Giovanni's Gift (33 page)

Helen had neither agreed nor disagreed, but we paid for our first few rounds, before Milland had joined us, with his largesse and torments, and left the glowy, liquorish but dry Clair for the night that was quite the opposite: black, sobering, and drenching with sleet. When I failed to make the turn at the road that would take us back to Helen's house, and continued instead toward town, toward the bank building at its center and Graham Tate's offices there, Helen did not disapprove or protest, but held my free hand tight as the headlamps illuminated numberless pathways of frozen rain. What's to lose? I thought, spurred on to continue in the reckless directions of the drunken evening. As we drove, Helen told me a story about Milland and Tate and my uncle, which made me realize that whether we wanted to do this or not, it was unavoidable and necessary.

When we reached the outskirts of town, saw the lights along the main street blurred by the torrents of rain, the perception came upon me in a flash, the realization that I, too, had become a night visitor. I, who used to be so devoted to the bells ringing the noon angelus in Rome, had become a midnight man.

Intuition is the most mysterious art. Even now I cannot say for sure that intuition was really what motivated me, compelled both of us, the night of the black rain, to coerce the door that kept Graham Tate's world safe from that of others. Arm in arm, unsteadily we climbed the dim stairway of the bank building, footsteps resounding and clothes dripping wet. I wasn't altogether surprised when Helen produced a credit card and slid it down between frame and door until the bolt eased away and we were inside Tate's office. No alarm or siren sounded, no security lights flashed in our eyes. As we moved into the dark rooms, whose furniture was palely illuminated from the streetlamps outdoors, we began to laugh and talk to one another, still drunken, somewhat astonished by where we were and what we were up to.

“His files are in here, I think,” Helen said, as wind thrashed against the windows of Tate's inner sanctum, facing the main street. I followed her silhouette, and noticed how beads of rain ran in swift descending patterns down the great panes of glass beyond her, back-lit by neon and a steady apricot light from the street.

The shadowy raindrops projected their impressions on the wall opposite, where legal file cabinets stood in a row. “I'll look under Daiches,” said Helen, who surprised me by turning on a desk lamp, a gooseneck with green shade on a low brass stand. “You look under Trentas, why don't you.”

I pulled open the heavy drawer, wondering how so many files could accumulate with respect to business in such a small burg as this, unnerved by the fact that these cabinets bore no locks and my fingers picked their way through alphabetical files which of course Tate would not want me, or anyone, to read. Should we have been wearing gloves? Too late now. Helen had already pulled a file and was riffling through sheets of paper under the lamp behind me, when I found what I was searching for. I pulled the manila folder marked
Trentas, Giov./H.
from the drawer and paused, took a breath, before opening it.

Intuition had led us up the stairs and inside—but never would I have dared guess at the images and scenes that would spring from words on the few scraps of paper I now found. Nor would I have been able to foresee that one of the most breathtaking of conjurings came from the most humble of these fragments. A shred, a tatter, just half a leaf of foolscap, there at the front of the file: and from it, this torn scrap, what a scene arose in my imagination. Ripped down the middle from top to bottom, only the left-hand side of the piece of paper was here, held between my quivering fingertips. The other half, I recalled, was at the bottom of Giovanni's box, where I'd stuck it, assuming so wrongly that it'd had no meaning, having given up weeks ago on interpreting the half-phrases and divided words that were split along the serrated edge where Tate—or someone close to him, for here it was in his file cabinet—had torn the sheet in two. While I held it in the dim light, it seemed as if both halves became whole again in my suddenly focused gaze, so obsessively in weeks past had I studied that remnant in the box before relegating it to the bottom of the heap.

What this was, what
these
were, had been written by Giovanni himself in a diminutive script, in ink. The account of a meeting, a shorthand digest. I deciphered, and as I did, words and letters became phrases in my head, and phrases soon rose into figures—the figures of Giovanni Trentas and my uncle, on a morning half a decade ago.
Late spring,
I read, and thought of spring, when the world was blossoming and soft clouds decorated the lovely blue dome over their mountain, over the valley and the town, over the gorge and creek and house where Henry and Edmé lived. Mid-May, in fact, and late morning.

A man, an old friend, someone whom Henry trusts above every other friend he's ever had, walks up the rise from the horsegate, reconsiders, doubles back down to the bridge by the cabin where I now live, hikes the green muddy field to the studio. He knocks on the plank door, and a familiar voice asks, —Who is it? and he says, —It's Sam, and he is of course invited to come in. —How's all? he's asked, and he answers, —All right, but knows that what he has to say here, this morning, will not make the other man, my uncle, very pleased.

Earlier that same morning Giovanni had already called on Willa, his other closest friend, to let her know that despite appearances, he'd not been feeling well lately. He had always taken such care of his health, knowing that his mother died pretty young from pulmonary disease and that his family had never been long lived, but for some months he'd experienced pressures in his chest, he wasn't sure whether heart or lungs or both, and the doctor who examined him didn't offer an auspicious diagnosis. —You're hardy as a horse, my uncle would have said, and Giovanni must have smiled and shaken his head from side to side, then said, —There's no problem for the immediate future, but just for the fact of Helen's future.

Giovanni, who pronounced the names of his daughter and best friend with his residual accent, said
elen,
said
enry.

—What do you mean? Henry asked.

—I've talked to Willa, and she agrees with me it's time the three of us sat down with Helen—

—No.

—Time has come.
Time as come.

And I can see Henry, although it would be difficult to put myself in his position, impossible really, in order to
feel
the multifold weave and complex layering of his years of apprehension that this day, a day of generous reckoning, would finally arrive. What I see is a combination of perplexity, fear, resignation, love for his unwell friend, his betrayed wife, his estranged lover, and his hidden and unclaimed daughter, as—enveloped by some fierce will that would insist that none of them was ready for the truth yet—he implores Giovanni not to ask this of them now.

But that isn't all, because I also see Edmé working the garden for spring planting, spading over ice-pocked soil and nipping out the first budding weeds, sorting out her rows, content in a profound way I myself have never known, utterly oblivious to what is being weighed between Henry Fulton and Giovanni Trentas across the creek. Further, I can imagine Helen Trentas, the child of three people, a radiant, skeptical, beautiful woman in her middle twenties who is devoted to the idea that Giovanni is her father and that Margery, the jackdaw crow woman, as she'd have it, had abandoned her and her father so long ago, and can imagine—as Henry is now explaining to Trentas—that she might not ever want to know all this about her heritage.

—At a certain point, Sam, what good comes of it? She'll wind up hating us all.

—She'll understand.

Giovanni must have continued, too, gone on to explain that whether Willa's husband likes it or not, and whether Willa's family likes it or not, Helen Trentas should someday be the rightful heir to several estates, not the least of which would be Henry's own.

—Back when we were young, secrets were more important than anything. They had good cause. I believed in it, and I still do. But look at us, Henry. We're old now. We wanted to save one marriage and make another possible, to protect the girl. My life has been better with Helen in it. In the end, it worked out. What's left to do is put Helen's good above our own.

—You spoke with Willa.

—She will do it.

—And Tate? What does he think?

Trentas was always plainspoken, and said, —He doesn't want anything to do with it. But Willa said she would, with or without his blessing. It's up to you.

—Willa may be ready but I'm not, my uncle said, with finality.

—Think about it, Henry. I don't say do it tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. But the time is coming when we've got to bring Helen in on her own life. Trying to protect her, we manage just to hurt her. You know this is the only fair way.

These words spoken quietly, and having finished saying what he came to say, he shook his friend's hand, left the studio, then undoubtedly crossing Ash Creek to join Edmé, exchanging comments about what kind of weather they might expect this summer, that sort of thing, before making his way back down to the horsegate to return home.

How strange it must have felt for Henry and Tate to realize that they, who had disagreed about everything under the sun over the course of their paralleling lifetimes, finally concurred about something. Tate, who always held Henry responsible for a barren marriage, knew all too well about Willa's difficulties in giving birth during her year in exile from the valley. He remembered that year of secrecy, which ended with her poised, proud, if despondent homecoming, and also her suddenly agreeing to marry him, so long as he would tolerate in absolute silence the fact that her secret daughter was to be adopted by Giovanni Trentas and that she would never be able to have another child, having “secondary infertility,” as her doctor put it—a terminology, not to mention disorder, that would continually gnaw at Tate, become a private canker to one who loathed the word
second
as much as he adored the word
first.
Still, he recognized Willa's stipulations and her saying that if, in fact, he loved her and could accept these constraints, she would love him, too, and be as dedicated a wife as she could.

Tate had agreed to this: wealthy wife over blood heir. But he never made any real peace with it, not then, not now. He agreed, knowing that one day Henry Fulton would have to pay for his intimacy and betrayal—if possible, in some way so that Willa could not reasonably fault him. And, of course, she could never reasonably fault him for pursuing his avocation as a businessman. Therefore, if Ash Creek was the necessary piece in a larger puzzle he needed to assemble for development, for some kind of resort, or to become, say, part of a land trust that would one day be given away in order to keep it out of
everyone's
hands, though emblazoned for time immemorial with his own name, then Willa would have no right (or ability, finally) to criticize such a venture. With patience, with time, Tate would exorcise Henry from his own family grounds. Tate's name would have to serve as his sole heir. That would be sufficient, or nearly so. But though he might have been willing to help Helen, in clandestine ways, and look out a little for her financially— she was, after all, Willa's daughter—he was not prepared to suffer the shame, as he saw it, of what the town would then know: that he, Graham Tate, was Willa's second choice.

Neither did Henry want to have so many years of difficult, tentative harmony thrown into discord by Giovanni's proposal. And this is where the most unhappy component of what I came to learn during my stay at Ash Creek would eventually rise into view.

As I slipped the torn fragment of Giovanni's account into my pocket, a phrase that Milland used back at the bar came to mind.
Sometime there's things for some people to know and for other people not to.
How much of our lives is spent, I marveled as I glanced over to see Helen working her way feverishly through a file, sorting out for ourselves what to say and what to hide. It was as if I were metamorphosing into a repository for everything people wanted no one to know. As if the night had a volition of its own now. Why had Helen told me, on the way over from the Clair, that story about Tate and Milland and Henry, if not intuitively to pry their secrets free?

I imagined Helen's surprise that quiet evening, after ten, she'd said, home alone, when there was a knock at the door of her cottage. She'd taken to spending more and more time by herself those days and nights after Giovanni had been laid to rest, not that she'd ever been very sociable. She might have known it wasn't the healthiest response, to mourn, hidden from the world. But it was everything she could do in the wake of what she saw as obstruction and repression among those around her, all she could manage since she believed herself to be alone anyway, given no one seemed to lend the same credence to the possibility that Giovanni's death was unnatural. The knock at the door was gentle. She might even have thought it was the wind disturbing branches of a tree, thus imitating the sound of someone knocking, if it had not happened again, this time somewhat more insistent.

Graham Tate smiled at her, face bathed in the pale porch light, and she must have looked as startled as she felt, because she would remember later, when she finally told me what Tate said that night, her words.

—What're you doing here? she asked.

“Not a very nice way to greet somebody at the door,” she'd tell me, with an acerbic laugh.

“Not very,” I'd agree. “So what did he say?”

—You have a minute? I've got something I want to tell you I think you'd find interesting.

She waited for him to continue, then realized he meant for her to invite him in, so she did. Across the threshold he walked, and sat himself down, laying his hat on the table before him.