The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel Read Online Free
Author: Andrew Sean Greer
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
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
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