The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “I knew your mother when she was a little girl,” Hughie said, eating more pie. Too much cinnamon, melting in the air.

  “It’s a Daisy!” my son yelled again.

  “You look just like her. Do people say that?” A shrug. “You have her mouth. She was pretty and outspoken and she drove her mother crazy. You never knew your grandmother, did you? She was a wonderful woman. Always funny and kind, imaginative. A … a friend of mine said she and your mother used to dress up in old clothes and sit in front of the fire playing chess. Imagine your mother, in crinolines and a Civil War hat! A witty girl. And sharp. She wasn’t like other kids. I admired her.”

  My son laughed. “She told me when she was a girl, she saw a cougar on the street, it had eaten someone’s parrot.”

  “I don’t know that story.”

  “Did you know my father?”

  Hughie looked down at the table. “I’m not sure. What’s his name?”

  I felt nauseated again.

  “Van Daler,” Sammy said. “That’s Danish.”

  “Is it? Van Daler.” Hughie sneaked a look at me. It seemed impossible, but she had told him. Alice, you kind soul, you had kept me alive for our son. “Van Daler,” Hughie said again. “No. No, I don’t think I knew him.”

  “Ah well.”

  “What did your mother tell you about him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’ve got a gun,” I said at last.

  “You do?” my son asked, thrilled.

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Can I see it?”

  Then someone else entered the conversation. Someone in the other room, shouting from the open front door, and all three of us turned to the empty hallway. A throaty laugh, a miracle, a strangled imitation of old memory, the third time I had first heard her voice: “Hey Sammy, I’m home, you’re not going to believe what I saw …”

  She stepped into the room. Black stars, black stars. So many years, so many miles. I began to breathe eccentrically and could focus only on the threaded brown of her irises, how they bled a little into the white. Was it really you? Mid-fifties, eyebrows plucked to commas, hair in an unlikely bun. Wide, oh, still lovely face, and yes, of course it was you. My little paper girl, crumpled in a pocket for half a century, unfolded now before me in the kitchen. Those eyes, starkly wide with hope and shock. They were not looking at me.

  “Hi, Alice,” Hughie said, smile across his plain, old face.

  Her hand went to her heart. We are each the love of someone’s life.

  We stayed for dinner and, in the low conversation of old people that followed, it was decided that we would stay the night.

  “Hotel? Absolutely not,” Alice said, shaking her head and frowning.

  “Well but it’s ridiculous, Alice. We can’t stay here.”

  “You’re an old friend.”

  “The neighbors …”

  Alice laughed. “I don’t give a damn what the neighbors think!” And then, of all miracles, she turned to me. “Don’t listen to your father. My house is yours, little Hughie.” A touch on my head, a kind glance down into my eyes; no remembrance, none.

  I was bunked in Sammy’s room and we were told to look at comics while the adults sat out on the porch to watch the sun fall from the trees. We did not look at comics, of course; we looked at Sammy’s meager collection of dirty pictures. He was so proud, and I was properly astounded, and then he laid out before me, in the tenderest tableau you can imagine, all the treasured objects of his life: two dozen ordinary stamps in a book, a perfectly round stone, a tin sarcophagus of King Tut, a mechanical bank in which a clown catapulted a coin into a lion’s mouth (demonstrated with my own penny), three rose-colored scallop shells, a baseball, a glove, and a photograph of Clara Bow cut from a magazine. We sat and rearranged and stared at these wonders for about ten minutes. Then my son asked if I wanted to play with his Erector set and the treasures were left, abandoned, while he filled the bed with clanking metal.

  I claimed I’d never seen an Erector set, and he gave a frogfaced expression of amazement. I recognized his face and gasped: it was Alice’s, as a girl. What a strange little haunting in this strange little room. I wondered, if I waited long enough, might I see a fleeting gesture of my own? But I heard faint voices from the open window. I went over and listened through a veil of climbing ivy. Two voices, quiet ones, floating up from the garden below:

  “A four-in-hand coach,” said the man.

  The woman: “A bit. Two bits.”

  “Gaslight.”

  “Of course.” She laughed. “And bustles.”

  “Woodward’s Gardens.”

  It was my old friend and my old love, sitting in the twilight. They were playing a sad game. They were naming what was gone forever. I was overcome by my luck, that I could sneak into my son’s life and see his treasures, and the face that wanted so much for me to approve; the luck to be a boy with him! But I also mourned the fact that I couldn’t be down below, with the old people, pawing through the attic of the past. Hughie in a velvet suit, Alice in a princess hat, old man Max in a mirror. And all of us as we used to be.

  “Do you miss it, Alice?”

  I could not hear the rest. I leaned out the window.

  Sammy was tugging at my sleeve: “All right, I’m gonna make a boat, see, and you’ve got to make a boat and we’ll race them on the bed, which is the river, see.”

  I did see. There below me, couched in the yellow blossoms of a forsythia fooled by this warm weather, two old people sat on an iron bench, looking just as I would have looked had time gone right for me.

  When Hughie came into his room, I was waiting.

  “How is she?”

  Sammy had long since gone to bed and I, too old for early bedtimes, had waited until I heard the sighs of his dreams before I slipped out. I had first listened to the murmur of the adults, but unable to make anything out, I had come here to the sewing room, where Hughie was to sleep. Fabric for new curtains lay on the table, and a finished apron.

  My friend smiled and took off his coat. We did not turn on the lamp; the moon was in the window. He said, “Hi, Max. I thought you’d be asleep with Sammy.”

  “He fell asleep hours ago.”

  “How was it, seeing him?” We were whispering.

  I clasped my hands in my pajama-lap as Hughie began to disrobe. I said, “Strange. Amazing. I don’t know. I’ll have to get used to it. He has an idea that he’s going to be the greatest something in the world, he doesn’t know what yet, but he’ll be the greatest. He’s not what I thought a little boy would be like. Not like I used to be.”

  “You were never a little boy, Max.”

  “I’m trying. Tell me about Alice. Is she the same?”

  “I don’t know. I knew her when she was, was it, was she sixteen?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “God, that was a long time ago.”

  “Is she the same?”

  “I remember her as being, I don’t know, talking all the time about what was in her head, asking me questions and then, well, she wouldn’t really wait for the answer. She’d be off talking about something else. She’s a bit like that. But a little dreamy, stares off at the sky and her mind is traveling, who knows where.”

  “Yes. She’s just the same.” So I hadn’t destroyed her, after all. “Did you talk about me?”

  “I didn’t tell her …”

  “I mean about me as her husband. Or me as her old landlord. What did she say?”

  “I talked about you as my son. I said you’re a rascal. Selfcentered and clever, you are, you know, smarter than any of the other kids. I said you never really fit in, that you like to spend your time with me. We play stupid word games in the kitchen and drink watered-down coffee. I told her about our trip and how you liked to pick the bed closest to the bathroom, in case robbers came in and you had to escape. And that you hate beef jerky. I said I tried to teach you to drive and you broke off the side mirror.”

  “I told Sammy about that. I
said you whipped me good.”

  “I should have. I said girls in school had crushes on you. That you loved books. I said she would love you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Grin. “Well.”

  Hughie faced away from me as he slipped off his drawers. Nude, old man’s body of shivering skin. How many years since he had known his brand of passion? He stepped into cotton pajamas, stumbling. The house was quiet, absolutely quiet, and the sky through the window was bright around the moon and starless. I thought it was time.

  I told him what he already knew. That he would have to leave me soon.

  Without turning, he said, “I told her you didn’t like beets, and she said neither did Sammy.”

  “Hughie.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it now. I’m so tired.”

  I said I had been thinking about it, and he should go in the morning.

  “Let’s not do this now.”

  “Before they wake up. I already put some money in your bag. It’s wrapped up in a sock, don’t lose it.”

  “Not tomorrow, Max. I can’t.”

  “We talked about all this.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “You promised me.”

  He explained how there was a better way. That we could both leave. Right now; we could take our things and get into the Chryster—it was just across the street, sleeping—and silently start it up, and silently leave this awful place. “We could do what we said, we could find a little town and live there. That’s the best thing. Doesn’t that sound like the best thing?”

  I said he had forgotten one thing. That I was dying.

  Staring at me, hands on his hips, pajama top unbuttoned so it showed the wisps of gray in the center of his chest. “Don’t be dramatic. You’ve got almost twelve years.”

  But I didn’t, and he knew it. Those twelve years would not be withering and going gray and falling asleep one night, in that town he imagined, letting my heart stop in the first hour of my seventieth birthday, in 1941. Perhaps he might die that way. But I was under a different curse: my last years would be a nightmare of the body. Shrinking, gaining baby fat, losing my mind and memories, my speech, until I could only crawl across the floor, staring at this father with eyes that begged him to kill me. We both knew I’d have to end it long before all that.

  “Oh God, Max,” he said, shaking his head. “Listen, listen what happens a year from now? When you’re two inches shorter? And what about me?”

  “They won’t notice.”

  “That your clothes are getting looser?”

  “It won’t come to that.”

  “It’s stupid. It’s selfish is what it is. It’s what you’ve always been, Max, it’s selfish. Think about it, just think about it for a second. Haven’t you done enough to her? You have to trick her again? And your son? And do this to me?”

  “This isn’t about you, Hughie.”

  “Oh, I—”

  “Let me stay here. My wife and son are here.”

  “You can’t be a husband! You can’t be a father!”

  “Hush. I’ll be a son. For a little while.”

  Or something like that. I don’t remember the actual words of that conversation, but I remember how it sounded, his final face, and what the light was like, how the room smelled of dust and oil, so I have colored it in from these, as one restores a damaged work of art.

  I said, “You can find that little town and live there. I gave you enough money for a long time.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “It’s a lot. You could buy a house and a lot of land. With a dog and a woman who comes in at five each night to cook your dinner.” I drew a picture he knew well, of a farm with a long drive through cypress trees, a barn, his goddamned chickens, all of it. I said that, if he wanted, he could get another Teddy. No one cares what rich men do. He could love someone.

  He was silent for a moment, and turned to face me.

  “Someone,” he said, and the way he looked at me made me afraid.

  There are things we can say only once, and the words I could see forming on his lips he had already said. Years before, decades before in the parlor of his house where I lay, stupefied by hashish, on the sofa as a fire crackled in the hearth. He had looked at me this way, and faced the fire, and muttered something that the snap of flames had covered. I could pretend I hadn’t heard it; pretend we were just the way I wanted, and the fire was too loud, or the throb of blood in my ears; I could imagine he was drunk, and I could forget. But over thirty years had passed, and there were his blue eyes, and he had not forgotten. I saw the words arranging themselves, but there are things that we can say only once. He began to button his top. From the way his hands were shaking, I knew that life had gone terribly wrong for both of us.

  “Hughie, hand me the whiskey.”

  “You’re too young.”

  “I’m not likely to get another drink. Hand it over.”

  “I won’t go, Max,” he said, though he looked so tired of arguing.

  “You will, I know you will.”

  “I’m stubborn. You remember, don’t you? When we were little? You were, God, you were about a foot taller than me and still I’d wrestle you to the ground. I didn’t care. I was half your size and I’d beat you.”

  “This isn’t like that.”

  “Was there anything as good as that? Those lessons together in the mornings? And my dad would unfold a map upside down and start pointing at it like it was a new continent in the world? And later, you’d lift me up and throw me into the grass. Remember, Max?”

  “There was never anything as good.”

  We talked for another hour or so about old things. The smell of chalk as we erased it from the slate, and frogs we hid in the pantry to frighten Maggie and John Chinaman, and the terror of sneaking into my father’s parlor and holding each of the wonderful forbidden objects on his whatnot (and how we chipped the monkey’s head in glass and blamed it on the chimney sweep). Jokes that would make no sense to anyone but us. Old childhood secrets. A sled ride in snow among the gravestones. By then, the moon had set and I could hear from his soft voice how drowsy he had become. I said that maybe it was time for bed.

  He whispered, “No, no …”

  “It’s time to go.”

  “Sleep here tonight.”

  “All right, but I’ll leave before morning.”

  “One last thing.”

  “It’s time to go, Hughie.”

  His voice intensified, one last time, the last energy he had left for this: “Tell me. You won’t come with me? Right now? Or wait a few days, we’ll leave then. Or I’ll go and you can take a bus. Be with your family, then take a bus, or have them drive you to meet your dad. Tell me you’ll do it. Come live with me on the farm. It would make me so happy. You’ll come, you will, you’ll grow old there. You’ll … you’ll become a little boy, a baby, you’re afraid of that, but I’m not afraid. I’ll be there. I’ll take care of you until you die. I will. Oh Max, come with me.”

  There were sheep on his pajamas. “No, Hughie.”

  “No,” he repeated, and what he heard was Never.

  “Goodbye,” I said.

  Quietly: “I won’t say goodbye. I won’t leave.”

  “You’ll know what to do. When you wake up, you’ll decide.”

  “Sleep here tonight,” he said, not looking at me.

  “Oh, Hughie.”

  “Sleep here.” I did. I held him in my little-boy arms for a while until his leg gave one jerk and I heard his breathing slow to a dead tide. His face was knotted as if he were concentrating on his dreams, making them better than life, and his mouth lay open. He began to snore softly. That is how I think of him—and I think of him all the time—mouth open not like a child but like an old man, dreaming of the past. I kissed him and crawled out of the sheets, made my way back to my son’s room, and fell asleep in that small bed. I was so tired.

  I should write that it is my birthday today, and we have had
a picnic. I write now barefoot in the grass. It spreads out for acres, the grass, a dozen shades of green among the gravestones, not very carefully trimmed so that here and there are little meadows with tiny birds chattering and fighting in them, and buzzing bees, and clustered green seeds waving in the wind. It’s quite beautiful. The September air is cool despite the bright sun, and many of the trees down by the river have jumped the gun and are already falling to yellow. There are very few people here today; just a couple of old widows replacing dead flowers, and two young women doing rubbings from the facets of an obelisk. And Alice, of course, down at the other end. I can see her red scarf floating in the breeze. Somewhere behind her is Sammy.

  There is a blanket spread out on the grass, and scraps from our lunch of egg salad sandwiches, tomato soup, a few peach pits, and an orange cake stuck with thirteen melted candles. The ants are already at work. There is also the wrapping paper from my presents, crumpled balls of sky blue. Sammy was very happy with my Erector set, which Alice said “could fit with the other one,” but bored by the collection of books—Irving and Blackmore and Joel Chandler Harris—from another century, and quite out of fashion. “I used to love those when I was a girl,” Alice told me. I remember, darling. You sent Sammy off to find a grave from the Civil War, and we were left alone.

  “I have another present,” you told me. You wore a long dress embroidered in red and a little white cloche, and your camera lay like a pet beside you.

  “You do?”

  You handed it to me. An ordinary envelope. Inside, a card from the government regarding my change of name. No longer just little Hughie. No longer just the son of your old friend who left me in your care. I was now Hughie Harper. You and the doctor have adopted me, in expectation of your own marriage, in expectation of a final form to life.