A Trip to the Stars (2 page)

Beginning to doubt the latter myself, I walked around the city carrying Loren’s photograph for weeks. It was the only photograph of him I possessed, taken one summer at Coney Island: wearing a sailor cap aslant, hands on hips, he was squinting into the sunlight. My mother didn’t believe in photographs. She said they didn’t preserve memories, they diluted them. She had other such odd, but firmly held, beliefs. Like her proud claim that she never dreamed. And that a dreamless sleep was the sign of a clear conscience.

Radiating outward in circles from the planetarium, I showed the dog-eared photograph to everyone I could think of—taxi drivers, storekeepers, workmen, doormen, dog walkers—and then, in desperation, to people who couldn’t possibly help me, like random pedestrians and obvious transients. No one had seen anything. Before my circles reached the city limits, the photograph had crumbled, days, then months, had blurred away, the seasons had run their cycle, and finally, exhausted, I gave up my search. The police gave up, too. “It’s an open case that is never going to be closed,” they told me. “ ‘Inactive,’ we call it.”

During that year, all of 1966, I stayed in my mother’s house in Brooklyn. I slept not in mine but in Loren’s bedroom, which had been my sister Luna’s room before she ran off with Milo. At night I lay on his small bed, under the blue quilt, with his things around me, and for hours in the dark I went over and over the last day I had spent with Loren. From the little I had seen of him, I had drawn a strong impression. In his pea coat and cap he walked with something of a rolling gait, like a sailor. He was a wiry, athletic kid with the straight posture
and the intense, direct gaze of someone who, on his own too soon, had grown up too fast. As, strangely enough, often happens in these cases, he had ended up looking a good deal like my sister, his adoptive mother: symmetrical features built around wide cheekbones and a straight nose, and the same dark wavy hair and gray eyes. But while Luna had nervous hands, quick gestures, and a staccato way of talking, Loren was steady and unhurried. Perhaps with such peripatetic parents, this had been his only recourse—a positive development.

That last afternoon, before going to the planetarium, we had stopped at a diner nearby. I drank coffee and Loren picked at a western omelette. This was only our second time out since my mother’s death. The night before, we had gone to the movies. Though I was nominally his aunt, not only did Loren and I hardly know each other, but we shared almost no history together. Before my mother’s death, I hadn’t seen him in nearly a year. And suddenly I was the only person between him and an orphanage. Two months short of my twenty-first birthday, with a cramped studio apartment in Boston, three hundred dollars in my checking account, and my secondhand Impala, I now had a ward to care for—by default.

My mother, robust all her life, had died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage while getting ready for bed. Loren had discovered her the next morning. After calling for an ambulance, he had sat on the floor with her head in his lap. Though the police operator had instructed him not to move her, Loren told me he had known right away that she was dead, and, after holding the mirror in her compact under her nose to make sure, he couldn’t stand the idea of just leaving her there like that, on the cold wooden floor. After they took her body away, and telephoned me in Boston, the police wanted Loren to go stay with one of the neighbors, but he refused to leave the house. The woman next door came over and cooked him dinner and then sat up in the living room after he went to bed. When I arrived in the evening, I found Loren in my mother’s bedroom. He was lying on his back in her bed, still dressed and on top of the covers, with the lights off, gazing into the darkness. I switched on the lamp and sat down at the foot of the bed. His eyes were bloodshot and his face grief-stricken. But whatever crying he had done was behind him and his voice was composed.

“What will I do now?” were his first words to me.

“You’ll be okay,” I said, keeping my voice steady and pressing my
hand to his cheek. Though I had been asking myself the same question—on his behalf and my own—all during the drive from Boston, I did not yet have a real answer for him.

When I went to the bathroom to get him a glass of water, I closed the door behind me, buried my face in a towel, and cried—not for my mother, but for Loren. As much as I felt I had gotten a raw deal when it came to family matters, it didn’t compare to what he had been through: twice orphaned and now orphaned again because of an untimely death—all before the age of ten.

My mother and I had been estranged for three years—since I had left for college, just months before Loren arrived at her house. Our estrangement was the culmination of the eight years since her own mother’s death in which we had lived alone together, in an atmosphere that alternated between suspiciousness and outright hostility. I never knew my father. He enlisted in the Marine Corps at the height of the Second World War and was sent to the South Pacific in June, 1944. At the time, Luna was eight years old, and my mother didn’t know that she herself was barely a month pregnant. I was born the following February, seven months after my father was killed in the battle to liberate Guam from the Japanese. Posthumously my father had been awarded a Silver Star for valor, which my mother kept framed in the living room. My mother never remarried, and the three of us lived frugally on her salary as a salesclerk at Macy’s and the veteran’s benefits she received for my father. For the first ten years of my life, until her death, my mother’s mother moved in with us, to help out. Not surprisingly, my mother never spoke of it (an aunt from Staten Island filled me in on the story) but my grandmother had been a drunk. My mother always told Luna and me that our grandmother, the long-suffering widow of a fireman, had died of “a broken heart”; but according to this aunt, the toxic agent at work in my grandmother’s bloodstream when her heart gave out one night had been, not love, but Seven Roses rye, which she drank from a teacup. So I was raised by widows, in a house of women seldom visited by men.

When I was eighteen I had an abortion—illegal in those days—and because of complications afterward my mother got wind of it. At the same time, I was busted for selling marijuana, in order to pay the doctor, and what little communication existed between my mother and me broke down completely. One year I only came home from college
on Christmas Day, and another year it was on Thanksgiving—for half a day—but that was it. And because of the way Luna moved around, I hardly ever saw her—or Loren—for more than a day at a time, also, inevitably, in chaotic circumstances. In her will my mother had made no provisions for Loren. Not surprising, since the will had been drawn up twelve years earlier, before his birth or adoption, when my mother had bequeathed her small savings and her sole asset, the house, to Luna and me.

So Loren and I had sat in that diner and tried to plot our next move, each of us squirming. An orphanage was out of the question. In my mind, there were three possibilities: a foster home for him, with a new family; a continuation of his life in my mother’s house—the same school, neighborhood, and all the rest—with me assuming her role and getting some sort of job in the city; or if I sold her house, he could move up to Boston with me, into a bigger apartment, while I finished school. From our previous conversations I knew that the foster home was anathema to him. Living in my mother’s house, working in a dead-end job, was equally repellent to me. Which left option number three. I was six months away from my degree in classics, and after plowing through Strabo, Lucretius, Tacitus, and Procopius—the natural scientists and historians—I had planned an extensive trip around the Mediterranean basin the following year before entering graduate school. If Loren moved in with me, that would all go out the window. And even if I managed to obtain more financial aid, and we lived on a shoestring, yoking our lives until he was old enough to go away to school himself, what kind of existence would it be for either of us? I who had no desire for children of my own, and he who desperately needed a parent and not someone, however well-intentioned, with the age difference of a sister rather than a mother—someone who surely exuded the same sort of ambivalence as had Luna and Milo, his late father.

Some of this was spoken between us, some we kept to ourselves, but, in the end, the hour we spent huddled in that red vinyl booth, our breath clouding the window as we stared at the stream of traffic on the West Side Highway, felt interminable. We ended up talking mostly about Luna and Milo. I told him about how they had met, waiting on line outside a movie house when Milo was playing hooky from his job at a music store and Luna was on Easter break from the fashion design school to which she never returned. And about Luna’s peculiar desire
as a girl to live on a houseboat, which she never realized. From my mother Loren had acquired a skewed—highly sanitized and fanciful—version of their lives. For someone who insisted others hew a taut line with regard to the truth, my mother took many liberties.

For example, she insisted to Loren—who knew better—that Milo was a construction engineer, though in fact when he worked at all after his marriage it was as a carpenter with minimal training who did pickup jobs or short-term stints on construction sites. Between jobs he drank, smoked reefer, and pursued his fantasy of becoming a disc jockey by practicing incessantly with a tape recorder and taking his demo tape by every radio station in every city they passed through. The rare times he was summoned to audition, he never got the job. Luna all the while provided a small but steady income as, variously, a cashier, a waitress, and a manicurist. My mother had also informed Loren that Luna had become a psychic at the end of her life—a strange admission (or fiction) for someone who boasted that she didn’t dream. My mother claimed to me that in the last month of her life Luna dreamt the circumstances of her death and sent them to her in a letter. I never saw the letter, and when I spoke to Luna at that time, late one night, long-distance from Kansas City, she didn’t prophesy her death or anything else. Her voice thin, exhausted, she told me that Milo was drinking more heavily than ever and that the following week they were setting out for Pittsburgh, where he claimed to have lined up a job on an evangelical radio station.

Instead, on a highway entering the city, he swerved across the double line and slammed into an oncoming milk truck.

And this was very much on Loren’s mind that afternoon at the diner. Until then, he had never once mentioned the accident to me.

“See, I wasn’t killed,” he told me matter-of-factly, “because of the way I used to sleep in the back of the car. They always traveled at night. They would build me a little tent with a suitcase jammed in front of the seat, where I was stretched out on a blanket, with another blanket suspended over me so that headlights and the highway lights wouldn’t wake me. Sound was muffled, too. I remember how low, how far away, their voices sounded in the front seat when I heard them at all. When we crashed, I was asleep, snug in there, with no place to get thrown. The sound that woke me was awful: a roar, then screeching metal and breaking glass. My ears rang so hard I couldn’t hear anything else. It was pitch-dark and things were pressing down
on top of me. I opened my mouth to scream, and then I felt two pairs of hands groping for me. I thought: they’re okay and they’re going to pull me out. But it was the state troopers. Lights were flashing everywhere. Police cars and ambulances. A big milk truck with its engine on fire. Our car was crushed, but I had no cuts, just a bump on my head and a broken finger which—see—never healed right. It’s still bent. When one of the ambulances drove away, I knew they were inside it. And I knew from what was left of the front of the car that they must be dead. It was horrible,” he said, and here his voice broke. “All over the highway milk was streaming from the truck, which had been ripped open. It was ankle-deep in places, and bright white. Except in front of the car, where their bodies had been thrown, the milk had turned red.”

Twelve months after Loren’s disappearance, on New Year’s Eve 1966, I left the city in the dead of night after scraping the ice from the windshield of my Impala. In November I had sold the house in Brooklyn to a couple who promised me that they would always keep a lookout for Loren, should he show up on the doorstep. That brick house, on the shady street in Bensonhurst with a dozen other brick houses, had been the only home he had ever known for longer than six months. The proceeds from the sale would enable me to pay off my student loan and go without a job for a few months.

At that time, I changed my name. My first name, too. Moving the letters around, I changed it to Mala. Of course I knew that Mala meant
bad
in Latin. In Spanish and Italian as well.

On the road, I felt cut loose, isolated—an island unto myself. It seemed for a while I was following my sister’s example, though not her path. I drove south, stopping only for gas and, once, to eat, and spent the next night in Charleston. Then I veered west, never sleeping in the same bed for two nights running for a month. To Birmingham. Nashville. New Orleans. San Antonio. Amarillo. I zigzagged to California, then eastward to North Dakota, and south along the Mississippi, keeping as close to the river as I could, back to New Orleans, which I had liked the first time around more than anyplace else.

I stayed in New Orleans for four months, in a furnished room on Perdido Street. Though my money was holding out, I got a job, to be busy. It was a temporary position in a remote branch of the public
library in the Saint-Eustace parish, filing books that were being taken out of circulation. Slotting them away on dust-caked shelves where they would never be opened again. Quite amazing books, some of them, like
A Catalogue of Imperfections in Venetian Glass in the 17th Century; The Journal of Timothy Marlin, Physician to Prince Henry the Navigator; The Funereal Jewelry of the Chaldeans;
and
A Geological Survey of the Island of Remóra
.

I worked in the basement, which was called the morgue, and it was there I met a man named Zaren Eboli. He was an arachnologist, writing a book about the arboreal, cannibal spiders of the Caribbean, which I felt sure would one day be shelved beside these other curiosities by one of my successors. Within a week, I went to work for Eboli, in his old, three-story, faded blue clapboard house on the river. It was my knowledge of Latin, primarily, that had led him to hire me on the spot. Every afternoon I catalogued the dead spiders preserved in their jars and fed the live ones in their terrariums.