The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  Perhaps it’s clearer that when Macbeth is visited by Banquo’s ghost it is simply his own guilt that has called forth the apparition, as invented as the blood covering his wife’s hands. When Glynnis and my mother appeared to me in dreams, I was no Hamlet. I will wish every day for the rest of my life that I was no Macbeth, without knowing for certain the truth. They were dead, Glynnis and my mother. When they haunted me they did not haunt me bodily, though they did not leave me, either. But in my dream, Françoise was there in that river with them, and now it was time for me to hold up the mirror to nature.

  Acknowledgment: Caesura

  Only two months after his reading in Boston, two months after the triumphant publication of Skylock, after my parents and I read his book and I’d talked to everyone I could about every aspect of the book I could think of, my uncle Poxl’s memoir was publicly revealed as a fraud.

  His defrocking came all at once. We all learned of his fate together over breakfast one Sunday morning less than five months after he came to our house all full of joy at the discovery of his neighbor’s hundred-dollar-bill-bookmarked estate, all full of the hope and possibility that was to accompany his impending publication.

  “Look at this, honey,” my mother said. “Another picture of Poxl. This one’s on the front page of the ‘Arts’ section.”

  My mother hadn’t read the headline yet. She’d only seen Uncle Poxl’s face again, an occurrence that had come to feel commonplace. My father barely responded. My uncle had received enough notices in the local press since the publication of his book that we’d quickly grown desensitized to seeing his picture.

  But this piece was in a bigger paper—the biggest. Though we lived outside of Boston, my parents subscribed to The New York Times. On weekends they relaxed by reading aloud to each other from stories they knew the other would read in full only minutes later. Such redundancy drove me to distraction, but without Poxl to take me downtown anymore, I longed to hear what I could of him.

  “Oh,” my mother said. “Oh, Maxwell, seriously. You’d better come look at this.”

  My mother and father crouched over the paper. At first my father started reading aloud, as he always did when he saw a story worth noting: “‘Poxl West’s memoir of World War II heroism, Skylock, has been a surprise hit, both a critical and a popular success from the week of its publication,’” my father read. “‘This month, scholars at UCLA and Tufts have alleged factual inaccuracies that threaten to discredit aspects of the best-selling book.’” My father’s voice started out full, but quickly lowered to a pianissimo. “‘Some have called for a statement from West’s publisher addressing their allegations.’”

  He read the rest of the article to himself. My mother was beside him. There was no place for me.

  “Well?” I said. Neither of them responded. “Some bloodsuckers out for Uncle Poxl’s money?”

  My mother and father just continued to look down at the paper. I pretended not to care. Later that night instead of looking at Uncle Poxl’s book, I found myself reading the crumpled “Arts” page my parents had left behind.

  * * *

  For a month, Uncle Poxl refused to comment on the allegations. Then, as summer was upon us and the season of Skylock’s release was not quite ended, a piece was published in The Atlantic Monthly that Poxl and his publisher were unable to ignore.

  The writer of the piece said my uncle had never flown the sorties he claimed to have flown during the firebombing of Hamburg. He’d never been in a lightning cloud over Lübeck. The writer had gone up to the RAF Museum in Hendon and found no record of a Poxl West ever having flown sorties in the Lancaster bomber S-Sugar. There were solid records of the crew from that plane, and no Poxl West was on the ledger. Another man, albeit a man with the surprisingly Jewish-sounding name Herman Janowitz, was listed as the plane’s pilot. When the reporter put this to Poxl, seeking a quote for his story, my uncle had broken down immediately.

  The piece included a long, difficult description of Poxl’s behavior—erratic outbursts over perfectly made and viscerally described Pimm’s cups and cucumber sandwiches at his apartment in Manhattan. The writer had the gall to ask him to take off his trademark porkpie hat and show the lightning scar atop his head. Poxl demurred and was asked again, until finally he showed his bald pate, atop which was a measly dog bite he’d gotten as a kid. Finally, he gave a tearful confession. The reporter gave a great deal of emphasis to the fact that from the moment he uttered the name Herman Janowitz, something wholly changed in Poxl’s disposition.

  Whatever my uncle Poxl might have been through in the war, whatever experiences he’d had then, bombing Hamburg wasn’t among them.

  Poxl’s publisher had defended the book in the days after the Times piece—the claim felt unsubstantiated, and Poxl had stood by the fundamental accuracy of the book and its aims. But the editors of The Atlantic promoted the story they’d published through all channels, and given the book’s success, the attention it had garnered, its ascendancy toward the status of instant classic, now it wasn’t just a book; it was a news story. The response to its fall was commensurate with the size of Poxl’s growing fame. The book might not have been a pure critical success on its own terms, but the story of the author of a bestselling memoir, a Jewish RAF pilot, fabricating parts of his story, was. The reporter who’d written the piece made a name for himself with it—he went on NPR’s All Things Considered, was interviewed on 60 Minutes. This was 1986, and there was no CNN crawl. The only way to find information was to seek it out like a historian, or to wait to see what the newspaper or television told you. It was long before the days of a thousand talk shows, in which a story might blare on the sidelines, or an Internet, where it might be trending, news only to those who sought it as news.

  When the story hit, it hit loudly enough that no one could ignore it. Skylock’s publisher made a complete mea culpa. Poxl West had admitted that he’d lied about having flown those sorties over Hamburg that were so central to his memoir and its reception. He refused to go on television himself. He would address the claims only through his publisher, who said they would remove the book from the shelves of all the Waldenbooks and small bookshops around the country. If readers wanted to have their money back, they could have their money back. The world wouldn’t be hearing from Poxl West again anytime soon, and what they’d heard to date they were encouraged to forget.

  * * *

  I threw away my spiral-bound notebooks soon thereafter. Rabbi Ben’s books on Kabbalah took up the space Skylock had occupied on my bookshelf. As painful as the allegations were, my uncle’s admission was even more painful. Now when I read back over that Atlantic story instead of the book, I saw things about it that I hadn’t before: There was, in fact, too much emphasis on sex in the book. The pathos of Poxl’s need for Françoise drove the narrative, and somehow my focus on the war heroism hadn’t allowed me to see the vacillation in his guilt at leaving her. The narrative did wander at times. The anonymous reviewer from The Economist had taken a good bit of the writing to task, and maybe his anonymous parsing of Poxl’s prose wasn’t so inaccurate. Maybe the book hadn’t been the triumph I understood it to be when I first read it. Maybe I was a teenager sitting around pouting in his bedroom and doing an amateur job of what I would later teach my undergraduates is called “historiography.”

  Maybe it was my uncle who’d made me love that book so much, and not the book, after all. But then hadn’t the Times called it an instant classic? It was a bestseller, and didn’t being a bestseller mean something? Best. The epithet contained the word best.

  It was the most confused I’d ever been in my young life. I don’t know if I’ve been as confused in my life since.

  I kept expecting we’d hear from Poxl—that he’d call to let us know he hadn’t lied but had been pushed too hard, that he had cracked under interrogation, that the whole thing was some misunderstanding. Or that he’d lied and had an explanation. Or that they’d gotten it wrong, he’d gotten it wrong—anything, an
ything as long as it came from his mouth. Or even for him finally to send us those signed copies he’d promised.

  But we heard nothing.

  In history class the following fall, for the first time but not the last in my long career as a student, I had nothing to write about. We moved on to a unit on American history. I was happy to be granted a reprieve from having to think about World War II. I tried writing a research paper on the Volstead Act. The comment from my teacher was written in letters just the tiniest bit longer and taller than before:

  “A bit diffuse. Research feels thin. B−.”

  * * *

  My parents didn’t talk to me about my uncle at first, just after we learned of his ignominy. Before bed one night, I heard them at the dinner table.

  “Does the kid seem like a mess to you?” My father asked this without my mother having said anything further. “I’d be a mess. We did this. He looked up to Poxl so much even before his success. How many times do you think he’s read that book? It’s all he talks about.”

  My mother said she didn’t know. She didn’t know what to say, she said.

  I thought that would be all, until I heard her footsteps on the stairs. I was on my stomach on my bed. I tried to wipe the tears off my face, but it was no use.

  She put her hand on my back. I put my face back into my pillow.

  “I know how much you care for your uncle,” my mother said. She was known as a taskmaster around our house, a hospital administrator at our city’s biggest hospital and a home administrator, too. I was last among my friends to get to watch R-rated movies, and she didn’t allow any sugary foods in our kitchen. Where my uncle Poxl had shown me the outsized sweep of the arts and culture in Boston, she had taught me the discipline that would serve me when I was older, but which felt only like an obstacle when I was a kid. But when she touched my back, she was the softest, easiest person on the planet. Her hand on my back was like Pentothal in my veins.

  “How on earth could I have believed him all the way?” I said. “Every word. I ate up every word. And he didn’t even fly those planes.”

  “You didn’t have any reason not to believe him, Eli,” my mom said. “Like we’ve said all along, your uncle is a complicated character. He suffered such grave losses throughout his life. And he’s been so long alone, since the last of them—one loss too many. I think he just lost his way.”

  I started to say something back, all the things her soft hand on my back unleashed, but at that point I’d simply crumpled. For months I’d been going around telling everyone not only that my uncle Poxl’s book had been a bestseller—but that I’d been a part of its creation somehow. I was the one who’d sat at Cabot’s and over sundaes listened as he’d spun nimbus clouds around his head—and mine—narrating his bombing of Hamburg. I saw all in one stroke that Poxl West was less like an Elie Wiesel or a Primo Levi, and more like Prospero, conjuring an unknown world with the pen he’d only now abjured when public spectacle forced him to. So what did that make me? Some Caliban he’d given language to, slave and accomplice to his rough magic? Even if I was so lucky as simply to be his Ariel, a fairy out in the world doing his bidding, the task hadn’t been what I’d understood it to be. It wasn’t reporting; it was world building.

  I put my face into my pillow and my mother rubbed my back until I fell asleep.

  Later that night, after she left my room, I woke up in the dirty evening dark. Some light crept in under my closed door. My clothes were still on. I got up and put the light on to undress for my night’s sleep. But before I did, I put my copy of Skylock on my bookshelf between a couple of X-Men collections.

  * * *

  The pain of a response like the one the world had to my uncle Poxl’s lies brings with it an imperceptible vacuum. Descent from fame bares no bluster to match the bluster of its ascent.

  There is only nothing.

  As I say, my parents didn’t hear from Poxl in the weeks after the revelation of his improprieties, his confession. He didn’t call on us. He’d come to our house unannounced during the Super Bowl only months earlier, and that was how my uncle Poxl so often came.

  Unannounced.

  There is no announcement of absence. It’s just that: absence. Days passed. All events were nonevents. I didn’t go to see musicals at the Wang Center. I had nothing to write poetry about. At Brandeis there was a performance of King Lear. I didn’t even think of attending. Occasionally I would see advertisements in the Globe for a performance of Tosca or the Bach solo cello suite performed by Yo-Yo Ma—my parents swore off their subscription to the Times around the time they swore off my uncle, or he swore them off; I didn’t know which—and a strange open feeling would buzz and whir in the balls of my feet.

  But there was no one to take me to any of these events. When he wasn’t working on the weekends billing his hours, my father and I made trips out to Mr. Big Toyland for baseball cards, or I played flag football in the backyard with my friends, but it didn’t feel like a replacement. It wasn’t a replacement for what was missing. Just some other thing.

  Truth was, I didn’t think I cared much back then for the opera or Shakespeare or the symphony. I would much better have liked a trip to Fenway or Foxboro.

  I just liked going to Cabot’s for sundaes with my big, handsome, red uncle Poxl.

  What I did have were my Hebrew lessons at Beth-El, which continued even into the summer, though class met less frequently. A few weeks after The New York Times article appeared, I sought Rabbi Ben out in the hour before our class. He’d long had a standing period before his class that he called “Rap Time,” a time when his students could come talk with him about anything they wanted.

  I may have been the first student ever to go see him—and now for the second time. He had on huge headphones like the guy in the Maxell cassette advertisements. I had to say his name three times before he turned around.

  “Oh shit,” he said. “I mean, oh.” He took off the headphones and pointed to the burlap-upholstered chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat, my man,” he said.

  Even when I’d come to see him that previous time, after class, I hadn’t really looked around his office. I’d been so focused on Poxl, I hadn’t seen anything in front of me for months. Now here I was. On the wall behind his desk he had both a Grateful Dead poster (Oakland Coliseum, 1976) and a photo of an unremarkable bald old Ashkenazi Jew with oversized ears and large dark eyes. He saw me looking at both. “The show was the first I ever went to,” Rabbi Ben said. “Sick Jerry solo on ‘Dark Star’ that night.” I just looked at him. “The dude on the right, that’s Gershom Scholem. Wrote my dissertation on Kabbalah on him, you know.”

  I knew.

  “I know you know,” Rabbi Ben said. “Just didn’t want to assume. Did you ever get a chance to check out those books I sent you home with last time?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. Where in the past I might have lied, found a way to say something broad about them, this was a new time in my life as a teenager. There were many things I wanted, and to tell so much as a single white lie was not one of them.

  We both sat in silence for a second.

  “So now I will do some assuming. You’re not here to talk about Kabbalah. You’re not here to talk about those books I lent you. You’re not even here to talk about your crush on Rachel Rothstein.” What was there to say to that? “You’re here to talk about your uncle,” Rabbi Ben said. “Poxl West.”

  “I guess I am,” I said. “I guess you heard.”

  “Hard to miss on the ‘Arts’ page of the Times,” Rabbi Ben said. “How you feeling?”

  It was a simple question, but one I was unprepared to answer. I didn’t have any answers then, and I’m not sure I have any answers now, decades later. Just questions.

  “What’s the worst of it, my man?” Rabbi Ben said. “That now Rachel Rothstein will stop paying attention again?”

  “What the—” I said, and hoped he’d drop it.

  “Okay, sorry,” he said. “I mean, I know y
ou know I see you looking at her. And I saw the way she looked at you when we were talking about your uncle. She even told me she’d read the book.”

  “She did?”

  “She said she did. She might even have said she liked it. Although I got the feeling from talking to her that she was not so impressed by the way he wrote about having left that woman in Holland. I know how much you care about your uncle’s heroism. But seems possible a reader like Rachel might not be so impressed by all of what he did. All of which might not matter so much anymore.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  For a minute, neither of us said anything more.

  “Okay, let me try it this way,” Rabbi Ben said. There was a kind of seriousness on his face I’d not observed in him before. The skin was bunched above his hirsute brow. I could see that the smirk I often had seen in his eyes was somehow absent. “How did you feel before you learned about it?”

  “Good,” I said. “Proud. I mean, the guy was my uncle. He was, you know, he might as well have been my grandfather, for what he meant to my family. He’d read me all those stories before they ever even appeared in the book, and now…”

  “Now what?”