DURING A YEAR in my life when I spent a lot of time alone, I discovered in Somerville a somewhat forgotten, almost always empty bowling alley—actually candlepins, which is what we play here in Massachusetts—with a pool hall attached. I wiled away many Sunday afternoons teaching myself to play pool. Playing in a hall that didn’t allow alcohol, and under the watchful eye of an elderly attendant, I felt comfortable most of the time amid the young, male, mostly working-class regular clientele. Against this testosterone-charged yet antiquated backdrop, I was stunned to look up one day and notice high on the wall a photograph bearing the inscription, “Queenie & Gertrude Stein,” and showing what sure looked like Gertrude Stein along with an unknown young woman. The only other clue to its provenance were the words “New York City, 1903,” added to the inscription. The more I thought about it, the more curious I became. Was Gertrude Stein in New York in that year and, if so, what was she doing there?
A little research revealed that Stein did in fact go to New York City, from London, some time in early 1903, perhaps in February, apparently in an effort to escape London’s gloomy weather and to get over a painful love affair with May Bookstaver, a friend from her Baltimore Medical School days, who had left Stein for another woman. Not much is known about how Stein spent the six months or so that she lived on the Upper West Side, which is itself somewhat mysterious, since Stein is someone who kept notebooks assiduously through most of h Despite the absence of relevant letters and notebooks, 1903 was actually a fertile writing period for Stein, who appears to have coped with the grief following her breakup with Bookstaver. She either wrote or blocked out two novellas, Q.E.D. and Fernhurst, and also wrote extensive notes for what would eventually become her massive novel, The Making of Americans, published in 1925. Both Q.E.D. and Fernhurst have a triangulated love affair as their core, and Stein depended heavily on her experience with May Bookstaver, including letters they wrote back and forth, for her material. It was in 1904 that Stein moved to Paris to live with her brother Leo. Having been inseparable most of their lives, even to the point that rumors of incest had circulated among their crowd, their bond began to change in the ensuing few years. Stein met Toklas in 1907 and Leo met Nina Auzias, whom he later married. It was around 1912 that Gertrude and Leo stopped speaking altogether; they never saw one another again. It isn’t entirely clear what caused the break, but one likely factor was a mutual dislike of each other’s spouse. Gertrude only returned to the United States once more, and that was for a book tour rather than familial obligations. Years later, Leo would learn of his sister’s death from a newspaper account. Against the busy backdrop of Stein’s stay in New York, she appears to have had time to shoot a little pool. Where the photo was taken—whether in a public venue or a private residence or elsewhere—is not revealed by anything on the photo itself, and I found no documentary reference to it. Today the photograph hangs, as it has for many years, in this pool room along with several photos of well-known pool players, some drawings of children or dogs playing pool, other amusing if dated pictures, and a few aged articles on the game itself. They’re part of a collection of photos amassed by the longtime owner of a chain of bowling alleys, now deceased. And who was “Queenie”? According to Timothy Young of the Beinecke Library at Yale, where most of Stein’s papers reside, Stein and her friends used nicknames for each other all the time. In this wonderfully appealing photograph, Queenie, looking ornately Victorian in contrast to the plain, nondescript Stein, has what seems to be a sixteen-inch waist. She’s also very much the femme to Stein’s butch. Queenie stands tall, holding the bridge and possibly a pool cue as well, while Stein sets up a shot. Is Queenie holding Stein’s cue stick? Whether this pastiche is set in a public pool hall or in a friend’s home is also an alluring question, as the two possibilities have diametrically opposite socio-economic implications—yet one can readily imagine Stein hanging out in either sort of place. What we have, then, is this tiny bit of documentary evidence revealing how Stein spent some of her time in New York; and we’ll probably never know who Queenie was. Stein hasn’t figured strongly in my literary preferences, but when I graduated from high school, my mother asked what I might want as a present from Mrs. W—, one of her friends. I’d heard about a collection of Stein’s work that had recently been issued, which included Q.E.D., Fernhurst, and The Making of Americans (all of which have roots in 1903). Mrs. W— gave me the book and I read it, not entirely understanding it, but glad to have it, since the representation of lesbianism was valuable to me in my coming out process. I haven’t thought much about the book since then, but upon this re-examination, I also remembered that some years ago I’d heard that Mrs. W—’s daughter, someone I knew casually when I was much younger, is also now a lesbian. The photograph of Gertrude Stein and Queenie is back on the poolroom wall in Somerville after the manager was kind enough to take it down so I could snap the image that you see (a photograph of a faded photograph, taken through glass). I have to admit, I like shooting pool where the picture of a lesbian oversees the action, her identity unknown to the usual crowd of boys and men who play there. Whatever the story of this picture, its mysteries make me smile inside whenever I catch a glimpse of it while setting up my shots.
er life. What’s more, many letters that she wrote during this period are missing, perhaps having been removed by Alice B. Toklas, who tried to eradicate much of Stein’s life prior to their meeting. What we do know is that Stein was 29 at this time, and that she resided with three other friends from Baltimore: Harriet Clark, Estelle Rumbold, and Mabel Weeks.
