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

another with my father’s hair and a green ribbon. It hung on Mother’s wrist, with a small enamel portrait of him, long after he was gone.
    “What’s Woodward’s Gardens?” I asked, pressed beside her.
    She smiled sadly and took my hand. “It’s a park. Outside.”
    “Oh.”
    “I should warn you, there will be children there.”
    Not “other children,” just “children.”
    “Oh.”
    “Little bear,” she said softly; I was always her “little bear.” I fed the last of her hair into the little hole and looked at her nervously. She was so young then, with the shimmering beauty of a sky after a rain.
    “Don’t you want to go?” she asked me in that young, sweet voice.
    Sammy, more than anything in the world.

    WOODWARD’S GARDENS
THE EDEN OF THE WEST!
Unequaled and Unrivaled on the American Continent
NATURE, ART AND SCIENCE ILLUSTRATED
Education, Recreation and Amusement the Aim
Admission, 25 cts. Children, 10 cts.
Performance Free
SKATING EVERY DAY.

    There are still people alive who remember Woodward’s Gardens, and the May Days when Woodward, rich from the famous What Cheer House down at Meigg’s Wharf, would pay for all the children, hordes and hordes of the city’s youth, to come to his backyard and play.
    The rows of small and furry dromedaries, dried brown tears streaking from their eyes, bearing children and teenage men in derbies; a lake with an Oriental bridge and pavilion; a racetrack; a maypole; pools full of bellowing sea lions; a Rotary Boat shaped like a doughnut within its little pool, which kids could row endlessly; fantastic inventions of all sorts including the zoographicon, orchestrion, and Edison’s talking machine; an aviary where young couples hid among the ferns and spooned beneath a cloud of birds; herds of emus, ostriches, cassowaries; a “Happy Family House” where the monkeys would sit and mimic the humans by hugging and kissing each other; but what I remember most from that day were two events marvelous to behold, one by looking down, the other by looking up. Those and, of course, meeting Hughie.
    As our neat two-in-hand drew closer to the great hedgework wall on Thirteenth and Mission, I could barely breathe. “There’s seals,” Father told me through his whiskers, which, like cupped hands, gave his words the hush and excitement of a secret, “and
parrots and cockatoos.” Of course he loved the gardens; hadn’t he changed his own name in memory of a playland like this? On his voyage from Denmark, Asgar Van Daler had remembered a place long ago where the swans cried out like Loreleis from the lily ponds and, believing his own name unsuitable for this new land of Smiths and Blacks and Joneses, christened himself after that old candle-glittering park—his Tivoli.
    “Swans!” he shouted to me, grinning. “A famous performing bear!”
    “Like me? A bear like me?”
    “Like you!”
    And before I knew it, we were already inside. I had been so distracted by his descriptions, so entranced also by the schools of children lined up behind their schoolmistresses, the prams and crowds and stuffed ibises and flamingos posed before me in the bushes, I did not even notice a small and sad detail. At the very moment that I began to run through the grass, Father was pocketing three red ticket stubs. He had paid for three adults.
    I was not even a very convincing old man in those days, of course—beardless, too short for an adult, too large for a boy—but people stared only briefly before letting me pass by. There was so much else to see. As I was trying to take in the wonders around me, a bell rang and a man announced that Splitnose Jim was to perform in the bear pit. I looked at my parents, pleading with my eyes, and Mother, tightening the veil beneath her chin, nodded approval. Within minutes we were sitting on a pine board in an amphitheater full of children and well-dressed couples, smelling the neverchanging popcorn-and-dust odor of childhood. A man appeared in the ring