Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  The road widened after I passed the hotel and found myself speeding along an open stretch. Concurrently, the valley narrowed, as a ring of mountains rose up to pierce the precipitous shapeless clouds that cramped and burdened the sky. The radio in the jeep didn’t work, so I listened to the heavy fingers of wind rapping against the tattered canvas roof and heard when every fissure and sill in the road shocked the suspension; even the mundane process of getting there was imbued with an exhilaration of peril. So I told myself as the road vaulted into a sudden vertical canyon cut by the river that ran below, then reemerged into a higher flats where a motley assembly of houses called Red Hill came into view. A cinder-block structure with flat roof drew up on my immediate right. Its crude painted sign, indicating coffee was served within, stood on the sod before it like plywood hands tented together. Here I pulled over, climbed out, breathed in the crisp mountain air. Inside, I ordered the coffee not because I wanted to drink but to earn some chance at finding out where Margery lived.

  Within ten minutes I found myself standing before a grim tan stucco palace of two stories with a weathered mansard roof of gray slate and multitudes of windows tucked in it, echoing the grand Victorian manner of another time and, to be sure, place. Framed in one arched window jutting from the mansard roof was the pale face of a woman looking down at me in the milky afternoon light, her hair done in a loose chaplet of silver plaits. Both hands thrust into my trouser pockets, I stood there not quite knowing what to do next, returning her frank and somewhat apprehensive gaze. Even from this certain distance, staring up through smudged, hazy glass, I was able to see that Edmé was right. Here had once been a woman of considerable beauty, the forehead hieratic, the whole visage simply filled with light, only the eyes veiled by shadows. She might have looked like a ghost to me then—a day ghost, too shy to haunt the place after dark, too introverted, for hers was a face marked by reticence—but that she suddenly smiled and gestured in the most inviting way. After this, she withdrew into the dim interior, and I made my way up the narrow stone walk to the front, where I waited. When she opened the door, and welcomed me inside, I doubt that if I had seen a ghost I would have been more surprised: She spoke my name, “Grant?”

  “Have we met?” I asked as I stepped into a large, moist room which was empty but for some wicker chairs and an ottoman.

  “Listen, dear, if you don’t remember me, what brings you here to visit an old lady you don’t know?”

  Fair question. “Well, I—”

  “Maybe you were too young. But I recognized you right off.”

  Hers was the kind of face that seemed extravagantly old when creased by its natural frown, and limpidly youthful when punctuated by her smile. It was one of those faces easy to imagine weeping. I did not recognize it, however, nor did I witness there in it Helen’s lineaments and character. What was more, I hadn’t understood that here was yet another reason for having driven this distance to encounter Margery, until that shimmer of won-recognition made itself known to me. She led me through more sparsely furnished rooms to the back of the house, where there was an arboretum of sorts, with dirty glass walls and ceiling, humid and aromatic, thick with blossoming plants. We sat.

  “So,” she said. “What brings you here? Have you come all this way to tell me what a bad person I am? To tell me what I already know you and all of them think?”

  “Hold on. What makes you say that?”

  I thought, weren’t there pleasantries she and I ought to be mincing around with first, before rushing into the past with such precipitous honesty? I liked this woman already, for her lack of congenital social grace.

  She said, “Why shouldn’t I say it? Ever since Giovanni and me went our ways, I’ve heard things. I’ve known what they say about me over on the other side of the valley. There may be miles between here and Ash Creek, but rumor never did respect distance.”

  “Look, I don’t live on the other side of the valley, and what’s more, nobody has said anything bad about you.” My ears warmed and undoubtedly reddened at the falsehood, but I persisted, nevertheless wondering for the second or was it third time that day just what it was I hoped to accomplish here beyond simply seeing her. “Let me tell you the truth,” I said. “I’m not even quite sure why I came. I suppose I came to talk about Giovanni.”

  “Giovanni,” flat, unavailing.

  “Giovanni, yes. And about your daughter, Helen.”

  “I don’t have anything much to say about Helen. I don’t know her. You could probably tell me more about her than the other way round. And as far as Giovanni goes, why should anybody care about my opinion? I wasn’t even invited to the funeral, if there was one. He was still my husband, after all.”

  Again, I wondered how had we managed to come so far so quickly. She presumably had some similar reaction, and rose—which led me to wonder whether I was about to be invited to leave—then left me in the greenhouse annex for several minutes alone, before returning with a tray on which was an antique crystal decanter of sherry and two delicate matching stemmed glasses. She asked about Edmé and Henry, about David Lewis, whom I gathered she got to know during her time at Ash Creek. And I answered, as best I could. When she inquired about Helen, her voice fell off so that I barely heard her words. She feigned, I saw, supreme reserve, but did after all want to know.

  I said, “Helen’s tormented by her father’s murder, and so am I. But you tell me you don’t have anything to say about that.”

  The house was noiseless but for the distant ticking of a clock.

  “Well, I would have things to say, but why should I, is my point. How do I know you’re not one of them, anyway.”

  “One of them?”

  Her face metamorphosed from pugnacity to skepticism. Her mouth transformed from that frown in which both ends were drawn down, to a smirk in which one corner perked shrewdly upward while the other remained resolute, somber, as if burdened by memory.

  She tipped her head to the side, birdlike.

  I said, “Margery— Do you mind if I call you Margery?”

  “It’s my name.”

  “Margery, I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “You are right about Giovanni being murdered; that much I can tell you. And I may be wrong about you being one of them. Either way … ,” and she failed to finish the thought.

  Rather than plead for some absurd absolution, I simply drank, sat there, diffident as a stump, and waited for her to finish judging me. After a long interval, she whispered, “Everything could have been very different. And you know what else? What else is, you think you want to know about these things, don’t you.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You don’t, though. You don’t want to know, Grant.”

  “How come?”

  “Why do you think I left Ash Creek and moved back over here?”

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s not because I fell out of love.”

  I waited; and as I did I couldn’t help but look at this pale, forceful woman, and wonder at Helen’s animosity toward her.

  “Giovanni was a decent man, as you know. It wasn’t so much him as the girl I just couldn’t live with. Not even the girl herself but, that is, all the difficulties that went with her.”

  “Difficulties? She was just a baby.”

  “Well, so was I, for that matter. The point is, she wasn’t my baby,” said Margery. “She’d grow up one day, wouldn’t she? And then what would happen when she found out I wasn’t her mother?”

  A numbness came over me. I’d known this in my heart of hearts, hadn’t I. Something Edmé had said, maybe, something about Margery and Giovanni living together that winter at Ash Creek with the girl, which didn’t add up, something about the dates not fitting together right. I had no thought what to say by way of response, but was sufficiently shocked that it didn’t occur to me to ask who Helen’s mother was, then, if not Margery. Whether or not such a question would have been deemed improper is, now, an
yone’s guess. Margery simply continued to speak in the absence of anything from me, beyond my quiet, “What? I’m sorry?”

  “I said, I was young, what can I tell you. At Ash Creek, the future seemed uncertain at best, and the more I learned, the less I felt I could ever belong. Henry’s father was so devoted to Giovanni that he knew Ash Creek would always be a place he could feel was home. For me, this was my home”—raising her hand. “I never ran away from home, I ran away to home. It was a long time ago.”

  By not pressing Margery, I may have experienced a moment of unwonted grace. So I would like to believe. Because when I left her, I did so with the knowledge that Giovanni’s young wife had abandoned him—if that is the right word for it—not from madness or malice, as Helen had suggested, not from some kind of misplaced love for a gang of helpless and callow brothers, as Edmé’d told me, but from an ingenuous fear of some day of reckoning that seemed to lay ahead for all of them. I liked Margery, couldn’t help myself. Although one has a hard time understanding the compromises chosen by others, especially when they’re informed by doubts and terrors, it was no more my place to question her decision of that spring of 1966, three years into their romance and not six months after they’d finally eloped, than to question her further about who Helen’s real mother was, or is. Margery had, after all, welcomed me into her house, spoken at least a little with me. Enough was, as they say, enough. Throughout the hour I spent with her, I kept waiting for the famous brothers to appear like expectant wolves out of one of Hawthorne’s tales, but no such creatures manifested themselves. I left, convinced she lived in that grand, ruined old place utterly by herself, serving the roles of both patient and caretaker, one living in regret for the past, the other modestly grateful for what good life had afforded her.

  I went back to the jeep. I had to see Helen. My fear about appearing needy, or whatever, seemed irrelevant now. I did want to call first, and so at a junction where the road branched—one that would take the traveler north through alpine valleys toward state lines, the other that returned to town—I pulled over, having seen a telephone booth.

  Finding only an empty metal folder where there ought to have been a directory book, I dialed information, asked for Helen Trentas’s number, was told no one was listed by that name. “There’s a listing for a”—the operator spelled this—“Giovanne Trentas, if that’s any help.” Having penned the number on my palm, I thanked the operator and replaced the handset, wondering why on earth Helen would leave the misspelled name of her dead father in the directory, and hesitated before I dialed.

  Where are you? I could almost hear her voice asking me.

  Can I come over? I would ask.

  But then, rather than hearing, Of course, please come, Grant, followed by directions to her place, I could imagine her saying, You’re just as deceitful as the rest of them, I never want to see you again, once she knew my whereabouts and the fact I’d visited Margery. No, I would appear, just as she appeared, and leave others aside; I telephoned Edmé and told her not to hold dinner.

  An uneventful, blind journey back, one of those stretches of time in which you travel from here to there without much process of consciousness occurring, within which you steer without really seeing, you respond to curves in the road without noticing them. Surely I saw a kaleidoscope of distinct images, some before me, some behind, but most present was a continuous queasy texturing of thoughts, an intermingling of Margery’s words with those of Helen, a melding of Edmé’s words about Giovanni with those of Noah the other evening at the Hotel St. Clair—into whose parking lot I now pulled, regaining consciousness. It was as if I’d dreamed but could not remember what the vision had been, as I walked into the taproom, empty but for the bartender, who was engaged in resetting the balance of a pinball machine down at the far end. I asked him, first, did he have a bottle of champagne he could sell to go—perhaps drinking too much, again, but I asked anyway—and, second, did he happen to know where Helen Trentas lived? The drive had revived me somehow; I was inspired to continue with my wandering day.

  The champagne was a vintage I didn’t know and can’t recall, and the directions to Helen’s house involved the briefest distance and a couple of simple turns. The sun washed the air orange as it descended behind the violet sawtooth range beyond her cottage. I admired the mowed yard edged with dying flowers, and the ascending walk overhung by the thick branches of old trees. The paper bag rustled under my arm as I walked toward the front door, painted azure blue to match the shutters, contrasting with the natural wooden shingles, blackened by weather and honeyed by hard sunlight. The cottage was set apart from any other house, and up behind it rose a field at whose remote edge several horses cropped, red flecks in the dwindling light. I was nervous. My stomach churned. Perhaps this wasn’t such a wise move, showing up here uninvited. My edginess served to remind me how very negligible was my knowledge of Helen, how little I finally knew about her personal life. She understood much more about me than I her. What, say, if she had another lover, who might even now be nearing me on the other side of this door? What if she had a child, for instance, that no one had the nerve to mention? So ran my thoughts when I knocked and waited, as dusk breezes toyed with the paperlike leaves in the shrubbery that hedged this cobbled rock stoop. The answers to those questions were all the same: Why not find out now, before I became even more deeply involved with Helen than I was already? Again, I knocked.

  The champagne, the misgivings, soon seemed for naught. No one answered the door. Suppressing my urge to prowl around to the back of the cottage and peek through her windows, I turned toward where I’d parked. Sunset apricot light blazed like fiery glaciered crowns in those high mountain snowfields above and ahead of me. Staring at the reflection off the never-melting snow, I felt a perfect emptiness.

  Behind me I heard my name called then, and I turned to look again at that door, but saw it remained unopened. You stupid fool, I mumbled kindly, Hearing voices now, are you? and started to turn again when I did hear her, distant but distinct. Squinting out across the field, with my hand shading my eyes in a kind of informal salute, I saw her riding toward the house on one of the horses I’d noticed earlier. Pale dust rose in her wake.

  She was beaming as she dismounted, tied reins to a post.

  “You’re industrious,” she shouted.

  “What?”

  “I figured you would find me.”

  “That’s why you never invited me over?”

  She kissed me, took my hand, and we went through a tack room at the rear of the house, into her kitchen. “I hardly know you. How could a decent lady like me invite a man of uncertain background to her house?” She smiled, and I with her. “What’s that?” she added.

  “Champagne.”

  “I can’t drink champagne in filthy jeans,” and she got glasses down from the hutch and left me alone in the kitchen. I peeled the foil, popped the cork, filled both glasses, which effervesced as I carried them. Circumspect, silent as any burglar, I toured Helen’s downstairs: the kitchen that led into a dining room and beyond that into a greatroom whose appointments seemed—how else to put it—so mature, unexpectedly organized. Evidence of her daughterly devotion was present in the form of framed architectural etchings, probably from the nineteenth century, of Italian origin: triumphal arches of Severus and Titus; another showing the system of Roman aqueducts, with marvelous cutaway views; yet another displaying columns from various periods, Ionic and Corinthian orders with ornate acanthus leaves and fanciful godlets and sweet little beasts etched in their entablatures. I took a sip from my glass, just a little, so that we might still make some kind of toast when she came back downstairs, and wondered whether Giovanni himself had given her these, maybe some inheritance from the old country. Helen seemed so parentless, it dawned on me there, gazing in the failing light at this series of prints hung in her living room along the length of one windowless wall, that I liked this idea, that Giovanni’s family might once have owned these images and hung them in Rome i
n their own flat, having left Valle d’Aosta, or in Velletri even, way back when they were all still together, before the war had pulled them apart forever. She really was her father’s daughter, in fact, I realized, hearing her footsteps above me—although rather than being packed off to a foreign country when young, in Helen’s case it seemed more that she was born in a place truly foreign to her. How unthinkable it might seem to one who hadn’t gone through a parallel experience himself, to be ultimately so different from those you grew up with, from the other kids who struggled for identity and preeminence on the playground. For Helen did have a childhood, of course, though even I might have a hard time imagining what it must have been like, here and sometimes even up there at Ash Creek with that exotic and in some ways defiant custodian of her welfare, of her fate really. I sat down on a dark-green couch whose leather was old but supple, that faced a matching one centered in the long room, and placed the glasses on the reflective face of the low table between. On a small round table in one corner was a stuffed raptor, an eagle whose wings were spread as if it were about to take flight; on the wall of the dining room was hung the handsome skin of a wolverine, its sensuous, protracted claws curled at the ends of its forepaws, its blank black eyes staring hard at the floor. Giovanni Trentas surely had lived here with his daughter, yet even in his absence the atmosphere was not traditionally feminine. Helen was no girlish woman. The many masculine details in these rooms—these taxidermic trophies, the abundance of firearms in that antique gun case on the wall opposite the etchings— seemed as much to her taste as what might have been her father’s. I found myself content being here in her reflected presence, their presence. She appeared again, dressed in a simple dark tunic cinched at the waist with tied lengths of bright scarves, barefooted. Her hair flowed arrant about her wide shoulders.

  “Hello again,” she said, and took the champagne. We toasted, and she sat beside me. “I’m sorry I left without saying goodbye this morning. You were asleep, dreaming, I think. You were making these little moaning sounds, like this”—she teasingly re-created a series of sobbing sighs—“and your face was twitching. Sort of like this,” and then she burst out laughing.