The Confessions of Max Tivoli Read online

  Alice, are you reading this? It’s you!

  I had seen girls before, of course. Not only from that nursery window where I watched them in their little-lady dresses pointing at the birds, but, later, I saw the girls of Nob Hill on their way to school, kicking pebbles at each other and laughing; I saw young ladies coming home past curfew in their beaus’ phaetons; I even spotted some kissing in the parks until the couples, noticing a leery old man, took off for thicker bushes. And I had fallen in love with the everyday girls: the girl at the newsstand with a shine above her lip, the girl with sad eyes selling pineapples stacked up in a pyramid, and the German butcher’s daughter who came with him to our back door and translated. But I never said a word to them. I merely nodded from the kitchen, or tried to hide my nervous sweat by tossing down my coins and rushing away. It was a thrill, an agony.

  I hadn’t yet met a proper girl. All boys are primed at seventeen, ready for love. And I, imprisoned in that awful body, was sure to fall for the first one to meet my eye.

  “I’ve been stung!”

  And so had I, Alice, seeing you for the first time. Worst luck of my life: I was struck dumb by my heart.

  Hughie ran to her. “Are you all right?”

  She blinked as the pustule at her neck began to swell. “I’ve never been stung before,” was what she said.

  “You’ll be all right,” Hughie told her. “Lie down.”

  She refused, sitting there and looking at the poisoner in her palm. “It hurts.”

  “Well …”

  “More than I expected. Mother got stung once and I thought she was making too big a deal of it, but … oh, it hurts.”

  “It’s swelling, too.”

  Now she turned those soft brown eyes, those ageless eyes, on me. “Sir, your son is very kind.”

  I tried to speak but nothing happened. I was a mute old man and she looked away.

  “Mother!” she yelled, then looked again at the wasp. “Poor little thing.”

  “Hmm,” Hughie said, getting up.

  “You’re going to leave me here?” she said.

  At that moment, I was opening my mouth to say the words I’d been trying to speak for almost a minute. She seemed to notice and looked right at me. I blinked. There, they came out at last:

  “He’s …he’s not my son.”

  But the words were drowned out by a shout from the side of the house. I looked and it was merely a woman, a mother. Alice, you turned away and never heard me.

  I would like to call it fate, but I should call it chance, that put you in my yard at the time my heart was at its most tender. I suppose I’m lucky it was you and not someone crueler. Still, if it had been anyone but you, Alice, I would have loved again, and plenty, before this ripe age. Cursed by your eyes, however, I never have.

  “Mr. Tivoli!”

  Her mother rushed out of the house and kneeled at her daughter’s feet. She held a cloth against the girl’s taut neck, pressing against that tender skin with the casual efficiency of a nurse. She was a fine woman, moving so naturally with her sticks-and-bones daughter as the girl hissed and struggled. Mrs. Levy wore clothes from the final years of widowhood, and she had the careful beauty of an older woman. She dressed for her face, with a collar of pearls, and for the things that do not age: a discreet folding bustle for her womanly silhouette, and a creased shirtwaist for her impressive bust. I am not good at age; what was she, Alice? Forty-five or -six? She had a dark-complected face shaped like a hazelnut, with a bow hairline and uncolored lips. She smiled and scolded as, she daubed the girl, but she was not looking at her. She was looking, with those deep brown feminine eyes, straight at me: “Mr. Tivoli, it’s wonderful to meet you at last, don’t flinch, Alice, it’s not that cold.”

  Alice! I had her name, and now she was twice the girl I’d known before.

  “I hope you’re happy with your brother’s old home, we just love it here, don’t we, what were you doing, you foolish girl? You slap them, they sting you, ah well, I hope it won’t swell, and if it does it will remind you, won’t it? Alice, sit still. Now you’ve got your dress wet, and we’ll have to air it. I met your sister-in-law, Mr. Tivoli, and she’s a charming lady, so sad, so sad.”

  Hughie snickered. “That’s right, Mr. Tivoli, your lovely sister-in-law.”

  It was all a scene that Alice’s mother was directing. Every moment that I stood there, seeing Alice, the girl was growing ever clearer to me, ever larger; I watched her blinking her tears away, red with anger, and sighing as her mother held her hair. Yet Mrs. Levy was pulling me in the opposite direction, taking away my right to have a schoolboy’s heart, replacing it with the leather flaps of an old man, someone whom stung-Alice could never love.

  “Alice, be quiet, this is your landlord, Mr. Tivoli. He is old South Park, aren’t you, Mr. Tivoli?”

  She was crumbling me before her daughter’s eyes. My hat felt far too tight and it occurred to me that it wasn’t mine; I must have picked up the wrong one at some party.

  “Not old at all, Mrs. Levy,” I said, then, “Hello, Alice,” which had no effect on the girl, who was staring elsewhere with a riveted gaze, but which made the older woman laugh in a downward, separating scale like a string of pearls.

  Alice turned to me at last. “I hope you don’t make noise upstairs like the last couple. They sounded like cattle.”

  Mrs. Levy attacked her daughter with a reptilian noise. “Besides, Mr. Tivoli,” the widow added, “I noticed the beautiful rugs you’ve brought from your old home on Nob Hill. What a soft, lovely household you’ll have!”

  Mrs. Levy had a charming way with conversation, and I was a child of seventeen, so I could only follow where she led. I spoke of rugs, Brussels rugs, their color and feel, and I could almost taste them on my tongue as I kept up this dusty, woolen conversation while all the time I could have been asking Alice about her schooling, her piano, her travels; I could have been hearing Alice’s voice. Instead, I had to watch the sweet girl staring off beside me and falling ever further into her own thoughts. The pain of the sting must have subsided under her mother’s care or the dull growl of my voice, and dear young Alice was dropping, dropping into some imaginary life I longed to share.

  “ …I think, I think it’s nice to have rugs around.”

  Alice: “Ugh.”

  “And damask love seats, I saw them too,” Mrs. Levy said, as proud as if they were her own. “I’m impressed, Mr. Tivoli. You seem quite taken with the household, for a man.”

  But I’m not a man! I wanted to say, but she had already paused politely and then asked about the person beside me, whom I had completely forgotten.

  “I’m Mr. Hughie Dempsey,” Hughie said with all smoothness, tipping his hat to Mrs. Levy and her blinking, dreambound daughter.

  “Ah, Hughie,” Alice repeated.

  “He is a close friend of the family,” I said.

  Mrs. Levy was gathering her daughter together by the waist, as one carries cut flowers to a vase. “Wonderful, wonderful. I should get poor Alice in and treat her neck. I hope to see you visiting, Mr. Dempsey. And of course, Mr. Tivoli, we will have you and your sister-in-law over for dinner soon.”

  Bows, nods, smiles, and as the girl was carried into the house, worrying once again about the sting’s poison, I stood as still as any of our ornamental iron dogs. Some people were making a commotion in the park behind me, and through my haze I could make out a man walking along, waving a flag of caution as a steam-powered carriage made its exhibitory circle to general shouts and jeers, but the wonder of it was lost on me, for I was working to think how I could get into our lower story without my mother, find Alice alone, and convince her of what I truly was.

  Beside me Hughie’s amused voice: “Mr. Tivoli, I believe you are wearing my hat.”

  All of a sudden, life was gorgeous broken glass. There was no moment when I did not feel the pain of Alice’s presence underfoot, and sometimes when I stood in the parlor listening to Mother’s explanation of our accounts,
or weary recitation of her night beside the spirit lamp, I stepped to different places on the carpet, wondering, Is Alice underneath me now? Or now? And so I would move across the parlor like a knight on a chessboard, hoping that when I reached the point above Alice, when I stood in shivering alignment, I would feel the warmth of her body, the scent of her hair rising upwards through the house.

  Hughie thought I was acting like a fool. “Don’t think about her,” he said. “She’s fourteen. She wears her hair down and probably still plays with dolls. She doesn’t know about love.” Then he would flip another card into his hat across the room, intimating that he knew—as we often do at seventeen—all about the matters of the heart.

  But I could not be stopped. She swam like a mermaid in the swamp-tank of my dreams. I lay in bed with the window open, hoping I would hear the sound of her voice screaming at her mother from the kitchen—“I’m going crazy in this house!”—and it would enter like a sweet poison into my ear. Or I would hear faint footsteps, and I’d picture my girl in her black stockings and white dress dipping her finger into a fresh-baked chocolate cake and then trying to cover her crime. I plotted all sorts of ruses in those weeks and months as I listened to her below me, singing to herself like a phantom lady, or waking from a nightmare with a shout. I thought perhaps I’d come up with some household repair that needed doing. Normally, of course, we got some local men to help with the house, but maybe I could convince Mother that I was the one to do it. Hughie shrugged his shoulders at this, sniffing to say it just might work. Some minor task, a peek behind the wainscoting for mice, a paint touch-up. Anything so I could be near her.

  Not that things went well when I did get close. I charted her movements with the science of an astrologer, and knew she went to Mrs. Grimmel’s Girls’ Academy each morning at exactly eight with a bow in her hair and cake crumbs impastoed on her lips, and returned each afternoon at two; sometimes she did not come until much later, in another family’s yellow surrey in the company of two other girls with wine-dark hair and glasses. It was only on those occasions with her friends that I saw my Alice truly happy, waving her arms to part the waters for her story, because after she yelled goodbye on the dark stones of 90 South Park, she always turned to face the house with the jaded expression of late childhood and the loathing step of a golem. I often tried to put myself in the garden just as she might be coming home, but I could never time it right and Mother was always calling me inside for some chore.

  I did place myself correctly once, pretending to fix the iron gate. I had just returned from a job interview at Bancroft’s—a job that would keep me for over twenty years, filing documents for a thirty-volume History of the West that Mr. Bancroft was publishing—and I looked down the street to see moody Alice stomping along the two-bit boards of the sidewalk. The light went whitewash for a moment.

  “Hello, Mr. Tivoli.”

  “Hi, Alice. How was school?”

  My eyes had cleared enough to see she wore my favorite hairdo: barley-sugar curls with a floating lily. She pinched a sly corner of a smile.

  “Idiotic, Mr. Tivoli,” she said. “As always.”

  “I’m …I’m sorry.”

  “But I did decide never to marry.”

  “What …never?”

  She shook her head, sighing. “Never. We were reading Shakespeare, and I think The Taming of the Shrew is a real tragedy. There’s a waste of a good woman.”

  “Yep,” I said. I hadn’t read this one.

  “Miss Sodov didn’t agree. I had to rewrite my essay. How crazy! Now there’s a shrew.” Suddenly her tone became conspiratorial: “Mr. Tivoli, I wanted to ask you about—”

  “Max!” my mother said from the doorway. “What are you doing there? The gate is fine. Hello, Alice, don’t dawdle with Max there. I think your mother especially wants to talk to you.”

  Alice rolled her eyes and moaned, then lumbered into my house. Mother stood there, smiling without an idea of what she’d done. For a moment, I plotted matricide.

  There is a little lie in here. I have made my heart into a camellia floating in a bowl of clear, pure water when in fact it was a dark and bloated thing. It was absolute pain to watch my Alice pass under my window every morning and never once look up in curiosity or tenderness at the gargoyle perched above her. And it was not with stars set in her hair that I pictured her while I lay in bed each night. No, my thoughts obsessively recalled a single base moment.

  It was late in the evening, after supper, and I had slipped out into a corner of the back garden because I couldn’t read my book, or think, and had to go to the rosebushes there and crush a little flower in my fist. I had been weeping for a while when you arrived. Alice, you were in your chemise and pantaloons. I think you were worried you had dropped something earlier in the day, a valuable pin or brooch your mother would scold you for, and so you slid through the back door, closing it carefully, and hurried into the darkness of the grass, whispering, searching every blade, heedless of how you looked. I stood unbreathing in my dark corner. On your knees, cat-stretching your arms into the yard, I could see through the neck of your loose cotton chemise a pink landscape of skin. You turned and writhed in your cloud and I turned and writhed in mine. I saw your legs stretching and tensing as you hunted and jerked your body in hope; women’s pantaloons were devious things in those days, split down the crotch with overlapping fabric, and once you shifted just carelessly enough to allow the veil to part and I glimpsed the vulnerable blue veins of your thighs. A cat leaped in the yard; you froze, the chemise settling off one shoulder. Then, abandoning yourself to fate, surely imagining a lie that might save you, you ran to the back door, opening it to make a bright square and then, closing it behind you, a dark one. I spent all night looking for your jewel, darling, but found only a hairpin, a bird’s egg, and two battered coils of grass where your knees had been.

  The agony that one night caused me! The blueness of those veins colored everything in sight, and every night I had to rid the world of you just to sleep, just to survive another day. Sammy, close your ears. I did this in the most obvious, the most boyish of ways. I’m sure you think no one was ever like you in the world, and that young men in my day, adrown in love, secured their wrists in wolfman-chains until the dawn. No, we succumbed like all young men. Forgive my crudeness, Alice, but I was crude, and I hope you’ll find it flattering, now that you are old as well, to think of me in bed, staring at my memory like a French postcard, watching the starlight trickle into the darkness of your clothes.

  I did not climb down the trellis to peek into her window; I did not hang a mirror discreetly from a tree so I could see every holy one of the nightly hundred brushes of her sweet hair as she stared bored into the looking glass; I did not sneak into the carriage house to touch the seat from which she had just descended, feeling the startling warmth my fidgeting girl had made there. I imagined all these things but did none of them. No, I was left standing on the carpet and trying to feel her soul’s vibration (damn those Brussels rugs) and holding the memory of what I considered to be the closest I would ever get to love.

  “Don’t go on so much,” Hughie told me when we went out on our bone-shaking bicycles. “You’ll get love. You’ll get better love than she has to offer, I can tell you. I’ve got some books you can read, but don’t keep them too long. I think my father knows I took them.”

  I read the books. They had nothing to do with love, but they kept me up very late night after night. One, perhaps acquired for the collection by Mr. Dempsey to convince himself this was a form of study, turned out to be a tract on spermatorrhea and terrified me for almost a week, but the others were a source of great knowledge and fascination. I especially enjoyed the pictures. I returned them all to Hughie and we did not speak of them, just exchanged an understanding flick of the eyes. I had been distracted, at least, but I still was no nearer to love.

  The opportunity I was looking for came through Mrs. Levy herself. Desperate, heartaching, red and ugly from lack of sleep, I
decided I had to take a chance; I had to have another photograph to fondle in my bedroom. I rashly decided on the house-repair idea and went downstairs in shirtsleeves, a badly tied cravat, and with a yetunformed idea about needing to examine a leak in her daughter’s room.

  “Mr. Tivoli!”

  Mrs. Levy stood at the open door, smiling only faintly and touching her hair, which was middle-parted and done up with surprising sloppiness in puffs on either side of her head. A few presses of her experienced hand put things in place, and she stood slightly away from the door, embarrassed or signaling me that I was welcome. The sun pinkened her face. She was in unwidowlike green and wore an old-style bustle high at the back of her skirt. Mrs. Levy seemed conscious of her artificiality and straightened herself slightly. She made these small but profound adjustments in the first moments I saw her in the doorway, distracting me from her maneuvers by light, intelligent conversation:

  “ …something about the evening positively Shakespearean, don’t you think? Something about being in a grove of trees, like Arden? I wonder if that feeling will ever change. I wonder if a hundred years from now people will be standing at their doorways looking at the trees with that comical sensation of being in love.”

  She had transformed herself into the old Mrs. Levy again and gave a light rendition of her laugh—that descending string of pearls. “I’m being stupid. Please come in, Mr. Tivoli. I’m sure Alice would love to see you, too.”

  “I’ve come to check the paint,” I began, but found I was already inside the house, inside my own old hallways repainted in dimmer colors and sectioned by various wallpapers, dadoes, and friezes so that it was like coming upon an old friend done up for some event—a state dinner or a chowder party—looking so unlike themselves that you blink awkwardly and turn away, kindly refusing to recognize this strange person attached to a beloved face. I found no scent of my childhood here. This was not like walking through a pyramid tomb of the past, knocking against my old relics; this felt very new; someone else had cracked and repaired that porcelain figure; it was a museum of Alice. For there she was.