Giovanni's Gift (22 page)

Along that same narrow black highway that had taken me to the St. Clair—which I soon passed without giving in to the thought of stopping, sitting still for a moment to consider the purpose of these sudden, erratic urges somehow to
connect …
with whom if not with Giovanni Trentas—I continued toward the village of Red Hill.

The road widened after I passed the hotel and found myself speeding along an open stretch. Concurrently, the valley narrowed, as a ring of mountains rose up to pierce the precipitous shapeless clouds that cramped and burdened the sky. The radio in the jeep didn't work, so I listened to the heavy fingers of wind rapping against the tattered canvas roof and heard when every fissure and sill in the road shocked the suspension; even the mundane process of getting there was imbued with an exhilaration of peril. So I told myself as the road vaulted into a sudden vertical canyon cut by the river that ran below, then reemerged into a higher flats where a motley assembly of houses called Red Hill came into view. A cinder-block structure with flat roof drew up on my immediate right. Its crude painted sign, indicating coffee was served within, stood on the sod before it like plywood hands tented together. Here I pulled over, climbed out, breathed in the crisp mountain air. Inside, I ordered the coffee not because I wanted to drink but to earn some chance at finding out where Margery lived.

Within ten minutes I found myself standing before a grim tan stucco palace of two stories with a weathered mansard roof of gray slate and multitudes of windows tucked in it, echoing the grand Victorian manner of another time and, to be sure, place. Framed in one arched window jutting from the mansard roof was the pale face of a woman looking down at me in the milky afternoon light, her hair done in a loose chaplet of silver plaits. Both hands thrust into my trouser pockets, I stood there not quite knowing what to do next, returning her frank and somewhat apprehensive gaze. Even from this certain distance, staring up through smudged, hazy glass, I was able to see that Edmé was right. Here had once been a woman of considerable beauty, the forehead hieratic, the whole visage simply filled with light, only the eyes veiled by shadows. She might have looked like a ghost to me then—a day ghost, too shy to haunt the place after dark, too introverted, for hers was a face marked by reticence—but that she suddenly smiled and gestured in the most inviting way. After this, she withdrew into the dim interior, and I made my way up the narrow stone walk to the front, where I waited. When she opened the door, and welcomed me inside, I doubt that if I
had
seen a ghost I would have been more surprised: She spoke my name, “Grant?”

“Have we met?” I asked as I stepped into a large, moist room which was empty but for some wicker chairs and an ottoman.

“Listen, dear, if you don't remember me, what brings you here to visit an old lady you don't know?”

Fair question. “Well, I—”

“Maybe you were too young. But I recognized you right off.”

Hers was the kind of face that seemed extravagantly old when creased by its natural frown, and limpidly youthful when punctuated by her smile. It was one of those faces easy to imagine weeping. I did not recognize it, however, nor did I witness there in it Helen's lineaments and character. What was more, I hadn't understood that here was yet another reason for having driven this distance to encounter Margery, until that shimmer of won-recognition made itself known to me. She led me through more sparsely furnished rooms to the back of the house, where there was an arboretum of sorts, with dirty glass walls and ceiling, humid and aromatic, thick with blossoming plants. We sat.

“So,” she said. “What brings you here? Have you come all this way to tell me what a bad person I am? To tell me what I already know you and all of them think?”

“Hold on. What makes you say that?”

I thought, weren't there pleasantries she and I ought to be mincing around with first, before rushing into the past with such precipitous honesty? I liked this woman already, for her lack of congenital social grace.

She said, “Why shouldn't I say it? Ever since Giovanni and me went our ways, I've heard things. I've known what they say about me over on the other side of the valley. There may be miles between here and Ash Creek, but rumor never did respect distance.”

“Look, I don't live on the other side of the valley, and what's more, nobody has said anything bad about you.” My ears warmed and undoubtedly reddened at the falsehood, but I persisted, nevertheless wondering for the second or was it third time that day just what it was I hoped to accomplish here beyond simply
seeing
her. “Let me tell you the truth,” I said. “I'm not even quite sure why I came. I suppose I came to talk about Giovanni.”

“Giovanni,” flat, unavailing.

“Giovanni, yes. And about your daughter, Helen.”

“I don't have anything much to say about Helen. I don't know her. You could probably tell me more about her than the other way round. And as far as Giovanni goes, why should anybody care about my opinion? I wasn't even invited to the funeral, if there was one. He was still my husband, after all.”

Again, I wondered how had we managed to come so far so quickly. She presumably had some similar reaction, and rose—which led me to wonder whether I was about to be invited to leave—then left me in the greenhouse annex for several minutes alone, before returning with a tray on which was an antique crystal decanter of sherry and two delicate matching stemmed glasses. She asked about Edmé and Henry, about David Lewis, whom I gathered she got to know during her time at Ash Creek. And I answered, as best I could. When she inquired about Helen, her voice fell off so that I barely heard her words. She feigned, I saw, supreme reserve, but did after all want to know.

I said, “Helen's tormented by her father's murder, and so am I. But you tell me you don't have anything to say about that.”

The house was noiseless but for the distant ticking of a clock.

“Well, I would have things to say, but why should I, is my point. How do I know you're not one of
them,
anyway.”

“One of
them?
”

Her face metamorphosed from pugnacity to skepticism. Her mouth transformed from that frown in which both ends were drawn down, to a smirk in which one corner perked shrewdly upward while the other remained resolute, somber, as if burdened by memory.

She tipped her head to the side, birdlike.

I said, “Margery— Do you mind if I call you Margery?”

“It's my name.”

“Margery, I have
no idea
what you are talking about.”

“You are right about Giovanni being murdered; that much I can tell you. And I may be wrong about you being one of them. Either way … ,” and she failed to finish the thought.

Rather than plead for some absurd absolution, I simply drank, sat there, diffident as a stump, and waited for her to finish judging me. After a long interval, she whispered, “Everything could have been very different. And you know what else? What else is, you think you want to know about these things, don't you.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You don't, though. You don't want to know, Grant.”

“How come?”

“Why do you think I left Ash Creek and moved back over here?”

“I haven't any idea.”

“Well,” she said, “it's not because I fell out of love.”

I waited; and as I did I couldn't help but look at this pale, forceful woman, and wonder at Helen's animosity toward her.

“Giovanni was a decent man, as you know. It wasn't so much him as the girl I just couldn't live with. Not even the girl herself but, that is, all the difficulties that went with her.”

“Difficulties? She was just a baby.”

“Well, so was I, for that matter. The point is, she wasn't
my
baby,” said Margery. “She'd grow up one day, wouldn't she? And then what would happen when she found out I wasn't her mother?”

A numbness came over me. I'd known this in my heart of hearts, hadn't I. Something Edmé had said, maybe, something about Margery and Giovanni living together that winter at Ash Creek with the girl, which didn't add up, something about the dates not fitting together right. I had no thought what to say by way of response, but was sufficiently shocked that it didn't occur to me to ask who Helen's mother was, then, if not Margery. Whether or not such a question would have been deemed improper is, now, anyone's guess. Margery simply continued to speak in the absence of anything from me, beyond my quiet, “What? I'm sorry?”

“I said, I was young, what can I tell you. At Ash Creek, the future seemed uncertain at best, and the more I learned, the less I felt I could ever belong. Henry's father was so devoted to Giovanni that he knew Ash Creek would always be a place he could feel was home. For me, this was my home”—raising her hand. “I never ran away
from
home, I ran away
to
home. It was a long time ago.”

By not pressing Margery, I may have experienced a moment of unwonted grace. So I would like to believe. Because when I left her, I did so with the knowledge that Giovanni's young wife had abandoned him—if that is the right word for it—not from madness or malice, as Helen had suggested, not from some kind of misplaced love for a gang of helpless and callow brothers, as Edmé'd told me, but from an ingenuous fear of some day of reckoning that seemed to lay ahead for all of them. I liked Margery, couldn't help myself. Although one has a hard time understanding the compromises chosen by others, especially when they're informed by doubts and terrors, it was no more my place to question her decision of that spring of 1966, three years into their romance and not six months after they'd finally eloped, than to question her further about who Helen's real mother was, or is. Margery had, after all, welcomed me into her house, spoken at least a little with me. Enough was, as they say, enough. Throughout the hour I spent with her, I kept waiting for the famous brothers to appear like expectant wolves out of one of Hawthorne's tales, but no such creatures manifested themselves. I left, convinced she lived in that grand, ruined old place utterly by herself, serving the roles of both patient and caretaker, one living in regret for the past, the other modestly grateful for what good life had afforded her.

I went back to the jeep. I had to see Helen. My fear about appearing needy, or whatever, seemed irrelevant now. I did want to call first, and so at a junction where the road branched—one that would take the traveler north through alpine valleys toward state lines, the other that returned to town—I pulled over, having seen a telephone booth.

Finding only an empty metal folder where there ought to have been a directory book, I dialed information, asked for Helen Trentas's number, was told no one was listed by that name. “There's a listing for a”—the operator spelled this—“
Giovanne
Trentas, if that's any help.” Having penned the number on my palm, I thanked the operator and replaced the handset, wondering why on earth Helen would leave the misspelled name of her dead father in the directory, and hesitated before I dialed.

Where are you? I could almost hear her voice asking me.

Can I come over? I would ask.

But then, rather than hearing, Of course, please come, Grant, followed by directions to her place, I could imagine her saying, You're just as deceitful as the rest of them, I never want to see you again, once she knew my whereabouts and the fact I'd visited Margery. No, I would appear, just as she appeared, and leave others aside; I telephoned Edmé and told her not to hold dinner.

An uneventful, blind journey back, one of those stretches of time in which you travel from here to there without much process of consciousness occurring, within which you steer without really seeing, you respond to curves in the road without noticing them. Surely I saw a kaleidoscope of distinct images, some before me, some behind, but most present was a continuous queasy texturing of thoughts, an intermingling of Margery's words with those of Helen, a melding of Edmé's words about Giovanni with those of Noah the other evening at the Hotel St. Clair—into whose parking lot I now pulled, regaining consciousness. It was as if I'd dreamed but could not remember what the vision had been, as I walked into the taproom, empty but for the bartender, who was engaged in resetting the balance of a pinball machine down at the far end. I asked him, first, did he have a bottle of champagne he could sell to go—perhaps drinking too much, again, but I asked anyway—and, second, did he happen to know where Helen Trentas lived? The drive had revived me somehow; I was inspired to continue with my wandering day.

The champagne was a vintage I didn't know and can't recall, and the directions to Helen's house involved the briefest distance and a couple of simple turns. The sun washed the air orange as it descended behind the violet sawtooth range beyond her cottage. I admired the mowed yard edged with dying flowers, and the ascending walk overhung by the thick branches of old trees. The paper bag rustled under my arm as I walked toward the front door, painted azure blue to match the shutters, contrasting with the natural wooden shingles, blackened by weather and honeyed by hard sunlight. The cottage was set apart from any other house, and up behind it rose a field at whose remote edge several horses cropped, red flecks in the dwindling light. I was nervous. My stomach churned. Perhaps this wasn't such a wise move, showing up here uninvited. My edginess served to remind me how very negligible was my knowledge of Helen, how little I finally knew about her personal life. She understood much more about me than I her. What, say, if she had another lover, who might even now be nearing me on the other side of this door? What if she had a child, for instance, that no one had the nerve to mention? So ran my thoughts when I knocked and waited, as dusk breezes toyed with the paperlike leaves in the shrubbery that hedged this cobbled rock stoop. The answers to those questions were all the same: Why not find out now, before I became even more deeply involved with Helen than I was already? Again, I knocked.