Giovanni's Gift Page 6

  “I do?”

  “You could use a haircut. Other than that—”

  “You look well yourself,” twisting my hair, which did hang down to my shoulders.

  “You’ve got to be tired. Edmé’s making up your room.”

  “Thanks for letting me stay on such short notice—I mean, on no notice.”

  “We’re always happy to have you, Grant. You know that.”

  The conversation continued along these simple lines, my uncle and I never having developed over the years much skill at make-talk.

  As we spoke, I marveled at what I saw outside the window.

  The sun was higher now. It spread a lazy light across the wide valley, a vast moraine many millennia ago and now a fertile expanse of green crisscrossed by serpentine glacial streams. Small hanging glaciers and sparkly ice faces clung to shadowy crevices and gullies in the highest ranges surrounding this great bowl. Snow that never melted, centuries-old slush. Magpies alit on barbed wiring. Cattle grazed in the distance. The world was constituted of primary and secondary colors. The bright-yellow center line of the highway, the black of the road itself. Green upon green out across the valley and into the sierras below timberline. Purple ridges and spires and summits. And above all this, blue. Blue-from-some-god’s-palette blue. I was awed.

  Discourse between me and Henry revived once we turned off the paved road and got onto the rough narrow winding track that edged the marshy mountain delta where Ash Creek split into fingerlets, then rejoined, finally to spill its racy waters into the wide, slow river out on the broad plain. We needed things in order to connect.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He looked to where I was pointing. “Sandhill crane,” he said. “We see a lot more of them than we used to.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Is it? They’re only here because of a freshwater lake some developers got it in their head to dig near here.”

  “I thought architects loved development.”

  “I’m hardly an architect anymore.”

  “You think your night visitor’s been hired by some developer to get you off your place, maybe intimidate you into selling?”

  Henry cut me off, subtly but firmly, by just not answering. I glanced over at his profile as we were jostled by the thousand ruts and washboarding of the road, and saw there his firmness, his Fulton self-possession, a kind of stern restraint I had always admired in him but also feared.

  “The road’s bad as ever,” I offered by way of apology, and he warmed again, remarking, “Just the way we want to keep it, all but washed out.”

  “That’s one way to hold traffic down.”

  Behind us rose a great cloud of road dust. We passed the Lewis house, which was set far back off the narrow lane, in a meadow of wildflowers and tall grasses. His gate was closed, padlocked. Soon we reached the lower gate to Ash Creek, and I got out, unhooked it, and allowed gravity to take hold and swing it down until it cleared the road edge. Henry pulled through and braked again, once above the gate. I rehooked the chain over the post, heard the crashing cataract of the creek, hard by the road, whose sides were waist high in yellow scrub. Another mile and the second gate came into view, with its cattle-guard grating and aluminum rails. Once more he stopped, and I stepped out, drew back the same bolt I had drawn many times before, the bolt that held the gate in place, and stood aside to let my uncle drive through.

  Above, at the top of the meadow, embraced by a windbreak of pines, was the house. My home on top of the world, or almost-home.

  August last year, that year before I made my visit, had dissolved into September. And in the wake of Noah’s search of the woods above Ash Creek, September passed without trouble into October. The quaking aspens quivered in acre-long clusters across the faces of the mountains, as Edmé would recall, and between them the deep green of conifers lapsed black under the heavy shadows thrown by goliath thunderheads that would crop up in the skies, toss down wind and rain, and then fold up into nothing, or crumple beyond the peak-teeth above timberline. The nights grew cold; frost would come before Halloween.

  Edmé and Henry, I gather, had by this time utterly dismissed the night music as the preposterous gambit of some youngster whose notion of fun was different from that of others. Although Henry did not reveal to Edmé anything about the hanging, and also chose not to mention to his wife the discovery of Trentas’s miserable shoe, his exclusion of such information did not affect life much, since the passage of those untroubled weeks into months made it possible for Henry himself to begin discounting these details. Perhaps he had leapt to the wrong conclusion; maybe it wasn’t the dead man’s shoe after all, maybe the effigy strung up in Henry’s own clothes was truly the work of some rowdy who didn’t know the difference between simple mischief and outright, ugly perversity. Henry hadn’t slept much those nights before making the search in the dark up on that knoll at the mouth of the gorge: was it possible, being frazzled, he had hallucinated the whole thing? Time passed, and as it did he couldn’t help but begin to question himself on these points. He, moreover, had convinced himself that it had been wise not to fill Edmé in on various particulars. No need to frighten her. So that, when Noah had called a few days after the incident back in summer, to inquire whether there’d been any more trouble at Ash Creek, Henry remarked, —Nothing to report.

  —I guess it was a prank, then. There’s more goes on in the back hills than any of us would care to believe. I don’t know why you two don’t consider taking yourselves out of quarantine and coming on down here to live with the rest of us.

  —Don’t care for the company, Henry said.

  —I’ll try not to take that personally.

  —Why not? It might do you good, said Henry, in his flattest intonation. It was a way of speaking that allowed him to turn askew some trifling bit of humor in such a way that it cut just a little.

  Noah ignored this and said, —You given that shoe any more thought?

  —What am I supposed to think about it?

  —All right, have it your way. Let me know if our friend shows up again.

  —I think you’re right about it being a prank.

  —That’s refreshing.

  —What do you mean?

  —That you’d think I was right about something.

  —Noah.

  —Yeah?

  —Let’s forget about it, Henry said, and they talked a little about hunting season, the hunters who’d begun to arrive as they did every year, and so forth, before saying goodbye.

  After Noah had left the ranch the afternoon of their walk high into the woods, Edmé returned with supplies from town, including rolls of high-speed film for her camera and two boxes of fresh shells, one for Henry’s twelve-gauge, the other for her own rifle. Having put the food and other things away in cupboards and refrigerator, she decided to walk down to the creek and over the narrow bridge to the studio.

  Edmé read his half-averted face, on entering this rustic sanctum, so unutterably different from his former work spaces, with the exception of his beloved draftsman’s table, the same table he had drawn on since graduation from architectural school. Henry’s face told her it had not gone well with Noah.

  —Didn’t find anything, she said. Verification, not question really.

  Without raising his eyes from his drawing, he said, —Even if there had been, Noah would’ve seen right through it. And I don’t mean in the sense of seeing through a ruse or like that. I mean—

  —Henry, I know what you mean.

  She walked past the oak drafting table, as I imagine the scene, past Henry intent upon an elaborate sketch, fat-pencil in hand creating a hatch work of black on cream, to the bay of windows overlooking a series of waterfalls. In a landscape of magnificent perspectives, instances of nature displaying the balanced asymmetry and material urgency that human architectural imaginations coveted and strove to invent, this scene was her particular favorite. Its disruption of massive blocks of stone, like scree knocked loose
by some great giant. The swift white descent, throwing spray over the receptive pool, rippled the skin of the mahogany-colored water. The constant shimmer of light, never twice the same. The waggle and twitch of drooping boughs, kicked into motion by eccentric gusts created by nine waterfalls stepping down the gorge mouth. Bobbing of rotted logs, and taloned roots exposed along the rocky shoals. The declivities, the variance of flora, those cottonwood cotton balls lofting seeds here and there over the face of it all, miniature parachutists consigned to the whims of warm coastering thermals and cool, rising waterfall mists.

  Whenever she wondered about the decision they’d made those years ago—one year for each of the falls—she had but to come over here and stand at this window. The studio was a crude but solid shanty, built by Edmé and Henry with their own hands exactly as he pictured it in his dreamy boyhood. It was, as he called it, his monument of antiarchitecture, not one nail in the building, with every joist and beam embracing mortise and tenon, the roof a jigsaw of handhewn cedar, the interior forever warm in winter and cool in summer. And, then, there was the kinetic living photograph of a window that caught in its glass the rollicking falls. Still, those few who had been invited across the creek to visit the studio never failed to ask him why he didn’t fix the place up a little, and Henry’s response was always the same. He liked it the way it was.

  She said, —So beautiful, and left him to his work, that day last year, having brought Henry over some lunch. She returned to their house across the creek, where she wanted to develop some shots from their most recent foray abroad. Maybe later she would collect flowers for a bouquet that would brighten the kitchen table—an act that would help to dispel the intruder’s presence at the ranch. Maybe she would fill the kitchen with the smell of corn bread. But whatever she did, before the sun had lowered into the serrate haze of trees along the western ridge, the man from the telephone company would have come and reconnected the line, and, for that day at least, life at Ash Creek would return to normal.

  Now, a year later almost to the week, in the wake of more visits which had come in the middle of the night, I stood by the window in the studio where she had stood, having just taken a long walk with Edmé up into the gorge then come back down along the opposite bank, emerging just above Henry’s studio—stood there as captivated by the natural scene outside the window as she had been last August.

  “For all its magnificence, all its beauty, there isn’t a single vista in Rome that can touch that,” I said, gesturing over toward the many falls, craggy stones, multitudes of greenery outside.

  “It’s a different kind of beauty than you find in Rome.”

  Like Bellini on acid, I thought. His St. Jerome in the Desert, say, but without the scrawny saint, and instead of all those jagged outcroppings of barren dry rock, a vast roiling of cold water, an erupting of verdant trees. We had come inside, hoping to find Henry, but the studio was empty. During our walk, Edmé brought up the inevitable questions about Mary, my work, my aspirations, and so on and so forth—essentially rehabilitating all the subjects I had managed not to elaborate upon during her call to me in Rome. I confessed to her this time, even mentioning the wanderer of the Barcaccia and my insane flagrancy with her, since it seemed to me of no particular value to equivocate.

  “I’m not very good at marriage,” I said. “Some people seem to be able to do it, like you and Uncle Henry, and other people don’t.”

  “Maybe you need a break from one another. I know you love Mary.”

  “How could you not love Mary. Everybody loves Mary.”

  “People love you, too,” Edmé said.

  “Mary doesn’t. Not anymore. It’s not just a matter of having some time to ourselves, either, I don’t think.”

  “Well, we shall see. Things, as they say, do have a way of working themselves out. And what about the translation jobs and tutoring and all. That sounded like very interesting work.”

  I didn’t want to laugh, but did. “Let’s just say this isn’t the zenith of my career, the pinnacle of my love life, as good as it gets.” Edmé laughed, too, though not as disparagingly as her nephew, who concluded, “It’s safe to say there’s room for improvement.”

  Here in the studio I marveled at the miniature city, or whatever it was, the masterful maquettes that were situated on every available flat surface. “You’ll have to get your uncle to explain what they are,” Edmé answered, in response to my question about the colorful organic sculptures and masses of drawings attached to the walls and piled on several drafting tables.

  I said, “Doesn’t Henry worry someone will break in here?”

  “He hasn’t said anything to me if he does. Besides, why would anyone want to break in? What’s to steal—some architectural ideas, some models in progress, some books?”

  I had no answer, except that I wanted to broach the topic of this fresh round of night visits with her, and thus far, having been at Ash Creek for several days now—days and nights undefiled by loud midnight music or any other unusual episode—I’d been unable to get either of them to discuss the matter. In a way, I sensed I’d made my embarrassing confession, and now it was Edmé’s turn to offer some revelation about what had been happening, what it was that provoked that barely perceptible cry for help I heard in her voice over the line in Rome.

  “I suppose the answer to that is just another question: Why would somebody bother you at all?”

  “Don’t think your uncle and I haven’t gone over that question more than once.”

  “I told Henry the other day that I thought maybe it was some developers wanting to intimidate you, get you to let go of the place.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that happened around the valley. You probably don’t remember the Posners. Over on the other side of town. They had a good-sized ranch. Your uncle and John Posner used to be pretty good friends. I think they were over here quite a bit some summers when you were a boy.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, trying hard to remember. “I think so, yes,” not wanting to let Edmé shift away from the subject.

  “They had a lovely place that happened to be below state lands and above property that was owned by some consortium of development people who had it in mind to connect the upper land with the lower and turn it into another ski resort. I guess they had it all worked out with the state. So all that stood in the way of this thing coming into being was the Posner family. I know they turned down quite a lot of money for the ranch. And then their barn burned to the ground. They lost a whole string of thoroughbreds in that fire, I remember. But the arsonists did a good job. Henry says they were professionals.”

  “They never got caught.”

  “No.”

  “What happened to the Posners?”

  “They held out another year or so. But the harassments went on. They had a dog that had been like a member of the family, and after that dog disappeared, they settled. They got more than the land was worth, at least.”

  “And now the place is all pistons and lifts and fake Swiss cottages?”

  “The lease deal with the state fell through, is what I heard. But I don’t know. This kind of thing never went on out here when your uncle was growing up. Not when you were young, either.”

  “But wouldn’t that discourage them, the developers? That the deal failed over there?”

  “Those people never get discouraged, Grant. You tell them no, and they don’t say, Well, okay, we’ll go elsewhere. You say no, and they hear maybe. You say maybe, and they hear yes.”

  “So you think these night problems are—”

  “I don’t know what they are. Something tells me no.”

  The creek hissed and gurgled beyond the studio window as we sat for a moment, and then I asked, “What tells you no?”

  “I have no answer for that,” which was at least the beginning of a conversation about the visits, I thought, however elliptical was its conclusion, or non-conclusion. “You know, you really should get your uncle to show you these designs,”
she said, diverting us back to Henry’s futuristic city.

  We walked back to the house, where we found a note from Henry indicating he had gone to speak with David Lewis about repairs on the lower creek bridge, which were needed to prevent the rickety patchwork of boards-over-timbers from collapse. Edmé suggested I walk down the road to the bridge and visit them, and so I did. In no hurry, I sauntered along, thinking how happy I was to have reforged my perennial friendship with Edmé, to have talked a little, revealed some and learned some in return. Henry was not about to share so easily such conversation with me, at least not about things as abstract or conjectural as love and fear. So I told myself as I strolled down the scruffy road, hearing only the music of crickets. He had always been a restrained man. Shrewd, prudent, one who kept his own counsel. And yet his taciturnity seemed more pronounced than I remembered in times past. It would have been easy—maybe even proper—for me to worry that my crashing into their generally peaceful lives, in the hopes of helping people who had not asked for help, made them a little less than pleased with me. But, in fact, paranoia aside, Edmé and Henry had not been unwelcoming.

  To the contrary, I thought—as I saw Henry waving at me from some distance below, walking back up the road, his conference with Lewis apparently over—every hour, it seemed, had been filled with congenial doings, reminiscent of those days when I lived with them during my boyhood summers. Hadn’t Henry and I climbed those Bellinian rocks outside the studio window just yesterday? and fished the quiet pools there, brown oases amid the deranged white bubbling where the cold water tumbled from cliff to cliff? Hadn’t we caught trout just as we did when I was a child? small spotted brook trout that fought like salmon, and which, when we had a whole mess of them, my uncle and I cleaned with knives, side by side on our knees in the pebbly shoals down nearer the house, flinging their entrails into the icy current?

  We had. And before that, Edmé had me out there helping her in her garden. I had never appreciated what a wizard she is, at heart, how whatever she sets before herself to do, she does, how impressive and daunting is Edmé. The garden looked like a little Eden of tilled dirt and sturdy vegetables. A natural-born naturalist, she coaxed from the ground plants that were not supposed to thrive in the brief season which defined this zone—tomatoes and pole beans and favas—and kept a sophisticated root cellar in rotation, stocked with shelves of beets, potatoes, carrots, rutabaga. I noticed at lunch how skilled a vintner she had become, had even figured out how to extract decent liquor from mountain blueberries and juniper. After we had finished eating, we walked through the house to the back door to make our way down to the gardening shed. On the way, I noticed a remarkable photograph of a street scene in Beijing, a black-and-white print of a legless boy wrapped like a bust in silken drapery, who stared up into her camera lens with a look of angelic resilience. I realized that never had I seen Edmé in this light before: she was an artist just as accomplished as Henry. Landscapes and street life, karsts and deserts, businessmen and monte dealers, prostitutes, couples in love, greengrocers and graffitied storefronts—she captured so many different people and places in her shots. The house at Ash Creek was hung with prints of scenes from every corner of the earth. Edmé’s genius and Henry’s smile, when we met on the creek road, put my mind at ease once more. I was in the right place, whether or not I’d come here for the best reasons.