Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  I was out of the current and lay on rocks, and then, as if some other spirit that lived inside me came to life, I found myself on my feet and had my arms wrapped with the last of their strength around this person who had eluded me, threatened me, and now pulled me from the water, too. We went down hard, Helen Fulton and I. Both of us were too exhausted to give much more to the struggle.

  Rome is most beautiful on a rainy day. The venerable statuary is shrouded in mist, and mystery. The Baroque palaces along the Corso, once residences of privileged aristocracy but now given up to banks and boutiques, wrap themselves in the melodrama of drizzle and for a moment, despite the shop windows with their displays, seem again restored to their original grandeur. The Rococo stairway ascending to the Trinita dei Monti glistens with its puddles of water, which reflect the pale scowls of kids in ponchos who’ve come from around the world to idle, to hang. Every piazza is taken over by pigeons, and the face of the Tiber is delicately pocked by falling droplets. Back in this city of possibilities, I inhale the gentle northern wind, hoping it will revive me after another insomniac night alone in the hotel. Already it’s been a morning of wandering, one of my last before giving myself the chance at a different life, and now I ramble past the Pantheon, down the Corso, vaguely toward the Palatine, with Hawthorne in my pocket and nothing before me today but a cafe where I might sit for an hour with the book. I promised Edmé I would send it back to her after I’d read this last story, one about the Chimera, and then signed my name on the endsheet, thereby completing finally an endeavor I’d begun as a boy. Edmé’d said, “Keep the book,” but I see no reason to break her set. Indeed, of all the people I have ever known, Edmé might be the one who deserves wholeness, completeness, unbrokenness, because as I understand things now, she had, through her capacity for forgiveness, tried to keep so many lives unbroken. This is nothing I could ever communicate to her in so many words, of course. She would look at me with wondering eyes. But, as I say, while I have no desire to part with The Wonder Book, I haven’t it in me to want what’s not rightly mine. No more breakage.

  Someone at the hotel said that yesterday was Veterans Day back in the States, a Saturday in early November. While I don’t have a calendar and don’t really care what day it was yesterday, I feel that though I’ve come home wounded—veteran of a war not of my making—I have some chance at healing, too. Maybe even of finding some health I never knew before.

  I put up at a decent hotel; nothing with stars, but nothing with fleas, either. Though I can barely afford to stay here, a newfound pride didn’t allow me to check into some run-down pensione, as I might have done in times past. If I’d taken Tate’s money, I would have sought out something far fancier—but just because I chose not to sell out doesn’t mean I have to wallow. Some people claim that even the filthiest, most tainted money should be managed with some care, if it’s the only money you’ve got. Tate’s money was just too filthy, though. Until I know what I’m going to do, until I discover what she intends to do, this hotel suits my needs fine. Besides, the room has an eccentric dormered ceiling, not unlike my room back in the mountains, and looks out over thousands of rooftops, duomos, cupolas: quite a different sight than I’d become accustomed to at Ash Creek, but one I like nonetheless.

  Not that I spend much time looking at rooftops. In the past, I would have thought to come back to Rome to brood, would have delighted in the delicious sadness of these distracting streets, as I mused whether to try to find Jude, make up with Mary somehow, even search out Daniella. Domi manere convenit felicibus: how I’d have turned that maxim once more on its proverbial ear. But now who’s to say that happiness doesn’t come to many who do know home, embrace it wherever and whatever it is. There are those among us who seem destined to look for it beyond, out here, outside. It’s up to me to learn which is for me. Not that any of this will come easy. Just this morning, while I gazed out at the Roman vistas softened by balmy drizzle, I knew I had to get down into the streets one last time, as I start work tomorrow on another kind of existence. Maybe the finest solitude was not to be had there, as I’d always thought, but a final wandering seemed appropriate. To rephrase what Mary wrote in that last letter to me, Old habits die hard.

  There were moments during these past months when I’d have thought I might never walk the Corso again. My involvement with Helen, Edmé, Henry, Tate, and the others had reached an intricacy, a deepening involvement, from whose knotty web it’d begun to seem I might never escape, even if I’d wanted to abandon them all. But for what was in the envelope that Graham Tate passed me during the farewell party at the Lewises’, I might still be in Ash Creek. What it meant, however—what everything which culminated in the aftermath of that party meant—brought me finally to this understanding of what was no longer good for me. And to think that in the midst of so many other developments which claimed my attention that violent night, the envelope had temporarily slipped my mind.

  I’d been anxious to open it when Tate had first given it to me, but during my walk with Edmé back to the house, I simply forgot it was there in Giovanni’s—now my—loden coat. Edmé and I marveled at the full moon. We strolled up to the house. We told Henry a little about the party he’d boycotted. And, as the clock ticked steadily on the wall, I fell asleep at the kitchen table, until Milland’s anguished cries awakened us all and sent us off in pursuit of what would turn out to be both night visitors. Why the envelope wasn’t swept away by the rushing water of the creek that nearly drowned me in the gorge, I don’t know. When I finally picked my way back down to Giovanni’s cabin, after answering questions Noah and others had for me in the kitchen of the house, I was a mess. Sick at heart, bewildered, sore, frightened, wet, and all alone, I threw myself on my cot.

  That was when I remembered. I touched my pocket: the packet was still there.

  Hundred-dollar bills, fifty of them, held together by a rubber band, were inside. No note, of course, nothing to incriminate him— nor was there any need for one to explain the five thousand dollars Tate had given me to go away. If Helen hadn’t abandoned me, after helping me out of the creek, Tate’s lousy money might not have meant anything. Not even for the briefest moment would I have considered taking this bribe, this blood bread. But some part of my uninnocent spirit fractured up there in the gorge, after Helen shed both light and focus on so much that was happening around me.

  “Don’t you realize what you’ve done?” I’d cried out at her.

  “What I’ve done?”

  “Milland’s dead.”

  Even in the subtle light shed by the moon I saw her disquietude—not a look I was used to seeing on Helen’s face.

  “You knew about that trap. You led him there, didn’t you.”

  “I didn’t force him to step into any trap, he did it all on his own. Besides, if you heard what he said to me—”

  Her voice was more vehement now.

  “At the party I saw he was really drunk and so I asked him about something I happened to find, a receipt for a thousand dollars that dates back to the day after Giovanni died. I asked him why was it that receipt had his name on it?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me to meet him behind the house, we needed to speak in private.”

  “You went?”

  “Of course I did. Milland said Tate was mad, and wanted that receipt back. You can make it easy or you can make it hard,’ he said. ‘I bet you have it on you right now, don’t you?’ he told me, and before I knew it, Milland’s filthy hands were all over me. I started fighting him and then he came out with, ‘Don’t make me mad now, don’t make me do what I did before. Mr. Tate made me swear I wouldn’t do it to you, too.’”

  “Do what?”

  “He came out with it like it was nothing. He said, ‘Don’t you get why Mr. Tate had to have Giovanni roughed up a little? How else would everybody see he meant business?’ I asked Milland what the hell he was talking about, but he just kept on with his drunken babble. He said, ‘Shit, the old man was dyi
ng anyway, but he put up quite a fight.’ Milland told me everything. It got out of hand up there in the gorge, he said. He even bragged, ‘The foot was my idea, but Mr. Tate knew where to have me put that shoe to get you going,’” and then he smiled that idiotic proud disgusting smile of his. ‘Giovanni wasn’t your real father anyhow, so what do you care?’ That’s what he said.”

  I was speechless.

  Helen finished, “So I set it up with Milland to meet me at Henry’s studio. I told him I’d hid the receipt there.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Helen,” I said.

  She was crying.

  Quietly, I asked, “But why lead me up here? That’s what you were doing, isn’t it? You could have escaped me without half trying, if you wanted.”

  “Henry was supposed to catch up with me, not you. This was where Giovanni died, and this was where Henry was going to tell me what really happened to him and why. I’ve listened to Tate for too long.”

  “Tate?”

  “Don’t you understand? It all got out of hand, those nights with Milland running around in the dark. I never meant to hurt you that time—”

  “That was you who knocked me down?”

  “It was when that happened I knew I had to get out of this loop, that Tate was lying, lying like always, telling me Henry did it, that Henry had his reasons and it was never going to come out, and the only way to break the truth out of him is—”

  “Stop, Helen.”

  “I told them I wanted out, but Milland wouldn’t ever have let me; Tate, either. They were both getting what they wanted. Tate was getting his revenge, and Milland, I don’t know, he was getting money and Tate’s attention and—”

  I kept listening behind me for Henry, who I imagined would have arrived by now, summoned by the shotgun blast his daughter made, but heard nothing more than the perpetual deafening rush of spring water. Helen’s confession was disturbing for so many reasons, not the least among them indicative of the choices I must face. It was then I got it, understood with lightning intensity that my love for Helen wasn’t counterfeit, or unreal, or contrived. Her last words, before she broke away from me and disappeared into the shimmery woodland, were heartbreaking to hear.

  “Now you’re the only one who knows. Do what you think is fair. That’s all I want. Nothing more.”

  What was there to say in response to such a torturous edict? I should have told Helen that I was in love with her and all this was unimportant in the end, this forcing people to unearth secrets from their pasts they’d rather leave buried. I should have told her that the secret of her appointment with Milland was safe with me, that we’d ride out whatever would be the consequences of the evening’s disaster and, after that, go away together—back to Rome, even—and live anonymously, quietly, happily, and so forth. I would stop with this wandering, stop with the lassitude, do something with myself. I should have said something, no matter how banal. Yet, at the same time, wasn’t it true that when we parted, each of us knew what the other desired? And didn’t those desires interweave? While my last hours at Ash Creek were struck by bewilderment, they were also charged with insight, and clarities I had never enjoyed before.

  Noah had arrived at Ash Creek with several men, and though I first emerged from the gorge disconsolate, with teeth chattering and fingers going blue, I maintained some presence of mind, and continued naturally my own pattern of protective dishonesty. The red lights running with supernatural speed around the bowl of the valley were menacing. An ambulance was parked by the gate, the white lights emanating from the opened rear doors spreading an eerie glow over a block of meadowland. Several other cars were parked down there. Some men had gone up into the gorge to have a look.

  I had never seen Noah looking so tired as that black morning. His approach to me was more paternal than suspicious. When I came into the house, he offered me his leather bomber jacket, as I was shaking from the cold. It was I who ought to be comforting him, it might have seemed, here in these hours after his brother’s accident, but Noah’s undoubtable grief was not something he was going to show any of us; and what was more, I wondered how many years he had known that this day of his brother’s reckoning might arrive. I sat in the ranch house kitchen with his jacket thrown over my shoulders and drank hot tea and tried to mold my spinning thoughts into some consistency, as he asked questions. Truth is freedom, secrets are pain, I thought, however paradoxically, as I began to weave Helen out of the story, hoping as she herself had hoped that all this madness might find its way to an end with Milland’s death.

  No, I told Noah, I never caught up with the guy. No, I never saw his face. Yes, whoever he was seemed to head out of the gorge and continue northward up toward timberline. My answers never once strayed into the light of fact, and in retrospect I wonder if Noah was really buying any of it. Was it possible that even he saw the chance that Milland’s ruin could somehow be a martyrdom? Maybe not, maybe not.

  The riskiest of my fabrications was that I heard the intruder taunt me, in a voice I did not recognize. I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, but yes, it was definitely the voice of a man.

  Noah’s attention, after he’d finished with me, was directed to Henry, who freely admitted to having set the trap, saying that of course he never expected anything like this could happen. It was fortunate, I suppose, that Henry had the shrewdness—was this the word? or had he acted innocently, out of habit?—to bait the trap pan with fresh raw meat. This allowed Henry to warrant he’d set the device for obvious, lawful purposes, against which no one could responsibly claim otherwise. That Milland had been trespassing his lands, drunken and uninvited, in the middle of the night, made it all but impossible to bring up charges of wrongful death or anything else, even if Noah had wanted to, which as I say I suspect he didn’t. By prosecuting Henry, or for that matter going after Tate, Noah might only succeed in further disgracing his brother. Matters had suddenly arrived at a restive equilibrium.

  “I doubt we’ll be having any more midnight intrusions up here,” Henry ventured—a brash scrap of accusation that Noah did not fail to disregard. Surely he understood the framework and dynamics, the political and psychological rivers which ran beneath these surfaces better than I or anyone could suspect. That hard arbiter’s face of his, I thought, was shaped by moments such as this. I thanked him for the use of his leather jacket, handed it back to him. I felt spent now, spiritless and frazzled, as first light began to redden the eastern ridge.

  My impulse just before dawn, when I’d finally gone down to the cabin and opened Tate’s envelope, was to grab the cheap freedom it would allow me. I never felt so alone as when I lay there on my side, in the firelight from the old stove, and counted those moist bills. Edmé had tried to convince me to stay at the house, to sleep upstairs in my old room. But I craved a dense, thorough withdrawal from everyone and everything—and that is what I got in spades. Exhaustion finally overcame me as the sun broke over the trees, and I fell asleep, though not before hiding the money in Giovanni’s box under the bed—a gesture whose impropriety went unnoticed by me that morning, so tired was I, ready to vanish into whatever anemic consolation was to be had from sleep.

  The sky was overcast later that day. Autumn was unpredictable, and the weather would change from hour to hour. But I, at least, woke up with some resolve, some clarity. For the first time in memory, I knew with assurance a few commitments I must make if I was to leave Ash Creek without my spirit entirely shattered.

  First and foremost, Tate was going to get his fucking money back. How I would adore shoving it down his vile throat. When I recalled where I’d stowed the envelope, a wave of shame washed over me, but there was no time to bother with scolding myself. I did a funny thing when I unnotched the brad, lifted the lid, and removed the money: I apologized to Giovanni, asked him to forgive my stupid transgression. I promised him I’d take good care of the box now—I knew what to do with it—and not make a mistake like that again. I promised him I’d do what was within my
power, to care for Helen, too—if that was what she wanted. For just a fleeting instant, I felt him there in the hut, his certain presence, evidenced by an indescribable warmth. What was communicated, I swear, was some benediction, a gift for having, in my absurd, unfocused, backward way, managed to bring matters so long left tangled toward resolution. For being, a gift for better or worse, a kind of catalyst. I gathered myself together and walked up to the house.

  Henry was downstairs and still wore on his face the look of shock. Nothing so disturbing as getting what you think you want—here was an adage which spoke of such bitter ironies, was it not? I caught a glimpse of myself in the front-hall mirror, and noticed how my hair had grown. Noticed, too, that the countenance on my own face matched Henry’s, although I couldn’t see how my shock came from getting what I wanted.

  “You lied last night, didn’t you,” were his first words.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Grant, I would never repeat anything you told me, not if it would bring any harm your way. But you were lying. I could tell. Who was it up in the gorge?”

  “I think you know who it was. I don’t think you need me to tell you. Is that why you disappeared on me?”

  “It was Helen, then?”

  “One of these days you’re going to have to deal with it, face her. You can’t go on like this, none of you can.”

  Henry brushed his flattened hand across his cheek.

  “That’s what she wants?”

  “You don’t need me to answer that, either.”

  “She didn’t have to do things this way—”

  “This is where you’re wrong. I can’t help you, if you really believe she had other ways to go about getting the truth. She still doesn’t really have it. Milland gave her a hellish version of it—she deserves better. If you won’t talk to her, then I will.”