He grinned and tousled my hair. “I’m going to tell her everything about you.”
They spent a good ten minutes in his office while I waited in the outer room again, dead or dying of something, thinking how to interrupt their conference, perhaps counterfeit a yellow fever attack, and realizing with a dull laugh that I was showing my age after all: the disease had been wiped out by 1900. That very moment, I heard the movie-reel sound of adult laughter in the hallway and there they emerged, my Mrs. Ramsey looking so young, amused, and aglow. I was handed a green candy wrapped in paper; Mrs. Ramsey wrote down the name of a novel she recommended; Dr. Harper took the note, then gave a wink and a serious wave before departing again; and before I knew it we were out into the always-fresh sun of my new hometown. I put the candy in my pocket beside the pills I had carefully pilfered from the exam room. Then she told me my lot.
With men like Dr. Harper around, I will be forever safe. It turns out I showed early stages of what doctors call parotitis. That is to say: the mumps. A child’s disease. If the quack proves to be right, I have swollen glands to look forward to and days of fever in my bedroom. But he is certain to be wrong. Have you ever heard of mumps in a man of nearly sixty?
Mrs. Ramsey took me to the drugstore and bought me a chocolate bar, a pair of roller skates and a silver toy army pistol much like one Hughie used to own. For you, Sammy, she bought the Ruf-Nek chewing gum you love. For herself, she browsed the cosmetics aisle and laughed and giggled over the potions before choosing an erotic shade of lipstick and two kinds of eyebrow pencil. She examined the scents, frowning, and finally learned from a pink-eyed clerk that her favorite cologne had gone out of style and had to be specially ordered. I asked her what it was. “Rediviva,” Mrs. Ramsey replied with a sigh. I produced the doctor’s prescription, which I had enhanced with my own forgery, and she took it dutifully. Then it was an easy trip to the pharmacy counter, where this little soldier became the proud owner of potassium, quinine, and a lovely blue bottle of morphine. We live in a golden age.
It was almost a week before I had him break her heart. Your heart, Alice, your bruised-peach of a heart. I did not do it out of spite; I did it because it was absolutely necessary. Now, looking back, it would have been far wiser to have Hughie run into her arms and bedevil her with cheap diamonds and carnations, and whisper sticky things into her ears; nothing turns a girl like an amateur’s heart. She would have dropped him in a fortnight, I think, and not because she was stupid or fickle, but because sometimes we are frightened when the bomb we’re planting goes off in our own hands. And if I had done this, what would have come of it? She would have hated Hughie, and probably me through association; she would have fallen for the next handsome boy she saw, at one of those dances she loathed attending, gone out with him, and, finding herself waiting on a foggy corner one afternoon, her heart would have been broken after all. At least this way it was managed by someone who cared.
Hughie agreed to do just as I said. He was to meet her at the Conservatory of Flowers, where she had taken to visiting him after school, and break her little heart with the sharp crack one employs to split a geode. He was to be gentle but firm and leave no tatters of love hanging in her chest; she was to be cleansed of this ridiculous sensation and thus find herself open to, even grateful for, the love of an apparently older, more considerate man. Hughie wondered at the plan; he thought it was remarkably cruel to such a pretty girl. “Pretty?” I asked, suspicious. “Did you … did you do something to make her feel this way?” He denied it and agreed to the task. At first I was going to hide behind a fern to watch my bit of theater, but he said this would make him nervous and he’d probably foul it up. So I was sent home and there I waited for word from Hughie that he’d cleared the brush for my arrival. I sat in the parlor and tried unsuccessfully to read; I set out a card game for myself but kept losing. I ended up finding one of my father’s whatnots—a monkey’s head encased in glass—and stared at it for over an hour, finding in its grotesquery a brief escape from my own.
At four o’clock, the front doorbell rang and I heard Maggie speaking to someone in the hall. I had told her I would be in for anyone except those calling on my mother. Presently there was a knock at the parlor door: Maggie, telling me there was urgent news. I waved my hand and poured a glass of whiskey for myself and one for Hughie. I steadied myself, looked out the window to where two squirrels were at war. I heard a wretched voice:
“Mr. Tivoli, I need your advice.”
It was Alice.
We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world—the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has—it will not sacrifice itself. It is not a heart, at seventeen. It is a fat queen murmuring in her hive. I wish I’d had it in me, when Alice stepped into the room looking so drowned and desperate, when she fell to her knees and sobbed so hotly into the wool of my pants, to send her back to Hughie. To stroke her hair (though I did that) and cup her chin in my rough hand (that too) and tell her he would kiss her in an instant; he was a boy, after all, and she was a thicket of beauty. To say “He’ll love you” and “There are ways” and turn into the tilted light of the room as she wiped her face and blinked and readied herself for another battle. To let her go. But there was no heart in me. When do we grow one? Twenty, thirty years after we need it?
Instead, I looked at the head shuddering on my knees; I stared at the pale furrow between her braids as if searching for the source of a lost river. I waited until it was time to touch her, and then I did, and she did not shake my arm from her shoulder or my hand from her head but emptied herself even more into my lap. Without knowing it, she and I were conjuring her father, and we each played our parts—Alice weeping unashamedly, Mr. Tivoli hushing and shushing her—until her sniffs and gasps meant it was almost over.
She began to speak: “It’s Hughie, Mr. Tivoli.” I slipped my finger into the loop of her hair ribbon.
“I know,” I said, then added too silently for her to hear: “Call me Max.”
“He was a monster, a monster, he said …”
“What did he say?” With a tug from my finger, her ribbon fell out of its knot; I shivered; she did not notice.
“He said …he said he wanted us to be friendly. Idiot. He said he didn’t want to spoil a sweet moment.”
I sipped my whiskey nervously. Hughie had improvised from the script; he had treated my Alice like any girl he met on the street. “Where were you?” I asked quietly, wondering what else he had added.
She sniffed and sat back, letting my hand fall from her; the spell was undone. “It was at the Victoria Regina, like always. I always meet him there. He can usually get away for a minute and it’s quiet there and you can just stare at the lilies. I was …I thought I’d be brave and ask him when he was going to take me out. And he said …oh, he said I was just fourteen. And that he wasn’t interested in girls like me. At fourteen. Not that way. Girls like me? Are there really other girls like me?”
This was a little off the script, but close. I imagined Hughie getting a little stage fright, there in his uniform beside the enormous lily pads, and whispering whatever came into his head; possibly, he was truer than I’d intended. “What else?”
Some memory cut her and she winced in grief. “He said he loved me like a sister. I’m not an idiot, Mr. Tivoli.”
“Max. You’re not, no, no, Alice …”
“I know what he was saying. He was saying he can’t ever love me. Wasn’t he? Or … was he maybe …”
“No, no, Alice, sit here beside me …”
“I don’t understand,” she murmured.
I touched her shoulder again. Then I made a mistake: “Just forget him, Alice.”
She pulled away and I saw that she hated me. It happened so quickly; one minute I was an understanding friend, a father almost, and then the next I was an old man wh
o knew nothing of love, nothing of passion, a man who could offer only his own sad poison. But to see that hatred in her eyes; it felt as if she was gone forever and no plan of mine would ever bring her back. Hughie might wreck her heart a hundred times, but if I told my Alice to forget him, to find a sweet and loving boy nearby (perhaps nearer than she ever imagined), she would send me out of her life. She would turn again into the sullen downstairs girl who never thought of me. Those eyes, threaded with hate like opals, burning off the tears; I would have done anything to change them. So I sputtered as she looked on. And then I discovered what she had come to hear:
“I’ll talk to him, I’ll tell him … I’ll mention you …”
“You will?”
“I’ll tell him how beautiful you are.”
“Does he think I’m beautiful?”
“He does. He thinks you’re the most lovely girl.”
“Oh my.”
“Yes, the most lovely girl he’s ever seen.”
“The most lovely girl …” she repeated.
Alice left my parlor happier than when she entered it; she left with all these stupid promises of mine, done just to keep her in the room, just to force one more occasion for us to talk and to make a secret between us, for this was to be kept from her mother at all costs. I nodded, pursing my lips. When she left, she kissed my forehead, and as I smelled the soft cotton at her throat, I thought of how I was more than a confidant to her, more than the sharer of a secret; I was her only route to love. As she had once depended on me to light a Sabbath fire, so now she depended on me to bring some word to warm her heart. And though I knew the smile faintly forming on her face as she left was not for me, and the sleepless night she would spend was not over my bearded face, still I was there in it somewhere. I was a houseboy of her heart. When we are very young, we try to live on what can never be enough.
Alice, what are you thinking, reading this, now that you are old? You know where this is leading and I’m sure you have a different story. One, perhaps, in which you are more lost and innocent, a little piece of Alice-glass chiming in the window, or one full of details I can never know: how Hughie laughed at your cleverness; the thick, erotic pads of the Victoria Regina; the angry way you missed your father; the weird sensation of that old man undoing the ribbon in your hair. While in my version Hughie is just the man who happened to block the light, in your memory I’m sure you loved him for specific reasons, as we think we do; you still warm your hands over the ember of that early love; you could never be convinced, in your old age, that it was only chance.
I told your mother—did you know? Of course I did. I told her, as a secret between us, that you were in love with Hughie and that he did not deserve you. This was not a lie, but it was cruel; it was meant to make her huff and sigh if you ever mentioned Hughie. Looking back, this could only have made you love him more.
One night, you were different. You will remember this. One night, Maggie let you in and you were a stone daughter striding into the room. You didn’t sit on the rug and blush; there was no blood in you that night. You chose my father’s old chair, arranged your braid, then stared at me and said, with no accusation in your voice: “He doesn’t love me.” You waved away every one of my words, wincing just a little, and kept repeating what you were now too smart not to see. He didn’t love you; no, of course he didn’t. It had been clear from the beginning. You wore a gaudy young girl’s necklace and cheap shoes that fell from your heels. You produced a cigarette from a reticule and it was as if you said: I am now a woman who does these things. At fourteen, a woman who does these things. I stopped talking and let you build this other woman from smoke, breathe her into being there in the room. There was silence while she turned, all hair and tendons, in the slant of moonlight. When she was gone, I was the one who fell to the floor at your knees and wept; I can’t say why. You were the one who touched my hair and said soft things that gave, as always, little comfort.
Then I heard you murmur something I cannot forget. You said, “I feel so old.”
I lifted my face. “What?”
You shook your head, latching the thought back in.
“You can’t feel old,” I said.
You just rocked a little in your chair, your hand on my head as you lit another cigarette. The room held you in the curve of some shadow. You looked as old as you would ever be. You said, “Like I’m floating above my body. And I watch myself and my little stupid movements, how I put the kettle on for tea or brush the dust from the braid on my dress, complaining how it gets so filthy, sitting with Mother and reading the visiting cards. It takes so little to be myself, and I’ve done it for so long, being so little, doing such little things. But most of me is floating above, watching. As if it weren’t my body. Part of me knows something that it can’t bear to tell the rest.”
I sat, stunned, feeling the burn of your words. A woman whose body wasn’t hers, floating outside her life; you would understand, I thought. You would know what life was like for the sick, timetwisted boy who was in love with you. I watched you smoking, as if the smoke could keep the coldness in your face.
“I want to tell you something, Alice.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
But it was too late; I had begun to say the thing my mother taught me never to say. It felt like the first words of a spell, though, the kinds of words that try to lift a curse. “I have to tell you. Listen to me. You don’t have to talk. Just listen.”
You took your eyes down from the gaslight and they were alive again, for a moment, and I think you hoped I was going to say something about Hughie; I think that even after this last no, still it was not beyond belief that there would be a yes.
“I’m not … what you think I am, it’s not what I am. I know what I look like.” I was speaking roughly, between hard breaths. My throat was gagging on this foolish thing, but I went on: “Alice, I’m … I’m seventeen. Do you see? Alice. I’m just a boy.”
I felt a little rapture when your looks broke open. I think you had never considered me to be another person in the room; here I was, listening all this time, the messenger of renounced love; here I was, kneeling before you on the carpet; and all this time I had been as wretched as you.
“I’m just a boy.”
I saw a sadness beating at the back of your eyes, an insect dying behind a screen.
“Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
You will remember: you held my face with both hands and, thumbs out, wiped the tears from my cheeks. There was blood in your face again; your eyes were moist like my own; you were my old Alice thinking, Let’s one of us be happy. There in the parlor you saw through me and knew how young I was, younger than you; you gripped my face and were the soothsayer for both of us, pursing your lips over something bitter, then nodding your head in slow degrees before you kissed me. You will remember: it was you who kissed me that evening in the parlor. I tasted that last coil of smoke held in your mouth; it tasted like a word, like a yes. From some other room we heard a baby’s undulating oh. You kissed me and did not pull away or change your mind; you drank from me like a thirsty girl. I was the first to say he loved you. You will remember.
I wanted to see her first thing in the morning; I could not wait. It’s true I had not slept since she whispered, Mr. Tivoli, Mr. Tivoli, and stood to rearrange her hair and calm her swarming breath (I did cause something there, at least) before leaving me. I sat in my chair as my sister wailed into the night, and of course in my imagination I continued that evening with Alice as far as a moral man could, and then I set the cylinder back in its cradle and replayed each moment in the music box of my mind.
As I lay in bed, I went over the scene I had been rehearsing since dawn: what I would say to Alice. I had an addict’s rage against himself, the rage of a reformed man waking to the evidence of his night—a scorched pipe of opium, a cold and beaded vial of ether—but feeling inside him, gnawing past his first reproach, the love of those long-desired objects; his arm is alre
ady reaching across the bed. I had to see her. Why had I told her I loved her? It might have cost me everything. But no, I rationalized, no, she needed to hear about love; everyone does. Don’t they? Didn’t she? Oh God, and I had said I was just a boy; she had believed me. Had she? Perhaps it was sweet, or perhaps for her it was just as it seemed: an old man wetting her face with his gross kisses. But as much as I tried to search the details of her face in the gaslight of the evening, I lost her more and more. The past had its back already turned; there was no speaking with it.
I plotted as well as I could. I would smile and laugh and pretend the night was nothing in particular; that I, like her, was baffled by tangled human moments like ours. I would apologize; no, that would give me away. I would pretend it was a private joke of ours. The old man, the old neighbor, a private joke. Unless, of course, unless I could make out on the surface of her face some ripple of hope. I got out of bed, eager to see her as soon as possible, if only to know of my fate.
“Mr. Tivoli?” Maggie’s voice came from the door.
“Yes?”
“I have your coffee and a note.”
On custard stationery on the silver tray, beside the toast. One edge of it was dark with spilled coffee; I glared at Maggie and she left. A note from Alice, I thought, and felt relieved. What a coward I was. Now I would not have to confront her; I could know, in a few lines, what that first kiss had meant for both of us. Here is how it began:
Max,
You are a monster of the lowest kind. You are a false, betraying criminal. You are a sick, blackened, evil old man and I cannot believe I ever cared for you. To have betrayed me is nothing. To have seduced the mother is nothing, used me up, is nothing. You may toss aside my old broken heart, it doesn’t matter. But Max. You have touched my girl, my Alice. And if this mother ever sees you again, I am sure to tear your eyes out.
It was only much later, of course, that I pieced together what must have happened. Alice, late at night, arriving home in a teary whirlwind of confessions. And Mrs. Levy, sitting in a black nightgown, listening, feeling her heart fall to pieces inside her. She saw only an old man, her lover, pawing her daughter with reechy kisses. She could not have understood it was a boy of seventeen, like in a song, stealing a kiss.
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