The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

heads eagerly as you shouted to them: true boys.
    Let it rest. The recess hag has appeared at the door, piping furiously away. I have to stash these pages for another day; the times tables await me.

    My life’s story really begins with Alice, when my deformity is at its worst, but in order to understand Alice, and why I needed so badly to fall in love, you must hear about Woodward’s Gardens, and Hughie. But, first, you must understand the Rule.
    It happened one winter evening, not long after Grandmother’s death. I awoke to the piff of the gaslight in my room and saw, as its fluttering magic brightened, my parents sitting near my bed in their opera clothes, rustling with silk and starch. I don’t know what had happened to them that evening, what tragedy they had witnessed or which famous hypnotist they had confessed their case to, but they had the expressions of repentant murderers who have called their victim up in a seance, and as Father turned the key of the lamp to fill my room with rosy light and a bitter smell, Mother kneeled close to my tired face and told me the Rule. She offered no explanation, but simply repeated it so that I would know this was a lesson we were learning, and no dream; this was a spell she was casting, and if I was a dutiful son I would let her weave her charmed circle. My father stood by the lamp, his eyes
closed in holy dread. And then I fell asleep and remember nothing else. The Rule has dictated my actions throughout most of my life. It has allowed me to relax all great decisions before its simplicity, and has therefore taken me further than I ever would have gone, all the way from my home city to the cold sandbox that now immerses my naked toes.
    “Be what they think you are, ” my mother whispered to me that evening, a tear at the corner of each eye. “ Be what they think you are. Be what they think you are.”
    I have tried, Mother. It has brought me heartache, but it has also brought me here.

    In those days after Grandmother’s death, everything began to change for me. We moved to a smaller but more stylish house high on the new Nob Hill. South Park had “gone down,” as mother ruefully acknowledged; the newer houses around the park were being built of wood rather than stone, divided into flats, and merchants and newly married couples began to replace the rich old Virginians who used to promenade with their black sunshades and ribboned bonnets. We turned the old house into flats and rented the upper floor to a married couple, the lower to a Jewish widow and her little daughter. Then we left, with the rest of the rich, for Nob Hill’s promise of a view, which was nearly always wrapped in thick ermine fog.
    And I was freed. I had gone outside a few times with Mother, to the market or the park. Mostly, though, my adventures were confined to the narrow view I had from the nursery—a crowd of geese with goslings, an open carriage with a picnic party inside, the milkman passing with a wetted carpet thrown over his cans to keep them cool on hot autumn days, and any dog or cat that passed and sniffed and looked up gave me the same thrill an astronomer
might have seeing the creatures on the moon turn to smile at him.
    So it was something like an annunciation when Mother told me, one morning at her vanity, that I was being taken to Woodward’s Gardens. I was six years old, slightly larger than a child but looking nothing like one. She sat holding a hairpin over a candle, heating it to curl her lashes, and I was engaged in pulling the hair from her brush and feeding it to the ceramic hair receiver. I loved the way the thick and wondrous dead stuff knotted and clumped so evilly; I loved feeling the long strands of her hair, so fine and airy as I plucked them from the brush and fed them to the receiver, so dark and twisted in those porcelain guts. Mother used to take the hair and weave it. She made a bracelet from Grandfather’s hair that Grandmother still wears in her grave, and, later,