The Confessions of Max Tivoli Read online

  Another set of twins, Ling and Ho, famous through a series of eighteenth-century antisyphilis pamphlets, led lives that more closely resembled my own. Actually, only one of them did: poor, cursed Ho. They were born the children of a Shanghai prostitute (so the pamphlet read), and while Ling was an ordinary, drooling, pink baby, Ho was born much as I was: from the other end of life. So while Ling grew to crawl and giggle, Ho began to reverse. Our mutual disease, however, had crippled Ho from birth. He was always a kind of mummy in his bed. Even when he appeared to be more youthful, more ordinary, he still lay stiff and stupid, able to drink only beef tea, while seething at his brother’s good fortune. Eventually, nearing thirty, the brothers approached the same visual age. It was then that Ho was able, at last, to thaw the life that had been frozen in him for so long. Ling left his village, wife, and children to meet his brother on their birthday. When he came into his brother’s room and leaned over the bed to kiss him, Ho brought down the knife he had been hiding and, after letting his twin fall to the floor, turned it on himself. Lying in their sticky blood, the twins had at last become identical, and as no one could tell them apart, they were buried in a common tomb with the inscription that one man was blessed and the other a devil, but which was which could not be told.

  The last I have found is a more recent man: Edgar Hauer. It’s a curious case that even my grandmother remembered. Son of a Viennese merchant, Edgar lived until the age of thirty before any of his symptoms manifested. It was only then that his appearance began to reverse, as mine has, and he led the rest of his life seeming to become younger and younger. I read his case carefully, hoping for a clue to his death (a major preoccupation for me now that the end is so near), but fortunately for him, he died of influenza before his fiftieth birthday, and his wife was left weeping on the bed, holding what appeared to be the body of a ten-year-old boy in her arms.

  And that is all. These are not lucky stories.

  I should explain this disguise of mine. It’s no excuse to say that I pretend to be a boy of twelve simply because I look like one, but the fact is that I do. I am small and freckled and lonely; I have patches on my knickers and frogs in every pocket. Only a careful observer would notice that I have too many faded scars for a child of twelve, too mean a squint, and that I sometimes stroke my soft chin as if I’d worn a beard. But no one looks that closely. I know it seems hard to believe, but the world is wholly convinced that I am what I claim to be, and not merely because I’m so good an imitator after all these awful years. It’s because nobody notices little ill-dressed boys. We simply disappear into the dirt.

  As far as anybody in this town knows, I am an orphan. According to the local gossip, I lost my father nearly two months ago, lost him in the spring lake-mist, and I was left here absolutely on my own. I was staying at the house of a boy in town and I fell upon the mercy of his mother to take me in. That boy was you, Sammy, my unwitting accomplice. That mother was your mother, Mrs. Ramsey, a local artist. I have lived here ever since.

  Ah, now you recognize me, don’t you, Sammy? The sad blond orphan forced to share the bedroom of your boyhood. The odd child in the bunk below whose snore, I’m sure, you’ve memorized by now. If you are reading this, you are older yourself, and perhaps you will forgive me.

  To play out this disguise, however, I have to walk to school each day and sit in idiotic classes. Today, for instance, was the Geography of America, during which we were told all manner of lies, including the fact that California (my native state) contains every possible kind of terrain. I had to bite my best Ticonderoga to keep from speaking. Volcano? Steppe? Tundra? But twelve-year-olds would never know these words, and I must keep my cover above all else.

  But why pretend to be a boy? Why not just enter the town, like any malformed midget, on the back of a circus elephant? Why not wear the crumpled hat and coat of the old man I really am? There are two reasons. The first, which I will get to shortly, is the Rule. The second, dear Sammy, is you. I have had time enough to consider how to find you, how to make my way into your life, how to slip into the bunk below yours and listen to the dog-yelps of your dreams.

  I am told that the first person to realize my condition was not a doctor at all but our maid Mary. Much fun had been made of Mary in our household—Grandmother liked to tell visitors that, having been used to descending farm ladders, the poor young woman still walked backwards down the stairs—but the truth of it was she was a fragile and neurotic girl, given to fits of jealousy and tears, and to giggles at any flattery or praise, a ripe thing for any clever man’s picking. And just as in any Irish ballad, she went astray. I was still a baby when Mary was sent away—and sent away she was, because the unnamed lover left poor Mary with only a stillborn baby, a thistle pendant, and a broken promise. She was replaced with a girl remarkably similar—red-haired and simple Maggie—and was never mentioned again except by Father, enjoying a cigar with the men, and then as a different kind of joke. And so Mary was erased from the books at 90 South Park Avenue.

  But she returned several years later, got in through the back door and reached the upstairs hall before Grandmother spotted her.

  “Mary!” the old woman exclaimed, clutching her jet brooch.

  “Mrs. Arnold, I—”

  “How did you get in here?”

  She no longer looked the part of a young woman. Her face was still attractive, but with the hardness of unripe fruit, and her eyes, which used to puppy-leap about the room, had been leashed and trained by the necessity of the streets. Her clothes were good, if a little flashy, but a closer look revealed how faded they were, as if she wore and washed them daily. Her hands were lined with the soot of the city, the ash that snowed from factories. Back then, all good women wore gloves, and why? Because the world was filth. But Mary had no gloves and here she was, fighting against the filth but no longer a maid; that was clear. Mary had fallen.

  She smiled as she never would have when she lived here. “John let me in,” meaning John Chinaman, our name for the cook. “It’s a little thing, just a—”

  “I am sorry, Mary,” Grandmother answered furiously, “but you have made your bed …” She launched into her usual speech about linens and destiny, but just then my nurse was bringing me from my mother’s room on my morning visit. Though I was nearly three, Nurse was still carrying me in her arms. Judging from the few photos taken of me then, I was in my most hideous stage, and all alather in lace when I caught sight of Mary. Permanently in purdah, it wasn’t often I saw anyone but my grandmother, mother, and nurse. I must have squealed in delight.

  “Ah, look at him!” Mary exclaimed to Grandmother’s horror. The old lady cast an arm into the hallway to stop her, but Mary walked towards me and touched my raisin’s face. “Why,” she said, astounded, facing Grandmother squarely. “He looks like me pa, and he’s lost his white hair!”

  Grandmother became stern. “Mary, I must ask that you turn out your pockets.”

  “Mum, he’s growing younger.”

  Both Nurse and Grandmother looked. It took a pair of eyes that had been away from me that could compare my gnarled baby self to this new, smoother form. The addled Irish girl was quickly whisked out of the house (what had her purpose been: to steal, to beg, to haunt?) but no one could deny her effect on the household. What legions of doctors had failed to notice, a scarlet woman saw in an instant.

  “I’m afraid,” the doctor told Grandmother when she called for him with the offer of old brandy, “that she’s right.” He sat in the upstairs parlor, sipping the brandy and looking about the room as if he planned to inherit it. “For what he is, he’s healthy as a pig.”

  It was Grandmother who raised me. She directed my feeding and care, opened the windows to let in the chill city fog she hoped would cure me. My mother later told me that the old woman barred her from the nursery because she was sure I would be a source of grief, just a little headstone in a month or so, as with most children, but I like to think Grandmother kept me to herself in that high, bare room beca
use she was lonely, and she hoped to love me a little: one last old man for her life.

  Grandmother was an odd woman, and is only a faint memory for me, but I loved her. I loved peering at her rubbery nose and the roman candle of vessels that spread outwards from it across her cheeks; I loved the weird lace Regina bonnet she wore, and how its tight ribbon cut into her slack jowls, forming long pink welts when she removed it. I loved her because she was my only companion and because we grow to love the ones beside us.

  I bet you’ve done the arithmetic. A boy born in 1871, seeming to be seventy, how long would he expect to live? Seventy years, of course. And if, like my grandmother, you sat above my cradle and worked at your pearl necklace like an abacus, you would take this expected age and arrive at the next obvious conclusion: the year of my death. This is what Grandmother did, standing at the open window in her furs and studying my cooing form overflowing from my cradle with the warm, wrinkled skin of a pudding.

  When Grandmother had calculated the date, she brought my mother in and commanded her to run an errand of such extravagance that poor Mama gasped with the bit of her still left to breathe above her corset. You would think it was an errand run for a prince in a fairy tale; you would almost think the old woman loved me above all else, and gathered these numbers like blankets to tuck around me in my fragile youth. But it was God she loved. Like the Fox sisters in their drafty mansion, she listened for the rappings of His spirit on my body’s wooden hull. So the gold pendant she had shaped and hammered at great expense was not for me; it was for Him, to show, as it hung around my hideous neck, that she had not been blind; she had seen Him at last.

  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!