Giovanni's Gift (41 page)

“Then we've got to look—and talk—beyond, forward.”

I took her hand, which was cold. “Let's go inside. I've got something I want to give you.”

She tightened her grip and we walked the rest of the field in silence. The banks of dark fleshy clouds continued to roll like waves, low over the valley. The mountains were shrouded in dense fog. We entered by the side door, she having produced a key from the pocket of her pea jacket.

Helen put up water for tea, and as she did, we were enveloped by our silences. Her hair was knotted into a loose bun, revealing her sharp profile, and as I sat at the table in the kitchen, I studied her beauty with the same intense fascination I'd felt that late-summer day up at the cemetery. She wore the simplest black turtleneck and black jeans, no jewelry, no adornments whatever, and as I watched her concentrate on pouring the hot water from kettle into pot, I understood that no one other than Helen would ever make any sense to me as an intimate, a companion. She filled the silver tea egg and lowered it into the pot, laid a knitted cozy over. As she sat down to wait for the tea to steep, I felt saturated with affection, and content that my recognition of Helen's importance to me was not mistaken. I reached down into my satchel on the kitchen floor beside my chair and pulled out Giovanni's box.

“This is yours,” I said.

She admired it without reaching out for it; she kept her hands in her lap, sitting directly across from me.

“I don't understand,” she said.

“Edmé gave it to me. It used to be your father's, Giovanni's. Now it's yours. I hope you don't mind, but there were some things in it he was holding on to for different people, and I took the liberty of returning them. There are a couple of things for you inside, too. Here—”

She took Giovanni's box from me, set it before her quite formally, and raised the lid. She smiled as she reached in and lifted out first the feather, saying, “Poor Sam will be pleased to have this back.” Then she took the photograph I'd placed in the box and held it up to the cream light. Edmé had given it to me that very morning, after Henry and I had our talk and said our farewells. She'd said she had known it was around somewhere among her thousands of prints. “It's not a very
good
photograph, as you can see,” she had apologized as she handed it to me. “But I think it's one you'll find interesting.”

It didn't take Helen quite as long as it had me to recognize whose three faces those were in the image. I, who was all of eight, stood on the timbers of the bridge with feet spread, right hand on my hip and left holding the hand of a small girl. Opposite, on the other side of the girl, knelt Giovanni Trentas, a beatific smile spread on that memorable face of his. He was holding the young girl's other hand, in both his own.

“My God. We
did
meet.”

“Edmé said we got along very well, too.”

Helen laughed quietly; we both did.

“It's a shame Henry had to keep his two families apart when we were kids. I could have known you all my life.”

Placing the photograph carefully back in the box, she said, “This is really good of you, Grant. But are you sure?”

“Sure of what?”

“Sure you want to part with it.”

“I don't want to part with anything,” I said.

Helen squared me in her sights. “You don't want me, Grant.”

“Since when is it your place to tell me what I don't want?”

“We don't even know if I'm going to be brought up on charges of some kind. I did admit to breaking into Tate's office, after all. That's against the law. And it may be true I didn't murder Milland, but it's not like I saved him, either. I wanted to, I tried. I heard that spring clamp snap and I heard him make this awful sound, and I ran back, and I tried to help him get loose, but he grabbed at me and was screaming, and those teeth were into him so hard. I wasn't strong enough. I grabbed the shotgun and I ran, Grant.”

“Are you breaking the covenant?”

We just sat there. We said nothing until I repeated to Helen that I had no interest in parting with anything, but that I was leaving— the time had come for me to go back to Rome.

“I can't come with you,” she said. “Not until what was happened here works itself through. Truth to tell, I haven't even decided whether I shouldn't just go down and talk to Noah, tell him everything, give him that receipt from Tate's files, let the chips fall where they may.”

“Whatever you think is right, that's what I'd want you to do.”

Helen brightened suddenly, smiled, then took my hands and said, “You remember back on Labor Day when you said I had three questions coming to me?”

“I remember.”

“Well, I still have one question to go, don't I?”

“You do?”

“I do, yes.”

“Well, then. Ask.”

“I'm not completely sure yet how I want to phrase it. I'm going to ask, though, someday soon. You just better be ready to answer.”

Her piercing eyes immersed themselves in mine; and after we drank our tea, each cocooned in thought, while outside the cold rain began to peck the windows and roof, we lay down together for an hour once more, upstairs, the rhythm of our breathing there matching curiously the pulsing of wind against the panes and rushing under the eaves like sea swells. After, she drove me down to the bus station, having reluctantly agreed to take the jeep back up to Ash Creek—seeing very easily through my ruse, my clumsy but well-meant manipulation to bring Helen and Henry together, a key passing from one hand to another, setting before my uncle the chance to speak to her. It was a chance I felt convinced he'd not fail to embrace.

On the back of Edmé's photograph of Helen and me and Giovanni Trentas I had written the address of the hotel where I decided I would stay, the place she could find me—La Speranza, of all things. Indeed, “When you can, if you can, please come—find me,” were the words I left Helen with as I boarded my bus in the rain, taking back with me both less than I came with and much more.

The rain here now in Rome is tapering, and the haggard sun is trying to find its way through the clouds. I have walked the length of the Corso and found for myself an old familiar cafe, where I can sit and read this last fable of Hawthorne.

Once upon a time,
it begins,
long, long ago.
But then, before I can read another word, I am distracted by the single chiming of a bell, far off in the distance, singing its pure high note from the crown of a medieval tower somewhere in this sprawling city. Soon another bell chimes, lower, and another, much higher than the first, and then more bells, of every timbre and tonality, join in. Bells of every size, weight, mold, material, and epoch are ringing; deep throbbing bells and broken reedy bells, quick clanging bells and bells that toll with slow dignity. More bells and yet others add their singular voices to the chorus, until it seems that,
yes,
all the bells of Rome are ringing the noon Angelus. Enraptured, I close my eyes and then open them on a whole new world.

A Biography of Bradford Morrow

Bradford Morrow is the award-winning author of six novels and numerous short stories, essays, poetry collections, and children's books, as well as the founding editor of the celebrated literary journal
Conjunctions
. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Academy Award inLiterature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award, as well as other honors.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951, Morrow grew up outside Denver in Littleton, Colorado, where his parents had settled after growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and Oak Creek, Colorado, respectively. Morrow's maternalgrandparents were farmers from Nebraskawho eventually migrated to Colorado after losing their farm during the Depression, and his paternalgrandfatherwas a doctor who came to Colorado to set up his practice on the frontier. His family instilled a spirit of adventure and curiosity in Morrow, traits that would be evident in his writing as well as his peripatetic travels and career choices.

Morrow left home at fifteen, traveling first to Honduras to participate in a summer program sponsored by the American Medical Association, where he worked as a medical assistant helping to inoculate thousands of impoverished, rural Hondurans. He then spent his senior year of high school as a foreign exchange student in Italy, earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, and spent time in Paris. For over a decade after setting off on his own, Morrow lived an itinerant life, moving back and forth from Europe to the States. He then spent five years in California, where he met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and finally settled for good in New York City. Before becoming a fulltime writer and editor, Morrow worked as a bookseller, jazz musician, and translator, and attended graduate school at Yale. His first book-length work was a bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, published in 1978.

In 1981, Morrow launched the literary journal
Conjunctions
. His taste, passion, and editorial savvy quickly attracted a diverse slate of contributing writers and editors, including Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, and Joyce Carol Oates. The novelist Robert Coover has called the publication “without exception, America's leading literary journal, one of the greatest such magazines in the literary history of the country.”

After years of contributing to anthologies and supporting the work of others in his role as editor, Morrow published his first novel,
Come Sunday
, in 1988. Morrow's debut set the tone for his later works with its rich historical allusion, globe-spanning plotlines, lyrical prose, and illuminating philosophical exploration. Morrow's second novel,
The Almanac Branch
(1991), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and highlighted the author's interest in the complex interior lives of his characters. The tone of his work is often Gothic, especially in
Giovanni's Gift
(1997), which was partly inspired by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Morrow meticulously researches his fiction: For his diptych consisting of
Trinity Fields
(1995) and
Ariel's Crossing
(2002), the author interviewed special ops veterans from the U.S. engagement in Laos, students involved in the Columbia University riots, and Manhattan Project scientists, among others. He even lived for a time near Los Alamos—where atomic weapons were first tested—to better understand the characters in his sweeping historical sagas of American life in the atomic age.

Aside from his work as an editor and writer, Bradford Morrow has taught writing and literature throughout his career, which has included positions at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and the Naropa Institute. He currently lives in New York and is a professor of literature at Bard College, which sponsors
Conjunctions
.

“Lois Hoffman and Ernest Morrow, my parents-to-be, standing in front of the Luscombemy father flew them in on their first date in 1949. My father was a pilot and the owner of a Harley-Davidson that he regularly drove from Oak Creek, Colorado, over the continental divide to Denver, where Lois lived at the time, an all-day drive on his cycle.”

“Age one, striking something of an authorial pose with the forefinger to the cheek. I remember those curtains, very Western in theme with the cattle and other cowboy imagery.”