Giovanni's Gift (11 page)

The barber went about his business. His friends, retired men who whiled away the day with him discussing whatever motes of gossip happened to be in the air, disappeared behind their buntings of newspaper. Soon he finished, laid hot towels over my face, shaved me with a straight edge, talcumed me, finally lifted away the sheet. I couldn't bring myself to look again in the mirror.

“Say, you're Henry Fulton's nephew, aren't you?” he asked, as I paid.

“No,” came out of my mouth, and immediately with that lie arose my recognition that I was involved in some process I felt uncomfortable with—something to do with resisting the burden and responsibility of
belonging
somewhere.

“You look just like him. He used to come in here years ago.”

“Sorry, you're confusing me with somebody else,” I said, thanked him, and left for the post office to certify the letter, and after, driving back toward Ash Creek, across the base of the vast bowl, away from town, nestled against one wall of mountains, toward the eastern range, I discovered that what I understood about myself was not unlike this concomitant emptiness I saw before me. Maybe it was the most insipid epiphany of my life, and one almost impossible to describe. Nevertheless, its upshot was this: Apart from the night visits, which still held angry fascination for me, and other than those three words scribbled on the piece of paper my uncle and I kept hidden from Edmé, nothing much held me here. However vague or subtle were those compulsions to stay, the freedom (
that
word again) to leave had even less purchase on me. I didn't want to become my uncle's keeper, so to speak; but my own life was so stalled that by default I thought I would stick around for another week. Certainly, see the Labor Day feast through. If nothing arose to suggest I should remain, I would take off. Toss a leaf in the air and see which way it drifted, then follow. In a life notably disconnected, never had I felt so extrinsic, so scattered.

And yet, look at Edmé coming down to greet me, and to help me carry up to the house the couple of boxes of food and drink I had bought for the feast. Look at the wide smile on her marvelous face, look at that endless strand of hair that has come loose and hangs elegantly, tracing the edge of her face down to the long, narrow neck. Just look at how bright is the red of her sleeveless blouse against the green of the woods behind her, how sharp blue her jeans are in contrast to the yellow of the mowed field. She walks with vivacity, and says, “The new Grant, I like it,” inspecting me from the side, her hand on my shoulder. “I like it.”

And I think, modifying my earlier impression, Well, not
everything
is adrift. No, not by any stretch.

The nights before the party passed without any disturbance, and Uncle Henry measured, cut, glued, braced, planed, and hung a plank door to replace the one that had been stolen. I already had gleaned some understanding, by watching this process of violation followed by recovery, about how it was possible to then move toward a kind of defiant refusal to dwell on the night visits, almost to forget they happened. It made sense to me. Time passed, and some of the acts that transpired in its fragile embrace passed, too.

Why the name of Helen Trentas, which appeared at the end of the list of those who were attending the Labor Day feast, caught my attention is not hard to explain. She had always been a figure of mystery, to my mind. Given that her father, Giovanni, had been my uncle's dearest friend, as I have said, I have always found it a bit odd she wasn't more a presence or part of life at Ash Creek when I was there. But Helen Trentas was always elsewhere. —Helen's with friends in town, I would be told, or, —She's not feeling well today, but wanted so much to come meet you. For years running, she had been sent to stay with some uncles or other relatives of the Trentases in the small town of Velletri, in the Alban hills near Rome, a fact which sometimes made me think that if I ever met her, it would more likely occur in Italy than in the States. There had always been something that prevented me from encountering this person whom I might have considered a distant cousin in the extended family of Henry and Giovanni's friendship.

But on Labor Day afternoon that would change, it seemed. Also, I would have the chance to see some others I had met in years gone by, such as Noah Daiches, whom I went hunting with when I was in my teens, alongside Trentas and Henry, on my one abortive attempt at that lurid sport. There was David Lewis as well, with whom I had only the most passing acquaintance, however nearby he'd always been.

The early clouds that had festooned the peaks of the mountains burned off by noon, and I found myself in a genuinely good mood, as if the celebration of the end of a disastrous summer might be just what I needed in order to make my way into the promise of fall. The kitchen was a tumult of cooking, Edmé presiding over all manner of pots, bowls, and cups, cutting strawberries, preparing cold bean salad. We had decided that since the clouds had been replaced by a hard blue sky, the festivities should be held on the lawn below the long porch. Henry and I carried several folding tables out from the cellar, spread them with tablecloths, and set up chairs around them. Bottles of Coke and beer were stood in big buckets of ice, and bottles of wine were left on a table in the shade. We lit the fire and went together down to the creek, where we caught a creelful of small trout to add to the mixed grill of ribs and chicken. And by three that afternoon, the cars began to arrive and guests colorful as chips in a kaleidoscope could be seen coming toward the house. Children ran; dogs chased one another. Men and women walked with baskets of fruit, potato salad in bowls covered with foil, cold casseroles, various other contributions to the feast. There must have been a couple of dozen people who turned up for the gathering: some friends of the Fultons, others who had worked here from time to time, though mostly in times past, and even others who were friends of friends. I met more than I would ever be able to attach names to, though a pair of identical twins, Sandra and Andrea the poor girls were called—who would, by the time they reached school age, metamorphose into Sandy and Andy—I accompanied, along with a little boy who seemed mute, to the stream, which they proceeded to lash with willow limbs. “Take
tha'
an'
tha'
,” they cried together, whipping the fast surface of the creek until one of the dogs mindlessly tumbled forth from the thicket of brush, across the bristling shoal, to splash headlong into the water, soaking the twins, who began to cry, then laugh, before they ran back toward the house, while the boy and I trailed behind. The adults stood in groups with their drinks and talked while the other children, some rather old for such games, I might have thought, played tag, their hair gussied up with crepe paper removed from the decorated tables, skipped and howled, kicked a ball in the sunlight back and forth across the divoted field, raising marl chalk like djinns' mist. The place was converted from calm to hilarity within a matter of a quarter hour. The valley filled with pleasant shouts and shrieks and squeals. The radio, which Edmé brought out onto the porch above the lawn, played some improbable classical music, like unidentifiable Berlioz or a piano trio of Arensky or some such, which would later give way to country western, once someone who cared one way or another about such matters had drunk enough to slip up there and change the station.

She who interested me most showed up last.

She came walking up the mild rise like a dark Botticelli, her feet not planted upon a seashell but veiled slightly in ocher dust, long hair neither rosy blond nor configured so as to hide her but willowy auburn flowing over one shoulder, which itself was covered in embroidered drapery, a dress that swirled below the knees and was cinched at the waist by an old Navajo belt with hammered silver disks. A potpourri of necklaces, clay and silver, hung around her neck, and a pair of ankle boots completed her funky, elegant outfit. She seemed familiar to me, of course, from a photograph that was taken half her lifetime ago—a framed photograph of a dark-eyed little girl who stood boldly holding hands with the men on either side of her, Henry on her left, looking straight into the camera, Giovanni on her right, gazing down at her with pride. The photo was in my uncle's studio, on a shelf otherwise laden only with books of his trade, and as recently as the day before, when I helped Henry rehang the door, I'd studied that image of the girl in the antiquated pinafore, blouse with a lacy collar, and floppy ribbon which gathered her hair just behind one ear. I knew at once who she was, then, this woman walking up the hill, and although I can at times be very shy, this was not one of those moments. Midsentence, midword, I found myself abruptly carried away from a dialogue with somebody's cousin or nephew, caught as if by some invisible thread, and I walked to the gate at the fence that divided lawned yard from field, then through it to meet her in the meadow. She was carrying a paper bag, and I said, “Can I help you with that?”

She smiled, and handed it over. Her eyes were not black, as they'd appeared to be from a distance, but were the darkest hazel. They were eyes in whose gaze one could discern a spectrum of spirits at play—here was a young woman who even before she spoke one could see was simultaneously wary but fearless, haunted but pragmatic, virtuous but mindful of what might be seen by others as forbidden. I was so swept away that I had literally to shake my head to clear my thoughts. She looked at me straight on, without blinking, with such disarming boldness that I found myself staring hard elsewhere.

“I'm Grant,” I said, glancing askance, “and you're Helen Trentas, aren't you.”

We walked side by side toward the house. The partygoers made a genial conversational medley of voices and laughter in the mild air.

“I can hardly believe the curse is finally broken,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“I thought there must be a curse some witch placed on us a long time ago that barred us ever from meeting.” She smiled sidelong at me, and I saw again the sweet ominousness, that formidable spirit that flashed there: how else to put it other than that I sensed, however capricious or infantile or fervent it may seem of me to say so, that we were
meant
to meet, and this afternoon, not a moment before. Her mention of witches and spells seemed to me appropriate, given the swelter my head was in.

“You've introduced yourselves,” Edmé said, taking the bag from me with one hand and extending her other hand to Helen. “How are you, Helen?”

“Edmé,” Helen said, and kissed my aunt on the cheek.

I was struck by the formality of these gestures and tones.

“You didn't need to bring anything,” Edmé said, looking into the bag at a couple of bottles of chardonnay and some freshly picked mint with small stalks of purple flowers at the crowns of each.

When we three strolled to the table covered with red checkered oilcloth, where Edmé set Helen's bottles beside the others, I asked her what she would like to drink, poured her some wine, and refilled Edmé's glass, and Helen and I moved out into the crowd. Her presence at my side was bewildering, somehow, I must admit—it was as if I were telescoped in time backward, back toward some fresh juvenility that caused me to scrutinize myself, my gestures, the way I would lift my glass to my lips and drink, the way I'd swallow. It was not something I was used to, nor was it particularly desirable, since I envisioned these Labor Day revelries as a chance to unearth some clue, maybe witness something suspicious and thus discover who, and what, was behind the night visits. Helen Trentas sweeping me away into dreamy postadolescence would not, of course, do much for my capacity to focus. In fact, she was saying something to me, asking me what brought me out to my aunt and uncle's. “I'd heard you're living in Rome.”

“I was,” I said. “But now I'm not really living anywhere.”

“Is your wife here? You're married, aren't you? That's what I heard.”

“You heard a lot.”

“Actually, I tend to hear very little.”

“Because no one tells you or because you don't listen?”

“Both,” she said. “You still haven't answered the question.”

“My wife and I are in the middle of a divorce.”

She looked down, and said, “I'm sorry.”

“It wasn't meant to be”—again that commonplace, the same I had offered Edmé the week before from Rome. “That is, it's something I don't seem to be very good at—”

“Marriage?”

“Well, that too. But I meant, explaining why we broke up.”

Helen Trentas said, “I didn't ask for an explanation. I just said I was sorry.”

We walked into the crowd, and I smiled to see Edmé taking shots of the children, even as she shepherded her guests, made sure they had drinks, told them which table they were to sit at. Henry tended to his work at the brick pit, where Helen tentatively embraced him, and he her, saying, “You look beautiful this afternoon.”

“Sometimes the eye of the beholder's blind.”

“He's right, though,” I said.

“That's enough of that,” she said, and as she did, I inferred something fundamental about Helen Trentas: she was, for whatever reason, a catalytic person, one who provoked change, some sort of reaction from others, whether she intended to or not. I don't even now believe my wobbly imagination was telling me lies, or manufacturing half-truths, when it speculated that others in the immediate group had moved either
toward
or
away from
Helen and me, as we made our way up the slight rise toward Henry, where he stood between the postern of the garden and the grill. It was subtle, the movement, and continued through the course of the afternoon.

What brought it to mind just then was that I couldn't remember ever seeing Henry Fulton happier. A remarkable contentment spread on his face as he stood there, his arm around the shoulder of his late friend's daughter. As interesting to me, though, was how Helen Trentas returned his affection only to a point. When Henry asked her, “So how has everything been?” her answer of simply “Fine, I guess” carried within it some message that I could not understand. She seemed to me relieved when someone, whose name I failed to get, joined our group to continue with the discussion about national politics, about which I was completely in the dark.