My head ached and my stomach complained. I decided to go up to the house, shower, and see if I couldn’t get something to eat. More than ever, my antics with Helen of the night just past seemed absurd and even dangerous. As I walked up the rise, it became clear that more than anything, I wanted to talk to my aunt Edmé about all this, but I couldn’t. Not without upsetting decades of secrets and uncovering God knows what other histories were best left forgotten in the process.
Henry, not Edmé, was in the kitchen. He was waiting for me, I felt, sitting at the empty table, his large hands set out before him, fingers knotted together, thumbs tapping against one another. Sunlight spilled through the windows and bounced off the burnished floor. This light was reflected in my uncle’s eyes, which gazed over at me, rather expressionlessly but with something about them that stopped me in my weary tracks. How could Edmé and Helen have missed this all these years? How could I myself not have seen it that first afternoon when Helen came walking up the very hill I’d just now climbed, full of confidence and fire and maybe just a little apprehension, too, and stared me right in the face until I had to look away?
The hazel eyes. The shared hazel eyes. Their hue and glimmer and, yes, their hauntedness, too. My uncle here before me—Helen Trentas’s father—would never be the same to me. He was different to me now, and would be different from this moment forward. He was my uncle, yes, but he was the father of the woman I made love with just yesterday, the woman into whose enigmatic past I’d agreed to search without any thought to eventualities such as this.
“What did Noah want?” he asked me.
“Is Edmé around?”
“Upstairs. What’d Noah want?”
“Wanted to know what I was doing last night.”
“And what were you doing that Noah would want to know about?”
“Nothing,” as I tried with perfect unconcern to select an apple from the bowl of fruit at the center of the table and then sat down. Everything felt so different here all of a sudden; even the apple tasted different, salty somehow, of cinnamon. I couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze. “Helen and I had a drink with him and Milland at the Clair. I took her home. I came on back here myself.”
My nose was lengthening to Pinocchio proportions. Once more I asked about Edmé—was he sure she was upstairs, because I had a question I wanted to ask.
“Remember that sign someone left on the gatepost that night a while ago, the one that said—”
“I remember.”
“What was that about? If it’s none of my business—”
“It’s not. Not really, Grant.”
“I just feel a little weird keeping secrets from Edmé.”
“Secrets aren’t there to make people feel comfortable.”
“I’d have thought that was just exactly what secrets are for, so that everybody can stay nice and comfortable and not know the truth about each other.”
“You don’t like secrets, then, do you?”
“Not particularly,” as I bit into the rock-hard apple.
“Well then, why would you lie to Noah like that? It’s one thing to tell lies to your family, or your friends, but another when you’re talking to the law.” The statement was unchallengeable because so peculiar. Before I could respond, however, Henry said in a deeper, quieter voice, “Tate called this morning. He knows what happened, and he doesn’t like it. I can’t say I do, either.”
“What happened?”
“For God sakes, Grant.” His hands broke apart, and one of them slapped the table. “What do you want from me?”
I found myself staring at the framed photograph on the wall behind Henry, a group of men working side by side on a decaying pier, taken in Sicily or perhaps Greece, island fishermen together mending their lissome nets. Edmé had managed to capture both the shiny fragility of the netting and the rough capability of all those knowing hands at work. Only one of the men had noticed they were being photographed, and as he’d apparently glanced up just when she opened the shutter, his face was a gray smear, a shadowy haze. Just behind him was a very young boy, or maybe a girl, whose delicate fingers were hard at work on repairing the net. The son or daughter of the blurred man. Edmé’s small genius was to distract this man—just him and no other—so that the photograph became not a routine illustration of picturesque villagers, seaside along their charming breakwater, but a portrait of a father’s concern, his protective vigilance, which forced him to leave aside his work for a moment—this moment, the moment caught in Edmé’s image—so as to check out this stranger, assure himself she posed no threat to his child. “I really, honestly, don’t want anything.”
“What are you doing in Tate’s office in the middle of the night, then? He thinks I put you up to it, naturally. I lied for you. I told him you were here. But he didn’t believe me any more than I believe you, Grant. Is it Helen who’s got you doing this?”
A day for vistas opening upon vistas, I thought, drawing my gaze down from the black-and-white photograph to my uncle. He was right, of course; and it only then occurred to me that Helen left her “signature” so Tate would contact Henry and Henry would talk to me and … could she be that manipulative? No, I thought. My adoration proposed I allow her every benefit of doubt. Yet Henry’s question was still there for me to answer.
I said, “I don’t want to hurt anybody. Least of all Edmé or you. But not Helen, either. I don’t know what to say. That’s about as honest as I can be, Uncle Henry.”
“We have the same objective, then, Grant,” he said, and a faint smile broke across his lips. “If I were your father, I would tell you something brilliant, no doubt. But I’m no diplomat, I’m afraid. I’m not sure what your father would say if he were here—maybe he’d be able to help us both—but as it is, I don’t have anything to offer other than that you must let people undo their own tangles—” and he made a backward nod toward the photograph, which he’d obviously noticed me staring at.
“My father would probably say, sometimes when we protect those we love, we risk becoming confused and unfocused ourselves.”
“Don’t think I’m not aware of that.”
The evocation of my father, the anniversary of whose death was coming up soon, brought us both to a point of silence. Even if Henry hadn’t mentioned him, my poor father, we two had reached the inevitable impasse.
Henry, in a voice suddenly sanguine, asked, “Don’t you want more than just an apple for lunch? Or, what is this for you, is this breakfast still? You look terrible, by the way.”
“I don’t feel so great, either.”
He got up, lifted a copper skillet down from the iron rack where it hung, and lit the gas stove. “Go wash, and when you get back down, I’ll have something ready for you. No guarantees about what. It’ll be warm, whatever it is. Fair enough?”
“Is that all we’re going to say about the other topic?”
“What more’s there to say?” and with this he offered me the most ambiguous look I’d ever seen—combining dread, hardness, love, distance—before disappearing into the pantry, where the refrigerator hummed steadily and pleasantly. I listened to the reassuring sound of it for some moments before going upstairs.
My afternoon walk into the forest above Giovanni’s hut, and my visit to the venerable cemetery on the knoll beyond, were meant to clear my head. With Hawthorne in Giovanni’s loden pocket—Edmé gave me his old ranch coat, as I had nothing appropriate for the coming season—I intended to take advantage of the day’s having turned warm. I settled myself facing south toward the great valley below, leaning against the wrought-iron fence. The sun warmed my cheek as I opened my book. I didn’t want to think about the consequences of all my choices this past month. Rather, like a child, maybe, preferred to enter Hawthorne’s fairy-tale world for a respite from considering what must surely lie ahead.
The scent of mothballs mingled with the sweet decaying odors of fall, and as I read about the three golden apples that grew in the garden of Hesperides, and the miraculous pi
tcher of Philemon and Baucis, from which you could pour endless rivers of honey-milk, my thoughts drifted away with the little breezes which finger-combed the grasses around me. The mothball smell brought Giovanni into mind, and when I closed the book, not quite willing yet to read the last story in it, one about the Chimera, I closed my eyes as well, and fell asleep.
What I dreamed seemed so real, so lived, that when I awakened an hour later the fantasy, the projective vision, seemed stronger than my solitary reality here on the knoll. We were all present, Giovanni and Helen, Tate and Willa, Henry and Edmé, my parents Maria and Matthew, in this meadow. Noah was dressed in priest’s garments, black cassock and surplice, white tippet draped around his neck, muttering in what seemed to be Latin. Milland Daiches and David Lewis stood on either side of the casket, themselves dressed in some kind of coarse cloth robes, each holding the ends of two sets of straps that were hitched under the front and back ends of the box. Willa had her arm around Helen’s shoulder, Henry and Giovanni stood side by side, as did my mother and Edmé. The lid of the box had not yet been nailed into place, and when I looked down at my hands, I discovered that in one was a clutch of long penny nails and in the other a hammer. When Noah finished, he waved his right hand over the casket, and stepped back. He looked up at me and nodded, by which I understood he meant for me to seal the box for burial.
Of course it was I who lay in the casket. I was dressed in Giovanni’s coat and a pair of black trousers. My eyes were open, but rather than eyes there were small gold apples in the sockets. My hands—which seemed rather larger than my own, more the magnitude of Henry’s—were folded across my chest. A wedding ring I recognized as my father’s glimmered on my finger. I glanced briefly over toward Helen Trentas, whose face I could not see although I knew it was she, and saw the matching band on her finger. The other me, the man who gazed down at himself, went about his business like any good sexton, arranged the pine lid over the coffin so its edges lined up properly, then began nailing it in place with disinterest.
What woke me up was the hand on my shoulder, which was my own hand, I saw, upon turning around and looking up, a little annoyed at the interruption. Several minutes must have passed before I was able to reorient myself. I didn’t know what the dream meant, if it meant anything whatever, but I didn’t like it. The sensation that had visited me in this place in the past came again—the feeling of being watched. Spooked, I got up quickly and found myself jogging across the clearing toward the trees.
That night allowed me only the most fitful sleep. No dreams, or at least none I could remember. Only recurrent images of Rome—of cats walking the Aurelian Walls; of the crumbling Colosseum and Byron’s silly poem with its prophecy When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; and when Rome falls—the world, which fails to fathom that the world has no intention of waiting that long to crumble; of the bustling Campo de’ Fiori, with its pretty name belying its drug dealers and spirits of those burned at the stake there, and Mary’s charming if disgusting love for campari at one of the outdoor tables at La Pollarola in the piazza nearby—and other images of what memory tricked me into thinking were such happy days in the ancient city. You see, I liked feeding the scrawny cats, watching the marketplace motleys of the Campo, and adored teasing poor Mary as she sipped her horrid neon-red drink. Only these half-invented remembrances of good times there allayed an otherwise haunted night.
It didn’t help that, sometime before dawn, I remembered I’d left Giovanni’s box in my rucksack over at Helen’s house. Edmé had told me earlier that evening, after we had finished dinner and she and I sat for a while in the living room, that the two of us would be going to the Lewises’ farewell party without Henry. “Would he prefer we didn’t go?” I asked her. “I don’t care about David Lewis one way or the other.”
“It’s less for David Lewis than the others who’ll be there—and for myself, too. I’ve given it some thought. Henry needn’t come along, but you and I should at least put in an appearance. Things change, people move on, it isn’t the end of the world. Your friend Helen will be there, no doubt. Tate and Willa, too.”
“Tate’ll be there?”
“He’s bound to come, if only to gloat.”
“Then we’re going for sure.”
“Grant,” she scolded.
“Best behavior, promise.”
Why my drive into town to retrieve the rucksack was so fraught with dread was not hard to guess. But Helen greeted me with no less enthusiasm than ever. And so, relieved, I assumed she hadn’t looked in my pack, and that the contents of Giovanni’s box remained my own secret. “Did Noah talk to you?” she asked.
“Sure did.”
“You deny everything?”
“Of course. I assume you did.”
“Well—I did and I didn’t.”
“Oh no, Helen.”
“Don’t worry,” she smiled. “I didn’t implicate you. I left it Open that I may have gone in on my own, but that on the other hand I may not have. What’re they going to do about it, even if I did? Arrest me? I don’t think so. Who’s going to turn over a stone if he himself is the slug who’s hiding under it?”
“You going to the Lewises’ tonight?”
“I am.”
“Let’s go together, with Edmé.”
Helen was serene. She seemed to have been liberated from the anger of not knowing about Giovanni’s death, freed from suspecting but not being quite certain. That the receipt she’d discovered in Tate’s files wouldn’t begin to carry the burden of proof required to convict Milland Daiches—even to arraign him on murder charges— didn’t seem to dampen this fresh calm. When I mentioned that Edmé had said Tate would likely be there, she didn’t flinch, but added, not only Tate but the Daiches brothers as well. “Many of the same people who were at the Labor Day party up at Ash Creek will probably come,” she said.
“You can face Milland Daiches?”
“We’ll find out.”
As I left, I noticed a black gaucho hat on the rack by the door, which I commented on as attractive. “Willa Tate gave me that one day years ago,” Helen said, and while I couldn’t at just that moment remember where I’d seen it before, sometime during the drive back across the long valley I did. Helen Trentas, I thought—was it possible she’d always known more than she’d let on? Maybe not, but a singular woman either way, and not someone to have for an enemy.
The evening was cloudless. No breeze provoked the leaves along the creek road where we walked, the three of us together. Parrish blue hastened toward black over where the sun had set, and out to the east above the dark ridge, the stars glistened dry and limpid. Edmé brought a flashlight but kept it in her pocket. We could see well enough without. The last flycatchers of the season—tenacious little souls in their feathery array—dove through the tender air and peeped, though surely most of their venturing forth must have been in vain, as the swarms of mosquitoes and gnats were gone by now.
Helen spoke in high spirits and even laughed with Edmé about nothing in particular. She had never seemed before so peaceful and gracious and, yes, happy. Edmé watched the two of us leave the house and descend the stone stairs hand in hand, and seemed herself to have reached some kind of harmony with the fact of our being a couple. Henry, it was true, remained adamant about not attending the dinner, but even he—though he didn’t come over from the studio when Helen arrived—had been a benevolent specter that afternoon when I returned from town with Giovanni’s box back in my possession. I still marveled at his having prepared me some fried bologna on toast the day before, which I ate cringing but happily, as it was the first time he had ever done such a thing for me in all the years I had been coming to Ash Creek. Delusion or not, I felt a measure of tranquillity had settled over those around me, who had each seemed so recently to have been mired in every variety of turmoil. The lights of David Lewis’s house were so festive down in the distance, as we strode alongside the creek, that for a moment I hardly remembered what the dinner was about. It seemed more a
celebration than a farewell. That was, at least, how I read—or misread—the atmosphere.
Until we crossed the bridge and began to climb the road up to the Lewis house, which was set behind a cluster of bushes and trees, situated so that it faced south and west at an angle that conformed to a long knob, it had not dawned on me that I’d never been inside. Indeed, I knew very little about David Lewis, and nothing about his wife. Edmé once told me about a tragedy that had struck their family, an accident that took their only son from them, but I’d never been clear about the circumstances of the child’s death. As I have mentioned, Lewis was a recluse among recluses, minding his own business as his father had before him, and as we neared the lit porch of the squarish board-and-batten ranch house, I recognized that part of the reason his selling off this land and moving away had made so little impression on me—and, thus, part of my not fully appreciating the impact it must have had on Henry—was this very ignorance. I wanted to ask Edmé to tell me again about what had happened to the boy, but before I had the chance, Jenn Lewis opened her door and welcomed us in.
Half a dozen cars were parked informally on the grass out front, and when we entered I saw the party was under way.
Helen showed miraculous pluck by going right to Tate, who stood with a group of men, several of whom I had never seen before, and kissing him on the cheek, as she said just audibly enough for me to hear, “Noah tells me there’s been some trouble down at the office. I hope nothing serious.”
“Nothing serious,” Tate said, confidence unshaken. Did that curling at the fleshy corner of his lip signify insolence? or was it really meant to be some sort of smile, as he reached out his hand to me, saying, “Grant, have you found employment yet? How are you tonight?”
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