A Trip to the Stars

  Desirée was toying nervously with the fingertips of her black gloves. “My father was someone Delia got involved with here at the hotel several months after her affair with Samax. She became pregnant, and in those days, abortion wasn’t always an option. Anyway, she didn’t want one. Samax didn’t know she was pregnant, but Dolores did, as did her sisters. Dolores sent Delia away and told Samax she had run off with a man. Actually, she went to Miami alone. That’s where I was born. Then we lived in New Orleans before settling down in the Florida Keys until I was six years old. All that time Samax knew nothing of my existence. Delia went out with other men, never for very long. She worked at a small hotel. We lived in an apartment that overlooked the ocean. Dolores sent us money every month. Then one day Delia wrote Samax a letter telling him what had really happened ten years earlier: that she hadn’t run off with a man, but a baby. He was dumbfounded to learn she had a child. First he requested, then demanded, that Delia and I come back to Las Vegas. Denise warned him that this could be catastrophic for Doris. Doris was still certain I was Samax’s daughter, on top of which, though they had tried for several years, she and Samax were unable to have children. But Samax wanted us here. And Delia was sick of her life in Florida, tired of having to take care of me by herself. I was lonely there, too.”

  “What about the man she got involved with?” I asked.

  “My father? Oh, he was long gone. Gone even before Delia left for Miami in the first place. She never saw him again, so far as I know.”

  “But who was it?”

  Desirée pulled one of the gloves halfway off, then pulled it back on even more tightly. “Until we left Florida, Delia had told me my father was a French pilot who had died in the war. But that wasn’t true. Anyway, we returned, and it was catastrophic, all right. Not for me—Samax gave me a lot of love right from the start—though for a long time I blamed myself for what happened next. Doris hadn’t been well for some time. Her marriage had reverted to its original state—a legal stratagem, a piece of paper—and when she laid eyes on me, it completed the rupture and put her over the top. It was as if all her worst delusions were realized, seeing me there in flesh and blood. Furious with Delia, and with Samax, who in turn was furious at all of them—especially Doris, for her insistence that I was his daughter—Doris felt utterly humiliated.”

  “And she killed herself.”

  “A week later. In the note she left, she mentioned none of this. Without explanation, she requested that her ashes be scattered from a plane over the Atlas Mountains, a place she had never visited. And Samax had it done.”

  “And your father …?”

  She pursed her lips and nodded toward the driveway.

  Just then Samax and Hadar came through the glass doors of the hotel and descended the steps, supporting Dolores between them.

  “But you said—”

  “No, not him. The fountain, that sculpture—for that matter, the hotel itself,” she added with a sigh.

  Still uncomprehending, I gazed at the sculpture of the woman behind her curtain of spray.

  “My father was a man named Spica,” Desirée said softly, “the architect of the hotel and the designer of that sculpture.”

  “What!”

  “So you know who he is.”

  “Sure. Uncle Junius told me about him.”

  “Ah.”

  “How Spica finished installing the sculpture after Uncle Junius bought the hotel.”

  Desirée stood up and smoothed down her dress. “That wasn’t all he did,” she said drily.

  Crossing the cul-de-sac, Dolores and Samax and Hadar looked ashen in the blinding sunlight. Samax was particularly unsteady, as if he were being supported by the other two even more than he was supporting them. Dolores wore a long pearl necklace that dangled on her plain black dress. A veil fluttered from the boat-shaped hat perched on her head. Through the veil’s black gauze her large, off-center eyes stared straight ahead, frozen wide, as they had been staring from the moment she was informed of Denise’s death and Delia’s disappearance. I was certain just then that Dolores would remain fixed in that moment for the rest of her life, and that the next, the only, moment to which she could progress would be that of her death. Indeed, from that day forth, Dolores, five months short of her one-hundredth birthday, stopped drinking the quarts of iced chamomile tea that she claimed promoted longevity. And the next time she shared her tucked-away spot in the quincuncial garden with Labusi, less than twenty yards from the vault that now held the urn with Denise’s ashes, she rejected his expression of condolences with a snap of her head and a terse reply, her eyes still wide and unblinking: “I never had any daughters,” she muttered.

  I missed Delia, who had been so kind to me. But I did not miss Denise, whom I had never liked for the simple reason that she didn’t like me. After I heard Desirée’s story, it seemed obvious why she wouldn’t. Maybe perceiving from the very beginning that I would be Samax’s heir, she feared that all her and her mother’s well-laid plans with regard to the Hotel Canopus would be disrupted. To Delia, who had always been warm to me, this would have been a blessing in disguise.

  Though on the surface it did not seem connected to these events, two months after Delia left the hotel, Auro lit out as well. That is, he ran away from home. And stayed away. The move took nearly everyone by surprise, especially Ivy, who became darker and more inturned than ever, a recluse among recluses, retreating so far into the shadows that, like Auro before her, she became a shadow herself for a long time, removed from the daily life of the hotel, to be glimpsed only at night, solitary and furtive.

  I for one was not particularly surprised to hear of Auro’s flight. I knew that he had been badly shaken when he found Denise’s body in the elevator, but I had seen his departure coming, for other reasons, well before that. For one thing, he had begun practicing his drums round the clock, stopping only to eat twice daily and to catch maybe five hours of sleep. And unknown to Ivy, he had also begun sneaking down to the Strip to hear jazz bands at the casinos. He knew, and could emulate, the playing of every major jazz drummer in his encylopedic collection of EPs and LPs, from Art Blakey and Max Roach to Buddy Rich and Tiny Kahn, who died a master at twenty-four. Big band, bebop, jive, jump, and swing—Auro could play them all. Not to mention the other percussive music he absorbed, from Morocco and India, Turkey and Trinidad. To my ear, he had become a phenomenal drummer, not just proficient but unique in his style. He was either going to do something with all this talent, I decided, or he was going to bust.

  There was also the fact that he had asked me late one night, writing it down on the pad he now carried at all times—in itself, for him, a leap toward communicativeness—if I would care for his parrot Echo if he ever had to take a trip one day. Of course I told him I would take good care of the bird. We were sitting in the garden in the darkness stargazing, as we often did during that time, our bond as we grew older lying not in exchanges of information—both of us, after all, were for our own reasons close-to-the-vest types—but in mutual silence. This was how we confided most intimately. And I felt that while I knew little about my cousin in the usual way—his thoughts, his ideas, even his aspirations—I had learned a great deal about the content of his heart during those long evenings when we sat facing each other while the desert winds ruffled the leaves of our uncle’s rare trees.

  I knew, for example, that Auro’s restlessness had grown dramatically in the previous year. Then eighteen, he was eager to break away from his mother. Stifled sexually and emotionally, Auro found his only release in drumming. But he was tired of doing it in a super-insulated room in the hermetic atmosphere of the hotel. He wanted to play for other people, wanted his drumming to be heard. Such was his agitation on the subject that I was stunned others hadn’t picked up on it. But because Auro was a nervous type to begin with, Samax and even Ivy hadn’t seen beyond his general edginess to the deeper turmoil. At the same time, he hadn’t been nearly as direct with them as he was with me. “I need to find w
ork as a jazz drummer now,” he had told me one evening, by way of his scratch pad. “I’ll start out as a sideman, first in the recording studio, then in clubs where they have live gigs, until I can put my own group together.”

  So, though I would miss his silent companionship, a part of me was relieved to hear one August morning that Auro had taken off. I was glad for him. I hoped he was already playing his heart out as a sideman. Two weeks after he had walked out of the hotel and got into a waiting cab with a suitcase, his drum set, and Echo in a traveling cage, I received a postcard from New York City. The photograph on the card was of Times Square lit up at night. In the card, a second-floor window in a sooty building over a nightclub called The Adhara Lounge was circled in ink. The message, in Auro’s tiny left-handed print, was short:

  DEAR ENZO,

  AUDITIONED HERE LAST NIGHT.

  IN THIS CITY PEOPLE DON’T NOTICE IF YOU REPEAT WHAT THEY SAY—THEY ALL DO IT.

  LAST NIGHT I GOT A FORTUNE COOKIE THAT SAID

  THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES.

  IN THE END, COULDN’T LEAVE ECHO BEHIND.

  YOUR COUSIN,

  AURO

  To Ivy he sent a Postal Service postcard with no picture on it, just two words besides his name: I’M OKAY. And that was the last we heard from him for some time.

  Still, all the traumas and crises, the deaths and disappearances, at the hotel at that time were overshadowed by the escalation of Samax’s bitter, ongoing feud with his severest and most formidable antagonist, Vitale Cassiel, a menacing shadowy figure to me—for I still had never laid eyes on him—but real enough to Samax, who now traveled with a pair of bodyguards whenever he left the grounds.

  The bodyguards were Tunisians, recruited in Tunis through connections of Sofiel—of all people—the gentle, introverted, half-Tunisian gardener. Former paratroopers, mutes who had lost their voices in a freak war-games accident (diving through a cloud of nerve gas released by an exploded truck), they were named Alif and Aym, which, as I soon learned, are the two letters in the Arabic alphabet that have no sounds attached to them. Alif was an Olympic marksman and Aym a kendo champion; both were expert boxers with short, compact builds that might have been lifted off a gymnasium frieze. They looked so much alike they could have been brothers: short-haired, thin-lipped, with square chins and sharp cheekbones. They lived in adjoining suites on the third floor of the hotel, ate together always, communicated in sign language with one another, and took orders from Samax in French. Intense physical culturists, they added a welcome nonintellectual dimension to our extended household. First to rise and first to bed, every day at four A.M. they ran three miles, pressed weights for a half hour, and swam two miles of laps in the pool. At first I enjoyed watching them fence with sabers or spar with kendo sticks on the lawn, race one another in wind sprints, and practice their marksmanship in the garden. In the case of Alif, this meant watching an artist at work, for he was capable with a single round from a .38 automatic of forming an A in the bull’s-eye—with either hand. My enjoyment dissipated, however, the first time I accompanied my uncle on what would once have been a routine trip to Phoenix and saw Alif and Aym, grimly alert, in trim cotton suits with pistols holstered under their arms and daggers strapped to their calves, precede him like pilot fish through two airports, a bank, a penthouse restaurant, and several art galleries. I realized that afternoon just how much danger Samax—as fearless a man as I ever knew—thought he must be in.

  Yet while it was true that Samax had good reason to feel threatened by Vitale Cassiel in a variety of ways, it was never clear that he was in imminent danger of the sort of mob-style execution which Alif and Aym had been hired to prevent. When gently questioned about this, Samax declared that their mere presence had served as a deterrent. “That’s the whole idea,” he said stiffly. And with the sort of logic I had never before heard him employ, he went on, “The very fact they haven’t been put to the test in a life-or-death situation is what tells me they’re indispensable at this time.”

  Still, in the many years he had been at odds with Vitale Cassiel, Samax had never felt the need for bodyguards, and I wasn’t the only one at the hotel who thought the larger source of his fears for his life was the unexpected blow he had been dealt in recent years with regard to his health and mortality. In private, it was more than his logic that had changed. He now would speak with intensity and a newfound intimacy of the Angel of Death, whom he was certain he had glimpsed, not once but several times of late. “I’m talking about an entity more real than I had ever imagined,” he solemnly observed. As was his custom, he did a prodigious amount of research and discovered that the Angel of Death manifested himself under many names, in many guises, over time: he was Michael for Christians, Azrael for Arabs, Mot for the Babylonians, Mairya for the Zoroastrians. The Jews, Samax learned, believed there were six Angels of Death, including Af, who held sway over men’s lives, Mashhit over children’s, and Meshabber over animals’. But it was the description of the Angel of Death by a tenth-century Talmudic scholar named Saadiah Gaon that truly seized Samax. “This is what I’ve seen,” he intoned, as we sat in his library one night and he handed me a large leather-bound book with silver-edged pages in which the following passage was bracketed: The angel sent by God to separate body from soul appears to man in the form of a yellow flame, full of eyes shining with a blue fire, holding in his hand a drawn sword pointed at the person to whom death is coming. “I saw it that night,” Samax said, “and every time since then it’s been the same. A walking fire …”

  The night he was referring to occurred in the summer of 1973, when, after a lifetime of robust health, exercise, and a near fanaticism about his diet, out of nowhere he had suffered a stroke. I was just about to go off to college at the time, and there were a great many other matters weighing upon him. Even so, it was quite out of character for him to disrupt all his other long-standing routines by seeking relief, then escape, working in the greenhouse straight through the night, every night, for several weeks. In the process, he achieved a small breakthrough in his quest to graft the star apple and the starfruit into the Samax Astrofructus that he hoped to have catalogued in the pomology register. And on that fateful night, bathed in the glow of the blue-green lamps while I sat listening on a stone bench running my toes over the velvety moss that grew between the floor tiles, he rinsed some seeds in the zinc sink and explained the botanical hurdles he had cleared and those that remained.

  “You know that grafting and hybridization are like night and day,” he said.

  “Or apples and oranges,” I quipped.

  If he got my joke, he didn’t acknowledge it—as if he were only half there with me. “You can easily graft an apple on a pear tree,” he went on, “but you can’t hybridize them—they won’t reproduce after that one tree. Grafting between genera can be done: there’s peach on plum, pear on quince—which, as you know, I’ve done myself—medlar on hawthorn. But try apricot on quince or quince on plum a thousand times and a thousand times it will fail,” he concluded, placing the seeds on a glass tray which he slid into a small incubator.

  Seeing Samax at work in his greenhouse was not like seeing him anywhere else. A man who had grown more formal with age, in the hotel he rarely wandered around in anything less casual than a jacket or silk robe. In fact, he rarely wandered around at all anymore. Even in his private quarters he favored the red smoking jacket mono-grammed in yellow that he had specially made for him in Milan every couple of years. But in the greenhouse, off-limits to everyone when he was at work, Samax had worn the same long white lab coat and scuffed rubber shoes—the outfit of scientists in old movies, I used to think—for years. The coat was thin from repeated washings, with countless plant stains and snags from thorns and twigs. In the lapel pocket he kept his reading glasses and a couple of cigars; in the side pockets, a pair of well-worn chamois gloves. He liked to handle soil, humus, peat moss, fertilizer. He liked the mud under his fingernails, the water drenching his sleeves, the fetid air clinging to hi
s nostrils. Sensations alien to his everyday life in the hotel. He lost himself at that zinc sink, at the long wooden tables, on the ladders and platforms enveloped in mist in the upper reaches of the greenhouse. His movements were as precise and unhurried as ever—the legacy of his years as a professional gambler—but his face was far more relaxed and his eyes seemed fixed on what was before them. They seldom strayed into the middle distance, where he might have entered the more difficult byways of his memory, or, worse, the urgent, treacherous terrain of worry and calculation which so preoccupied him at that time.

  “When I started out with this graft,” he went on, “everything indicated that it belonged to that category of failure. Not only had no one attempted to graft the Averrhoa carambola, or starfruit, of the wood sorrel family, on the Chrysophyllum cainito, or star apple, of the sapodilla family, but no one had ever successfully grafted other members of their respective families across genera. All problems of scion and rootstock aside—and they are big problems—as far as I know no one has attempted this graft because it would be considered problematic fruitwise. The star apple is purple and apple-shaped, with a rough skin. It grows in Central America. The starfruit is bright yellow and five-angled, with a waxy skin. It grows in Indonesia. The one has many tiny black seeds, the other a few amber ones.”

  “So what will your fruit look like?” I asked.

  A smile played over his lips. “I appreciate your confidence, Enzo,” he said. “If I’m successful, I foresee a star-shaped fruit when it’s cross-sectioned, with a hard, waxy skin. Its flesh will be indigo, speckled with yellow seeds. The fruit will appear in profusion, many to a branch, as it does on both these trees. This guy is my best candidate,” he added, pointing to a large grafting planted in black humus and bathed in ultraviolet light. “If the graft takes, I’ll know in a year whether or not it will produce fruit. The scion will become the aerial portion and the rootstock will form the roots. On my previous attempts, the scion got killed off because buds and suckers sprouted on the rootstock. I also have to keep an eye on the nutritive balance, to prevent leaf scorch and chlorosis, which is like botanical jaundice.”