Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Whatever your uncle said yesterday, he apologized and meant it. We’re family. I was thinking last night, when you didn’t come back, why not move into Giovanni’s cabin until things settle down some— you’d still be here, but at the same time you’d have a little distance, sort of a place of your own. Everybody would have the chance to cool down a bit, and if you wanted to find your own place, if you’re thinking of staying, it would give you some time. There’s no phone down there, but the woodstove works and the place is clean—I looked this morning—dusty but clean, and you would eat with us when you wanted, and always can use this phone. What do you say? I really don’t want you to go. How’d that work for a compromise?”

  Edmé walked down with me. I with my half-packed bag, to which Giovanni’s box was the only addition since my arrival; she carrying blankets, sheets, a pillow. We made the move before Henry returned from the studio later in the afternoon, because Edmé didn’t want him to talk me out of accepting her compromise arrangement, as she said he would lobby for me to stay where I was and she didn’t want to risk hearing more words between us other than words of agreement. The cabin stood just on the other side of the creek, not so far from where the old log structure had burned on Labor Day night. Grass had grown up around its rough timber walls sealed with white oakum, and the boughs of water spruce, which had overhung its roof when I was a boy, now canopied the modest dwelling in an embrace of foliage. For the most part, as I remembered, Giovanni did not occupy the cabin during those innocent summers when I visited Ash Creek, but stayed with his daughter in town, in order to give Edmé and Henry their space. Nevertheless I’d always kept my distance, sometimes watching the cabin from afar, like kids do, for no particular reason. We approached, in other words, a locus of mystery about to be unveiled.

  “See?” Edmé said, when we entered the haven, and yes, soft sunlight flooded the room, whose spartan chairs, table, bed were veneered by a fine dust film but otherwise quite immaculate. Through the closed windows, perhaps through the walls themselves, you could hear the burbling creek, very nearby. Sounded like so many voices engaged in slippery, gentle dialogue. It occurred to me, fleetingly, that Helen might not like my moving in here—ever protective of anything having to do with her father. But no other alternative presented itself, had it. Edmé had made the best possible proposal. I told her so, smiled as we sheeted a narrow bed, swept the checkered linoleum floor, then mopped it with cold stream water, and just passed a couple of pleasant, mindless hours together, working to make the place comfortable. We carried in some kerosene from the storage shed, filled the two hurricane lamps, replacing the tapers, and I lit a fire in the corner stove, which filled the place with smoke at first. Once the chimney flue had warmed and whatever spider-webs silting the passage there were burned away, the fire drew well. After the smoke cleared, we shut windows and door, and to all intents and purposes I was established down here, where already I felt a little freer, much less a burden to Henry and Edmé and even to myself.

  Up at the house, during dinner that evening we spoke tangentially of my meeting with Graham Tate, though I remained mum with regard to his accusation of Henry, of course. Nothing new was disclosed about Tate, nothing I hadn’t heard before. But when, tongue loosened by wine, perhaps, I mentioned my confusion about why Willa would stay all these years with Tate, locked in barren marriage to a powermonger, withdrawn like a Bluebeard mistress jailed in his opulent but coarse castle, Henry’s face clouded with a subtle, unrecognizable pain.

  “I’m sure Willa has her reasons, like any of us, for doing what she does,” Edmé remarked, not having noticed Henry’s expression (or did she not need to see it in order to fathom it was there?)—and proceeded to litanize Willa’s charity work and other involvements that showed a good woman doing good things, no matter who she was married to or how she otherwise chose to live her life.

  If I hadn’t been so fascinated by Henry, I might have felt properly scolded by Edmé. As it was, I commented, “I didn’t mean to belittle her. Just the opposite. She seemed like a remarkable woman, the day I met her.”

  “She’s been very kind to your friend Helen over the years,” Edmé said.

  Which did snap me out of it, not used to Helen’s name being evoked here all that often. And certainly not in association with me. Hoping, I suppose, to deflect any chance of discussing Helen, I asked, “Are her parents still alive?”

  Henry himself seemed to awaken, too, and said, “You know as well as anybody that Giovanni’s dead, Grant.”

  “I don’t mean Helen’s parents. I mean Willa’s.”

  What had that glazed look in my uncle’s eye been about? I felt protective of the man; he seemed increasingly like one possessed or haunted or bewildered. I didn’t want to contribute to whatever this was that seemed to bother him. I said abruptly, “Just idle curiosity on my part; we can change the subject. So tell me,” with as warm a smile toward my uncle as I could project, “did they finish fixing up that rain gutter?”

  The question was answered, the supper discourse meandered along, and all seemed as copacetic as could be expected among us. Though it was cool outside, cooler than those half-dozen weeks ago when we first sat after dinner and smoked on the porch, we enjoyed brandy and cigarettes, and Edmé joined us. Henry’s wayward look had faded completely, and he spoke with his usual measured spirits, saying that it wouldn’t take him that long to have the studio and the maquettes back to where they were before the harasser did his handiwork. “It is the ideas that take time, not the icons,” he said, which made me appreciate his resilience. He saked about my hand, and I told him it felt better, though in fact it throbbed this evening, perhaps from the work in Giovanni’s cabin. If he had some opinion about my having moved from the house to these new quarters, he didn’t express much of it: only when I bid good night to them both, saying I was exhausted and it was time to give this new bed a try, he proposed, “You want to borrow one of the rifles, just to have it there?”

  “No need,” I answered.

  “You sure?”

  Instead, I asked for a good flashlight, and after Edmé placed one in my hands, saying, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Grant—you know you really are welcome up here if you find you don’t feel comfortable, the door’ll be unlocked,” I smiled in the darkness on the porch and assured her I felt grateful to them both for putting me up. Henry shook my hand—formal of him, I thought—Edmé kissed me, and off I went down the field, crossing the same narrow unstable bridge Helen and I’d crossed on our way to the little cemetery, back in those simpler days which now seemed so long ago. Orange coals still brightened the grate in the belly of the corner stove, and I stoked them before adding several fresh chunks of dry wood to the fire. Kneeling, I blew gently into the glow until it caught again.

  I considered lighting one of the lamps and reading from Hawthorne the next story, which was about the golden apples of the Hesperides, but instead I sat on the edge of the bed to allow my mind to drift. Thoughts of what Giovanni must have felt here, way back when he himself was not much older than I am now, turned through me, nearly visceral, like golden apple-tree leaves which surely must have resembled back in olden times those of the quaking aspens in these mountains surrounding me. Leaves all fluttering about, having been plucked from the branches by a muscular wind. And as those thoughts—more thoughtless than reflective—whirled, I removed my clothes and climbed into the icy bed, and even shivered a little until the sheets began to warm against my skin. The room flickered with shadow figures cast from the stove fire, and whether asleep or awake, I heard myself say to Giovanni’s ghost both hello and good night, as the voices in the creek continued to prattle and chatter and sigh.

  And I slept. Money and golden apples, love and jealousies, rivalries and estrangements and every other worry drifted further and further from my dreamless mind than they ever had, or would.

  On waking, I heard the stream continue with its monologue, which m
ust have resembled, I thought as I rose to rekindle the fire, the meaningless babble Giovanni heard when he disembarked the ship with his sister, Paola, and entered America. Myself, I was not unfamiliar with such estrangements; again, what I felt this morning was such affinity with him, a deepening fondness. The man’s simplicity, of which I’d had some small knowledge, mostly from those who knew him far better than I ever did, was manifest in this pure plain shelter. Little had been disturbed here, I gathered, since he left the cabin for the relative grandeur of the cottage where Helen now lived alone. And now, these years later, Edmé and Henry seemed still to have kept it as a rustic shrine in honor of their departed friend. This table of pine, its top a palimpsest of scratch marks, some of them no doubt carved in moments of boredom by his girl, and now mine, two decades ago or better. This chair, timeworn but solid. These battered aluminum pots and chipped plates and the bent silverware in the cabinet near the stove. All these artifacts vouched for the simplest kind of life. It didn’t take much of a leap of faith for me to imagine how central to Giovanni’s existence his daughter had been, how considerable his love for her: what else did he ever bother to care about? His daughter, his friendships with a few who became his kin. That was all.

  Out the window, the field steamed. I dressed, knocked shut the stove grate, walked up to the house where I had my coffee, answered Edmé’s questions about Giovanni’s hut with truthful words of assurance, and asked if I was needed for any sort of work around the place. The day stretched before me, unusually worriless, especially in the wake of these last couple of nights.

  Willa Tate was who I wanted to see. Before I left, with no plan for how I would set about fulfilling my wish, I mentioned to Edmé my encounter with David Lewis. “I’ll do whatever you want,” I added. She said she’d think about what was best and let me know.

  The morning was warmer than it had been for some weeks, the sky a succinct blue trimmed with layers of cirrostratus. In the east was a sun pillar, like a candelabra of light in clouds that soon would burn away. Water droplets like silver pearls fell from the telephone wires along the creek road, and the hood of the jeep was beaded with dew. In a rucksack I’d brought along Giovanni’s box with me; I wasn’t sure just why, other than that I’d begun to fear someone might take it away from me. I’d placed it on the seat beside me; the beautiful dona in the oval portrait returned my quick gaze but didn’t look away from me as I did from her. Dust, gasoline, and damp canvas scented the interior of the jeep. Once more I turned from the dirt road onto the narrow highway, past the mailboxes affixed along the crossbeam of the rustic crucifix there, and headed toward town in complete ignorance of how I might go about effecting this proposed meeting with Willa Tate.

  Then the stables came to mind. If I went to see Helen, there was some chance (chance was just the word) Willa might have chosen a warm morning like this to ride. Today was Thursday, and Helen had said Thursdays were Willa’s riding days. Given the lack of other prospects, other than simply driving the juniper-lined route back up to the Tates’ aerie and ringing the bell, this seemed best.

  I knew my way there because when I was younger, my uncle Henry had brought me to the stables more than once to watch the horse shows that took place from spring through fall. Men and women and many horses, Arabians and palominos and other breeds, horses for sale and at stud—I remember these exhibits and how fearful those great powerful flanks and necks and flaring nostrils were to me. I remember finding it incomprehensible how boys and girls no older than I discovered in their hearts the courage, arrogance, poise, it required to climb aboard a beast so much stronger than they. We came and watched, and I noticed Henry would regard the show with a kind of nostalgic infatuation—I was not too young to make such a refined appraisal of him—that made me understand, even then, how he missed this world of his own youth. Edmé never joined us, and so the horse show had been one of those boys’-time-together experiences, and one which despite my fears I’d always looked forward to each visit.

  The stables had, naturally, changed some since those days—I noticed immediately the much vaster configurations of white painted fences that mazed the flats out east of town, just on the far side of the river. More paddocks, sheds, stalls, too. Twenty or thirty horses exercised out in the main ring. Whatever funky rural spirit might once have obtained here was now gone: this was an impressive concern. The very lot where I left the jeep, having stashed my Pandora box beneath the seat, was—though still of hard-packed dirt—somehow more serious business.

  And serious business this was, even to one with as untutored an eye as mine. I wandered the length of an extended barn, open at either end, and saw that each of the stalls bore a chalkboard with feeding, medical, and exercise instructions, as well as placards giving the individual’s name, pedigree, trophies and other awards. The sawdusted dirt floor was raked, the equipment immaculate; an air of professionalism washed up and down the corridors of the building. Not having seen Helen’s car back in the lot, I didn’t expect to run into her, and didn’t—but now was approached by a man wearing a red logoed tee shirt with the stable name, Pajarito, in white on his chest, and blue jeans and boots, who asked if he could help me. I told my name, and asked whether Willa Tate was around this morning.

  “Already come and gone,” he said. “Well, no—hold on. Maybe she’s still back there in the tack room. I know she’s done riding for the day. You mind waiting here?”

  Barley, hay, clovery smells, and the smell of horse piss. These were scents, in fact, I liked. I paced back down the center passage toward the brightening light where huge sliding doors had been pushed open to let in fresh air. Some doves coodled above me in the rafters. And then I turned and there she was, tentatively smiling and presenting me with her handshake, solid though not vising like her husband’s, whose was meant to wrench the blood from your hand rather than exchange warmth and respects. “Grant? This is a surprise,” she said. “You ride?”

  “No, no,” laughing, embarrassed. “Horses frighten me. I’m a great disappointment to my uncle for never having learned.”

  We walked together back toward the lot.

  “Never too late,” Willa said.

  “That may be true for most things, but not for me and horses.”

  “I’ll bet I could have you riding decent English style before Thanksgiving. How are Edmé and Henry?”

  “Fine,” I said, but the falsehood tasted awful in my mouth and so I quickly added, “Not fine.”

  “Oh, really?” and she turned toward me, a concerned expression crowding her eyes, brow furrowed. I considered that look, and the classical beauty of this woman, her eyes so clear, such presences, and intuited, without much evidence to support my thought, that this interest she displayed was genuine. None of the convolution her husband seemed so much to enjoy was evident in Willa.

  “Not altogether fine, no. You and I don’t know each other, and I’m probably being presumptuous talking with you about it. But I’ve kind of reached a dead end, and to be honest, I didn’t know where else to turn.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Maybe we should go somewhere else?”

  “Helen says nice things about you,” Willa said. “Did you know that? Not to me, but to others here.”

  We walked slowly along. I waited for her answer.

  “It’s too late for breakfast and too early for lunch.”

  The coffee shop I’d gone to when I first arrived in August came to mind. I proposed we meet there, figuring—rightly, as it would happen—that Willa Tate did not often frequent the place. This way, at least, we’d be on more equal footing. We drove separately from the stables back the several miles to town. Different parts of the sky displayed different weathers. Over there was cloudless and sunny; back over here was stirring with silver-edged stacks of darkening clouds; and just ahead ran a mingling of clear blues and clots of froth, as if many seasons had taken hold of the heavens at the same time.

  It wasn’t until I found myself in town, looking al
ong the curb for a free space, my own disquiet returned. Just for one, anxiety about my frail finances was reawakened by that hateful bank clock, pendant and casting its thin shadow on the sidewalk where I walked directly beneath it, hoping to summon some healthy defiance, as if it were a ladder and I the least superstitious man on earth. Then I thought, Are you really going to ask her these questions that are needling you, obsessing you? Are you that far gone?

  She had already taken her place in a booth, not near the window but quite far back in the room. She sat facing the wall. Was she smoking a cigarette?

  I lit one myself after sliding in opposite her, and she laid the immense plastic-sheathed menu before her when the young woman, May, whom I’d nearly forgotten, came to take our orders. She smiled, perhaps recognizing me, perhaps not, and Willa ordered tea while I indulged in bread pudding and coffee. After she left, some moments passed, while the wooden paddles of the ceiling fan carved the air and light above us, and late-morning customers raised their mild voices here and there as they spoke to one another.

  “Helen’s an interesting girl, don’t you agree?” Willa said at last.

  “She’s certainly that.”

  A pause, then, “You’re enjoying your stay with Edmé and Henry?”

  “Ash Creek’s always been special for me. And they’ve been like parents. I don’t suppose you get up to see them all that often, do you. I mean, besides Labor Day.”

  “When I was younger I went there a lot. Giovanni and I would play cards—canasta, even poker, if you can believe it. He was the best person to walk in those mountains with I ever met, knew the name of every plant, every stone, every bird. His English was never all that good, but he knew Ash Creek inside out. It’s still one of my favorite places on earth. Have you ever been up in the gorge?”

  “Pretty far up. Never all the way, though.”

  “It’s a different world up there, a fantasy world. You half expect the trees to take on life like in The Wizard of Oz, reach out and wrap their arms around you. And the springs at the very head of the gorge, where Ash Creek literally comes pushing up out of the earth—well, I used to hike there often with Henry and Giovanni and Edmé. Not anymore. Not for years.”