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Authors: Andrew Sean Greer

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BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
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I wept the day she was buried. I was not allowed to attend the funeral, but I remember very clearly a carriage pulling up in front of the house and my family standing at the front door, utterly veiled, wreathed, and enshrouded in black. Mother leaned down to explain that I was not to come and handed me, in consolation, her black-bordered handkerchief, dampened by her tears. Father waved to me and took her by the shoulder as they left, and I slipped from Nurse’s grip to climb the box ottoman and press my face against the window. I wiped Mother’s handkerchief against the glass, cleaning it of fireplace soot, and watched, weeping, as they rode away. The horses were plumed; the carriages were lacquered and plate-glass. The procession turned slowly around the elms of South Park and vanished behind the window’s filmy panes as it went on, as everything always did, without me.
I keep the pendant still. I have lost all the things I’ve loved—they have been sold or taken or burned—but this glittering collar, which I have hated all my life, has never left. Angels desert you; devils are constant fiends. Here, on this page, I have made a rubbing.
Remembering the date at the top of this diary, you may see for yourself the fate Grandmother gilt for me:
I have told you of my birth, and of my certain death. It’s time at last for my life.
My writing was interrupted by a boy. It was you, Sammy.
You came over in your usual flurry of action, as if you were ten boys all running together, and stopped short of me in the sad dust of this school yard. In the trees, birds or girls were twittering. Your usual newsboy cap was jettisoned in some bush where you would later be sent, petulant, by the yard-nag to find it, but now your hair blasted freely into the wind, twisting and glinting like a bright idea; your knickers were unbuckled and rolled high; your stockings’ elastics had snapped and were rolled low; your vest, your pants, your shirt, everything about you was smeared in dust as a roll is smeared in butter, and you arrived before me more alive than I, surely, have ever been.
“Wanna play ball?”
“Can I be second base?” I asked. I was asking for a high honor.
“We need right field.”
“Oh.”
“Can you play?” you asked, impatient now.
“No,” I said. “I’m writing. Here, write something,” I added, ripping a sheet from the notebook, “something for your mom.” To which you laughed girlishly and flew off because you are a
monkey, Sammy, you are a monkey that approaches on all fours and screams and screams, but when anybody reaches to you, you leap into the branches, howling. When I reach to you. For I am a sham boy, a counterfeit, and like a foraging animal you can smell the truth, born with blood that shivers at a stinking beast no matter how boy-shaped he may be, so today you ran away from me towards a group of wrestling boys, who now lay spent and dazzled in a cloud of dust, lifting their heads eagerly as you shouted to them: true boys.
Let it rest. The recess hag has appeared at the door, piping furiously away. I have to stash these pages for another day; the times tables await me.
My life’s story really begins with Alice, when my deformity is at its worst, but in order to understand Alice, and why I needed so badly to fall in love, you must hear about Woodward’s Gardens, and Hughie. But, first, you must understand the Rule.
It happened one winter evening, not long after Grandmother’s death. I awoke to the
piff
of the gaslight in my room and saw, as its fluttering magic brightened, my parents sitting near my bed in their opera clothes, rustling with silk and starch. I don’t know what had happened to them that evening, what tragedy they had witnessed or which famous hypnotist they had confessed their case to, but they had the expressions of repentant murderers who have called their victim up in a seance, and as Father turned the key of the lamp to fill my room with rosy light and a bitter smell, Mother kneeled close to my tired face and told me the Rule. She offered no explanation, but simply repeated it so that I would know this was a lesson we were learning, and no dream; this was a spell she was casting, and if I was a dutiful son I would let her weave her charmed circle. My father stood by the lamp, his eyes
closed in holy dread. And then I fell asleep and remember nothing else. The Rule has dictated my actions throughout most of my life. It has allowed me to relax all great decisions before its simplicity, and has therefore taken me further than I ever would have gone, all the way from my home city to the cold sandbox that now immerses my naked toes.
“Be what they think you are,
” my mother whispered to me that evening, a tear at the corner of each eye. “
Be what they think you are. Be what they think you are.”
I have tried, Mother. It has brought me heartache, but it has also brought me here.
In those days after Grandmother’s death, everything began to change for me. We moved to a smaller but more stylish house high on the new Nob Hill. South Park had “gone down,” as mother ruefully acknowledged; the newer houses around the park were being built of wood rather than stone, divided into flats, and merchants and newly married couples began to replace the rich old Virginians who used to promenade with their black sunshades and ribboned bonnets. We turned the old house into flats and rented the upper floor to a married couple, the lower to a Jewish widow and her little daughter. Then we left, with the rest of the rich, for Nob Hill’s promise of a view, which was nearly always wrapped in thick ermine fog.
And I was freed. I had gone outside a few times with Mother, to the market or the park. Mostly, though, my adventures were confined to the narrow view I had from the nursery—a crowd of geese with goslings, an open carriage with a picnic party inside, the milkman passing with a wetted carpet thrown over his cans to keep them cool on hot autumn days, and any dog or cat that passed and sniffed and looked up gave me the same thrill an astronomer
might have seeing the creatures on the moon turn to smile at him.
So it was something like an annunciation when Mother told me, one morning at her vanity, that I was being taken to Woodward’s Gardens. I was six years old, slightly larger than a child but looking nothing like one. She sat holding a hairpin over a candle, heating it to curl her lashes, and I was engaged in pulling the hair from her brush and feeding it to the ceramic hair receiver. I loved the way the thick and wondrous dead stuff knotted and clumped so evilly; I loved feeling the long strands of her hair, so fine and airy as I plucked them from the brush and fed them to the receiver, so dark and twisted in those porcelain guts. Mother used to take the hair and weave it. She made a bracelet from Grandfather’s hair that Grandmother still wears in her grave, and, later, another with my father’s hair and a green ribbon. It hung on Mother’s wrist, with a small enamel portrait of him, long after he was gone.
“What’s Woodward’s Gardens?” I asked, pressed beside her.
She smiled sadly and took my hand. “It’s a park. Outside.”
“Oh.”
“I should warn you, there will be children there.”
Not “other children,” just “children.”
“Oh.”
“Little bear,” she said softly; I was always her “little bear.” I fed the last of her hair into the little hole and looked at her nervously. She was so young then, with the shimmering beauty of a sky after a rain.
“Don’t you want to go?” she asked me in that young, sweet voice.
Sammy, more than anything in the world.
WOODWARD’S GARDENS
THE EDEN OF THE WEST!
Unequaled and Unrivaled on the American Continent
NATURE, ART AND SCIENCE ILLUSTRATED
Education, Recreation and Amusement the Aim
Admission, 25 cts. Children, 10 cts.
Performance Free
SKATING EVERY DAY.
There are still people alive who remember Woodward’s Gardens, and the May Days when Woodward, rich from the famous What Cheer House down at Meigg’s Wharf, would pay for all the children, hordes and hordes of the city’s youth, to come to his backyard and play.
The rows of small and furry dromedaries, dried brown tears streaking from their eyes, bearing children and teenage men in derbies; a lake with an Oriental bridge and pavilion; a racetrack; a maypole; pools full of bellowing sea lions; a Rotary Boat shaped like a doughnut within its little pool, which kids could row endlessly; fantastic inventions of all sorts including the zoographicon, orchestrion, and Edison’s talking machine; an aviary where young couples hid among the ferns and spooned beneath a cloud of birds; herds of emus, ostriches, cassowaries; a “Happy Family House” where the monkeys would sit and mimic the humans by hugging and kissing each other; but what I remember most from that day were two events marvelous to behold, one by looking down, the other by looking up. Those and, of course, meeting Hughie.
As our neat two-in-hand drew closer to the great hedgework wall on Thirteenth and Mission, I could barely breathe. “There’s seals,” Father told me through his whiskers, which, like cupped hands, gave his words the hush and excitement of a secret, “and
parrots and cockatoos.” Of course he loved the gardens; hadn’t he changed his own name in memory of a playland like this? On his voyage from Denmark, Asgar Van Daler had remembered a place long ago where the swans cried out like Loreleis from the lily ponds and, believing his own name unsuitable for this new land of Smiths and Blacks and Joneses, christened himself after that old candle-glittering park—his Tivoli.
“Swans!” he shouted to me, grinning. “A famous performing bear!”
“Like me? A bear like me?”
“Like you!”
And before I knew it, we were already inside. I had been so distracted by his descriptions, so entranced also by the schools of children lined up behind their schoolmistresses, the prams and crowds and stuffed ibises and flamingos posed before me in the bushes, I did not even notice a small and sad detail. At the very moment that I began to run through the grass, Father was pocketing three red ticket stubs. He had paid for three adults.
I was not even a very convincing old man in those days, of course—beardless, too short for an adult, too large for a boy—but people stared only briefly before letting me pass by. There was so much else to see. As I was trying to take in the wonders around me, a bell rang and a man announced that Splitnose Jim was to perform in the bear pit. I looked at my parents, pleading with my eyes, and Mother, tightening the veil beneath her chin, nodded approval. Within minutes we were sitting on a pine board in an amphitheater full of children and well-dressed couples, smelling the neverchanging popcorn-and-dust odor of childhood. A man appeared in the ring below and announced the arrival of “a terrifying bear who used to dance for an Italian on the streets of our city, but who one day, in rage, tore the ring from his nose and lunged at his master! Too dangerous for the sidewalks, Mr. Woodward brought him here for your enjoyment.” And out he shambled, Splitnose Jim.
An old bear is not too exciting for those of you who met lions and hyenas at the circus as a child, but I had never seen such an enormous creature in my life. I screamed twice, once in fear, then again in delight, to see old Jim lean back on his haunches and sniff the air, nodding repeatedly at us like a gentleman entering a restaurant where he is known.
He did a few miserable tricks for a peanut, and climbed up poles to rest dolefully on the platforms high above us. Each time, as the trainer shouted out how dangerous Jim had been wandering through the parklands of Yellowstone, how he was captured, and what marvelous thing he would do for us now, we applauded. As we clapped, Jim sat back against a rail, the peanut balanced on the tip of that dusty split nose, and daydreamed like any workman until the boss snapped his whip and it was time to earn the wage again. I loved old Jim, and I pitied him a little. I understood full well that he lived in a cage, lonely, confused, with just his keepers as his friends. Children, however, can sustain pity only so long. It burns; it itches; and we imagine a quick cure to the oppressed: ourselves. And so in my slippery boyhood mind I saved old Jim by bringing him home with me, making him live again within the fortress of Nob Hill, hide in the staircase ferns, crawl into the dumbwaiter and thereby sneak into the cellar where we kept the potatoes and old wines, watch over me with those tired eyes as I slept, and in general imbue my life with the very terror and adventure they had caged him for. I would save Jim and he, grateful and loving, licking my forehead with his tongue as black and big as a boot, would save me.
After the bear pit, my father wanted us all to go roller-skating, but Mother thought this was too risque. Instead, we followed the signs to the aerial ascension, something even Mother, dabbing beads of perspiration from her hairline, could not resist.
BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
8.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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