The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  “Now he’s a fraud.”

  “Well, is he? I don’t know any of this anywhere near as much as you do, but I read all about it. I read the book. But in terms of what he’s been accused of, what did he really do wrong?”

  “He didn’t fly that sortie over Hamburg he said he did.” I could see a flinch of smile reappear in Rabbi Ben’s eyes when I said “sortie.” “Flight,” I said. “He didn’t fly that bombing run.”

  “But he was telling a story, right? Honestly, I don’t see what’s so wrong with it. He confessed to his error. Book’s still mostly true, I’d say. He’s led an amazing life and told it well.”

  “I was basically bragging about him for months,” I said before I had time not to. “I said I was gonna bring him to talk to our Hebrew class.”

  “And if you had, I’m sure he would’ve been great. Will be. Why don’t you invite him?”

  “Still?” I said.

  “Anytime. Listen, I know you don’t care so much about Kabbalah. I know you might not have time in the next little while to read much up on it. But it’s my main jam. Thing. It’s my main thing. You know the main book of Kabbalah.”

  It was called the Zohar, I said. I’d listened to him enough to know.

  “It was written by this thirteenth-century Spanish Jew named Moses de Léon. Moses de Léon went into his study every day and came out every week with new material about the Ein Sof, about the Sefirot—the main tenets of Jewish mysticism. He would bring them out, read them to his friends. When people asked him where it came from, he said he was translating an ancient Aramaic text. Claimed he went back to his study every day and translated a little more. But you know where he got it?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “Up here,” Rabbi Ben said.

  He was tapping at his temple with his forefinger.

  “There was no ancient Aramaic text called the Zohar. There was a book that Moses de Léon wanted to write. A book based on how he saw Adonai, HaShem, the unspeakable represented by the Tetragrammaton, the God he wanted us to reach. And people wouldn’t listen to it from him, so he said he was translating some ancient text—and then he just went ahead and made up his story. That’s what people do when they write. They make up stories, details to fit the stories they need to tell. And people are still reading—worshiping—that book, almost seven hundred years later. I’ve basically given my whole spiritual life over to it.”

  In the picture behind Rabbi Ben, that old, big-eared Kabbalah scholar looked down at us. For the first time I looked back. I needed a minute before I could respond. A minute when I wasn’t looking at Rabbi Ben. A minute when I wasn’t even thinking about what Poxl West would think. A minute when it was just what I thought, directly.

  “So listen,” Rabbi Ben said. “I think it’s time for class.”

  He’d never had anything but time for me. Today he’d said his piece. Maybe he thought it would be better for me not to respond. Maybe he understood what I know now: that I couldn’t possibly have processed all of what had been happening in those months enough to really say anything yet. Or maybe he just hadn’t ever had a rap session with anyone before and didn’t know how to end it. “We should get to the classroom. But if you want to bring Poxl West to my class some time in the future—anytime in the future, my man—you just bring him.”

  I told him I’d give it some thought.

  “Give it all the thought you want,” Rabbi Ben said. “When you know, I’ll know.”

  * * *

  For a year and then another year, we didn’t hear from Poxl. I went to Hebrew class and then I didn’t—I was confirmed in the temple, and there was no higher step. I never did try to reach my uncle, and never extended an invitation for him to attend Rabbi Ben’s class. Uncle Poxl’s memory faded and that senescence was another absence, another void. No one mourns the death of a book. No fly buzzes at the death of a reputation. The prep school where he’d taught found a new teacher to take over his classroom. The Patriots were good, but not good enough to make it back to the Super Bowl. My father took me to Fenway a dozen times each summer—his firm got great seats. It would be almost two decades before the Red Sox returned to the World Series. By then, I had a kid of my own.

  I found new things to write about for my senior history class. I got more interested in an art class my senior year than I thought I might, not having cared for art beyond those trips Poxl had taken me on to the MFA, where what I cared about was him and not the paintings on the walls. We studied modernism. When Mrs. Hornicker turned her brown plastic slide tray and an image of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon flashed up on the screen, I sat back. Here were women with a dozen faces each, all blocked in washed-out colors, as if through the scrim of a Boston winter. I read a biography of Picasso and wrote about him. I got an A+ for the first time in a year, and a “See me.”

  “Your interest in Picasso is obvious,” Mrs. Hornicker said. “I’m going to take a small group of students up to MoMA in New York to see the permanent collection.” I asked my parents. They said yes.

  * * *

  A month later we were walking up Fifty-third Street. It was the first week in October, and the sky was so blue it seemed to push down toward the gray city pavement. I walked through air so crisp I felt as if a hand was at my back, pushing me forward with the ineluctable rhythm that seemed to carry the millions of humans rushing through Manhattan every midday.

  Inside the museum we browsed through the permanent collection. Picassos were hung opposite Pollocks and de Koonings, Duchamps and Rauschenbergs. Here we were, standing before the very works we’d just been looking at in books, set against pale gray-painted walls. I walked with determination. Where the colors of Les Demoiselles had looked washed-out in our textbook, now I saw the painting was covered in bright vermilions, oranges like the jack-o’-lanterns we bought at Volente’s Farm every autumn. Something about that brilliance pushed me away. The ceilings of the place felt too low, painted too white. In the doorways of every room I moved to after seeing the Picasso were scowl-faced security guards. None of the faces on the myriad old women in furs who passed me was a Hepburn face. I walked around, looking for a painting with muted colors like the peach pinks I’d seen in the Picasso reproduction in my book at home.

  In the last room I entered I came upon it: a watercolor of a girl with a large tuft of black hair. The canvas was beige, her face the same hue as the background. Her body was defined only by a dowdy black outline. Brushstrokes led down to blithely drawn legs. In between them, two curvilinear lines of gibbous, then concave labia. Just as my neck began to burn with my realization of their sex, as I recognized I was looking at a woman’s spread legs, a voice broke in.

  “It’s a Schiele,” the voice said.

  I turned. On the bench behind me, looking at this painting, was a wizened old man. I smelled the naphthalene on his suit before I saw him. He wore a blue Brooks Brothers suit and around his neck a scarf with two stripes in different shades of dark green. His face was blanched, hidden by a wiry red beard. “Mädchen mit schwarzem Haar, Girl with Black Hair. Not a major work, but characteristic of the essentially pornographic watercolors he did when he was young and painting in Czesky Krumlov.”

  The speech sounded like it had been written on the placard on the wall in the museum. This wiry man had been talking for longer than I’d like to remember before I realized it was my uncle Poxl. His face had undergone a transformation so violent it took me a moment to recognize him. His nose bore bright red bulbs. The red of veins spread back to his temples like a woman before she has properly rubbed in blush. The whites of his eyes were yellow. They, too, bore spreading red veins. Small patches all around his face were pocked with the white skin of scar tissue, remnants of hastily removed melanomas. He was still well dressed, my uncle, and he acknowledged me before I acknowledged him.

  “I’d always wanted to take you to see Schieles,” Poxl said. He made no move to get up, but he patted the space beside him. “Not this, though,” he said. “No, n
o, you would have to see even more than this.”

  I sat down next to him. For a moment we looked at the painting. Poxl didn’t turn to look at me. I started to say fifty-eight things but they all bottlenecked. Instead I said: “You come here often?”

  “What kind of pickup line is this?” Poxl said. “You want an old man, he’s yours.” Space invisible as static electricity seemed to grow between us. My uncle realized how odd this bit of humor was and he quickly said, “For a time I worked as a docent at the Jewish Museum. That’s all I ever really wanted to do from the beginning—see masterpieces. I didn’t have to make them. Now I just come to look at the art.”

  Once Poxl started talking, it was as if he couldn’t stop. He explained that in the time after he was discovered—that’s how he put it, “after I was discovered,” though it took me a while to realize he meant found to be a fraud, not discovered as a talent—he settled into an apartment he’d rented in Hell’s Kitchen. It was a short walk over to MoMA.

  “I felt anonymous here amid all the great paintings,” he said. “All the real art.”

  For the past couple of years, he could do little more than hide out and visit museums. His publisher couldn’t take back the advance he’d received for Skylock, which was just enough to live quietly on Tenth Avenue while he tutored kids from prep schools in Westchester, kids referred by friends of his old colleagues in Boston.

  But he was shunned. He had no one. It was as if his attempt at a foray into public life—into the public eye, into the fame that he’d long desired, let’s be honest—had negated his M.Phil, his having almost completed his Ph.D., his expertise on Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama. His ability to teach anyone anything. “Even my closest friends eventually cut me off,” he said.

  He stopped talking. He just stared ahead. I did, too. Had he considered my parents his closest friends? They wouldn’t have thought so. Poxl hadn’t called and he hadn’t left a number where to reach him. And though I wasn’t yet emboldened enough to say it, wasn’t this one more lie? It was Poxl who had cut them off, his friends and family, us. Not the other way around. But I had to say something.

  “I missed all those trips downtown,” I said. “I missed the opera. I even missed the Museum of Fine Arts. I know it wasn’t MoMA, but it was my introduction to the world.”

  A woman passed between us and the Schiele painting. Poxl had begun to turn his shoulders so he was half-facing me. I’d done the same. I had one knee up on the bench.

  “Why don’t you let me buy you lunch,” Poxl said. “Why don’t you let me take you to the Galerie St. Etienne, where we can see more Schieles, so many, and we can lunch on the way.”

  I looked around. I didn’t see my teacher anywhere, or any of my classmates. We weren’t to leave the permanent collection, on threat of a suspension from school. But here was Poxl West, sitting before me.

  I told him I couldn’t leave the museum but that we could eat there at MoMA if he wanted.

  We went off to the museum’s small café. He didn’t ask what I wanted, just bought me a cup of coffee. I didn’t drink coffee, so I let it sit in front of me.

  “I was always going to bring you to New York City,” he said. He’d just sat down and started talking like he had when he saw me back in the gallery, like we hadn’t lost a beat. “I was going to finish out the tour, and then I was going to bring you down to the Galerie St. Etienne to really show you something.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “You don’t believe me?” Poxl said.

  “You never even sent the signed copies you’d promised you were going to send before the book came out.”

  A tiny bead of sweat had formed at the tip of Poxl’s red, red nose. I sat looking at him. For how long had I wanted to ask him what he was thinking, not sending us those books? Me. For not sending me that book. It makes me as angry to think of it today as it did then. For how long had he been in my mind and then fled? And now here he was, the great man reduced to something smaller. My uncle, for all intents and purposes my grandfather, but diminished.

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore, Poxl.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “That.” I put the stirrer he’d picked up at the front of the café into his coffee and turned it around in the cup. I didn’t even need to look under the table to see that his feet must again be crossed atop one another.

  “When the magazine story first came out,” he said, “I was despondent. I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. I hadn’t meant to lie or to steal anyone’s story. I sat down and I wrote a book, and people loved that book and read it and they wanted to hear me read from it. So I did what they wanted.”

  “But you didn’t pilot S-Sugar.”

  He said nothing.

  “You didn’t drop bombs on Hamburg,” I said. “You didn’t fly sorties piloting that Lancaster.”

  “I flew for the Royal Air Force!” Poxl said. Something had changed in his face again. I could see now that the tips of both of his shoes were on either side of him, planted solidly on the floor. “I flew Tiger Moths, and I piloted RAF planes, training to be a Czech Jewish teenager attacking the Nazi nightmare!”

  “But you didn’t,” I said.

  “I did!” Poxl said. He said it too loudly; even in the din of MoMA’s café, families on either side of us looked up. A smartly dressed couple said something to each other in Italian, picked up their sandwiches, and moved away.

  “So I didn’t fly that sortie I wrote about in the book,” Poxl said, quieter now. “So I didn’t enter that cloud over Lübeck. But I flew RAF planes, I trained on them. And if I hadn’t been injured, I might have flown that one, too.”

  What was this now? Where just a minute before I’d been pushing him, not even able to get him to admit he’d forgotten to send me that signed copy of his book, I now saw that something in my understanding of him—of the world’s understanding of him—was shifting. I asked him what he meant. He’d made it up, having flown over Hamburg.

  “I trained for the RAF, just as it says in the book,” Poxl said. “In my book. But then at the end of my training, I landed hard, went to the infirmary. I had been injured and I’d developed pleurisy, just like I wrote. Just like I told you. And no matter how many months I begged, they wouldn’t allow me back to my commission. I’d met Smith and Gallsworthy and some others during training, and I kept up with them when I could. I was sent south to a desk job. When the war ended, I kept begging, until they sent me to a commission at a refugee camp in Wunstorf.”

  “Where you met Smith again?”

  “Where I met Smith again, just as it said in the book.”

  “Well, not just as it said,” I said.

  “Smith had always given me a hard time in training, and he gave me a hard time when we saw each other again in Wunstorf. But over time we became friends. There we befriended as well a Czech Jew, a survivor. He was a man my age, Herman Janowitz. Like me, he’d lost his whole family, had been sent from his home before the annexation and made it to London.

  “We’d known many of the same people—he grew up in Prague, his parents lived not far from my grandmother Traute in the Zizkov district. What were the chances of this! Two Jews who’d escaped the Nazi aggression to come and fly with the RAF. But then there was that Czech wing I’d heard of, and another Polish wing. I wasn’t so unique after all, I came to see.

  “I sat around for months and listened as Smith began to reveal a surprising sense of guilt at what he’d done in S-Sugar in the days after I was forced to resign my commission. And prompted by Smith’s story, Janowitz told quite a story of his own: There had been a night when he piloted a Lancaster over Hamburg himself. He’d flown into a thundercloud and somehow come out the other end, flown his sortie over Hamburg just the same. He told how many of his fellow kites went down, struck by lightning, or were forced to turn around, head back to base.

  “Both of these compatriots of mine had been in the air over Hamburg. Flying sorties! Flying those very bombers I might have been train
ed to fly myself had it not been for that damn injury. They’d gone on to kill the very Nazis I’d hoped to kill—and then been plagued with a remorse that I came to empathize with myself. I started to realize as I listened to them what I’d done to Françoise, what I’d done in leaving so many of the people I loved then. I started to realize what we’d all done, simply by listening to their stories.”

  Now Poxl quieted. It was toward the end of lunchtime, and the crowds moving through the café began to thin. It was the two of us sitting there, Uncle Poxl telling stories as if we were back in Cabot’s, back in Boston. Only now he wasn’t reading from pages in front of him. None of this was prepared. It was just Poxl West talking.

  “So you didn’t make it all up,” I said. He continued to look down into his coffee. “But you didn’t fly those planes like it said in your memoir.”

  “Over the course of many, many years, I wrote three drafts of a book—novel or memoir, what did I care? Each was rejected. Each was the story of the first love of my life, a woman I’d come to love in Rotterdam and whom I’d turned around at the end of the war and sought out only after I realized how badly I’d wronged her. But it wasn’t enough. I’d been injured; I hadn’t flown sorties myself. If I’m honest, perhaps I tried too hard to espouse those emotions when they weren’t my own—it was a book of love and vengeance I’d sat down to write, not yet of love and remorse.

  “And then Percy Smith died. He had no family, had lived out the last of his days in London, where I went to visit him when I could. He died a short, lonely, painful death from lung cancer, and when he died, I flew back for his funeral.”

  I told him I remembered—he’d mentioned the flight back during those early days of our Cabot’s trips. He hadn’t provided much detail then.

  “That’s right. I went to his funeral and thought, My own funeral can’t be long off. And only he knew about Herman Janowitz. He was the only one from that S-Sugar crew left, and now he was dead. So I picked the book back up, this novel that was now going to be a memoir. I thought of Janowitz, of my dearly departed friend Percy Smith, who had once been my enemy, of the shift I’d seen in them and the shift it had evinced in me. Here was a story I understood—not just a catalog of the things I’d seen—not just a profession of love—not just a paean to Françoise—but a story of vengeance, guilt, remorse and love. And then I began to do what Shakespeare would have done. I told a story—not factually what had happened, but bearing every drop of the truth of what had happened. As Iago himself said, ‘What you know, you know.’