Read The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel Online

Authors: Andrew Sean Greer

The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel (6 page)

BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
9.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Hughie smiled. “Well, anyway, like you used to be. Nob Hill didn’t suit you. You were starting to look like a bank president, old man.”
“You look like a music hall singer.”
That made him laugh. He was done up in lavender and gray, with the dandyish ill taste of a seventeen-year-old with some pocket money, wearing—just to spite me—a velvet vest that I had told him time and again made him look like an organ-grinder. Hughie never cared.
I noticed a movement in the downstairs apartment; the white flash of a dress, but in a moment it was gone. I hoped our neighbors would not come outside until we were moved. Those firstfloor renters were the last people I wanted to meet. I noticed a wasp’s nest had formed under the eaves since I’d been gone.
I said, “You know what Mother’s telling everybody?”
“No.”
“That I’m her brother-in-law.”
“But that’s stupid! So she’s your brother’s wife?”
“That I’m her brother-in-law come over from the East to help her run the household. Now that Dad’s gone.”
“But that’s stupid. You used to live here. Won’t people recognize you? I mean, the little freak?”
“Nobody recognizes me. When I left here, I was five feet tall with white hair. Now look at me.” Newly seventeen, nearly six feet, with a full head of brown hair and a gorgeous streaked beard, I looked positively presidential, but dressed in Dad’s old clothes, I felt I took on some of his European glamour and held my thumbs in my waistcoat pockets, preening. I said, “I think I’ve improved.”
He winked. “I think so, too, Max. Soon you’ll be a handsome old man.”
“And you’ll be an ugly one.”
Hughie swatted at a passing wasp and then turned to where Mother looked out from the window. The wasp flew on. “Hello, Mrs. Tivoli!” he yelled.
“Don’t shout, you plug-ugly,” I told him.
“I ain’t ugly,” he informed me, smoothing his vest.
Mother shook from stillness at her post, held one hand to her hair, and waved with the other.
“How is she?” he asked, still looking up at my mother while she smoothed her best black dress, the one she wore to present herself to her old home the way one dresses for a dinner knowing an old lover will be there. She disappeared into the darkness of the upper room.
“Pagan,” I said.
Now he was interested. “How so?”
I kicked the dry grass. “She’s reading tarot cards. She’s burning a spirit lamp all night in her room.”
“I guess she still has a lot to say to your dad.”
“Oh she doesn’t talk. She’s listening.”
“What does he say?”
“Nothing,” I said firmly. “He’s not dead.”
He nodded and looked back out at the park, arms crossed. “I agree.”
We had come up with our own idea (not shared by the police) that what happened to Father was happening to men all the time in those days. We were convinced he had wandered into a bar on the Barbary Coast, drunk down a mickeyed beer, and, fallen into a drugged stupor, been dropped through a false plank in the floor onto a waiting Whitehall boat. There, he was taken out in darkest night to a clipper waiting outside the Golden Gate, the fees exchanged, and awoke to find himself headed on the sunny ocean towards the East, part of a whaling crew. A captain would be shouting orders into the prevailing wind, and pigtailed, tattooed
crewmen would be shuffling by, eyeing their new mate. A trip backwards into his own salt-rimed youth. In other words, he’d been shanghaied.
But what I secretly thought had happened was even more obscene, fantastic. I imagined some Norse enchantment that had trapped my father so he was unable to reach us; I thought of some old ghost come round Cape Horn to haunt him and how, like Merlin locked by Nimue inside the rings of an oak, Father sat in a green coil of fire, waiting for me to speak the exact phrase to break his spell. What would it be?
“hap!”
The sound came from behind us. A girl nearly my age had just come out of the first-story door but now lay anguished in the grass. I could not imagine what she was doing. She was all in white lace and held her hand to her neck, waiting, almost listening to the seconds passing, and we stared at each other in the wake of her odd cry. Then, slowly, in terror, she removed her hand, showing me
first:
a bright kiss of pain on her neck; and
second:
rolling in her outstretched palm, the gold-black liquid body of a wasp.
Alice, are you reading this? It’s you!
I had seen girls before, of course. Not only from that nursery window where I watched them in their little-lady dresses pointing at the birds, but, later, I saw the girls of Nob Hill on their way to school, kicking pebbles at each other and laughing; I saw young ladies coming home past curfew in their beaus’ phaetons; I even spotted some kissing in the parks until the couples, noticing a leery old man, took off for thicker bushes. And I had fallen in love with the everyday girls: the girl at the newsstand with a shine above her lip, the girl with sad eyes selling pineapples stacked up in a pyramid, and the German butcher’s daughter who came with
him to our back door and translated. But I never said a word to them. I merely nodded from the kitchen, or tried to hide my nervous sweat by tossing down my coins and rushing away. It was a thrill, an agony.
I hadn’t yet met a proper girl. All boys are primed at seventeen, ready for love. And I, imprisoned in that awful body, was sure to fall for the first one to meet my eye.
“I’ve been stung!”
And so had I, Alice, seeing you for the first time. Worst luck of my life: I was struck dumb by my heart.
Hughie ran to her. “Are you all right?”
She blinked as the pustule at her neck began to swell. “I’ve never been stung before,” was what she said.
“You’ll be all right,” Hughie told her. “Lie down.”
She refused, sitting there and looking at the poisoner in her palm. “It hurts.”
“Well …”
“More than I expected. Mother got stung once and I thought she was making too big a deal of it, but … oh, it hurts.”
“It’s swelling, too.”
Now she turned those soft brown eyes, those ageless eyes, on me. “Sir, your son is very kind.”
I tried to speak but nothing happened. I was a mute old man and she looked away.
“Mother!” she yelled, then looked again at the wasp. “Poor little thing.”
“Hmm,” Hughie said, getting up.
“You’re going to leave me here?” she said.
At that moment, I was opening my mouth to say the words I’d
been trying to speak for almost a minute. She seemed to notice and looked right at me. I blinked. There, they came out at last:
“He’s …he’s not my son.”
But the words were drowned out by a shout from the side of the house. I looked and it was merely a woman, a mother. Alice, you turned away and never heard me.
I would like to call it fate, but I should call it chance, that put you in my yard at the time my heart was at its most tender. I suppose I’m lucky it was you and not someone crueler. Still, if it had been anyone but you, Alice, I would have loved again, and plenty, before this ripe age. Cursed by your eyes, however, I never have.
“Mr. Tivoli!”
Her mother rushed out of the house and kneeled at her daughter’s feet. She held a cloth against the girl’s taut neck, pressing against that tender skin with the casual efficiency of a nurse. She was a fine woman, moving so naturally with her sticks-and-bones daughter as the girl hissed and struggled. Mrs. Levy wore clothes from the final years of widowhood, and she had the careful beauty of an older woman. She dressed for her face, with a collar of pearls, and for the things that do not age: a discreet folding bustle for her womanly silhouette, and a creased shirtwaist for her impressive bust. I am not good at age; what was she, Alice? Forty-five or -six? She had a dark-complected face shaped like a hazelnut, with a bow hairline and uncolored lips. She smiled and scolded as, she daubed the girl, but she was not looking at her. She was looking, with those deep brown feminine eyes, straight at me: “Mr. Tivoli, it’s wonderful to meet you at last, don’t flinch, Alice, it’s not that cold.”
Alice! I had her name, and now she was twice the girl I’d known before.
“I hope you’re happy with your brother’s old home, we just love it here, don’t we, what were you doing, you foolish girl? You slap them, they sting you, ah well, I hope it won’t swell, and if it does it will remind you, won’t it? Alice, sit still. Now you’ve got your dress wet, and we’ll have to air it. I met your sister-in-law, Mr. Tivoli, and she’s a charming lady, so sad, so sad.”
Hughie snickered. “That’s right, Mr. Tivoli, your lovely
sister-in-law.”
It was all a scene that Alice’s mother was directing. Every moment that I stood there, seeing Alice, the girl was growing ever clearer to me, ever larger; I watched her blinking her tears away, red with anger, and sighing as her mother held her hair. Yet Mrs. Levy was pulling me in the opposite direction, taking away my right to have a schoolboy’s heart, replacing it with the leather flaps of an old man, someone whom stung-Alice could never love.
“Alice, be quiet, this is your landlord, Mr. Tivoli. He is old South Park, aren’t you, Mr. Tivoli?”
She was crumbling me before her daughter’s eyes. My hat felt far too tight and it occurred to me that it wasn’t mine; I must have picked up the wrong one at some party.
“Not old at all, Mrs. Levy,” I said, then, “Hello, Alice,” which had no effect on the girl, who was staring elsewhere with a riveted gaze, but which made the older woman laugh in a downward, separating scale like a string of pearls.
Alice turned to me at last. “I hope you don’t make noise upstairs like the last couple. They sounded like cattle.”
Mrs. Levy attacked her daughter with a reptilian noise. “Besides, Mr. Tivoli,” the widow added, “I noticed the beautiful rugs you’ve brought from your old home on Nob Hill. What a soft, lovely household you’ll have!”
Mrs. Levy had a charming way with conversation, and I was a
child of seventeen, so I could only follow where she led. I spoke of rugs, Brussels rugs, their color and feel, and I could almost taste them on my tongue as I kept up this dusty, woolen conversation while all the time I could have been asking Alice about her schooling, her piano, her travels; I could have been hearing Alice’s voice. Instead, I had to watch the sweet girl staring off beside me and falling ever further into her own thoughts. The pain of the sting must have subsided under her mother’s care or the dull growl of my voice, and dear young Alice was dropping, dropping into some imaginary life I longed to share.
“ …I think, I think it’s nice to have rugs around.”
Alice: “Ugh.”
“And damask love seats, I saw them too,” Mrs. Levy said, as proud as if they were her own. “I’m impressed, Mr. Tivoli. You seem quite taken with the household, for a man.”
But I’m not a man! I wanted to say, but she had already paused politely and then asked about the person beside me, whom I had completely forgotten.
“I’m Mr. Hughie Dempsey,” Hughie said with all smoothness, tipping his hat to Mrs. Levy and her blinking, dreambound daughter.
“Ah, Hughie,” Alice repeated.
“He is a close friend of the family,” I said.
Mrs. Levy was gathering her daughter together by the waist, as one carries cut flowers to a vase. “Wonderful, wonderful. I should get poor Alice in and treat her neck. I hope to see you visiting, Mr. Dempsey. And of course, Mr. Tivoli, we will have you and your sister-in-law over for dinner soon.”
Bows, nods, smiles, and as the girl was carried into the house, worrying once again about the sting’s poison, I stood as still as any of our ornamental iron dogs. Some people were making a commotion in the park behind me, and through my haze I could make out a man walking along, waving a flag of caution as a
steam-powered carriage made its exhibitory circle to general shouts and jeers, but the wonder of it was lost on me, for I was working to think how I could get into our lower story without my mother, find Alice alone, and convince her of what I truly was.
Beside me Hughie’s amused voice: “Mr. Tivoli, I believe you are wearing my hat.”
All of a sudden, life was gorgeous broken glass. There was no moment when I did not feel the pain of Alice’s presence underfoot, and sometimes when I stood in the parlor listening to Mother’s explanation of our accounts, or weary recitation of her night beside the spirit lamp, I stepped to different places on the carpet, wondering, Is Alice underneath me now? Or now? And so I would move across the parlor like a knight on a chessboard, hoping that when I reached the point above Alice, when I stood in shivering alignment, I would feel the warmth of her body, the scent of her hair rising upwards through the house.
Hughie thought I was acting like a fool. “Don’t think about her,” he said. “She’s fourteen. She wears her hair down and probably still plays with dolls. She doesn’t know about love.” Then he would flip another card into his hat across the room, intimating that he knew—as we often do at seventeen—all about the matters of the heart.
BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
9.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King
Chameleon by William X. Kienzle
Gone in a Flash by Lynette Eason
The Last Horseman by David Gilman
Forsaken by Sophia Sharp
Mahabharata: Volume 4 by Debroy, Bibek