“I just missed you this morning at the stables. They said you were talking with Willa.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Grant—you want some tea?”
“Whisky, more like,” I said.
She filled two glasses neat with Scotch whiskey, handed me one, then said, “Let’s run away to Rome.”
“Anywhere but Rome.”
“I don’t care where, just away.”
“Cliché. I’m naive and you manufacture clichés—quite a pair.”
Hours later, when we sat at the St. Clair together, drinking with the fervor of sailors on brief leave, I confessed. I told her I had looked at photographs in her desk drawer. Not in the closet, I assured her, nor elsewhere in the house. I couldn’t fess up to seeing the Tate documents, so it was a quasi-confession, but still, both of us were surprised by the burst of honesty. And rather than chide me, she said, “You’re a decent guy, Grant.”
“Not that decent.”
She said, “Decent enough.”
We were in a booth, sitting close side by side, holding hands, sometimes kissing. This was our coming out, I supposed, and we didn’t have to wait long before Noah and Milland Daiches walked in together, saw us, then sat at the bar, heads inclined with fraternal familiarity, speaking or softly laughing, bemused or amused, I couldn’t tell which. Helen, rather than growing tacit or shy, became even more animated than before. “Tell me about the photos, burglar. What did you learn about me?”
“That you were in Italy, and stop calling me burglar.”
“Visiting cousins and second cousins and twelfth cousins twice removed, yes. What else?”
“What else?” I echoed. “Nothing really. It’s embarrassing to talk about it. There was a photo of you when you were young at one of the Labor Day feasts.” I wanted to ask about the woman with the gaucho hat, but when we glanced up Milland Daiches was standing there. “Buy you two a round?”
“No, thanks,” Helen said at the same time I said, “Thanks.”
Milland sat across from us, having shouted the word “Round” to the bartender, and slurred, “Rotten out, boy. Good night for bein’ inside with friends. Looks like we all got the same idea. Helen’s got herself a boyfriend, looks like.”
“Shut up, Milland.”
“So now, Grant. Mr. Tate says you’ll be comin’ to work with us.” It was apparent Milland had already indulged before he and his brother came to the Clair.
“Is that true?” Helen turned to me, horrified.
“He offered me work. I didn’t take him up on it.”
“You will, though. Tha’s what Tate says.”
Milland thanked the man who brought over the drinks clutched together in both hands. After he left, I said as calmly as I could, “If that’s what Tate says, then you can be sure I won’t.”
“We’ll see, boy. Tate says you’re broke, says he’d pay better than anybody else around here. Says you will.”
Helen said, “Milland, you heard Grant. If he doesn’t want to work for Tate, he isn’t going to.”
“First of all, I’m not broke,” I lied. “And second, how would Tate know whether I was broke or not, anyway?”
“He’s smart, Mr. Tate. Knows things.”
We’ve all had too much to drink, I thought. “What else’s he know about me?”
“Tate prob’ly knows the way your asshole’s put in.”
“You’re an idiot, Milland,” Helen said with disarming evenness.
Not looking at her, he muttered, “You don’ even know how smart I am.”
“Oh yeah? What makes you so smart?”
“Nothin’ you’d want to know,” he said, still smirking at me rather than Helen.
“What sort of work you guys do, anyway?” I asked.
“Whatever needs to be got done.”
“Let me rephrase. What is it exactly that needs to get done around here that you boys do? Just say, like, if I went to work for Tate, what sort of work would I be doing?”
“Well”—drawn out long, Milland’s attempt to create suspense— “next week we gonna be workin’ up by you people, widenin’ out that road to Lewis. Want to get that done afore the snow flies.”
Helen interjected, “What did you mean by that before?”
“Huh?”
“When you said nothing I’d want to know is what makes you so smart. What did you mean when you said that?”
“Didn’t mean nothin’,” he smiled.
Milland did truly seem half-witted, I thought, though he had managed to provoke in me precisely the dismay he must have intended, with his unreluctant comment about the creek road. Tate was, if nothing else, blatant in his prideful display of power and ascension. Was he really going to drive his crew right up to Ash Creek’s gate? Yes, I answered my own question; why not? Did it have to do with land and development and all that? Yes, again, I thought; but that must have been a small convenient element in his larger purpose, which I finally began to understand as having much more to do with rivalry, jealousy, personal revenge, the usual human stuff, the pitiable motives that fester at the unquiet center of nearly all folly. Wars have been waged over such matters. Murders have been committed over much lesser disputes.
Milland was saying, “Sometime there’s things for some people to know and for other people not to, and that’s all.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You wanna know what I’m talkin’ about?”
This was more or less shouted at Helen, though he continued to look at me. Milland was a touch walleyed, irises chaste brown but whites ambered by time, and drink.
And then Noah was suddenly there with us, saying hello to all, sitting beside Milland, who became instantly silent, even childishly sullen, I might have thought, contemptuous—but of whom, and why? Noah asked how I’d been, nodded to Helen, and inquired about my aunt and uncle. “I think Henry ought to let me come up there, spend a couple of nights maybe in that studio of his, see if we can’t bring this business to an end.”
“I doubt Henry’d ever go along with anything like that,” I said, watching Milland, just as he’d watched me while speaking to Helen; his mood had shifted so abruptly from the high spiritedness of his cryptic intimidations to what now seemed to be muted ire. Fascinating, even a little frightening. Noah had his arm over his brother’s shoulder, I noticed. This was not the first time the older brother had been forced to jump in and save the younger from making an outrageous mistake, I thought. It wasn’t difficult to imagine them as a pair of kids, their faces hewn and hard even in their youth, nor to draw a mental picture of the elder with his arm cast over the shoulder of adolescent Milland, steering him off the field, say, where a group of tough boys had gathered to watch a fistfight between the Daiches boy and some youngster who was about to cream him with a flurry of knuckles for having opened his big mouth, said something that wasn’t supposed to be said. Even then, Milland must have been a bit like this, I believed. Such a fantasy made me like Noah a little more than I already did. But also made Milland more murky to me— murky, ambiguous, unintelligible—than ever. What was he capable of, this man? Besides, I didn’t like the way he leered at Helen.
Noah and Helen exchanged a few words, nothing I could hear, as my head was saturated not only by too many drinks but, now, with one overwhelming idea. Not an idea that was new to me this evening, but one which, in the wake of Milland’s provocations, had become wholly compelling. When Noah said it was nice to see both of us, and that he and Milland would leave us alone—he turned to Milland, shook him a couple of times as if to awaken him from a coma, and said, “These two have better things to do than sit here talking with a couple old dogs like us”—I reached over and shook his hand, then extended my hand to Milland, too, though he rose and left without having noticed. They had hardly withdrawn from the booth before I whispered to Helen, “You think I’m a burglar, well, I got an idea that’d prove you right.”
Helen looked at me with eyes that sugge
sted she was returning from another world altogether. I was reminded of the first day I met her, when she’d stared at the sky while we were sitting in the cemetery. Just as I did then, I kissed her, and afterward she asked me what was I talking about.
“Tate’s office,” I said. “He’s arrogant enough to have a bad security system.”
“How d’you know?”
“I happened to look, don’t know why. Was up there, and you see, I happened to look around on the way out. Wasn’t sure why then, and now I know why. There’s something up there in a file, I just know it. I don’t like it when people take it upon themselves to know my private business, and seems to me, best way to respond?—you just know their private business right back at them.”
Helen had neither agreed nor disagreed, but we paid for our first few rounds, before Milland had joined us, with his largesse and torments, and left the glowy, liquorish but dry Clair for the night that was quite the opposite: black, sobering, and drenching with sleet. When I failed to make the turn at the road that would take us back to Helen’s house, and continued instead toward town, toward the bank building at its center and Graham Tate’s offices there, Helen did not disapprove or protest, but held my free hand tight as the headlamps illuminated numberless pathways of frozen rain. What’s to lose? I thought, spurred on to continue in the reckless directions of the drunken evening. As we drove, Helen told me a story about Milland and Tate and my uncle, which made me realize that whether we wanted to do this or not, it was unavoidable and necessary.
When we reached the outskirts of town, saw the lights along the main street blurred by the torrents of rain, the perception came upon me in a flash, the realization that I, too, had become a night visitor. I, who used to be so devoted to the bells ringing the noon angelus in Rome, had become a midnight man.
Intuition is the most mysterious art. Even now I cannot say for sure that intuition was really what motivated me, compelled both of us, the night of the black rain, to coerce the door that kept Graham Tate’s world safe from that of others. Arm in arm, unsteadily we climbed the dim stairway of the bank building, footsteps resounding and clothes dripping wet. I wasn’t altogether surprised when Helen produced a credit card and slid it down between frame and door until the bolt eased away and we were inside Tate’s office. No alarm or siren sounded, no security lights flashed in our eyes. As we moved into the dark rooms, whose furniture was palely illuminated from the streetlamps outdoors, we began to laugh and talk to one another, still drunken, somewhat astonished by where we were and what we were up to.
“His files are in here, I think,” Helen said, as wind thrashed against the windows of Tate’s inner sanctum, facing the main street. I followed her silhouette, and noticed how beads of rain ran in swift descending patterns down the great panes of glass beyond her, back-lit by neon and a steady apricot light from the street.
The shadowy raindrops projected their impressions on the wall opposite, where legal file cabinets stood in a row. “I’ll look under Daiches,” said Helen, who surprised me by turning on a desk lamp, a gooseneck with green shade on a low brass stand. “You look under Trentas, why don’t you.”
I pulled open the heavy drawer, wondering how so many files could accumulate with respect to business in such a small burg as this, unnerved by the fact that these cabinets bore no locks and my fingers picked their way through alphabetical files which of course Tate would not want me, or anyone, to read. Should we have been wearing gloves? Too late now. Helen had already pulled a file and was riffling through sheets of paper under the lamp behind me, when I found what I was searching for. I pulled the manila folder marked Trentas, Giov./H. from the drawer and paused, took a breath, before opening it.
Intuition had led us up the stairs and inside—but never would I have dared guess at the images and scenes that would spring from words on the few scraps of paper I now found. Nor would I have been able to foresee that one of the most breathtaking of conjurings came from the most humble of these fragments. A shred, a tatter, just half a leaf of foolscap, there at the front of the file: and from it, this torn scrap, what a scene arose in my imagination. Ripped down the middle from top to bottom, only the left-hand side of the piece of paper was here, held between my quivering fingertips. The other half, I recalled, was at the bottom of Giovanni’s box, where I’d stuck it, assuming so wrongly that it’d had no meaning, having given up weeks ago on interpreting the half-phrases and divided words that were split along the serrated edge where Tate—or someone close to him, for here it was in his file cabinet—had torn the sheet in two. While I held it in the dim light, it seemed as if both halves became whole again in my suddenly focused gaze, so obsessively in weeks past had I studied that remnant in the box before relegating it to the bottom of the heap.
What this was, what these were, had been written by Giovanni himself in a diminutive script, in ink. The account of a meeting, a shorthand digest. I deciphered, and as I did, words and letters became phrases in my head, and phrases soon rose into figures—the figures of Giovanni Trentas and my uncle, on a morning half a decade ago. Late spring, I read, and thought of spring, when the world was blossoming and soft clouds decorated the lovely blue dome over their mountain, over the valley and the town, over the gorge and creek and house where Henry and Edmé lived. Mid-May, in fact, and late morning.
A man, an old friend, someone whom Henry trusts above every other friend he’s ever had, walks up the rise from the horsegate, reconsiders, doubles back down to the bridge by the cabin where I now live, hikes the green muddy field to the studio. He knocks on the plank door, and a familiar voice asks, —Who is it? and he says, —It’s Sam, and he is of course invited to come in. —How’s all? he’s asked, and he answers, —All right, but knows that what he has to say here, this morning, will not make the other man, my uncle, very pleased.
Earlier that same morning Giovanni had already called on Willa, his other closest friend, to let her know that despite appearances, he’d not been feeling well lately. He had always taken such care of his health, knowing that his mother died pretty young from pulmonary disease and that his family had never been long lived, but for some months he’d experienced pressures in his chest, he wasn’t sure whether heart or lungs or both, and the doctor who examined him didn’t offer an auspicious diagnosis. —You’re hardy as a horse, my uncle would have said, and Giovanni must have smiled and shaken his head from side to side, then said, —There’s no problem for the immediate future, but just for the fact of Helen’s future.
Giovanni, who pronounced the names of his daughter and best friend with his residual accent, said elen, said enry.
—What do you mean? Henry asked.
—I’ve talked to Willa, and she agrees with me it’s time the three of us sat down with Helen—
—No.
—Time has come. Time as come.
And I can see Henry, although it would be difficult to put myself in his position, impossible really, in order to feel the multifold weave and complex layering of his years of apprehension that this day, a day of generous reckoning, would finally arrive. What I see is a combination of perplexity, fear, resignation, love for his unwell friend, his betrayed wife, his estranged lover, and his hidden and unclaimed daughter, as—enveloped by some fierce will that would insist that none of them was ready for the truth yet—he implores Giovanni not to ask this of them now.
But that isn’t all, because I also see Edmé working the garden for spring planting, spading over ice-pocked soil and nipping out the first budding weeds, sorting out her rows, content in a profound way I myself have never known, utterly oblivious to what is being weighed between Henry Fulton and Giovanni Trentas across the creek. Further, I can imagine Helen Trentas, the child of three people, a radiant, skeptical, beautiful woman in her middle twenties who is devoted to the idea that Giovanni is her father and that Margery, the jackdaw crow woman, as she’d have it, had abandoned her and her father so long ago, and can imagine—as Henry is now explaining to Trentas—
that she might not ever want to know all this about her heritage.
—At a certain point, Sam, what good comes of it? She’ll wind up hating us all.
—She’ll understand.
Giovanni must have continued, too, gone on to explain that whether Willa’s husband likes it or not, and whether Willa’s family likes it or not, Helen Trentas should someday be the rightful heir to several estates, not the least of which would be Henry’s own.
—Back when we were young, secrets were more important than anything. They had good cause. I believed in it, and I still do. But look at us, Henry. We’re old now. We wanted to save one marriage and make another possible, to protect the girl. My life has been better with Helen in it. In the end, it worked out. What’s left to do is put Helen’s good above our own.
—You spoke with Willa.
—She will do it.
—And Tate? What does he think?
Trentas was always plainspoken, and said, —He doesn’t want anything to do with it. But Willa said she would, with or without his blessing. It’s up to you.
—Willa may be ready but I’m not, my uncle said, with finality.
—Think about it, Henry. I don’t say do it tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. But the time is coming when we’ve got to bring Helen in on her own life. Trying to protect her, we manage just to hurt her. You know this is the only fair way.
These words spoken quietly, and having finished saying what he came to say, he shook his friend’s hand, left the studio, then undoubtedly crossing Ash Creek to join Edmé, exchanging comments about what kind of weather they might expect this summer, that sort of thing, before making his way back down to the horsegate to return home.
How strange it must have felt for Henry and Tate to realize that they, who had disagreed about everything under the sun over the course of their paralleling lifetimes, finally concurred about something. Tate, who always held Henry responsible for a barren marriage, knew all too well about Willa’s difficulties in giving birth during her year in exile from the valley. He remembered that year of secrecy, which ended with her poised, proud, if despondent homecoming, and also her suddenly agreeing to marry him, so long as he would tolerate in absolute silence the fact that her secret daughter was to be adopted by Giovanni Trentas and that she would never be able to have another child, having “secondary infertility,” as her doctor put it—a terminology, not to mention disorder, that would continually gnaw at Tate, become a private canker to one who loathed the word second as much as he adored the word first. Still, he recognized Willa’s stipulations and her saying that if, in fact, he loved her and could accept these constraints, she would love him, too, and be as dedicated a wife as she could.
Giovanni's Gift Page 25