Giovanni's Gift (18 page)

If Tate and Milland hadn't arrived when they did, I wonder if I would have pressed on with the next question that had come to mind for Noah, regarding the note Henry and I found attached to the post, the night someone removed the door from the studio. Henry had sworn me to silence with Edmé, but never mentioned that I keep the note a secret from anyone else.

All things being equal, maybe it had been best that I missed my chance. As it was, I stood, thanked Noah again for the drink, shook hands with Milland, and pivoted to say goodbye to Tate but saw that his back was turned to me. He was involved in conversation with someone else. Once outside, I happened to look over into the taproom through one of the side windows, where I saw Tate speaking to Noah Daiches. His gestures seemed emphatic, and though I could view him only in profile and from some distance, he seemed to be annoyed. I wondered whether this change of demeanor had to do with me. I had the distinct sense Graham Tate considered me a nuisance, a mild inconvenience of some sort. But why?

I was probably paranoid, I told myself hopefully, as I climbed into the car, fumbled with key and lights, began my drive home. The dewy moon was full above me, above all of us, and shed a carpeting of light over the mountains and the valley they embraced. Tate more likely than not was barely aware of my existence here, I concluded. His annoyance was directed at someone else.

When Giovanni reached the age of nineteen, he left Coeur d'Alene. Seven years had erased the war, which, despite its emphatic gestures of having orphaned and exiled him, had curiously made little outward impression on the boy. He had adapted to his new surroundings tolerably well, and although he might have shown signs of developing into a maverick, who was to say that—had there never been a war, and had he never left Rome, and had he been brought up by mother and father in the way that anyone else with a little fortune smiling on him could reasonably expect to be raised—he would have turned out to be any different? Maybe gregariousness, social negotiability, and all that stuff, is borne in the genes. Who is to say? Perhaps, even having been nurtured by a loving mother and disciplined by a stern father, as mothers and fathers were wont to do back in the forties and fifties, Giovanni Trentas might have wound up a loner. Surely his orbit would have been narrower, his world and reach more limited. Though, from what I have been able to piece together, he seems to have been born with a pragmatic head, even if in his teens he developed, at least for a while, a wandering heart.

The man I would sketch stood on the shoulder of the road, his valise beside him, his thumb raised in the hope of hitching a ride to the coast. He was tall, lean, sinewy—with dark eyes that were both calm and penetrating. Whoever might observe him through the windshield of a car that perhaps braked to pick him up would see a strapping kid with large head, a musician's ears, abundant black hair parted on the side but tousled. They would note hollow cheeks and prominent chin before admiring his great handsome beak of a nose, raptorlike, with nostrils opened wide as if to breathe into himself the thin air of Coeur d'Alene before diving into the world. Above all, they would observe the grace of this angular creature who lifted his luggage into the back and then joined them for the ride as far west as they happened to be going. They might even find, I would imagine, that his voice, a gentle tenor, rose to mind for days after they'd let him off.

In the box, a photograph of him from this period showed him to possess these features, and though it was taken in the year 1952, a decade before I was born, when I stared at it in the morning, before heading downstairs, I closed my eyes and listened hard and found I could without any effort remember that tenor voice, and could see him walking across the hayfield with Henry, talking, smiling, arms swinging, strides long and sure.

Later in the day, helping Edmé harvest, then spade over and mulch spent rows in her garden, I asked how she and Henry had met Giovanni Trentas. I realized that while, on occasion, I'd spent time with him—helped with sheep shearing more than once; followed him around Ash Creek trying to get him to converse in our mysterious shared language of Italian; it was he who taught me to ride a bike, but never pushed me to ride a horse—just how Giovanni had gone from the hinterlands of one state to those of another was part of his history I would not be able to derive from the box.

His persistent role as an outsider, however, was one with which I could identify. Edmé spoke freely about the subject, but not before noting, in a quietly disapproving way, I seemed to have disregarded her advice about Helen. There was no arguing the point, so I didn't.

Henry was attending the university on the other side of the mountains, down near the capitol, and was in his last year, when he had his winter epiphany and decided that designing buildings in which people would live and work was more interesting than anything else a man could do with his life. He had already made up his mind by then not to return to Ash Creek but continue on to graduate school, and had made a list of schools where he would apply after military service—which responsibility he satisfied after getting a diploma, grateful he had just missed the war, being only sixteen the year that saw both Germany and then Japan surrender.

“Are you sure you want to hear all this?” she interrupted her story.

“Yes, yes—please,” I said, failing to suppress my eagerness.

Sometime during his service days, he got it into his head that the only way to understand architecture was to know how to use a saw and hammer, and given there were many jobs available to fellows who wanted to do construction work, he labored for a while building houses in the suburban outskirts of the city. This was where he met Giovanni Trentas, then an itinerant worker who had hitchhiked down the West Coast all the way to the tip of Baja, ventured across the southwestern deserts and up the front range of mountains until he arrived here, having experienced adventures that belied his years. He talked about having worked artichoke and lettuce fields, hopped freight trains in the middle of the night, served on a fishing boat out of San Felipe, even spent a week in jail in San Jose del Cabo—though he'd never say what landed him there. He must have been just twenty.

“Well, your uncle Henry,” Edmé went on, “worked side by side with this young rambler, and proximity and time turned them into friends. It wasn't until Henry's accident that this friendship deepened into what I always saw as a kind of fraternal love.”

There was nothing unusual about the accident, as such. Henry made the mistake of failing to secure the end of a roll of metal webbing that was unfurled in a rectangular crater, reinforcement grid for concrete that was to be poured for a cellar. As if it had suddenly sprung to life, the tense heavy wire he had just unrolled surged back at him the moment he let go of it to retrieve some tacks from a bucket, in order to nail it to a wooden framing. The cut tips of the reinforcement wire flew up at his face and caught him across his cheek and in the eye. Giovanni witnessed the whole horrible instantaneous event and with ice from a cooler assembled a cold compress, got Henry into a car, and drove him to the hospital, hardly before Henry had recovered from the shock enough to know what had happened. For years, the blindness was partial; later, however, it worsened, and although for reasons of pride he would likely never admit it, the deterioration of his sight might well have had something to do with the decision he made to resign from his firm in San Francisco. The immediate upshot of the injury, however, was that Giovanni Trentas and Henry Fulton got to know one another during the latter's convalescence. Edmé had already met and begun dating Henry by then, too, of course, and so she remembered this youthful, handsome migrant as well.

“How did he wind up here?”

“Your great-uncle was always needing help on the ranch. Those were the days when Ash Creek still was very much an active spread, with cattle and sheep, even swine. They were always hiring seasonal workers. Giovanni came up to the mountains with me and Henry one time, met everyone, and just became part of the family. It was that simple. He lived sometimes on the ranch, sometimes in town. This place became the center of his life, I think it's fair to say, before the days you started coming here. I remember when Henry's father, your great-uncle Wesley, died, how upset Giovanni was. That must have been half a dozen years before you first saw Ash Creek. Henry and I'd gotten married and moved on out to the coast by then, and in a way Giovanni'd become an adopted son. More than part of the family: a real, trusted member. Well, you can see where he's buried, right up there with the others. Your uncle dug his friend Sam's grave with his own hands. I never saw him more sad in his life. He was as decent a soul as there ever was.”

Margery came to mind if only by her noticeable exclusion from the story. Why had Margery left Giovanni? Not that people don't leave decent souls every day. But still, I asked.

Edmé said, “Well, poor Margery. Your uncle knew her better than I ever did—”

“
Knew?
”

“Knew, knows—she's not dead, if that's what you're asking. But from what I gather, her situation's almost as if. Margery used to be the most beautiful girl. But with four brothers straight out of
Grimm's Fairy Tales,
believe me. The grimmest of
Grimm's.
She took care of them when their parents got older, and I think maybe one of them fell in love and moved out, but the others just stayed on. When Giovanni and Margery met, you can imagine how threatened these lugs were, not that they
cared
about him, or her. They would tell you a very different story, no doubt, but what it came down to was simply that they didn't want to lose their nanny, maid, nurse, cook, aide-de-camp, mother figure, and whatever else they'd managed to make of the poor thing. I think she and Giovanni really did love each other, so after sneaking around for a year or two, one night, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I believe, she eloped with him. They had it all planned out, had Justice Phelps prepared with the license, had the wedding rings all ready in secret.”

“And soon after that, I guess, Helen was born,” I interrupted, while wondering why they didn't all live happily ever after.

Edmé paused, glanced over at me from where she was gathering heaps of pungent basil leaves into a basket. She had on her face the queerest look, querying and forswearing at the same time.

“Sorry,” believing I was being chastised for distracting her.

Edmé continued, the look suddenly having vanished. “Margery and Giovanni lasted longer than any of us expected they would, but it was sheer willpower on their part. Those brothers are lunatics. I mean, with screws loose and bats in the belfry. They took it as a challenge, almost like jilted lovers, to get her back home.”

“They finally succeeded, I guess.”

“I don't know how they did it, but they did, convinced her to come home. If I remember right, they'd made some offer for Giovanni to move in, too, with Helen as well. He refused, kept Helen, and one day Margery was gone. I don't think they ever bothered getting a divorce.”

“That's quite a story,” I said, wondering how Margery could leave her daughter for some covetous brothers, understanding Helen's resentment.

“Giovanni raised Helen by himself. She couldn't have had a better father or even mother. Margery never treated the girl like a daughter, anyway. She resented her, I always thought. The three of them tried that winter to live in a little place they'd taken somewhere between here and town, but it didn't go well, and by the time spring came, Giovanni was put in the position of having either to break off with Margery, or put the baby up for adoption, or something crazy. That was very near the end.”

We each took her last words to mean that she had no more to say about Margery and Giovanni, and so were silent for a time. Then I broke the quiet with, “Can I ask a question? It might seem a little off the wall. But can you remember what kind of cigarettes Giovanni smoked? or what brand of paper he rolled with?”

“What kind of question is that?”

I shrugged. My own exhausted cigarette dangled from my lips, and I imagined how unhealthy I must appear to my aunt, smoking in her wholesome garden, spilling worthless ash on its rich soil, the smoke fouling this pristine air—not to mention how neurotic she must have thought it was of me to ask about the cigarettes of a dead man. Edmé gave me a look, eyes smiling, lips frowning. “Not all of us share in that bad habit, Grant.”

“I know,” I said, extinguishing it and depositing the butt in my shirt pocket. “One of these days soon I promise I'll quit, but what are you saying—surely he must have smoked?”

“No, he didn't smoke. Didn't drink, either. They both cost money, and though Giovanni was always fairly paid for his work here, he never had much. That is, never had much for himself. He always seemed to have plenty for Helen, sending her overseas, buying her nice clothes—Helen grew up like some kind of aristocrat, comparatively speaking. I don't know how Giovanni managed it, if you want to know, except by sacrifice. Anyway, he was always too concerned about his health to do things like drink and smoke. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. Just thinking maybe I've been doing a little too much of both recently, I guess.” Such was my lame equivocation, though her answer raised more questions than it resolved. Why the rolling papers and that handwritten recipe for dandelion wine among the preserved artifacts of an ascetic? Why an aristocrat's daughter to a pauper father?

What came as the strangest surprise to me—there in my sunny room, by myself in the early afternoon, this fragrance of raw basil leaves on my fingers from helping Edmé mix the basil with pignolis and garlic, olive oil and parmigiana—what came as an astonishment was that I missed Helen Trentas. No: rather, was that I missed her this much. And not merely missed her but found myself longing for her. And, again, as part of this surprise or astonishment, was just
how
I missed her, in what ways longed for her.