Giovanni's Gift Read online

  We were married down at City Hall before Christmas. By first snow, an obstetrician was able to confirm Mary was indeed pregnant, and though we had predicted it, the disclosure caught us off guard somehow. How it transpired that after such a brief passage of time both of us had come not to want this child—at least “not now, not yet”—remains mysterious to me. I’d wager it will always linger in both our minds, the question of why we decided to go ahead with the abortion. I held her hand and looked into her eyes and saw the depths of her pain that day, as she lay under a sheet in the small recovery room in the clinic. We never discussed it after that.

  I can picture Mary with such ease (her animated face and pale cream skin framed by dark-brown short-cropped hair, resembling with uncanny exactness the bewitching boy with pouty lips and haughty feather in his cap in Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew, which hangs not far from here, in the San Luigi dei Francesi) and would imagine she’d describe these final months in terms not unlike my own. Because, even when we stopped agreeing about many things, we continued to acknowledge that when we made our decision not to have the baby, it was the beginning of the end of everything. And though it took several years for miraculous beginnings to come to a sorry end, it can’t be said we didn’t fight what simply happened to have been irrevocable. Rome was our last chance, as we saw it. We came, we tried to recapture our recent past, but the heat was gone. What kindled in its place was frustration, joyless and accusatory. Nothing we did was enough. Or, that is, nothing I did. For her part, I know she tried. But for mine, by taking up with a pretty young wanderer I met by the Barcaccia—a fountain, centered in a basin as oval as Mary’s face, that depicts a flooded ship from whose marble hull water cascades through cracks and breaches—I put reconciliation out of reach for good.

  Unaware of what I was doing, or why, I picked up this girl, took her home, and so delivered the quietus, as they say in the old romances. Coitus as quietus: Mary found us in bed, of course. Dreamily, cruelly, I made sure she would. And though I was furious, in my way, that she had the audacity to make the sanest possible move, which was to get away from me, from this monster we managed to become, I’m not the kind of person who would wish her harm or bad luck or anything of the kind. For her it had become life or death, really. And she thought to try life once more. For me, just then it hardly mattered which way it would go. The only decision I was able to come to was that I would make no decision. I would give myself over to the whims of chance. And if Rome was to be my little finale, all I could say was, it might have been worse.

  Not that my life had been all that grand or theatrical before. Nothing much had ever gone on with me. No super-wicked skeletons rattled in my cupboard. The troubled road I mention has to do with an untidy personal life, would be a way of putting it. I’d been in another marriage before this, one between youngsters that was never intended to survive. That and the tenuous but persistent affair with a woman named Jude constituted the extent of my serious intimacies. These three mark the cardinal compass points of my adulthood. Mary—my second try at matrimony—gone. Daniella, wife the first, vanished into another improbable marriage, which has taken her away to Jerusalem with her Protestant missionary husband, dedicated to retrieving for Christ as many Jews as possible. And Jude, always there but not there. North, south, east. An incomplete survey of an unfinished journey, not a map one could follow with any hope of arriving somewhere.

  In the dusty Forum one day not long after Mary had abandoned me, standing near what remains of those broken, evocative statues of the vestal virgins, listening in reverie to the hundreds of bells ringing the noon Angelus, I realized that there are times when loss is as easy to embrace as gain. This can happen only when hope is properly subdued, hope being a great troublemaker, with its cry of Try, try again and Give it another go. Hope was nicely becalmed that afternoon, as if the music of the bells had purified me. In my heart I felt a peace almost as sweet as any after the ecstasy of love. I’d failed anew, which was in itself nothing new.

  But before that? before I met Jude on a train spiriting across France some years before, each of us living out of knapsacks? before Daniella first said hello to me in New York, downtown at the Quad, and asked me if I wouldn’t mind moving to the left or right, as I was blocking her view of the cinema screen? before I met Mary?

  My life began in the maternity ward of Columbia Presbyterian, July 9, 1962. My mother and father were, even for their day, quite young to be parents. Maria Teresa had a dark Piedmontese beauty: olive-black eyes and black hair fell straight around her subtle face in such a way that unveiled the trace of Turkish blood which complicated her family tree—something Muslim, something Byzantine there. Her manners, as I imagine her, were those of someone far more mature than a girl of just twenty, back in the early and still somewhat innocent part of that uninnocent decade. First generation, she was; the wild child, the nonconformist daughter of a diplomat—not the ambassador’s daughter, but that of some mid-echelon aide in the Italian consulate in the city.

  Likewise, my father’s father had affiliations, whose meaning responsibility I never much bothered to understand, with the foreign service, and spent a lot of time shuttling back and forth from New York to Washington, with trips overseas between. My parents were introduced in those same grand, marble mansionette rooms where so many others in the diplomatic corps met. Maria Teresa had just turned eighteen. Matthew Morgan—freckled and sandy-haired and bony—was himself in the last month of his eighteenth year. They formed their youthful confederation within a matter of days, an act that would be repeated by their son. For my parents, love at first sight—never a guarantee of permanence, as they too learned—perhaps came as an acknowledgment of mirrored isolation, the product of their general unrootedness. Or maybe theirs was at first a rarer love, unaffected by any sort of individual need. Either way, neither of them was still a virgin within a week of their introduction. So my mother confessed, in her charming way, to a nosy son who often doubled as her confidant and friend.

  Both grandfathers of each family were temporarily engaged with work at the United Nations for those first years of the sixties, and I’m not straight on the details of who represented whom or in what capacity, or any of that stuff. So far as any of it mattered to my life, it was their momentary permanence, their provisional staying put, that made my entry into this world even possible. For this reason, I’ve always harbored a real envy toward anyone lucky enough to be born in a place, grow up there, get married and go on living there, thrive and suffer and eventually get old and die—and, yes, be buried there. Yet those few people I’ve met who knew what home means, by my definition, either hate it or don’t appreciate it for the fateful gift it is. The thought of being able to visit your parents in the old neighborhood, stay the weekend in your childhood bedroom, know what’s happened to friends through the years, up and down the block, seems like a dream come true. This is why Ash Creek, as my uncle’s ranch is called—taking its name from the brook that cuts it down the middle—has always held such an important place in my heart, and even though it’s true that Uncle Henry himself had to venture away from it to see its real virtue. Domi manere convenit felicibus … never was there a saying whose wisdom was more eternal: Those who are happy might best stay at home! Even in Rome, where those words were first uttered, such an adage failed to find its way into my experience.

  My father, not so unusually, would follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. In every way, I might add. Which is to say that his work worked him, so to speak, as he and his youthful family were condemned to follow him to points around the world. He never quite rose, just as my grandfather never rose, to a position of sufficient prominence that he could make a demand of his superiors for a permanent post somewhere, an assignment that might give his family the chance to set down roots. He lingered in the middle ranks, in the same murky professional substratum where grandfather Ernest had lingered for decades, never catching the break that would allow him to stop being shuffled from one pla
ce to another. We went where the political winds carried us, and no more complained than do fallen leaves blown down avenues in Vienna, or London, or for that matter Caracas, where we passed one brief autumn after the advent of some vague cabal, some assassination, some wrestling of power by this clique from that.

  My own childhood neighborhood was a cobbling of capitals. Most of them were here and there in Europe; some I’ve named already. No need to set down the rest of these cities, or the dates when we lived in them, and when we moved. They are something of a blur, anyway. Whenever I try to look back over those days of tutorials, or playtimes in the embassy yard behind thick walls, for whatever reason, I can’t arrange the details into any kind of total pattern. It’s all a disarray of half-remembered boulevards, of old statuary and mustard-colored buildings and manicured lakeside parks. It is a disorder of faces, some mustached and some mascaraed, leaning down to greet me in foreign tongues or mutilated English—How you do you do? or Please meeted you, or Hello do you? The only significant—that is, telling—pattern I can see is the blur, the smudge.

  I knew, from as early as I had the means to fathom such things, that my parents’ marriage had become, if not loveless, quite cool, and it was when I intuited that they stayed together less for their own happiness than for mine, I turned into a masterful little manipulator. It became of utmost importance to me that I please both my father and mother at any cost. Thus, I became a good boy, in the sense that I went out of my way not to be bad—whatever bad meant at the moment. I understood in my immature heart that the way to keep them together was to make them love me, above all, so that any consideration of breaking apart our fragile family would be seen as impossible. They’d damn well stay together, if only for my sake.

  And this was how I grew up, carried around from place to place by a couple who themselves had been ferried and flown and driven in cars that never belonged to them, living in temporary rooms their nation gave them, and so forth. Only when I reached the age of eight or nine did my parents realize it would be healthy for me to have some exposure to a more stable environment, a place where I’d have a summer room I could (sort of) call my own, no matter where diplomatic work took us during the rest of the year.

  My father’s sister, Edmé, had met and married a man named Henry Fulton, an architect who made his career out on the coast, and the two of them had often expressed a willingness to have me as a summer resident on Henry’s family ranch, where they spent their summers in the western mountains.

  The first time I wandered up into their lower meadow, careful not to brush against the brash razory leaves of stinging nettles, short of breath in the meager alpine air, running up toward their ranch house with the shiny roof, I was thoroughly exhilarated. Here was a life unlike anything I had ever known. Sky bluer than any blue I’d seen, clouds more magisterial than any skyscraper or other man-made wonder, and beneath them, the ranging mountains and green valleys forever changing hues as the day aged. Sometimes, during low moments in my later years, I would find myself wondering whether my adult dissatisfaction and disenchantment weren’t made keener whenever I considered the serenity my aunt and uncle and their place inspired back when I was a kid. Childless themselves, these two spoiled me with long days of honest work and honest play—of mending fences, helping with chores, building a treehouse; of evenings at the table in the kitchen playing cards, or out in the yard, stargazing, learning from Henry the names of constellations. When, in September, I returned overseas to whatever city my parents were situated in for the year, they understood, just watching my behavior, that the summer visits to the ranch were a good idea. They continued without interruption until I went to college.

  My uncle had woven those three months’ absence from the office into the rhythm of his work year because, he once told me, he needed distance to understand what was near at hand. And he was good enough at his art that he got away with doing things his way. He might have risen to greater prominence in the world of architecture, perhaps, if he hadn’t marginalized himself with this annual retreat. But no one could say that he marched at someone else’s orders, just as they couldn’t claim he failed to carry his own creative weight even from a distance.

  And so here I stood, newly alone in Rome, further away than ever from the serenity of those summer days, having just enjoyed my only cherished moment of the week—a moment in which often I caught a blind glimpse of old serenities—when the bells in every church and cathedral of Rome began pealing the noon Angelus. Back from the Forum, there in my cramped apartment, the bells still rang in my head, with the same clarity as when I heard them just an hour ago. I threw my head back and closed my eyes to the world and simply basked once more, if one can be said to bask in the tintinnabulation of church bells, relished the pure strength of history. Maybe this slow drifter who was I, this mangier of marriages and failer at any number of things, managed in this one weekly ritual only to produce the most shallow, false sense of bliss for himself. But it didn’t matter to me. I loved the afternoon of the Angelus anyway, even though I knew that no one pulled on the ropes in those ancient campanili on my behalf. That was as it should be. Why should any bell resound for one who’d whittled away at every last thing that might once have had personal significance, until so little was left? I didn’t harbor the slightest sorrow, however, that none of this soulful magnificence of bells was in my honor. I took the music into myself like a sacred drug, reveled happily every Sunday in the vast pealing of those bells, and for hours afterward I belonged to the continuity of history here, somehow, and to Rome itself.

  That day when Edmé called was no different. After the Angelus itself ended, and the ringing was silenced and faded in invisible wreaths of sound, following the gray circling of pigeons startled from their roosts, I returned in no great hurry from Palatine to Pantheon to our, I mean my, flat. The telephone had been ringing when I unlocked the door, and I had that curious conversation with Edmé.

  The moment of paralysis and memories by the window didn’t last long, however profound it had been. An idea formed in its wake. My birthday had just gone by the month before, gone by like so much else, and the time had come for me to remedy my small misery by doing something affirmative. Any move, it seemed, would be the right move, given my current conditions. And the imponderable cry for help I detected in Edmé’s voice gave me direction. The fact that hubris may have tarnished my altruism, my grand idea that maybe I could help straighten out the matters of others even if I couldn’t remedy my own, didn’t occur to me then. Instead, I was committed, even joyously overwhelmed by this fresh purpose which rose up, as I say, into my personal emptiness while I continued to stare at Rome’s rooftops that Sunday afternoon.

  Having packed some clothes, I walked downstairs to look for presents, then splurged on a cab to the airport, where I boarded a flight which would take me away from Rome. I had left, on the kitchen table where my landlady would find it, rent for the balance of the month, and a note instructing her to keep anything of mine she fancied and give away the rest to friends, charity, or the garbage men. I apologized for the abruptness of my departure but wrote, É l’ora di andare … the time had come to move on.

  The house at Ash Creek stood miles from the nearest neighbor, a man named David Lewis, who was even more reclusive than my aunt and uncle. It was the only dwelling on earth I knew which remained just as it was when I was growing up. That my fondness for the place has endured over the years, has even grown, proves my parents made a brilliant move when they decided to deliver me into Edmé and Henry’s hands during those summers years ago.

  Ash Creek has taken on some of the rousing grandeur of myth in my absence, and has remained for me a kind of blessed sanctuary, a refuge in potentia, an asylum to which I might retreat whenever my life had gotten, well, impossible. Even though I haven’t visited there all that often as an adult, my room with its narrow bed by the creekside dormer window means solace to me. Its sage and chestnut geometric stencils chasing up the walls and across the slopin
g, angled ceiling. Its Morris chair—almost my namesake chair—with an old russet leather pillow for a backrest. Its Chinle Indian blanket worn thin and agreeably faded, there on the plank floorboards. Its little desk still the repository of drawings I made of flowers when a kid, annotated with great care as to habitat and species. These signify home like nothing else in the world.

  Once, when I asked my architect uncle how he managed to envision corridors and alcoves and rooms for a building that only existed in his head, before he began to lay them down in lines on a vast sheet of blank paper, he said, —Close your eyes, Grant.

  I closed them, and said, —Yes?

  —Now think of a chair, he said in his deep, familiar voice.

  I thought of my chair, its armrests and how the cool dark seat was hollowed to fit my body. —Okay, I said.

  —You’re sitting in the chair now?

  —Yeah.

  —So stand up, and then sit down again.

  All right: I stood, sat.

  —Feel the floor under you?

  Yes, I could feel it.

  —Picture the floor. And picture the wall in front of you and the ceiling over your head.

  I did what my uncle asked me to do. The wall was sage, olive, chestnut, with abstract repeating patterns, just like in my bedroom upstairs. So was the ceiling.

  —You need some air in the room. Make a window or two in the wall, nice big rectangular windows for the sun to come through.

  I did, and the sun shone through, altogether quite real.

  —Now stand again. And walk out the door into the hall.

  In my mind, I did. I found myself standing just outside my bedroom, on the landing, where I leaned against the lathe-turned newel post and gazed down the stairs along the curve of the railing.