A Trip to the Stars

  I concluded there were two possible avenues I could explore in trying to find my father: Vitale Cassiel, still alive in Reno, who might no longer be estranged from his son (though Geza Cassiel’s letter made that seem highly unlikely), or the woman to whom the letter was addressed. In the nine years since he had written the letter, my father might well have found her. She might know of his whereabouts—or he might even be with her. At any rate, I reasoned that if I could find her I had a good chance of finding him. Of course this was only after I had come up against a brick wall when I tried to learn his whereabouts through the Air Force; they would tell me only that he had resigned his commission and they were not permitted to give me additional information unless I was an immediate relative. I was his son, I replied. When asked for proof, all I had was a birth certificate that read FATHER: UNKNOWN. And a different surname, on top of it. The Navy was equally unforthcoming about the nurse named Mala Revell. I tried to play the sleuth myself, but with such old, scant information, I wasted many months going down dead-end streets. Finally, I followed Samax’s advice of last resort and hired the Hopkins brothers out of Miami, who he said could find anyone anytime anyplace—except for Alma, whom they had never found.

  I paid them dual commissions, to locate my father or the nurse, whoever they tracked down first. And then I waited. With Geza Cassiel they too hit a wall, once removed from the one that had stopped me: it seemed he had indeed resigned from the Air Force, a full colonel, but was still working in some way for the government, his current activities and whereabouts tightly classified, top secret. Could he have become a spy? I thought. That covert action he was ordered to undertake in Vietnam was obviously CIA. He mentioned them outright in the letter. And before the war he was doing espionage surveillance. Joining the CIA would have been a natural transition after the war.

  Reading of Geza Cassiel’s adventures in Laos and his captivity with the montagnards, I had been enthralled in much the same way as when I pored over the journals of Captain Cook and Sir John Mandeville that Samax gave me as a boy. This was a man of action, and courage, and for someone like me who had grown up around men of ideas—enterprising, iconoclastic men, to be sure, but idea men all the same—action of the life-and-death sort was always impressive. At the same time, I had been heartened to read of my father’s disgust with the war, and equally saddened to think that—if indeed he was with the CIA—it might have been a passing emotion. I could understand how someone like him, not a gung-ho enlistee but a career military man posted against his wishes, would have ended up in combat in Vietnam; but with all the information about the CIA’s unsavory wartime actitivies that had surfaced, the possibility he had joined that organization was harder for me to swallow.

  Samax was the most apolitical man I ever knew, and I had grown up in an environment shaped by his belief system. Later, going out into the world, and being on a college campus in the early seventies as the war dragged to a close, I found that my eccentric education at the hotel, at its core almost fanatically humanist, had left me with a very definite, if unintended, set of political beliefs. Samax, who was repelled by the killing of animals, could never have endorsed organized slaughter between human beings. At the same time, however strong his pacifist tendencies, he was a man who did not hesitate to retain armed bodyguards when he felt sufficiently threatened.

  Maybe I shared some of that ambivalence. For no matter how powerful my own revulsion for the Vietnam War, I confess that I was also proud to read of my father’s combat decorations, the Purple Hearts and the Flying Cross and the Silver Star—like my adoptive grandfather’s—in Brooklyn. But I wondered if this weighing of my father’s actions—and my notions of him based on what he had written, not to me, but to someone he was in love with—was really one way of cushioning the shock I felt in discovering his identity as I did. Even at the age of twenty-four, maybe I was just trying to protect myself in case I should actually find him, a virtual stranger with whom I might discover I couldn’t get along. Living with a romantic like Samax for fifteen years had not necessarily made me a romantic—not when it came to family relationships. Quite the opposite, in fact, after what I’d witnessed around the likes of Ivy, and Dolores and her daughters, and Luna and Alma and my grandmother in Brooklyn. At any rate, it looked as if I wouldn’t have to deal with these questions concerning my father anytime soon, for in the end the Hopkins brothers couldn’t find a trace of Geza Cassiel, not even a photograph.

  They had a hard time with the nurse as well—a civilian now—but after a protracted search, they found her. In fact, I received the Hopkins brothers’ report on Mala Revell, in a special-delivery envelope, on November 30, 1980, just moments before Sofiel knocked urgently at my door—still Room E when I was visiting the hotel—with the news that Samax was dead.

  Mrs. Resh had found him slumped on the floor in his private library at one o’clock when she brought up his lunch—baked plantains and apples and some of his own Samax Astrofructus, neatly pared. When I ran into the library ahead of Sofiel minutes later, still clutching the Hopkins brothers’ report, I found this meal scattered on the carpet where Mrs. Resh had dropped her tray and run from the room in terror.

  I knew why the moment I saw my uncle’s body. I felt as if I had been struck in the chest and had all the breath knocked out of me. His posture was not that of an old man who had dozed off. He was contorted grotesquely, one leg extended and the other tucked up behind him, clutching the side of his chest, as if he had suffered a heart attack or that monster stroke he so feared. His eyes were open, rolled back in his head, his lips were blue, and his teeth clenched. His free hand was balled up tightly, the arm stiff, and his white hair, which he had begun to wear long, was spread out on the dark blue carpet. As always, he was wearing his red robe over Chinese silk pajamas. He appeared to have fallen in agony from his favorite reading chair, by the picture window that overlooked the desert. There was a book beside his body, inches from his stiffened arm.

  I rushed to his side and sank to my knees. I could still smell his cologne, faintly citric, and the scent of the greenhouse’s moisture on his pants cuffs. There was a cut on his lip, which he had apparently bitten through in his death throes. For an instant I went blank, I panicked, telling myself, no he’s not dead, just unconscious—how can I revive him? I put my fingertips to his cheek, then his throat. Both were cool, but not yet cold. I saw that my hands were shaking. My stomach was all balled up. And suddenly my eyes were burning so badly that I had to close them. When I opened them—it felt like hours later—Samax’s body was still there.

  In my previous experiences with death, a kind of protective icing had come over me from within, helping to keep me intact. Even in the car crash with Luna and Milo, or when finding my grandmother facedown in her bedroom, or as a teenager seeing Denise sprawled out in the elevator. Now, when I needed that icing most, I felt it wasn’t there. And I knew that all those other deaths had not prepared me for Samax’s, which I had long dreaded.

  I loved my uncle dearly. And I knew he loved me, maybe more than he loved anyone else, as Desirée insisted. He was a generous man, but I was well aware that he didn’t share a great deal of himself, his real self, with others as he had shared it with me. I knew, too, that I could never have repaid him for the new life he had given me—a second chance on the largest possible scale—though he said I had done so, many times over. However, at that moment in his library, where I had sat alone with him so many evenings, hearing the tales of his travels or diagramming Latin sentences, my feelings were not so much sentimental as angry. I simply couldn’t believe he was gone. Having for the better part of my life thought him invulnerable, and finally immortal, I still expected him to come to and pull himself out of that horrible position and stand up and tell me he’d had a close shave, but it was going to be all right, and he even had a few new things he’d seen on the other side of the river that he wanted to share with me.

  But it wasn’t going to be all right, and there would be no more new thi
ngs for him to share with me, not ever, for he had certainly crossed that river from which no one comes back, where the ferryman, as he once told me, looks right through your eyes and reads your soul in an instant, like a map, before seeing you on your way on the other side, down one of millions of dark paths.

  What tears I had, I held back. I told myself to keep my head. Mrs. Resh wanted to telephone for an ambulance. I told her to wait. I wanted to move Samax, to straighten his limbs and lay him peacefully on his back and cushion his head, but something stopped me. It wasn’t just the way he had collapsed: I was struck suddenly by the absence of Alif and Aym. Where were they? And where was Sirius, who, even before I moved to New Mexico, had gravitated to Samax’s side; slow and plodding in his own old age, Sirius was more comfortable in the company of an equally plodding old man. An old man whom I was certain at that moment had not suffered a heart attack or stroke. Someone had helped Samax get to the river. But who?

  After sending Sofiel out in search of Alif and Aym, I turned to Mrs. Resh. “Has anyone been up here since you last saw him?” I asked.

  Usually cold and distant, she was weeping silently behind me, her red hair for once in disarray. “Not so far as I know.”

  I examined the book beside Samax’s hand: it was Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus, a nineteenth-century private edition which I had read myself years before. An obvious favorite of my uncle’s, it was all about the quincunx, especially the history of quincuncial gardens and plantations. I knew that, whatever else he was reading, this was a book Samax always kept, along with a dozen other such favorites, piled on the table beside that chair. And so when I saw that the top half of the pile had been knocked over—despite the fact Samax had fallen in the other direction—and when I also saw no sign of his eyeglasses, it struck me that he had not been reading The Garden of Cyrus, but had deliberately, and with obvious effort, yanked it out of the pile as he collapsed.

  Why would he do that, I asked myself. Why that particular book?

  Just then, Desirée rushed into the library, wearing a black robe over a black bikini, fumbling with the sash. She had been swimming, and her skin and hair were still wet. She stopped short, and took several steps backward before approaching Samax’s body, never taking her eyes from his face. “Oh no,” she whispered, laying her hand on my shoulder.

  “He hasn’t been dead long,” I said. “Have you seen Alif and Aym?”

  Desirée cleared her throat. “Sirius was missing this morning and Samax sent them to find him. He’s been wandering into the desert alone lately, at night, and staying there for hours.”

  Of the three of us in the library at that moment, Mrs. Resh had been the last to see Samax alive, and then the last to speak with him. I was still sleeping when she said he left the greenhouse alone around nine-fifteen. And Desirée was at the pool, where she glimpsed his red robe through the foliage of the sycamore trees along the driveway. Crossing the lobby to the elevator, he said nothing when he passed Mrs. Resh seated behind the front desk. Then, at nine-thirty, he called down to her and ordered his lunch, specifying the hour he wanted it brought up. Aside from the fact he could have told her this minutes before in the lobby, he customarily made this call at noon, not early in the morning. He also told Mrs. Resh that he didn’t want to be disturbed by anyone—no exceptions—which I only thought unusual because Desirée and I were just in for the weekend and at dinner the previous night he had twice mentioned that he wanted to spend the day with us.

  My last conversation with him, after dinner over coffee, revolved around his renovation plans for the Hotel Canopus, to be implemented by Calzas after his death. Samax was not bequeathing the hotel outright to anyone—including me, once he realized that I would never go on living in it without him. Rather, I encouraged him to convert it into that private museum for rare collectibles he had never brought to fruition in the abandoned factory in New York. He found this notion particularly attractive because it meant he could keep the hotel alive while realizing—even posthumously—his dream of the museum, complete with a visitors’ park consisting of his orchards and gardens. If he was going to leave behind any one monument to himself, like the princes and emperors whose most precious possessions he had spent his life collecting, then this would be it. Calzas, Desirée, and I were to be the museum’s trustees. In working with Calzas, I would have the opportunity as an architect to transform the hotel even more radically than Samax had when he first bought it. Aside from its being predicated on Samax’s death, the renovation was an unsettling proposition for me on many levels. Not least of which was that the Hotel Canopus in its current incarnation was the basis for the memory palace I had constructed in my head. Would I be altering my memory palace as we altered the hotel?

  As for Desirée, she was a reluctant trustee. Dolores was still vehement about Samax’s leaving Desirée the hotel, to run as a hotel—though Desirée had repeatedly made it clear that she had no wish to do any such thing. When Samax designated her a trustee, she was wary of even that much involvement in the property. After his death, she said, she wanted a clean break. Meanwhile, rather than being placated by Samax’s gesture, Dolores was only further enraged: converting the Hotel Canopus into anything else was to her a slap in the face.

  “She’s getting to be impossible,” Samax muttered to me that last night. “I don’t have the energy for it anymore. But on Monday my lawyer’s bringing out all the papers, and once I sign them, it’s done.”

  As on my previous visits since discovering the dead letter at the Hotel Rigel, I had been on the brink of telling Samax about its contents, but once again resisted the impulse. With his health so frail, I thought the emotional impact would be too tough on him, especially when he learned the identity of my father and the stark fact that by birth I was half-Cassiel. No less than the grandson of Vitale Cassiel.

  Now that Samax was dead, part of me was relieved that he would never have to absorb that particular shock. Another part of me was saddened, for perhaps it would have been some small comfort, after the decades of antagonism, for him to know that he and his archenemy had something in common besides their enmity. That it should be me was something Samax, a man with the keenest sense of irony, would surely have appreciated. As he would have appreciated the many ironical layers pertaining to him and Vitale Cassiel that were implicit in my father’s revelations. Samax was an intensely curious man. At its core, his life had been constructed around his curiosity, and around the raveling and unraveling of secrets. That is why, in the end, whatever the pain and repercussions, I believe he would have regretted—as I did—that he hadn’t shared in the discovery of my paternity.

  At the same time, whatever his other regrets might have been, Samax was not one to talk about them. Even to do so obliquely, as he had the previous night, was unusual. He had walked me to my room just before going to bed, and standing in the corridor in these same pajamas and robe that he wore in death, he told me he had been having trouble sleeping.

  “It’s not the physical stuff,” he said dismissively of his various ailments, “though the plumbing problems wear on me, getting up to piss every hour on the hour. And even if I dose myself with herbs, I don’t sleep deeply enough anymore to have nightmares. It’s an ongoing unease that eats at me—like the fungi that get my trees, working their way beneath the bark. I’ll be tossing, drifting in and out of sleep that’s indistinguishable from the darkness of my room, and suddenly I’ll be looking in on myself, watching scenes from my life play themselves out—as they happened, but with the smallest, disturbing variations. I’ll be with some people, having dinner, say, just as it was except that one person will be wearing another’s clothes, and another will say something, verbatim, that really someone else said, and through the window I’ll glimpse the streets of a city—Chicago in a rainstorm, say—though that dinner really took place in Miami on a clear night. It brings me up in a sweat. I know it doesn’t sound bad, but it’s as if I’ve lost my dreaming function; it seems what I do now in my slee
p is alter my memories in strange ways, all the time knowing what occurred in reality, so the alterations aren’t even pleasurable. I mean, it’s not like you get to go someplace you always wanted to go but didn’t, or find a woman you had looked for everywhere but could never find.”

  These were Samax’s last words to me before he shuffled down the corridor in his velvet slippers. It was a curious and poignant confessional for him to have delivered out of the blue, and I wondered what place he could have had in mind, world-traveler that he was, where he had never gone. As for the woman who could never be found, I had no doubt that must be my grandmother Stella, whose disappearance, Samax would have been interested to know, had also been one of the great obsessions of my father’s life. Twelve hours before his death, Stella was still on Samax’s mind.

  For several endless minutes, Desirée, Mrs. Resh, and I stared down at Samax’s body.

  “It must have been a massive stroke,” Mrs. Resh remarked, wiping her eyes.

  Without replying, Desirée said to her, “Would you find out what the delay is in finding Alif and Aym.” As soon as Mrs. Resh had left the room, Desirée turned to me. “Look more closely, Enzo.” She indicated the place on his side which Samax was clutching when he died.