“No, you are the duckbrain,” I said, and hit you with the firstaid kit.
Your bloody-murder shriek of joy.
From outside the tent, my ex-wife’s voice: “What’s going on in there, boys?”
Later, after a muffled, giggling quiet, I heard your breath begin to jerk its way into sleep, and though the father in me wanted to hear you sleeping, the sound of your breath which is the shadow of your dreams, I had to take this moment. Time was against me; I might never be able to whisper, lips-to-freckled-ear, again.
“Sammy?”
“What?”
“What was your father like?”
“I don’t know. I never met him.”
“I mean what’s your mom say?”
“Well, she talks about Ramsey like he’s my real dad, you never met him, he was with us for I think four years or something. I kind of remember him, Mom says he taught me how to swim. I don’t know. But we left there when I was little. He’s not my real dad, anyway. He was just some man she married.”
I was so glad to hear this; it made her betrayal of me so small, if Victor Ramsey was just “some man” instead of the one who ended my marriage. “So who’s your real dad?”
“I just know his name. I’m not supposed to talk about him.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe she’s afraid of him,” you said, your sweet voice in the darkness. Then your tone became quick and bright: “Or I think maybe—see, maybe he’s got a different name now. Maybe he’s someone famous, maybe a movie star or something, I saw The Iron Mask, last year it’s got Douglas Fairbanks and this scene with swords in a castle, did you see it? I saw that and I think maybe he’s my dad. Only he’s too famous for people to know. So Mom’s trying to be quiet, or maybe because someday he’s going to come and find me, you know, take me to Hollywood and give me lots of money. Only they’re trying to keep it a little secret. ‘Cause of how famous he is.”
We sat in the dappled silence of the forest. Finally, I said, “You think so?”
“Oh yeah, I just know my dad’s a great guy,” you told me hastily. Then you added: “Not like Ramsey.”
There was some laughter from outside the tent, the snap of fire.
“Or Harper,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What if your dad came and got you?”
There was no response for a little while. “I don’t know.”
“What if he did this, went camping with you?”
“Jeez.”
I could not see you, but we were so close, that night, that I could smell you under the smoke and charred potato: all milk and green-apple sweat. You were shifting uncomfortably and I wanted to reach across that little space of darkness, take your shoulder, and say, I’m here, I’ve come, it’s all right. “Sammy, what if he turned up right now?”
“Shut up,” you said loudly. “Duckbrain, you shut up.” There was the sound of rough breathing and I knew I had gone too far. I said nothing more, but like any animal caring for its young, I sniffed the thick air. Sammy, I could smell your tears.
I came out here beside the river a little while after I knew you were asleep—after I heard the mumbles and sighs you always make in your dog-dreams. The fire was long dead, faintly glowing under its shroud of ashes, the adults gone, leaving just the evidence of Alice’s slippers, an illicit bottle of booze, and mismatched glasses. I saw a deer come down with moon-iced antlers and sip at the water. I heard the splash of an insomniac fish. Then, as I sat staring at the sky and wondering how I could be a father to my son, how I could suck the poison from his snakebit life, I saw another movement in the night that robbed my breath. It was a man, slipping out from the parallelogram of his tent. Dr. Harper in his nightclothes.
A stumble, a curse, then a shuffling movement towards the farther tent, my Alice’s. Sammy, you still slept while the doctor unzipped that flimsy door and whispered, when that old girlish laughter rang through the air, when his back straightened with confidence as he stepped inside and closed the tent. You slept through all your mother’s indiscretions. But I, the old loving husband, had to listen to every laugh and whisper under that hex of a moon. And I wept.
This is a love story, so I will spare you the bombs and broken skulls. There is nothing to tell of war. At the conscription office, I was convincing as a young man and, because I was not afraid to die, I was even mistaken for brave. I was sent to France with the first troops, and it is proof of a godless world that every young man I met there, every poor ordinary boy, had his life mutilated or lost in those fields while I—devil in the trenches—came out with only the scars that, these days, I try to pass as chicken pox. Mist, and burning eyes, and boys screaming from jawless faces. There is nothing to say of war. When it was over and I was shockingly alive, intact, blood thick as gasoline, I lay in a London ward and received a note from Hughie, who had sad news to tell. In California, thousands were dead from a flu epidemic, among them his son, Bobby, and my own mother.
How do we forgive ourselves? Our parents watch us so carefully when we’re children, desperate not to miss a first scream, a first step, a first word, never taking their eyes off us. Yet we do not watch them. They near the end in solitude—even those who live beside us die in solitude—and rarely do we catch their own milestones: the last scream before the morphine settles in, last step before they cannot walk, last word before the throat seals.
Still I can feel it, the sudden drop of the heart—that I would crack the world open if I could, that I would sell my bones to have her back—for though she held me as a child, my mother never got to see me as a boy.
My mother’s death was the end of my sanity. I went into a private tornado and the army returned me to my country only to imprison me, for two years, in a veterans’ asylum called Goldforest House. It was perhaps the coziest place for me on the planet. The inmates there called me “the Old Man” and unhesitatingly believed my life’s story, but the doctors did not and cast me back out into the world. My father’s fortune allowed me to travel the globe at last, but eventually, bored, I returned once more to my country. I tried to pass myself off as nineteen and went to a Rhode Island college, but I found it brutish and illiterate—I was paddled twice for not wearing my freshman “dink”—and I did not graduate. I found my way back to San Francisco and rented a room in a cheap flophouse where no one would find me or bother me. I grew young and blond, but my heart never healed. A finned beast lying at the bottom of a black lake, waiting to die; the last of its kind. That was how Hughie found me in 1929.
Poor Hughie, picking through the trash and blown-paper streets where I finally landed—Woodward’s Gardens—situated, of course, in the Irish neighborhood where my old playland used to stand. Nothing grand or green about it now; just a wasteland of apartment houses and laundry hanging on the line, some supper clubs that didn’t serve liquor, one downstairs joint that did, and streetcars full of people heading to the Old Rec Park to watch a game. I had chosen it because, of all the places I could live, I wanted to be in the old wooden pit once again, where Splitnose Jim used to climb a pole for a peanut and scratch his dusty hide for me. Sometimes, in my postwar dreams, it seemed that it was me, and not Jim, who came out of his cave one morning to find a German with a gun.
I heard “Max!” shouted a few times and then an indecipherable conversation behind the door before the crystal sound of keys meant my landlady Mrs. Connor, her chest too scrawny for a heart, had betrayed me.
Feeble scratching, crack of the door. Muttering (paying of a bribe, I assume) and the sound of kicking over bottles—no no, things were not as bad as you imagine. I kept my igloo clean and the only gin of the house slept, warm as a pet, in bed with me, where I lay doing the crossword. That morning, I had drunk it from a coffee cup, which lay on a table; I am a tidy wino. Stomp of boots; in came my best friend.
“Well at least you’re not dead,” he said, standing skinny and bald in a long tweed coat.
“Hughie, get o
ut.”
He came over to me. “I thought all that travel and, well, Turkey, that would kill you for sure, I thought you’d get shot, but, well. Apparently this is where you want to die.”
“It is.”
“Max, this is stupid.”
“Get out. I have a lady coming.”
“Do you?”
In fact I did. Don’t be jealous, Alice, but there was a likable girl in those days who used to pal around with me, surprisingly clever and well dressed, with celluloid legs and a laugh like a cougar. I would give her an alias here except I’m fairly certain she isn’t alive; despite her many charms, she was a part-time hophead and the skin between her toes was tattooed with needle-pricks. Sabina liked to stop by around noon to help me with the crossword, maybe lift me out of bed to dance a little, but usually by two she would be weepy over her parents—I understood she had a wealthy father whose heart she broke—and had to go out and find a fix. I would usually not see her again for days, sometimes a week. I gave her a little money. She was young and never believed my true age. “Ha! Why you’re almost a child!” she’d croak, borrowing a cigarette. “I should get arrested, baby!” She didn’t love me, though. She was too broken.
I said, “Actually, you’d like her.”
He laughed and then threw himself onto the bed beside me. From the window, we could hear a crowd cheering. A Seals game at the Old Rec Park. He said, “Give me some of that gin.”
“It’s coffee.”
“The bottle.” I handed it to him; he kicked off his shoes and took a slug.
His remaining hair was ginger and gray, and no longer seemed to belong to his pale face, but here was the lucky thing about Hughie: since he was born with no particular grace, no exceptional features, time could do almost nothing to him. While what we remember of beautiful people is their skin, their eyes—and why we gasp when, at sixty, they have all dried to sand—what I recognized as Hughie was none of these in particular, but simply the way he used them. The explosion of lines on his forehead was much the same whether those lines were permanent now or not, and the thoughtful smacking of his lips sounded just as irritating as it had when we were boys, even though his lips were thinning every day. Age is kind, at least, to the unlovely.
“Where’d you get this stuff?” he asked, handing me the bottle.
“I made it. Potato alcohol from the bootlegger, comes in a tin. A gallon and a half of distilled water, juniper berries, and a secret ingredient. All right, ginger. Let it steep. That’s my humble recipe.”
“Ugh, it’s awful.”
“You’re right, it’s no good. Oh, I have a story to tell you, Hughie.”
But he didn’t hear me. “You know I’m retired, Max?”
“That’s crazy. You’re too young.”
“I’m not too young. I’m done with it, that’s all. Abigail’s gone back to her mother’s, it was a relief after Bobby’s death. I have nothing to hold me anymore. I think I’m going to get a farmhouse maybe north of here. With chickens. I think that sounds nice.”
“Chickens? I never heard about this.”
“I haven’t seen you in years, Max.”
“Well.”
“Mary’s dead,” Hughie told me.
“Old Mary?”
“Madame Dupont herself.”
“It never occurred to me. Of course she’d be dead.”
“Yes, well, she lived to be eighty, they say.”
“She always claimed she was sixty-four.”
“Good old Mary.”
“You know what she said to me?” I told him, then tried to imitate her toadish voice: “‘I thought time was not on anybody’s side.’ That’s what she said.”
“Not on hers, at least. We’ve got to get you out of here,” he told me.
We could hear people murmuring in the next room, and very suddenly, with the scrape of a chair, it became an argument of round, indecipherable vowels, then just as suddenly faded to the flow of water. Hughie and I chatted for a while about other old things, other changes in the world. Then I said, “I’ve got a story for you, Hughie. A girl I met in Spain. You’ll never believe this.”
“What. Tell me.”
“I saw her, it was in this little village. This little village and I stayed in an inn. Had a kind of American bar, I guess, and nobody in it but this little girl. Browned, in braids, with a strawberry mouth. I mean little, maybe twelve years old.”
“This is recently?”
I was talking quietly, almost whispering. “This is a while ago. Twelve-year-old girl, and she was drinking a shot of something at the bar, and you know what I thought?”
“What?”
“When she looked at me. Kind of cased me out, not like a whore, but like an old woman. And I thought: She’s like me.”
“Max …”
“No really, I thought, It’s another one like me. Here in this village. From the way she looked, I can’t describe it, like a little speck of hate in her eyes. And I think she knew what I was. I’m sure of it. She must have been sixty or so.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“I tried. Would you believe she bought me a drink? But I didn’t speak whatever she spoke, not Spanish, and she didn’t know English. The bartender treated her funny, with respect but as if he was scared of her. I think they knew about her in that town, I imagined this idea that they’d seen her grow from an old woman into a little girl. That she was the local witch. You know, like me, but a witch. And she just kept staring at me so sad, like: Don’t grow old like me, don’t grow old like me.”
“Max, I don’t know.”
“Then we’d had a few drinks but of course couldn’t talk, and she said something. I think she wanted to come up to my room. And I felt so bad for her, because here I was, I looked like a young man, and there she was in her sixties and who knows the last time some man had loved her, or ever would again. Who’d love the witch in a superstitious Catholic village like that? Is this what’s going to happen to me? I felt awful. I felt as if I should save her.”
“You didn’t, old man, come now …”
“Sex, no. I didn’t. What if she really was a twelve-year-old whore? I got up and left, it was so sad. Except that look, I can’t forget it. You know, Don’t grow old like me.”
“I’ll get you out of here, Max.”
“You will?”
“I will.”
There was the bumblebee drone of a plane. Two radios competed from open windows—a sorrowful colored woman and an optimistic brass band—then conjoined miraculously with one identical, slightly overlapping advertisement for soap: “Zog does not scratch, scratch.” The sun shone on two men in our late fifties sipping gin. It felt very much like the end of our lives. And so it might have been, or at least the end of our story, if it had not been for Hughie.
He said, “Max, I brought this for you.”
Out of his pocket came a little envelope; he threw it onto my chest. It was square and white, torn open and slightly soiled at the corners. I noted a nameless address in Massachusetts and a date nearly a year old.
Dear Hughie,
Hello, old friend. You haven’t heard from me in a long time. Perhaps you won’t even remember me. I’ve been thinking about people from the past (old folks do this) and how it’s rotten I’ve lost touch with so many. It happens when you move around as much as I have. I heard you were married and had a son; in fact, I saw you and your wife in the park years ago while I was out walking with my husband-to-be. You seemed very happy. Good. I am happy, too. I’ve had three husbands and can’t say much for them, but each love gets you somewhere, doesn’t it? From my marriage to Asgar, for instance, I got myself a wonderful son. What a miracle, at my age. Isn’t it funny to think of, Hughie, each of us with a son?
I know it sounds odd, but I nearly named him after you. I always wanted a Hughie. But there was another in the family and I wanted to save confusion, so he’s Sammy. And I am happy, all on my own after my mother died, after I left my third husband and
moved to Massachusetts. Please write to me. I have such grand memories of our time in South Park and the Conservatory of Flowers. It all seems impossibly perfumed with roses, doesn’t it? Maybe I’m old and sentimental. Well, we are both old, aren’t we? I hope you are still redheaded and smiling. Life is short and friends are few, so write to me.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Victor Ramsey (Alice Levy)
It took only an hour of carefully poured gin and sober argument to talk Hughie into it. After all, hadn’t he come to Mrs. Connor’s with this very idea? Hadn’t he said he would get me out? He lay on the bed while I paced the room, opening curtains and gesturing to a sun that was also shining over miraculous Massachusetts. The Massachusetts of the letter. I spoke of human frailty. I mentioned the passage of time. A son, a secret son named Sammy, and because my body was young and quick and light, I leaped around the room like a faun, explaining that life had very few joys. The country could wait. The chickens could wait. From this very window one could see, calmly parked, a Chrysler the color of blue compacted stars, well cared for, tires in good condition. A home could be made there for a little while. The Nevada sun would bristle on its surface like a prickly pear. I reminded him that the driving age in states between here and Massachusetts was unreasonably low. Consider love, Hughie. Consider lonely old men like us.
The Chrysler was serviced lovingly, its rooms and compartments cleaned until they sparkled, the pipes and tubes legally liquored with its favorite fluids, the undercarriage greased until it dripped a shadow of itself on the concrete, and it was treated like a grand hotel now open for the season. Hughie and I had our hats reblocked according to the latest styles. We brought out of storage my old wicker suitcases. Travel clothes and camping equipment were purchased. The glove compartment was armed in case of highwaymen (a gun: Teddy’s army issue, forgotten when he left Hughie at last). A quiet case of booze was placed like a gangster’s body in the trunk. We shaved and perfumed ourselves—automobiling was a gentlemanly art back then—and sat in the larded leather of the seats. Fog descended in a dew and evaporated from the engine.
The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel Page 21