The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said.

  I would be back on weekend leave when I could. I would write letters. For so long I’d known only that I longed to leave. That old muscle memory. Now in the moment of leaving it felt as if some space had opened up beneath my feet. I must plant them more firmly on the ground. With the carmine of that hollyhock and my elation I felt the immediacy of a desire for Glynnis I’d not felt in months.

  “When I return,” I said, “we’ll talk of marriage.”

  For the first time Glynnis’s eyes caught mine. Saline dripped in the intravenous line behind her. In my peripheral vision I saw the black ant crawl up until it achieved the very inside of that hollyhock blossom.

  “I don’t know if I need that much,” Glynnis said. “Just.”

  Then she reached up and pressed those kiln-hot cheeks against mine until they baked into kisses.

  Acknowledgment: Second Interlude

  After years of my peace-loving life, now I was fifteen years old and interested only in war. It was the spring of 1986, barely a decade since the end of Vietnam. That one—and Korea, too—were between us and what we understood to be the morally unambiguous days of World War II. Dovish was really the only mode for us then, Bostonian or otherwise. Teenage or otherwise.

  I spent hours in the library at our public school looking for books about the British military and Eastern Europe during the war—books I read, books I thumbed through, all to fill the void Poxl West had now left in my life. Military histories by John Keegan that were too dry and martial to keep my teenage interest. Narratives by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi that elicited only bile from me at the time. These books contained stories, but not the stories my uncle Poxl had to tell. Somehow even they, in their dour precision and moribund facts, couldn’t touch the tales of sexual impropriety and reckless aviation Poxl told. He hadn’t been forced into victimhood, didn’t need to be called survivor—he had flown his way right into the attack against that awful German force. More often than not I found myself flipping to the back to look at lists of names in their end pages: acknowledgments of relatives long dead, lists of names whose thick Ashkenazi sounds carried no meaning to me.

  During that same time I found that the things that had once floated me on the weekdays between my outings with Poxl were somehow lacking in buoyancy in comparison with what little I could dredge up on his time at war. Now for the first time I had Poxl’s book—but not Poxl. The absence was almost tangible. As I sat and watched the best team the Bruins had fielded in years win game after game, even on the most perfect full-ice pass from Ray Bourque to Cam Neely, I could hardly get excited. My team appeared good enough to head for the Stanley Cup for the second year in a row, but my uncle Poxl wasn’t there to take me to the MFA or the opera, to distract me from the things I felt I loved more—so he distracted me from afar. He stole my concentration from anything that didn’t pertain to him with his absence and his successes. He’d promised to send me a copy of his book, signed, and I still didn’t have a copy personalized by him. He’d promised to take me down to New York City and show me something more, and I hadn’t yet seen it. For years he’d had me, but he hadn’t published the book he always longed to publish; now he’d published a book, and it was as if he’d flown from me, too. My football team had been to the Super Bowl, and even the prospect of a second championship for one of our town’s teams that year didn’t carry the same weight it once had. The Celtics, too, had fielded their strongest team in years, and the Red Sox, with Roger Clemens and Wade Boggs, seemed as if they might be bound for a World Series themselves. Never before were our teams so stacked with players: McHale and Parish, Rice and Evans, Fryar and Marion.

  All I wanted was my uncle Poxl back.

  At the time this desire felt wholly natural. Thinking of it now, listening to my own wistful voice and how it ached at Poxl’s absence, it sounds like obsession.

  Maybe it was.

  But it carried with it the absence I would always feel of my grandfather, the one Poxl had come to fill here in town. Before I knew enough to know, Poxl West had been in my life. He’d chosen to be there, not because he was duty-bound, bound by blood. His attention to me was the conscious bestowal of a gift, one that was renewed every time we saw each other. There I was, fifteen—the gift had been given, and now it was not being given, at just the moment when its magnitude was revealed, clouds parting to display morning’s spidery light. Was this what Françoise had felt when he left? Glynnis? His own mother? I’d lost a grandfather before I knew what it meant to have one, but in his place I had what every Ashkenazi kid in America needed without knowing he needed it: a Jewish war hero, at my side. When Poxl was around, he did fill in for my missing grandfather. Now it was like I’d lost two grandfathers in one sweep of Poxl West’s international success. Does this sound like obsession? Do I lament looking back, magnifying what Poxl was then? I only know that’s how it felt at the time. And that, if I’m honest, it’s how I feel decades later.

  * * *

  One afternoon amid the unexpected blanching that had overtaken my days during that period, my father decided he would take up Poxl’s absence and take me to Waltham, to a store called Mr. Big Toyland. The toy store advertised regularly on local television stations. My parents were friends with the owner’s daughter—my father had helped them out with an audit years before, so we were treated well there. We got a small jolt from watching their kids thumbing their way through the Cabbage Patch Kids and G.I. Joes on those TV commercials—Ellen and Joseph, who’d been at my Bar Mitzvah, up there on television, enjoying some local fame. We knew them, and there they were on television, between episodes of Diff’rent Strokes. Fame feels larger when you’re fifteen: It appears to be its own reward. I’m not sure what I wanted to be acknowledged for, what I did at the time that deserved attention, but the idea of being on television was mesmerizing.

  In addition to toys, Mr. Big sold baseball cards, the best selection of old cards in town. My parents thought spending money on baseball cards was a kind of institutionalized insanity. Usually I had to beg my father to take me out there.

  Today he’d offered unbidden.

  On the way out we passed through the wealthy town where Larry Bird, the best player on the Celtics team, had bought a large house after being drafted. He was known to spend afternoons outside in his driveway shooting baskets. There was something intimate about it, its own gift, seeing through the window of a car what we normally had to see on the screen of our television sets. It could back traffic up for miles, drivers stopping to watch his mastery, the perfect shot executed by a man with mangled, broken fingers on each hand that somehow came together to make him the best shooter of his generation.

  When we arrived in Waltham, Mr. Big wasn’t there. One of the clerks—no one we knew—took out books of cards for us to look through.

  “What about that Larry Bird Topps’?” my father said. It was twenty-five dollars, an exorbitant amount back then to spend on a card. “You were just talking about him.”

  I told my father I wasn’t that into basketball cards, so we turned to the curio case that held baseball cards. There was a 1976 Topps Fred Lynn, statistics on the back documenting the year he won both Rookie of the Year and MVP. A Yastrzemski third year. Even a couple Mickey Mantles. Somehow they all seemed trivial compared to tales of Uncle Poxl’s feats of war. My father must have noticed something in my face. He turned to the clerk and pointed to a card on the top level.

  “Ted Williams,” my father said. “’51 Bowman. You know he had to stop playing for more than two years, in his prime.”

  “He did?” I said.

  “Yeah, he enlisted in the army.”

  “Really?”

  “They say he gave up the best years of his career, the height of his hitting powers, to fight in the war.”

  My father looked over the cards in the case where we were standing. I was a card collector and a Sox fan, and I’m sure I had to have heard this story before, but somehow it
had never registered with me. It hadn’t stuck. Now I looked down at the cartoon depiction of Williams’s handsome face twisted upward, the bat swung back around his body at the end of a perfect cut.

  “You want it?” my father said.

  On the plastic case the card was held in, a white sticker read “$140.”

  “Are you serious?” I said. My mother hated my baseball-card collecting, thought the money we spent on it was money wasted. Did I think at the time this was strange, my father overcompensating for Poxl’s absence? Because in remembering it now, I see it for what it was. I’d grown dour on a level that must have begun to concern him. Here we were, attempting to rectify it. If this fact registered subconsciously, it was quickly forgotten in the excitement of what we were about to do. I was getting a thing I wanted and never dreamed I could have.

  “They say these will be a good investment in the long term,” my father said. “Like a relic of history. You’ll have to keep it in good shape—not take it out to show friends or anything.”

  For weeks I’d wanted something I could put my hands on, something that had been denied to me: Poxl had promised to send books and he hadn’t, and though my father had bought us copies, that hadn’t sated me. But he’d recognized need in me, and here he’d pulled off an emotional sleight of hand: He’d gifted me something I didn’t know I wanted. We don’t eat because there is food. We eat because there is hunger. It didn’t occur to me then what Poxl West had been doing all along, filling in for my grandfather. He was attempting to plug an emotional hole, not to acknowledge it as one. Perhaps that’s what left me wanting in those days since his absence; and perhaps it was obsession, but not obsession with what I thought I was obsessed. It was a doubling down on absence. Wasn’t this the fissure I didn’t see then, what Poxl’s heroism did for me as well? Shouldn’t I have seen what Poxl didn’t see himself—that his bombing Nazi Germany didn’t undo his parents’ deaths, the morbid facts I was attempting to sidestep in putting down Wiesel in favor of West?

  Should, shouldn’t. We can’t undo the past. The fact was I didn’t see it. It looks so clear now saying it, but that’s not what I saw. I saw Ted Williams’s handsome, expensive face staring up at me, and I saw Poxl West’s handsome face, and I felt sated. Who could blame my father for wanting to give it to me, and who could blame Poxl.

  I didn’t feel any of that when I was fifteen years old and in possession of a baseball card so valuable I would never have thought I’d own it. On the ride home I clutched the paper bag the clerk had put the card in and looked out the window, thinking of someone other than my uncle for the first time in weeks.

  * * *

  The shift my father had helped make in my mind didn’t last long. I read about Ted Williams’s war heroism, but soon after I also read about his personality. Williams was known to be a surly figure—wouldn’t talk to fans, refused to sign autographs.

  My uncle had sat and signed books for anyone who’d wanted one signed.

  We went one weekend to visit my mother’s great-aunt Leah at her apartment in Quincy, the only one in her family who lived here in Massachusetts. She was by far the most Bostonian Bostonian in my mother’s family, and she subscribed to NESN so she could watch every game now that she was too old to travel from Quincy to Fenway. She told me about how she had once been on an airplane with Williams, in the mid-seventies.

  “Wouldn’t so much as make eye contact with me when I went up to tell him I was a fan,” my great-great aunt Leah said. “I was wearing a Sox cap at the time and everything. Written the man off ever since.”

  When I got home that day I put the Williams card in a drawer. I pulled out Skylock for another read and it felt like some buzzing at the back of my head had been silenced. I didn’t have Poxl near, but that couldn’t negate the fact that I had read his book. I found what I could on the RAF in our school library. But now when Rabbi Ben brought up Poxl in Hebrew class, I would find some way to deflect the conversation, not wanting to talk again about the idea of Poxl’s coming to visit us—not wanting to admit I hadn’t spent time with him in months, and I hadn’t asked if he’d come see us. I could talk about Skylock, but not its author.

  “So what’s the deal with Kabbalah, anyway?” I said one Monday evening when conversation had drifted away from Hebrew and I feared it might drift toward me. But there was real need in my voice, and whether it was for an absent uncle or an unknowable God, everyone in the room could hear it. Rachel Rothstein rolled her eyes and I immediately wished I hadn’t said a word, but Rabbi Ben sat up straight.

  “You never seemed all that interested before,” he said. But before I had time to respond, he said, “Shit, I wrote my dissertation at Yeshiva on Moses de Léon. He was the thirteenth-century Spaniard who wrote the Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism. Check it out, guys—he believed that God was in everything around us. The world started in ein sof, he said. Who can translate that term, Ein Sof?”

  Our Hebrew had gotten us only so far that Rachel could say she knew the first word, Ein. It meant “one.”

  “It means ‘nothingness.’ One endless nothingness. The world started in nothing, and even though God made something—Adam, Eve, a garden, Zion, later us—the original state of our souls, of our existence, was nothingness. The Zohar says we need to return to that state if we want to touch the Godhead.”

  “I want to touch some kind of head,” Zach Swartz said.

  Everyone cracked up.

  “What’s that, dude?” Rabbi Ben said. Now everyone just looked down at their feet. “Well, look, Eli, if you want to hear more about Kabbalah, let’s definitely find some time to rap outside of class. I’ll give you some Gershom Scholem. You’d like Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I told him that was fine, and everyone in class looked at me like I’d lost my mind. But I hadn’t lost my mind. I just was missing my uncle, and while he wasn’t my uncle, Rabbi Ben was here.

  After class that night I went into his office, where he walked around his overloaded bookshelves and showed me the major texts of the modern study of Kabbalah. Some part of me had come to think that the elders at our shul read only books about the atrocities of World War II, and all at once my eyes were opened to the fact that mostly on Rabbi Ben’s shelves were texts of Talmudic study, midrash, and Kabbalah. We only see what we want when we’re in need, and for months I’d seen only one history. Now I was seeing something else. Here was one thing Poxl West hadn’t talked about, but which was always lingering: God.

  We were sitting now, me in the chair in front of Rabbi Ben’s cluttered desk, him behind it. I was ready to hear what he had to say. Receptive.

  “So I finally had a chance to read Skylock, dude,” Rabbi Ben said. This was unexpected. It threw me for a moment, made me more comfortable than I could have anticipated. Here I was, ready to ask him about the Zohar, all that he’d wanted to talk about for months, and instead he was bringing up Poxl West’s memoir.

  “And?” I said.

  “And!” Rabbi Ben said. “Your uncle’s a majorly good writer, and mein Gott, the experiences he’s had. I can totally see why you’ve been so into that book. And him.”

  “Well, he is my uncle,” I said. Talking to Rabbi Ben, in that moment, all my regret and sense of absence was gone. It was almost as if Poxl were back with us. “I did kind of play a part in helping him get his manuscript together.”

  “It occurs to me that some of what goes on in there isn’t so different from what draws me to the Zohar. I mean, when he describes flying in his plane, he describes looking into the face of the whirlwind. That’s what Job did, right? Look right into the face of the Behemoth. For me that’s why I care about thinking about God. Not just to say, ‘What stories do we read in the Torah?’ But to say, ‘What would it look like to meet face-to-face with the deity?’”

  When Rabbi Ben had brought this up in class, we were too uncomfortable to discuss it. But sitting in his office, I remember I gave it real thought. What had
Poxl West seen up in those skies? And more important: What occurred in my daily life that could bring me face-to-face with Ein Sof? Rabbi Ben gave me a handful of books to take home. I shoved them into my book bag and thanked him.

  I wish I could say now that I’d read them.

  But once they sat down on the shelf next to Skylock, their gray cloth covers just seemed so gray. There was a book full of stories of heroism and emotional drama; here was some unintelligible drawing of Hebrew letters adding up to a rudimentary picture of a body that might be our Lord. And there I was, a teenager, confused. I wanted to think about mysticism, but it grew ever more intangible the more I thought about how tangible Poxl West’s story was. That it had come almost to replace the human himself for me. I liked Rabbi Ben and I liked Gershom Scholem, but for me, then, with Poxl gone and only his book to consult, it was still Skylock to which I’d be turning in my moments of confusion.

  * * *

  Finally in May, I turned in a final report in history class on Uncle Poxl’s memoir, which by then I’d read five times. Each time I reread I watched as Poxl again left his mother in Leitmeritz, again left Françoise, again left Glynnis for training. As much as it hurt, as much as it tore the scab off my not having spent time with him, what I fell back on was his heroism, and what came after. I cited more than a dozen sources on the Royal Air Force in the report, sources on military actions in Britain during the war. I quoted from two other memoirs, and I even learned to make the citations properly.

  Interspersed within those quotations and summaries, I wrote florid reminiscences of my trips into Boston with Poxl, memories that made it feel almost as if he were back again, taking me to see Shakespeare, to eat sundaes. Almost. As I wrote, I overplayed my role in giving him someone to talk to while he was drafting the book. I won’t lie: No matter what ended up in it, I still feel some pride now thinking of how hard I worked on that report. No matter what was to come, no matter what lay beneath any of my motivations during that period, Poxl West had brought to life in me a curiosity I wouldn’t otherwise have had. One I retain to this day.