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Authors: Andrew Sean Greer

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BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
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“Yes, Dr. Harper. He makes me happy. He says he’ll take us all on a trip around the world, imagine that! Any place you ever dreamed of going? I’ve dreamed of so many.”
Alice, you wore your hair down like a girl, and I felt it made a mockery of the girl you used to be, someone who needed no sunburned doctor to take her on trips. Did I invent that girl? Or had she hidden herself decades ago, and lived now only in my memory?
I asked her if her other husbands had made her happy.
“Of course they did.”
I am insane; my mind was burning and I could not control it. I have not yet found your diary, Alice, if you have one, so I am forced to ask these things out loud. “Then why’d you leave? Sammy’s father, why’d you leave him? Didn’t you love him?”
For a moment the old intelligence, cruel and exciting, arose in her like a magic sign, and I thought she was going to say something one should never say to a child. My heart shuddered, terrified that she’d seen through me, and my skin shrank on my bones. Then, like a swan shaking its feathers into the water, she smoothed away her memory and looked at my pure, childish face.
She said, “That was all a long time ago.”
“I’m sure you’ll be happy together.”
A chuckle. “Thanks.”
With a whisper of love that surprised her, I fell into her lap.
If Harper ever finds these pages, I’m sure he’ll show them to his psychoanalyst friend, and, oh, what a thrill for the old boy! I can hear his pencil chattering away. Let me imagine the notes: “Subject attempts intercourse with mother”—oh, not with my miniaturized equipment, Doctor, but I’m sure you mean something symbolic. Though is it exactly Oedipal if I married the mother before becoming the son? Is there some other myth with a better correlation? No, I am too twisted a knot. There is no untying me, Doctor. To release me, you must cut me in two.
We had the address through a trick at the library, and with the help of a map posted near City Hall, the old Chrysler was humming homeward within an hour.
“What are you thinking, old man?” Hughie asked me.
We had turned the radio off and the only sounds were lingering birds and the rumble of a motorcycle on some adjacent, invisible street. “That I just want to see my son.”
“Just him?”
“And her.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know.”
A green strip of land appeared beside us: Lincoln Park, where you play your baseball, Sammy. Hughie drove on slowly—too slowly for the car behind, which passed us, radio blaring. He said in that voice I hated: “I know you. We’ve come too far. You’re not just going to peek through a window and come back into the car, are you?”
“I thought we’d knock on the door.”
He laughed. “That’s stupid. She may recognize me.”
“I know. That’s all right. Say you’re passing through town. And I’m your son.”
His hand smoothed over his scalp, an old gesture, searching for hair that had been gone now for years, then lay once again on the gearshift. With the smell of rubbing metal, he shifted into the right gear. Then I told him.
I told him what I had planned in Ramsey’s chemical-smelling studio. No, we were not just going to knock on the door. Or take a mental picture. I told him my final dream; a poem, really, a work of art. What I wanted from this place, and from Alice, and Sammy. And him. It was a great thing to ask of someone, too great a thing, I guess. But I took his silence for agreement, because he had said it himself: we had come too far.
“Are you going to tell?” he asked at last.
“No. I think now I won’t ever tell her.”
“I mean Sammy.”
“He wouldn’t believe me.”
“Will he believe you’re just a little boy?”
“Everyone else does.”
“Well, what do you want me to say your name is?”
I looked out at the road and saw a baby staring at me from its pram, as wary as a woman in an opera box.
“Hughie, of course. Little Hughie. After my father.”
He laughed.
But there we were, 11402 Stonewood, and Hughie parked noisily before the car went silent, revealing a quiet barking from behind the house. A plain house, yellow and black, decorative window on the door and the slightly askew woodwork of an added second story, done on the cheap. Church spire above the trees. A side fence opened, and out slipped the cagey dog itself, and there was old Buster, golden as a cake, woofing from a corner of the lawn. Then he paused, turning his head to the doorway. His owner
stood there, chewing gum like a maniac. A little boy who looked like me.
“Did your mother make this pie?”
Hughie sat in the glow of the kitchen lamp, smiling and holding out a forkful of apple pie. I could not eat mine; I had already had to visit the bathroom to empty my stomach and sigh into the mirror. Now I could only stare at the boy who blinked at us and tossed a baseball from one hand to the other. He shrugged.
“Well it’s very good,” Hughie said.
“I guess.”
“And you’re very kind to let us wait here for your mother.”
Another shrug and Sammy stared into the backyard, where Buster made stupid loops around the old hemlock tree, terrorizing a squirrel. A moth was trapped behind the back screen door and nobody, nobody would set it free.
“You’re in school now, Sammy?”
Pause, as if this were a trick. “I’m at Benjamin Harrison. I’m in fifth grade. I’ve got Mrs. McFall and she’s been sick so we didn’t have any homework for a week last week.”
“Do you like her?”
“She’s all right. Next year I’ll have Mrs. Stevens and I hear she’s a …” You stopped there before you said some crude word, then you looked at me and smiled. My brain filled with black stars.
Victor Ramsey had prepared me for your looks—not a spitting image of your diminutive father, but alike enough, with enormous ears and blond hair in a cowlicked swirl—but you mangled your dad’s face beyond any recognition. It was never still: you elongated it in boredom, or crunched it up in thought; your restless eyes rolled and narrowed and snapped shut as if what Hughie said might put you to sleep; and your lips, God, smack, smack, smacking
with the gum you chewed like a betel nut. One elbow was freshly scraped and oozing a little yellow fruit-juice; the other was bruised and blue. You bit your nails even as we sat there. You leaped out of your chair from time to time to yell out the window at Buster, who was doing nothing particularly interesting, but who I suppose was the best friend of your life (and whom I never truly replaced). You were polite to a point (inviting us in when you heard we were old friends) but bossed us around, making us sit in particular chairs and telling us, “Don’t eat all the pie ‘cause I’m saving it for later.” There was no sign, in all of this, that you loved a girl named Rachel. Or that you sat alone in your room and prayed for your mother. That you then imagined awful deaths of teachers and schoolmates, or that these dreams made you fear the devil. That you were like me, a little, in the end. I saw none of it then; I only saw a champion baseballer, a cowboy fan, a runt who thought that everything he said was so brand new and brilliant that he smiled at his own words. A perfect, maddening little boy.
“We’re studying Asia,” you said.
“Sounds good.”
Your face collapsed in disgust at the entire continent. “The swell place has about a million swell little people on it, and about a hundred swell little nations, all of them exactly the same and can’t say their names even, except there’s China, you know, whose main export is tea. No, silk. No, rice. One of those. And Japan. Would you like to hear my haiku?”
“Yes.”
He arranged his head very sternly beneath the light and recited this masterpiece:
A little sandwich
Sweetly singing to itself
“
Tunafish salad.
”
He added, “That’s because I was pretty much
starving
when I wrote it. I got an A, though. I get all A’s.”
Hughie said, “Now you’re twelve years old, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well that’s the same age as little Hughie here! Isn’t it? Isn’t it, son?” My old friend looked at me so strangely—almost angrily, or as if he were going to cry—and I recognized, crazily, my dead mother’s face:
Be what they think you are.
“Yes, Dad.” I said in my sad, hiccupy little voice. “I am twelve.”
“You got a gun?” Sammy asked me, and I wondered what kind of child my old wife had raised.
But Sammy didn’t wait for an answer. “My mom won’t let me have one. She doesn’t know anything about it, she never had one, my dad would let me have one, I’m sure of it. Danny Shane down the street’s got a BB with a double pump but it busts up sometimes and his dad screams at him like heck, and Billy Easton’s got a Daisy.” All of a sudden, with remarkable joy, he shouted the advertising line: “It’s a Daisy!” Buster ran to the screen door barking and Sammy teased him until he jogged away.
“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:
BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
5.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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