A Trip to the Stars

  “I’m really proud of you, Auro,” I said. “And I missed you so much.”

  Instead of holding back his feelings, Auro burst into sobs and said, “Missed you so much.”

  And that was it. We both had a good cry until Frankie Fooo and their saxophonist knocked on the door. Auro and I made a date for the next day, and I left. Of all the people who had disappeared in my life, I thought, Auro was the first ever to come back.

  As I made my way to the parking lot, Ivy stepped out suddenly from between a pair of sleek tour buses. She had been waiting for me. Desirée had already returned to the hotel with Eboli. Behind me, the after-midnight crowd was entering the casino in clusters. In her shades and black dress, Ivy looked like the guest at a funeral who’s had one too many drinks. Which caught me off-guard, for in even the worst of times I had never known her to be a drinker. But maybe for Ivy this was the worst of times.

  “He’ll talk to you,” she said disdainfully, “but I wasn’t even allowed backstage.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “You’re not sorry! You’ve never been sorry. And you never gave a damn about Auro, but now you pretend to be his friend.”

  “I am his friend, and he knows it.”

  “Don’t tell me what Auro knows,” she snapped.

  The gin fumes on her breath made me wince. I tried to step around her, but she blocked my way. “I have to go,” I said.

  “No,” she shook her head.

  “Ivy, get out of my way.”

  “You going to hit me this time?” Among her many grievances, she had never forgiven me for standing up to her when she slapped me as a kid, the night I first met Auro.

  “Don’t talk crazy,” I said.

  “Crazy? You think you’re so smart,” she sneered, “but you don’t know anything.”

  I tried to step around her again.

  “You don’t even know who you really are,” she went on, blocking me again.

  “What?”

  “I thought that might grab you,” she said with a sharp laugh. “You’re a bastard so many times over, you must have lost track. Tell me again how many times you were orphaned, Enzo,” she said in a voice of mock concern. “Or should I say Loren?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That’s more like it. Twice? Or three times, counting that ‘aunt’ of yours—I forget her name.”

  “You’d better stop now.”

  “Going to hit me?”

  “What do you want from me, Ivy?”

  Her mouth twisted up in a smile. “Surprise! I already got it, a long time ago.”

  “Yeah? Then why don’t you leave me alone?”

  “I took something from you and you didn’t even know it,” she said through her teeth. “You still don’t know it.”

  Somehow, afterward, I was sure I had known at that moment what she was about to tell me. Known, too, that it would change everything for me.

  “The letter you and Samax wrote to your aunt, that he asked me to send her by messenger—guess what?” A long pause, then she dropped her voice to a whisper. “I never sent it. That’s right, so she never knew what happened to you. Never could have known.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said, knowing instantly it must be true.

  “Oh no?”

  “You’re lying.” But as her words sank in, it was as if a gun had gone off beside my ear: my head was ringing, and everything around me for miles was crashing to a standstill, and all I could think was, god help me, Alma, what did we do to you.

  Ivy was gloating, savoring the moment. “So far as she knew, you were kidnapped and murdered,” she went on. “And why not? An orphan, a castoff, if Samax hadn’t butted in, that’s probably how you would’ve ended up.”

  “You must be lying,” I repeated, my voice coming from far away.

  “You can tell yourself that,” she said.

  My legs, my feet, then the ground beneath me turned to vapor, until it felt as if I was standing on nothing at all. I closed my eyes and saw Alma, not as she had appeared in my dreams all those years, but far more care-ridden and in a much darker place. It hit me what sort of fear and guilt she must have felt back then—she was even younger than I was now—and how it would have worn her down. As a child, I was convinced that what Samax had done, spiriting me away, had benefited both Alma and me, freeing her of a terrible burden; instead, an even worse one had been imposed—one that, it seemed to me now, could never be lifted. In a matter of seconds, the many alternate lives I had over time envisioned Alma leading were wiped away. Again I revisited that planetarium, seeing us rise from our seats, a twenty-year-old woman and a ten-year-old boy, and jostle in a press of bodies up the aisle where a gloved hand took mine. I watched Alma search frantically through the sea of faces. She was panicked to a degree I had not allowed myself to imagine before, having reassured myself that later that very day she would receive the letter from Samax which would alleviate her fears. But there had been no letter. And where was Alma now? Across seas of time and space, in that long-ago spot, I had slipped off the edge of her world when someone turned it upside down, and it was true, she would never, could never, have known how or why this happened to her.

  Just a couple of feet away as she dropped all this on me, Ivy hadn’t flinched. Admitting such an act of cruelty toward someone she had never even met, whose life she had so casually sabotaged, did not faze her. So long as she was lashing out at me, her actions were justified in her own mind. But why, I asked myself? What in her own past provided that justification? And what were her insides made of to contain a secret so toxic for so many years? Labusi once told me that when Alexander the Great was poisoned, the toxin was so virulent the only container it wouldn’t eat through was an ass’s hoof. Ivy’s stomach must have been like that.

  Still reeling, I braced myself against the side of the bus even as Ivy backed away from me. I could barely focus on her now, but for a moment thought she actually looked frightened: perhaps something in my face made her believe I really was going to strike her finally. I wish it had been that easy, but with each passing moment she grew smaller and smaller until she faded into a mist of red and blue lights that had risen up like a veil between us. For several minutes I was sure I was going to be sick. Then I sucked in my breath and headed for my car, breaking into a run when I was halfway there.

  For the next week I didn’t stop running. I didn’t confront Ivy, and I didn’t contact Samax in Japan—she must have known I wouldn’t—nor did I have a chance to see Auro again during his stay in Las Vegas, though I left a note at his hotel. No, the next morning, after an interminable sleepless night, I packed a small suitcase and boarded the seven A.M. flight for New York. By three-thirty New York time I was standing in front of my grandmother’s old house in Bensonhurst, having gone there directly from the airport. The last time I had walked out that door, I thought, I had locked it behind me and handed Alma the key when I slipped into the front seat of her white Impala.

  The house had changed, but not very much. It looked incredibly small—not surprising considering the size and scale of the place where I had lived ever since leaving it. But the passage of years had also blurred the dimensions of my old street. It was narrower and shorter than I remembered, with fewer houses which—to my surprise—were piled on top of each other like dominoes. The lawns were dime-sized, and many of the shade trees lining the sidewalk had been cut down or were stripped and dying. My grandmother’s house had a different roof—green, and no longer new—and a heavier front door. And someone had dug up the two gloomy fir trees that used to flank the front steps and replaced them with azalea bushes. However, the smell that filled my head, a mix of damp leaves, wet concrete, and exhaust fumes from Bay Parkway, two blocks north, was exactly the one that had lingered in my memory.

  I walked up the flagstone path to my grandmother’s house and prepared a little speech in my head before ringing the doorbell. No one answered. I tried making inquiries of the neighbors, hoping to find someone who mig
ht remember Alma, but after twelve years that trail was ice cold. In fact, none of the people I talked to remembered me—nor I them. Only one old man, way down the street, who said he was a retired mailman, remembered my grandmother.

  “Mrs. Verell, sure,” he said, standing outside his screen door with his hands in his pockets. “For a long time she was a widow.”

  “Her husband was killed in the war,” I said, “on Guam.”

  This didn’t seem to ring any bells for him. “And she died when?” he asked.

  “In 1965.”

  He nodded, lighting a cigarette. “Anyway, no, I don’t remember you or your aunt—that’s what you wanted to know, right?”

  The neighborhood had changed: most of the old people had moved away or died, and while the street all year round had always been cluttered with children, I didn’t see a single one. I wondered who did live there now.

  I went around to the side of my grandmother’s house, down the damp mossy gap between the houses where we used to keep the garbage cans, which I took out to the curb on Tuesdays and Fridays. I looked up at my old window, which now had striped curtains rather than the dark blue ones my grandmother had sewn. That window was directly opposite my bed, and I remembered lying there the very first night I had spent in that house when my grandmother brought me on the train from Pittsburgh after Luna and Milo were killed. I remembered, too, doing my homework at night at the little desk that had belonged to Luna, her initials carved with a nail file on the underside where my right knee touched the wood. Often when I lost my concentration midway through an arithmetical problem or a spelling list I ran my fingertips over those letters, LV, and thought that if you added two more letters you could spell out LOVE.

  I checked into a midtown hotel, requesting a room in the back where I kept the curtains drawn. After ordering up some sandwiches and coffee, I set out to find the site of the planetarium Alma and I had visited. I remembered only that it was at the northern tip of Manhattan, on the Hudson River side. It was a Saturday, so I wouldn’t have access to the city’s building department records until Monday morning—and I didn’t want to wait that long. Instead I went up to that neighborhood and combed it on foot, questioning shopkeepers and people who looked like long-term residents. It wasn’t long before an old shoemaker near the elevated subway line told me that, sure, he remembered the old planetarium. It had been demolished, he said, in 1966—less than a year after Alma and I visited it—and then gave me directions to its former site, seven blocks away, much nearer to the river than I remembered.

  What I found there was a housing project wedged between a scrap of park land and a shopping center. The clerk at the rental office told me the project had been built in 1967, but he had never heard of the planetarium. He grew suspicious when I asked him if I could just roam around the project, but relented when I signed a form that legitimized me as a potential tenant. And what was I looking for there? I asked myself as I wandered the cement paths bordered by sparse trees. Buildings have their own ghosts, and using my architect’s eye, I tried in vain to imagine the long-gone planetarium on that site. But it was impossible. I had scanned my memories of the place thousands of times, but it had been so altered by the housing project that I couldn’t even recreate the point on the sidewalk where Ivy had propelled me to the waiting sedan.

  If it was ghosts I wanted, I would have to look elsewhere.

  Early the next morning, I visited the police precinct nearest the project. I told the desk sergeant that I was interested in tracing a missing persons report that might have been filed in December, 1965.

  He looked at me askance. “You know someone reported as missing back then?”

  I nodded. “Me.”

  Something in my voice must have told him I wasn’t a crackpot, or maybe he just wanted to get rid of me. Looking me in the eye, he said, “You have to go downtown for that,” and jotted down the address of the Missing Persons Bureau in lower Manhattan.

  The bureau happened to be open on a Sunday, and after I’d answered a slew of questions and filled out some forms, a plainclothes detective sat me at a bare table in an empty room and placed a manila folder before me. When I saw the date on which my missing persons report had been filed, December 17, 1965, I felt the same mixture of astonishment and emptiness that had overwhelmed me that same day when, newly arrived in Las Vegas, I rode a bus to the County Clerk’s office to check my birth certificate and confirm that my name was Enzo Samax. Now I was reading about the disappearance of one Loren Haris, age ten, last seen at the Herschel Planetarium on River Avenue and Water Street on December 16, 1965, at 3:10 P.M. Just seeing my old name on the tab of the folder had given me a shock. Over the next hour I experienced the impact of Loren Haris’s disappearance almost as if he were another person. But chilling as that was, it could not have compared with what Alma must have felt over the course of those painful, drawn-out days twelve years earlier—and for how long afterward, I asked myself.

  That she was beside herself with fear, panic-stricken, was clear from her initial statement, made to a pair of detectives named Kinor and Turel. This document—six typed, single-spaced pages on onion skin—covered everything Alma and I had done and everyone with whom she recalled our having had contact on the sixteenth, from the time we left the house in Brooklyn to the moment she last laid eyes on me at the planetarium. This was followed by a blow-by-blow account of the frantic hour she spent scouring the planetarium’s theater and lobby, its anterooms of exhibits, its corridors and men’s rooms, and then the surrounding streets. Interspersed throughout were short, often fragmented digressions—how I had come to live with her mother, the nature of her life in Boston—intended to provide the cops with pertinent bits of her history and mine. All of it was excruciating for me to read. Even in the clipped, dictated prose transcribed by the police, her terrible grief and helplessness were palpable, made all the more heart-wrenching to me finally by the detectives’ obvious skepticism. In their notes accompanying her statement I was stunned to discover that from very early on they simply didn’t believe her story. In his cramped script Detective Kinor ventured ominously that she might be a drug user. Or the victim of some trauma, weaving hysterical tales. For a brief time, the detectives even suspected her of foul play: supposedly driven to desperation by the sudden pressures foisted upon her as my guardian, she had bumped me off. Next they embraced some sort of Huck Finn theory: a wild, rootless boy with tragic family circumstances—my grandmother dead, Alma (by her own admission) a virtual stranger, unprovided for financially—I’d simply upped and run away.

  When the cops finally did accept Alma’s story of my abduction, still with a strong dose of skepticism, their investigation immediately hit a wall. In fact, they got nowhere at all. There were simply no leads, they insisted in their own report. No witnesses, no ransom demand, no trail to follow. The F.B.I. was called in, to no avail, though my description was dispatched to police departments nationwide a month after my disappearance: five feet tall, 105 pounds, brown hair, gray eyes, wearing a navy pea coat, black watch cap, and plaid scarf; distinguishing features: my bent right index finger, broken in the car accident outside Pittsburgh, and a birthmark under my left arm. (And how had Alma known about the latter, I wondered.) The F.B.I. flirted with the notion I had been the victim of a sexual predator who had murdered two other children in New York that winter and was still at large. They questioned some pedophiles recently paroled from New York prisons. For their part, the NYPD interrogated my schoolteacher, the school nurse, and several of the neighbors, still trying to determine if I had it in me to take to the road on my own. Why I would have done so from a planetarium, without even a change of clothes, they never addressed.

  Three months later, both these investigations slowed to a crawl. Obviously frustrated, Alma then hired a private detective and he quickly dug up a witness the police and F.B.I. had missed: an elderly woman who was the cashier in the gift shop near the exit Ivy had taken me through. Blind in one eye, this woman had seen
a young woman, dressed exactly like Alma and fitting her physical description, leading a boy fitting my description, out onto the sidewalk. That clinched it for the police, who, with little appetite for the case from the first, zipped right back to their hunch that Alma was either a hysteric or a wily criminal with tortuous motives. And despite the fact that I was still physically gone and unaccounted for, the police at that point relegated the case to “inactive” status, effectively ending their investigation. They did keep an eye on Alma, unknown to her, and Detective Kinor noted near the end of my file that she had left New York under rather suspicious circumstances: in the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve, 1966, in zero-degree weather. That was the last they ever saw or heard of her.

  And so, in the improbable position of reading my own missing persons report, I learned not only the immediate torments Alma had suffered after my abduction, but even more devastating, the fact that after a torturous year spent searching for me, she had not returned to school, which I knew had been her anchor, the place where she lodged all her hopes after much personal turmoil. Instead she had left town and dropped out of sight, the entire course of her life altered—like my own life, but not so benignly, I was sure. I returned my file to the officer on duty and inquired about the two detectives, Turel and Kinor; the former was dead, he informed me, and the latter had retired—to Arizona, he thought, but wasn’t sure.

  I was exhausted at that point, but so agitated by what I had just read that instead of returning to my hotel, I took a taxi up to the address I had possessed from the first but been saving for last. Everything I had been holding in that week—my ugly encounter with Ivy outside The Aladdin, my sudden return to my grandmother’s house, hearing Alma’s voice across the years in those police reports—rose up in me when I caught sight of the large white brick building my taxi was approaching. We had turned into the same narrow street Ivy and Nestor had sped down in the blue sedan when they took me to Samax. Now as then, my palms were sweating with trepidation, and when we pulled up at the curb moments later, my chest began shaking with suppressed sobs and tears welled up in my eyes.