Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  How much time she spent with them I cannot say. What they did together, whenever the four were out on some social evening, I can only guess. More likely than not, their activities centered on such innocent things as hikes, picnics, hunts for arrowheads or edible mushrooms—something Giovanni was expert at, having learned early on from his father the rudimentary skills of distinguishing lethal soma from those they might toast over coals and eat for dinner. Or they might go to the county-fair mudshow, ride the transient, rickety carousel trucked in one week along with the convoy of other circus machinery—bump cars; the wobbly Ferris wheel, held together with chewing gum, string, spit, and prayers; the booths for pitching balls and shooting painted tin ducks in a cheap gallery—and then trucked out, in the night, not to be seen again until the following season. They fished together, Henry and Willa being more adept at reading the streams and matching the hatch than the others. They swam naked in the river on the hottest July nights, and sat afterward on the stony beach by a driftwood fire and got quietly silly from a bottle of wine they shared.

  Graham Tate, several years younger than Henry and several older than Willa, must not have taken too kindly to these excursions. It was said, by voices more cynical than mine, that Tate had fallen in love with Willa the day he met her father, and not a moment sooner. Cynical maybe, perhaps unfair, such a comment—not least because he has proved himself devoted to Willa over time, has never been known to cheat on her or in any way show other than complete loyalty and even obsessive protectiveness, as we will see. But there was some truth to the thought that, in the beginning, Tate fell in love as much with where she came from as with who she was. Tate himself was from a family neither rich nor poor, but austere. “My father believed that a man ought to earn just enough to make sure smoke always came out of his chimney and a meal was set on the table, but never a penny more,” he’d been heard to say. At an early age, Tate decided that this approach to life was not for him. When he fell in love with the daughter of the richest man in the region, he further became enamored of the dream that one day his son would be heir to the two largest fortunes here—that of his mother’s family and the even greater estate of his father. That Willa did not, at first, return his affections didn’t deter Tate—who had the sturdy patience of a dealmaker—but her inability to bear him the son (or even daughter) who would be beneficiary to all that he managed to amass over those years that passed since the mid-sixties, after she finally did agree to marry him, skewed his fond plan. Some would say it skewed the man himself.

  But in any case, what concerns me most, as now I have learned more about those times when Henry, Edmé, Giovanni, and Willa were inseparable from late May through Labor Day, is the relationship that developed between not Giovanni and Willa but her and Henry. Seeing only the swiftest exchange of glances between them on Labor Day this year, I didn’t dare read too much into what I sensed might be there. But on discovering the dance recital card, I was duly entrapped, duly curious. I was reminded of that note Henry and I had discovered the morning after the studio door had been removed with such symbolic melodrama from its hinges: Tell the truth. Was reminded of how he’d requested I keep it to myself, and how I had even in the most haunted moments of the following weeks managed to refrain from asking myself, Why? Why would the simple petition to Tell the truth prompt him to ask of me a complicitous vow of silence? Willa and Henry, I’d now become convinced, had been involved. How involved, I wasn’t sure. Whether or not Edmé knew, again I wasn’t sure. But either way, Tate had poured gas over the flames of my suspicion that evening, and by the time I left, my confusions about his hatred for my uncle were heightened, even as my certainty of his wickedness became clearer. That Graham Tate was at least wicked I might have known before I parked the shabby jeep in his immaculate driveway, there before his impressive stone house with its many chimneys and lighted walkway to the grand portico. Just how wicked, and what that wickedness was capable of producing, were as yet unknown.

  Confusion, in fact, surmounted confusion. What had Tate said to me that night? For one, it was what he didn’t say: how he didn’t reveal to me just why or how he knew every last move, it seemed, that I had made since my arrival at Ash Creek. I asked. He smiled only, and continued with something else. The look in his eye was as if to say to me, What? do you think I wouldn’t know your various doings? Why would I fail to observe you, even when you thought that you weren’t being watched? What would give you the right to plunk yourself down into my little world and move about unseen? Green as I was with inexperience, such questions—obscure to me but obvious to him—had never encumbered me. After all, how would a rambler know about such things as the inalienable rights of the propertied and rich, or the exemptions from law or rules or simple good manners (like allowing me my privacy) that the powerful naturally presume for themselves? And that he behaved like some isolationist hick at the Labor Day party—how was I to know it was only one of the many useful masks such an elaborate fellow as Tate might don on a given occasion?

  Willa was not there when I rang the bell, and Tate himself swung open the wide door to let me in. “She’s gone to town to have supper with one of her friends, sends her regrets,” he told me, as he led me down a hallway and into an impressive library lined from floor to ceiling with books. Tate said, “You like to read?”

  “You obviously do,” taking the whiskey he handed me.

  “Me, read? God, no. I don’t have the time for distractions, and books are just that, I don’t care what anybody says to the contrary. There’s nothing much in books that wouldn’t be better learned out in the real world. I like having them around, though. They give comfort of sorts.”

  “This must be your favorite room.”

  Coolly, he smiled and motioned me to sit, then sat across from me in a club chair draped with an old Navajo blanket. “That’s too bad what happened up at Ash Creek last night.”

  I pitched my head to one side, waited.

  “About Henry’s little city, whatever that was. Noah told me. Seemed like pretty gratuitous vandalism.”

  “Gratuitous in what way?”

  “Seems to me that if you want to destroy a city you’d best wait till it’s built—why fool around with toys?”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant. You meant it was calculated, that there wasn’t anything gratuitous about it, right?”

  “That’s closer to what I might have thought.”

  Tate paused, as if to take in not just what I’d said but the way I’d said it.

  I corrected myself, altogether too late, with the words, “That is, Yes, that’s what I meant.”

  His next pause seemed even more testing, throwing me more off balance, so that when Tate’s words came forth in a confident stream, I felt as if they might sweep me away.

  “Let’s cut to the chase, Grant. That’s how they say it in books, isn’t it? Little inauthentic words like that?”

  “What chase?”

  “You think I did all this, don’t you. Everything points to Tate, that’s what you’re thinking. You think I’m behind Trentas’s death and that I’m behind all the vandalism and the harassment and every other goddamn thing that’s gone on up at your uncle’s. But you’re not right, Grant.”

  I winced at the sound of my name coming from his mouth, again waited for him to continue, sensing that whatever I said would be dismissed or misconstrued or distorted. My wait wasn’t long. Tate preferred the music of his voice to any silence.

  “Tell me, Grant. What do you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Looking away as if speaking to someone else, he said, “Answers my question right there, doesn’t it,” before turning back to me with his great hands folded together into a powerful fist as he leaned forward and continued: “You a slacker, Grant? I think that’s the word your generation uses for it, slacker. We had other terms for it, less appealing than slacker.”

  “I teach English to foreign diplomats’ kids, do
translation work, things like that. Nothing that has much use here, but overseas—”

  “You don’t have a job.”

  “Well, no,” I admitted.

  “You want one?”

  “So much for cutting to the chase,” under my breath.

  “I always got work for a man who’s willing to work.”

  “I’m fine for the moment, thank you,” amazed he could move so quickly from accusation to bribery.

  “If you intend to stay on here, since this isn’t overseas, you might want eventually to bring home some income. Keep it in mind, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Nonplussed, I managed to thank him again, then said, “About what you mentioned before? About what’s been going on up at Ash Creek?”

  “Yes, yes. That’s why you’re here. Well, like I say, you believe that Giovanni Trentas was murdered, and I bet you want to blame it on me, don’t you. So I gather from my friends. Is this a valid analysis of your point of view?”

  Now was the first time I really looked at Tate, truly saw him. During that hour I passed in his company on Labor Day, dining al fresco beneath a flawless sky, my thoughts had swirled from having just met Helen Trentas. Now I noted how arctic blue were his irises, how vast and furrowed his forehead, how straight was his nose. He was a ruggedly handsome man with stern mouth and ruddy pocked complexion, and with angular athletic shoulders to match those great square hands. His black sweater set off the silvering hair, whose length and unruliness belied his unambiguous love of order. The trappings of success—his thick tweed trousers, surely tailor made, and polished calf boots, and the heavy silver and gold wrist-watch with its several dials that would give him notification of phases of the moon and international dates and Christ knows what else besides—he wore with the ease of someone born to such luxurious trinketry and fine apparel. But they were there, the signs of the struggle as well as the scars of success: the sunkenness of those icy eyes and the puffy flesh that collected beneath them surely were the residue of thousands of nights worrying, like Hawthorne’s Midas, about assets, and the softening of the jaw and curl of the lip suggested to me the consequences of prosperity. Moreover, the ambitious, nervous boy he must have been, once, showed, I swear, in the wince he made in the wake of my silence.

  “Well?” he was saying. “Is it or is it not?”

  “You expect me to deny it, don’t you.”

  “I don’t have any expectations.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, since you seem to know everything else around here. If you weren’t behind it”—couldn’t bring myself to say the words death or murder, not here, not sitting alone with him right before me—“then, well, who was?”

  “No one was behind anything, of course.”

  “So Helen’s insane?” “I haven’t heard Helen accuse me of anything. And you haven’t heard me accuse her of anything, either. This is why I’m beginning to get a little cross with you, Grant. You seem to like accusing people of things they haven’t done. Not a good personality trait.” Tate smiled, “You throw darts?”

  “What?”

  “Look here,” as he rose and I followed him to a room furnished once more with trappings of privilege—the vast green baize of the antique billiard table, the vintage movie posters in frames, and so forth. “Wonderful sport, darts. How much simpler can it get? You pitch a weighted object with a sharp tip in the air, and you either hit the bull’s-eye, or you don’t. You win or you lose, period. I like that,” and he handed me a clutch of darts. “After you.”

  “I didn’t really come to play darts, Mr. Tate.”

  “For chrissakes, ease up, Grant. Can’t you do two things at once? We’re talking, aren’t we? Go on, let’s see you hit that bull’s-eye.”

  “What makes you think I can’t?”

  He laughed. “But I know you can. Otherwise I’d never have asked you in here to play. What fun would there be in that?”

  Turning to face the circular corkboard with its concentric rings of red and green, its clock-face bands radiating out, and the small round plug at the center, I said, “And Margery’s crazy, too?” as I squinted, held one dart aloft, sent it flying, watched it punch the target close to its heart but drop to the floor, the tip not having penetrated the cork face deeply enough to stay.

  “You’ve got to put more energy into it than that,” Tate said, unnecessarily. “See, there you go again with accusations. I’m not saying they’re crazy. I’m saying they’re mistaken. Altogether different, being mad and being mistaken. Nothing wrong with being mistaken, unless you hurt others by retailing your mistake all over the place. And I’ll tell you something else. It isn’t something I really planned on saying, but since you want to push”—and here he introduced the idea that if Trentas was murdered, what made me think he, Tate, was the only one interested in Giovanni’s permanent silence? Did I think I really knew my uncle that well? “None of us knows anybody as well as we think we do,” he said. I listened with combined disbelief and fear as Tate suggested Henry himself might not stand so utterly innocent of any responsibility in the death of his best friend. “Remove just one little letter from the word friend and you have fiend,” he leered, then—seeing my discomposure—said, “Give another toss, why don’t you.”

  I launched the other darts, stepped aside for Tate to take his turn. Naturally, he placed two near center and the third on the bull’s-eye. I didn’t congratulate him, but retrieved the darts, including mine that lay on the floor. We threw several more sets, and the results were about the same each time. “All kinds of variations you can play,” he was rattling on. “Sudden Death, Killer, Shanghai. An ancient sport, damn good sport.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You know, Willa adored your friend Trentas, and that fact alone exculpates me, or should, because I myself would never in a million years do anything that would hurt my wife. You hear me, Grant? You been listening?”

  His tone had changed radically through those last words. Our game was over.

  “Clear as day,” and handed him the darts.

  He glanced at his watch. “How’d it get so late?” though of course it was not late.

  “Well, thank you for the drink,” I said.

  As he led me out through the library, my eye caught on something I hadn’t noticed there before. A surveyor’s map lay unfurled on the desk, edges pinned flat by several of Tate’s unread books. Unthinking, impulsive, I stopped to look at the pale-blue surface of the map, and was seized by what was before me. The territory encompassing all the acreage from the county road up into the valley formerly owned by Lewis and, yes, continuing up through Ash Creek and the gorge north, all the way to state lands above, was depicted on the map. That this would be of interest to Tate, who I assumed had just gone into contract with David Lewis, was not what startled me, of course. Nor, really, should I have been shocked by what I did observe. I was, however. Not only was David Lewis’s name absent on this map, replaced by the surveyor’s legend Lands of Tate Trust, but Ash Creek was absent as well. The entirety of the tract depicted carried that legend, in fact. I knew but didn’t quite know what it meant. When I glanced up from the map, I found Tate standing beside me, unfazed, expressionless. I said, “What kind of monster are you?”

  “You can’t fault a man for dreaming,” and in the foyer he gave me my jacket and pointed at the bandage on my left palm. “I’ve been meaning to ask, Grant. What happened there? Looks like you took quite a fall.”

  “It’s nothing,” I managed; all I wanted was out.

  “Maybe you ought to be more careful about where you’re going.”

  Driving the switchbacks down the pass from the hillside aerie, lighting a cigarette with my injured but free hand, I grew furious with myself for having agreed to meet with Tate. How ridiculous of me to think he would offer anything other than lies and flamboyant deflections. His tender assertion that he would never do anything that would hurt his wife rang hollow as a cracked bell, not to mention his factitious concern about my hand. A
bove all, the map, which Tate must have laid out for me to see—or, even worse, had left on the desk in complete disregard of whether I saw it or not, utter indifference—this map focused my impotence, my helplessness. Tate was not a man on whose shoulders a pair of angel wings looked very good; but neither was I. Are the greedy and vengeful any better than the inept and traitorous? And I was traitorous—wasn’t I?—because I had no intention of telling anyone about this map. How could I tell, even if I wanted to? What was I supposed to do, go narrate to Henry that during a pleasant game of darts, Tate shared his covetous dreams with me? Not hardly. Grant, what a fool you are, I thought. The lights in the valley below were sparse, and burned like the reflections of the brightest of the stars above, so that for one moment I experienced the sensation of being in space, surrounded by cold fiery stars. As I descended toward town—my left hand, the injured one, lay in my lap—I thought back over what had happened just the night before, and how I’d come by this painful bruise. I wondered, was there any way on earth that Tate hadn’t known exactly what had transpired up at Ash Creek? or, more to the point, who was there, last night, armed with a crowbar and either rancor or a twisted sense of humor?

  There had been the pounding on the roof that awoke me from my sleep. There had been soon afterward voices in the hall, which I recognized as those of Henry and Edmé. Then there had been a brief silence followed by half a dozen rapid jolting whacks. Never had I heard my aunt Edmé scream before, but now I heard her scream. As if by rote, I’d turned off my lamp and sat unmoving in the blackness, convinced this was a nightmare. Quiet then for another interval, in which I found myself counting out the seconds—one pause, two pause, three pause, four—and yes, there’d been more hammering, lashing hard with metal—surely that was a tire iron—on metal. And now I was up, too, out into the dark hall, and downstairs, hearing the hoarse whispers of my uncle and aunt, as the pummeling echoed down through the walls and window glass. Somehow, I had dressed in the interim, had pulled on sweater, pants, shoes without socks, and as I rushed past them, silhouetted in the pale light that gave through the windows from the tentative sky outside, I did whisper to my uncle, “Don’t shoot,” as I bounded onto the porch and noisily marched the length of veranda toward the rise behind the house. “Who’s there?” I shouted in a voice so hostile it seemed like someone else’s, as I stomped along, and “Get down off there—come on, you son of a bitch.”