Giovanni's Gift (19 page)

These were not the hollow affections manufactured in my baser heart, say, or even baser parts of me than that—though I would be less than honest were I not to admit that I longed for Helen Trentas there, too. This was not the way I'd felt toward that girl I'd picked up near the Spanish Steps, and fucked—that's the word for it, truly—in the very sheets where my wife and I slept the night before. Nor was this the sometime manipulator's devotion kicked into life once more, as it had been when I was a boy threatened by the specter of divorce between my parents. This degree, measure, variety, manner of yearning that came over me as the trapezoid of sun poured warm and brilliant on my back was altogether of a new order. Even compared to my flawed but genuine love for the women in my past, this
thing
which clutched me like an exquisite fist about my heart was undeniable, wonderful, and frightening. Was it possible I unselfishly cared for Helen?

I sensed that those several compass points in my incomplete map were about to be rendered meaningful, as this fourth direction rose into view, and to prominence. If, say, north stood for Daniella, then north had been a bit chilly. If south had been my compass point for Jude, that would mean with Jude everything had gone south, south toward the overhot tropics, south being a tormented direction. And if Mary, whom I met in the East and with whom I traveled farther east to salvage the unsalvageable, was that third point, then what was left in this personal metaphor for Helen Trentas if not west? West where my own wayward feet perhaps had come to find something more permanent, more substantial, more earnest, than what I had known in times past.

But then, I thought, here was a unique way to leave Ash Creek: by not going. While Edmé, with the help of her deficient
sous-chef,
poured the fresh pesto into plastic pint containers and sealed each for the freezer, I mentioned to her that my earlier idea of leaving after Labor Day had come into question. I had nowhere really to go, I told her. “I can move to a room in town, if I'm in the way here,” hoping not to sound somehow pathetic.

Edmé gave me a lovingly horrified look. Always her paradoxical gazes.

“Don't get me wrong,” I said quickly. “I don't want to be underfoot is all. I don't like the idea of being a burden to you two—it's not why I came.”

“Grant, this is your home. You stay here until you want to go elsewhere.”

I thanked her, and as I did I recognized that what I failed to mention (though Edmé may have surmised it) was that the magnetism of this place was now irresistible to me, the curiosity it aroused in me was overwhelming, or something else altogether was at play—even I couldn't be sure. Whatever drew me, any thought of moving on from Ash Creek, was for the moment erased by my unexpected feelings for Helen, and also by what I'd discovered tucked beneath the pretty rubble in Giovanni's box. For once I found myself grateful that nothing and no one awaited me outside Ash Creek. It left me free to pursue phantoms as I pleased. It left me free to be with Helen.

My fingers trembled when I opened up the box, because for the first time I began to understand there might be more to its contents than just a repository of beloved flotsam, of mere memorabilia, as I had presumed a couple days before, when I first undid those ribbons that corseted the thing. I lifted, for one, the packet of
Papiers Mais
and held it up in the light, studied the gold ears of corn stamped on the cover, confirming that these were the same that Noah had used, then opened the packet and saw that more than half the papers were missing. I set it on my bed, rummaged around again in the box. For no particular reason other than that it came first to hand, I read the recipe for dandelion wine, which, like the rolling papers, had no obvious place in Giovanni's trove—
Take
3
quarts dandelion blossoms, 4 qts. boiling water, 3# sugar, 4 lemons sliced. Pour boiling water over the blossoms
—and winced at how horrid this weedy concoction must taste. I placed the recipe beside the
Papiers Mais,
and regarded them together. Neither of the little talismans made much sense to me. So, like the collage artist who must lay out his raw materials before beginning work, or the jigsaw puzzler who spreads before him all the differently shaped pieces to begin to assemble them into a coherent picture, I set out, one by one on the bed, all the other objects. Surely, I thought, there was something here for me to understand if I had but eyes to see.

Two feathers, the joke book, pennies … all the stuff was spread out. The brass plunger, whose shiny barrel flashed sharp light straight into my eyes, did begin to seem familiar. What was this thing? I held it like a tiny rifle in the palm of my left hand and drew back the ring on the end of the plunger, then pushed forward, pulled again and pushed. It was not an air pump. The nozzle end wasn't shaped right, I didn't think.

A little brass gun, I wondered,
a little brass gun
—

Then memory raised an image up before me of Giovanni. He was crouched down next to this young boy, who had the serious role of helping the man, by holding a wrench or a can of oil. Both of us idled beside a beat-up bicycle I used to ride around on paths here during summer months. The memory was of Giovanni smiling at me, speaking gently while he worked on my bike, allowing me to believe I was helping him, greasing the chain and rusty sprockets with this little brass gun.

—Good as new now, see here? I could almost hear his voice, as he stood, steadying the bike for me while I climbed uncertainly aboard. His front teeth were marvelously gapped.

—
Grazie,
I might have said.

—
Niente, prego,
as he let go and stood back to watch me ride wildly down the hill toward the horsegate and road along the creek.

Happy, in a wistful way, at the memory and the fact that I, too, was represented among the puzzle pieces in the box—for it did seem a puzzle to me, a rebus of sorts—I laid the radiant apparatus with its companions, wishing I could ask it just one modest question, which would be, What are you doing here, my trifling friend? why on earth would Giovanni Trentas set aside and thereby memorialize such a paltry widget as
you?
Instead, I touched each of its companions, with a reverence one might show toward inanimate things when in church, where often the inanimate represents the animate, where wafer and wine become flesh and blood. I couldn't help but chide myself, in the midst of all this small pleasure, with a question that
could
be answered, however. What if the box was simply a box, a pretty cigar box kept by a charming eccentric who used it not as a treasure chest or an assemblage of mute but eloquent symbols, but merely as a dump for discards and junk? And what kind of fool would spend time trying to make order of such chaos? Good questions, but not good enough to dampen my interest.

Not until I read several other of the penciled trysting notes from the anonymous correspondent, who was, I thought, surely Margery, did I notice something about the ticket to the dance recital. One note read:

You know I love you and I will do it but I can only do it when they're not here, so I will call and I hope you forgive me for all the trouble I do cause, it will be sometime this week, I love you.

Which seemed more of the same, really.

Another was further along in the affair:

Dearest yes, I do want to be with you for ever, and sense there is no way on earth they will go along with it, I will consider what you say, and will see you next Tuesday.

And then there was this:

On Sat eve then, and it is kind of your Henry to offer to shelter us till the storm clouds pass over, I know that one day they will forgive, but I cannot continue on like in this manner and must grab my own chance at life with you, how much I love you dearest, soon soon.

So that was what happened, or was it? Edmé had left out of her story the crucial detail of Henry's offering the newlyweds Ash Creek as sanctuary from these ridiculous men who were her brothers, apparently. The dance recital card was, as I mention, what came to my attention next, having read my way through all the notes from Margery, and what intrigued me was that it was made out not to Giovanni Trentas and Margery, though it was dated the twenty-third of March, 1965—which was, I gathered, about the time the two of them met and fell in love—but rather to Henry Fulton and Willa Richardson. My uncle and Willa together at a dance recital? and in March, when I'd thought he was always out on the coast, his stays at Ash Creek at that time confined to summer months? Moved as if by a force outside myself, I swept the objects before me into a heap, and tossed them back into the box. My earlier elation was eclipsed now by bewilderment.

Maybe there were things here that I really didn't want to know. I retied the ribbons and put the box away in the armoire. I left the room in something of a hurry, assuring myself that it was my own corrupt imagination that would cause me to think for even an instant that Henry and Willa Richardson had ever been anything but distant acquaintances, as I'd always assumed they were. Just look at how they behaved at the Labor Day gathering, I reminded myself as I emerged onto the porch. Elegant, proud Willa, the wife of Tate. This was a false lead. Nothing in the box meant anything; so I now decided. I walked far up into the gorge, with the fishing rod I had taken down from its perch of nails in the eaves of the porch. From placid springheads I caught several rainbows, including a great long one—all of which I put back into the cold water, where I watched them each as they drew from the current molecular liquid through their white gills, recovered their sense of place, then bolted out into deeper riffles with several hard swipes of their muscular tails.

That evening for dinner we ate fresh “pesto macaroni.” Henry and I discussed the stock market and other ultimately irrelevant matters with a kind of warm enthusiasm that belied the sketchiness of our various points. Five rather than six cigarettes were decimated by me on the porch that evening. Maybe two not three liqueurs were consumed on the veranda, as we—or rather Edmé—noticed the first of the fall warblers settling for the night in the tops of trees, having begun their migration south toward points beyond both Mexicos, headed equatorward. We retired, as usual, though while again I found I wasn't sleepy, I had no desire to go back to the taproom. Tonight Hawthorne would do fine, I thought. And so he did, with a desperate tale about Midas and his poor, loving daughter, whom, through his own greed and by a fateful accident, he temporarily murdered with his touch, turning her to a statue of gold when she ran to embrace him. Midas's stock market, I reflected, trying and more or less failing to work out an anagram,
Dim ass's mock rakett.

I lay on top on the bed, fully clothed, arms crossed in the ambient glow, staring ahead at the complicated golden angles of this dormer and that wall. Thinking or dreaming of Helen, in the most abstract way. Not awake but not asleep, either. Just alone. By myself on that bed where I'd slept as a boy. Where now I dozed, the volume of Hawthorne on my chest, until I was awakened by the subtlest sound coming, or so I believed, up the creek road. Subtle, meager, the grinding unoiled metal, tires which rolled on the moist earth to a halt.

Tonight I would not panic. Instead, I set my book aside, on the table, having folded the corner of the page so I could find my spot when I returned. I extinguished the lamp by the bed and slipped into my shoes, went to the door, downstairs, and onto the porch, where I stood, listened. A walking stick of ash that was left beside the screen door frame I grasped and held as a demented king would his scepter. No one stirred in Edmé and Henry's bedroom, so I assumed it was only I who'd been awakened. The moon did not shed tonight the light it might have only last week, when it was full, but by this time my feet knew the way better than they had when I walked toward Henry's studio the other night, groping through drenched grass near the creek. Hearing nothing, seeing nothing, I decided to make my way down to the front gate, by now wondering whether I had simply dreamed those few noises of iron, rubber, dirt.

The foreyard gate at the end of the pebbled walk, which I had skirted, was ajar and thus I needn't have worried about how to swing it open without disturbing the garrulous bells that hung from it. A cool autumnal breeze serenely ascended the valley. By next month, if not sooner, I would be able to see my breath in a cloud at this time of night. Summer was near its end. Fiery yellow lochs of aspen would very soon appear in the green conifer seas as the season gave way to autumn and then to my favorite: beautiful, mesmerizing winter, when the world is softened by snow.

I reached the gate, which glowed palely under the starlight, and as I did, the presence of another was plainly in the air. I could almost smell someone, almost taste a vitality on my tongue. Up my arms and neck this recognition registered as my hair stood on end and goose bumps rose. My fear was, in a superficial way, irritating, even painful. I breathed in slowly, silently, as if by drawing the cold into me I might restore my calm, and as I did, I was reminded of the fish that brought themselves back to life from their own terror, earlier that day, by a similar process. The horsegate also stood ajar, and though it was not unusual for the sheepbell-laden foreyard gate to be left unlatched up by the house, this lower gate never was left unbolted. Something was wrong here.

I wedged myself between gate and post, stepped down the road a few yards. The creek whispered words I couldn't understand, and as it did I discerned the outlines, or rather the substance and bulk, of my prey—it
was
prey because I stalked it—at the side of the road, some hundred feet farther along. Or was I the prey? Without pausing, I walked on, toward it, quietly but steadily. Once I was sure of what I beheld in the midst of all this darkness around me, darkness that lay like some filthy shroud over the hollow and hill crests and mountaintops beyond, I found my voice, then heard myself ask aloud, “Is someone there?” Foolish enough question, I suppose. Nevertheless, it was what I said, and then pronounced similar words again, maybe with more authority the second time: “Who's there?”