Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  Tate had agreed to this: wealthy wife over blood heir. But he never made any real peace with it, not then, not now. He agreed, knowing that one day Henry Fulton would have to pay for his intimacy and betrayal—if possible, in some way so that Willa could not reasonably fault him. And, of course, she could never reasonably fault him for pursuing his avocation as a businessman. Therefore, if Ash Creek was the necessary piece in a larger puzzle he needed to assemble for development, for some kind of resort, or to become, say, part of a land trust that would one day be given away in order to keep it out of everyone’s hands, though emblazoned for time immemorial with his own name, then Willa would have no right (or ability, finally) to criticize such a venture. With patience, with time, Tate would exorcise Henry from his own family grounds. Tate’s name would have to serve as his sole heir. That would be sufficient, or nearly so. But though he might have been willing to help Helen, in clandestine ways, and look out a little for her financially— she was, after all, Willa’s daughter—he was not prepared to suffer the shame, as he saw it, of what the town would then know: that he, Graham Tate, was Willa’s second choice.

  Neither did Henry want to have so many years of difficult, tentative harmony thrown into discord by Giovanni’s proposal. And this is where the most unhappy component of what I came to learn during my stay at Ash Creek would eventually rise into view.

  As I slipped the torn fragment of Giovanni’s account into my pocket, a phrase that Milland used back at the bar came to mind. Sometime there’s things for some people to know and for other people not to. How much of our lives is spent, I marveled as I glanced over to see Helen working her way feverishly through a file, sorting out for ourselves what to say and what to hide. It was as if I were metamorphosing into a repository for everything people wanted no one to know. As if the night had a volition of its own now. Why had Helen told me, on the way over from the Clair, that story about Tate and Milland and Henry, if not intuitively to pry their secrets free?

  I imagined Helen’s surprise that quiet evening, after ten, she’d said, home alone, when there was a knock at the door of her cottage. She’d taken to spending more and more time by herself those days and nights after Giovanni had been laid to rest, not that she’d ever been very sociable. She might have known it wasn’t the healthiest response, to mourn, hidden from the world. But it was everything she could do in the wake of what she saw as obstruction and repression among those around her, all she could manage since she believed herself to be alone anyway, given no one seemed to lend the same credence to the possibility that Giovanni’s death was unnatural. The knock at the door was gentle. She might even have thought it was the wind disturbing branches of a tree, thus imitating the sound of someone knocking, if it had not happened again, this time somewhat more insistent.

  Graham Tate smiled at her, face bathed in the pale porch light, and she must have looked as startled as she felt, because she would remember later, when she finally told me what Tate said that night, her words.

  —What’re you doing here? she asked.

  “Not a very nice way to greet somebody at the door,” she’d tell me, with an acerbic laugh.

  “Not very,” I’d agree. “So what did he say?”

  —You have a minute? I’ve got something I want to tell you I think you’d find interesting.

  She waited for him to continue, then realized he meant for her to invite him in, so she did. Across the threshold he walked, and sat himself down, laying his hat on the table before him.

  —Well? she said, arms crossed, eyes undoubtedly darkening. —What brings you here in the middle of the night?

  Tate smiled. —This is hardly what you’d call the middle of the night, Helen. How come you hate me, anyway? You have no reason to hate me. Quite the opposite. I’m worried about you.

  Helen didn’t speak, didn’t move.

  —Milland told me something this afternoon. Told me something interesting.

  —What did Milland possibly have to say that was interesting?

  —You scoff, but Milland’s a good man. He doesn’t mean harm. He’s hardworking and honest.

  —He doesn’t have enough intelligence to be dishonest.

  —You underestimate people, Helen. You overestimate and underestimate. It’s probably your greatest fault.

  —Say what you’ve come to say, why don’t you?

  —Milland told me he was up at Ash Creek a couple of days before they found your father. Said Trentas had invited him up to hunt with him, and that he took up into the gorge on the east side of the creek where that studio of Henry’s is.

  Tate paused.

  —And? said Helen.

  —Nothing much, really. He just said Henry saw him walking up into the gorge with his pack and gun and all, but that he never did mention it to Noah when Noah came around asking Henry if he’d seen anybody up there.

  —I don’t see the point.

  —Milland said Henry saw him, looked him right in the eye, said he looked like he saw a ghost but just turned his back. Didn’t go out and ask Milland what he was doing, or anything. Just turned his back like that.

  —Are you telling me Milland had something to do with my father’s death?

  —No, not that. Milland said he started up into the gorge and kept hearing somebody tailing him, and so he got spooked and doubled back down, and never did join up with Trentas. —Noah knows all this?

  —Of course. Doesn’t change anything, not really. Except we found it interesting that Henry never mentioned Milland was there. Makes you kind of think Henry has something to hide, doesn’t it?

  —That’s all? You came all the way over here to tell me that?

  —Willa says you’ve been meaning to go up to Ash Creek and get some of Giovanni’s effects out of that cabin of his. Why not use it as a chance to drop in and have a few words with Henry about all this? Just some friendly advice, for what it’s worth.

  —I’m tired, Helen demurred.

  —I’ll just be going, then. Glad we had this chance to talk.

  With that, Tate reached out his hand to place on her shoulder, but she jerked away before he was able to touch her. He may not have been able to bond with her, as such, but left knowing, Helen’s indifferent facade to the contrary, that he had planted the worm in the rose. She withdrew for several days even more than she had in months gone by. She didn’t leave home, didn’t telephone anyone, was paralyzed by the ideas which had taken up residence in her mind.

  Then, as she went on to tell me, one warm summery late-July morning a year ago, she finally had gathered her strength and made the drive up to Ash Creek. Whether she’d have the temerity to confront Henry with Tate’s questionable revelations she didn’t know, but she understood the time had come for her to retrieve the remnants from Giovanni’s hut—Sam the eagle he’d kept there, for instance, among other belongings—and so she drove across the broad valley, along the creek road, and parked by the horsegate, as she often had in the past. She was surprised to discover the padlock on the cabin door, and realized that because of it she had no choice but to walk up to the house and ask for the key. Her relief at finding Edmé there rather than Henry was great, as she remembered, but the gratitude would not last for long. Edmé asked Helen if she wanted any help, and Helen had said no, that she thought shed like to be alone, so she strolled back down and across the creek, and opened the door to the cabin.

  Sam the eagle was there, in his corner perch. Some other things were right where Helen had seen them last, back when Giovanni was still alive. But something was different; she sensed it immediately on entering the room. She went about her business, carting things across the ramshackle bridge over to her car, then returning. She decided to leave most of it, as Edmé’d told her everything was hers to have whenever she wanted—Edmé having forgotten, perhaps, that Giovanni’s box was upstairs in the house, tucked away in her own chest of drawers. And so it wasn’t until she went back to re-lock the door that she found a shoe, a right shoe with a tarnished buckl
e, the old shoe which had been missing the day her father was found in the gorge, placed neatly under the cot—almost as if Giovanni himself had left it there upon retiring for the night.

  Not a week passed before the night visits at Ash Creek began.

  “Look at you,” I now said, seeing that Helen had made herself comfortable in Tate’s leather chair, going through the records he held on Milland. “Like you own the place.” Intent on something she had discovered, she neither answered nor even glanced up. For myself, feeling queasy, I wanted to put Giovanni’s file away, but then I saw it, buried deeper among the papers, and couldn’t resist—this unexpected photocopy of a birth certificate. Helen Richardson’s birth certificate, with Willa’s name given as the baby’s mother, but no listing for a father. How was it possible Helen didn’t know this?

  My fingers froze in the damp room, as I recalled that dance recital card in Giovanni’s box. Helen’s birth date, two days before Christmas 1965. That dance recital, March twenty-third, I remembered, and made the inevitable nine-month count in my head, as I closed and reinserted the telling folder where it belonged.

  Nine months down to the day. Impossible, I thought, and when Helen glanced up finally and asked, “Find something?” an irrevocable deceit, my “No, nothing,” was the best I could manage. All I wanted now was to get out of this place before someone down in the street happened to glance up and notice lights and movement in the bank building office, but when I asked Helen, “How about you?” she said, “Look at this.”

  At first, I didn’t get the point. Cash receipt made out to Milland Daiches in the amount of a thousand dollars, 24 Aug 92. “So what?”

  “Don’t you get it?” I guess not.

  “Milland Daiches murdered my father,” Helen said, in a voice so calm there was no connecting the meaning with the speaker. “Daiches and Tate.”

  “Based on this? Sorry, Helen, but that’s ridiculous. Nobody makes out receipts for murder contracts. Let’s talk outside, why don’t we. I think we ought to go.”

  “Can’t believe it,” she whispered to herself as she folded the receipt and slipped it into her pocket. Standing now, she carried the file to the cabinet, but then changed her mind and returned to the desk, where she laid out the folder, open to the place where the receipt had been, right at the center of Tate’s writing pad.

  “Put it back, Helen.”

  “This is better,” and she turned off the light.

  We left without having pushed the file cabinet door closed. Helen’s further idea of a signature. The drive back to her cottage was silent. She didn’t ask me to come in, which was fine, as I myself wanted to be alone. We kissed good night and I drove away, exhausted to the point that the world beyond the window seemed hallucinatory. Low running clouds were violet, the highway had a postapocalyptic emptiness about it. The earth, it seemed to me, was wholly tenanted by shades, leased by obscurities, franchised by deception.

  All I wanted was to be back home, quiet in the quiet recesses of Giovanni’s dwelling, where I would wed two halves of an old piece of paper that had been torn in two; for I, like Helen, had stolen from Tate. Where also, before I fell asleep, I would be appalled by the fear he must have felt, here in this very bed, when he returned to the little cabin one night and found his record of the meeting with Henry ripped down its center. The ceremonial nature of the gesture, leaving him half his story, must surely have made him suspect he was in danger for what he knew, and what he wanted for Helen. Did he guess that Tate had been behind the vandalism—rage renewed perhaps at a barren marriage, or at the threat of disclosure of truths Tate’s pride would have him keep forever buried—or did he sense his best friend had turned against him? I hope it was the former, since my now having found the missing half at Tate’s proved it so, at least to me. But I can easily imagine Giovanni suspected the latter, and for that reason would entrust Edmé with this rebus of what he knew.

  Either way, it must have been on that desperate night the idea to shelter his memoirs, to house and protect his suspicions within a fragile wooden cigar box, was born.

  A face was at the window—and Jacob’s ladders of sunlight spiriting down into the curtainless room—as I awakened into a morning that was already more or less finished, as burnt out as I now felt. At first, I didn’t recognize this face, which peered in at me, unmistakable as it was, with its purposeful frown, hard blue eyes, sunken cheeks, flinty edges. The head disappeared from the window as the man made his way around through the hedges of grass to the door. The moment I was able to connect a name to that face, the name Noah Daiches, I understood why he was here—though it seemed too quick for Tate to have discovered Helen’s impudent signature, called in Noah, and deduced that I had something to do with last night’s break-in. Since I’d slept in my clothes, I had no need to get dressed. I opened the door and asked him in.

  “You’re living down here now, Henry tells me. Independence over comfort, eh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I remember when Trentas used to live here.”

  I lit a cigarette, would have offered him one but saw that he was already smoking one he’d rolled—oh, yes, Papiers Mais, no doubt, thinking how canny Giovanni had been to add some classifying element, some thing that identified each of those who he sensed had played and would play a part in the resolution (is that the right word?) of his challenge to Henry, Tate, Willa, regarding Helen. It was then, as I rekindled the fire in the cast-iron stove, having offered Noah a cup of instant coffee, that I experienced what was nothing less than an epiphany about Giovanni’s box. Of course, of course, I thought. Those papiers—Papiers Mais, and the Prince Alberts— actually meant the Daiches brothers, and the typed sheet of paper which bore those columns of numbers accruing into millions must surely have meant Tate, even as the little black leather change purse holding its ten lire, two wartime pennies minted in alloy, and all those pennies that I would wager numbered forty-seven—ten lire for ten years in Italy, two tin cents for his two war years abroad, and one penny for each of the years he had left to him—meant Giovanni Trentas. But what did those meanings mean?

  Noah interrupted my streaming epiphany by saying he had a couple of questions he’d like to ask me.

  “Ask away,” was how I responded, effecting innocent cheerfulness with probable mixed results.

  “I know you were out with Helen last night, of course, having seen you at the Clair, but I’m wondering where you went after you left there. You mind telling me?”

  “We went back to her place.”

  “Went back there directly?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  It wasn’t too bald an attempt, I hoped, to get him to reveal whether or not he’d already spoken with Helen, so that I might know if I was in the midst of contradicting her account of the same events.

  Noah wasn’t going for it, however, obvious or not. His face quite unmoved and unmoving, he said, “Because I’m asking you.”

  “We went back to her place, then I came home.”

  I thought to ask him what this was all about, but kept quiet instead, to see what he would reveal on his own. Noah was far too shrewd not to see through such bosh from the likes of me.

  “Came straight home, did you?”

  “Straight home.”

  “All right,” he said. “Thanks,” and stepped toward the door.

  “Don’t you want that coffee? This water will be boiling any minute now.”

  “I’m fine. Sorry to bother you.”

  After he’d crossed the rotted threshold and was outside again, I changed my mind about not asking Noah the purpose of his visit. After all, wouldn’t it have been peculiar of me not to ask? I stepped outside, barefoot, called his name, and asked boldly as I could manage, “Hey, what’s this all about?”

  Noah half turned round, his angular silhouette against the pale autumnal foliage along the creek beyond him. “You think I believe you don’t know? You think a sorry old unsophisticate like Noah just don’t get
it, is that what you think, Grant?”

  “I’m lost.” Although I felt increasingly uncomfortable about these homely lies of mine, this particular pronouncement, which came forth in something of a raspy whisper, had an element of truth about it. So much so that I repeated myself, spoke up: “I’m lost.”

  “That I believe,” he said. “But if you’re lost you might want to spend a little time thinking about getting yourself unlost, before you go straying any deeper into the dark than you already have.”

  Nonchalant, even serene, he turned away, as my mind pin-wheeled and fingers thoughtlessly tugged at the collar of my rumpled shirt, which had been dampened by night sweats. My feet were too cold against the new October ground for me to remain there watching Noah Daiches recede into the distance down the hill, where he crossed the broken bridge. My mouth was dry, eyes ached. He was unarguably right, Noah was, as right as he could be. No matter what his own involvement with Tate might have been, or not, no matter if I’d just contradicted word for word what he earlier extracted from Helen, and no matter what earnest, even virtuous motives might lie behind my activities—Noah was correct. I was lost and had better find my way out of this abstracted lostness, but quick. The sun had a bony pall to it that morning, I thought, those Jacob’s ladders having transformed into glowing spines of light, as I returned to the cabin, cursing myself for not having come up with better responses to his simple skepticisms. Noah wanted to like me; he with his love of lacrosse and I with my hatred for all sports—we were mates of sorts. I sensed it the evening when we drank together at the St. Clair. And now I had let him down.