A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  This part of the story I heard in Samax’s own words one afternoon during his convalescence when I followed him on his rounds of the orchard, up and down the grassy corridors of the quincunx. He wore his red silk robe, rope sandals, and a big straw hat against the strong sunlight. He had to walk slowly, favoring his right leg and taking deep breaths at regular intervals, often as he poked his cane through a tree’s foliage to examine a cluster of fruit.

  “You’re eighteen now,” he said, glancing at me sidelong. “You ought to hear the whole story.”

  I understood from this that he was about to tell me something highly personal which did not cast him in the best light.

  “You’ll meet women in your life like Stella,” he said ruefully, for he was well aware of my pursuit of girls at that time, “or maybe you already have.” Then he shook his head. “No, if you had met a girl like Stella, you wouldn’t be here now with me.” He shook his head. “How beautiful was she? An old man’s memory embellishes, it’s not to be trusted. But I’ll tell you what I remember. Blond hair that shined like gold. A sly turn to her lips when she smiled. Eyes blue as this sky that stayed lit even at night. And a laugh you could hear, like a piece of a tune, long after she’d left you.” He folded his hands over the top of his cane. “She was something, Enzo.”

  “When did you first meet her?”

  “October, 1938. On Belmont Street in San Francisco. I can’t tell you the exact day,” he smiled, “but I remember it like it was yesterday. She was someone you never forgot. On my brother’s arm, crossing the street to enter a restaurant, she wore a midnight blue dress with a diamond choker. Every man they passed turned to look at her. I froze in my tracks. I was thirty-eight years old, and in the twelve years since my release from prison, this was one of only two occasions that I crossed paths with Nilus—the other was in a lawyer’s office. It caught him flat-footed as well. He never knew what to say to me anyway—what do you say when you’ve betrayed your own brother and seen him get locked up?—so kind of to deflect things, he mumbled an introduction between Stella and me. She was surprised—probably to find out that Nilus even had a brother—and looked me in the eye, and then he hustled her into the restaurant. I felt a shudder go through me, I wanted her so bad. I’d never felt that way with any woman right off the bat. But there wasn’t much I could do about it—not just then. When Vitale Cassiel encountered her for the first time a few months later, he had a similar reaction, but he came at it entirely differently. Whatever his lust for money and power, it was nothing like what he felt when he gazed upon Stella. She became the great and abiding passion of his life.

  “And so Vitale Cassiel stole her away from my brother, and Nilus was left alone in a big house with two babies, Bel and Ivy. When Nilus died five years later, Stella was still living with Vitale Cassiel. In 1944, their son was six years old, but they had never married. Stella didn’t believe in marriage. She was the runaway daughter of a ship’s captain—at sixteen she ran away and never stopped running. Her six years with Vitale Cassiel in Reno had been her longest interlude with anyone, anywhere. Wild was the word that had attached itself to her, as if it was a part of her name. In 1944, she was still only twenty-six years old, twenty years younger than Vitale Cassiel, eighteen years younger than me. And she was restless. Chafing at the bit. Vitale Cassiel may have been one of the richest guys in Reno, but during the war, on the heels of the Depression, Reno was a dusty backwater—unbearable for a girl who had grown used to the high life in San Francisco. He took her all around Europe, and there were Caribbean cruises, and he piled on the jewels and furs, but she took those things as her due. If anything, they made her even more restless. At the end of those six years, she was more than primed to jump ship: she was overdue. That’s where I come in. My revenge on Vitale Cassiel, I decided, would be to seduce Stella away from him myself.” He paused for a deep breath, and winked at me. “How unpleasant a task could that be? And how much faith I obviously had in my own powers of attraction,” he added drily.

  Then he looked closely at me. “What, you can’t imagine me playing such a role?”

  “I can imagine it.”

  “It was messy. Like something out of an Italian comedy,” he muttered, “where you never get love served up without vengeance, and vice versa, and often it all comes out as tragedy in the end. One thing was for sure: Vitale Cassiel wasn’t laughing.”

  We sat down on one of the wooden benches, in the shade of an apricot tree. A blackbird was singing in the higher branches. Samax fell silent, probing the tufts of onion grass at our feet with his cane.

  “I can tell you,” he said suddenly, “that I did possess considerable charm with the ladies in those days. I had made some money. I dressed sharply. I knew how to have a good time. In the spring of 1944 the world was preoccupied with the war; Europe was in flames and all across the Pacific there were vicious battles over remote islands. But I was engaged in a different kind of warfare—obsessed with Stella and only Stella—utterly focused.”

  “What did you do?”

  He leaned back, his eyes faraway. “First I should tell you that I ran into her one more time after San Francisco. It was here in Vegas, at some charity function at the old Avior Hotel. Very stodgy. I doubt it was something Stella did very often. I was just leaving with a bunch of business guys I knew when I crossed paths with her. It was just for a few seconds on the front steps, but I know she recognized me from that time with Nilus six years before. She looked into my eyes, she smiled at me, I smiled back.” He paused for a long moment. “I felt like I was drinking her in. And then she was gone.” He chuckled softly. “That’s what gave me the idea that I could seduce her, and make her mine. I told myself I was taking revenge on Vitale Cassiel, but really I was just hooked, like him and my brother before him. So the comedy began. A few weeks later, I moved into a fancy hotel suite in Reno and started pursuing her. I found where she spent her time, and that’s where I began spending my time. Finally, I was following her outright. Well, it didn’t take me long to accomplish my mission, and instead of making me wary, this merely reaffirmed to me that I was pretty hot stuff. Then I found out that for Stella I was no more than a means to an end: getting away from Vitale Cassiel. Stella used me even as I was using her—except she did it better. We ran off together just two weeks after I first approached her, outside the auditorium of the Fleischmann Planetarium one afternoon. She was there with her son, but that didn’t stop me.” He sighed. “Vitale Cassiel and her son never saw her again. I took her to Acapulco, where we lived together for two weeks in a rented villa. I couldn’t get enough of her. I gave her anything she asked for, including plenty of money. So it hit me like a ton of bricks when she ditched me. She boarded a Hong Kong-bound ocean liner late one night in July, 1944. In addition to the money I had given her, she had cleaned out two of her joint bank accounts with Vitale Cassiel and sold a bunch of the jewelry he had given her. Thus she could do whatever she liked, which evidently included sailing into a war zone at a time of fierce naval engagements from Midway to Guam, where the marines were landing even as her ship passed a hundred miles to the north.

  “I went after her, flying by clipper to Hong Kong, but when I met her ship, Stella was no longer aboard. It had put in at only one port, in Honolulu, and evidently she had disembarked there. I flew back to Honolulu and searched for her in vain, knowing full well that from there she could have sailed or flown anywhere—the mainland, Australia, Mexico again. Before coming home, I hired several private detectives, and even a psychic, but none of them could pick up her trail.” He shook his head. “I was in the same boat as Vitale Cassiel: I never saw her again.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I tried to come to my senses. But, in trying to get over her, I realized that, despite her treachery—maybe because of it—I was still in love with her. I tried other women, solitude, intense traveling—nothing worked. Loving Stella was a form of insanity for which there was only one cure—unattainable—which was Stella hers
elf. At the same time, when I finally began thinking of something besides my own interests, I was left to ponder the hard fact that, thanks to my scheming, both Stella’s young son in Reno and Ivy in San Francisco would never see their mother again. I told myself that Ivy never saw Stella anyway, and that Stella would certainly have taken off soon enough—if not with me, then with someone else. In fact, by the time she reached Honolulu there was a good chance she was with someone else. But, no matter how I sliced it, I had instigated her flight and now she was gone for good. I had been so busy trying to wreck Vitale Cassiel’s life that it never occurred to me I might have been wrecking the lives of these children. And so, in my own way, I tried to make amends, and it helped me regain my sanity.”

  What he did, back in San Francisco, was to begin looking after Nilus’s daughters as if they were his own. Because of their closeness in age, six and seven at that time, the girls were often taken for twins, and in their earliest years had been treated as such by the servants in Nilus’s household who cared for them, dressing them alike, cutting their hair identically, and so on. But as soon as the girls became aware, for example, that their birthdays were celebrated three months apart, they began asking Nilus questions. Not much of a father otherwise, he was honest with them on this count—up to a point. That is, he told them that they had different mothers, both of whom were dead. In Bel’s case, this was true, of course; and, only two months old when Stella ran off with Vitale Cassiel, Ivy obviously had no memory of her. Because Stella had severed all contact with Nilus—he had no idea where she was in those last years of his life—this lie must have seemed to him more than an expedient. Nilus could tell himself that he was sparing Ivy undue pain: an unresolved disappearance was likely to torment someone more than a confirmed death. On top of which, it was not too far-fetched to think that Stella might really be dead. He knew she had run off with someone—with her history and their own stormy relationship that hadn’t altogether surprised him—and that anything could have happened to her afterward.

  But the fact is that Stella was alive, and when Ivy, just turned sixteen, learned this nine years after Nilus’s death, she was heartsick and furious. She did not blame Nilus, of course, whom she revered and recalled only as a doting father. In fact, with his daughters Nilus had been anything but doting; paying only sporadic attention to Ivy, he had compensated in timeworn fashion, spoiling her with lavish gifts and elaborate outings. And this was the part of their relationship Ivy fixed in her memory. All the rest she blocked out: the topsy-turvy household, the caretakers who were changed with alarming frequency and no explanation, the lonely nights, Nilus’s erratic comings and goings and the detritus of his intrigues. She chose sheer denial to prop up the shaky edifice of her illusions, and eventually, inevitably, it led her to become the custodian and defender of the memory of a man whom she hardly remembered.

  Ivy diverted the anger and resentment provoked by Nilus’s neglect onto Samax, who was anything but neglectful. It only made matters worse that from the age of seven on, Ivy had no other adult in her life who took even a fraction of the interest in her that Samax did. In short, Samax’s care and generosity worked against him: he provided Ivy with a target for her rage that happened to be the only target, outside of Bel. That rage—and the size of that target—increased exponentially after Ivy discovered that during Nilus’s lifetime Samax had known not only that her mother was still alive, but where she could be found—and that he had withheld the information. Forget that Stella had run away, and that it was doubtful Nilus would have acted on this information had he possessed it. Forget, too, that in over six years Stella had made no effort whatsoever to see her. When Ivy made the additional discovery, about a year later, that Samax had caused the rupture in her mother’s relationship with Vitale Cassiel, running off with Stella before she disappeared once and for all, she declared to Samax that she could never forgive him. And she never did.

  Samax in turn never forgave himself—for letting Stella get away. But he also couldn’t understand from whom Ivy had learned these secrets, which he had so carefully guarded. At the Hotel Canopus, where Ivy and Bel lived in their teens, not even Dolores and her daughters knew any of this. And that included Doris, Samax told me, whom he had married, very much on the rebound, in 1945. For a wild moment, he thought Stella might have returned and was in contact with Ivy. But it wasn’t that. And not until later did he suspect that Ivy had met Vitale Cassiel around the time she came into all this information; but knowing Vitale Cassiel to be notoriously close-mouthed, Samax couldn’t imagine him opening up so freely with a teenager. At any rate, Samax never denied Ivy’s accusations, but when he demanded to know how she had learned these things, she took some delight in refusing to tell him. And, to his credit, considering the guilt he felt, Samax didn’t use that occasion to inform Ivy what had motivated him; it would be some years before she learned—and promptly denied it could be so—that Nilus had conspired to put Samax into prison. For Samax Ivy had about as much compassion as Stella and Nilus had had for her.

  Samax also knew that Vitale Cassiel had long suspected his role in Stella’s disappearance (that he wanted him to suspect it was a prime underpinning of his revenge), but hadn’t been able to prove it—at least not for a long time. Oh, but he had tried. Samax had been told how Vitale Cassiel hired one private investigator after another (how the tables had turned in that regard!) to find Stella, but they each reported that her trail went cold in Honolulu. Infuriated, Vitale Cassiel advertised for, and got, a soldier of fortune—a recently discharged Foreign Legionnaire—who combed the Hawaiian Islands and half of Indochina for her, to no avail. But he was able to pick up the brief trail that she and Samax had left in Acapulco. And that was how Vitale Cassiel confirmed Samax’s role in Stella’s flight, which, while deepening the animosity between them, was not the end of that particular chapter in their rivalry.

  It did come to an end of sorts ten years later, in September, 1955, in a rocky stretch of desert midway between Las Vegas and Reno, where a different cast of characters was playing out a notably similar game, underscored by love and vengeance, flight and pursuit. One participant was Stella and Vitale Cassiel’s son, who was carrying a valuable item of his father’s which the latter had sent an emissary to retrieve. Vitale Cassiel’s son would disappear, and the emissary would later be found, charred beyond recognition, with a bullet in his skull, in a burnt-out car at the bottom of a ravine.

  What exactly happened at that ravine would never be completely unraveled, but there was no doubt it crucially changed the course of several lives, including my own: my mother, Bel Samax, then four months pregnant with me, was also there, and barely avoided death herself. Nevertheless, the terrific shock she received in that stretch of wasteland would mark the beginning of the end of her own life and would cause her to give birth to me prematurely, and with great difficulty, three months later. Soon after she had put me up for adoption, the medical complications springing from childbirth resulted in her death.

  I was intensely curious about Bel, for obvious reasons. When I turned eighteen, Samax had given me that small chest of her possessions which he showed me when I first arrived at the hotel. Sometimes I took out the gold hairbrush or the ivory-handled mirror, or flipped through the blue bankbook that held, among so many numbers, the ones that had enabled Samax to find me in the world. And though the hummingbird pendant was gone, I still used the slim red fountain pen that had once belonged to my mother. In my years at the Hotel Canopus I had discovered a few additional objects which I added to that chest; at the same time, I had tried to gather all the information I could about her, which in the end did not amount to much.

  Bel simply had left very little of herself behind outside of the contents of that chest. Even in the way of photographs. Her pretty, pale face with the blue eyes, shapely lips, and straight bright teeth with the slight overbite (I saw now that they matched my own) smiled out of the slim “family” album of Samax’s, which I must have leafed through a thousan
d times. Not one for impromptu snapshots (he disliked photographs of himself almost as much as my grandmother in Brooklyn did), my uncle had stocked the album with generally unrevealing portraits and stiff group shots by professional photographers. His household had never formally celebrated holidays and the like, so they would hardly have been memorialized; even in my time, and in ironic contrast to the large-scale dinners each night, Christmas and birthdays were observed in small, intimate gatherings, casual yet with a decorum that would not have encouraged any of us to pull out a camera and pop a flashbulb.

  Somewhat more revealing was a photograph album that had belonged to Bel which I stumbled across one day in a box of old magazines in the library stacks. Bound in green leather, even slimmer than Samax’s, Bel’s album was also impersonal in its way. The single shot of Desirée, at age six, sunning herself by the pool exactly as she would at age twenty-six, and one of a youthful Delia kneeling on the patio feeding some bluebirds were the exception. Nearly all the other photographs, maybe twenty altogether, were of landscapes—sandstone pillars in the Painted Desert, gypsum dunes at White Sands, salt flats—that reflected excursions she had made outside of the Mojave. Always to other deserts. But how and with whom? Samax didn’t know; as Bel got older, he said sadly, she came and went as she pleased, sometimes disappearing for a week or more and never discussing her destinations or her companions.

  There were a couple of grainy photographs of Bel herself tucked into the album, solo shots taken in front of desert gas stations and diners, from so far off that her features were barely visible. In both, she was waving at the camera—and the person behind it, who may or may not have been my father, though this time his shadow was nowhere to be seen. These otherwise unsatisfying shots—as distant and nebulous as the verbal descriptions of her I had been given—interested me because they seemed to have been taken around the same time, and by the same hand, as the photograph of Bel that Samax had shown me at the abandoned factory, smiling in a red dress against a yellow background. And I realized that the clear, living impression of her I so desired was always going to elude me. At night, when I lay in bed and tried to fix her image in the darkness above, it was as if I were gazing at a heavenly body, remote from me in time and space—like those stars whose light takes billions of years to reach earth—that had mysteriously, all my life, held sway over my impulses, choices, and fears to a degree I didn’t fathom properly until I was older.