Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  “You were watching me while I was sleeping? That isn’t fair.”

  “What can I tell you.”

  “Well, it’s probably for the best you left, truth be told. Edmé suggested to me some time ago that Henry wouldn’t necessarily be all that supportive of you and me—”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Edmé mentioned it, for what it was worth. She knows very well what’s happening between us.”

  “It’s none of his business.”

  “Henry? I’m sure it’s just that he cares about both of us.”

  “What you and I do is no one’s business but our own.” Helen’s face changed so quickly, it was as if she were another person for some unmeasurable brief squib of time, then returned to its original complexion of humor and warmth.

  “What can I tell you,” I said.

  We sat, mute. Feeling awkward, maybe, she rose, went to the kitchen. I scolded myself for having mentioned Edmé’s dissuasion. But why not put the matter before her? A voice within asked back, reasonably enough, What matter? And besides, her reactions would allow me to know her better, if I was able to interpret. Helen returned with the champagne bottle in one hand and in the other a shot glass which she filled.

  “Who’s that for?” I asked.

  “Sam,” she said.

  “Sam?”

  A quizzical glance as she walked to the mahogany tripod table which accommodated the great beaked, feathery relic there. “I call this fellow Sam, for Uncle Sam, bald eagle. It’s bad luck not to share an offering.” She set the oblation at the base, near its very yellow talons.

  “I thought bald eagles were a protected species.”

  “They are. Sam was snared in a trap by mistake, by your uncle, in fact, before eagles were endangered. He gave him to my father years ago.” She tenderly smoothed its back feathers. “You have to have a license for these, even if they were mounted before the ban. I think he’s so beautiful.”

  “Kind of sad.”

  “Only in so far as he messed up by getting himself caught in the trap in the first place. It was set there for a lynx or some other small game, a winter trap, Henry said. He must have been desperate for food, is all I can guess. Eagles prefer to kill for their own meat.”

  “You ever get the itch to leave this place?”

  She came and sat close. “That’s quite a non sequitur.”

  “Want to hear another?”

  “Outside. Let’s walk.”

  “All right,” and I followed her to the door. We strolled into the field where she’d been riding. The minute flecks, those horses that had been there before, were gone now. Twilight was held at bay still by a sky marked with luminescent filaments of cirrus, and pile upon pile of cumulus edged with wondrous pigments overhead.

  “You were saying?”

  “You never answer my questions, you know.”

  “That’s a dirty lie,” and slipped her arm around my waist. “Answers are, One, Yes, not only do I get the urge to leave, but two, I know that one day I will. It’s a matter of figuring out what direction to go when I do decide to leave.”

  “You can come with me,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “When you figure it out, let me know.” We soon came to a wide slow river, whose rilling surface reproduced fluid chinks of the last dying gold-pink sky shades. A bridle path followed the bank. She mentioned that Ash Creek was tributary to this river and that back when she was a teenager, after Giovanni and she had moved down here during the summers when Edmé and Henry returned from the coast, she would sometimes place a crudely carved toy boat in the running water by the bridge at Ash Creek, and then spend hours down on this very shoal, waiting for the boat to reappear. She made this experiment many times, she told me, but the boats never made the long passage from the mountains down across the valley flats, over here to the far side of town, where the river widened out into such a massive and majestic flow. “Stupid game,” she concluded.

  “You know what I wanted to ask, the non-sequitur question?”

  “Aren’t I the one who has a third question coming?”

  “It was about your mother.”

  “I have no answers for you on that front.”

  “Look, for once in my life I don’t want to keep secrets or lie or anything of the sort.”

  “Why not? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I hate liars more than any other thing on earth.”

  To explain my sudden embrace of truthfulness would be difficult; instead, I simply plunged forward into the truth itself: “I wasn’t going to tell you, but well—I went and visited with Margery Trentas.”

  “That’s not her name. She’s no Trentas. And now I suppose you’re going to tell me she’s a lovely lady and I have no right to hate her.”

  “From the little I’ve seen, she is.”

  Helen removed her hand from mine, and halted beside a bend in the river. I could see the evening star beginning to glimmer in the violet dark above her, very faint still. “We all have hard lives. She’s got no special claim on the difficulties of being human. I don’t get you.”

  “Well, that’s kind of my point, I suppose. This is one thing I really don’t get about you. You told me once you’re not even sure she’s your real mother, but you hold this grudge against her as if she were.”

  “Listen. Do I go around asking questions about your parents, your background, anything of the kind?” She was quietly crying out at me. Her face was flushed with hostility, yes, but fear, too.

  “Helen, don’t be mad at me,” I said. “I’m just trying to understand.”

  “Your trying to understand gives you the right to stick your nose in other people’s business?”

  I thought back to my imaginary conversation with Helen in that phone booth back near Red Hill and was reminded how accurately I’d predicted her outrage, a fact that gave me pause. If she hadn’t the right to be offended, of course I would never have been able to prophesy it. “I’m sorry, Helen,” I said—not words I’d often heard out of my mouth in an argument.

  “You’re not sorry for an instant. Look. I’m not going to tell you how to behave or not to behave. I don’t have a mother, and I’m not about to be your mother. I’d rather—” and she just turned and began to walk away, back toward the field and the house.

  As I followed quietly behind, the hollow that had been carved in my chest seemed more capacious than the chest itself, and the drafts of dismay, of confusion and shame, that gusted through that sudden hole at my center made me tremble. If the skies had abruptly opened and snow begun to fall, I would not have felt a colder chill.

  The document was not meant perhaps to be hurtful. The man who dictated it to some innocent amanuensis might have been staring out a window as he worked through the specifics of the contract. All this was so everyday to him, no doubt, and these words must have come by rote. To him, as to any other lawyer, this was just a writ notifying a person (or party, as we are ironically called—no party, this) on behalf of a client regarding the commonest of suits. And yet the wistful melancholy that this divorce document generated in me, even in light of my new romance with Helen Trentas, went beyond what I might have imagined. I had known it was coming. I had time to prepare. But I was not prepared.

  Edmé’d left the express envelope on my bedside table, by the Hawthorne. It awaited me when I returned home that evening, beat and bewildered by the events of the day. I thought back to Helen’s rebuke, how I had caught up with and walked beside her—my arms dangling, hers crossed—returning along the river and over the field to her house. She calmed down some during the hike back and, by the time I left, had forgiven me, after her own fashion, for my overzealousness.

  “Nobody likes to be gawked at, watched,” as Helen put it, “and I’m the kind of person who dislikes it even more than most.”

  What I’d said that broke through her resentment was that my Margery visit had more to do with learning about Giovanni than his da
ughter. “Look. Regarding your father’s daughter: I don’t need any convincing or disclosure or any—I don’t know—information. I just don’t see how I could hear that a man who I remember from my own cast-to-the-seven-winds childhood—”

  “It’s four winds.”

  “Four winds, seven winds, whatever. My point is, if Giovanni was murdered—and Margery agrees with you that he was—”

  “How would she know?”

  “—how could you expect me not to ask around about it? I’d have thought you’d want me to share an interest in the matter.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “In fact, if I had to guess, I might have imagined that you meant for me to pursue the idea that your father hadn’t died in—in an uncomplicated way.”

  She did not deny this. She said only that she might prefer it if I let her know what I was going to do before rather than after the fact. “If you’re serious about it, then I can tell you what we have to do.”

  “Yes?”

  “Graham Tate. He knows. I believe he knows everything there is to know about this. And I think Henry knows, too.”

  “What would Henry know?”

  “I don’t have the answer to that question. I don’t have answers to many of these questions. I just know.”

  “You suspect, you mean.”

  “No. I know,” and she held her fist against her temple and gently tapped her head there, as if by such a gesture she might conjure from some chasm in her imagination the traces of a hard knowledge, the recognition of what precisely she meant. Without thinking, I reached out (we stood, still outdoors, at the foot of her kitchen porch, in the new dark) and took her fist in my hand. She resisted at first, then slowly relaxed—I could feel the muscles in her hand give way—so that I brought her fist to my lips and kissed her knuckles, then pried her fingers so that the fist exfoliated. I whispered I was sorry to her palm, and her palm now was on my cheek. We embraced as some vesper bird arabesqued over us, and she said, “I get crazy, I get crazy because there’s such a tangle here, and I won’t ever get free of it until I know what really did happen.”

  “I don’t want you to be crazy. I want you to be happy, trite as it may sound.”

  She said good night, and I watched her disappear behind the dark door of her cottage, before I returned along a path to the jeep.

  Haggard, I drove home. The porch light was left on, but Edmé and Henry had gone to bed. Then found this, took it downstairs to the kitchen, where I put on some water for tea. Devils love to work in spurts, making clusters of trouble, I thought as I slit open the envelope with a knife, knowing full well what was inside. And no, the papers came as no surprise, as I say, this cold, hard thing that required my signature agreeing to the division of property as stipulated here below in a brief attachment, and further agreeing … well, no need to detail the various points that were laid out, because what I found myself focused on were simple words, like division and brief attachment. Three years with Mary; a pretty brief attachment, and now the inevitable division. With the pen that lay beside the telephone I signed the documents, initialed the attachments, slid them into the envelope enclosed for return of the various materials, licked and sealed it. I spit the gluey taste out of my mouth into the sink, removed the tea bag from the cup, and went outside on the porch. The chamomile warmed me. A drowsiness settled through me. Soon enough, I climbed the stairs and into bed. No Hawthorne tonight, no dreams good or otherwise, no visitations or nocturnal music, no unexpected midnight encounters of any kind—nothing but a profound, needed sleep.

  The morning following, I woke with an idea. From the bottom of the armoire I retrieved Giovanni’s box, opened it, ferreted out what I was looking for, and discovered I was right. One of the feathers was a small breast or head feather from the eagle that had been caught in that trap set up in the gorge for some other animal. I brushed the feather back and forth beneath my chin, against the fresh stubble, and pondered once more what these puzzle pieces could mean. Half asleep still, I riffled through the love letters from Margery and tried to imagine her, back when she was a young woman filled with desire and purpose and hope and fear, too, writing these few trepidatious words to her handsome suitor. One by one I reread them, wondering if Giovanni appreciated how much she loved him, tracing the words with the tip of the eagle feather as I studied the notes that were obviously meant never to be seen by any eyes other than his.

  And then I detected something so inappreciable, so subtle to my unstudied eye, that I hadn’t seen it when I first read through these letters. The briefest among them, penciled on a small piece of paper—When he goes I can come to see you but not before. I don’t want him to see me. Until tomorrow, then—was not in the same handwriting as the others. Now that I noticed this, it was plain as the daylight that streamed through the dormer window, and I wondered how had I missed it. The calligraphy was somewhat more refined, even though it was obviously written in haste, and the words themselves carried a meaning rather different than that of the other notes. For one, Margery had more than one man who opposed her romance with Giovanni—all those nasty fairy-tale brothers—which did not reconcile with the references here, When he goes and don’t want him to see me. They were not a lie. I was wide awake now, and turned the bit of paper over. Maybe in the excitement of finding these letters in the first place, I had failed to look at the other side; maybe I’d looked but the light hadn’t been quite this bright. In any case, I now read on the reverse of this note, in script faded by time and possibly never very boldly inscribed at all, the letters H xxx W.

  H for Helen? What else could it be? I thought. But then, no, of course not. I understood without having to think further. The H meant Henry. And the W meant no one other than Willa—Willa Richardson, not Willa Tate.

  This was more confusing than anything yet I’d discovered in the box. And the man mentioned there, the poor he who was meant to be kept in the dark about a meeting? “Tate knows and Henry knows, too,” as Helen had said. Could the reference possibly be to Tate? I wondered. Did Henry’s relationship with Willa go back as far as Tate’s? Was my imagination simply running wild?

  I packed Giovanni’s box away, as if by getting it out of my sight, the tales it began to disclose might also disappear. They didn’t, though. Indeed, yet another question was stirred to life. A voice within me asked with lurid hilarity, Just what was Giovanni Trentas doing in the first place with this dark little confidence, this tattered trysting note between Henry and Willa—if that was truly what this proved to be—hidden in his cryptic box? More than ever, it was clear to me that Giovanni’s box held the whole story.

  The next day was overcast; a cold wind whipped the dying grass. A covey of black birds was driven along by the gusting from north to south, in the low sky. Summer was surely gone now, and it seemed as if a season was to be skipped, that we might arrive abruptly into the first snow. To think that only the day before I had passed so many hours outdoors, working the fence line with Henry, making repairs where barbed wire had broken, or rails had rotted. How many times during that day together I’d wanted to broach all those questions with him, have some answers straight from the source; but was held back by my fear he’d consider it an insult that I would dare pry into his past and the histories of people to whom he was close. What I did, instead, was enjoy the company of my uncle, engage myself in our work. I let Giovanni and Helen and Mary and Willa and Tate simply float up and away from me, during those late-morning hours—after a quick run into town to mail the papers—and through the afternoon. I allowed any thoughts of Giovanni’s box to dissolve, as Henry and I tramped from the horsegate up west over the saddle ridge, hauling cat’s-paw and hammers, snips and staples and saw, and a wreath of lethal thorny wire wrapped in a mantle of heavy old hide with us as we went. Even when I was in town I resisted the chance to drop in on Helen. It was a day to stand back, to work with my hands, not my head.

  The only moment in which Henry and I touched upon a subject other than fence mending
was when he encouraged me about my life in the wake of a second divorce, an encouragement offered now but which would later be revoked. “You’re young for two divorces,” he said, one eye staring me down even as I saw in it his concern, “but you have all the time in the world ahead of you, just remember that. Go easy. You’ll be fine if you just go slow.”

  When I thanked him, I couldn’t resist wondering whether these words referred to me and Helen. “That’s never been my strong suit,” I remarked, as we fitted a fresh-hewn rail into position.

  “Never been divorced, you know. But I bet I know more about these sort of things than you’d think. The only thing I know for sure is that slow and steady’s the way to any happiness in this world. It’s worth remembering.”

  “I’ll remember,” I said, then clopped the timber to square, lifted the bale of wire over a shoulder, and we moved along the margin to the next breach.

  And now the new day had come all bluster and blowing wind and grayed heavens and withdrawing birds. Although today I had intended to meet Helen, who’d promised to give me lunch if I came over, I wound up telephoning her to cancel. For the first time since I’d arrived, my uncle could really use my help here at Ash Creek, and my obligation was to stay; his studio roof had been damaged by the high gales that hurried down, whistling as they shook the windows and made the trees quiver and bow, and we had to go over, lay down some fresh asphalt tiles, in case it did begin to snow, or settle into freezing rain, as it threatened. She understood, told me to call later, but not before wondering aloud, “Why does he insist on keeping that studio in such bad shape as it is. It’s a little perverse for somebody who designed so many beautiful buildings to retire to such a hovel.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Talk to you later.”

  Henry lent me an oilskin and gloves, and for the second day in a row we marched off together, across the creek, and began to work. The wind had ripped several odd bundles of asphalt shingles off the saggy roof, and the tar paper had here and there torn away, exposing sheets of plywood beneath. Wind thrashing us, we unrolled paper and stapled as best we could, then nailed courses of fresh asphalt where the defaulting had occurred—hasty nails in a formerly nailless building. Our faces were cold, and so were our fingers. The change from yesterday’s mild sunshine was marvelous for its gross extravagance. When the first pellet of hail, tiny as a seed, rigid as stone, struck my wrist, and then another my cheek, we were almost finished with the patching, but not quite. The storm advanced from above in the gorge as a wall, or sheet; when I looked over my shoulder to witness it, I was impressed by the distinctness of its contour, and its weird chartreuse hue. It was upon us within minutes, there on the mildly pitched roof, as we worked quickly as we could to complete the job.