A Trip to the Stars (57 page)

When I grabbed a few minutes alone with Auro backstage, it was awkward at first. We embraced; I congratulated him. But there was too much to say, too much had happened. I understood why his silence toward Ivy had had to encompass all the rest of us, including me: to effect such a difficult break he’d had to make it a complete one. But that hadn’t made it any easier for me. Over the previous years, I was surprised just how acutely I had missed his companionship, our late-night communings in the quincunx garden. I knew that the telephone had of course always been an impossible device for Auro—he couldn’t even say hello first—but I wished he had been able to send me a
follow-up to that one postcard of Times Square lit up at night. At the same time I realized his continued correspondence might have tipped Ivy off to his whereabouts, for the Hotel Canopus could be a very small place when it came to such information. But there was more to it than that.

The most elementary verbal communication—taken for granted by most people—was the central issue of Auro’s life. His frustrations thereof had defined his personality. Concentrating fiercely on an alternate form of communication like music had turned into a life-or-death proposition for him, his only hope of breaking through. With the members of his band, music was the common language; the verbal interchanges that accompanied the music’s creation were secondary. With Frankie Fooo, apparently, Auro had also been introduced to the language of love, including sex—nonverbal communication in its purest form; like music, it must have effected radical alterations in Auro’s internal workings. When he had run away from the hotel, after all, Auro was not only a budding musician who had never performed publicly, but also an utterly inexperienced virgin. In short, aside from escaping Ivy and being on his own for the first time—huge factors in themselves—one reason he had remained strictly incommunicado had to be that he was simply overwhelmed by these powerful new sensations, sexual as well as musical.

Or so I concluded, even before I had entered his over-air-conditioned dressing room and found him sitting alone, pensive, before the long pink-lit horizontal mirror dusty with makeup powder. His face lit up when I told him how much I loved his music. Knowing the emotional pressure he was under just by being back in Las Vegas, I tried to hold some of my own feelings in check. I thought he’d do the same and—in true Samax family fashion—our feelings would somehow cancel themselves out.

“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 might 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?”