Chapter One
April 25, 1930
We are each the love of someone's life.
I wanted to put that down in case I am discovered and unable
to complete these pages, in case you become so disturbed by the
facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get
to tell you of great love and murder. I would not blame you. So
many things stand in the way of anyone ever heating my story.
There is a dead body to explain. A woman three times loved. A
friend betrayed. And a boy long sought for. So I will get to the
end first and tell you we are each the love of someone's life.
I sit here on a lovely April day. It keeps changing all around
me; the sun alternates between throwing deep shadows behind
the children and trees and then sweeping them back up again the
moment a cloud crosses the sky. The grass fills with gold, then
falls to nothing. The whole school yard is being inked with sun
and blotted, glowing and reaching a point of great beauty, and I
am breathless to be in the audience. No one else notices. The little
girls sit in a circle, dresses crackling with starch and conspiracy,
and the boys are on the baseball field or in the trees, hanging upside
down. Above, an airplane astounds me with its roar and schoolmarm
line of chalk. An airplane; it's not the sky I once knew.
And I sit in a sandbox, a man of almost sixty. The chill air has
made the sand a bit too tough for the smaller kids to dig; besides,
the field's changing sunlight is too tempting, so everyone else is
out there charging at shadows, and I'm left to myself.
We begin with apologies:
For the soft notebook pages you hold in your hands, a sad reliquary
for my story and apt to rip, but the best I could steal. For
stealing, both the notebooks and the beautiful lever-fed pen I'm
writing with, which I have admired for so many months on my
teacher's desk and simply had to take. For the sand stuck between
the pages, something I could not avoid. There are more serious
sins, of course, a lost family, a betrayal, and all the lies that have
brought me to this sandbox, but I ask you to forgive me one last
thing: my childish handwriting.
We all hate what we become. I'm not the only one; I have seen
women staring at themselves in restaurant mirrors while their
husbands are away, women under their own spell as they see
someone they do not recognize. I have seen men back from war,
squinting at themselves in shopwindows as they feel their skull beneath
their skin. They thought they would shed the worst of
youth and gain the best of age, but time drifted over them, sand-burying
their old hopes. Mine is a very different story, but it all
turns out the same.
One of the reasons I sit here in the sand, hating what I've become,
is the boy. Such a long time, such a long search, lying to
clerks and parish priests to get the names of children living in the
town and suburbs, making up ridiculous aliases, then crying in a
motel room and wondering if I would ever find you. You were so
well hidden. The way the young prince in fairy tales is hidden
from the ogre: in a trunk, in a thorny grove, in a dull place of
meager enchantment. Little hidden Sammy. But the ogre always
finds the child, doesn't he? For here you are.
If you are reading this, dear Sammy, don't despise me. I am a
poor old man; I never meant you any harm. Don't remember me
just as a childhood demon, though I have been that. I have lain in
your room at night and heard your breathing roughen the air. I
have whispered in your ear when you were dreaming. I am what
my father always said I was-I am a freak, a monster-and even as
I write this (forgive me) I am watching you.
You are the one playing baseball with your friends as the sunlight
comes and goes through your golden hair. The sunburned
one, clearly the boss, the one the other boys resent but love; it's
good to see how much they love you. You are up to bat but hold
out your hand because something has annoyed you; an itch, perhaps,
as just now your hand scratches wildly at the base of your
blond skull, and after this sudden dervish, you shout and return
to the game. Boys, you don't mean to be wonders, but you are.
You haven't noticed me. Why would you? To you I am just the
friend in the sandbox, scribbling away. Let's try an experiment:
I'll wave my hand to you. There, see, you just put down your bat
to wave back at me, a smile cocked across your freckled face, arrogant
but innocent of everything around you. All the years and
trouble it took for me to be here. You know nothing, fear nothing.
When you look at me, you see another little boy like you.
A boy, yes, that's me. I have so much to explain, but first you
must believe:
Inside this wretched body, I grow old. But outside-in every
part of me but my mind and soul-I grow young.
* * *
There is no name for what I am. Doctors do not understand me;
my very ceils wriggle the wrong way in the slides, divide and echo
back their ignorance. But I think of myself as having an ancient
curse. The one that Hamlet put upon Polonius before he punctured
the old man like a balloon:
That, like a crab, I go backwards.
For even now as I write, I look to be a boy of twelve. At nearly
sixty, there is sand in my knickers and mud across the brim of my
cap. I have a smile like the core of an apple. Yet once I seemed a
handsome man of twenty-two with a gun and a gas mask. And before
that, a man in his thirties, trying to find his lover in an earthquake.
And a hardworking forty, and a terrified fifty, and older
and older as we approach my birth.
"Anyone can grow old," my father always said through the
bouquet of his cigar smoke. But I burst into the world as if from
the other end of life, and the days since then have been ones of
physical reversion, of erasing the wrinkles around my eyes, darkening
the white and then the gray in my hair, bringing younger
muscle to my arms and dew to my skin, growing tall and then
shrinking into the hairless, harmless boy who scrawls this pale
confession.
A mooncalf, a changeling; a thing so out of joint with the human
race that I have stood in the street and hated every man in
love, every widow in her long weeds, every child dragged along
by a loving dog. Drunk on gin, I have sworn and spat at passing
strangers who took me for the opposite of what I was inside-an
adult when I was a child, a boy now that I am an old man. I have
learned compassion since then, and pity passersby a little, as I,
more than anyone, know what they have yet to live through.
* * *
I was born in San Francisco in September 1871. My mother was
from a wealthy Carolina family, raised in the genteel area of South
Park, originally planned for Southern gentry, but, with the loss of
the war, open to anyone with enough wealth to throw an oyster
supper. By then, the distinction among people in my city was no
longer money-the blue silver clay of the Comstock had made
too many beggars into fat, rich men-so society became divided
into two classes: the chivalry and the shovelry. My mother was of
the first, my father of the wretched second.
No surprise that when they met in the swimming pool of the
Del Monte hotel, staring at each other through the fine net that
separated the sexes, they fell in love. They met again that very
night, on the balcony, away from her chaperones, and I am told
my mother wore the latest Paris fashion: a live beetle, iridescently
winged, attached to her dress with a golden chain. "I'll kiss you,"
my father whispered to her, shivering with love. The beetle, green
and metal, scampered on her bare shoulder, then tried to take
flight. "I'll do it, I'll kiss you this moment," he insisted, but did
nothing, so she took him by the handles of his muttonchops and
brought his lips to hers. The beetle tugged at its leash and landed
in her hair. Her heart exploded.
Throughout the autumn of 1870, the Dane and the debutante
met on the sly, finding secluded spots in the new Golden Gate
Park to kiss and grope, the nearby bison grumbling in their corrals.
But like a clambering vine, lust must lead somewhere or
wither, and so it led to this: the detonation of Blossom Rock. It
was a city celebration, and Mother somehow slipped away from
Grandmother and South Park to meet her Danish lover, her Asgar,
and watch the great event. It was to be the greatest explosion
yet in the city's history-the dynamiting of Blossom Rock, a shoal
in the Golden Gate that had been shattering hulls for a century-and
while optimistic fishermen prepared for what they assumed
would be the best catch of the century, pessimistic scientists
warned of a great "earth wave" that would roll across the continent,
wreaking havoc on every standing structure; the populace
should flee. Did they flee? Only to the highest hills, for the best
view of the end of the world.
So my parents found themselves among the thousands on
Telegraph Hill, and afraid of being recognized, they rushed inside
the old heliograph station for privacy. I imagine my mother sitting
in her pink silk dress in the old operator's chair, pressing her finger
against the window and clearing an oval from the window's
dust. There, she saw the crowds in their black wool looking out
to sea. Even as she felt my father's fingers upon her lace she saw
the young boys chucking oyster shells at the tallest of the stovepipe
hats. "My love," her lover whispered, undoing her rows of buttons.
She did not turn to take his kisses but shivered at the sensation
of her skin. She had rarely been naked since the day she was
born, not even in the bath, having always worn a long white
nightgown into the warm water. As my father-to-be shucked her
like a rare oyster, she wriggled like one, too, chilled and weeping
now not just with love-" mine dyr, mine dyr," he whispered-but
with relief at what she was about to lose.
At 1:28 a warning shot came from Alcatraz and that is the exact
moment that my mother's technical girlhood ended. A little
gasp in the cold air, a glare from the heliographic plates across the
room, and my father was shuddering into her ear, whispering
things he could not possibly mean and that no one but an angry
parent would ever hold him to. Mother was calm, watching the
cheering boys outside the grimed window. The crowd was restless
but excited. And Mother-who knows what mothers feel when
fathers first possess them?
And then-at 2:05 exactly (well endured, my young and eager
father)-her lover cried out in ecstasy as a great rumbling seized
the air. To her right, through the window, she witnessed the most
extraordinary sight of her lost girlhood: a column of water two
hundred feet in diameter, black as jet, rising into the crisp air of
the Golden Gate. At the top floated great hunks of the dissipated
Blossom Rock, and it looked for all the world like the conquering
fist of a Titan punching at the clouds. So huge, so menacing. The
world around her shouted so loudly she could barely hear her
young man's cries. Steamers whistled; guns fired by the hundreds
into the skies. The dark column fell back into the water and then,
to her gasping surprise, another column heaved into the air-just
as her lover's moans were rising once again-and fell back in boiling
blackness into great circular wells of bay water that lashed at
every fishing boat at sea.
The young man calmed at last, mumbled something foreign
and ecstatic into her collarbone. "Yes, my love," she replied, and
for the first time looked back upon her lover. He mewled like a
child on her breast. She touched the hot gold of his hair and he
whimpered, his strong hands moving spastically in the froth of her
ripped lacework. Like the shining beetle on the night of their first
kiss, he lay chained and happy on her shoulder. In that moment,
she panicked a little, remembering the girls who had made mistakes
in her neighborhood and had disappeared. She could hear in
her lover's sighs how little he was thinking of the future.
And somewhere in the postcoital pawing and fussing, somewhere
in the softening swells of the blackened Golden Gate, as
bits of rock fell through the sooty waters to rest forever on the
deep bottom, somewhere in the weeping sorrow of the glaziers
and fishermen who found none of the booty they had hoped for,
somewhere in the cheers and gun salutes and steam-whistling of
the hysterical hat-tossing crowds, somewhere in that chivaree, I
came into being.
But the question is: Was the crazed explosion of Blossom Rock
enough to jolt my cells into a backwards growth? Was my mother
so shocked by the sound, or so saddened by herself, that she distorted
what little existed of me? It seems ludicrous, but my
mother fretted until her death over the price she paid for love.
* * *
On the morning I was born, according to my mother, the midwife
handed me down in my flannel wrap and whispered, You
should probably let him go, the doctor says he's a little wrong. I was
not much to look at. Wrinkled, palsied, opening my blind, clouded
eyes as I wailed into the room, I'm sure my mother was horrified.
I believe she might even have screamed. But in the corner stood my
father; arms crossed, smoking his ever-present Sweet Caporals, he
looked at me and expressed no horror. Father came close, squinting
through his pince-nez, and saw a mythical creature from his
Danish boyhood:
"Aha!" he cried aloud, laughing, smoking again as my terrified
mother looked on, as the midwife held me away. "He is a Nisse!"
"Asgar ..."
"He is a Nisse! He is lucky, darling." He leaned down to kiss
her forehead and then my own, which was falsely lined with
decades of worry. He smiled at his wife and then spoke sternly to
the midwife: "He is ours, we will not let him go."
It was untrue; I was not lucky. But what he meant was that I
looked like those little old men who lived beneath the Danish
countryside. I looked like a gnome. A monster. And aren't I?
* * *
I didn't smell like a baby. My mother said she noticed this as I
suckled at her breast, and though she could never be brought to
speak unkindly of me and always bathed my liver-spotted arms as
if they were the tenderest baby's skin, she admitted that my scent
was wonderful but not like any infant she'd ever held. Something
more like a book, musty and lovely but wrong. And my proportions
were unusual: skinny torso and small head, long arms and
legs, and a surprisingly sharp nose that must have been the cause
of at least one chloroformed cry from the birthing room. Babies
have no noses-anybody will tell you this-but I had one. And a
chin. And a face reupholstered in elephant's skin, buttoned with
the clouded, sad blue eyes of the blind.
"What's wrong with him, suh?" Grandmother whispered in
her Carolina accent. She was dressed in the black bombazine and
veils that encrust her in my memory.
Continues...
Excerpted from THE CONFESSIONS OF Max Tivoli
by Andrew Sean Greer
Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Sean Greer.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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The Confessions of Max Tivoli
