Allan Stein

by Matthew Stadler

  Gradually the boys left. Or some of them left. A whisper persisted, a whispering handful of them diminishing so that I thought they must suspect me (or, rather, the toilet stall) and be concealing a plan of attack. It wouldn't do to be found crouching. From beyond the walls the clean ping of balls echoed, bouncing on the hardwood. The game was under way, or maybe just warm-ups, each team beginning their choreographed weaves. A great spasm of the building's machinery shook the walls and pipes, swallowing the nearby whispers and the reports of their drilling teammates out on the court. The toilet rattled. Tiny waves mottled the water, tracing the disappearance of this huge sound, and then it was quiet again. I took a deep breath, flushed the toilet, and stepped out. The room was empty. A bench lay on its side, strewn with clothes. The distant hiss of steam heat mixed with the crowd's watery conversation from the gym.

  Per and Miriam sat in folding chairs by the court, laughing and smoking. I strode into the gym, said hello, and we kissed and Per pointed to the bright lit scoreboard: 12 to 3, only a few minutes left in the quarter. The boy glanced over, adjusted his sweatbands, and showed his indifference.

  "Has he scored?" I asked Miriam.

  "I don't think so. Per, has he scored yet?"

  "Yes, he has, dear, he made that basket, that layup"—this was a bit of jargon Per was proud of—"when he took the ball from the other boy."

  "He had a steal?"

  "Yes," Miriam said. "He stole the ball a number of times."

  "Stealing is his specialty."

  "Defense is his specialty," Miriam corrected. "Stealing is just one facet of it." This surprised me, given the ease with which I had abused the boy in the park. But as he resumed his position it became clear he could prevent any of his opponents from scoring. There was some kind of tactical fussiness, a sort of elaborate diplomacy about the other team's offense that made their progress to the hoop slow and uncertain. Every movement forward seemed to be negotiated, like the visit of a foreign head of state, so that Stéphane's refusal to move when the other team wanted to kept them from getting to the hoop. Their game simply stalled out somewhere between midcourt and the foul line, until the boy finally took the ball away from them.

  "Bravo," I shouted as he snatched it from the weak grip of his smaller opponent. "Slam-a-jammababy." This exclamation brought Per to his feet and Stéphane abruptly to a halt, as he stared at us and grinned, losing any chance for the breakaway layup I had anticipated. Time expired and we took a small hamper of fruit juice and yogurts to the boy's bench. The crowd was in fact not a crowd at all, but extra players who preferred to sit on chairs. Per and Miriam were the only "parents" in attendance. At the break these uniformed boys swarmed the court, dribbling and maneuvering in great bunches while the sweaty heroes milled around the sidelines with their sports drinks and juice. Stéphane shook my hand and described the four steals I had missed, plus the layup, which was acted out with Per playing the part of the defender. Everything was normal now; I was normal, where a few minutes ago I had been so creepy. I glanced at the rafters. A running track hung there, riddled with cracks and great holes where its plaster had rotted and fallen. It was unlit, hovering in the gloom, so that a man might've been up there now, a sniper or voyeur, without giving any sign.

  "Creepy place," I said. "Are all your games here?"

  "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 ♦

  Allan'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 Père 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 Père 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?

  At 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 m
oment 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 ♦

  In 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.