Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  Which made me laugh a little, but also wince. And this is why. Because I loved my uncle Henry, wanted to laugh at his jokes, no matter how ridiculous or flat they were, and because he had become for me as much my father as my own father had been. Because I didn’t want him to be wicked or wrong in anything, to have any faults, to err—be human, I suppose, is what it comes down to in the end. Why not? For the same reasons most sons want to believe their fathers are, at least to some essential degree, honorable, benevolent, noble, and so forth; are good—like daimons who perhaps will be there for us when we sons make such a mess of things. If my father were still alive, I might well have been spending this month with him and with my mother, too. But they died, my parents, in the most archaic possible circumstances, aboard a cabin cruiser that sank. Perished with a delegation of people in, of all places, a harbor, in calm water, October 1988, seven years ago next month. They died in “suspicious circumstances,” given that the passengers were representatives of countries some of which were involved in political enterprises not popular with what my father called the fringe. Nothing was ever proved, though some men were arrested.

  Was it callous of me not to develop any interest in vengeance or the quest for justice? My orphaning affected me differently than Jude thought it should. Jude, who I was living with at the time in New York, wanted to see me sue the government for negligence, or something like that. But what I felt was mortal resignation more than outrage or inspired grief. All I saw was that my parents were gone. They who had stayed together for my sake for a number of years, then found something valuable in one another again, after I wandered off to make my own life, so that their marriage was renewed and rejuvenated for at least a time before the accident. Now it was dissolved in murky water, and I was alone. That is, except for Edmé and Henry.

  When I brought Jude here to meet these surrogates, I had built up such an impossibly fabulous image of my aunt and uncle that Jude might fairly have expected to meet divinity; I worshiped them both. And Jude, I remember well, was not disappointed. For all my devoted embellishments, she found my aunt to be, —Amazingly sane, which was, in Jude lingo, a compliment of the highest order. And as for Uncle Henry, she had no compunction in assuring me that if he were just a few years younger and unmarried … well.

  Which brings me, circuitously, to my wincing. I winced because that morning when Henry and I walked back up to the house after the discovery of the Tell the truth note, I sensed that I’d witnessed a flaw of some kind in my uncle, a deficiency or even worse; that something here was more wrong than I might have suspected. Nor was my apprehension diminished when Henry folded the note, slipped it into his shirt pocket, and asked me, in a voice thinner than usual, “Grant, I’m going to ask you not to mention this to your aunt.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “It’s something I have to take care of myself.”

  No problem, I thought to say again, and I wanted it not to be a problem. However, for the few days subsequent to that single oddest pact my uncle and I had ever made, I felt awkward whenever he and I were alone together. Maybe I was afraid he would again take me into his confidence, which now I did and didn’t want. But my nervousness passed away under the incremental currents of other things that seemed to rise, one after another, into view, distracting me in such a way that Rome seemed farther away in space and further in time than it actually was. My past was beginning to look simpler than my present.

  First among these other things was Mary’s letter. My heart began to pound when Edmé handed it to me, having driven as she did every several days down to the end of the creek road, where the rural route mailboxes stood, battered bright mini-Quonsets secured to a crosspost that resembled the skeleton of a crucified puppet. Mary knew me too well, I thought, as I thanked my aunt, left the house, descended the steps, and walked west toward the high saddle of grass and scrub where I could be alone.

  The envelope didn’t have a forwarding notice on it from Rome; no—she had known to send it directly here, had known I wouldn’t last long by myself in Italy. I found an outcropping of rock to sit on, and faced east so that it was possible to look down across the cradle of the valley which the creek bisected, see the great barn several hundred yards below and the house to its left, and the other buildings, even the cabin where my uncle was born, near the gate, a ramshackle structure that had not been lived in for half a century but which in its way was the spiritual nucleus of Ash Creek. Tucked into the foliage on the opposite bank, Giovanni’s own small hut stood, and I could even see a corner of the roof there from this high vantage. I inhaled, looked down to what I held in my hands, exhaled. Enough of what lay before me; let’s see what was gone.

  The letter was handwritten. Blue ink on white paper. I hoped, I must admit, that Mary would offer some chance for reconciliation. A breeze from the valley breathed on my cheek.

  Dear Grant, it read, I figure this is where you might be, and if not, assume Edmé will forward it to you in Rome if you’re still there. As for me, there’s no point in being coy. The postmark is right. I’m back in Seattle. What goes around comes around, right? Bainbridge Island is where I need to be for right now. All the old familiar faces, and all that kind of stuff. What I imagine you are also seeking. I am writing to tell you I don’t feel so hurt as I did before, and I feel bad about some of what I said that night in Rome. I was hurt, as you well know. I was angry and lashed out. You are and always will be someone I love—

  Here I glanced up into the midafternoon light playing across the fields, noticed briefly the darker patches below me, where the bales of hay had been removed onto old wagons and taken away about this time yesterday. Ambiguous as to whether the hope I had just felt for the words of reconciliation I probably now would read was wise or foolish, I wondered: Did I really have the courage to work things out with Mary? Then I read what followed.

  —someone who will always live in my heart, despite what’s happened. But as you seemed to figure out long before I did, love just isn’t enough to hold us together. I have hired a lawyer. He’s a nice guy.

  My own arrogance made me quiver with revulsion for having so completely misread her pledge of love.

  I’ve told him that we don’t own very much, we aren’t “thing” people. That we don’t have any property really to contest. He says it isn’t very orthodox for a couple seeking divorce to share the same lawyer, that it can be seen as a conflict of interest and all, but I told him we aren’t very orthodox and that we have no interest in conflict. You know, like that. He needs something in writing from you, though. Or if you want to give him a call, I’m enclosing his card. I propose we just split the filing and whatever other legal costs there are. I don’t want anything of yours, and it is my guess you are of the same mind. Grant, I’m sorry this didn’t work out for us and am willing to accept part of the blame. I know you think that if we had the baby those years ago things might have turned out different. But there is no saying now. What’s done is done. There were some wonderful moments that I’ll always cherish, and it’s those times I want to remember. The rest will fade into dust, as it should. All I want back now is my freedom. It’s a sad thing, but for the best. I know I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. Let’s keep things simple by making any other communications through the lawyer. Please give my love to your aunt and uncle. And, Grant—take care of yourself. Love (a hard habit to break), Mary.

  Freezing hot and scalding cold was how I felt. As if I had a fever. When I rose to wander back down to the house, a dizziness forced me to sit until my head stopped swirling. Got up again, and a sere riptide of unidentifiable sentiments carried some ruptured part of me away with it, so that I might have sworn the person who descended the hill was not quite as whole as the one who had climbed it. I wrote a letter to her lawyer that night, informing him that whatever Mary wanted was agreeable with me, warranting that whenever he required my half of the retainer he had only to write me in care of Ash Creek and the money would be forwarded str
aightaway. I set forth the somewhat contradictory position that because I loved Mary, I had no intention of disputing any details of the divorce—though I did hope he might be able to file on grounds of incompatibility, or irreconcilable differences, or whatever was permissible, something that suggested our mutual failure rather than blamed the collapse of the marriage solely on me. The glue of the envelope, needless to say, tasted bitter when I sealed the letter. Edmé and Henry, bless them, got nearly as drunk as I did that night, and were both blustery and outrageously sanguine about how bright my future would be, once I got over this and was able to move forward with my life. Not one of us had a bad word to say about Mary.

  For all the hopeful inebriation of the prior evening, the next morning found me under an extravagant cloud of defeat. Nursing my hangover, I borrowed the car and drove into town to make good on my promise to myself about a visit to the barber. My blue mood brightened as I entered this little realm of remembrance. The tile wainscots, mirrored wall, burnished chrome, and the brown vinyl of the classic swiveling chair. The polychrome bottles of tonic, oil, pomade, and the metal combs marinating in indigo liquid; all the elixirs and instruments of the trade standing in rows magically doubled by their reflections in the mirror. These sights and perfumy smells, the echoey quiet, and my old barber’s words, “What can we do you for today?”—yes: you for—combined to make me feel, though an outsider, at home. As I sat in that chair and was shrouded in a white shawl, I caught sight of myself, however, in the mirror, and this spell of comfort was broken. I found myself bewildered about who was staring back at me.

  “Well?”

  I snapped to, said, “I want to look different. Just take all this hair off. And let’s go ahead and shave this, too,” running my hand over the sparse growth on my cheeks and chin.

  “You got it,” he said, and went to work.

  How sunken my eyes appeared. My nose seemed more bladelike, my lips narrower, pallid, more downturned than how I’d maintained them in my imaginary self-portrait. My green eyes were liquidy this morning, and reddened along the rims. And my skin was darker than usual from being out under the sun, I supposed, a component that gave me my only real intimation of health. No doubt the binge of the night before didn’t help matters, but this Grant who began to emerge, as the backcombed tangle of hair fell to the marble floor, was someone I—like the barber—had a more difficult time identifying, accepting as being me, than ever in the past. Christ in heaven, I thought.

  The barber went about his business. His friends, retired men who whiled away the day with him discussing whatever motes of gossip happened to be in the air, disappeared behind their buntings of newspaper. Soon he finished, laid hot towels over my face, shaved me with a straight edge, talcumed me, finally lifted away the sheet. I couldn’t bring myself to look again in the mirror.

  “Say, you’re Henry Fulton’s nephew, aren’t you?” he asked, as I paid.

  “No,” came out of my mouth, and immediately with that lie arose my recognition that I was involved in some process I felt uncomfortable with—something to do with resisting the burden and responsibility of belonging somewhere.

  “You look just like him. He used to come in here years ago.”

  “Sorry, you’re confusing me with somebody else,” I said, thanked him, and left for the post office to certify the letter, and after, driving back toward Ash Creek, across the base of the vast bowl, away from town, nestled against one wall of mountains, toward the eastern range, I discovered that what I understood about myself was not unlike this concomitant emptiness I saw before me. Maybe it was the most insipid epiphany of my life, and one almost impossible to describe. Nevertheless, its upshot was this: Apart from the night visits, which still held angry fascination for me, and other than those three words scribbled on the piece of paper my uncle and I kept hidden from Edmé, nothing much held me here. However vague or subtle were those compulsions to stay, the freedom (that word again) to leave had even less purchase on me. I didn’t want to become my uncle’s keeper, so to speak; but my own life was so stalled that by default I thought I would stick around for another week. Certainly, see the Labor Day feast through. If nothing arose to suggest I should remain, I would take off. Toss a leaf in the air and see which way it drifted, then follow. In a life notably disconnected, never had I felt so extrinsic, so scattered.

  And yet, look at Edmé coming down to greet me, and to help me carry up to the house the couple of boxes of food and drink I had bought for the feast. Look at the wide smile on her marvelous face, look at that endless strand of hair that has come loose and hangs elegantly, tracing the edge of her face down to the long, narrow neck. Just look at how bright is the red of her sleeveless blouse against the green of the woods behind her, how sharp blue her jeans are in contrast to the yellow of the mowed field. She walks with vivacity, and says, “The new Grant, I like it,” inspecting me from the side, her hand on my shoulder. “I like it.”

  And I think, modifying my earlier impression, Well, not everything is adrift. No, not by any stretch.

  The nights before the party passed without any disturbance, and Uncle Henry measured, cut, glued, braced, planed, and hung a plank door to replace the one that had been stolen. I already had gleaned some understanding, by watching this process of violation followed by recovery, about how it was possible to then move toward a kind of defiant refusal to dwell on the night visits, almost to forget they happened. It made sense to me. Time passed, and some of the acts that transpired in its fragile embrace passed, too.

  Why the name of Helen Trentas, which appeared at the end of the list of those who were attending the Labor Day feast, caught my attention is not hard to explain. She had always been a figure of mystery, to my mind. Given that her father, Giovanni, had been my uncle’s dearest friend, as I have said, I have always found it a bit odd she wasn’t more a presence or part of life at Ash Creek when I was there. But Helen Trentas was always elsewhere. —Helen’s with friends in town, I would be told, or, —She’s not feeling well today, but wanted so much to come meet you. For years running, she had been sent to stay with some uncles or other relatives of the Trentases in the small town of Velletri, in the Alban hills near Rome, a fact which sometimes made me think that if I ever met her, it would more likely occur in Italy than in the States. There had always been something that prevented me from encountering this person whom I might have considered a distant cousin in the extended family of Henry and Giovanni’s friendship.

  But on Labor Day afternoon that would change, it seemed. Also, I would have the chance to see some others I had met in years gone by, such as Noah Daiches, whom I went hunting with when I was in my teens, alongside Trentas and Henry, on my one abortive attempt at that lurid sport. There was David Lewis as well, with whom I had only the most passing acquaintance, however nearby he’d always been.

  The early clouds that had festooned the peaks of the mountains burned off by noon, and I found myself in a genuinely good mood, as if the celebration of the end of a disastrous summer might be just what I needed in order to make my way into the promise of fall. The kitchen was a tumult of cooking, Edmé presiding over all manner of pots, bowls, and cups, cutting strawberries, preparing cold bean salad. We had decided that since the clouds had been replaced by a hard blue sky, the festivities should be held on the lawn below the long porch. Henry and I carried several folding tables out from the cellar, spread them with tablecloths, and set up chairs around them. Bottles of Coke and beer were stood in big buckets of ice, and bottles of wine were left on a table in the shade. We lit the fire and went together down to the creek, where we caught a creelful of small trout to add to the mixed grill of ribs and chicken. And by three that afternoon, the cars began to arrive and guests colorful as chips in a kaleidoscope could be seen coming toward the house. Children ran; dogs chased one another. Men and women walked with baskets of fruit, potato salad in bowls covered with foil, cold casseroles, various other contributions to the feast. There must have been a couple of dozen
people who turned up for the gathering: some friends of the Fultons, others who had worked here from time to time, though mostly in times past, and even others who were friends of friends. I met more than I would ever be able to attach names to, though a pair of identical twins, Sandra and Andrea the poor girls were called—who would, by the time they reached school age, metamorphose into Sandy and Andy—I accompanied, along with a little boy who seemed mute, to the stream, which they proceeded to lash with willow limbs. “Take tha’ an’ tha’,” they cried together, whipping the fast surface of the creek until one of the dogs mindlessly tumbled forth from the thicket of brush, across the bristling shoal, to splash headlong into the water, soaking the twins, who began to cry, then laugh, before they ran back toward the house, while the boy and I trailed behind. The adults stood in groups with their drinks and talked while the other children, some rather old for such games, I might have thought, played tag, their hair gussied up with crepe paper removed from the decorated tables, skipped and howled, kicked a ball in the sunlight back and forth across the divoted field, raising marl chalk like djinns’ mist. The place was converted from calm to hilarity within a matter of a quarter hour. The valley filled with pleasant shouts and shrieks and squeals. The radio, which Edmé brought out onto the porch above the lawn, played some improbable classical music, like unidentifiable Berlioz or a piano trio of Arensky or some such, which would later give way to country western, once someone who cared one way or another about such matters had drunk enough to slip up there and change the station.