The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Ha, Max, this is it!” We were off.

  We were very bad travelers, Hughie and I. We often ran out of food or gas or were so charmed by the larch-lit forests of Montana that we put off finding lodging until a dangerously twilit hour, when nothing seemed to move in the darkness except the bugbears of our imagination. We never had enough water. We always had too many cigarettes (although, midway, clerks refused to sell them to me, saying they would “stunt my growth”). We always had too many inquisitive widows, who would appear in cherry-red dresses at drinking fountains, flirting horribly with Hughie and asking him about his darling son, who would smile and pull out that shocking cigarette. Too much coffee, not enough liquor. Too much sleep, not enough photographs (no photographs, in fact). No trace of Alice, or of Sammy.

  At first, with masculine optimism, we camped out in fallow fields. It was lovely, and rustic, with the campfire snapping and popping, which I said reminded me of how Hughie cracked his knuckles every hour (on the blessed hour!) as he drove, and which he said reminded him of my loud breathing when I slept. But the dirt was tough to sleep on, and we would awaken early in the morning to a thick and starless darkness that terrified us both. I had yet to join the Cub Scouts and knew nothing of the noises of the forest, and every falling leaf seemed to be a bear or a hunter. And Hughie always awoke stiff and sad; he said he was too old. So we began to use the little traveler’s cabins newly built along the road, most of them bare and smelling of insecticide, the shared bed overly soft, but we slept dreamlessly as if at sea.

  He told me I had nightmares. I learned this a week into our journey, at the north end of Skull Valley, Utah, after a long day of driving through hot auburn brush and cracked blue skies. He said I shouted as I slept, and cried; he said it always sounded the same, and must have been the war. I can’t say. My mind has spared me; it seems I remember this particular horror only when I am sleeping. He told me I always wept until he held me, stroking my hair, and then I would go limp like the dead.

  We found the Massachusetts house but there was no Alice there. A pretty Germanic woman opened the door of the little place (new, white, straight out of an old Sears catalog) and said they had left a while ago. “Funny Mrs. Ramsey,” the woman said, smiling, gesturing at the impossibly dark interior, “I guess she put in all these bookshelves.” She said she saw her only once, as Mrs. Ramsey was moving out. A boy named Sammy, boxes of books, and framed photographs of nude women. “Pretty crazy gal,” the woman told me, taking a drag on her cigarette.

  “Do you know where she went?”

  She blocked the door with her leg so the cat wouldn’t get out. The poor thing undulated back into the house. “Mmm-mmm.” That meant no. Nearby, an oriole flew from tree to tree.

  As I walked away, under the shadow of overgrown wisteria, I noticed an old wooden toy in the weeds of the front lawn. I picked it up; an unamused wooden duck with wheels, darkened by more than one season in the snow. Left there by local boys? By one particular local boy?

  When I got back into the car, I told Hughie I wasn’t going to give up. You seemed so close, Sammy, so terribly close. “We’re not going home,” I insisted, and my friend put his hand on my shoulder, laughing, and asked where was home for us, anyway?

  Nobody in nearby towns had ever heard of you or your mother; she had left Ramsey, then she had left Massachusetts, and there was only the rest of the wide world to hide in. And still—still I was convinced I could hear your shout! Or sometimes, when I leaned out the window on a sultry evening, that I could smell your mother’s Rediviva on the wind. Like my mother before me, I could swear there were more senses than the ones we knew, and also like her, I fell into the grace of self-deception.

  I found you almost every week or so. In Hopkinsville, Ky., on the fourth-grade school roster, when I spotted a Ramsey, S., and ran, with the secretary in limping pursuit, to find only a towheaded girl in a classroom spelling bee, reciting “O-B-S-E-S-S-H-U-N” with the confidence of the truly dense. Or on the banks of Lake Erie, where I found an Alice Levy in the records of a synagogue, and waited through a perplexing and exotic Hebrew service only to find a gray-haired lady in furs and a wig; she smiled at me and gave me a quarter, sweet girl. An A. Van Daler in Minnesota was no Alice but turned out to be an actual cousin of mine. And so on. City Hall documents, church records, ladies’ auxiliary minutes, Scout troop lists, Junior Leagues, and local associations of every kind. So many times I thought I’d found you, of course, just as any true believer will search the Bible and see signs of his particular life. But like the feast of fairies, these pleasures lasted only for the few hours I believed them. Their names were nowhere. I would not find them. America would not reveal its secrets.

  I think I would have given up much sooner had not Hughie had a purpose of his own. It was to taste roadside lemonade from Maryland to Missouri and write down on a special pad of paper who had won (Georgia, as expected). Similar contests were announced for diner coffee, meat loaf specials, spaghetti, and a particular favorite of Hughie’s called “pandowdy” (only three entries, all of them soggy), as well as more informal competitions for Best Scottish Rites Temple, Most Humorous Barbers, Fattest Policemen, Loudest Swing Sets, and Best Misspelled Cinema Marquee (which went to the Aztec, Greenville, S.C., for THE JAZZ SIGNER, no talkie after all, I guess). I remember the year crammed with these points and scribbles, and with laughter, and I am comforted. I suspect, though, that memory has contracted with the chill of time and mostly the drive was long tiresome stretches of farmland, no longer quaint or fresh, windows rolled up against manure and skunk-scent, radio hissing for days until we reached another station. And it was the radio, Alice, that gave you away in the end.

  By Georgia, the thrill of driving had vanished from Hughie’s life—policemen had begun to pull me over when I was at the wheel, drawling, “Son, best your daddy teach you to drive somewheres else,” so Hughie had all the burden—and while we were getting the Chrysler serviced for an alarming ululation, Hughie shouted out: “Can you attach a radio to that thing?”

  “A what?”

  “A radio. I can get one in town.”

  “You mean a cabinet radio?”

  The mechanic was young and skinny, friendly, with a falling curl of yellow hair, and looking back, I think we got our beloved radio because Hughie liked to watch his tanned muscles in the Alabama sun. No more than that—nothing obscene or desperate—just an admiration of youth. Hughie and I did go into town, and he chose a gleaming Philco shaped like a small confessional, with those classic mesh panels. Our young man hauled it to the backseat and began, with a smile, to do the wiring. This was no simple job. Strips of antenna were laid across the roof. A long discussion of tubes and batteries and conversions took place, and the poor dashboard had to be drilled, but Hughie patiently watched the shining movement of the boy’s arms, and at last he turned a wooden knob and the sounds of the Happy-Go-Lucky Hour appeared in the air. My friend tipped him a crisp five dollars and gave a sigh as we drove away.

  “A radio, Hughie?”

  “Shut up. Turn up the volume.”

  Well, that was always a problem; the noise of the car and the wind was always louder than the radio, and we had to come close to a stop to hear anything in particular of the news. Music did better, so we tried to find it whenever we could, and since the pickings in the middle of the country were fairly slim—few transmitters, and what few listeners there were used wind-powered radios—we learned to appreciate the ugly, modern clatterings that young people seemed to adore. I know they adored it because when we stopped in small towns, girls in pinafores and boys in Ucanttear knickers would huddle around us, listening, fascinated as Pacific Islanders. One or two sometimes knew an obscene dance to go with it. This was often stopped by elders and we were encouraged to move on. Still, it was nice to be popular, and it would have been a great way to meet women had I not looked a pimply thirteen.

  Endless stretches of static nearly drove us home, but every time we grew disgusted with
that empty ocean sound, Hughie would tell me to “try it one more time” and some precious local program would appear, first as a phantom, then materializing in full color. For the entire, stunningly dull length of Texas, we grew fond of a particular mystery serial set on an ocean liner (“Bang! Crash! What was that? The telegraph, oh God, the telegraph!”), and almost turned around when, in Deaf Smith County, the whole cast drowned under a wave of crackling sound. Fanny Brice followed us everywhere with her annoying “Baby Snooks,” and on mountaintops we could hear the opening words of “The Fat Man”: “He’s stepping on the scales now. Weight”—a pause for the scale to settle—“three-sixty. Who? The Fat Man!” “Yowsah yowsah yowsah,” the maestro Ben Bernie used to whisper to us, and “Au revoir, pleasant dreams.” And advertisements, of course, an interesting insight into the obsessions of the middle class: “If you want your teeth to shine like pearls, buy Dr. Straaska’s Toothpaste.” I admit it; I bought some. In the Southwest, we became fans of an amusing cooking show where the woman (surely a man in falsetto) would tell listeners, “Now get a pad and pencil, I’m waiting, go get it, this one’s a good one,” then pause, humming, before she went on to recite the most ludicrous recipe you could imagine. I swear some “specials” in local restaurants must have been made by listening suckers.

  I have carried this unlikely love of radio with me. You, Sammy, have taught me your favorite programs and on certain Radio Evenings nights, we sit with Alice in awe of orphan-and-pirate adventures, complete with loud footsteps and slamming doors, utterly fake thunder, and hair-raising silences as harrowing as if the lights had all gone out. I remember when I first got here and the radio was broken. Alice stood up to turn the dials but it would not speak. Sammy, you put on a good face—“Wadder we gonna to do now?”—but you were as broken as an Aztec who has learned his god is dead. After my long travels with Hughie, I understand too well.

  Still, the best gift of the radio was news. Traveling for so long, we had become accustomed to living outside of time, outside of the world, and petty details like a wasp’s nest in our bathroom, or my (apparently annoying) habit of reading aloud from billboards, took on the significance of world events. With the news read to us, though, we were humbled. Gangster massacres. Stockbrokers in a panic. The South Pole crossed by some flyboy. We heard it usually at night, as we paused beneath a black fringe of pine, and listened to the distant news of riots, earthquakes, fires, and death. Some man’s soft, rumpled voice. Some father telling us the nation would prosper and stocks would rise again, and still the world was bad. In the dark night with a halfhearted patter of rain over our heads. Some father telling us we were too far from home.

  Not long after we acquired the radio, when we passed through Austin, Hughie, very trickily, led me along a twisting route through the suburbs, claiming he wanted to show me a botanical garden with an orchid named after his mother (why would I be interested?) and then abandoned that mission when he suddenly parked the car and made us rush into a restaurant. It was one of those friendly places whose name—for instance, the Swedish House—meant nothing, since they served the same food everywhere. Hughie was very distracted, mooning out the window, and ordered something I can’t imagine he wanted—chicken fried steak—which even the waitress found hard to believe. I had a bowl of chili and it was excellent. Hughie was still staring out the window when I finished, and only then did I bother to follow his gaze. There, across the street, framed by an office window and talking on the phone, was a man with dead-black hair and a handsomely broken nose. A moment passed before I realized it was his old love Teddy.

  We sat for a while in silence, as people do when they are watching a sunset. Our subject soundlessly talked, laughing and leaning back in his chair. He had gained weight, but otherwise looked the same. My friend glanced at me and smiled.

  He said, “Isn’t it funny? There’s my old servant.”

  “What a coincidence.” It occurred to me to lock the glove compartment when we got into the car, in case Hughie wanted to return the gun to Teddy (so to speak).

  “I sent him a letter of reference. So I knew he lived here. I thought maybe we’d stop by, say hello.”

  “You haven’t eaten a bite.”

  “It’s awful. It’s chicken fried steak,” he said. “On second thought, maybe we won’t say hello.”

  “Hughie. I know all about Teddy.”

  My friend rested his head in his hand. He looked at me and he seemed so old, so worn and tired. He said, “I know you do, old man.”

  Poor old friend. Staring at lost love as if, by the mere magnification of hope, you can make it burst into flame. My God, the old queer; he had become exactly like me.

  Somewhere in the mountains of America, while we dallied for weeks in an endless talcum snow, my body betrayed me at last. In the last few years, I had noticed a definite shift in things; my muscles lost their form, my shoes became too big, and, most astonishing of all, the world began to rise around me. Mirrors, windowsills, drawer pulls—through the months they ascended without my noticing until the day when, extending an arm to open a door, I found my knuckles bloodying themselves an inch or two below the knob. I was shrinking. I began to knock over water glasses (a telescoped arm) and trip over the curb (a shortened leg). Hughie was amused, especially by my new voice, which sounded like an orchestra tuning up, and though I laughed with him, and though the cheap cinema tickets were nice, it worried me. It was never going to be safe in my body again; I would be stumbling until I died. I was becoming a child.

  It was difficult to realize that the young women who had always honked their horns on our journeys, smiling and laughing at the teenage boy and his father, the girls who stared at me on the street while Hughie bought me an ice cream cone—they no longer saw me. I had passed beneath the surface of some lake, and had become invisible. I grew weaker, smaller, like something falling out of sight. But the worst, of course, was when my body paused for a moment in its decline, took a breath, and silently unsexed me.

  There was no particular day. It was just somewhere in the dust-storm of snow that mild winter, among the dozen coffee shops with tired waitresses, and cowboys, and desperately poor people staring at Hughie’s watch, while the radio and the sky were equally static, that I stopped being a man. Hairless as a pup, shriveled below into a sleek little snail. I tried to manipulate it into life, and it still worked for a while, but eventually grew forever soft, rubbery, good only for peeing long distances on the side of the road. I felt a terrible shame. I hid it from Hughie, but as we lived together constantly, it was only a matter of time before he saw me, one morning, getting out of the tub, and realized what a eunuch I had become.

  Later, in the car, he grew silent. I knew he’d been shocked by my changed body. At last, he asked if we shouldn’t maybe find a good town, perhaps the one we were approaching, and just settle down until the end of our days. Billboards called to us—the Howdy Hut, Reinhardt Bakery, A and V Photography—and budded apple branches brushed the windows. As good a town as any.

  “We’re never going to find them, Max. Not if we lived forever.”

  “Settle down?”

  Telephone poles passed us one by one, each with a gust of sound. We went through downtown, more stores than expected, a crowd at church, a town that any two monsters could live in and be happy, then we passed through to the other side. The road stretched flat and endless, disappearing in a bluish blur before us, which could have been a mountain, but was only a distant thundercloud, raining on a distant town.

  “We’ll never find them. It’s no fun anymore to try. We could turn around,” he said softly. This was his idea, to save the shriveled child he’d seen in the bathroom. “You’ve got money, we could buy a house today. Come on, it’s not a bad idea. We could go back to that town, what’s it called? Back there, buy a house. Probably a mansion in this part of the country. With a porch and a yard and a dog out back. Don’t you want a dog? Aren’t you sick of this car? I mean, really. Really, we can just turn around.”


  I went along with it; it was a pleasant thought. After all, we were no closer to my son than before. “You could open a law practice.”

  “I could. I’d have to pass the bar, or I could fake it.”

  “I could go to grammar school.”

  “A sort of family. We could live here. Really, I mean, really. We could turn around.”

  I saw the gravity in his eyes. I think, now, that although he had cared, and worried, and laughed with me over the ridiculous state of my body, he had been so close to my life that he had never bothered to imagine it. Just as we do not think of our grandmother as old; she is merely Grandma, forever, until we visit her one day and realize that, despite her smiles and kisses, she is going blind and will die. I had always been merely Max. I noticed him thinking, and glancing over, and what he saw there was not Max anymore—not that old, lumbering bear, the cub of Splitnose Jim—but a fidgeting boy of twelve, picking at a scab, crinkling his sunburned nose in disgust. Hughie had begun to mourn my death.

  “Well, Hughie, old friend, perhaps—”

  And then a miracle:

  “Come and take your Easter photos,” came a deep voice from the radio. “Crisp and clear, always on time. Alice and Victor Photography, Eighth and Main.”

  Hughie said, “Well, let’s—”

  “Hush!”

  “Memories forever. I’m Victor Ramsey and I guarantee it.”

  The birds all scattered when the Chrysler came to a stop, and they watched warily from the trees as it swerved, too fast, in a rough, squealing semicircle back towards town.

  Ramsey’s store wasn’t hard to find. A quaint two-story brick building with black iron numbers near the top: 1871. Flower boxes sat empty under the windows, and a trumpet vine had taken charge of a pot originally meant for roses, of which one white bloom remained. A brass spittoon, turned into an umbrella stand, signaled a bygone era. A sign said they were closed on Sundays; the floating choir song from the nearby church reminded me of the day.