Giovanni's Gift Read online

  As ashamed as I am to admit it, by the last uneventful week of August I began to doubt the extravagant stories I’d been told about the night visits. I kept these growing doubts to myself, but began wondering whether maybe it was some animal that had caused the trouble. Perhaps my aunt and uncle’s imaginations had gotten the better of them, I began to think—although it was true that the year before, in new frustration at a second wave of pre-winter visits, at Edmé’s insistence they had quietly hired a mercenary soldier who staked out the place for a month, or six weeks, dressed in his fatigues, his face blackened with military greasepaint. He had more than one encounter with the night visitor, even pursued him using a nightscope of some sort and shot at him, but never caught him, and quit. My aunt just yesterday showed me the photograph she had taken of this young guy with hard eyes, crouched with rifle at the ready, earnest and muscled, smiling for the camera. I couldn’t explain away his skirmish with the intruder, but nevertheless found myself a little skeptical.

  This changed. After dinner one night, we sat on the porch and watched the bats come out from under the barn eaves to begin their ballet of feeding. We smoked our evening cigarettes—Uncle Henry joined me; Edmé didn’t—and had glasses of musty port, then decided to call it a day. Before going upstairs I remembered something. Edmé owned a set of the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a present her mother gave her when she was a girl. The books, bound in leather with gilt edges and gold-stamped on the spines with fanciful acorns and ornate flourishes, were kept in a bookcase in the front room. Over the years I had worked my way through Hawthorne, a project that was now nearing completion. From the beginning, back when I was in my early teens, Edmé had me sign my name on the endsheet of each volume I read, and so I developed a special fondness for The Marble Faun, as well as his other books, and every so often would take down one volume or another and look at how my signature had changed over the years. Sentimentally inspired by the port, maybe, I went to the bookcase that night, and so took to bed a volume entitled The Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, thinking, This is just your speed, Grant.

  The fact is, The Wonder Book enthralled me. I read about the Gorgon, Perseus, and Danaë—who reminded me of Jude, for no reason other than that I missed her and remembered the time I’d brought her to Ash Creek, where she slept with me in this small bed, her strong, supple limbs woven around me and her warm breath on my neck. In the yellow lamplight I learned how some unrighteous people set Perseus and Danaë adrift in the sea, where they floated in a wicker basket until they reached the isle of Seriphus. Perseus grew up to be a handsome youth, and so forth, and as he did, the evil king got it in mind to send him on a treacherous enterprise, where he would likely be killed—at which time the king could have his way with helpless Danaë. What the king dispatched Perseus to bring back to Seriphus was the head of Medusa, a Gorgon with snakes for locks of hair, a monster who if she looks you in the eye will turn you to lifeless stone forever.

  I might as well have been six, given my impassioned response to the text. The description of Medusa’s brazen brass claws, scaly iron body, and venomous tongue was spellbinding. On the road to Gorgonia, or Gorgonzola, or wherever, Perseus encounters the god Mercury, who goes by the name of Quicksilver. The two discuss the boy’s plight, and Quicksilver advises him how it were better to be a young man for a few years than a marble statue for a great many. And when I read this I was reminded of the Forum and all its broken, bloodless statuary, and how I had felt just a few days earlier more at home there with them than anywhere else. Not so healthy, that kind of attitude, I thought, and fingered my hint of a beard, the stubbly mirage of a vandyke, and decided that tomorrow I would go into town and get my hair cut short and face shaved at the barbershop. At worst, it would be another childhood reminiscence made real: I wondered, for instance, if they still had their barber’s pole that revolved in its glass case like a pirouetting candy cane. My mind drifted away from Perseus as now I studied the abstract designs on the ceiling wallpaper, which resembled—what else?—the manifold faces of scary grotesques.

  And so, here I was, in bed alone, at night, in the middle of nowhere, as they say, feeling apprehensive as a result of reading a children’s fantasy. I would be a liar not to admit to skittishness whenever I heard something outside in the dark. That in my hands was a comfortable narrative from another age did nothing to assuage these real fears conjured by the unusual sounds—unusual to me, at least—produced in the woods outside my window: sounds of yawning branches and tittering leaves, the susurrus of the stream like white noise. It was so quiet, compared to those months of living in Rome, where the noises of a cosmopolitan city rose all night from the streets, offering me their false sense of community, even of fellowship. But still, the dread that sometimes seized me when I was a boy, fear that someone was watching me, had not died with my childhood. The dark forest was alive out there, no matter what adult rationalizations I was able to bring to bear against it.

  My eyes were closed, the light still on, and I awakened myself when Hawthorne fell from my fingers to the floor. I rolled over and pulled the cord to extinguish the lamp. Same white noise of the creek, same white noise of the crickets, my own breath deepening as I drifted toward sleep.

  What prevented it was so faint as to be unreliable. Sometimes a song will come to mind and you will listen to it, absentminded, letting it continue almost as if it were background music to your thoughts. And sometimes you will let that song go on for longer than it should, until it becomes annoying and moves from background to the fore, so that those other thoughts are scumbled like soft aural paint under a palette knife, until you admit that you have to force the song out of your mind.

  What was happening to me was not unlike one of those irritating moments when the song in my head had subtly moved from the back to the fore. I suppose that my eyes were open now, when I pulled aside the blanket and sheets and swung my legs around out of the bed. The music was not in my imagination but truly wafting in from the open casement window. The softest, most ineluctable music, sweet and distant. I peered out into the night and found myself finally coming awake. Surely I couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few minutes, I would have thought, but a glance at the glowing hands of the alarm clock there on the bedside table proved me wrong. Several hours had passed. The clock read twenty before three.

  I saw nothing out the one window and so crossed the room to the other, the dormer that overlooked the creekside field. As I did, I felt my heart racing; I drew deep breaths in and blew out. Scanning the dark, I saw not one but two needles of white light bobbing slowly across the field on the far side of the stream. The music faded in and out of earshot. It was buried by the rushing water and complaisant chirring of crickets, then it reemerged, vague and very out of sync with the world up here on the hill.

  This was it, I thought. This was what I had come for, wasn’t it. For just the briefest instant, a voice within might have asked why—now why have you come here for this?—but if that voice spoke, I didn’t heed those words.

  Instead, my whole concentration was focused on the field. The lights disappeared behind a thick stand of trees, I supposed, since they were suddenly gone from view, and so I took advantage of this interval to grope in the dark for my clothes, get into them as best I could, buttoning my shirt as I crept down the staircase to the first floor of the house. I was careful not to knock down any of Edmé’s framed prints, whose glass glowed like rectangular ghosts, but was negligent of my shoestrings until I tripped, making a crash and catching my temple against what turned out to be the corner of the breakfront (aptly named, under the circumstances). I touched my forehead, feeling for dampness in the dark, but there was no blood there, so, head throbbing, I stood again and listened, hoping I hadn’t awakened my aunt and uncle—assuming they weren’t already roused by the soft music of the night visitors. Hearing nothing, I made my way to the front door, opened it slowly, and stepped outside onto the porch, knelt, tied by touch the shoelaces. Palming the smooth
irregular handrail, I made my way down the steps to the pebble walk that would lead to the gate. That is, it would have led to the gate had I followed it. Instead, I walked due east rather than south.

  The field was far more dewy than I might have imagined. My trousers were wet from cuff to knees by the time I reached the chicken-wire fence that enclosed the garden. I wondered whether it hadn’t rained a little during the night for the grass to be this drenched. Step, then step, then another step, then another, raising my foot high and carefully placing it out ahead of me, I continued toward the creek.

  Only when I heard the voices behind me, whispering, calling my name—or was that an illusion? was it the creek making human sounds, as it sometimes does?—while at the same time I saw the lights again, across the creek, up toward the studio, did I realize it hadn’t been all that wise for me to place myself between Edmé and Henry and their antagonists.

  Gunfire shattered the empty night. This is rich, I thought, as I buried my face in the stones on the stream beach. Beautiful, perfect.

  An eroticism resides at the heart of panic. Where have I read about the wondrous erections some men experience when they are about to meet death? As if death were the vixen of vixens, and the only way to pass beyond the pale was through this literal final surge of orgasmic life. The hysteria I felt there, lying beside the not-still waters of the cold brook, inspired at the same time heightened awareness and a nonsensical madness of sorts. My mind twirlygigged and fussed with all kinds of little things that didn’t matter and never would matter. As I heard the laughter and shouts from across the water, even dared to raise my head to see, some hundred yards away, the flashlights of the intruders jerking as if seized by spasms, bounding across the upper field for some brief distance before being extinguished, I found myself thinking about Mary. Yes, Mary. Wondering where she had gone. If she had already found for herself my replacement. How could she have left? and so forth. Found myself daydreaming—nightdreaming, rather, though very awake—about what Mary would think if she could see me now, here, soaked through from dew and the splashing creek, not quite crying, but not quite not crying, either. Mary, I was thinking, maybe you would take a little pity on me if you could see me here—

  And then it was I heard the voice breaking in on my miserable fancy, the loud voice, my uncle’s voice, in a fury so harsh that I hardly recognized it, blurting out, “Stand up, get up, get up,” as he discharged from his shotgun another blast straight into the sky, the report of which echoed back from the gorge and hills even before I was able to climb to my feet, screaming, “It’s me.”

  “Jesus, God,” I think he said before he came up and threw an arm around me. “I thought, you know, you were … you better go back to the house,” and went on toward the footbridge.

  Instead, I followed him as best I could across the creek and up the path into the ghostly meadow. “Henry?” I cried out as softly as I could, having fallen behind and wanting to avoid any chance of mistaken identities again. He didn’t respond, but I heard him exclaim, “Jesus,” once more as I ascended the brief acclivity of mud just by the cantilevered edge of the studio, smelling in the mist the floral cedar, which mingled with the aroma of my own sweat. He was standing beside the studio entrance, at the uppermost gable of the building, and had his flashlight trained on something there. When I reached him, expecting to witness who knows what, I stood at his side and stared, too, at the empty space where the door used to be. They had extracted it from its hinges, removed it entirely from where it had hung. A quick search inside disclosed they’d taken nothing else but the door.

  “What would they want with a door?” I asked.

  My uncle hushed me, said, “Listen.”

  We stood together in the hollow, at the empty sill, and heard the raw whine of an engine turning over, then turning over again before catching, as if fed by a dying battery. Although we could not see the main gate from the studio—lush undergrowth which Henry had often meant to cut and burn blocked the view—we could hear the rattling shocks of the car as it plunged down the road, away from Ash Creek, back toward the valley.

  A cursory search up into the meadow, following their tracks in the heavy grass, failed to give us any answer about what they might have done with the door, but I believe that by walking together for those long minutes in pursuit of an explanation for what had happened, we were relieved temporarily of the burden of trying to answer the more difficult question of why. “We’ll find it in the morning,” my uncle said, finally, and we retraced our path to the house, which was brightly lit and looked welcoming, familiar, and safe against the pitch-black night that embraced it. That Edmé had brewed black tea was pleasing, too, unless you paused to think about what it meant. Which is to say, why make a pot of tea unless you feel assured that things will fall back into place? What bothered me, as I sipped the tea with my aunt and uncle in the kitchen, was the insight that the preposterous had become reasonable, the abnormal become normal for them. In my naïveté, I asked myself, How can we sit here like this? How could someone be expected to put up with such brazen contempt? How should I have answered, really, that question Edmé first asked me when I climbed back up the stairs to the bright veranda, around whose white halogens moths and midges and all sorts of other airborne insects hovered, the simple question, “Are you all right, Grant?”

  “I’m all right,” is what I had said. But I wasn’t all right, and moreover understood that nothing was all right here. “I hadn’t realized Henry was shooting in the air, so I took a dive half into the creek in case he thought I was someone else,” I continued, by way of explaining my soaked, muddied, torn clothes. When I ran upstairs to change, I glanced at myself in the mirror and saw that the welt on my forehead was already purple; my hands, too, were cut and mildly bruised.

  “… their way of declaring you have no secrets you can keep from them,” I overheard Edmé saying, as I came back down to the kitchen—a comment which all these months later I would find myself plumbing for deeper meaning than I might have guessed just then.

  “What’s that?” I asked, taking a chair.

  Edmé answered, “I was just telling your uncle why I think they took that door off. Since they didn’t steal anything valuable and didn’t vandalize anything in the studio, they just wanted to make a little gesture. It’s how they seem to do things—crude but subtle. Here, put this on your forehead,” and she handed me a dish towel bundled with chipped ice.

  I thanked her, pressed the ice pack against my temple, and glanced over at my uncle, who had said nothing. What would remain with me during the day that followed was not my trivial injury, nor the eccentricity of the vandals’ performance, nor even thoughts of what Edmé could have meant by her interpretation of the stolen door. What would return to me was the blanched cast of my uncle’s face in response to that interpretation. I had known Henry Fulton for many years now but never had seen his eyes turn that blankly inward in their gaze, nor the corners of his mouth draw into such a scowl. That look would return to me, as would what we found, instead of the old door, down at the main gate the next morning, when Henry and I walked there.

  As we approached, we could see that the intruders in their hurried exodus had left the gate wide open. But they’d left something else, too. A piece of paper was tacked to the gatepost. It waved lazily in the light breeze that ranged up the valley. We could make out the black lettering scrawled across the paper, even before we reached the gate.

  Tell the truth, the note read.

  Labor Day had always meant change at Ash Creek. And change had always been marked with a feast. In times past, the party was a farewell to their friends and acquaintances, before they returned west for nine or ten months, to their reengagement with city life. But when Henry reached his crise de coeur, his crise de croyance, or whatever precisely it had been, and he and Edmé moved to the mountains permanently, they found the Labor Day feast habit was impossible to break. And so when September came around, Edmé made all the invitations by rote, and
both found themselves preoccupied with getting things ready for the annual event. I found myself caught up in these preparations and even excited at the prospect of the great party, which I’d always been forced to miss as a boy, because I had invariably been shipped back overseas for the beginning of school.

  The kitchen smelled sweet with zucchini bread, and tart with homemade gazpacho, days in advance of the party, and I helped Uncle Henry clean the year’s worth of stray leaves and other debris that had drifted into the enormous barbecue which he used only on Labor Days but which otherwise stood, like some squat cenotaph of cement and brick, in the upper corner of the yard. The grill, fashioned from an old steel bed frame and blackened with char, we chafed with wire brushes and washed with cheap vegetable oil. I made a pile of split wood behind the venerable structure, then asked how long the barbecue pit had been here. “I built it back in the year they discovered fire,” he said, without the slightest grin on his face.