A Trip to the Stars (59 page)

Within a minute of entering Ivy’s suite and confirming what I had told him, he banished her from the Hotel Canopus forever, effectively banishing her from his life. Forbidden by Samax from saying another word to anyone, no good-byes, nothing, even to Dolores and Desirée, Ivy put three white suitcases in the trunk of her Coupe de Ville and, at the age of forty, after living at the hotel for over thirty years, drove away. To Reno, as it turned out, where, enraged at Samax and at me, she would quickly cement her unholy alliance with her mother Stella’s former lover, Vitale Cassiel.

Meanwhile, Samax had me join him in the greenhouse for a serious discussion. He was determined to right a wrong, as he put it. No matter that twelve years had elapsed, and that Alma, now thirty-three years old, could be anywhere at all, he wanted to find her.

“But you’ve got nothing to go on,” I said gently.

“What do you mean—there’s always something. I found you years ago, didn’t I?”

Relatively easily, I thought, by bribing and intimidating people once he discovered the adoption agency where Bel had taken me.

“I don’t care what it costs,” Samax shouted toward the upper canopy his fruit trees formed beneath the greenhouse roof. “We’ll get Pinkerton’s. And the Hopkins brothers in Miami—they can find anyone when no one else can. And, just in case, there are private investigators my friends at the casinos hire—sometimes to track down wise
guys fifteen, twenty years after they think they got away with something. I have other people downtown I can ask, too. And I’ll have Alif and Aym scout around, with their paramilitary friends. We can crack this thing, I know.”

He knew nothing of the kind, but he was so furious that he had to convince himself he could find Alma, even if he needed to conjure up a small army to do so. The fact is, he felt horribly guilty and ashamed, not just on Alma’s account, but, most especially, on mine.

How could you have trusted Ivy, of all people, with that letter, I had been thinking for days, but Samax was already so agitated, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him this question. Indirectly, he answered it moments later.

“The very first promise I made you, Enzo,” he declared, “was that your aunt would get that letter. For Chrissakes, everything was predicated on it, from the day you came out here with me. I was careless—inexcusably so—and Ivy broke my promise. At what cost to your aunt I shudder to think. Sabotage is too clean a word for what Ivy did. Now we just have to find your aunt.”

“And what will we do then?”

He didn’t answer this question, and it turned out he would never have to, for the combined genius, muscle, and resources of Pinkerton’s, the mob private eyes, the cops with connections, Alif, Aym, and their soldier of fortune pals, and the Hopkins brothers who succeeded when all others failed, turned up absolutely nothing about Alma Verell: last known address, 222 Cabot Place, Brooklyn; last known occupation, student, Boston University. It wasn’t just the NYPD Missing Persons squad that never saw or heard of her again, it was everyone. Right away, Samax feared that she was dead, he was responsible, and there was no way now that he could ever make his amends. It didn’t look good, I had to agree, and I was more heartsick about it than anyone, but still I couldn’t believe Alma was dead. That just didn’t ring true in my bones. Samax kept paying people to look, and spent countless hours on the phone himself, exploiting his many connections, but nothing came of it. Like that ancient amulet depicting the dark side of the moon, Alma seemed to be one lost thing Samax was going to have a great deal of difficulty finding.

Around this time, the hotel population felt skeletal compared to the days of my childhood. There were few short-term visitors anymore,
and the three new long-term ones were anything but collegial: fat Professor Zianor, dry as his cough, who holed up in the library for days at a time unearthing paintings of Adam with a navel and drinking licorice tea; Harahel, an elderly archivist from Alexandria, Egypt, hired by Samax to put in order his personal papers as well as the hotel’s voluminous files; and the polite but unsmiling So Li, who was assiduously studying her bells—for a long time the myriad harmonies of ceremonial bells—in Auro’s former practice room. As with Zianor and Harahel, however great her devotion to her work, on the outside she appeared passionlesss to the point of indifference.

After a while, this cold-fish attitude seemed to infect the old-time residents: Labusi, who either shot billiards alone or sat with Dolores in the garden, an umbrella affixed to his wheelchair to shield him from the sun; Hadar, never sociable to begin with, who practically camped out in his subbasement laboratory when he returned from expeditions; and even the irrepressible Deneb, who when he wasn’t delivering his stump speech about Atlantis at Basque social clubs, generally made himself scarce around the hotel. Meanwhile, to my great disappointment, Zaren Eboli had become an infrequent weekend visitor after moving to west Texas to complete his catalogue of spiders of the Southwest.

Mrs. Resh, the replacement for Delia and Denise from the world of four-star hotels, turned out to be a soulless woman who literally never spoke except when spoken to. She ran the hotel with great efficiency, following the model laid out by Dolores years before. As for the latter, at the age of 103 she finally began walking with a cane, and rarely spoke to anyone outside of Mrs. Resh and Labusi. Desirée avoided her, as did Samax, to whom she had taken to writing sharply worded requests, which he ignored; first, she demanded to see his will, then inveighed against him for refusing to verify that he had bequeathed the hotel to Desirée—who still didn’t want it.

“What do you expect?” Desirée said to me one night as we sat by the pool drinking wine and I complained of the general torpor at the hotel. We had both just returned from trips: I to Santa Fe, where I had visited Calzas and his wife upon the birth of their second child; Desirée
to Bali, on what she described as a “pleasure trip,” making me wonder if she had added a new photo to her gallery.

“It’s not because of Zianor or So Li or Harahel,” she went on, “that things have come to this. It’s Samax. He’s the one who invited them, and he handpicked Resh out of a slew of terrific applicants the agency sent over. The same with Harahel: there was a young guy from the University of Hawaii who had ten times the spunk and would have given some shape and vitality to the material Samax shoveled at him, rather than just compiling the stuff. Samax has got Harahel in there sifting through the history of his life as if he’s already dead. It makes me crazy—like he has a mortician on call. Samax wants these people around him now because he was so knocked out by the stroke and Denise’s death. Labusi’s accident and Calzas’s marriage didn’t help either. Why should he want fascinating dinner companions, like the old days, when he never comes to dinner himself? He no longer craves distractions, or the kind of overstimulation he used to thrive on. Again, why should he when he’s always up there in his library with the Angel of Death? To my mind, all that motivates him now is finding that amulet and producing his hybrid tree. And of course making sure you’re okay after he’s gone.”

This last observation was not made with bitterness, but it was also not the first time she had said something to this effect over the previous few years. She may not have wanted the hotel, but that didn’t mean Desirée was indifferent to Samax’s making
some
provisions for her future. And because he had showed less and less interest in her activities—not the surest barometer, I thought, considering his state of mind—she was certain that he hadn’t.

Soon afterward, Samax did fulfill his longtime pomological quest for the hybrid he had sought to create between the star apple and the starfruit. In fact, he succeeded. It was just before sunrise one morning when I received a summons from him on the house phone.

“Can you join me for breakfast in the greenhouse?” he asked.

Though of late such requests had often come in response to crises, this time I detected a lilt in my uncle’s voice. Still, the hybrid was far from my mind just then, so, as I threw my clothes on, and made my way down to that tunnel where I had first encountered Auro, I didn’t know what to expect.

Alif and Aym, in blue sweatsuits and running shoes, were playing backgammon under a plant light at the entrance to the greenhouse. They nodded when I passed, with Sirius trailing me. The first person I saw in the greenhouse was Harahel. Desirée was right, I thought: he looked like a mortician. Gaunt, with pale hands and sallow cheeks, Harahel was wearing a tan fez and a khaki jacket with an ink-stained handkerchief stuck in the front pocket. As usual, he was cross-referencing two bundles of folders that documented some aspect of Samax’s earliest collecting days. So far, after a year of unremitting labor, he had covered only the years 1935 through 1940. At that rate, it would take him six more years to finish the job.

In a terry-cloth robe, Desirée was sitting near the zinc sink, fingers flying on her silent portable typewriter, filling up one of her yellow sheets of paper. She and Harahel were so absorbed in their own activities that I was utterly unprepared for what Samax was about to reveal to me.

He did it quite simply, walking out from behind a pair of palmettos in his red smoking jacket, the customary yellow and red flower stuck in the lapel. His threadbare lab coat was hanging by the door, but he was wearing his scuffed rubber shoes. In his outstretched palm he cradled a piece of fruit, which I took from him. Samax’s hand was trembling—from emotion, not the aftereffects of the stroke—and I too felt a welling up in my chest and behind my eyes as the coolness of the strangely oblong, dark blue piece of fruit permeated my palm. What Samax had predicted to me years before was exactly what his hybrid had turned out to be: a star-shaped fruit with a hard, waxy skin. It smelled acrid, the juice my thumbnail drew from the skin part citrus, part ammonia. And when Samax cut it in half with a pocketknife, I saw that the flesh was also indigo, speckled with golden seeds. Like a night sky, as he had promised.

“The rootstock and scion
were
in perfect harmony with this tree,” he murmured approvingly. “But only after it had produced the first full-fledged and edible pieces of fruit could I be sure. Taste it, Enzo.”

It was as pungent as it smelled. Sharp as a tamarind, with traces of clove and pepper. Like biting into a fleshy spice, just as Desirée had predicted years ago.

“The
Samax Astrofructus
,” I said, swallowing the pulp and feeling its faint afterbuzz on my lips. “Congratulations, Uncle Junius.”

“Thank you, Enzo,” he said, and for one of the few times in all my years with him, his eyes gleamed with tears. “You understand, I know.”

I did. I understood that with the various setbacks of late, and the increasing friction in his life on several fronts, this accomplishment was all the more important to him. He had worked at this for a long time, with a singular concentration, responsible only to himself, and, patiently, diligently, he had produced a tree that had never before existed. Which in turn had put forth a piece of fruit with its own unique color, texture, and taste, that still lingered on my palate. The
Samax Astrofructus
was Samax’s baby in every way, a hedge against mortality now that he could rest assured it would outlive him.

“There is something I wanted to do at this time,” he said softly. His tone was that of someone about to offer up a prayer, which in his own way was perhaps what he was doing. He pointed to the flower in his lapel. “I’d like to give this flower a name, too,” he said simply, “with which it can be officially registered.”

It stunned me to realize that in all those years, in an environment in which the names of things—whether asteroids, flowers, or stars—had been so important, this flower which I had seen nearly every day from the time I was ten years old had managed to remain anonymous. It was true I had never heard any name ascribed to it, nor had I ever sought one out. In my mind this flower had always been simply “the flower with the red and yellow petals and the orange center,” a variety of the desert poppy which it most closely resembled. But it was not a poppy. Samax told me it was a kind of marigold.

“It’s a hybrid that has no name,” he went on, “a lost flower developed in mysterious circumstances by a horticulturist who never registered it and whose own name has been lost over the years. That sense of mystery always appealed to me. But now I feel this flower should have a proper name. Because I’ve cultivated it, and possess the greatest concentration of the flower in North America, I can do so. With your permission, Enzo, I want to name it after your aunt.”

This was an even bigger surprise. “Alma?”

He nodded. “I want to call it the
Alma
. You can do that with a flower—give it just a single name.” Shaking his head ruefully, he
looked me in the eye. “I wanted to make up, in a small way, for some of what we know she must have suffered. Is that all right with you?”

“Of course,” I replied, and now it was I who choked up.

“After two months, the flower will officially be known as the
Alma
.”

“It’s a fine gesture, Uncle Junius.”

He embraced me. “It’s done, then.”

He clipped and lit up one of his Upmann coronas, for despite his doctor’s instructions, he refused to give up cigars. Harahel had shuffled out of the greenhouse with the folders, Desirée was still typing, and after a long silence, Samax beckoned me over to a nearby table beneath ultraviolet lamps. “I’ve saved the best for last,” he whispered, “and for the moment I’m not showing it to anyone but you.”

“Not even Desirée?”

“No one.” He placed the other half of the blue fruit on a small plate. “Look at this, Enzo. It’s incredible.”

At first I thought that, with an old man’s pride, he was reaffirming the mere existence of the fruit.

“Look more closely,” he urged me, taking my elbow.

I studied the golden seeds in the indigo pulp, and they did indeed look like stars. In that lamplight, particularly, they glittered. Then I saw that the seeds formed a familiar pattern, which I recognized after a few seconds.