“It’s not delicious puzzles from Capablanca’s secret journals,” Samax said one night in the solarium to Hadar and me, “or ever more intricate memory palaces that will get through to him—those are the things he’s always gone after. He needs to take up something completely different.”
“Like what?” Hadar said.
“Just leave it to me,” Samax replied confidently, which made me squirm, for in my heart I was as skeptical as Hadar.
“But we can’t even get him to leave his rooms most of the time,” Hadar grumbled.
“Exactly my point,” Samax said. “Because what he needs is utterly unavailable to him now. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. What’s the one thing Labusi ever left the hotel for, gentlemen? Not women and wine, but …”
“Song!” I said.
Samax nodded. “We’ll give him something new,” he murmured, “and something old.”
Samax began bringing in chamber groups from the area to perform in the ballroom every Friday night. The first such Friday, when a string quintet arrived, he simply went up to Labusi’s quarters himself, and without a word conveyed him to the ballroom. Every Friday after that, at eight o’clock sharp, Labusi would be in the ballroom waiting for the musicians to arrive. The night they played Boccherini’s 2nd String Quintet, one of his very favorites, the tears ran down my old tutor’s cheeks—the first time I ever saw him weep.
The “something new” that Samax provided Labusi was even more ingenious, and I marveled that it had occurred to Samax at all. He had commissioned a company in Carson City to construct a customized billiard table, fully convertible to pocket billiards, of regulation size and specifications, but resting on electronically adjustable legs that could rise at the touch of a button from thirty-two inches—exactly the right height for someone in a wheelchair—to the customary forty-five inches. The legs operated with such precision, and the table’s internal honeycomb, springs, and balances were so perfectly calibrated, that when the legs went up and down not a single ball on the table stirred a millimeter. So Labusi could play pool or shoot billiards with anyone. And play he did, sometimes for ten hours a day. With his still-steady cellist’s hands and steely chess player’s nerves, his Pythagorean passion for geometry, and of course his memory skills—filing away countless variations of bank and combination shots—Labusi was a natural at all billiard games. He could best any of us at the hotel in the game of our choice—mine was always 8-ball—and when he craved stiffer competition, he found that, living in Las Vegas, there was no shortage of first-rate players with whom he could compete seriously. First in pickup games, for which various pool sharks came to the hotel, and then in formal competitions in town to which Labusi traveled with his custom-made table in a small truck. “Like a pianist,” he said to me drily, the s whistling faintly through the triangular chip in his front teeth, “with his Steinway.” For thus, through his own and Samax’s perseverance—a quality my uncle perhaps prized above all others—Labusi began his third career, following a painful yet surprisingly symmetrical route in his life’s journey: from chess champion, to scholar and tutor, to the billiards champion he would soon become.
Would that the other catastrophes occurring in and around the hotel at that time had lent themselves to such constructive, even happy, resolutions. In fact, happiness was fast becoming a scarce commodity at the Hotel Canopus; Labusi aside, Samax’s Midas touch and vaunted ingenuity, rather than overcoming that trend, seemed to aggravate it. In ancient days, heroes single-handedly diverted the courses of rivers to alleviate drought or prevent flood; in our own times, deciding on your own to divert the course of someone’s life in order to secure his happiness might be a comparably dramatic achievement. And a tremendous gamble, too, as Samax had acknowledged on the day he undertook just such an action with regard to my life, informing me right away that he had once been a gambler. But, whatever the magnitude of their feats, those ancient heroes I had read about in Homer and Virgil were convinced that no man could change his or anyone else’s fate, which was written in the stars. When a man thought otherwise (signalling, in effect, that he had gone mad), he was struck down. I doubt that Samax shared this conviction.
Since that first day, and all through my boyhood, he had always seemed a kind of magician to me: passionately whisking people around the globe in the service of their own passions; delving into history’s murky byways and bringing the rarest objects back into the light; even cultivating the most delicate fruit in one of the world’s hottest deserts; and all the while presiding over an enormous extended household and successfully maintaining a set of private—if not secret—lives within the confines of his public one. But when it came to the elemental issues that underlie all others—the fragility of life and inescapability of death—Samax was, of course, as powerless as any other man and well aware of it. With lesser issues, he was not so philosophical. Philosophy, magic, and even his gambler’s instincts were not the things to which he automatically turned when confronted with crises in the real—the fallen—world, where he had had to make his way against fierce adversaries. Deep down I think he fell back on the ethos of the streets he had been forced to incorporate, as a young man, among his other beliefs. One of Samax’s great paradoxes was that, for someone who had thrived as a gambler, in most matters he was terribly unwilling to leave things to chance. He was not an accepting man. Blind acceptance of his condition, or of the hand dealt him, was never a part of his emotional vocabulary; instead, he concentrated his tremendous energy on making sure that he would be the one—quite literally—who always dealt the cards.
Even so, the deck, like all decks, always contained a joker, a wild card over which even the likes of Samax had limited control, as became clear later that year when Dolores, still firmly rooted in her shadowy cul-de-sac in the garden, became the passive hub at the center of an amazing turn of events after Labusi’s accident. At least, they amazed me at a time when I didn’t think I could still be amazed by anything that happened at the hotel. Those events would be the catalyst to all that unfolded soon afterward.
It started with Denise suffering a fatal heart attack one night at two A.M. in the red elevator. She had been on her way to the lobby after bringing Samax a pint of freshly squeezed blackberry juice—his choice of soporific—in the penthouse. But Samax was not the last person she spoke with (in fact, they barely exchanged a word) before her death. While switching elevators on the ninth floor, she ran into Delia, and the two sisters quarreled loudly, awakening Desirée, who ran into the corridor to intervene. Before Desirée could say a word, however, Denise stormed into the elevator and Delia returned to her room, locking the door behind her.
Shortly afterward, up late playing his drums, Auro found Denise sprawled facedown in the elevator. She was already dead when the door opened before him in the lobby, and it became the rare occasion for one of his spontaneous cries that did not echo someone else.
“De-nise!” he shouted, kneeling beside her. And then: “Help me! Help!” which, even more torturously, he was able to cry out over and over again until Yal the doorman ran to his aid.
The next day, with the household in turmoil and Samax bereaved, Desirée emerged from her rooms sleepless, distraught, her long hair wild, and embraced me outside the library, blurting out, “Oh, Enzo, my mother is gone. I’ll never see her again.”
For a moment, I thought she had really come unhinged, referring to Denise in this way. But Desirée knew exactly what she was saying: her mother, Delia, was indeed gone, fleeing the Hotel Canopus in her car just hours after Denise’s death without a word to anyone but Desirée.
Why she left without any good-byes I would learn two days later, shortly before Denise’s funeral. Desirée and I were sitting on a wooden bench in the garden waiting for Samax and Dolores to emerge from the hotel. I was wearing a shiny black suit, she a long black dress, gloves, and wraparound sunglasses. Long legs crossed, one foot tapping in the grass and the sunlight rippling over her, Desirée had never look
ed more beautiful to me. In the circular driveway, around the fountain with its beatific female figure, three black limousines awaited us. Desirée spoke to me in barely above a whisper. Still shaky, her guard down, she alternately choked on her words and spat them out.
“So my mother split without looking back. I always knew it would happen like this.”
“But how do you know she won’t come back soon—did she tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to. Trust me, she’ll never be back. It’s been building for a long time, Enzo. A long time. Maybe I ought to fill you in on a little history.”
And she did, crossing and uncrossing her legs, but growing more composed as she went along—as if recounting the history took her out of herself.
“Samax and my other aunt, Doris, were married for ten years,” Desirée began. “Doris died when I was ten years old. My mother and I had just come to live at the hotel. My grandmother had been living here from the first, all those years. Dolores’s connection to Samax is not as simple as you might imagine.”
“Simple? I’ve never been able to figure out what it is.”
“You know the story of how Samax bought that land in New York after eating the bad oysters. The deal that was the cornerstone of his fortune. What you probably don’t know is that Dolores lent him the down payment after all the banks turned him down. He was desperate, on the verge of borrowing from loan sharks when she stepped in.” Desirée tilted her head into the shadows. “In those days Dolores owned a small residence hotel in lower Manhattan, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, and Samax was one of her tenants—one whom she’d become friendly with. He never forgot her generosity, and when he had money he bought her two other hotels in New York. There isn’t anything he wouldn’t have done for her. And that was still the case even after she made some money in her own right, and retired, and wanted to come out here to run this place. Samax agreed at once, so Dolores brought her three daughters and they did what they knew best.”
All of this was news to me, but I was still trying to figure things out. “And Uncle Junius fell in love with Doris?”
“I don’t know about that.” She hesitated. “If he felt deeply about any of them back then, it was Dolores. He never knew his own mother, you know.”
Like me, I thought. “I did know that,” I said.
Grief, which can silence a talkative person, had made Desirée, who kept to herself more than anyone else I knew, talkative. At least with me she had a lot to say that afternoon—more than in any other conversation over the previous nine years.
“After they were married,” she went on, “Samax developed other feelings for Doris. But in the beginning, it was just a business arrangement—between him and my grandmother. This was really his way of paying Dolores back: Doris was the eldest daughter, and the arrangement ensured that the Hotel Canopus went to her. Samax said wills could always be contested, but in Nevada it was practically impossible to prevail in such a case against a spouse.” She exhaled softly. “He didn’t want there to be any legal loopholes. We all know how cautious—even paranoid—he is on the subject, having been disinherited himself. Before your arrival on the scene, no one could say who would get the bulk of his fortune. And don’t think for a minute that Ivy will step aside easily, for you or anyone else.”
I knew that Samax had provided for me—he never had to say so outright—but no one had ever spoken openly about it to me. Not even Ivy, who wasn’t shy about such things and whose obsession with the topic I didn’t have to be reminded of. Desirée was the last person at the hotel I would have expected to break that precedent.
“Well, there’s no doubt Dolores now wants the hotel to go to Delia, the only remaining sister, and no reason to believe Samax would not go along with her, as he always has. If it were just up to them, everything would be hunky-dory. But my mother’s not going to play along.” She shook her head. “I’m sure glad I wasn’t in Samax’s shoes two days ago. Breaking the news of Denise’s death to Dolores couldn’t have been an enviable task.”
That was an understatement, for what Samax had had to explain to her was that she had lost not one daughter, but two. Years before, when Dolores had learned of Doris’s death, it had nearly killed her—and the old lady had only been eighty at that time! So we were more than apprehensive, now that she was almost 100, at the effect the death of her second daughter and the disappearance of the third would have on her.
“You see, it’s not just that Delia’s gone,” Desirée said, “it’s that she made it clear all along that she never wanted sole responsibility for the hotel. She’s the youngest, so as long as her sisters and mother were around, that seemed a remote possibility. Denise always felt quite the opposite: once Doris died, she looked forward to inheriting the hotel, and Samax changed his will accordingly. But she always expected Delia would help her run it. Dolores, who was always closer to Denise, had the same expectations. Delia told both of them that she had other plans. You know she’s always dreamed of living alone somewhere. She often told me that in her entire life she’d never been completely on her own—with just a few rooms someplace, or a cottage or something.”
I nodded. “Reading to me one night when I was small, she told me she wished she could live on a houseboat.”
“Did she. That sounds about right.” She brushed aside a yellow jacket that hovered between us. “Well, back in reality, with Dolores closing in on her one-hundredth birthday, a lot of this stuff obviously came to a head. I mean, when someone hits one hundred, you realize they’re not going to be around much longer. Recently, to get Delia to come around, Denise offered her a fifty-fifty split of the hotel after Dolores dies. Denise said she would ask Samax to make it official and change his will. And Delia told her to forget it, that she had no intention of sticking around once Dolores is gone. Between them they’ve been quarreling about this ever since, with Dolores weighing in behind the scenes, pressuring Delia. The other night was just the explosion of that quarrel into the open. Denise thought that because Delia was always cowed by Dolores, she too could cow Delia. But that wasn’t the case. And the moment Denise died, Delia knew she had to take off, rather than deal with Dolores, who would have made her life hellish. She didn’t see any point in waiting around to find out just how hellish.”
“Is that what she told you before she left?”
Desirée smiled. “What she told me was that she’d send me a letter. And that she hoped I understood.”
“And what did you say?”
“That I don’t want the hotel, either, and that I didn’t appreciate her making me the heir apparent by flying the coop.”
“But why can’t Dolores accept that Delia doesn’t want the hotel?”
“The same reason she can’t accept that she’s going to die. In rejecting the hotel, my mother’s rejecting her—that’s how they both feel about it. At least, it’s always been obvious to me, looking at it from that angle.”
I shook my head. “And they were all so afraid of Dolores?”
“You don’t know the half of it, Enzo. Hey, Doris was always Dolores’s favorite. Dolores adored her, doted on her, as she never did on her other daughters. When Doris died, it was Delia and Denise who found out about it first. And it took them a week to get up the nerve to break the news to Dolores. They were that afraid of her reaction. Samax was in Cambodia at the time, so it was three days before he came home. When he got back, he was so shell-shocked that he went along with Delia and Denise for a while before telling Dolores himself. Think about it. That’s how much power Dolores had over all of them.”
“But how did Doris die?” I asked, as finally the front doors of the hotel opened and we watched Zaren Eboli emerge, followed by Labusi being pushed in his wheelchair by Azu. “Was there an accident?”
Desirée shook her head. “Suicide,” she said abruptly “Carefully executed.”
This wasn’t what I had expected. “Here at the hotel?”
“No. She went down to the motel on Route 15, across from th
e Shell station. The Twin Stars. I’ve spent one or two nights there myself,” she said with a crooked smile. “The rooms have little efficiency kitchens. She sealed the door and windows with electrical tape, turned on the gas in the oven, and lay down on the floor. That’s where they found her.”
“But why did she do it?”
Desirée skipped a breath. “Because of me.”
“You?”
“It was coming for a while, but I was the last straw.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When I arrived here with Delia, Doris was convinced I was Samax’s child. His ‘love child,’ she called me.”
I felt a flutter in my stomach. “And are you?”
Now it was she who was surprised. “No, I’m not. Before he married Doris, Samax and Delia had a brief affair. I mean, a single night. Doris knew about it, and from that concocted her entire fantasy. In fact, it happened over a year before I was born.”
A Trip to the Stars Page 36