The Confessions of Max Tivoli Read online

  I could never write a true history of my childhood, because everything happened before I knew what time was, the point in my life when a promise to pick berries on Saturday would cause me to ask every few minutes, “Is it Saturday yet?” Life had no before and after, was not yet strung upon a thread, and thus cannot be brought out from the drawer intact.

  So my memories of that time are of Mr. Dempsey visiting and Hughie drawing with chalk across his shoes; Maggie and Nurse gossiping in the hall; a series of turtles in the terrarium who lived and died just inches from my glass-pressed nose; the vegetable man banging on the back door each morning; the song of the grinder’s cart—“Any old knives to grind, any old knives to grind?”; fountains of smoke rising from the side-wheel steamers in the harbor; the flies and acrid odor of the horses, how pained they looked and how sorry I felt for them as they rested in the carriage house; the wet-wool smell of my bathing suit drying in my room; the old women on the street dressed from eras past in frightful wigs and hoopskirts; Mother and her balms; the rasp of Father stroking his whiskers; the smell of the gas which was the smell of the night. These were the Years Before Alice.

  I want to note that I am no longer sleeping well.

  The bunk below yours, Sammy, could accommodate a little boy’s nightmares and late night reading of cowboy books, but not this old man. And the odd little night-light in the corner, besides being a waste of electricity, reminds me too much of the electric gem my father tried to add to my mother’s jewelry box, glittering so falsely from the baseboard. The whole house, so modern and efficient, so slick and wallpaperless and fine in the daytime, loses every one of its charms at night and leaves me feeling lonely beneath the dry husk of its walls. It could be, too, that all this writing of the past, like scratching a bite, prolongs the pain. So I am not sleeping.

  One night a few weeks ago, I got out of bed, careful not to wake you, and crept into the bathroom where a window opens onto the sky. I climbed onto the toilet and stood there, staring at the stars and trying to make out their patterns one by one as my father taught me. I found Orion; one can always find Orion. I found the Dipper. And bloodshot Mars. I tried to convince myself that, even though my hands had shrunk into tender starfish, the stars were unchanged, and their light pulsing across the universe was the same as ever, and that if I stared unblinking and let it pool into my eyes, I might close them and keep that same light, like a mouthful of milk, trapped inside me for a moment. Then I might feel the way I used to feel, full of this same light. But this was not the sky I once knew; there was a new planet out there with a new light. Pluto, I think they’ve called it, the planet of the underworld. And if I closed my eyes, that would be in there as well, a drop of violet poison clouding all the rest.

  “Hello?” The light came on.

  I turned and saw my mother.

  No, it was your mother, Sammy. It was Mrs. Ramsey with her hand upon the switch, but the light fell over her so unnaturally that it showed every line on her face with the harshness of a rival who does not forget. She stood and stared at me with the face of an insomniac, and for a moment I was afraid somehow she’d caught me, seen an expression on my face that no child of twelve could have. Instantly, though, I saw that it wasn’t discovery in her face, and it wasn’t pity for an odd child who couldn’t sleep. It was grief. For here was another burden in her life, the burden of a little boy standing on the toilet to look out at the sky, on top of all the other burdens she had carried. A woman in her mid-fifties, nearly my own age, wandering the midnight halls in grief; I understand her better than she can ever guess.

  “I’m sorry,” was all I said.

  Mrs. Ramsey smiled; the look was broken. “What are you up to?”

  “I don’t know.” The answer I knew a child would give.

  “That makes two of us.”

  Mrs. Ramsey shifted her weight in the doorway and looked out at the stars herself. Her dressing gown fell open at the neck and showed a constellation of heckles across her breast. “Want some milk?” she asked. I nodded and took her hand.

  The day that Father disappeared, long ago in San Francisco, I awoke from my unmade bed to find another, formed in snow outside my window. Like a health-crazed mother who feeds you on a steady diet of grains and crackers but one morning produces a sugared white cake just because she’s missed it for too long, the world had happily shrugged off all expectations and given me a snowy day. I had read about it, and heard my father’s recollections of the castles and dragons carved from the banks of creamy Danish snow, how he and the other boys would slide on wooden boards all the way to Prussia, but I was not prepared for the real thing. I thought it would be like a toy left in the yard; I was not prepared for snow to erase the world entirely and leave a crisp, blank page. I stared out at the mansions that were not there, the horses, the surreys, the work-bound men I was so used to seeing. There was no sky; there was no city. I gasped as we always do at the unnatural.

  I was not a child anymore. I was sixteen and a little sullen, full of self-pity for my dreadful fate, forced to wear old-fashioned clothes so I would pass more convincingly as a man of fifty-four. Hughie, of course, wore anything he liked: a sack coat, loose pants, wild paisley. All I could be proud of was a beard as thick and luscious as any poet’s. I had it shaved and clipped just under my chin; each night I stroked it in the mirror like a pet. It was even losing its gray at last (through the help of some dye my barber happily suggested). I was, however, no closer to being a real boy.

  But despite my appearance, I was merely sixteen, and, bookish and lonely as I was, I felt the thrill of the day’s change as much as anyone; maybe more so. It seemed, somehow, as if it had leveled the world; from my window I could see men in frock coats and ladies in bonnets throwing heaps of snow at one another. Magically, a carriage came by done up with boards to reproduce a sleigh, and couples were lying inside, laughing under a layer of fur. I dressed in my shabbiest clothes, kissed a bewildered mother as she stood holding the curtain back, and was let out into a world turned deaf and blind to what it was before. Children were being led, dazed, through the haunted paths of a dead and crystal world, but older boys (more my own age but grown into wild, handsome lads) were drawing on boyhood novels to produce snowballs that, correctly aimed, were knocking down the top hats of old Nob Hill swells. It was no world, that morning, to be old and tired.

  And I, for once, was not; with the grin and dyed-brown beard of a young man, I was no target for young rascals. I was able to con a sled ride from some boys who had nailed old skate boots to a crate, and found myself sailing to the bottom of California Street where the streetcars were running on their tracks as usual, having already kicked a morning of snowfall into slush and dung.

  They say some young men, older than I, put stones in their snowballs and aimed them at politicians, Supreme Court justices, even our dear Mayor Pond. They say the tax collector and assessor’s offices went to snowy war in the corridors of City Hall. They say Chinese who were caught outside of Chinatown were pelted with rocky snowballs and that, in retaliation, all whites sneaking through Chinatown’s alleys looking for a smoke or a crib-girl were thrashed with bamboo. They say the buffalo in Golden Gate Park finally looked at home with powdered-wig hides, but I saw none of this. I only know that I found Hughie sledding through the cemetery near the old Mission Dolores, skipping his schoolwork just as I was, and that together—old man and young boy—we bruised our legs into bouquets of violet and gold, scarified the clean white hill, and yelled our voices raw with joy.

  They say the most that fell that day was a foot of snow in Golden Gate. About three inches fell in the city itself. I have since learned in my travels, especially during a hip-high whopper in Colorado, that this is nothing; this is a mere extravagance of frost. But for us it was as thick and bright as luck.

  When I came home that night, trudging through a wet and sodden twilight because most of the snow had melted downhill and Out into the bay, I found a house of dimmed gaslights and worried look
s. Mother sat in a shawl in the back parlor, doing her needlepoint. A canary cage sat behind her, empty as a winter tree.

  “Max,” she said as I stepped in, “we don’t know where your father is. He hasn’t come home.”

  “He’s late at work,” I offered.

  “We sent a boy, he’s not there.” Her face was one of infinite patience, an expression she had readied hours ago just for my return. I saw a spot of blood on the flesh of her thumb; she had pricked herself just before I came in.

  “I’m sure he’s okay, it’s the snow,” she informed me.

  The image of Woodward’s Gardens came to me, and Father walking among the snow-powdered dromedaries, searching for the great silver balloon he’d loved so much. But I knew it was ridiculous.

  Mother took my hand. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “John has dinner out for you, and do your lessons for Mr. Dempsey because he’ll be able to come tomorrow …”

  “What if it snows?”

  “It’s already melted,” she told me evenly. I saw the pinprick welling, now a red pearl catching the light, quivering on her skin; she did nothing and only looked at me. “And Father will be home later, but don’t you wait up.”

  “Mother.”

  “You need sleep, dear boy.”

  “Mother.”

  “Kiss me,” she whispered. I did, catching some of her powder in my beard. And after I left the parlor for the dim light of the hall, I thought I heard the clatter of needles falling to the floor, and then the soft noise of a thumb pressed against a sucking mouth.

  But he did not come home, ever again.

  For the first few months, we had the frozen hearts of people kept alive on hope. But all the police ever found corroborated what they’d known at the outset: that Father had never gone to work the day he vanished, that he had worn his black wool suit and top hat but not taken his cane, that he had bought a fine cigar from his favorite store on Clay, had a whiskey at the Bank Exchange on Stockton and enjoyed a free lunch, tipped his hat to a judge outside the Main Library, and was never seen again. The dotted line connecting all these witnesses with our own house led nowhere convincing at all; it led in a straight line out of San Francisco and directly into the water. No body was found, nor was there any evidence to show it might be, and I remember thinking it strange that on the one day a father might leave a trail of bootprints through the snow, mine had not left one.

  After a half a year, however, the visits from our accountants outnumbered the visits from the police. They sat with Mother and myself in the parlor, where the coal fireplace caused their middle-class brows to dampen with sweat. Mother, dressed in the deep purple of uncertain mourning, listened while I tapped a pen nib on the table (they took me for a freeloading in-law). “Things are complex, Mrs. Tivoli,” they told her. Father apparently liked to run his finances with an element of risk, and so everything he made always became tied up in some new venture; very little was saved. Without Father at the helm, the fleet of these astounding little projects was floating wide of its goal and a few had sunk to the bottom. Add to this the lack of income after the brief pension from his business had run out, the missing body that gave insurance no reason to pay, and thus, the accountants told us over greasy spectacles, “the books grant you one year to live as you are doing, in this house, and then there will be nothing.” They told us to sell the house for what we could.

  “We will speak plainly, Max,” Mother told me once they had left. “They’re right.” I would not look at her; I sat in what doctors now would call an adolescent anguish. I rested my head against the plasterwork, feeling the raised outline of a poppy on my temple. She continued, her hair escaping from her pins in cheroot-smoke curls: “We’ll sell the house. We’ll sell the love seat and the gentleman’s chair of the second parlor, the clocks, the lamps. Some furniture in your father’s study, the desk, the chairs, the moth collection. Maybe the geode. The duplicate silver. We’ll keep Maggie, I think, if she wants to live in South Park again.”

  “South Park?”

  “Where else are we going to live? Besides, I need to be at home.” For a moment, as if the word were the planchette of a Ouija board, moving without her power, she took on the lilting strangeness of my father’s voice: “We will speak plainly, Max.”

  She explained the plans to me in phrases that seemed to come from a distant star, so bright and clear but already old. Someone had to fix them, our new plans, as calm, real, and undesperate as we could make them. You see, a phoenix was rising within my mother, or, as the good mothers of this small town might put it, a miracle. Sammy, I’ll use your gross twentieth-century term: she was pregnant.

  “I like you better poor,” Hughie said when he arrived on moving day.

  “We’re not poor.”

  I could hardly talk to him. I was so ashamed at our change in station. I stood among the old ornamental iron dogs of the yard, and Mother stood at the upstairs window looking down. For we were to live upstairs this time, with another fatherless family—the Levys—living a quiet life in the flat below. I faced away from South Park itself; it had changed so much. The little wall and fence around the park were gone, leaving it a stamped green oval among houses that no longer even resembled the beautiful old ones such as ours. The trees in the park seemed to be different as well, less maple and elm and more eucalyptus, following the recent misplaced craze for the trees that left the city smelling like a medicine chest. In fact, it had even lost its old name; some of the new people were grimly calling it Tar Flats.

  Hughie smiled. “Well, anyway, like you used to be. Nob Hill didn’t suit you. You were starting to look like a bank president, old man.”

  “You look like a music hall singer.”

  That made him laugh. He was done up in lavender and gray, with the dandyish ill taste of a seventeen-year-old with some pocket money, wearing—just to spite me—a velvet vest that I had told him time and again made him look like an organ-grinder. Hughie never cared.

  I noticed a movement in the downstairs apartment; the white flash of a dress, but in a moment it was gone. I hoped our neighbors would not come outside until we were moved. Those firstfloor renters were the last people I wanted to meet. I noticed a wasp’s nest had formed under the eaves since I’d been gone.

  I said, “You know what Mother’s telling everybody?”

  “No.”

  “That I’m her brother-in-law.”

  “But that’s stupid! So she’s your brother’s wife?”

  “That I’m her brother-in-law come over from the East to help her run the household. Now that Dad’s gone.”

  “But that’s stupid. You used to live here. Won’t people recognize you? I mean, the little freak?”

  “Nobody recognizes me. When I left here, I was five feet tall with white hair. Now look at me.” Newly seventeen, nearly six feet, with a full head of brown hair and a gorgeous streaked beard, I looked positively presidential, but dressed in Dad’s old clothes, I felt I took on some of his European glamour and held my thumbs in my waistcoat pockets, preening. I said, “I think I’ve improved.”

  He winked. “I think so, too, Max. Soon you’ll be a handsome old man.”

  “And you’ll be an ugly one.”

  Hughie swatted at a passing wasp and then turned to where Mother looked out from the window. The wasp flew on. “Hello, Mrs. Tivoli!” he yelled.

  “Don’t shout, you plug-ugly,” I told him.

  “I ain’t ugly,” he informed me, smoothing his vest.

  Mother shook from stillness at her post, held one hand to her hair, and waved with the other.

  “How is she?” he asked, still looking up at my mother while she smoothed her best black dress, the one she wore to present herself to her old home the way one dresses for a dinner knowing an old lover will be there. She disappeared into the darkness of the upper room.

  “Pagan,” I said.

  Now he was interested. “How so?”

  I kicked the dry grass. “She’s reading tarot card
s. She’s burning a spirit lamp all night in her room.”

  “I guess she still has a lot to say to your dad.”

  “Oh she doesn’t talk. She’s listening.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Nothing,” I said firmly. “He’s not dead.”

  He nodded and looked back out at the park, arms crossed. “I agree.”

  We had come up with our own idea (not shared by the police) that what happened to Father was happening to men all the time in those days. We were convinced he had wandered into a bar on the Barbary Coast, drunk down a mickeyed beer, and, fallen into a drugged stupor, been dropped through a false plank in the floor onto a waiting Whitehall boat. There, he was taken out in darkest night to a clipper waiting outside the Golden Gate, the fees exchanged, and awoke to find himself headed on the sunny ocean towards the East, part of a whaling crew. A captain would be shouting orders into the prevailing wind, and pigtailed, tattooed crewmen would be shuffling by, eyeing their new mate. A trip backwards into his own salt-rimed youth. In other words, he’d been shanghaied.

  But what I secretly thought had happened was even more obscene, fantastic. I imagined some Norse enchantment that had trapped my father so he was unable to reach us; I thought of some old ghost come round Cape Horn to haunt him and how, like Merlin locked by Nimue inside the rings of an oak, Father sat in a green coil of fire, waiting for me to speak the exact phrase to break his spell. What would it be?

  “hap!”

  The sound came from behind us. A girl nearly my age had just come out of the first-story door but now lay anguished in the grass. I could not imagine what she was doing. She was all in white lace and held her hand to her neck, waiting, almost listening to the seconds passing, and we stared at each other in the wake of her odd cry. Then, slowly, in terror, she removed her hand, showing me first: a bright kiss of pain on her neck; and second: rolling in her outstretched palm, the gold-black liquid body of a wasp.