Giovanni's Gift (10 page)

“… their way of declaring you have no secrets you can keep from them,” I overheard Edmé saying, as I came back down to the kitchen—a comment which all these months later I would find myself plumbing for deeper meaning than I might have guessed just then.

“What's that?” I asked, taking a chair.

Edmé answered, “I was just telling your uncle why I think they took that door off. Since they didn't steal anything valuable and didn't vandalize anything in the studio, they just wanted to make a little gesture. It's how they seem to do things—crude but subtle. Here, put this on your forehead,” and she handed me a dish towel bundled with chipped ice.

I thanked her, pressed the ice pack against my temple, and glanced over at my uncle, who had said nothing. What would remain with me during the day that followed was not my trivial injury, nor the eccentricity of the vandals' performance, nor even thoughts of what Edmé could have meant by her interpretation of the stolen door. What would return to me was the blanched cast of my uncle's face
in response to
that interpretation. I had known Henry Fulton for many years now but never had seen his eyes turn that blankly inward in their gaze, nor the corners of his mouth draw into such a scowl. That look would return to me, as would what we found, instead of the old door, down at the main gate the next morning, when Henry and I walked there.

As we approached, we could see that the intruders in their hurried exodus had left the gate wide open. But they'd left something else, too. A piece of paper was tacked to the gatepost. It waved lazily in the light breeze that ranged up the valley. We could make out the black lettering scrawled across the paper, even before we reached the gate.

Tell the truth,
the note read.

Labor Day had always meant change at Ash Creek. And change had always been marked with a feast. In times past, the party was a farewell to their friends and acquaintances, before they returned west for nine or ten months, to their reengagement with city life. But when Henry reached his
crise de coeur,
his
crise de croyance,
or whatever precisely it had been, and he and Edmé moved to the mountains permanently, they found the Labor Day feast habit was impossible to break. And so when September came around, Edmé made all the invitations by rote, and both found themselves preoccupied with getting things ready for the annual event. I found myself caught up in these preparations and even excited at the prospect of the great party, which I'd always been forced to miss as a boy, because I had invariably been shipped back overseas for the beginning of school.

The kitchen smelled sweet with zucchini bread, and tart with homemade gazpacho, days in advance of the party, and I helped Uncle Henry clean the year's worth of stray leaves and other debris that had drifted into the enormous barbecue which he used only on Labor Days but which otherwise stood, like some squat cenotaph of cement and brick, in the upper corner of the yard. The grill, fashioned from an old steel bed frame and blackened with char, we chafed with wire brushes and washed with cheap vegetable oil. I made a pile of split wood behind the venerable structure, then asked how long the barbecue pit had been here. “I built it back in the year they discovered fire,” he said, without the slightest grin on his face.

Which made me laugh a little, but also wince. And this is why. Because I loved my uncle Henry, wanted to laugh at his jokes, no matter how ridiculous or flat they were, and because he had become for me as much my father as my own father had been. Because I didn't want him to be wicked or wrong in anything, to have any faults, to err—be human, I suppose, is what it comes down to in the end. Why not? For the same reasons most sons want to believe their fathers are, at least to some essential degree, honorable, benevolent, noble, and so forth; are
good
—like daimons who perhaps will be there for us when we sons make such a mess of things. If my father were still alive, I might well have been spending this month with him and with my mother, too. But they died, my parents, in the most archaic possible circumstances, aboard a cabin cruiser that sank. Perished with a delegation of people in, of all places, a harbor, in calm water, October 1988, seven years ago next month. They died in “suspicious circumstances,” given that the passengers were representatives of countries some of which were involved in political enterprises not popular with what my father called
the fringe.
Nothing was ever proved, though some men were arrested.

Was it callous of me not to develop any interest in vengeance or the quest for justice? My orphaning affected me differently than Jude thought it should. Jude, who I was living with at the time in New York, wanted to see me sue the government for negligence, or something like that. But what I felt was mortal resignation more than outrage or inspired grief. All I saw was that my parents were gone. They who had stayed together for my sake for a number of years, then found something valuable in one another again, after I wandered off to make my own life, so that their marriage was renewed and rejuvenated for at least a time before the accident. Now it was dissolved in murky water, and I was alone. That is, except for Edmé and Henry.

When I brought Jude here to meet these surrogates, I had built up such an impossibly fabulous image of my aunt and uncle that Jude might fairly have expected to meet divinity; I worshiped them both. And Jude, I remember well, was not disappointed. For all my devoted embellishments, she found my aunt to be, —Amazingly
sane,
which was, in Jude lingo, a compliment of the highest order. And as for Uncle Henry, she had no compunction in assuring me that if he were just a few years younger and unmarried … well.

Which brings me, circuitously, to my wincing. I winced because that morning when Henry and I walked back up to the house after the discovery of the
Tell the truth
note, I sensed that I'd witnessed a flaw of some kind in my uncle, a deficiency or even worse; that something here was more wrong than I might have suspected. Nor was my apprehension diminished when Henry folded the note, slipped it into his shirt pocket, and asked me, in a voice thinner than usual, “Grant, I'm going to ask you not to mention this to your aunt.”

“No problem,” I said.

“It's something I have to take care of myself.”

No problem, I thought to say again, and I wanted it not to be a problem. However, for the few days subsequent to that single oddest pact my uncle and I had ever made, I felt awkward whenever he and I were alone together. Maybe I was afraid he would again take me into his confidence, which now I did and didn't want. But my nervousness passed away under the incremental currents of other things that seemed to rise, one after another, into view, distracting me in such a way that Rome seemed farther away in space and further in time than it actually was. My past was beginning to look simpler than my present.

First among these other things was Mary's letter. My heart began to pound when Edmé handed it to me, having driven as she did every several days down to the end of the creek road, where the rural route mailboxes stood, battered bright mini-Quonsets secured to a crosspost that resembled the skeleton of a crucified puppet. Mary knew me too well, I thought, as I thanked my aunt, left the house, descended the steps, and walked west toward the high saddle of grass and scrub where I could be alone.

The envelope didn't have a forwarding notice on it from Rome; no—she had known to send it directly here, had known I wouldn't last long by myself in Italy. I found an outcropping of rock to sit on, and faced east so that it was possible to look down across the cradle of the valley which the creek bisected, see the great barn several hundred yards below and the house to its left, and the other buildings, even the cabin where my uncle was born, near the gate, a ramshackle structure that had not been lived in for half a century but which in its way was the spiritual nucleus of Ash Creek. Tucked into the foliage on the opposite bank, Giovanni's own small hut stood, and I could even see a corner of the roof there from this high vantage. I inhaled, looked down to what I held in my hands, exhaled. Enough of what lay before me; let's see what was gone.

The letter was handwritten. Blue ink on white paper. I hoped, I must admit, that Mary would offer some chance for reconciliation. A breeze from the valley breathed on my cheek.

Dear Grant,
it read,
I figure this is where you might be, and if not, assume Edmé will forward it to you in Rome if you're still there. As for me, there's no point in being coy. The postmark is right. I'm back in Seattle. What goes around comes around, right? Bainbridge Island is where I need to be for right now. All the old familiar faces, and all that kind of stuff. What I imagine you are also seeking. I am writing to tell you I don't feel so hurt as I did before, and I feel bad about some of what I said that night in Rome. I was hurt, as you well know. I was angry and lashed out. You are and always will be someone I love
—

Here I glanced up into the midafternoon light playing across the fields, noticed briefly the darker patches below me, where the bales of hay had been removed onto old wagons and taken away about this time yesterday. Ambiguous as to whether the hope I had just felt for the words of reconciliation I probably now would read was wise or foolish, I wondered: Did I really have the courage to work things out with Mary? Then I read what followed.

—
someone who will always live in my heart, despite what's happened. But as you seemed to figure out long before I did, love just isn't enough to hold us together. I have hired a lawyer. He's a nice guy.

My own arrogance made me quiver with revulsion for having so completely misread her pledge of love.

I've told him that we don't own very much, we aren't “thing” people. That we don't have any property really to contest. He says it isn't very orthodox for a couple seeking divorce to share the same lawyer, that it can be seen as a conflict of interest and all, but I told him we aren't very orthodox and that we have no interest in conflict. You know, like that. He needs something in writing from you, though. Or if you want to give him a call, I'm enclosing his card. I propose we just split the filing and whatever other legal costs there are. I don't want anything of yours, and it is my guess you are of the same mind. Grant, I'm sorry this didn't work out for us and am willing to accept part of the blame. I know you think that if we had the baby those years ago things might have turned out different. But there is no saying now. What's done is done. There were some wonderful moments that I'll always cherish, and it's those times I want to remember. The rest will fade into dust, as it should. All I want back now is my freedom. It's a sad thing, but for the best. I know I'm not telling you something you don't already know. Let's keep things simple by making any other communications through the lawyer. Please give my love to your aunt and uncle. And, Grant
—
take care of yourself. Love (a hard habit to break), Mary.

Freezing hot and scalding cold was how I felt. As if I had a fever. When I rose to wander back down to the house, a dizziness forced me to sit until my head stopped swirling. Got up again, and a sere riptide of unidentifiable sentiments carried some ruptured part of me away with it, so that I might have sworn the person who descended the hill was not quite as whole as the one who had climbed it. I wrote a letter to her lawyer that night, informing him that whatever Mary wanted was agreeable with me, warranting that whenever he required my half of the retainer he had only to write me in care of Ash Creek and the money would be forwarded straightaway. I set forth the somewhat contradictory position that because I loved Mary, I had no intention of disputing any details of the divorce—though I did hope he might be able to file on grounds of incompatibility, or irreconcilable differences, or whatever was permissible, something that suggested our mutual failure rather than blamed the collapse of the marriage solely on me. The glue of the envelope, needless to say, tasted bitter when I sealed the letter. Edmé and Henry, bless them, got nearly as drunk as I did that night, and were both blustery and outrageously sanguine about how bright my future would be, once I got over this and was able to move forward with my life. Not one of us had a bad word to say about Mary.

For all the hopeful inebriation of the prior evening, the next morning found me under an extravagant cloud of defeat. Nursing my hangover, I borrowed the car and drove into town to make good on my promise to myself about a visit to the barber. My blue mood brightened as I entered this little realm of remembrance. The tile wainscots, mirrored wall, burnished chrome, and the brown vinyl of the classic swiveling chair. The polychrome bottles of tonic, oil, pomade, and the metal combs marinating in indigo liquid; all the elixirs and instruments of the trade standing in rows magically doubled by their reflections in the mirror. These sights and perfumy smells, the echoey quiet, and my old barber's words, “What can we do you for today?”—yes:
you for
—combined to make me feel, though an outsider, at home. As I sat in that chair and was shrouded in a white shawl, I caught sight of myself, however, in the mirror, and this spell of comfort was broken. I found myself bewildered about who was staring back at me.

“Well?”

I snapped to, said, “I want to look different. Just take all this hair
off.
And let's go ahead and shave this, too,” running my hand over the sparse growth on my cheeks and chin.

“You got it,” he said, and went to work.

How sunken my eyes appeared. My nose seemed more bladelike, my lips narrower, pallid, more downturned than how I'd maintained them in my imaginary self-portrait. My green eyes were liquidy this morning, and reddened along the rims. And my skin was darker than usual from being out under the sun, I supposed, a component that gave me my only real intimation of health. No doubt the binge of the night before didn't help matters, but this Grant who began to emerge, as the backcombed tangle of hair fell to the marble floor, was someone I—like the barber—had a more difficult time identifying, accepting as being
me,
than ever in the past. Christ in heaven, I thought.