Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  Not until I read several other of the penciled trysting notes from the anonymous correspondent, who was, I thought, surely Margery, did I notice something about the ticket to the dance recital. One note read:

  You know I love you and I will do it but I can only do it when they’re not here, so I will call and I hope you forgive me for all the trouble I do cause, it will be sometime this week, I love you.

  Which seemed more of the same, really.

  Another was further along in the affair:

  Dearest yes, I do want to be with you for ever, and sense there is no way on earth they will go along with it, I will consider what you say, and will see you next Tuesday.

  And then there was this:

  On Sat eve then, and it is kind of your Henry to offer to shelter us till the storm clouds pass over, I know that one day they will forgive, but I cannot continue on like in this manner and must grab my own chance at life with you, how much I love you dearest, soon soon.

  So that was what happened, or was it? Edmé had left out of her story the crucial detail of Henry’s offering the newlyweds Ash Creek as sanctuary from these ridiculous men who were her brothers, apparently. The dance recital card was, as I mention, what came to my attention next, having read my way through all the notes from Margery, and what intrigued me was that it was made out not to Giovanni Trentas and Margery, though it was dated the twenty-third of March, 1965—which was, I gathered, about the time the two of them met and fell in love—but rather to Henry Fulton and Willa Richardson. My uncle and Willa together at a dance recital? and in March, when I’d thought he was always out on the coast, his stays at Ash Creek at that time confined to summer months? Moved as if by a force outside myself, I swept the objects before me into a heap, and tossed them back into the box. My earlier elation was eclipsed now by bewilderment.

  Maybe there were things here that I really didn’t want to know. I retied the ribbons and put the box away in the armoire. I left the room in something of a hurry, assuring myself that it was my own corrupt imagination that would cause me to think for even an instant that Henry and Willa Richardson had ever been anything but distant acquaintances, as I’d always assumed they were. Just look at how they behaved at the Labor Day gathering, I reminded myself as I emerged onto the porch. Elegant, proud Willa, the wife of Tate. This was a false lead. Nothing in the box meant anything; so I now decided. I walked far up into the gorge, with the fishing rod I had taken down from its perch of nails in the eaves of the porch. From placid springheads I caught several rainbows, including a great long one—all of which I put back into the cold water, where I watched them each as they drew from the current molecular liquid through their white gills, recovered their sense of place, then bolted out into deeper riffles with several hard swipes of their muscular tails.

  That evening for dinner we ate fresh “pesto macaroni.” Henry and I discussed the stock market and other ultimately irrelevant matters with a kind of warm enthusiasm that belied the sketchiness of our various points. Five rather than six cigarettes were decimated by me on the porch that evening. Maybe two not three liqueurs were consumed on the veranda, as we—or rather Edmé—noticed the first of the fall warblers settling for the night in the tops of trees, having begun their migration south toward points beyond both Mexicos, headed equatorward. We retired, as usual, though while again I found I wasn’t sleepy, I had no desire to go back to the taproom. Tonight Hawthorne would do fine, I thought. And so he did, with a desperate tale about Midas and his poor, loving daughter, whom, through his own greed and by a fateful accident, he temporarily murdered with his touch, turning her to a statue of gold when she ran to embrace him. Midas’s stock market, I reflected, trying and more or less failing to work out an anagram, Dim ass’s mock rakett.

  I lay on top on the bed, fully clothed, arms crossed in the ambient glow, staring ahead at the complicated golden angles of this dormer and that wall. Thinking or dreaming of Helen, in the most abstract way. Not awake but not asleep, either. Just alone. By myself on that bed where I’d slept as a boy. Where now I dozed, the volume of Hawthorne on my chest, until I was awakened by the subtlest sound coming, or so I believed, up the creek road. Subtle, meager, the grinding unoiled metal, tires which rolled on the moist earth to a halt.

  Tonight I would not panic. Instead, I set my book aside, on the table, having folded the corner of the page so I could find my spot when I returned. I extinguished the lamp by the bed and slipped into my shoes, went to the door, downstairs, and onto the porch, where I stood, listened. A walking stick of ash that was left beside the screen door frame I grasped and held as a demented king would his scepter. No one stirred in Edmé and Henry’s bedroom, so I assumed it was only I who’d been awakened. The moon did not shed tonight the light it might have only last week, when it was full, but by this time my feet knew the way better than they had when I walked toward Henry’s studio the other night, groping through drenched grass near the creek. Hearing nothing, seeing nothing, I decided to make my way down to the front gate, by now wondering whether I had simply dreamed those few noises of iron, rubber, dirt.

  The foreyard gate at the end of the pebbled walk, which I had skirted, was ajar and thus I needn’t have worried about how to swing it open without disturbing the garrulous bells that hung from it. A cool autumnal breeze serenely ascended the valley. By next month, if not sooner, I would be able to see my breath in a cloud at this time of night. Summer was near its end. Fiery yellow lochs of aspen would very soon appear in the green conifer seas as the season gave way to autumn and then to my favorite: beautiful, mesmerizing winter, when the world is softened by snow.

  I reached the gate, which glowed palely under the starlight, and as I did, the presence of another was plainly in the air. I could almost smell someone, almost taste a vitality on my tongue. Up my arms and neck this recognition registered as my hair stood on end and goose bumps rose. My fear was, in a superficial way, irritating, even painful. I breathed in slowly, silently, as if by drawing the cold into me I might restore my calm, and as I did, I was reminded of the fish that brought themselves back to life from their own terror, earlier that day, by a similar process. The horsegate also stood ajar, and though it was not unusual for the sheepbell-laden foreyard gate to be left unlatched up by the house, this lower gate never was left unbolted. Something was wrong here.

  I wedged myself between gate and post, stepped down the road a few yards. The creek whispered words I couldn’t understand, and as it did I discerned the outlines, or rather the substance and bulk, of my prey—it was prey because I stalked it—at the side of the road, some hundred feet farther along. Or was I the prey? Without pausing, I walked on, toward it, quietly but steadily. Once I was sure of what I beheld in the midst of all this darkness around me, darkness that lay like some filthy shroud over the hollow and hill crests and mountaintops beyond, I found my voice, then heard myself ask aloud, “Is someone there?” Foolish enough question, I suppose. Nevertheless, it was what I said, and then pronounced similar words again, maybe with more authority the second time: “Who’s there?”

  The answer, which came from behind, startled me. “It’s me,” is what she said, and although I hadn’t known her all that long, I easily recognized Helen, as I turned on my heel and glimpsed her silhouette, dark black against a vaguer black backdrop. She stood, in fact, by the horsegate.

  “Helen?” I murmured. “What are you doing here?”

  She was walking toward me. A shiver released my welled-up apprehension; it was as if my body involuntarily shook off fear the way some beast might shake off water. I was grateful this darkness hid from her my odd spasm.

  “I had to see you,” she answered. Even as she spoke I felt her arms around me and found myself absorbed in a kiss more impatient than deep, more severe than pleasant. The urgency of her tongue and hands was nearly as startling as her presence here in the first place. I dropped the ash stick to the ground. When the embrace ended, I asked, “Are you all right?”

  “L
et’s go up to the house,” she said, taking my arm.

  “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

  “We won’t wake them up, don’t worry.”

  “But if you want to talk—” I said.

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  Despite everything—despite that rational, wiser part of my character telling me, This is not what you want to do, Grant—I walked beside her, more or less swept away by the strong current of her will.

  “Don’t you realize how dangerous it is to come up here in the middle of the night?”

  “You mean because of those music men you were telling me about?”

  “Well, them too, but I meant you come unannounced and you risk having Henry take his shotgun to you. I know; he almost shot me not so long ago.”

  “It doesn’t look like you learned your lesson, does it? You’re out wandering around in the dark. Anyway, I can handle myself. I’m not afraid of night visitors, or Henry, for that matter.”

  “Your father wasn’t afraid, either, and—well—”

  “The gorge is a dangerous place.”

  We neared the foreyard gate, and I said, “Helen, what’re we doing?”

  She stopped, turned, and kissed me once more, somewhat less panicky, more deliberate this time, and whispered, “Didn’t you miss me, too?”

  I admitted that, yes, I did. We passed through the gate and up into the house. She knew her way through the rooms as well as I, and within minutes we found ourselves in my bedroom, unclothing one another in the hushed but charged atmosphere, a harmony of fingers unbuttoning shirts, unzipping pants, removing underwear, until our bodies were naked and entwining on my sheets. She was my aggressive lecheress tonight, sat in the splayed fork of my legs and lifted my hips toward her face with a strength I might never have predicted. Her tongue and mouth moved in long methodical arcs around from thigh across the flat plain of my stiffened belly over to other thigh, and I lay back with no doubt a grimace on my face, as this physical ecstasy was excruciating to me. My palms cupped both sides of her precious head when she finally took me inside her mouth and lowered herself over me, her hair spread like fibrillate waves across my middle. Time passed, supple and plastic time bent from its normal regularity. When I moved to kiss the top of her head, maybe press my lips into the mysterious soft spot that centers the parietal juncture where, at the crowns of babies’ heads, the new blood pulses, she lifted her mouth to mine and I tasted the sweet saltiness of my own body on her lips. She took both my hands and pressed them out away from me and above my head, as we lay down, so that I stretched out beneath her like some intoxicated martyr being prepared for his lascivious crucifixion. Though we tried as best we could to do all this in silence, there was a moment in which nothing mattered anymore, and the rest of the world disappeared from consciousness. The oblivion that drew upon me and blanketed my exhausted body in the wake of climax was sudden and total, and so whether the springs creaked or not, or whether the bedstead whacked against the wall, or whether Helen may have allowed herself to giggle when I found a ticklish notch in the flesh of her neck with my tongue, or even whether we cried out in the moment of abandonment of everything, I couldn’t say.

  That I woke up alone, with no sign that Helen had been there other than the scent of her on my skin, somehow didn’t surprise me. Indeed, my first feeling was of relief at not having to appear downstairs in front of Edmé and Henry with Giovanni Trentas’s daughter at my side. I didn’t really understand, still, the nature of Edmé’s warning regarding Henry, his probable discouragement of our liaison. Despite the several objections I already mentioned, none of which seemed of great merit so far as I could see, especially in light of the fact that I was falling in love, and had no intention of hurting her, I felt I had every right to be with this young woman—felt that surely we were meant to be together, that our separate childhood roads had finally merged. Having thought that, I drew the blankets up over me, screening myself off from those many lightening predawn clouds that skimmed the window-framed horizon over the eastern ridge, and slumbered awhile longer, peacefully ecstatic that such an encounter had just taken place, without our having inherited any shame or confusion, or opened ourselves up to judgment the morning after.

  David Lewis knew where he would find Henry that morning. He knew Henry’s several defining obsessions and where they took him after dawn, or were likely to take him noon or night. So that when he pushed his hands down the sleeves of his barn jacket and settled a hat on his head for the walk, he sensed there would be no need for him to relate his news to both Edmé and Henry at the same time. He would find Henry, whose business this was, in his opinion, insofar as it pertained to the ranch lands, and tell him—the son of one steader to the son of another. Let Henry go and grieve or complain about it to his wife, as he would: that was none of David Lewis’s affair. Instead, as he stepped outside into the crisp midmorning, he pictured his neighbor up in the studio, like always, intent upon that curious chipboard and foam-core utopia of his, the blueprints of indeterminate shapes, and clay models conforming to wise organic curves. As Lewis walked across the bridge that took him from his own lands over onto the creek road, he called out to his dogs, two black Labradors. They bounded ahead when he turned north and up the road, climbing its mild incline with ease.

  He would miss this. The road, the very greenness of the valley and familiar purity of the air, the dogs leading the way, up to Ash Creek. His gait was not as spirited as usual this morning. The quickness of his step, the resilience, was not there. Nor did his hands swing freely at his sides, as they always had over the many years Lewis had tramped here. Why should they? After all, what Lewis had to confess to Henry troubled him, too. These were circumstances he had averted for the longest time, as Henry well knew. His heritage, his own personal history, decades of both hard and sweet toiling, had been at stake. His family had lived in this valley bordering the Fultons for as many decades as anyone alive could remember, and therefore he believed his regrets were every bit as strong and earned as what Henry would no doubt feel. Times change, he reminded himself as he reached the horsegate and shot back the bolt. The dogs had long since figured out a way around obstacles like gates, and rejoined him momentarily, coats wet with creek water from their wading around the terminus of the fence.

  Lewis ran his fingers through his hair and glanced up at the bright roof of the house where it mirrored morning light. Smoke from the near chimney meant Edmé was in the kitchen. All these intimate nuances, the tiny particulars he was able to interpret from living in such proximity for so long, all the simple knowledge he would miss having at his disposal … he shook his head, then turned away toward the east, where he crossed the rickety bridge into the farther meadow. Let Henry tell Edmé, he thought. By the time he did, Lewis would already have returned down this same road, following these rampant dogs across the narrow wood trestles, back home.

  He was there: Lewis knew his man. When he rapped fist against doorframe he heard, —Come on.

  —Henry? he said, and to the dogs, —You two sit, stay.

  —Lewis? Heh.

  He stepped inside.

  —Take your coat off, man, said Henry.

  And so he did.

  —What have you got to say for yourself this morning?

  David Lewis had this to say: As Henry knew, he’d avoided it for some years now, but the inevitability of the numbers—the loans and second mortgages he could not carry, the taxes he could no longer afford to pay, the ranch revenues or lack thereof—made the place untenable. He was forced to let it go, was selling it off in its entirety. He’d been approached by a broker who brought him an offer he could not sanely refuse. The contract had been signed, and it was only a matter of some weeks before they’d go to closing.

  —I either sell now with some dignity, or foreclose sometime soon without, and I like what dignity I’ve got, Henry, just like you would if you were in the same spot.

  Henry sat tacit. He stared at the constancy of the wat
er out the window—moving and falling, pooling and moving and falling—up at the gorge aperture. He said, at last, —This is all done, then?

  —I’m afraid so.

  —Thank you for telling me.

  —I’m sorry, Henry. I know you think of this as a kind of treachery, but who’s to say? Maybe they’ll do something better with the place than I’m doing.

  —You made no deed restrictions?

  —Well, I tried to get some language into the contract that would serve as a restrictive covenant against building or doing anything unfortunate with the land, but they weren’t going for it. Like I say, I’m really sorry. I didn’t have a choice.

  —We always have choices.

  —No, not always, he said.

  —Are you at liberty to tell me who’s buying?

  Here was the one question Lewis might have hoped Henry would not ask, for wasn’t it unnecessary, really, wasn’t it finally just a little cruel to force him to state the obvious? Given how Henry felt about Tate, how he represented a kind of leisurely, methodical evil to Henry, through his patient acquisition of power over the years and his equally unhurried dispensation of trouble to anyone who happened to find himself in Tate’s path, why would he want Lewis to speak the name? Or, that is, the corporate mask for the name, since who or what had already paid a percentage of the substantial sum for some thousand acres of stream, valley, and hills was not in fact Tate, but one of any number of anonyms. Lewis must then have wondered why every year, without fail, Tate had been invited to the Labor Day function, allowed to mingle among them, dine upon Henry and Edmé’s fare and drink their wine, possessed of an arrogant bearing that might suggest to any uninformed bystander that all this was already his. But there it was, come he always did. Possibly he was invited for Willa’s sake—a vestige of days, perhaps, when Henry and Willa were closer, or when Giovanni Trentas was alive and among her best friends, however odd the friendship seemed to anyone who paid attention to such matters. Or else he was invited so Henry could remind Tate just how handsome was Ash Creek, this place which he’d never be able to own.