Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  She who interested me most showed up last.

  She came walking up the mild rise like a dark Botticelli, her feet not planted upon a seashell but veiled slightly in ocher dust, long hair neither rosy blond nor configured so as to hide her but willowy auburn flowing over one shoulder, which itself was covered in embroidered drapery, a dress that swirled below the knees and was cinched at the waist by an old Navajo belt with hammered silver disks. A potpourri of necklaces, clay and silver, hung around her neck, and a pair of ankle boots completed her funky, elegant outfit. She seemed familiar to me, of course, from a photograph that was taken half her lifetime ago—a framed photograph of a dark-eyed little girl who stood boldly holding hands with the men on either side of her, Henry on her left, looking straight into the camera, Giovanni on her right, gazing down at her with pride. The photo was in my uncle’s studio, on a shelf otherwise laden only with books of his trade, and as recently as the day before, when I helped Henry rehang the door, I’d studied that image of the girl in the antiquated pinafore, blouse with a lacy collar, and floppy ribbon which gathered her hair just behind one ear. I knew at once who she was, then, this woman walking up the hill, and although I can at times be very shy, this was not one of those moments. Midsentence, midword, I found myself abruptly carried away from a dialogue with somebody’s cousin or nephew, caught as if by some invisible thread, and I walked to the gate at the fence that divided lawned yard from field, then through it to meet her in the meadow. She was carrying a paper bag, and I said, “Can I help you with that?”

  She smiled, and handed it over. Her eyes were not black, as they’d appeared to be from a distance, but were the darkest hazel. They were eyes in whose gaze one could discern a spectrum of spirits at play—here was a young woman who even before she spoke one could see was simultaneously wary but fearless, haunted but pragmatic, virtuous but mindful of what might be seen by others as forbidden. I was so swept away that I had literally to shake my head to clear my thoughts. She looked at me straight on, without blinking, with such disarming boldness that I found myself staring hard elsewhere.

  “I’m Grant,” I said, glancing askance, “and you’re Helen Trentas, aren’t you.”

  We walked side by side toward the house. The partygoers made a genial conversational medley of voices and laughter in the mild air.

  “I can hardly believe the curse is finally broken,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “I thought there must be a curse some witch placed on us a long time ago that barred us ever from meeting.” She smiled sidelong at me, and I saw again the sweet ominousness, that formidable spirit that flashed there: how else to put it other than that I sensed, however capricious or infantile or fervent it may seem of me to say so, that we were meant to meet, and this afternoon, not a moment before. Her mention of witches and spells seemed to me appropriate, given the swelter my head was in.

  “You’ve introduced yourselves,” Edmé said, taking the bag from me with one hand and extending her other hand to Helen. “How are you, Helen?”

  “Edmé,” Helen said, and kissed my aunt on the cheek.

  I was struck by the formality of these gestures and tones.

  “You didn’t need to bring anything,” Edmé said, looking into the bag at a couple of bottles of chardonnay and some freshly picked mint with small stalks of purple flowers at the crowns of each.

  When we three strolled to the table covered with red checkered oilcloth, where Edmé set Helen’s bottles beside the others, I asked her what she would like to drink, poured her some wine, and refilled Edmé’s glass, and Helen and I moved out into the crowd. Her presence at my side was bewildering, somehow, I must admit—it was as if I were telescoped in time backward, back toward some fresh juvenility that caused me to scrutinize myself, my gestures, the way I would lift my glass to my lips and drink, the way I’d swallow. It was not something I was used to, nor was it particularly desirable, since I envisioned these Labor Day revelries as a chance to unearth some clue, maybe witness something suspicious and thus discover who, and what, was behind the night visits. Helen Trentas sweeping me away into dreamy postadolescence would not, of course, do much for my capacity to focus. In fact, she was saying something to me, asking me what brought me out to my aunt and uncle’s. “I’d heard you’re living in Rome.”

  “I was,” I said. “But now I’m not really living anywhere.”

  “Is your wife here? You’re married, aren’t you? That’s what I heard.”

  “You heard a lot.”

  “Actually, I tend to hear very little.”

  “Because no one tells you or because you don’t listen?”

  “Both,” she said. “You still haven’t answered the question.”

  “My wife and I are in the middle of a divorce.”

  She looked down, and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be”—again that commonplace, the same I had offered Edmé the week before from Rome. “That is, it’s something I don’t seem to be very good at—”

  “Marriage?”

  “Well, that too. But I meant, explaining why we broke up.”

  Helen Trentas said, “I didn’t ask for an explanation. I just said I was sorry.”

  We walked into the crowd, and I smiled to see Edmé taking shots of the children, even as she shepherded her guests, made sure they had drinks, told them which table they were to sit at. Henry tended to his work at the brick pit, where Helen tentatively embraced him, and he her, saying, “You look beautiful this afternoon.”

  “Sometimes the eye of the beholder’s blind.”

  “He’s right, though,” I said.

  “That’s enough of that,” she said, and as she did, I inferred something fundamental about Helen Trentas: she was, for whatever reason, a catalytic person, one who provoked change, some sort of reaction from others, whether she intended to or not. I don’t even now believe my wobbly imagination was telling me lies, or manufacturing half-truths, when it speculated that others in the immediate group had moved either toward or away from Helen and me, as we made our way up the slight rise toward Henry, where he stood between the postern of the garden and the grill. It was subtle, the movement, and continued through the course of the afternoon.

  What brought it to mind just then was that I couldn’t remember ever seeing Henry Fulton happier. A remarkable contentment spread on his face as he stood there, his arm around the shoulder of his late friend’s daughter. As interesting to me, though, was how Helen Trentas returned his affection only to a point. When Henry asked her, “So how has everything been?” her answer of simply “Fine, I guess” carried within it some message that I could not understand. She seemed to me relieved when someone, whose name I failed to get, joined our group to continue with the discussion about national politics, about which I was completely in the dark.

  As this person talked, capturing at least superficially Helen and Henry’s attention, I stared with abandon at Giovanni Trentas’s daughter, glancing away only whenever those eyes of hers darted toward me. Soon enough, my uncle asked me to tell the others to bring their plates, the feast was ready.

  “I’ll come along with you,” Helen said.

  “You don’t think Grant can handle it himself?” my uncle asked.

  “Who knows?” she laughed. “I’ll find out.”

  “Very funny,” I said, as we walked to Noah Daiches, who was standing with his wife, Martha, and announced supper, then moved along to the next group. David Lewis (whose mane of black hair was drawn back into a ponytail, a small embodiment of liberalism quite untoward in this part of the world) stood with a woman whose silk cardigan and flounced dress seemed haute among all these jean shirts and dirndl skirts, among bola ties with elaborate slides—lapis, coral, turquoise—and great silver aglets that sparkled like bantam stalactites at the ends of woven leather cords. This woman, whom I had not met yet, gave me her hand and introduced herself, and as she did I noticed Helen drop behind me some, almost as if she were reluc
tant to speak to “Mrs. Tate, Willa Tate, and you are?”

  “I’m Grant, Edmé and Henry’s nephew.”

  “Good to meet you, Grant. Hello, Helen,” Willa Tate said, gazing around my shoulder.

  Helen nodded, I saw from the corner of my eye.

  “How have you been?” Willa continued, as if I weren’t there.

  “All right,” Helen said.

  “I wish we saw you sometimes up at the house. You know you’re always welcome. Won’t you come for dinner sometime?”

  “Thank you,” was all the response she made.

  “Time to eat.” I smiled at Willa and noted the shiver about the dark painted lips and some sadness that toyed at the periphery of her eyes, which were dark and shaped like lilac leaves, open and of an intelligent arch. Her hand, after she let go of mine, left with me an impression of physical strength. Her even voice was edged, guttural, perhaps with a cigarette rasp, although she seemed not to smoke. She was a handsome woman, with pale, fragile skin whetted by time and tautened by willfulness, or so I guessed. A force, a presence, Willa was anything but willowy.

  Helen Trentas, who had seemed diffident and unsettled during their exchange, was once more poised the moment Willa said, “Again, very nice to meet you, Grant,” and left us.

  The company sat at many different tables, the children sitting on blankets laid on the grass. At the two tables nearest mine, Edmé headed one, Henry the other. I may as well admit I was crestfallen, to use that nice old word, when Helen Trentas, demure but smiling her half-smile at me as she drew back a chair there, sat at Henry’s table in the upper yard near the grill, along with Martha Daiches and David Lewis, rather than my own. These three tables, at the edge of the others, were arranged so that Edmé’s was closest to the foot of the stone steps that led up to the house, Henry’s was above, and I sat with my back to the garden and the creek beyond, which rustled like raffia. David Lewis’s wife, Jenn, Milland Daiches, and Graham Tate—called by his surname only, it appeared—sat with me. Over Milland’s shoulder I could see Edmé talking with Willa Tate, while Noah listened, passing the bottle of wine as the purple shade of the house began to envelop them, the afternoon creeping steadily toward evening. David Lewis’s black quirt waggled at me, while he engaged Helen Trentas and Martha Daiches in conversation, as Henry looked on, now and then oddly staring, or so I thought, at Helen. For myself, I was soon enough drawn away from my little dreary fantasy of disappointment, into a dialogue I did not really want to have with Tate, toward whom, within minutes of shaking his large hand, a hand in which my own seemed frail and worthless somehow, I developed a dread which might have been irrational, had I not been prepared to dislike him during a brief conversation I’d had earlier with Edmé. Labor Day, she’d told me when Henry was out of the room, was the only time during the year that Graham Tate and Henry Fulton were willing to stand together under the same sky. Every other day, she went on, they had difficulty acknowledging each other’s presence.

  What was the conflict? I asked, and then Edmé seemed to want to back off. She conceded that the enmity was old, involved misunderstandings, she insinuated, between the two of them that dated back to days when they were growing up in the valley here. It was a story for another time, maybe, she said. But she wanted me to know, in case Tate used the occasion of my visit to some advantage. I’d nodded, but wondered what Tate could possibly say or do to gain any edge over my uncle through the likes of me. Edmé finished with some mention of Tate’s obscene wealth, and how she suspected he always had it in mind that to take Ash Creek away from Henry would be a fine piece of satisfaction. “How could that ever happen?” I asked. She said, “It couldn’t,” though again I had to wonder at just who this man was and how he might fit into any theory about the night visits.

  So now I had shaken his hand and sat with him to eat. I’d intended to watch his interaction with my uncle, but failed to see if they’d even spoken. “I understand you’ve just come from Rome,” he said to me, however, removing the fillet of one of the trout from its skeleton of white bones no thicker than whiskers.

  I said yes, coming forward from my wash of thoughts.

  “We visited Rome some years ago,” he said. “Willa seemed to like it.”

  “And you?”

  “Me, I found Europe depressing, nothing more than ruins, ruins and ruins, restored ruins, ruined ruins. A vast graveyard compared to where we live. Imagine a whole continent smelling of mildew and diesel exhaust. Even their air is full of death—”

  “Mildew is alive, actually,” I whispered.

  “And what about the saints and bishops behind glass in the crypts of the cathedrals? They call us barbaric, but what sort of civilized people would want to worship in a place where putrid old skulls and bones are on display?” Deft, he lifted the moist spine and crispy head of the trout free of the other fillet and laid it aside. My eye followed the golden-black roasted eye of the fish and for a moment I marveled at what amazing things that eye had seen during its brief time alive in the creek, then smiled to myself at Tate’s deboning a dead beast in order to feed on its flesh, while diatribing about the ironies of spiritual nourishment occurring in a church full of bones. Tate apparently could read my mind, and said, “You find that amusing, I gather, but both civilized and barbarous men have to eat, don’t they, Grant.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “You probably think I’m an isolationist or uninformed or what have you, but if you give it some thought unprejudiced by centuries of their continuous self-aggrandizement, you might see there is something to what I say. Not that we, in this country, are all so much more refined than they in Europe. It’s just that here we know we’re savages, and there they believe otherwise, and for myself I prefer the pure to the hypocritical savage. A little less vicious, somehow, less wicked.” Tate finished his wine, then said, “I didn’t like Rome,” which I understood to mean, among other things, that he didn’t like those who came from Rome recently, either. I turned to Jenn Lewis, and asked, “Have you ever been to Europe?” hoping to bring in another point of view that might dispel the sudden quiet that came over our quartet by the garden.

  “No, I haven’t,” she said, and Milland Daiches said, “I haven’ neither. I’m no traveler. Never was. Other places just don’ interest me. Why go somewhere where nobody knows you and you don’ know nobody?”

  “My mother’s family came from Italy,” I said. “So maybe I can’t be objective about it.”

  Tate asked me how long I intended to stay at Ash Creek, and I said I wasn’t sure. “Well, I think it is good of you to visit your aunt and uncle, them being up here alone so much.”

  “They’re doing me the favor of taking me in.”

  Jenn said, “Good people, Edmé and Henry.”

  Milland Daiches, I noted, remained quiet now, childlike, as if waiting for direction from Tate, who poured more wine, tipping the bottle toward the glasses on the table with a carefulness that oddly brought to mind an acolyte setting his lengthy candle to the wicks of other candles on an altar. His argument about Europe was of course absurd, as he forecast I would judge it; though there was just enough of a flicker of truth to it, if you maneuvered yourself around to his singular perspective, that I found him more unnerving than before. Prejudice need not be slapstick or vaudevillian to be prejudice, I thought; buffoonery comes in various guises, sometimes in the robes of priests, sometimes the gowns of academics, why not in the sorrel tweed of a local power? Because, as it would become more clear to me, Graham Tate was powerful, and yes, as Edmé’d said, was wealthy, and his opinions were monolithic and often given as fact. The near hour we spent in one another’s company on the lawn, seated side by side at the Labor Day table, made me come to a troubled respect for him. He certainly had an appetite for wine and food as well as dogma.

  Whatever formality there had been to the supper now began to fracture, as desserts were brought down and laid out on the long table, and the shadows stretched out like phan
tasmic auras of giants over the grass and dying flowers and rustling loosestrife. Kids rushed in clusters up and down the hayfield hill, trying without success to get a kite to rise into the warm evening sky. There were breezes, but they were wayward. Down and up the children ran again, but no sooner did their paper wing begin to gather some height than it would turn over and head in a steep descent to crash nosefirst into the soft turf. The country music was on the radio and someone who had brought a guitar began to sing and play along, exuberantly, in another key. I was standing, listening to David Lewis’s wife, Jenn, discussing something, I cannot remember what, with someone, I cannot remember who, when Helen Trentas appeared at my side and said, “You having fun?”

  “Tell me,” turning toward her, I asked, though I knew the question was clumsy, “who is Tate?”

  “That’s not an answer. I don’t have an opinion about Tate. Or, let’s put it this way: I try to refuse to have an opinion about him. How’s that? Did he give you his speech about the Old World?”

  “He seems not to think much of any place beyond this valley.”

  “Since you’d just arrived, I imagined that was what you would hear. He likes to throw people off balance. I’ve heard the same speech, of course. Because I’ve been there, and he never has.”

  “But—”

  “He said he’s been there, right?”

  “Yes, with Willa. But why would he lie about such a thing?”

  “Because that’s his nature.”

  I looked at her, waiting for more, but seeing she had nothing further to add, said, “Tell you what, let’s go help those kids get their kite flying, why don’t we?”

  We walked down away from the party, into the field, where it was markedly quieter.

  “No, wait. I have an even better idea,” she said. “You want me to show you something I’ll bet you haven’t seen?”

  The children would get along fine without us, I said, and went back for a bottle of wine and two glasses. I caught up with Helen, who had strolled down past the barn toward the shaky, half-rotted trestle bridge that the tractor used to be able to cross pulling behind it a fully laden wagon but over which one now trod gingerly, with a legitimate fear the whole structure might collapse beneath one’s feet. We crossed, Helen first, then me, running on tiptoe, holding our breath and arriving at the far side bursting with laughter. She raised her index finger to her nose, and started through a meadow of spent lupins whose spires, only last month, must have been brilliant with yellow blooms, and pink, and violet. The lowering sun cast a rose tinge over the woods along the ridge crest. She led, and as I followed I took in the fluency of her movements, her boyish hips on her lean frame moving so easily in counterpoint with her swinging arms as she climbed through the meadow and into a sparse stand of aspens that edged the forest. I could smell her hair, and I admired how agile she was as she placed one foot then the next at just the right rocky flat when the grade became steeper, and the children’s voices were left behind, as well as the guitar and singing. I concentrated on following in her footsteps exactly and even tried to mimic how I imagined she was breathing, just ahead of me there.