The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  “If you’d like to stay here and have this tea with me,” she said, and would say repeatedly in the days to come, “I have no qualms with it. But that is all it will be. Us, having a cup.” She drank her tea and I drank mine, and it was not clear if this was an end or a beginning.

  Acknowledgment: Final Interlude

  My junior year at college my parents called with news of Poxl’s fate. He was seventy-one. He’d gone into Mount Sinai for a gallbladder operation and died from complications related to the anesthesia when he was put under. After years of skirting danger, Poxl West had been killed by something that had gone wrong inside himself. My father received the call one Sunday night when he was at home. Poxl had had the foresight to leave a will for what little he’d left behind, and he’d named my father executor. I wondered if there wasn’t someone who had better be called. He must have had some family, though I realized only then I’d never heard tell of them. Everyone must have passed, or been estranged.

  Apparently there was no one else.

  Poxl had listed our number in Needham as his emergency contact when he went in for his surgery. Only we were my uncle Poxl’s kin now, and there was an apartment to be emptied.

  So while I didn’t have time to leave school just then, I decided to go home.

  My uncle Poxl was to be buried at the Beth Israel Memorial Park in Waltham. Though he’d given up on Massachusetts, as I’d discovered that afternoon at MoMA, Poxl’s body would rest farther north. No one attended his funeral but a couple of older men I assumed to be professor friends. What old friends he had left must still have been across the sea, and none of them had come to see him laid to rest as he had gone to pay his last respects to Percy Smith years before. My father took care of all the arrangements, and maybe he simply didn’t know whom to tell, or how.

  A rabbi davened the Kaddish. We dropped dirt on his thin wooden box. We shook hands with the two men who’d come. One was short, with his head shaved to the skin; the other had a shock of gray hair.

  “He was my uncle,” I said. “Like a grandfather to me.”

  “He was very good to us after our father died,” the gray-haired man said. “He helped Jules with our father’s estate.” The bald man just nodded. These were the neighbors whose father had stashed the hundred-dollar bills in his books, the failed novelist Poxl had come to tell us about that Super Bowl Sunday, which felt, now, a lifetime ago or more. But still: Jules and Willie.

  Nothing would have stolen those names from my head.

  I turned to tell my father that these were the sons of the novelist Poxl had told us about years earlier, but he was busy taking care of the rabbi—my uncle had hardly left a thing, but he’d left enough to pay for his obsequies—and by the time I got his attention, Willie and Jules were gone.

  The next afternoon we drove down to New York to see to Poxl’s estate. My father was to drive me back to campus in Connecticut and then head to Boston in the U-Haul. We arrived at his apartment on Fifty-sixth Street near Eleventh Avenue with the sun bright and painful above the tops of the buildings. By the time we’d reached his fifth-floor walk-up, shade had fallen for the day, and Poxl’s apartment was steeped in a grainy half-light. I helped my father lug a couch and a dresser down five flights. We soaked through our shirts that gelid late-fall afternoon. We carried furniture and appliances downstairs and loaded the U-Haul. Some of it my parents would keep. I somehow didn’t feel right taking any of his stuff.

  “You don’t at least want a memento of the man?” my father said. “He was your uncle, after all.”

  “Not my real uncle.”

  “We were there when he needed us,” my father said. “And no matter what happened later on, he was there when we needed him. We’d grown to be family, Eli, and you know it. He was like a grandfather to you. He had put us down as his only emergency contact, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I saw him once, you know,” I said.

  “You saw him lots of times.”

  “No, like, I saw him after the whole thing with his book.”

  The corners of my father’s mouth turned down. This twitching thing happened under his left eye that I recognize in myself when my kids have angered me. That dim smell of naphthalene I’d caught on Poxl back at MoMA years earlier lifted into the air from some indeterminate corner of his half-vacant apartment.

  “When I was in New York, my senior year,” I said. “Remember I got suspended? You guys thought I might not have gotten into college because of it.”

  “You might not have.”

  “You were so pissed those early moments after it all went down, I couldn’t tell you. And the longer it went on, the harder it would’ve been to tell you. But I ran into him, at MoMA. In front of a Schiele painting. He explained to me what had happened with the book—why he’d made that stuff up.”

  My father didn’t say anything. It was a lot to take in all at once and especially right after a funeral.

  I lifted a chair and moved it to another side of the room. It needed to go downstairs. My father didn’t follow. I walked it back over toward him. I sat.

  “So he admitted it,” my father said. “Even to you.”

  “It was a lot more complicated than that,” I said. And I proceeded to recount to him just what Poxl had told me. Telling it then, saying it aloud after years of rehearsing it in my head, trying to think how I’d tell it to someone, in which exact words in which exact order and with what inflection when I finally did, I felt as if a kind of constriction in my chest had let itself go. It was as if the words were coming out of me on their own, in their own syntax, as if the language had coalesced around the story in the only way they possibly could. There were no choices to be made anymore. None of the questions of inflection or order I’d considered so carefully remained. Now there was just the old ineradicable rhythm of the story—a story I haven’t told or known so well since. I wondered if this was what Poxl had felt in those days when he tried to write his memoir one last time, when he took Herman Janowitz’s story as his own.

  “It’s a lot for him to have held inside, alone, for all that time,” my father said.

  “Alone,” I said. “Why was he alone after all?”

  “He never told you.”

  I asked him what—I was sure Poxl had told me everything there was to tell, some of it even true.

  “One day in the early seventies, when he was still living in London, his wife was hit by a car. Died instantly. They’d never had kids, and she was all he had. He really never got over it. Before we learned about his war stories, it had kind of come to define him, that sadness. Now we understand it was just the last in a long line of losses, but it was the most immediate. They’d been married twenty years.”

  We both sat there in the faded light, amid the smell of mothballs. From the apartment one floor down some loud heavy-metal guitar buzzed on the floor, one final insult to the myth of Poxl West’s private life.

  “That’s why we always let him spend so much time with you, Eli. Poxl was a good friend of your grandfather—your grandfather was the dean who hired him, and they became fast friends soon after Poxl arrived in the States. After the accident, Poxl could never bring himself to return to London. He’d suffered one too many losses, I guess. Couldn’t even bear to be in London at all anymore, except to go back for a wedding or a funeral when duty dictated he had to. He’d told us he had cousins who’d survived, unlike so many of their kin, and that they had returned to Czechoslovakia after the war. But he’d grown estranged from them because of their returning. They’d gone back to a city that was now called Litomerice, but that wasn’t the city he’d grown up in. His was called Leitmeritz, the German for it. He found a place here, and a job, with an ocean between him and those awful memories.

  “So after Grandpa died, when Poxl asked if he could take you into town to see plays, to go to the museum, to go out and listen to him at Cabot’s even, of course we always said yes. Like I said, he and his wife had never had kids. I think it fulfilled something
for him, spending that time with you. I’m sure there was something in those outings that let him talk about one long, momentous period of his life that had previously been too hard to remember. Lots of those from his generation didn’t want to talk about it, but now Poxl did. We felt it had to be a good thing. I’m sure writing it down in that memoir, having it acknowledged—his love, his experiences, no matter what he fabricated—must have freed something in him.”

  “Well, why the shit didn’t he ever tell me that?” I said. When I started talking I was sure I would feel the anger of it having been kept from me. But there wasn’t enough air in my lungs. I felt light as a cirrus cloud, jittery. The question came out thin—so lacking in conviction, my father could hear it.

  “We did, Eli,” my father said. “I think you just didn’t hear it.”

  “He could have talked to me about it.”

  “Could he have? Talked to a fifteen-year-old about the pain of losing his wife after years of marriage, a memory that stayed so present it was as if it wasn’t past? That’s different from telling war stories. Maybe war stories are easier to tell than simple tragedies. Or harder. I don’t know. I guess in the end it was easier for your uncle to tell the stories from back then—Nazis killed his kin and so he tried to kill them back. That might not even have been quite how it was, but he could remember it that way. Why would he have told you about a car up and hitting his wife, years later? That’s a different kind of story altogether. It would take a whole other novel to tell it.”

  I started to say that he was wrong. Or that he was right. Or that as I thought about it now, I wished that my uncle Poxl would have loved me enough or trusted me enough to have confided that pain. I could quote three dozen historiographers and theorists to him now, but not one of them would have helped me to have something to say that evening. It would take years of trying to process what Poxl West meant to me in those days and even after all those years; the best I could hope for was a glimpse of the truth of a feeling I’d had when I was a teenager. Is that a truth best gazed at up close, pretending the tectonic weight of years hadn’t passed deep below the surface? Or from the other end of a telescope, one big world made round as a shooting marble by distance, and a trick of light? Neither of those have made it knowable to me.

  Not one thing I could have said then would have been right.

  I know that now.

  I was a teenager back then, and Poxl West had been a red old Ashkenazi Jew in his dotage. What he needed from me he needed from me. I was lucky he needed anything from me at all. Luckier than I could have expressed. Luckier than I can conceive even now, no matter what percentage of it was fact. Maybe that’s the one thing I do know of that time: Whatever pain or confusion it brought then and brings still, I wouldn’t give back a minute of the time I’d spent with the hero, the writer, my uncle Poxl West.

  Finally I picked up the chair and took it down to the U-Haul. We lifted and lugged. We didn’t say anything more about Poxl.

  All through the evening I kept eyeing his library. I had forbearance of some kind, by then twenty and not a kid watching a Super Bowl, and not yet the man I am now. As I say, my uncle Poxl’s stories stuck with me over the years, and though I flirted with a degree in art history, I don’t have that kind of visual memory—not like Poxl—and the images didn’t take hold. History did. I took my Ph.D. in nineteenth-century European history. I’ve always had a hard time answering why that period was the one I settled on. Maybe I’ve known all along: There’s a comfort in living with the period before all the tumult Poxl lived through. Eighteen forty-eight wasn’t 1944. It was a period of wars and revolutions and upheaval, but distant enough to be history and stay history. It had no living survivors.

  When we finally did come to dealing with Uncle Poxl’s library later that evening, even after all I’d just learned, my palms prickled—desirous, intemperate. Only the day before I had seen Jules and Willie, whose father had failed as a novelist before scraping by as a book reviewer, but who had filled his books with bills. What might Poxl West’s books hold? What lessons had his neighbor taught my uncle all those years before, my uncle Poxl, whose brief fame had fled and left him in penury, an old man on a bench staring at Schieles and confessing his most public trespasses to a teenage kid while still hiding his sharpest pains?

  I pulled his old Shakespeare, the very copy Mrs. Goldring must have left for him in that cave east of London, off the shelf. It was travel-worn and smelled of mildew. Its leaves fell against one another with a whish. They flapped, heavy with possibility.

  Nothing.

  I turned the book to inspect it further, All’s Well That Ends Well to The Winter’s Tale, only to find so many notes covering those pages, it was rendered nearly illegible. I remembered the notes Poxl had written about, notes Mrs. Goldring had made in that book decades ago, and a knot drew up in my throat as I turned to King Lear. Here I was about to find evidence of a lie or a truth on the pages in his book, a verifiable, incontrovertible truth. Or lie. I turned to Act 1, and on the second page, when Cordelia has just so unwisely shunned her father’s love, when she has publicly shamed him for refusing to say she loved him most, there it was. Next to the Lear lines, in a wavering pen but clear and distinct:

  “Pocksall.”

  The airy cold breath of a ghost seemed to huff against my neck. My head felt light, and then my father said, “Eli, come give me a hand here,” and I had no choice but to put the book down. Before I left that night, I put it in my backpack. That book would be mine.

  We packed twenty-three boxes with Poxl’s books that evening. I put eighteen copies of his book into a single box and with a fat Magic Marker labeled it:

  “Nonfiction.”

  Before taping the box up, I turned to the back of the last copy I encountered. My name was still there, typed in black ink. Just above it was a paragraph I’d never paid much attention to before—I’m sure I must have read it, put the words through my head—how could I not have?—but I’d never really taken in. Every time I’d turned to that page, and I must have done so a thousand times, maybe more, my eyes went reflexively for that place where my name was in print, simply skimming everything before and after it. I’d been acknowledged, and when you’ve been acknowledged, it’s hard to pay much attention to anything else.

  “For my love, Victoria, the last I lost,” it read. “All these stories came after you.”

  My father passed in the hall outside. I flipped the book shut so hastily it fell from my hands with a clamor before I could keep it from hitting Poxl’s hardwood floor.

  ACT FIVE

  1.

  Françoise hosted me weekly for chamomile tea. She never accepted any help with the preparation of the tea, or of the traditional British foods she’d learned to serve William Rutherford’s guests—cucumber finger sandwiches, scones and heavy cream with strawberries and currants—foods she’d rarely encountered when I first knew her, but which now were central to her existence. Once a week, on Wednesday afternoons, she gathered our teacups, lit the gas and passed her hand over that open flame on her stovetop, and then ran cold water on her singed palm.

  With time Françoise allowed the range of our conversation to broaden. She sat before me and fingered her teacup. Now her face was somehow less dynamic and a far greater mystery than it had been those years earlier. One depends so much on the subtle movements of another’s eyes to perceive her thoughts—the face is so much more than simply the façade of a building.

  Françoise’s thoughts were now entirely her own. What her mouth didn’t say, her eyes couldn’t reveal.

  What Françoise would say was only that she was interested in current events. She allowed me to tell her what had transpired in the Pacific Theater, what was in the papers, in the political decisions which followed from the treaties at Yalta and a conference at Potsdam, in the austere postwar days of rationing and bedsit living in London. Within a year I was working three days a week as a flight instructor for British European Airways, as it was then
known. Wednesdays were not a possibility, and as an RAF veteran, I was given no trouble with this request. I first set out as well on attaining an A.B., for which I was able to apply some of the courses at Leathersellers College early in the war. Much later, in the evenings after work, I was able to attain an M. Phil. I went on to a program for a Ph.D. in English literature, with a specialty in Elizabethan drama, and completed the course work and began a dissertation on Shakespeare. With the focus I’ve given to writing this memoir—and then to teaching, and to life—to this day I’ve not completed it. I still hope one day I will.

  During this same period Richmond began to call me with ever greater frequency and, its being in the direction of RAF Northolt, was a natural way station on my daily commute. For a period a lull in training at British European Airways allowed for Fridays off as well.

  On those days the bench outside Françoise’s window beckoned. I sat and waited for her to open her curtains. There were blackout curtains installed during the Blitz. William left their flat at nine in the morning, and at ten Françoise stood at her second-story window—not looking out, of course, for she couldn’t see, but standing with the sun on her face. She had changed so acutely since those days in Rotterdam. The deep scars around her eyes seemed to shift the whole manner of her person. She had now a slick burn mark across her brown left cheek. Her front teeth no longer had their gap—they’d been replaced.

  I wondered how extensive the damage to her body was. Her hair was still so long and dark, her frame so full. Her nose was still flat, the most prominent feature on her face, and it still bore those brown islets her eyes had lost.

  For five minutes, maybe ten, Françoise would stand by that window. At some point she would recede back into her room. I don’t know what my purpose was during those days, only that being granted a view again of Françoise, what I’d wanted for so long, I had no interest in leaving. It wasn’t clear to me what my love for her was now. I knew only that Park Sheen was the sole venue where I might discover what it had become. I would sit on the bench and read plays and sonnets, and often when my eyes grew tired, I’d move to the center of the courtyard to deadhead the gardenias, pull off hollyhock blooms that were beginning to suffer from rust, so the whole plant would not be infected.