The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  Every story my uncle Poxl told moved through me like radiation.

  My mother said, “We could be here forever. I’m sure we’ll catch up with Poxl before he leaves town.” My father agreed, but he wanted to catch my uncle’s eye before we left.

  Uncle Poxl was talking to a thin young man with blond hair cropped tight to his head, and a tweed jacket. When I looked down, I saw something in Uncle Poxl I’d never before seen: He sat with his shoulders hunched forward, his feet one on top of the other like they were trying to hide under his chair. He seemed not to be answering any of the questions he was being asked by this young man, but only wanted to move him along. Maybe he wanted to be done so he could come see us; maybe he was simply tired after a reading that had gone on longer than he’d intended, ended with a question he’d not expected amid the personal triumph of bringing his book to publication.

  But where he’d shimmered like a flag in a strong wind when he’d walked into the room, now he looked older, shaken, vaguely defeated. It was hard to reconcile it with the fame he’d just attained, the triumph of his narrative voice. We left without getting to talk to him. We never even got to congratulate him in person on his success.

  * * *

  Uncle Poxl didn’t come to call on us after his reading like he’d promised—my father said Poxl had left a message pleading for our leniency amid the chaos of his trip. He was off to New York and then the West Coast only four days later, and he hoped to visit Harvard, MIT, and Radcliffe before he left Boston. It sounded more like an invention than an actual excuse, but who could blame him with this new light shining upon him?

  But this didn’t mean we would wait any longer before reading, finally, his book. On the kitchen table in front of my father, as he told us this story, was a thick plastic Waldenbooks bag. Inside were three hardcover copies of Skylock, one for each of us Goldsteins.

  “We’ll have him sign them when he’s through with his tour, Elijah,” my father said. “But at least now we can read it.”

  Uncle Poxl’s memoir was well over two hundred pages long. I read and read and read that first night after I got it, but my energy began to flag halfway through. I’d read more than enough to see that the stories as he had put them down were somehow fuller, more real and true than when he’d read them aloud from his manuscript pages. It’s no longer a surprise to me to find that first-person accounts are more evocative than the historiographies I teach, but at the time it was a revelation. My uncle Poxl’s stories now, between two covers, were so full of wandering detail, flashback, and of course, of the action that he’d recounted to us that night in Boston.

  But more than that, they were typeset, printed, and bound. Somehow the permanence that binding his stories had received made them more believable, more important as I read them than they’d even been as he read them to me. As Poxl’s Tiger Moth pitched and rattled, as the ailerons on his Lancaster iced over and lightning struck his bomber mid-flight, the image doubled: In the front of my mind, sun glinted off the Perspex of Uncle Poxl’s cockpit, drawn near-blindingly bright by adjectives and precise images. But in the back of my mind flashed only images of a youthful old man, lit from behind by some terrestrial sun, his hands gesticulating wildly around his head as he read to me from these same stories over a bowl of rapidly wilting whipped cream.

  Though I had finished only half the book late the night after my father handed it to me, before I closed it I instinctively turned past the final pages, to the material that came after the narrative of the book had ended. There I found a list of those people my uncle Poxl had wanted to acknowledge for their help in the production of his book, in bringing this life goal to fruition for him—the culmination of so many years of work. There were plenty of names there, but I didn’t let my eyes linger. Because I saw only one thing, standing out as if bolded and italicized—a lone tree in a forest—in a list toward the bottom half of the page:

  “And thanks to Elijah Goldstein, my first reader and constant listener. I’ve told these stories to you, and for you.”

  Poxl had noted me. There was my name, my full name, in print for the first time. When I published my first paper in an academic journal decades later, and every time since, it has felt simply a reiteration of that first moment I saw my name in Poxl’s book.

  Would I be lying if I said seeing it was better than it would have been to be standing on stage at the Wang? To have a painting hung on the walls of the MFA? All those painters were long dead. My head felt lifted toward the ceiling by a sense of importance you might call ego—a sense that, if I’m honest, I’ve sought ever since without being sated, no matter how many journals accept my work. Spidery fingers ran up the back of my neck.

  My reverie was broken when my mother called my name. The book clapped shut on my egotism. I yelled to my mother that I knew, I knew, and I turned out the light only to turn to dreams of my own grandeur mixed with my uncle’s.

  * * *

  I bragged of my uncle Poxl’s success for weeks after that night I got his book. The first weekend after, I read the second half, all in one sitting, a whole Saturday afternoon lost in Poxl’s European world. Now as I read, my energy didn’t flag. In the weeks that followed I read it over and over. Some days I came home and ran upstairs just to stare at the acknowledgments page again. I had been at work for months on a sententious poem, modeled on the Keats we’d just begun reading in English class, entitled “Upon Being Acknowledged.” It wasn’t quite an ode and it wasn’t quite a love poem, but it encapsulated all the self-seriousness and ardor of both.

  Though I’d only read Poxl’s book, not lived his life, now I peppered conversation with both the language of the memoir—“Have you ever seen a nacelle?” I might ask a friend. “Do you even know what one is?”—and the broader life experience it implied. I’d only just kissed a girl for the first time at summer camp the year before, but now I felt I knew what it was like to have been with prostitutes in brothels in Rotterdam, to have fought in a war whose aims we now understood to have been wholly noble. I’d read and knew that there were mitigating factors, of course, the complicated relationships Poxl had been through, but somehow those passed between my fingers like water. I was reading for airplanes and heroism, and that’s what I found.

  I told anyone I could all about Uncle Poxl’s accomplishments. The book received another glowing review in the daily Times the week after his Book Review triumph, and in the very same Boston Globe Poxl’s neighbor had written so many reviews for over the years. A week later it landed on the bestseller list. Not at the top of the list, but it was official: Poxl West was a bestselling author.

  I’d stayed on at my synagogue, Beth-El, to be confirmed in the years after my Bar Mitzvah. On Monday nights, I’d head out Route 9 to a Hebrew class Rabbi Ben offered for the handful of us who’d stuck with it. His class was relaxed, more catching up on our social lives and our spiritual lives than arduous Hebrew study. When I arrived one night soon after Poxl’s reading, Rabbi Ben interrogated me about him.

  “So your uncle’s book got published,” Rabbi Ben said.

  I’d just pulled up one of those desks that was attached to a plastic chair. Our classroom was in the basement of the shul. The heat of the building’s massive boiler pushed in on us. The room smelled of must, and of Ben’s patchouli oil.

  “Way more than just published,” I said. “It got a glowing review in the Times this week. It made the bestseller list. It’s a great book. The Globe said it’s destined to be a classic.”

  “Maybe you could get him to come talk to our class,” he said. “Like, in between our Hebrew lessons we could talk to him about writing, about making images and stuff. Oh, or man, we could get him to come along with a songwriter and a poet or something, and have them talk about craft.” Rabbi Ben was always trying to catch our ears by talking to us about what he thought we wanted to hear—it was all poets, and song lyrics, and if we’d let him, talk about Kabbalah, the study of Jewish mysticism. We wanted to learn Hebrew and flirt. What
made him think we’d care about some esoteric sixteenth-century mystics was beyond me.

  “I bet it’s really expensive to get him to give a talk now,” I said. I had no idea if that was true, but it sounded right.

  “He’s your uncle, right?” Rachel Rothstein said. I’d had a crush on her since the third grade, and even though we were in school and went to shul together, I don’t think she’d ever acknowledged me before. Even the confidence I’d gained from that summer camp kiss hadn’t helped. My uncle’s memoir was paying off in ways I couldn’t have imagined. “You couldn’t get him to come?”

  “I guess I could,” I said. “I mean, he’s not my real uncle.” Rachel Rothstein looked disappointed. I needed her not to be disappointed. “I mean, he’s more like a grandfather to me.”

  Rabbi Ben looked at me. The other six kids in the class were looking at me now, too. I only looked back at Rachel Rothstein.

  “I guess I could try,” I said. “If he’s in town for some other event or something.”

  Everyone seemed happy with that. Even Rachel. We returned to our Hebrew text. The attention withdrew from me, and for the first time since I’d read his book, I was glad we weren’t talking about my uncle Poxl.

  * * *

  Time and again during the weeks that followed the publication of Skylock, my father would come back with a magazine or a newspaper that had reviewed Uncle Poxl’s book. This was more than a decade before the advent of the Internet. The only way to find out what was being said was to seek out those periodicals themselves. There was a cigar shop and newsstand in Jamaica Plain, near my father’s office, that carried every magazine you could think of. On a Saturday afternoon in late April my father told me there was a piece on the book in The Economist. We should go seek it out, he said.

  I’d never even heard of The Economist before. Why, I asked, would a magazine about the economy run a story about my artist of an uncle?

  “It’s the biggest magazine in England,” my father said. “It’s about everything happening in the world. And it will be a real feather in your uncle’s cap to have been mentioned there. Not just because so many people will read it but also, since he lived in London for so long, because it will be another kind of triumph.”

  So that afternoon, one of the few Saturdays in that period my father didn’t have to head into his office to work, we left our house in Needham for the city. As we passed through the back roads of Wellesley, across the road that passed before the reservoir, I looked out my window to see a family of deer shocked by the whir of our Volvo engine, heads up, from their stolid meal. We made the long drive along Route 9 and into Boston. Puddles had begun to collect in the woods alongside that small highway, the last remnants of the snow that had covered the ground winter long. Bare trees popped buds like tiny green lightbulbs all up and down their branches.

  This was the first time I’d made that trip on a weekend since my uncle Poxl’s book had come out—after months and years of riding into the city with him for our cultural outings, now I was returning to downtown Boston. Only this time my trip was to see Poxl through the scrim of space and time, through the window the magazine provided into his life. The only time I’d been with Poxl in the past weeks, it felt, was at night, when I was reading his memoir. It was as if the Uncle Poxl I knew now was a teenager, set adrift across the Continent with the onset of war.

  We parked. Even though spring was upon us, the damp air brought a biting chill, somehow colder even than the frigid nor’easters we’d just endured. My father popped his coat collar against the cold. We arrived at the newsstand, and there, in the back of the magazine, was a review of Poxl’s memoir, complete with a photograph of his ruddy Ashkenazi face. Under the photographer’s flattering lights the garnet red of my uncle’s face seemed almost to glow, giving off a sense of import and beauty. He wore a Harris tweed jacket and a burgundy tie and looked every bit as hale as he had in the days before his Boston reading—it was as if that dandruffy grad student had never questioned him, as if no one had ever questioned Poxl West once in his whole Nazi-killing, war-enduring life.

  The piece was not quite as glowing as the Times review, but it felt as if a consensus was building that Uncle Poxl’s memoir was an important one, no matter its flaws. At times the book wandered, the unnamed reviewer said (I didn’t understand then that all the articles in The Economist were unbylined, and the fact seemed all the more curious in the light of Poxl’s success and in the glow of having seen my own name in print). At many (many!) times it was a bit more sexually graphic than the reviewer might have liked. And while the details were revealing of a certain kind of war experience most readers hadn’t seen before, the reviewer felt its depiction of England was “too broad.” In the final paragraphs he went on to praise Poxl’s writing and to suggest that the book would likely be read in the years to come, but each henpecking at the book’s details ate at me. I could see only the criticisms.

  I felt like reaching across the page and punching that unbylined reviewer in his mealy, unbylined mouth. My uncle Poxl’s memoir had hit the bestseller list just weeks after publication, and here was some anonymous reviewer trying to pick at it. I didn’t understand then that the book’s early success was part of what drew it attention, scrutiny.

  Now the damp cold cut through my jacket when we exited the cigar shop. My father and I walked back to the car, traversed the city, and as we drove the roads of Jamaica Plain and into downtown Boston we crossed the same streets where my uncle Poxl had once taken me for our weekend outings.

  “Wanna head over to Cabot’s for a sundae?” my father said. “I know you and Poxl used to go there after your days together.”

  “It’s a little cold out for a sundae, don’t you think?” I blew into my hands.

  “Well, then, a grilled cheese,” my dad said. “We could get a grilled cheese. Or something.”

  But I demurred. My father stood there in his lawyer’s jacket and with his lawyer’s stolid face. Every event that kept me too far from my uncle’s book in those days felt like a burden, a jilting—and after reading that review I just wanted to look at the book again, to remember its heft, its import. The ride back on Route 9 seemed to take twice as long as the ride out. This time no deer appeared beside the road. The trees looked like they’d never again wear leaves. My father and I barely talked.

  “It’s a very particular book,” he said as we neared home. “It’s not for everyone. You know Poxl suffered so many losses—including losing his wife—and some of it can be hard to read. His confessions about Françoise can be hard.”

  “It’s a perfect book,” I said. “That reviewer has no idea what he’s talking about. I mean, he couldn’t even put his name to it? Cowardly.”

  My father tried to say something more, to explain the magazine’s policy, but I was too distraught from the effect of the review to listen.

  When I got back to my room Uncle Poxl’s book was facedown on my bedside table. That book didn’t need to press itself up against the paucity of content of X-Men compendia, Bill James Baseball Abstract, or even the classics of American literature we read in class. I sat down on my bed and touched the back cover, my fingers lingering over Poxl’s face. The back of the book lifted a little on its own, Poxl’s author photo moving from the table toward me almost like one of Shakespeare’s ghosts, with the natural levitation cracking the spine at the acknowledgments page.

  ACT TWO

  1.

  I arrived in London after my long trip on the Batavier Line and was admitted to the UK at a port in the small northeastern city of Grimsby. After my first sight of that precious gem set in the silver sea, I arrived in London by train four days since last seeing Françoise. I found my way to the little two-bedroom flat in Bermondsey where Niny lived with her sister.

  “Poxl, you’re here! And just after I’ve had the most terrible night,” Niny said.

  She approached me at the threshold to her flat as if it was the most natural thing in the world that I was now suddenly
in London. She held me tight. Niny was a slight brown variety of cousin. She had a smattering of dark moles across her face that longed to be read like Braille, the most pronounced just above her upper lip. She wore dark-rimmed glasses and a printed linen dress. Her shoulders hunched forward as if she was forever trying to inch closer to you, the hollows of her mole-speckled clavicles grown obscure with shadow.

  “You feel very skinny,” Niny said. “Let’s get you a meal.”

  Niny favored her left leg as she walked toward the small kitchen in her flat. Her toe was wrapped in tissue soaked through with blood. She saw me eyeing the injury and said, “Oh, I’ve stubbed it trying to get off the train. It’s so dark between the blackout and there being no moon or streetlight.”

  Given the effects of my arrival, fatigue, and the comfort of seeing Niny’s face, I’d not noticed the blackout curtains drawn against the evening. The room glowed with soft yellow light sent infinitely back upon itself. Even my cousin Johana’s little ceramic spitz, which I remembered from their home in Leitmeritz, seemed to emit a halo of refracted light.