Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  Edmé was all riddles this morning.

  “What’s inside?” I asked.

  “Giovanni told me everything that ever meant anything to him he kept in here. I thought to show it to Noah when he was looking into Giovanni’s death, but I didn’t. The investigation didn’t last very long—they closed the case so fast it seemed like a sham to me—and I didn’t want his life, or death, to seem part of a sham. Mind you, I’m not asking you to open it. I don’t think that you should, but, well— it’s yours.”

  “Thanks,” I said, wondering what was the point of having a box you couldn’t open.

  “Why don’t you take it to your room, put it away. I’d just as soon your uncle not know about any of this. He’s got enough on his mind.”

  “All right,” and I got up and left her there on the porch. The contents shifted from one side of the box to the other as I climbed the stairs. I closed my bedroom door behind me, gently, and opened the mirrored door of the armoire with the firm thought of following Edmé’s instruction to the letter, even though I could make no sense of it, by hiding the box in my bag which was stowed within. As the mirror sprayed reflected silver light around the room, I caught just a glimpse of the colorful ribbons—plum, green, puce—held between my hands in the mirror face, and thought what harm could come from having just a look at what was inside. A myth like the one about Pandora loosing evil sprites across the earth as the simple result of her being curious was just that, a myth, a fable. And besides, hadn’t all the evils that there were in this world already been set free? What more harm could possibly be done?

  I sat on the edge of the bed, and began one by one to untie the ribbons that shrouded the beautiful, if a little tattered and soiled, old box. Outside my door, I could hear my uncle on the landing, then descending the stairs. For a moment, but just for a moment, it occurred to me to wonder why my fingers rather than those of Helen Trentas were the ones touching these many ribbons.

  Unbound, the antique wooden box was beautiful. La Flor de Fontella, it read on the ornate lid, Fontella over and over again. On its top was an oval portrait of a brown-eyed beauty with cocoa hair partly covered by a lace head shawl and with a red rose that matched her red velvet bodice, trimmed in white and cut low at the breasts. She wore a smile of perfectly modest yet just as perfectly frank sensuality. Above her floated the legend with the name of the Havana-filled cigars that once were kept inside. Giovanni had carved a little niche out of the center front of the lid and driven a brad into the panel, which served as a latch.

  As I turned this latch, and lifted the lid, the perplexities that had arisen in this place I had always considered far above the world’s welter came to mind in an absurd litany: Tell the truth—”Grant, I’m going to ask you not to mention this to your aunt”—tell the truth—“I’d just as soon your uncle not know about any of this”—tell the truth—“Say, you’re Henry Fulton’s nephew, aren’t you?” the barber had asked, to which I replied “No.” The night visitors themselves seemed detestably misguided. After all, if they so badly wanted my uncle to tell some kind of truth, why was it they had to make their desire known in such wicked and skewed ways? As I sat there in this little room I knew so well, I came to the firm understanding that in my attempt to escape the patterns of self-created crisis that had become so habitual in my life, I had only managed to enmesh myself in a fresh complex of troubles. Troubles that seemed less easily solved than any I had managed to create. Troubles that only a week before were attractive for being so distant and separate from my own, but which by now were moving toward the heart of what was left for me to love.

  II

  The Paradise of Children

  “What can it be?” thought Pandora. “Is there something alive in the box? Well!—yes!—I am resolved to take just one peep! Only one peep; and then the lid shall be shut down as safely as ever! There cannot possibly be any harm in just one little peep!”

  —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,

  The Wonder Book for Boys and Girls

  HE HAD JUST celebrated his tenth birthday when his parents put him aboard the ship with his older sister so that they could make the crossing before the weather turned bad, and before the war got even worse than it already was. They added the name Sam to his papers, in the ingenuous hope that such a good, common name might make his acclimation in the new world easier. After all, wasn’t it true that all the men over there who weren’t named Joe or Harry or Dick went by the name of Sam? If not, who was Uncle Sam with the goatish beard, top hat, and pointing finger they had seen once in a magazine from overseas? Yes, Sam would be his new-world name, they agreed. And therefore Giovanni Sam Trentas was settled aboard ship with his sister, Paola, unable to speak a word of English, and rather unsure of the reasons he was being deported, although his mother had explained to him, and more than once, that she would follow, his father would follow, and soon they would all be together again, reunited in a place called Coeur d’Alene, way out west in America.

  Paola herself spoke only passable English but, unlike her shyer brother, more than made up for whatever shortcomings she might have with the language by employing her natural vivacity, her gift for lively pantomime, to make her thoughts understood. She cherished her new role as her brother’s substitute mother, as she saw it. Slender, dark-haired, with green eyes that were said to be her Valle d’Aostan maternal heritage, with long hands and legs and neck, Paola was an irreverent but naturally graceful sixteen-year-old who could pass for a decade older than she was. I can imagine them, she and her brother, wandering the decks during the voyage to New York, perhaps being adopted by another family on the overcrowded ship whose cargo included not just refugees from fascist Italy but livestock. Cattle, sheep, chickens, a menagerie of domesticated animals. I can picture them sharing meals of baudin and filoncini, red wine and frutti seed, which made the crossing tolerable as they were pressed together in cabins, all their possessions tied into unwieldly bundles stacked in every corner, hoping against hope this choice to leave their homeland was the right one. I can understand that though she had been told to call her brother “Sam,” she either forgot or else decided Giovanni was still Giovanni—or else Gianni, as she called him, despite what had been typed on his emigration documents. Either way, the nickname never took hold, so that by the time they dropped anchor in New York harbor, everyone who had gotten to know Paola and her brother cried out to him, —Arrivederci, piccolo Giovanni! buona fortuna e stammi bene! When the two were processed through New York immigration, one of the customs officers did refer to him as Sam Trentas, but that was the last time either the boy or his sister heard the name used, with the single exception of my uncle Henry. When Henry heard this story, he then and there adopted “Sam” as his own nickname for his friend. Giovanni always liked that, too, that his friend had a special name for him.

  The train trip took nearly as long as their ocean passage. A woman who is only referred to as the Signora in the little diary of their voyage—presumably kept by Paola, but present in Giovanni’s box and hence my extrapolations—accompanied the children as far as Chicago. The children continued on alone, and were met at the train station in Spokane, then driven across state lines back to Coeur d’Alene, along the immaculate river there, through the green and red and brown unspoiled mountains of Kootenai County. Giovanni must have been awed by the Bitterroot range, its snowcapped peaks and the great lakes that had collected in the deep ravines of this northern scape. There is preserved in the box a photograph of the clapboard house, whose every eave is hung with gingerbread trim and which, though the photograph is black and white, was clearly painted in several shades. A black dog barks at the photographer from the porch of this house, and is blurred somewhat in the faded image, which gives him a ghostly look and elongates his bared fangs, but otherwise the house has about it the look of comfort, even gaiety. The woman who took them in was one Marie-Alexandre Ponset, a friend of the Trentas family from their days in Aosta, in northern Italy, indeed the only friend they knew in America
, and it would seem that while Giovanni could at the time speak no English, Marie-Alexandre conversed mostly in French. The babel of many voices speaking in several languages around the table at dinner in Coeur d’Alene must have been something to hear. Until he managed to learn some English, or even a little French, I would think young Giovanni was forced to spend quite a lot of time in his head.

  Lost in the mercenary sump of time past are years whose activities are largely unaccounted for, years whose daily doings must have seemed so significant to those who lived them, years of adjusting to a foreign culture, of striving not to feel forever like an outsider, of playing with children who made judgments upon one because one dressed differently and spoke with an unlikely accent—the years in which Giovanni grew up and came of age. I am unable to account for all kinds of personal history. There was nothing in the box that explained why the Trentases failed to keep their word and follow their children to Coeur d’Alene. A letter written in bad French and posted from Aosta, enclosed in the black-bordered envelope that was traditionally used to convey the news of a death, begins with the phrase Il ç’est avec grande douleur que je vous adressé la présente lettre … and goes on to express the sender’s condolences on the passing of their mother. The letter seems to suggest, though in subtle terms, that had she not gone south to Rome, not allowed herself to be swept away by the promise of a better life elsewhere, she might have lived longer. But other than that extraordinary bit of inbred philosophy, nothing.

  Or, rather, much that went in many directions: for while the box gave me little about specific events in Giovanni’s childhood days in the Bitterroots, it was a cornucopia indeed, of preposterous stuff collected hither and thither in the years that followed his departure from that tidy, prim house by the lake. The box was the repository of fragments from another age.

  Here was the ticket for a dance recital.

  And here, the recipe for dandelion wine.

  Here was a pair of rusted spinner hooks in a folded paper case.

  And here, the calling card of one Maurice Oser, Controller of rats, mice, roaches, vermin.

  A carefully typed column of numbers I read up and down until I figured out they were meant to show how, by saving one dollar one day, and then two dollars on the second day, four on the third day, eight on the fourth day, and so on, doubling the number of dollars you save for each new day of the week, you will have amassed in a few weeks over a million dollars.

  Here was a packet of rolling papers—Papiers Mais, Bestest 200 leaves, Verdadeiro papel Francez—and another of the Prince Albert brand.

  Subscriber’s receipts for Country Home, Automobile Digest, True Detective, I found in the box, together with a printed flyer for Presure lactique Suisse, beneficial in the treatment of lanemie, la gastralgie, la dyspepsie, le diabete, la constipation, and les effets pernicieux de I’alcool.

  Half a sheet of foolscap was here—or maybe only a third of the original leaf of paper—ripped roughly from top to bottom down its center. The leaf was densely written on in a small hand, black ink. Since it was only a scrap, which I had tried hard without success to read over the next days, and because a couple of feathers had fallen out when I unfolded it, I assumed it was meant to protect these feathers: two beautiful feathers, grayish brown with white fuzz.

  A little black leather change purse lay beneath the feathers, an old purse holding ten Italian lire, two wartime pennies struck in some cheap alloy, and a handful of several dozen copper pennies—which, as I weighed it in the palm of my hand, made me think, He couldn’t go far on that.

  This handsome brass cylinder, with a plunger at one end and nipple at the other, was the largest talisman here, something whose use I could not fathom, at least on first scrutiny.

  Photographs and keepsake cards in abundance.

  A miniature diary for 1942, which I leafed through with hope of discovering what Giovanni had done before his emigration from Italy, but in which I found not a single mark other than the letter S—as ornately drawn as a treble clef—penciled in the addresses section at the back.

  An amusing booklet, printed on cheap paper, whose cover was illustrated with a man wagging his finger at two women and a gentleman who resembled Fred Astaire, all of whom were laughing merrily, beneath the banner: Dr. Miles New Joke Book “What’s the idea of the Smiths taking French lessons?” I read. “They’ve adopted a French baby, and want to understand what it says when it begins to talk.” Jokes such as this were interspersed with advertisements for products such as Dr. Miles Anti-Pain Pills and Dr. Miles Nervine.

  And so Giovanni’s box, it appeared to me, was a little museum of whimsical curiosities which allowed me some glimpse into the life of this man my uncle had so dearly loved and who knew Helen Trentas from before she could walk or speak. His treasures offered me the chance to envision the history of one who had always been peripheral in my life, a man I never saw as having much to do with me, one whose voice I could for some reason remember, but whose face and figure I recalled only after discovering a formal portrait of him, standing beside an unlikely plinth, his arm settled upon its capstone with an elegance that seemed inherent.

  Still, this stuff allowed me only a patchwork portrait. And while it might have been sufficient to satisfy my curiosity a few brief days earlier, now it was not. Now I wanted to know everything I could about the life of this immigrant.

  And I was not to be denied. Hidden beneath the gewgaws and bric-a-brac were the letters which would give me my clearest insight into the life of Giovanni Trentas. That morning, the morning Edmé placed the box into my hands, I did not, of course, read them, if only because there wasn’t enough time for me to do so and still make any pretense of abiding by my aunt’s opinion that I not open the box at all. Nor did I go through its contents just then and touch each of the objects catalogued above with the reverence of a credulous sleuth. All I did was crack the seal, so to speak, then put the thing away, as I’d been asked to do, before returning to the porch, where Henry had joined his wife in a debate about the cause and meaning of the fire. My attentions were divided, though, as I heard Edmé’s words “No one would dare—”

  “Why not?”

  “Somebody would be bound to see them, all those people around. It’s just too risky.”

  “Nothing risky about it,” Henry scoffed. “If anything, it seems all too convenient.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “All those people around make for good distraction, that’s what I’m saying. Besides, Edmé, listen—face facts. It did happen, and the timing, right after we’d opened our place to the community, the mockery of it … ,” and his voice descended into a whisper until we could not hear him anymore, although his lips continued to move. We three sat, as if suspended in that image, quiet and saddened by the allusion. Then my uncle turned to me and spoke again. “Grant, did you notice anybody missing from the party when the fire first started?”

  Before I opened my mouth, Edmé intervened. “There were so many new faces, how would Grant be able to tell whether someone had slipped off? What’s more, it was getting dark by then.”

  For my part, I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You’re sure somebody actually set it?”—coming back into the present, out of the curious wonderment of the box.

  Henry said, “Well, what caused it otherwise? You think it was a case of spontaneous combustion?”

  We had spread plastic tarps over the tables overnight, because after the fire had been extinguished no one had the stamina to begin putting party things back in order. I took this as my opportunity to sidestep my uncle’s understandable animosity—not really directed toward me, as such, but dangerous to be near in any case, I sensed—and so I left them there on the veranda and went down into the foreyard to see where to start cleaning up. The tarps were bright blue, and the lawn looked strangely populated by these shiny mounds. As I pulled the covers off, wet with dew, and laid them out across the fence in the upper yard to dry, my mind went back to Giovanni Trentas and what an
awful ending he’d met just up in the gorge there. The beautiful small boy he must have been, who had come and made his way in a country foreign to him, who had worked hard during his life and raised his daughter in the absence of a wife who’d left him—that that long road would carry him to such a butchering, and the horrid disfigurement of his body besides, seemed to me, as I breathed in the soft morning breezes which moved through the trees and over the grasses, appallingly unfair. No one deserved such a fate as that, I thought. And the idea that whoever had done this to him was alive and well, as able as I to breathe this sweet air, caused a deeply unsettling indignation to come over me. It was as if I could hear Jude’s disembodied voice again, chastising me for not pursuing those who’d been responsible for my parents’ death that evening so long ago, telling me that here I had in some way a fresh opportunity, one not to miss. So far as I can tell, it was during these moments by myself, before Edmé came down to join me, that my passion to discover who it was that killed Giovanni Trentas was born.

  I remembered a book about the origins of consciousness I had read some years before, a book I was able to understand in only a limited way but in which I found an unforgettable line. The most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discovering the will of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of unusual or important events. Other than the fascination the words held for me in their proper context of mythology, and of the genesis of religious rites, my interest in the idea was purely intellectual. That is, I believed then that these words would never have any direct impact on my own life. And yet, now look: I find myself writing this chronicle, like a primitive looking for direction from a great, or small, unnamed power. As I stood there that morning, however, I sensed that the will of silent gods was not confined to deep history. Even the most obscene myth and nastiest god manifest themselves here and there every day. All we have to do is notice them.