Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  “That’s too bad. To give up something you obviously like so much.”

  Willa read me easily, in part because I wanted to be easily read. Her face was arranged into the most sorrowful smile, elegant and defended, sentimental yet tough.

  “So what is it you wanted to talk about, Grant?”

  Remembering this was not Willa Richardson but Tate’s wife, I said, “I assume you probably already know. But for the sake of argument, I should say that I’ve been given a present by my aunt that maybe wasn’t mine to have. Giovanni’s box. Did you know about it?”

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea.” The pudding was like manna from some Hawthorne heaven.

  “You ought to try this,” and pushed my plate toward her. To my surprise, she took up her spoon and sampled some. “Good, right? Well, he kept this cigar box—”

  “He never smoked a cigar in his life, always was telling me I ought to give up cigarettes.”

  “And in this box he kept a lot of knickknacks and mementos and things.”

  “That doesn’t sound like my Giovanni. He was never a hoarder, couldn’t have cared less about material things. Are you sure you understood Edmé when she gave you this box?”

  “Oh, yes, very sure. And it’s definitely Giovanni’s. There’s a stash of letters in it, written to him from overseas, and letters from his sister.”

  “Paola wrote Giovanni? I always felt bad they were estranged during his last years.”

  “Yes, and letters from Margery Wilkins, later Margery Trentas, in the box, brief frightened little notes, more like, but love letters written under duress. And there’s another note, too, that I guess I wanted to ask you about, but maybe I shouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it involves you.”

  “Involves me? I see. There are no love letters in your box from me to Giovanni, I can tell you that much. I think there are people around who would like to think differently, because he was one of the best friends I ever had, and people adore nothing better than to create dirty stuff where there was only good.”

  “That’s not what I said, though. The note isn’t from you to Giovanni. It’s from you to my uncle.”

  Silence; that smile, and what did she do but say, “I’m not surprised. There was a time when Henry and I were very close. It’s no one’s business but our own, and besides, it was a lifetime ago. Why would such a thing interest you, anyway, Grant?”

  “Because, to answer your earlier question, if I do love Helen, that letter from you has something to do with her, doesn’t it? And until there’s some closure regarding her father’s death, she’s never going to be free to love me, and so I’m interested in seeing that closure come to pass.”

  All of which was sort of news to me, too. That is, these ideas might have been cognitive play toys worried at, in an amused though terrified way, these past weeks. But setting them out, one by one, in words, to be heard by this woman whom I barely knew but who I could sense was deeply enmeshed in the lives of those for whom I cared, made the thoughts themselves condense into real dispositions.

  “Do you expect me to say something now?” Willa asked. “What would you like me to say to you?” She held her cup with both hands before her face, so that all I could see was a look in her eyes I couldn’t fathom. Surely somewhere there must have been wariness in that look. Dismay, maybe, at this news she’d been discovered—though I had not truly discovered anything, nor had she as yet admitted anything, either. What I saw, instead, was warmth, if you will, like affection, and relief, perhaps. As if some absolution was suddenly available to her, if she chose to embrace it.

  To my amazement she did, more or less. She told me that her friendship with Henry back then was, yes, close—closer than merely close—and as she continued, she asked aloud, as much for her sake as mine, “No reason not to tell you, is there? because surely you agree there’s nothing to gain by going with this to Edmé, not after so much time. It would only hurt her, for no reason. Henry knows, my husband knows, Giovanni knew, and now you know, and that’s the full circle. Are you happy now?”

  “Edmé and Henry were married, right? “

  “They were. I was young. I made a mistake. So did your uncle. We had the choice of going on with the relationship behind Edmé’s back, or telling her, or stopping. And we stopped. I went away for almost a year. That was how I broke it off.”

  “Edmé’d be devastated.”

  “Would she? They say women know. And I think we do. Edmé needs to believe otherwise, and Henry’s gone out of his way to provide for that belief. So have I, by the way.”

  “Don’t you feel guilty?” knowing myself hardly to be in the position to question someone else’s morals, considering my own past behavior, but asking away nevertheless.

  “Why should I? It’s over now. I’m an old married woman with a forgiving husband and a memory that’s uncomfortable, tormented even, sometimes. I’ve made my mistake, I’ve suffered, I’ve done what I could do to keep that suffering from spreading out into others’ lives. And like I say, it’s over now.”

  She rose, went to the rest room, and when she returned, I asked, “Want to go?”

  “You know what I want?”

  I stood, placed some money on the table, followed her out into the bright daylight, which stung my eyes. Outside, I said, “What?”

  “I want you to consider giving me that note. Giovanni’d want me to have it. You know now, you know what you wanted, and I’m not even unhappy about having shared it with you. But let me destroy the note. Nothing good can come of keeping it around.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Have you told Henry about this?”

  “No. I doubt he’d be anywhere near as forthcoming as you’ve just been, and besides, let’s just say he’s not very happy with me right now as it is.”

  “Think about it, Grant. I’ve been honest with you, be fair with me. I’m not ashamed of what I did. I loved your uncle in my way, but it’s been thirty-some years. We’ve all made our separate peace with what happened.”

  “How’d Giovanni know?”

  “Because I told him.”

  “Why’d you tell him?”

  “That’s enough with questions, Grant. Think about giving me the note. It’s not much to ask. And never let on to Helen about this. If you do, nothing but pain will come from it. I think if you bring it up with her, you can forget your romance. Helen won’t be grateful. Trust me on that score. And thanks for the tea and sharing the bread pudding.” We shook hands, accomplicelike, as business people might, and parted.

  Having crossed the street, I sat in the jeep, across from Tate’s office on the second floor of the bank building, toward which Willa had walked, and savored the last white warmth of the retiring sun through the scratched windows. I understood by my abstracted sense of grief that Willa had confirmed something I’d preferred to think of as a bad fantasy, something I myself, guilty and prurient dreamer, had invented with the harmless box as my muse. But look: Seek and ye shall find. Wasn’t that how the adage went? Although what she revealed about her relationship with my uncle was disturbing, I was grateful to have the knowledge in hand, because for the first time I felt I had some inkling about what that note, Tell the truth, might have meant, and why it was important to Henry that I not mention it to Edmé. Here was one possible truth the night visitor might want Henry to admit—though, of course, as Willa’d rightly said, it was a long time ago, and one might fairly question what good could come of digging up such dead issues. None, to be sure, unless these dead issues were attached to living ones. Lord, I thought. I wasn’t a bit closer to any answers than before; perhaps if anything was a little further afield.

  The warning Willa had laid out about Helen bothered me, more than anything else. It didn’t jibe with what Helen herself had insisted from the first mention of such matters. I remembered her words, could hear them echo in my head: I get crazy because there’s such a tangle here, and I won’t ever get free of it until I kn
ow what really did happen. Willa said just the opposite—she’d counted on my never telling Helen about her doomed affair with Henry, based on a forewarning that she would not be grateful for such knowledge.

  I didn’t get it. Was it possible two distinct, contradictory truths were at play? I believed that both Willa and Helen had been honest with me, but the ledgers when run together refused to add up. I felt a spasm rush through me, an ache of perplexity. I didn’t get it, and didn’t like it that I didn’t get it. For a moment I was persuaded the only sane move for me to make was to take the note out of Giovanni’s box—it was, after all, right there—and run upstairs, find Willa, and put the piece of paper into her hands. Instead, however, I just sat there, paralyzed. It was as if I could find it in myself to do such a thing, but the box wouldn’t allow me to begin parceling it out, would not consent to any schism in its integrity. The temptation passed. The box remained unbreached.

  Afternoon had turned gusty, wind fingers combing through the wild grasses. Storm clouds fumed at the mountain fringes. The sky had settled upon an endless gray.

  Helen was not home. I took a walk along the river, where we’d argued recently, and tossed stones into the water. When I returned to the cottage, I saw she still wasn’t around and so let myself in with the key she kept hidden in the stone wall beside the back door. I’d grown disheartened and cold waiting for her to turn up. Going inside seemed the natural move for me to make. I assured myself she wouldn’t mind.

  Inside, transient light filtered through the windows, making the surfaces of the kitchen ghostly, softly fuzzed and thereby a little unreal. It was as if a new faculty were aroused in me, as I stood in her rooms alone, free to smell Helen’s scent, which marked them, at liberty to explore if I dared. I guess I should have felt more of an intruder than I did, though it would be a falsehood to suggest I didn’t feel the nervous flutter one gets in his gut knowing he is doing something transgressive. I set my rucksack, with Giovanni’s box in it, on the kitchen table. Glancing now and again out the windows to warn myself if Helen was about to arrive, I meandered from kitchen through dining room through living room. An unearthly silence abided, an exquisite calm.

  Upstairs. I had to go upstairs. What drew me there was plain curiosity and what bade me to open the drawer to her desk was also curiosity, although the wiser sense of foreboding, which before had led me to glance continually out windows, to be certain I was still alone, was forgotten in my lust to rummage around, see what there was to see.

  The usual junk any of us deposits over years into our drawers rattled together—more spare keys, some tarnished silver jewelry, a broken seashell. What interested me were some photos she kept in no apparent order. Helen with blue ribbon and a grand wreath of flowers, standing next to a magnificent stallion. Helen in tan jodhpurs and black velvet jacket. Another of Helen, in Italy with women who appeared to be kin surrounding her, though their faces were so different from hers, their clothing, their smiles—not kin, though the next photographs would lead me to believe she was in Velletri, standing with these women in the Piazza Cairoli, with the Trivio tower rising behind them no different now than it was in the fourteenth century. And here was yet another of Helen, a girl about ten years of age, a tomboy in overalls and with hair shorn—quite different from her pinafore garb in that photo in Henry’s studio—once again surrounded by people, though I couldn’t immediately make out who they were. Where they were was easier—the knoll to the right and the long veranda which stretched from south to north and thereby paralleled the creek were plainly Ash Creek’s. Some caught in the shot looked directly at the camera, others didn’t, and after a moment’s reflection, telling by the number of people there, I realized this was a Labor Day feast from a couple of decades ago. Giovanni Trentas had his hand on her shoulders and stood behind the girl, I now recognized. On her left was a woman whose face was altogether bathed in shadow under her flamboyant black gaucho hat. To her right, I could see, stood my uncle Henry, his arm over Giovanni’s shoulder, placed there as a brother might, it his gaze off away toward someone outside the view of the camera. It wasn’t my imagination that led me to believe he had a look of deep sadness or even apprehension on his face—once more, the two Henrys of Ash Creek caught in a single instant, one the comfortable paterfamilias and host posing with dear friends, and the other Henry gazing away toward problems on some immediate horizon. Little Helen smiled openly, as only children can, at the person taking the shot, She was beautiful, a dark angel even then, Nothing was written on the reverse of the print, unfortunately. I would have liked to verify who the woman was at Giovanni’s side.

  I put the photographs back into the desk, tried to arrange them so they appeared to lie there haphazard, just as before. I listened hard and heard nothing, and was persuaded by the silence to open yet another drawer.

  Here were receipts, business documents, phone bills, that sort of thing. None of this much interested me, but I found myself sifting through the papers, anyway. Who did Helen write checks to? Nothing very unusual; to the gas company for propane, the electric company for the power that would allow the lights to shine were I to come to my senses and shut this drawer and hurry downstairs to the kitchen, having turned the lights on there, where I might rather innocently sit and await Helen’s return rather than continue with this folly.

  Then my eye caught a glimpse of something unexpected. Graham Tate’s name printed on a series of documents; mortgage receipts, they appeared to be. The amounts were substantial, at least from my purview, and though my fingers went cold and numb at the vision of his name here in the house of Helen Trentas—for what could this mean but that she had been hiding from me the extent of her involvement with Tater—I continued to lift sheet after sheet of these bank statements, and gazed in disbelief even as I began to realize that I was probably standing in the second-floor bedroom of a house owned not by Helen Trentas—nor left to her as part of the estate of the late Giovanni Trentas—but by Graham Tate. The omnipresent Graham Tate, the omnivorous Tate. Here he was again. I pushed the drawer shut and went slowly downstairs, sat on the couch facing Sam the stuffed eagle. The wind at the windows whistled, calmed, then whistled anew. My mind raced similarly, went blank, raced. When I laid my head back into the pillow of the sofa, I remembered seeing an eagle during a family excursion to salt marshes on Long Island, a few hours east of New York City, near Sag Harbor; remembered the sight of the bird whose wingspan was tremendous and head imperial, as it flew steadily across the low sky, carrying the fish it had just caught in its talons. The fish faced forward, its tail jerkily wagging and snapping. It was a vast fish, with mouth jutted open and a look of shock registered there. Sleek, with its silver sides caught in the claws and spurs of the fisher bird. Prey and predator journeying toward their final wrestle in the nest where chicks equipped with their own beaks and claws would render the fish into mutilated strands of meat and skin, fin and bone. And before I closed my eyes, I gazed at Sam and knew he’d made many similar kills during his brief time on earth—just a fact of nature, as Helen might say, in that same calm voice she used when telling me about trapping bear. But the remembrance bothered me, just as the witnessing had, back near the salt marshes of that boyhood junket. I felt a curious kinship with the stupid twitching fish. What a ludicrous fate he suffered. Or was it? Maybe he’d been in an ecstasy, soaring toward his ruin. Maybe it beat being caught in a yellow tide and washing ashore poisoned, or cannibalized like most in the deplorable food chain, condemned by fate for being slower or smaller than the next.

  Despite my uneasiness, my concern about being here uninvited, despite my memory of that eagle and her hostage, and of these new dismaying discoveries upstairs, I nodded off to sleep, there on the sofa, as the wind went on blowing.

  My awkward nap wouldn’t last long. Soon Helen was standing over me, a smile awry on her lips. “Burglar,” she said.

  I yawned, stretched casually as I could, smiled back with the words, “Caught me.”

  “Breaking
and entering now, are we.”

  “It was a crime of passion, and also it was cold out. Punish me as you see fit.”

  “Don’t think I won’t,” she said, smile gone as she sat beside me, fluently wrapped her arms around me, kissed me with a kind of rough levity. “Your cheeks are cold,” I whispered; but they weren’t cold for very long, neither of us was cold for long, as I found my way inside her there on the davenport, while the first grains of what would begin as a light shower percussed against the window, grains that would develop into fine hail, then settle into a steady drizzle driven by capricious gusts.

  “So tell me the truth,” Helen said, as we gathered ourselves up and faltered toward the kitchen. “Did you snoop around before I got here? Truth now.”

  It would be easier to trap a tempest in a bottle than describe the next moments, such a chaos of subtle lies her questions evoked, even as she surprised me with goads, like, “Closets are the best places to look for things people don’t want you to find, the backs of closets, and under stuff at the backs of shelves. Only mediocre cat burglars look in people’s drawers. Nobody hides important stuff in drawers; too obvious.”

  “Is that so,” as neutral as I could manage.

  “Or else they put things there hoping they’ll be discovered.”

  “I see.”

  “If I had to guess—”

  “You don’t—”

  “If I had to guess, I’d guess you were one poor burglar.”

  “I’m not the thieving kind.”

  “Sure you are, everybody is.”

  “I don’t think you are, for instance.”

  “Naive.”

  “Look, why are we talking about this? I didn’t steal anything, and if you have something to hide, why not just tell me what it is, and that would save us the trouble of playing word games.”