tin tub having been brought up ahead of time. And you ‘bought’ a bath, as it were. It was all very primitive and very exciting and very wonderful to me.
“The Michael Steins moved to the rue Madame, I think it was 58 rue Madame, and part of my duties as an assistant in the household was to take the little boy to school. I’m going back a couple of years. I’m going back a couple of years. He went to a private school a few blocks away. And each morning I would meet Degas, the painter, who lived a block away, and each morning he’d ask how my little boy was. Well, I was only ten years older than Allan, but just the same I never corrected him. I was very proud of him, this very handsome young boy. Degas was an interesting figure and must have been at the height of his painting career then. I was just stupid enough to be really only interested in music. Well, it’s hard to follow in detail. There’s so much detail.”
The last days of March, all crazy with cold weather, swooped and shifted around me like the torn, blown pages of an old book. My forced holiday had brought new pleasures, but it had also robbed me of any enduring structure. I woke most mornings to nothing. For six years there had been some necessity to getting up. The stack of marked exams, toast in a paper napkin, plus my leather satchel stuffed with books and what-have-you (torn from their nooks as I rushed to the door), and my head full