Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  —You outside the room? he said, interrupting my fantasy.

  —Yeah.

  —Well, hold on, wait a minute, he said. —How’d you get outside the room?

  —Through the door? I half answered, half asked.

  —I don’t remember mentioning a door. Where’d that door come from?

  I opened my eyes. —I don’t know. It was just there, I guess.

  —Just where it needed to be for you to walk out of the room, is that right?

  —That’s right, I said.

  —Well, that answers your question. You created a door where there needed to be a door: that’s how I do it, too.

  But what I didn’t tell him was that the door I walked through was not the door I imagined but the one he had imagined years before when he built the house and that bedroom in it I so cherished. What I did learn that day, because of the imagining game we’d played, was that Edmé and Henry were the principal reasons I loved the house.

  Some might consider Ash Creek a lonely place. Indeed, few ever came out this way—no matter what hour it was—and, until the night visits began, none came without being heard or seen miles before they reached the hillside. This was just what Uncle Henry had in mind from as far back as when he was a boy making sketches in his head but not really knowing why, having been born on this same land and grown up in a house that once had stood not far away. Its particular setting displayed the same concern some wise Clovis predecessors ten thousand years ago might have shown, and that was with an eye toward assuring that he have a dominant view over the long, narrow valley, day or night, so that no one could appear here unexpected.

  The house was traditional, arts-and-crafts inspired but with western details; William Morris crossed with Zane Grey. An honest and well-made building, stone covered with stucco and whitewashed, it had dark-green wooden shutters at every window, which were stayed with old brass hardware. Graceful plump copper rainspouts snaked down the gables from that tin roof made steep in order to prevent birds from nesting in its niches or joints. In deference to its rural solitude, there was no formal entrance to the place, though a staircase with varnished driftwood railings and river-stone risers and flag steps would get you up to the porch that wrapped two and a half sides of the house, supported by carved, weathered pillars of local ash. The edifice nestled so naturally in the landscape that one might think it had always been there. You would never guess it was occupied by someone completely conversant with the postmodernist nuances and varied postulates of contemporary architecture, unless you entered Henry’s studio and saw there his maquettes of unbuilt dream palaces in odd shapes and bright colors.

  Naturally, they hadn’t been expecting anyone that first night the music came harrowing their peace. They rarely expected people. Not that these members of my family—all the family I have left now—had always been ascetics, solitary mavericks, or whatever. My uncle, as already mentioned, had lived a life veritably the opposite of this seclusion. He had migrated to the West Coast, where he made his name and money, and returned on his fiftieth birthday, having had enough of urban engagement—the war of ambition, as it had become for him.

  With Edmé, he had circled the globe more than once, by rented car or hired tuktuk, by horses or caravan of camels, by airplanes— sometimes quite rudimentary, such as the retired military carrier flown among Andean peaks in Peru, three of four props turning over, the cargo door but an open void secured by a single rope, beyond and below which were marvelous blue, windy vistas—and all kinds of ships, from trawlers to liners. During those journeys, they traveled way off the trodden paths of holiday tourists, so that they knew the back streets of Comayagua better than the avenues of Paris, knew Buddhist wats in the mountains of Burma better than any Catholic mission in southern California, knew firsthand the folk architecture of Chad, unrenowned beach villages of Cyprus with their contiguous Moorish hives of bone-white dwellings interconnected by narrow twisty stairs carved in cliffs, knew the astute shanties atop stilts in coastal Nicaragua and Madagascar. They had seen more examples than most of the handiwork of man at his best. That is: engaged in erecting houses, shelters where families could sleep, work, worship. Their travel had been a passion fully indulged and had the effect of making both Edmé and Henry come to appreciate the old truism about the sweetness of home.

  This past decade of relative solitude at Ash Creek was the simple consequence of a decision made one afternoon in his lair of glass and burnished steel, with its view of Coit Tower and the bay beyond. He had gone into the office early that morning, with the idea of finishing the redraft of a museum extension. It happened, he said, in an instant. He laid his pencil down on the drafting table and walked to the wide window. An orange tanker with rusted white deckhouse was churning laboriously toward port, out in the choppy waters of the bay. Gulls, aft, hovered like dirty rags dangling from invisible wires in the air behind the radar mast. As he stared at the slow progress of the ship, the idea formed in an almost physical, palpable way before him. He was finished, he thought. What he had wanted to do was accomplished, and anything more would be redundant. He had the chance at an unusual, spiritual symmetry in that he could bracket a part of his life with the same quickness and surety he had shown a quarter century before, when he’d marked his path, so to speak, with a decisive open bracket. It made sense he could arrive so abruptly at the terminus of his career, insofar as he had come upon it just as suddenly.

  Henry had left to attend state university more at the bidding of his father than from any personal desire to leave Ash Creek, had done well enough there in classes but developed no ambition as such to go out and make some brilliant mark in the world. That is, not until he discovered the religion of architecture. There was a time he was fond of telling the story of his revelation, but he’d always suspected no one quite got it with anywhere near the impact he intended to communicate.

  —One winter day, he would begin. —Deep in January, snowing hard, just plain bitter cold. One of those days where no matter how many layers of clothes you were wearing, the wind cut right through to your bones. Just after sundown, everything had gone sparkling deep blue, a blue that seemed to radiate right out of the snow. As I walked toward the library down at the far end of the commons I noticed the building was glowing, gold orange, like a melon color, and all the windows were glowing, too. I kept walking, and as I did I don’t know how it happened but I began to see the larger planes of the building. I’d never noticed the columns along the front before, never saw how they were finished at the capitals and at their bases, and how they carried their weight so effortlessly, so that you wouldn’t notice really. Masses, I saw. Forms. And how each part of the building, no matter how big or small, extended away from the central entrance, had its part to play, like a role in the drama of the whole building. Well, I completely forgot about how cold it was. I found myself tramping in the snow around every side of the place, just bowled over by how many decisions somebody’d made, one after another so interesting, and how they all added up to the good old school library! It was my only brush with the divine.

  This was inevitably a moment when Henry, normally taciturn, even shy, having revealed, as he saw it, his soul to the person listening, made either a new friend or whatever the opposite of a friend might be. Not necessarily an enemy, but someone who would fade back into the prodigal world of people and more people. He wasn’t altogether wrong in believing that more often than not whoever heard this story of falling in love with architecture, his January epiphany, would nod, smile, even allow, —That’s a good story, before moving the conversation along to some other subject, and so as time went on he told it less and less often. Edmé, a rapt young woman with brown eyes and an abundance of chestnut hair gathered into a French braid, had listened too, of course, when he first told her his miniature fable, and she would happily tell you that hearing it might have marked the moment she fell in love with him.

  Then, after so many years of finding his own way to make those masses harmonize, a
llow verticals to carry and distribute weight without effort, coax materials and colors and forms to work, each in roles that satisfied him, he’d come to this revelation that he had fulfilled, or nearly, whatever need had been born that winter’s evening outside the campus library. I say nearly, because another architectural fantasy remained unfulfilled, one that had less to do with commissions and the construction of buildings. Designing the perfect city was a project that had obsessed him from as far back as he could remember, and if he got the designs right—so that harmony between nature’s needs and those of man could be discovered on his drawing board and in his models—then maybe the day would come when he would see it made an actuality. This was nothing he spoke of with his colleagues, who’d have scoffed or condescended, he assumed. Even he sometimes thought the project a folly (or folie), but nothing would come of never giving it a chance. He would fix up the studio across the creek from the house, then, and move toward theoretical design on his own. Yes, he thought: it was time for him to finish properly his other life, the one he’d known as a boy and had eloped from—or been benignly evicted from by his father—not three decades before.

  Other considerations drew him to return to Ash Creek, too. Giovanni Trentas, for one. Henry had some difficult obligations to attend to, he knew; unstated promises, but promises nevertheless. Time had come to begin keeping them, or at least begin to assess whether they could be kept.

  Edmé, as I would later piece together from the puzzle which lay before me, was meant not to know of any alliance between her husband and Giovanni Trentas, and initially resisted all this suddenness. She had looked forward to their visits every summer to Ash Creek, where their retreat from the world was as absolute as they wanted it to be, but the melancholy vision of giving up city life altogether for country was summed up when she said, —We’ll go mad all alone out there. We’ll start seeing things, start talking to trees and rocks. We have the perfect balance now, let’s don’t ruin things.

  —You’re looking at it backwards, Henry countered. —It’s a chance at freedom, more freedom than we have now, to travel, to do whatever you want. I see it as a beginning, not an end.

  —As the beginning of what?

  He thought about this, looking out over toward the lights of Berkeley across the bay, where he had completed his graduate work and gone on to establish his practice with a firm in the city, looking at this place that had been their principal home for so long. —If we find that it doesn’t work out—

  —You mean, if it doesn’t work out for you.

  Henry had no viable response, and said as much. He could only repeat that, for his part, he had reached an end, and could think of no other alternative.

  —If you want to stay, he began to offer, but Edmé did not.

  The firm, in which he was a partner, granted him an extended leave, but refused his resignation offer. Henry stuck around long enough to finish the projects that were close to completion, and consulted in the transfer of designs in which he had some personal interest to others who had worked with or under him. Within a few months they had closed the house, shipped everything to Ash Creek, and left by car for the long drive to the mountains.

  Together Edmé and Henry began this third and probably final act of their lives, far from any crowd urban or rural, and set about living it, making a point of never getting in people’s ways, nor on the other hand allowing others to insinuate themselves into their routine. For half a decade, all had continued without incident. During winter they often persisted in their informal investigation of the world; during summer they hibernated at Ash Creek. Giovanni Trentas continued to help Henry with the running of the place, though now of course the ranch was more a ranch in name than in function. He and his daughter had taken a cottage in town, and though she was seldom seen here, Giovanni himself remained a constant, congenial presence.

  Life was good. Better than they might have expected. Indeed, life for them might have been considered ideal, idyllic, Utopian. Especially to someone like me, whose path seemed, by comparison, random and vagrant—as if I were living up to my name, Grant the vagrant, Grant the migrant, Grant the nomad without a cause, gazing enviously at any crusader who at least carried a map and had some sense of objective, of bearings and goal. Not to mention a welcome place to return to when the road got foul.

  MEMORABLE FOR its sculptural, resolute edges, Noah Daiches’s face was that of an arbiter. Its every facet was taut, hard, firm, and his forehead soared above blue eyes that resembled a pair of turquoise earths, bright as the waters of the ocean as seen in photographs from the moon. His red-brown, fine hair seemed forever unruly, though it was freshly trimmed. Burnt-umber thin lips rarely lifted into a smile. His head was long, cheeks profoundly sunken, and deeply furrowed crow’s-feet fanned out into his temples and down so far as to almost touch upon his sharp jawline. Likewise, his body was long—rangy, as some would have it—with sinewy arms and long strong legs. His clothes were invariably khaki and he wore a run-down leather flight jacket on the warmest days. Many respected him, though he had his detractors, who read his solemnity as contempt.

  —Noah, Henry said, having walked down to the gate, a few hundred yards below the house at the bottom of the mowed meadow.

  —Morning, Henry, Noah said, taking his outstretched hand. —I hear you had company last night?

  Henry shrugged his shoulders, half embarrassed, and allowed them to fall, saying, —Come on up.

  Together they climbed the mild rise of the field, which gave off a slight peppery scent in the daybreak air, Noah waiting for Henry to begin some clarification of why Edmé was obliged to call, the morning after the intrusion, from David Lewis’s house. Seeing he was reluctant to talk, Noah simply asked, —You recognize them?

  —No, said Henry.

  —How many were there?

  —I just saw one, but it felt like there might have been more.

  —How’s that?

  —I don’t know. You know how you can feel people’s presence.

  —Not really. I don’t have a third eye like some of us, said Noah, voice edged with a mild trace of sarcasm.

  —You mean a sixth sense.

  —Third eye, sixth sense. Edmé says the phone’s dead.

  Henry walked alongside Noah and said nothing; he and Noah had grown up together in so far as they were the same age and attended the same rural school, a clapboard structure that stood on the grass shores of the river and now, though its roof leaked and windows were boarded, bore a historical landmark plaque which designated it the oldest one-room schoolhouse in the region. This freedom to gibe came from so much shared history. Here was a childhood friendship that had never matured, and just beneath its surface, just at its edges, some of the comical cruelties of youth lay in wait. The cynicism, the taunts, the derision—neither of them could help himself: it was like some game begun with a boyhood bout, like a hundred-yard dash across the schoolyard that evolved into a subtle lifetime marathon.

  —Maybe the storm knocked the service out, Noah said.

  —It wasn’t a storm. Mild rain is all. The line’s been cut.

  Henry pointed with his hand to the right as he spoke, gesturing over toward the creek, which widened down beyond the gorge. The two men deviated, still side by side, toward an enormous old barn with rusted tin mansard roof and adze-hewn boards that once had been painted flat red though the paint had since been flayed by weather, so that what remained was silvery plank siding. Along the back of this structure, white birches and mountain willows and cottonwoods curtained the runoff brook, which burbled in its pristine bed of smooth brown stones. Harrows, an old jeep with a mildewy canvas top, a vintage tractor crumbling into metal dust. They walked past these. And they walked around behind the barn, along a narrow natural corridor between it and creek trees, and then Henry halted.

  —See that, he said.

  Noah glanced at where he indicated with a nod of the head.

  The line dipped at the corner of the barn, before the far end
of its catenary curve lifted back high to an impromptu pole that had been fashioned of a dead, defoliate, and limbed tree farther down the hill. Henry said, —I keep meaning to raise the line here. It’s my own damn fault.

  —You don’t even have to stand on nothing to get at it, said Noah, who squinted at the earth directly beneath where the black cable had been snipped away from the green glass insulator attached to the low eaves.

  They both looked closely but could see no footprint.

  —I’ll call the phone company for you when I get back to town, said Noah.

  —I’m sure Edmé already did.

  Continuing up along the bank of Ash Creek, they passed the stone springhouse and veered left toward the foreyard.

  —Was it kids, you say?

  —The one I saw might’ve been a kid; he wasn’t too tall. It was hard to tell—he had a mask on.

  —Nobody you recognized from around here?

  —I never saw the mask before, if that’s what you mean.

  Henry continued to play with the idea of whether or not he should mention the effigy, the hanging, the skull head, the thing dressed in his own clothes. He hadn’t mentioned it to Edmé in part not wanting her frightened more than she already was, not to mention that she’d wondered aloud, before going to town this morning, about whether it’d been a mistake to move to Ash Creek, that maybe she’d been right to be reluctant. —Listen, Edmé, this kind of thing happens anywhere you live these days, he’d argued.

  But also, he had to admit at least to himself, as he’d later confide to me, once all the secrets had been laid bare, that he was somewhat embarrassed—was that the word?—certainly unnerved, by that vision in the high meadow the night before. Perhaps it had been a rash move to burn it, after all, but it seemed the best way to get it behind him. As if by obliterating it and keeping the matter to himself, it almost didn’t take place. Henry did have some idea why that effigy hung in the tree, but sensed it was premature to discuss it with Edmé, Noah, or anyone else.