Giovanni's Gift (23 page)

The champagne, the misgivings, soon seemed for naught. No one answered the door. Suppressing my urge to prowl around to the back of the cottage and peek through her windows, I turned toward where I'd parked. Sunset apricot light blazed like fiery glaciered crowns in those high mountain snowfields above and ahead of me. Staring at the reflection off the never-melting snow, I felt a perfect emptiness.

Behind me I heard my name called then, and I turned to look again at that door, but saw it remained unopened. You stupid fool, I mumbled kindly, Hearing voices now, are you? and started to turn again when I did hear her, distant but distinct. Squinting out across the field, with my hand shading my eyes in a kind of informal salute, I saw her riding toward the house on one of the horses I'd noticed earlier. Pale dust rose in her wake.

She was beaming as she dismounted, tied reins to a post.

“You're industrious,” she shouted.

“What?”

“I figured you would find me.”

“That's why you never invited me over?”

She kissed me, took my hand, and we went through a tack room at the rear of the house, into her kitchen. “I hardly know you. How could a decent lady like me invite a man of uncertain background to her house?” She smiled, and I with her. “What's that?” she added.

“Champagne.”

“I can't drink champagne in filthy jeans,” and she got glasses down from the hutch and left me alone in the kitchen. I peeled the foil, popped the cork, filled both glasses, which effervesced as I carried them. Circumspect, silent as any burglar, I toured Helen's downstairs: the kitchen that led into a dining room and beyond that into a greatroom whose appointments seemed—how else to put it—so
mature,
unexpectedly organized. Evidence of her daughterly devotion was present in the form of framed architectural etchings, probably from the nineteenth century, of Italian origin: triumphal arches of Severus and Titus; another showing the system of Roman aqueducts, with marvelous cutaway views; yet another displaying columns from various periods, Ionic and Corinthian orders with ornate acanthus leaves and fanciful godlets and sweet little beasts etched in their entablatures. I took a sip from my glass, just a little, so that we might still make some kind of toast when she came back downstairs, and wondered whether Giovanni himself had given her these, maybe some inheritance from the old country. Helen seemed so parentless, it dawned on me there, gazing in the failing light at this series of prints hung in her living room along the length of one windowless wall, that I liked this idea, that Giovanni's family might once have owned these images and hung them in Rome in their own flat, having left Valle d'Aosta, or in Velletri even, way back when they were all still together, before the war had pulled them apart forever. She really was her father's daughter, in fact, I realized, hearing her footsteps above me—although rather than being packed off to a foreign country when young, in Helen's case it seemed more that she was born in a place truly foreign to her. How unthinkable it might seem to one who hadn't gone through a parallel experience himself, to be ultimately so different from those you grew up with, from the other kids who struggled for identity and preeminence on the playground. For Helen
did
have a childhood, of course, though even I might have a hard time imagining what it must have been like, here and sometimes even up there at Ash Creek with that exotic and in some ways defiant custodian of her welfare, of her fate really. I sat down on a dark-green couch whose leather was old but supple, that faced a matching one centered in the long room, and placed the glasses on the reflective face of the low table between. On a small round table in one corner was a stuffed raptor, an eagle whose wings were spread as if it were about to take flight; on the wall of the dining room was hung the handsome skin of a wolverine, its sensuous, protracted claws curled at the ends of its forepaws, its blank black eyes staring hard at the floor. Giovanni Trentas surely had lived here with his daughter, yet even in his absence the atmosphere was not traditionally feminine. Helen was no girlish woman. The many masculine details in these rooms—these taxidermic trophies, the abundance of firearms in that antique gun case on the wall opposite the etchings— seemed as much to her taste as what might have been her father's. I found myself content being here in her reflected presence,
their
presence. She appeared again, dressed in a simple dark tunic cinched at the waist with tied lengths of bright scarves, barefooted. Her hair flowed arrant about her wide shoulders.

“Hello again,” she said, and took the champagne. We toasted, and she sat beside me. “I'm sorry I left without saying goodbye this morning. You were asleep, dreaming, I think. You were making these little moaning sounds, like this”—she teasingly re-created a series of sobbing sighs—“and your face was twitching. Sort of like this,” and then she burst out laughing.

“You were watching me while I was sleeping? That isn't fair.”

“What can I tell you.”

“Well, it's probably for the best you left, truth be told. Edmé suggested to me some time ago that Henry wouldn't necessarily be all that supportive of you and me—”

“You're not serious.”

“Edmé mentioned it, for what it was worth. She knows very well what's happening between us.”

“It's none of his business.”

“Henry? I'm sure it's just that he cares about both of us.”

“What you and I do is no one's business but our own.” Helen's face changed so quickly, it was as if she were another person for some unmeasurable brief squib of time, then returned to its original complexion of humor and warmth.

“What can I tell
you,
” I said.

We sat, mute. Feeling awkward, maybe, she rose, went to the kitchen. I scolded myself for having mentioned Edmé's dissuasion. But why not put the matter before her? A voice within asked back, reasonably enough, What matter? And besides, her reactions would allow me to know her better, if I was able to interpret. Helen returned with the champagne bottle in one hand and in the other a shot glass which she filled.

“Who's that for?” I asked.

“Sam,” she said.

“Sam?”

A quizzical glance as she walked to the mahogany tripod table which accommodated the great beaked, feathery relic there. “I call this fellow Sam, for Uncle Sam, bald eagle. It's bad luck not to share an offering.” She set the oblation at the base, near its very yellow talons.

“I thought bald eagles were a protected species.”

“They are. Sam was snared in a trap by mistake, by your uncle, in fact, before eagles were endangered. He gave him to my father years ago.” She tenderly smoothed its back feathers. “You have to have a license for these, even if they were mounted before the ban. I think he's so beautiful.”

“Kind of sad.”

“Only in so far as he messed up by getting himself caught in the trap in the first place. It was set there for a lynx or some other small game, a winter trap, Henry said. He must have been desperate for food, is all I can guess. Eagles prefer to kill for their own meat.”

“You ever get the itch to leave this place?”

She came and sat close. “That's quite a non sequitur.”

“Want to hear another?”

“Outside. Let's walk.”

“All right,” and I followed her to the door. We strolled into the field where she'd been riding. The minute flecks, those horses that had been there before, were gone now. Twilight was held at bay still by a sky marked with luminescent filaments of cirrus, and pile upon pile of cumulus edged with wondrous pigments overhead.

“You were saying?”

“You never answer my questions, you know.”

“That's a dirty lie,” and slipped her arm around my waist. “Answers are, One, Yes, not only do I get the urge to leave, but two, I know that one day I will. It's a matter of figuring out what direction to go when I do decide to leave.”

“You can come with me,” I said.

“Where?”

“I don't know yet.”

“When you figure it out, let me know.” We soon came to a wide slow river, whose rilling surface reproduced fluid chinks of the last dying gold-pink sky shades. A bridle path followed the bank. She mentioned that Ash Creek was tributary to this river and that back when she was a teenager, after Giovanni and she had moved down here during the summers when Edmé and Henry returned from the coast, she would sometimes place a crudely carved toy boat in the running water by the bridge at Ash Creek, and then spend hours down on this very shoal, waiting for the boat to reappear. She made this experiment many times, she told me, but the boats never made the long passage from the mountains down across the valley flats, over here to the far side of town, where the river widened out into such a massive and majestic flow. “Stupid game,” she concluded.

“You know what I wanted to ask, the non-sequitur question?”

“Aren't I the one who has a third question coming?”

“It was about your mother.”

“I have no answers for you on that front.”

“Look, for once in my life I don't want to keep secrets or lie or anything of the sort.”

“Why not? I mean, don't get me wrong. I hate liars more than any other thing on earth.”

To explain my sudden embrace of truthfulness would be difficult; instead, I simply plunged forward into the truth itself: “I wasn't going to tell you, but well—I went and visited with Margery Trentas.”

“That's not her name. She's no Trentas. And now I suppose you're going to tell me she's a lovely lady and I have no right to hate her.”

“From the little I've seen, she is.”

Helen removed her hand from mine, and halted beside a bend in the river. I could see the evening star beginning to glimmer in the violet dark above her, very faint still. “We all have hard lives. She's got no special claim on the difficulties of being human. I don't get you.”

“Well, that's kind of my point, I suppose. This is one thing I really don't get about
you.
You told me once you're not even sure she's your real mother, but you hold this grudge against her as if she were.”

“Listen. Do I go around asking questions about your parents, your background, anything of the kind?” She was quietly crying out at me. Her face was flushed with hostility, yes, but fear, too.

“Helen, don't be mad at me,” I said. “I'm just trying to understand.”

“Your trying to understand gives you the right to stick your nose in other people's business?”

I thought back to my imaginary conversation with Helen in that phone booth back near Red Hill and was reminded how accurately I'd predicted her outrage, a fact that gave me pause. If she hadn't the right to be offended, of course I would never have been able to prophesy it. “I'm sorry, Helen,” I said—not words I'd often heard out of my mouth in an argument.

“You're not sorry for an instant. Look. I'm not going to tell you how to behave or not to behave. I don't have a mother, and I'm not about to be your mother. I'd rather—” and she just turned and began to walk away, back toward the field and the house.

As I followed quietly behind, the hollow that had been carved in my chest seemed more capacious than the chest itself, and the drafts of dismay, of confusion and shame, that gusted through that sudden hole at my center made me tremble. If the skies had abruptly opened and snow begun to fall, I would not have felt a colder chill.

The document was not meant perhaps to be hurtful. The man who dictated it to some innocent amanuensis might have been staring out a window as he worked through the specifics of the contract. All this was so everyday to him, no doubt, and these words must have come by rote. To him, as to any other lawyer, this was just a writ notifying a person (or
party,
as we are ironically called—no party, this) on behalf of a client regarding the commonest of suits. And yet the wistful melancholy that this divorce document generated in me, even in light of my new romance with Helen Trentas, went beyond what I might have imagined. I had known it was coming. I had time to prepare. But I was not prepared.

Edmé'd left the express envelope on my bedside table, by the Hawthorne. It awaited me when I returned home that evening, beat and bewildered by the events of the day. I thought back to Helen's rebuke, how I had caught up with and walked beside her—my arms dangling, hers crossed—returning along the river and over the field to her house. She calmed down some during the hike back and, by the time I left, had forgiven me, after her own fashion, for my overzealousness.

“Nobody likes to be gawked at,
watched,
” as Helen put it, “and I'm the kind of person who dislikes it even more than most.”

What I'd said that broke through her resentment was that my Margery visit had more to do with learning about Giovanni than his daughter. “Look. Regarding your father's daughter: I don't need any convincing or disclosure or any—I don't know—information. I just don't see how I could hear that a man who I remember from my own cast-to-the-seven-winds childhood—”

“It's four winds.”

“Four winds, seven winds, whatever. My point is, if Giovanni was murdered—and Margery agrees with you that he was—”

“How would she know?”

“—how could you expect me not to ask around about it? I'd have thought you'd want me to share an interest in the matter.”

“I do,” she said.

“In fact, if I had to guess, I might have imagined that you
meant
for me to pursue the idea that your father hadn't died in—in an uncomplicated way.”

She did not deny this. She said only that she might prefer it if I let her know what I was going to do before rather than after the fact. “If you're serious about it, then I can tell you what we have to do.”

“Yes?”