Giovanni's Gift (24 page)

“Graham Tate. He knows. I believe he knows everything there is to know about this. And I think Henry knows, too.”

“What would Henry know?”

“I don't have the answer to that question. I don't have answers to many of these questions. I just know.”

“You
suspect,
you mean.”

“No. I
know,
” and she held her fist against her temple and gently tapped her head there, as if by such a gesture she might conjure from some chasm in her imagination the traces of a hard knowledge, the recognition of what precisely she meant. Without thinking, I reached out (we stood, still outdoors, at the foot of her kitchen porch, in the new dark) and took her fist in my hand. She resisted at first, then slowly relaxed—I could feel the muscles in her hand give way—so that I brought her fist to my lips and kissed her knuckles, then pried her fingers so that the fist exfoliated. I whispered I was sorry to her palm, and her palm now was on my cheek. We embraced as some vesper bird arabesqued over us, and she said, “I get crazy, I get crazy because there's such a tangle here, and I won't ever get free of it until I know what really did happen.”

“I don't want you to be crazy. I want you to be happy, trite as it may sound.”

She said good night, and I watched her disappear behind the dark door of her cottage, before I returned along a path to the jeep.

Haggard, I drove home. The porch light was left on, but Edmé and Henry had gone to bed. Then found this, took it downstairs to the kitchen, where I put on some water for tea. Devils love to work in spurts, making clusters of trouble, I thought as I slit open the envelope with a knife, knowing full well what was inside. And no, the papers came as no surprise, as I say, this cold, hard
thing
that required my signature agreeing to the division of property as stipulated here below in a brief attachment, and further agreeing … well, no need to detail the various points that were laid out, because what I found myself focused on were simple words, like
division
and
brief attachment.
Three years with Mary; a pretty brief attachment, and now the inevitable division. With the pen that lay beside the telephone I signed the documents, initialed the attachments, slid them into the envelope enclosed for return of the various materials, licked and sealed it. I spit the gluey taste out of my mouth into the sink, removed the tea bag from the cup, and went outside on the porch. The chamomile warmed me. A drowsiness settled through me. Soon enough, I climbed the stairs and into bed. No Hawthorne tonight, no dreams good or otherwise, no visitations or nocturnal music, no unexpected midnight encounters of any kind—nothing but a profound, needed sleep.

The morning following, I woke with an idea. From the bottom of the armoire I retrieved Giovanni's box, opened it, ferreted out what I was looking for, and discovered I was right. One of the feathers was a small breast or head feather from the eagle that had been caught in that trap set up in the gorge for some other animal. I brushed the feather back and forth beneath my chin, against the fresh stubble, and pondered once more what these puzzle pieces could mean. Half asleep still, I riffled through the love letters from Margery and tried to imagine her, back when she was a young woman filled with desire and purpose and hope and fear, too, writing these few trepidatious words to her handsome suitor. One by one I reread them, wondering if Giovanni appreciated how much she loved him, tracing the words with the tip of the eagle feather as I studied the notes that were obviously meant never to be seen by any eyes other than his.

And then I detected something so inappreciable, so subtle to my unstudied eye, that I hadn't seen it when I first read through these letters. The briefest among them, penciled on a small piece of paper—
When he goes I can come to see you but not before. I don't want him to see me. Until tomorrow, then
—was not in the same handwriting as the others. Now that I noticed this, it was plain as the daylight that streamed through the dormer window, and I wondered how had I missed it. The calligraphy was somewhat more refined, even though it was obviously written in haste, and the words themselves carried a meaning rather different than that of the other notes. For one, Margery had more than one man who opposed her romance with Giovanni—all those nasty fairy-tale brothers—which did not reconcile with the references here,
When he goes
and
don't want him to see me. They
were not a
lie.
I was wide awake now, and turned the bit of paper over. Maybe in the excitement of finding these letters in the first place, I had failed to look at the other side; maybe I'd looked but the light hadn't been quite this bright. In any case, I now read on the reverse of this note, in script faded by time and possibly never very boldly inscribed at all, the letters
H xxx W.

H
for Helen? What else could it be? I thought. But then, no, of course not. I understood without having to think further. The
H
meant Henry. And the
W
meant no one other than Willa—Willa Richardson, not Willa Tate.

This was more confusing than anything yet I'd discovered in the box. And the man mentioned there, the poor
he
who was meant to be kept in the dark about a meeting? “Tate knows and Henry knows, too,” as Helen had said. Could the reference possibly be to Tate? I wondered. Did Henry's relationship with Willa go back as far as Tate's? Was my imagination simply running wild?

I packed Giovanni's box away, as if by getting it out of my sight, the tales it began to disclose might also disappear. They didn't, though. Indeed, yet another question was stirred to life. A voice within me asked with lurid hilarity, Just what was Giovanni Trentas doing in the first place with this dark little confidence, this tattered trysting note between Henry and Willa—if that was truly what this proved to be—hidden in his cryptic box? More than ever, it was clear to me that Giovanni's box held the whole story.

The next day was overcast; a cold wind whipped the dying grass. A covey of black birds was driven along by the gusting from north to south, in the low sky. Summer was surely gone now, and it seemed as if a season was to be skipped, that we might arrive abruptly into the first snow. To think that only the day before I had passed so many hours outdoors, working the fence line with Henry, making repairs where barbed wire had broken, or rails had rotted. How many times during that day together I'd wanted to broach all those questions with him, have some answers straight from the source; but was held back by my fear he'd consider it an insult that I would dare pry into his past and the histories of people to whom he was close. What I did, instead, was enjoy the company of my uncle, engage myself in our work. I let Giovanni and Helen and Mary and Willa and Tate simply float up and away from me, during those late-morning hours—after a quick run into town to mail the papers—and through the afternoon. I allowed any thoughts of Giovanni's box to dissolve, as Henry and I tramped from the horsegate up west over the saddle ridge, hauling cat's-paw and hammers, snips and staples and saw, and a wreath of lethal thorny wire wrapped in a mantle of heavy old hide with us as we went. Even when I was in town I resisted the chance to drop in on Helen. It was a day to stand back, to work with my hands, not my head.

The only moment in which Henry and I touched upon a subject other than fence mending was when he encouraged me about my life in the wake of a second divorce, an encouragement offered now but which would later be revoked. “You're young for two divorces,” he said, one eye staring me down even as I saw in it his concern, “but you have all the time in the world ahead of you, just remember that. Go easy. You'll be fine if you just go slow.”

When I thanked him, I couldn't resist wondering whether these words referred to me and Helen. “That's never been my strong suit,” I remarked, as we fitted a fresh-hewn rail into position.

“Never been divorced, you know. But I bet I know more about these sort of things than you'd think. The only thing I know for sure is that slow and steady's the way to any happiness in this world. It's worth remembering.”

“I'll remember,” I said, then clopped the timber to square, lifted the bale of wire over a shoulder, and we moved along the margin to the next breach.

And now the new day had come all bluster and blowing wind and grayed heavens and withdrawing birds. Although today I had intended to meet Helen, who'd promised to give me lunch if I came over, I wound up telephoning her to cancel. For the first time since I'd arrived, my uncle could really use my help here at Ash Creek, and my obligation was to stay; his studio roof had been damaged by the high gales that hurried down, whistling as they shook the windows and made the trees quiver and bow, and we had to go over, lay down some fresh asphalt tiles, in case it did begin to snow, or settle into freezing rain, as it threatened. She understood, told me to call later, but not before wondering aloud, “Why does he insist on keeping that studio in such bad shape as it is. It's a little perverse for somebody who designed so many beautiful buildings to retire to such a hovel.”

“I don't know,” I said. “Talk to you later.”

Henry lent me an oilskin and gloves, and for the second day in a row we marched off together, across the creek, and began to work. The wind had ripped several odd bundles of asphalt shingles off the saggy roof, and the tar paper had here and there torn away, exposing sheets of plywood beneath. Wind thrashing us, we unrolled paper and stapled as best we could, then nailed courses of fresh asphalt where the defaulting had occurred—hasty nails in a formerly nailless building. Our faces were cold, and so were our fingers. The change from yesterday's mild sunshine was marvelous for its gross extravagance. When the first pellet of hail, tiny as a seed, rigid as stone, struck my wrist, and then another my cheek, we were almost finished with the patching, but not quite. The storm advanced from above in the gorge as a wall, or sheet; when I looked over my shoulder to witness it, I was impressed by the distinctness of its contour, and its weird chartreuse hue. It was upon us within minutes, there on the mildly pitched roof, as we worked quickly as we could to complete the job.

“Hard snow,” my uncle shouted.

“—can say that again.” Our words were blown in circles by the busy driving winds.

“No, don't mean it's snowing hard. I mean this's called
hard snow
—freak, different from hail, colder.”

“Yeah?”

“Don't see it too often. That's good enough; let's get back to the house.” We clambered down the ladder, stowed it alongside the building, made our way—Henry half running before me—down the bank, across the narrow bridge, up the already whitened rise past the garden, the grainy snow percolating in the grass and percussing off my stiff jacket. “Won't last long,” he said, once we managed to get back to the porch.

We removed our jackets, shook them, pulled off our soaked shoes, even left our trousers at the doorsill, so wet were we both. Edmé had towels for us, and while it might be true that this was a moment when we stood together as a family, a moment when after a couple of days' laboring side by side I might have been fairly given to feeling connected, even emotionally contiguous, with my aunt Edmé and uncle Henry here at Ash Creek, I had the oddest apprehension of just the reverse. What I felt in the kitchen by the door was my extraneousness, an intrinsic alienation. What was I thinking?—that I would simply continue to live on and on and on here with them? It was the sudden squall that brought this upon me, I knew. Somehow, with the weather still warm, I had been enjoying with my father's sister and her husband just another of my summers at Ash Creek. But now, the air having turned gray with hard snow, however early in the season it had come, I glimpsed that my stay could not continue forever. It would have been an upsetting revelation under other circumstances, but its precipitant character—the fact it barreled down on me with exactly the speed of the storm itself—made it all the more intense. The house had become abruptly very small, to my mind. The three of us, moving around in the kitchen (Edmé'd lit the cast-iron stove in the corner and Henry had gone below, dressed in socks and a long coat from the rack by the door, to fetch up fresh coal from the bin), seemed now to bump into one another. When I climbed the stairs to change into dry clothes, even the staircase was, I swear, narrower than it had been only a few hours before. To be sure, this was
in my mind.
But just because it was did not mean the thought was specious. Out the dormer you could not see the tree line along the creek, so thick was the storm with vapor from the warm soil and with flying snow as well. In a lifetime punctuated by moments of feeling myself destined to be a perennial vagrant, occasionally pausing to build my own nest before finding some nice way to tear it apart, more often than not just camping out in someone else's roost, I had never felt quite as bereft as this.

Get a grip, I warned myself. In the armoire, where I'd gone for some corduroys, I encountered the green and gold corner of Giovanni's box winking from beneath a stack of clothing. “Fuck you,” I whispered to the box. Unchallenged by its contents, I might never have gotten into this tangle with my uncle and the pasts of others; it did not occur to me that I was now in the middle of just what I'd come here for in the first place. Diversion from my own worries. The irony was that mine were now enmeshed with those of the very others I had hoped to use as a distraction, a gloomy frolic of sorts. I changed, returned downstairs.

The storm did not pass through as quickly as Henry'd predicted, and if anything it seemed that although the wind had died down, the freak snowfall was even steadier than before. Because the earth was warm, the snow did not accumulate except in shady places, so when it finally petered out, we looked across the fields and down along the creek and what we saw was like a negative print of a winter scene. The fields seemed blackened, and so did the trees and barn roof and so forth, but beneath the boughs and eaves, and along the lee of stone walls, the sheltered places where usually it was dark with shadow, now it was white with unmelted snow. Only the sky, which was low, and which dropped occasional tardy flakes that corkscrewed their way down instantly to thaw on contact with the world there, did not fit into this negative-print image: neither black nor white, it was the most peculiar gray-green any of us had ever seen. It was as if a whole new color was born that day, mixed from equal parts beauty and grotesquerie. We had soup in the kitchen, and I drank so much tea my head spun.