The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  But I was thinking of none of that. I was reading quickly, trying to figure out what I’d do now. Maybe a full confession, disease and all, with Mother as a witness. Maybe have Hughie talk to Alice once again. And Mrs. Levy; well, perhaps she was still in my thrall. A few perfect words and I might be saved. So I read on.

  More hateful, overwritten stuff, pulled from the deepest well of a mother’s rage. Some upsetting parts about the police, immediately retracted. And then a final bit that chilled me:

  Enclosed is a check for our last rent. Our furniture is all taken care of, but there is nothing to reveal where we are going. Oh, Max, this much I will ensure: you will never see Alice again. Nor me, my moonlight love.

  Overwritten, yes, but I could tell at last what I had done. To have peeled her clothes off in the garden, night after night, and listened to her giggling in my ear. Her moonlight love. I had never thought about her, in all my worrying over Alice; she was an adult, of a different world, and I’d never considered she might be just as fragile as her daughter. And yet it seems quite clear that I shattered poor Mrs. Levy. That I took perhaps the last love in her old heart.

  I heard horses breathing and battling their reins out front. A panic seized me, and I ran in my nightclothes to the window. That childhood sound of hooves and springs and leather, that old carriage noise, and below me I watched a hired two-in-hand clattering away. Black and dull, it rattled slowly across the light, the isinglass unrolled so I could see two faces in the window. There she was. My love, my sweet girl, shaking in the cage of the carriage, in traveling clothes, a bag on her lap, eyes closed against the dust cloud of her future. That was the end of the first time I loved Alice.

  Sammy: this is a letter from the front lines; I write this with you in the room. With you asleep beside me in this bed, muttering through some shallow dream just as Buster twitches through his own there on the floor. My writing may be shaky, for it turns out Dr. Harper’s right, after all:

  At nearly sixty, I have caught the mumps. And you, poor Sammy, have caught them as well.

  At first Mrs. Ramsey, feeling my improbably swollen gills, sent me alone to the “sewing room,” as she calls it, to suffer in solitude among the scraps of her unfinished dresses—I can see fabrics of cherries and corals and reclining geishas; or are these perhaps my fever’s inventions? I have been so sad in my sickroom, writing in my journal, burning in and out of my fever like a lighthouse. But today I awoke to find a brightly opened door and another little boy being shoved inside.

  “Better get it over with,” your mother said as she dragged you to the bed, poor Sammy.

  “Jeez, not with the duckbrain!” you shouted.

  “With the duckbrain. In you go,” she said, and folded you, still complaining, into these sheets warm from my sickness. That old folk wisdom, that it’s better to catch it as a child than as a man—well, everything’s reversed in me, I guess. I remember fifty years ago when my mother took me for a carriage ride and I was thrown into a goose-down bed with hot, irritable Hughie. Mumps again, but that time I was no child; I did not catch it. I remember Hughie’s moans and mutterings made it impossible for me to read my Boys’ Life in peace, and I lay for a week beside my best friend until he reached a level of sanity to throw me, perfectly healthy, from his bed. You, Sammy, burn brighter.

  You lie asleep in the bed beside me, in an equal fever. Earlier today, after another throat-probing from chuckling Dr. Harper, we stared at the ceiling and tried to name the shadows we found there. We like to guess from sounds in the hall what your mother is up to, and from sounds outside what the ridiculous neighbors are arguing about, and you make up fantastic stories to soothe our hot brains. We are forbidden sour things, and so eat gruel night and day until we are fairly sick of it. I am your friend again, Sammy, the only other boat on this particular sea, but I am worried. When I wake from a hot sleep, I find you watching me curiously. I hope I have not been mumbling. I hope that in my fever I have not given too much away.

  But what a lucky chance this virus turned out to be. To lie so close beside you, Sammy; to time each breath to yours. Fathers have traveled this far for less; dying fathers, we have traveled across the world for less, for glimpses, for the carried voices of our sons.

  II

  MAY 30, 1930

  Forgive the gap in these pages; I have finally recovered from my illness and have found myself, once again, in school.

  It is a humiliation, to say the least, to recite my times tables with this Midwestern crowd of children—five times twelve is sixty—but the hardest part is to keep my voice as quiet as I can, my profile low, so that the teacher (a woman exactly my age) won’t notice that odd boy in the corner scribbling his life’s confession. I’m not the only child who hides this way. Some of the poorer students, with cardboard shoes and nits in their hair, sit in the back with me and glare out the window, or at the wall where seven chromolithographed presidents stare down, each with his signature hairdo. We try to fade into the plasterwork; we are the classroom ghosts. “What’s the capital of China?” the teacher will ask one of us loudly, and we will quake and pause and answer, predictably: “France.” A smirk from the adult, a laugh from the good kids up front, including my own dear son, and we move on to history. In a moment, I will move on with my own.

  But first, Sammy, let me put down that you love me. Something in your long fever must have burned away your doubts and, after the gauntlet of the hotbed, I am once again your bosom friend. You pass me notes while our forefathers dump tea into a Boston bay; you blink and feign narcolepsy while redcoats march in lines across distant states; you allow me to see your pencil art—the automotive wonders you would produce, all bristling tubes and fold-down gadgetry—as Valley Forge swallows its frozen victims. This morning you were the ink monitor and soberly filled our clay inkwells to their brims before gaily dropping a tiny frog into mine. Until it perished, gagging on the lampblack, the creature left a leaping pattern across my lesson book so exquisite—a hail of dark roses falling from the sky—that I will try to place it here in this memoir as the only evidence that I am not lying, Sammy. Your father was beside you all along, grubby lad. And you did sometimes love him.

  Onward.

  I was a dead thing after Alice.

  I turned eighteen, nineteen, twenty, entering the first chill of adulthood, losing the last of my gray hair. I went to work each morning at Bancroft’s, I coughed at the dust of books and came home late each night, the man of my own family. I took care of Mother, little sister Mina, and the receipts and details of 90 South Park Ave no. 2. I was also in charge of no. 1, that ghost-rapping flat below us, dealing with the new renters; they were gentile and I was never called down on Fridays to pour a forgotten cup of tea or light an untended fire. Instead, I was the dispenser of paint and polish, the boss of the chimney sweep.

  Alice’s departure led to a maniacal obsession with the trivia of their escape and the discovery of their trail. I spoke with other Shabbos goys I had run into, badgering them until they agreed to ask around the Jewish homes, and the temple the Levys frequented on their well-dressed Saturdays. I had Hughie stalk the dress shops where the elder Levy bought her clothes, dropping flirtatious hints about his missing aunt, her lovely girl; I found myself prying open the floorboards in the bedroom, convinced I had heard the creak of a hiding place; in short, I lost my mind. But there was no trace.

  Hughie tried to help me. He took me to see Lotta Crabtree perform her leather-lunged parodies of Jenny Lind, all burnt cork and fright wigs; he bought me tamales on Market, strawberry sodas at Slaven’s, milk baths at Anna Held’s in the Baldwin, and a nickel peek at the grand full moon one drunken night on O’Farrell.

  But Hughie had his own concerns. By twenty, he was no longer the lanky custodian of the great Victoria Regina, dusting that vegetable vulva with a long-feathered mop, but had become something else entirely. He now sipped brandy in warm libraries and sang foul choruses of “Goober Peas!” in arm-over-shoulder quartets; he sewed ini
tials into his old bright blouses and bought new ones, brighter but finer, and new collars, stays, and spats and various tweedy, glittering things. Hughie took up a clever and cruelly argumentative style of talking, a handsome sideways grin, and a few phrases—“Ye gods!” and “I swan!” and “exflunctication”—that confused the rest of us. He had all the excitement of someone newly allowed into a great country, all the tics and warts of pride, and the glow of someone happy and relieved. You see, without a word to anyone, a mention of any hopes or applications, Hughie had landed at Berkeley on scholarship, and now he had become that rare thing in my South Park: a college man.

  A neat fold in fate, I think, for Hughie to climb from tutor’s son to starry student while I, the once-rich monster, burrowed ever further into the honeyed Bancroft warrens. But as a dear soothsayer told me once: every face card looks back underneath.

  My beard turned an autumnal chinchilla blond and I wept when Hughie told me to shave it off. “You have to decide,” he said, “whether to be old or young, and I think you’ve been old long enough.” It was a disaster. The beard, it’s true, had made girls turn away from my grandfatherly face, but the mustache I kept made them laugh; I seemed too much like those widowers who brush hair over their bald heads and dye their skin a summer’s bronze in winter. An antique gigolo; a joke. My waist was thinning with the receding tide of my twenties and I looked less and less like a burgermeister in a Brueghel, but these changes seemed impossible, artificial to anyone who knew me more than a year. Does he wear a corset? I could hear them snickering at my workplace, so I had myself reassigned, and spent the rest of my career at Bancroft’s in solitude, hidden by old books. Hughie’s taste in dressing me was hopeless, and after stepping out proudly one sunny day in one of his inventions—shirtsleeves, a cap, and white belt-looped trousers—I soon realized I looked more like a tightrope-walker than a gent. Mother, of course, agreed; her wordless face repeated: Be what they think you are, be what they think you are. I went back to my frock coats and opera hats and hid, once again, in the anonymity of old men. I would be old until I was young, no sooner.

  As the years passed, my only companions were my sister, my mother, and Hughie. I was the priest of Alice, keeping the sacred embers glowing until her return, and then, when I could learn nothing of her whereabouts and as the years passed on without her, I became the widow to my own hopes. Like many men before me—like my missing father, I believe, and perhaps like my dear Hughie—I numbed myself to life.

  And there was Mina, my beautiful and ordinary sister. At six, seven, eight, she never wavered from the charts of typical height and weight, had as much talent at the pianoforte as any young girl should have (none!) and, in short, was never precocious or particularly bright. The only thing she could draw with skill was our carriage horse (shivering Mack); any other subject became a bristling slide of paramecia. She was polite to a point, but also liked to scream in a rage before bed. In fact, her moods were not recognizably adult in any way and seemed more like the facets of a con man’s dice—gorgeous piety, prim respect, bitter tears, wild lava-spouting ire—that could be weighted to fall wherever most suited her. My point at last: she was not a real person. True children never are. She was a fraud striving to be human and was, therefore, simply (and printer please put this in your plainest type) a regular girl.

  Despite this blessing on our house, I was not allowed to be a regular man. Remember that to the rest of South Park I was still Mrs. Tivoli’s brother-in-law, living out the last years of his bachelorhood in plodding duty. Mother decided very quickly that no chances could be taken with a child—especially not chatty Mina—and so I was introduced to my own sister as Uncle Max. “Mina, give your Uncle Max a kiss before he leaves, no, don’t pout, dear girl, that’s it.” She didn’t call me Uncle Max, of course, because from some odd church lesson she felt that, like Adam, she should give every man and animal her own proper name. She began buy calling me Uncle Bean, and through a series of edits, I became Beano, then Beanhead, and eventually my final name: Beebee. She would shout it with joy in the morning—“Beebee!”—and the same way at night when I returned, with attention-getting volume at dinner when she wanted the gravy, with sorrow when I took a vase from her shattering hands, and last of all with wistful remembrance at night when I pulled the counterpane to her chin and sang to her, which she used to love.

  I was envious of her youth. You can’t imagine what it was like to hear girls screech at her from across the park and find that same, bloodlusting shriek coming from my sister’s lips—and to realize with a shock what childhood was for her: belonging. So new to the world, she was already a part of it. To be so favored by nature; to know of no reason why anyone would not love her—in fact, to have no suspicion that one single person in the world did not love another—made her into a creature so enviable that, at times, I hated her. Each morning, I would stand in the doorway of her room watching as her eyes blinked at a day as standard and blessed as the last. As with so much else, of course, I hid these occasional splinters of hate within my flesh. “Good morning, little one,” I whispered.

  “Oh Beebee!”

  I am a kindly monster, of course; I do not deny the world its lovely things. Its Minas.

  Mother had changed, too, over the years. She had been brought up carefully, trained to be loved, so I could never have blamed her for practicing her birthright. Men came by now and then: a banker, a saloon owner with a gold cane and vulcanized rubber fillings in his smile, an actor who wore a wig. They were not so bad, but they did not stay. Instead of turning to a man, the last of which had abandoned her so ruthlessly, she turned to her daughter. Mina became the purpose of my mother’s life, and that, of course, meant money. So Mother went to work.

  For a while she kept her occupation secret. It wasn’t seemly for a woman to work, and the career she had chosen was out of the ordinary. Her clients usually came when I was at work and Mina was at one of her dance classes, but nothing can ever be secret for long in San Francisco. The first clues were feathers left in the front parlor from very expensive hats belonging to ladies far richer than Mother was used to seeing. And then, one morning, a strange woman appeared at the front door and told me she had an appointment.

  “With whom?”

  She wore an expensive outfit of fur tails. “Madame Tivoli.”

  “Madame …” I repeated.

  Mother was already rushing to the door, saying, “You’re early, you’re early!” and quickly got rid of the woman. She walked back into the parlor and it was there that I confronted her.

  “Mother, what is going on?”

  “Nothing, little bear.”

  But I was the man of the house. “Tell me now.”

  She did. In a voice so drained of life that it implied an anger too great to be expressed, she explained exactly why a rich woman would stop by so mysteriously in the morning, and why another was due this afternoon. She said this, handed me her card as proof, and then told me: “Now don’t ever talk to me that way again. And I don’t want to hear that you are embarrassed, upset, ashamed. This has nothing to do with you. This is about Mina. Take this tea into the kitchen and wake your sister or she’ll be grouchy all day.” She sat sideways in her chair as if she still wore a bustle; she was of a generation that had learned to sit this way in their youth, so she still did it out of habit and out of a sense that this antique pose was the essence of beauty. The women who sat this way are all dead now.

  Her calling card said it all, as strange and simple as electric light: “Madame Flora Tivoli, clairvoyant.” After so many years in the sewing room trying to speak with the past—her lost husband, lost girlhood, her son growing backwards in time—now, for the sake of her good, beautiful, ordinary girl, she would make money in commune with the future.

  As for Hughie, he and I were closer than ever, and had our own adventures. We were young men, no matter what my looks might have implied, and we did live near one of the crudest, filthiest, liveliest places on earth: San Francisco�
�s Barbary Coast. It was located east of Chinatown, where the old town square used to be, just close enough to the docks for sailors to stagger off their boats, spend all their dough on drinks and whores, and stagger back by daybreak. The kind of place where bars offered any man a twenty if he spotted a waitress wearing underpants. Our parents had warned us against it since we were boys, at church the preachers spoke in low tones about the vice that went on over there, and local leaders were always making up curfews to keep young boys away. Of course we went as soon as we could.

  Our first couple of times down at the Coast were innocent failures. We were young dupes, of course, and when a beautiful blond waitress offered us her house key to visit her after work hours, we gladly accepted. “Shall I trust you, sirs?” she asked, biting the lipstick from her lips, and we nodded our innocence. “Well, I can’t have you keeping my key, so what will you give me to show trust?” We offered a little money, finally settled on twenty dollars, and she smiled and dropped the key onto the table with a whisper of her address. Hughie and I were all giggles and liquor when we made our way to that boardinghouse at around two in the morning, but by two-thirty we were sober and solemn. The key did not fit any lock of the building, and we were halfway around the block, trying every door we could, when people began to yell from their windows and we realized we had been taken. Later, on our way back from drinking, we would see young men like ourselves trying keys in doorways all across the city, and by then it was our turn to laugh at youthful lust and folly.