A Trip to the Stars (16 page)

Among their primary duties, either Della or Denise always oversaw dinner at the Hotel Canopus. When Samax was home, he insisted I dine with him, either alone in his quarters or more elaborately with other residents in the large tenth-floor dining room at the long oak table with its high-backed chairs. Above the table was a skylight and through the floor-to-ceiling windows we had a panoramic view of the desert. Those dinners were an important element in the complex structure of my formal education. Calzas and Desirée were nearly always there, as were the hotel’s more long-term residents. As an overseer, Della was usually talkative, joining in the conversations, but Denise hardly ever spoke. Samax never betrayed impatience with her, though he usually disliked it when people were silent at dinner. All the same, Denise was more skilled than Della at keeping the meal flowing—no mean feat with a kitchen ten stories removed.

When I first arrived at the hotel, my mother’s sister, my aunt Ivy, always occupied the seat opposite Samax, at the foot of the dinner table. Following the discussion around the table, while rarely contributing to it, she usually ignored me completely. When her dark brown eyes did leave the radius of the plate before her, they seldom betrayed her feelings. Except when they alighted on me. Then she would cast me a withering look. If Denise was cold to me, Ivy was positively sub-Arctic.

My mere presence there, sitting literally at Samax’s right elbow, was an affront to Ivy. It was not that I had displaced her—for the simple
reason that he had never held her dear. Close to her father, Nilus, and knowing of his hatred for his brother, Ivy had from the first been hostile to Samax. He had tried to bring her around, but her hostility was hopelessly intertwined with her sense of loyalty to her dead father; Samax’s kindnesses inflamed her all the more. Bel, on the other hand, had been close to Samax—at least until she was eighteen and had run away and given birth to me. And Samax had loved Bel, which made Ivy all the more bitter and jealous. It was not surprising, then, that Ivy should have such hard feelings toward me.

The feelings were mutual. Though I had come to enjoy my life at the hotel, which I would not easily have exchanged for another, and to love Samax as a devoted and doting uncle, I never forgave Ivy for abducting me on that chaotic winter day. My fate may have been altered for the better, but I resented that Ivy had been an agent of that alteration. It wasn’t difficult to hate her, because she so hated me. In New York, she had been acting on (while not strictly following) Samax’s orders, so it did occur to me more than once that I had rather neatly channeled whatever rage I felt toward Samax onto her. But maybe that was too neat, because Samax and I had many times discussed my feelings about my abduction—it was never a taboo subject. They ranged from gratitude that I had been rescued from the strong possibility of a hand-to-mouth existence with Alma (whose life would be wrecked in the process, thanks to me) to resentment that someone, anyone, should play god with my fate, however sterling his intentions. Many times, I confessed to my uncle, I had plotted my escape from the hotel, from the life he had set before me like a sumptuous and overly organized meal, but in the end I had balked. I had no one, and nowhere, to flee to, after all. I had gotten a taste of the open road, of drifting aimlessly, friendless and penniless, with Luna and Milo all those years, and had found it to be, not a pathway to adventure, but a dead end. No, even if I couldn’t define it as such until I was an adult, I, too, preferred living by Samax’s unspoken assumption that if you didn’t try to give shape to your life, life would shape you—usually for the worse. If, at the same time, life at the hotel was isolated, cut off from the hubbub of so-called reality, then it was a splendid isolation. On the worst days, I would not have traded it for what Milo had thought of as freedom. True, there were other ways than Milo’s to
negotiate the open road, but I wasn’t familiar with them at that time, at thirteen, when, anyway, I tended to think in absolutes.

Ivy’s hostile feelings for me were further complicated by the fact that she had a son of her own, named Auro, and she was terrified Samax would disinherit both her and her son for me—now his only other living blood relative. In a very short time this fear became an obsession with her. To make matters worse, a year before my arrival, Auro had been sent away from the hotel. Then ten years old, Auro began attending a school in Chicago for students with speech disabilities. He suffered from echolalia—the pathological repetition of what other people say. He was a walking echo who could literally throw a room into chaos by parroting everything that was said around him. The local private schools couldn’t handle him, and the tutors Ivy brought to the hotel quit, despite their lavish salaries. They all said he was unteachable. Finally Samax insisted he get specialized help, and making inquiries, discovered the school in Chicago; Ivy grumbled, but with little choice in the end, acquiesced.

Ivy’s husband, Nestor, who hated living at the hotel, accompanied Auro, leasing an apartment a few blocks from the school. And Ivy remained at the hotel, regularly flying to Chicago. Nestor was the man in the brown hat and coat who drove the blue sedan—and started weeping—when Ivy spirited me from the planetarium. As it turned out, that day would be the one and only time I would ever meet him. And it would be ten years before I even saw, in a photograph, what he looked like. I had not seen his face that day in the car, and the only photographs of him at the hotel were in Ivy’s quarters, which I never entered. High-strung, frail of constitution, riddled with anxieties, Nestor was constantly fighting off illnesses. At the same time, he drank heavily and chain-smoked. He was twenty years Ivy’s senior, a piano player on the Strip and something of a dandy when she met him. No sooner had he abandoned his bachelor life in a green bungalow off Paradise Road than his health began to go. A few years under the same roof, and in the same bed, with Ivy took a major toll on him. Though she was barely twenty when they married and had Auro, she dominated Nestor utterly, and as the years passed, he had few reserves to fall back on.

So when he left Las Vegas, what was left of his health the Chicago
winter finished off. With his fragile lungs, Nestor was a natural desert dweller; in Chicago he contracted double pneumonia, pleurisy, and then St. Vitus’ dance, losing control of his facial muscles and hands. So quickly did he deteriorate that his doctors insisted he go to a clinic in Zurich to undertake a severe cure; anything less, they said, and he was a goner. It turned out the Swiss had an even better school for someone with Auro’s condition, and so, two months after I moved into the Hotel Canopus, Ivy moved out, accompanying her husband and son to Switzerland, where they had remained ever since.

In those two months, nevertheless, I came to a realization that was unfortunately to prove all too true: whenever she could, and by whatever means, Ivy would try to make my life a living hell. She was a master manipulator. And whether by innuendo or distortion, subterfuge or outright sabotage, she would do her best to undermine me in Samax’s affections—as she had never been able to undermine my mother Bel—hoping, scheming, working overtime to get me out of the picture as abruptly as I had entered it. And as cut-down-to-size as possible. Her relationship with me aside, from what I had seen in those two months, Ivy was generally unpopular around the hotel. The fact that her favorite reproach, freely tossed at the staff—from the doorman to the gardener—was “shit-for-brains” didn’t endear her to anyone. Her relationships with Dolores and her daughters were more complex and problematic, as I was to discover later. But for three years running I had been free of her, and in that time it was always one of the sisters who sat across from Samax at dinner.

What I was to learn over the years was that the crux of Ivy’s hatred for me was a carryover of her feelings for my mother, Bel, her half-sister. At first I thought Ivy wished Samax had never found me; then I realized she wished I’d never been born.

My longest discussion about my mother with Samax was a very formalized one, initiated by him. Taking me up to his study one day a few months after my arrival at the hotel, he unlocked a wall cabinet and took out a small leather-covered chest which he unlocked with a tiny key. “You asked me how I came to find you in Brooklyn,” he began, “and I promised I would show you. The answer is in here, where I’ve kept a few of Bel’s possessions—things she had with her when she died.” He paused and studied my face, as if to assure himself
I wasn’t going to get upset. “Though I had sifted through these things many times before,” he went on, “one morning last October I suddenly spotted something I had never seen before—that is, I had not seen it clearly. It was thus I discovered the fact of your existence, unknown to me until then.”

Peering at the chest’s contents, I tried to imagine which object contained the momentous clue. There was a red felt cap. A brown handbag with a brass snap. A gold hairbrush, monogrammed with a
B
, in which a single strand of blond hair was still wound. A hand mirror with an ivory handle. A slim red fountain pen. A set of car keys. A silver pendant on a chain. A blue bankbook. And several unused—but stamped, with 2¢ stamps—postcards depicting a low skyline and captioned
RENO—THE BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD
.

I held the brush up to the light and the blond hair appeared red-tinged; I looked at my face in the mirror; I jangled the car keys, which I noted were for a Buick; I examined the pendant, on which a small bird was embossed, and then unscrewed the top off the fountain pen.

But it was the bankbook that Samax lifted from the chest and opened flat on the table.

“The clue was in here,” he said, slowly turning the pale blue pages.

The numerals, punched in by machine in black ink, dated in red, showed that the bankbook’s owner,
Bel Samax, Hotel Canopus, Las Vegas
, made only six deposits and one withdrawal in all of 1953 and 1954, but in the last two months of 1955 and the first month of 1956 made dozens of withdrawals for small sums—fifteen, twenty-five, a couple of times fifty dollars. These transactions abruptly ended in February, 1956, at which time her balance had dwindled from $2,982 to $366.40.

“I opened this account with her on her sixteenth birthday,” Samax said. “Every three months, I added five hundred dollars. As you see, only at the end of her life did she begin using the money. But what I want to show you is here at the end.”

He flipped to the very last two pages in the bankbook, well beyond the tellers’ entries. There, scrawled in pencil in a small hand, was a maze of figures. Numerals scattered in all directions—being subtracted, added, multiplied and divided, erased and crossed out.

“Obviously Bel used these pages to make her calculations,” Samax continued. “I glanced at them years ago, and never paid attention to
them again. But if you closely examine these particular numbers in the lower right-hand corner,” he said, putting his index finger on the page, “concealed among many other numbers—it’s clear they’re not calculations.” I bent low over the book and saw the numerals:
33–879
, and below that,
6244511
.

“After toying with them,” Samax said, “it hit me that the second set is simply a phone number. I called the number, and it was an adoption agency in Reno. The first set of numbers, I then realized, referrred to one of their case files. Right away, I thought, oh my god, Bel must have had a child and put it up for adoption. Why else would she have that number? At first, the agency wouldn’t give me any information about the file. Quite properly. But I have a few connections in this state, and eventually I got to see that file. You can judge if that was the right or wrong thing to do. But the file led me to the County Clerk’s office you yourself visited, where I found your birth certificate.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “And here you are, Enzo. Probably with as many questions as I had when I first saw all this, but I don’t know much more than I’ve told you. The other circumstances around Bel’s putting you up for adoption are still in the dark for me. I know now when and where it happened, and then who adopted you, but not much more.”

I took all this in wide-eyed, hanging on his every word, my lungs seemingly frozen. When I drew my breath again, I said, “So the adoption records didn’t say who my real father was.”

He shook his head, not surprised at the question. “They read
unknown
, just like your birth certificate.”

I looked hard again at those numbers, camouflaged and circumscribed by other numbers, as if I might find some further meaning in them.

Samax seemed to anticipate my thoughts. “We’ll never know whether or not Bel left those numbers there as a deliberate clue,” he said. “I tend to doubt it—maybe because it took me ten years to decipher them. But certainly, subconsciously, she must have known she was leaving them there.…”

“You mean, she wanted you to find me.”

He smiled faintly. “I think we can say now that she would have been pleased I did find you.” He locked the chest after returning all the contents, including the bankbook, except for the red pen and the
pendant. “You can have these other things someday, if you want them. But the pendant and the pen I’d like you to have now. That bird on the pendant is the desert hummingbird, sacred to the Zunis. The pendant was made by a craftsman at the Zuni pueblo, and Bel cherished it, wore it all the time. The pen is one I gave her many years ago.”

When I returned to my room, I examined the hummingbird for a long time, running my finger over it, imagining the smooth side of the pendant pressed to my mother’s chest. The pen I filled from the inkwell on my desk, and after holding the tip poised above a sheet of paper for a long moment, I signed
Enzo Samax
. Then, just below it, I signed
Bel Samax
, as I imagined my mother would have signed her name. It would be several years before I saw what her handwriting actually looked like.

Samax was a man of fixed habits. He woke at five o’clock punctually, swam a dozen laps in the pool, did his Qigong regimen (the eighteen ancient “stork” movements that direct vital energy), spent twenty minutes in the sauna, and then was served his customary breakfast: strong maté tea with a sliver of lime, a pint of mixed fruit juices, fresh figs with yogurt, and amaranth toast with jam. (My suspicion that Desirée was Samax’s daughter truly began when I realized that, just as I dined with him every day, she shared his breakfast, usually out in the garden.) Befitting his boundless appetite for fruit, but unusual for a man who chose to live in the desert, Samax’s great passion after antiquities was pomology. He had a full-time gardener named Sofiel—a dark diminutive man, half-Tunisian, half-Korean—who looked after the trees and bushes. Wearing a broad straw hat and loose white smock, chamois gloves, and his darkest glasses, Samax often joined Sofiel in the impeccably tended orchard, digging, hoeing, and watering.