Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  Henry said, “You wouldn’t know what to tell her, because you don’t know all that happened.” It was then he confessed to me about Willa, their brief love, and the story of Helen’s beginnings.

  “She needs to know this, and straight from your lips,” I said, quietly, once he’d finished speaking. “Again, if you won’t tell her, I will.”

  “It’s not for you to do,” he said.

  His voice and his eyes told me this was as far as we would ever venture together down this line of thought. Henry and I discussing somewhat openly his true relationship with Helen—this was both much further than I’d ever expected us to get, and not quite far enough, because neither of us had a willingness to broach a deeper dialogue about the meaning of my relationship with her. I didn’t myself want to ponder the vocabulary of intimacy, and therefore had scant interest in discussing it with my uncle. I did tell him that unless Noah Daiches, or some other authority, meant to bind me over for further questioning, I was going to return to Rome. A job had been in the offing there before I left, something I wouldn’t have considered before, because it would have involved a burden of time and energy I wasn’t, then or even recently, able to embrace. This employment, if still available to me, was nothing anyone else would consider particularly special—working for an import-export company—but meant a livelihood, a pursuit.

  Winter was around the corner, I told him. I couldn’t remain in the cabin much longer and didn’t want to be underfoot at the house. If Edmé and he needed me to help with any winter preparations, any repair work, anything at all, I would stay as long as necessary, then be on my way. Henry thanked me, said he and Edmé would take care of whatever had to be done with Ash Creek and whatever else needed restitution.

  “We’ll find out where the road leads,” he said, by which I assumed he promised to begin the process of setting wrong to rights.

  With that, he left for his studio, and I went upstairs to find Edmé to say goodbye, to thank her for letting me stay with them and for calling me in the first place.

  Edmé looked radiant to me this morning, somehow unburdened. “I’m off,” I said, rather unnecessarily, as she embraced me.

  “You’ll be all right?”

  I nodded, then, without having pondered my question, asked, “Why did you give me that box?”

  She spoke in even and quiet tones. “Giovanni would have wanted you to have it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I saw the rootlessness that scarred my brother—your father— and even you, Grant. I’ve always loved my husband, my home. I did the best I could, by giving you the box.”

  Once more, Edmé’s riddles.

  “Certain things had to be said which I couldn’t, wouldn’t, say. Don’t you understand? Giovanni wasn’t able to speak in so many words, either. We can love people and know what they’ve got to do to be whole and healed, when they’ve broken themselves, say. It’s the oldest truth in the world that we can’t take their actions for them, walk their road for them. But it doesn’t mean we can’t alter the landscape through which the road passes, help them see their way.” The look on my face—one surely of astonishment—must have been misread by her as critical, while she stood there revealed before me, because she finished with, “I hope you won’t think ill of me, Grant.”

  “Never,” was what I said, and kissed her on the cheek.

  I spent a few minutes alone in my cherished room before driving the jeep down the creek road and across the ranging expanse of valley.

  Phalanxes of dark heavy clouds marched low overhead, and to the east a column of gray smoke rose up into them—someone burning off a field for winter. It looked as if the sky and earth were connected by this pillar, as if heaven were supported by the earth. Given it was the weekend, I assumed I’d have a better chance of finding Tate at home than in his offices.

  When Willa greeted me at the great door of the aerie, her first words, “I warned you,” were no different than I might have expected.

  “You’re wrong—I did exactly what you said, Willa. She’s known all along, in her own way. Helen’s only been waiting for you to step forward and tell her.”

  A silence passed between us.

  Then I spoke again. “Here, I think this is yours,” and I handed her the note she’d asked for that day we met at the coffee shop. “And this is for your husband,” giving her the envelope of money, which I had placed inside another envelope and sealed. “Thank him, if you would.”

  We shook hands, uneasy intimates, then parted. A time would come, I hoped, when Willa and I would see each other again.

  My next stop was the post office, to complete what was perhaps the most unorthodox of my parting deeds. I was compelled to release back into the world all the pieces Giovanni’d assembled into this reluctant collage. It seemed a necessary gesture. I had chosen carefully objects for each of the individuals who’d been part of this portrait, and wrapped for them small parcels. As I’d gone about my business, deconstructing Giovanni’s box behind the closed door of my bedroom upstairs at Ash Creek, I thought of the paradise of children that had existed before the god Mercury got it in his head to leave that box in Epimetheus’ house—in Hawthorne’s version of the myth—of a world with no danger, nor trouble of any kind. Eve’s daughter, Pandora—or Pandora’s, Eve—seemed so richly human to me, as I went about my business there. Hope was born in the shadows of clouds of demons, according to all versions of the old myth, and in that I saw there was a familiar human dark-edged radiance.

  To Noah I sent the packet of Papiers Mais, Bestest 200 leaves, Ver-dadeiro ipapel Francez, as well as the Prince Alberts, wondering whether he would simply use them, roll tobacco into the supple antique yellow leaves of paper and smoke his way through them one by one, never knowing who or where they came from. To Margery went her precious letters, some photographs and keepsake cards, along with the affection of a stranger and my admiration for one who made a tough decision and stuck with it. Tate I mailed the typed column of numbers, nothing more. The miniature diary for 1942 had no owner, as such, but I thought that the Lewises, beginning their own migration, ought to have it. The pair of rusted spinner hooks went off to Henry, in memory of those times with Giovanni spent in quiet friendship along that creek they’d loved; as well as the dance recital card, which was meant not to challenge him but to put his mind at ease, allow him to make his own decisions about responsibility. The pieces of foolscap I’d taped together also were Henry’s to have, sent by me in the strong hope that he would take it upon himself to share with Helen what Giovanni wrote there. Finally, the black leather change purse and one of the two feathers I wrapped, tied with string, and addressed to Edmé, in the belief that they were fetishes very close to Giovanni’s heart and that he, who entrusted all these secret objects to her, would want her to have them.

  This nearly emptied Giovanni’s box. But not quite.

  For myself, I would keep that brass cylinder, I decided, and the recipe for dandelion wine. I also treasured the joke book, the exterminator’s card, and some few other inexplicable odds and ends, not least among them that old subscriber’s receipt to True Detective. It was for me to clear out any detritus so that when I gave the box itself to Helen, it would contain two things only, one placed there by Giovanni, the other by myself.

  The drive to Helen’s cottage was unhurried. The closer I got, the more faulty and precarious became my resolve. Having gone this far with her, I didn’t want to lose her, although what had happened so recently gave me every fair reason to believe she wasn’t mine to lose. At the same time, Helen frightened me—there, now I have said it— frightened me by her passion. It awed me in a way no passion had I’d ever witnessed. There was faith in it, a kind of hope bordering on madness, and there was fury crackling at its edges. When she withdrew the night before, the emotional fracturing I felt was easy to reduce to diagnosis. No, I didn’t want to be in love with Helen Trentas, or Helen Fulton, or any other Helen—but I was. I would have preferred my
unreachable Jude, or my heartsick Mary come for another reconciliation to be followed soon after by one more sad deception, disagreement, and divorce. Such again were my thoughts, as I arrived at her house. Helen was terrifying because she had my respect. I’d loved women before, had loved trying to make them happy and felt desire for them, kindness toward them, and tender anger, too. More than once I believed I’d found someone suited to me. But what had always been absent was such thorough respect.

  No one responded to my knocking on the side door, and when I tried the knob, for once it did not turn. I walked back around to the front door, knocked again. Again nothing, and a locked door. I knew of course where the key was hidden, but this time I wanted to be invited in. Still, I wasn’t going to leave here until I’d said the few things I wanted to say, and given Helen my present. Because the temperature had fallen and the sky lowered, I decided to wander out across that field toward the river. Better than sitting on the stoop. A walk at least had the advantage of getting my blood circulating.

  Out at the far edge of the pasture I crossed, a solitary horse stood, head lowered to crop at grass. Magpies picked their way over hummocks of dried mud and tufts of vegetation. Above, a flock of small birds bounded southward, calling to one another with voices that whistled fee-fee-bee. Behind me, back toward town, the random barking of a dog broke through this private atmosphere, this heavy silence. As I neared the horse, it raised its great chestnut head, shook its mane, fixed one wary eye upon me, and as it did, I felt the strangest urge come over me. I wanted to touch it, for some reason. I, who had never known anything but the deepest fear of these creatures, had got it in my head I wanted to see what its dusty, gray, velvet muzzle felt like. As I got closer, I began to speak to the horse. “It’s okay, don’t worry.” Gently, slowly, I murmured, approaching the mare, which surprised me by not retreating as I expected it would. “Good girl,” I sang as softly as I could. “That’s right.”

  And she did stay there, she did allow me to touch her. I ran my hand along her neck, amazed by the animal warmth of her coat. I continued to speak to her, marveling at her indulgence. At the center of her forehead was the most perfectly formed white star marking, which I stroked. She smelled of home, I thought—whatever that meant. The world surrounding us was, for those few moments we stood together at the margin of this long field near the river, the most completely hushed I’d ever heard, or not heard, it.

  When I glanced up, raised from this serenity by the sound of someone approaching, I saw Helen. She herself had been walking along the river trail and, having seen me in the field, turned back to meet me. “Should I believe my eyes?” she said.

  “I know.”

  “What’s got into you?”

  I shrugged. The horse sputtered, then broke away, leaving Helen and me behind.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I seem to have survived.”

  “No thanks to me.”

  I looked down, then up again.

  “You hate me now, don’t you.”

  “What? Of course not. Why would I?”

  “Because you probably should.”

  We’d begun to walk side by side toward the house. I may have shown the temerity to touch that mare, but could not bring myself to take Helen’s hand. Not that she took mine, either.

  “Because?”

  “You’ve got to believe that as much as I hated Milland Daiches, I never meant for him—”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Are you going to tell them?”

  “I had my chance last night when I got back down out of the gorge. Noah was right there, some others, too. They wanted to hear all about who I’d chased, if I found somebody.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Told them I’d heard a man’s voice. Told them it was somebody I didn’t recognize.”

  “Grant, I did mean for Milland to get hurt, didn’t I. Why lie about it?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Can we do something, make a covenant? Can we never talk about this again? I have to make this right, and you can’t help me. You’ve already done what you can, whether you meant to or not. But you and I, if we’re still going to talk—”

  “Of course we are.”

  “Then we’ve got to look—and talk—beyond, forward.”

  I took her hand, which was cold. “Let’s go inside. I’ve got something I want to give you.”

  She tightened her grip and we walked the rest of the field in silence. The banks of dark fleshy clouds continued to roll like waves, low over the valley. The mountains were shrouded in dense fog. We entered by the side door, she having produced a key from the pocket of her pea jacket.

  Helen put up water for tea, and as she did, we were enveloped by our silences. Her hair was knotted into a loose bun, revealing her sharp profile, and as I sat at the table in the kitchen, I studied her beauty with the same intense fascination I’d felt that late-summer day up at the cemetery. She wore the simplest black turtleneck and black jeans, no jewelry, no adornments whatever, and as I watched her concentrate on pouring the hot water from kettle into pot, I understood that no one other than Helen would ever make any sense to me as an intimate, a companion. She filled the silver tea egg and lowered it into the pot, laid a knitted cozy over. As she sat down to wait for the tea to steep, I felt saturated with affection, and content that my recognition of Helen’s importance to me was not mistaken. I reached down into my satchel on the kitchen floor beside my chair and pulled out Giovanni’s box.

  “This is yours,” I said.

  She admired it without reaching out for it; she kept her hands in her lap, sitting directly across from me.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Edmé gave it to me. It used to be your father’s, Giovanni’s. Now it’s yours. I hope you don’t mind, but there were some things in it he was holding on to for different people, and I took the liberty of returning them. There are a couple of things for you inside, too. Here—”

  She took Giovanni’s box from me, set it before her quite formally, and raised the lid. She smiled as she reached in and lifted out first the feather, saying, “Poor Sam will be pleased to have this back.” Then she took the photograph I’d placed in the box and held it up to the cream light. Edmé had given it to me that very morning, after Henry and I had our talk and said our farewells. She’d said she had known it was around somewhere among her thousands of prints. “It’s not a very good photograph, as you can see,” she had apologized as she handed it to me. “But I think it’s one you’ll find interesting.”

  It didn’t take Helen quite as long as it had me to recognize whose three faces those were in the image. I, who was all of eight, stood on the timbers of the bridge with feet spread, right hand on my hip and left holding the hand of a small girl. Opposite, on the other side of the girl, knelt Giovanni Trentas, a beatific smile spread on that memorable face of his. He was holding the young girl’s other hand, in both his own.

  “My God. We did meet.”

  “Edmé said we got along very well, too.”

  Helen laughed quietly; we both did.

  “It’s a shame Henry had to keep his two families apart when we were kids. I could have known you all my life.”

  Placing the photograph carefully back in the box, she said, “This is really good of you, Grant. But are you sure?”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure you want to part with it.”

  “I don’t want to part with anything,” I said.

  Helen squared me in her sights. “You don’t want me, Grant.”

  “Since when is it your place to tell me what I don’t want?”

  “We don’t even know if I’m going to be brought up on charges of some kind. I did admit to breaking into Tate’s office, after all. That’s against the law. And it may be true I didn’t murder Milland, but it’s not like I saved him, either. I wanted to, I tried. I heard that spring clamp snap and I heard him make this awful sound,
and I ran back, and I tried to help him get loose, but he grabbed at me and was screaming, and those teeth were into him so hard. I wasn’t strong enough. I grabbed the shotgun and I ran, Grant.”

  “Are you breaking the covenant?”

  We just sat there. We said nothing until I repeated to Helen that I had no interest in parting with anything, but that I was leaving— the time had come for me to go back to Rome.

  “I can’t come with you,” she said. “Not until what was happened here works itself through. Truth to tell, I haven’t even decided whether I shouldn’t just go down and talk to Noah, tell him everything, give him that receipt from Tate’s files, let the chips fall where they may.”

  “Whatever you think is right, that’s what I’d want you to do.”

  Helen brightened suddenly, smiled, then took my hands and said, “You remember back on Labor Day when you said I had three questions coming to me?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I still have one question to go, don’t I?”

  “You do?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “Well, then. Ask.”

  “I’m not completely sure yet how I want to phrase it. I’m going to ask, though, someday soon. You just better be ready to answer.”

  Her piercing eyes immersed themselves in mine; and after we drank our tea, each cocooned in thought, while outside the cold rain began to peck the windows and roof, we lay down together for an hour once more, upstairs, the rhythm of our breathing there matching curiously the pulsing of wind against the panes and rushing under the eaves like sea swells. After, she drove me down to the bus station, having reluctantly agreed to take the jeep back up to Ash Creek—seeing very easily through my ruse, my clumsy but well-meant manipulation to bring Helen and Henry together, a key passing from one hand to another, setting before my uncle the chance to speak to her. It was a chance I felt convinced he’d not fail to embrace.

  On the back of Edmé’s photograph of Helen and me and Giovanni Trentas I had written the address of the hotel where I decided I would stay, the place she could find me—La Speranza, of all things. Indeed, “When you can, if you can, please come—find me,” were the words I left Helen with as I boarded my bus in the rain, taking back with me both less than I came with and much more.