The Last Flight of Poxl West Read online

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  For Erin, Abigail, and Delia

  The bomber will always get through.

  —BRITISH CONSERVATIVE LEADER STANLEY BALDWIN DURING A PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE, 1932

  Acknowledgment: Prologue

  Before halftime on Super Bowl Sunday, January 1986, my uncle Poxl came over. He was just months from reaching the height of his fame, and unaware the game was being played. He wasn’t technically my uncle, either. He was an old friend of the family. For years he had taught at a prep school in Cambridge, where my grandfather had served as a dean. After a massive heart attack a year after I was born left my grandfather as much a memory to me as thin morning fog, Uncle Poxl came to fill the void. That Sunday he sat down in the living room and, speaking over the game’s play-by-play, started a story he could barely clap his gloves free of snow fast enough to tell.

  A miracle had occurred that afternoon. His neighbor had died a few months back, and though my Uncle Poxl was consumed with the details of the upcoming publication of his first book, he’d advised the neighbor’s sons on the handling of the estate. The neighbor was an obscure literary novelist who’d enjoyed acclaim early and then none. Their father had left nothing more than his immense library—and thousands of dollars of debt from a mortgage on a house too far in arrears to sell. Uncle Poxl had become immoderately involved in figuring a way to help them, though it wasn’t clear what expertise they felt he could lend—decades ago he’d quit a job at British Airways to take a Ph.D. in English literature, then later dropped his dissertation on Elizabethan drama to finish what would in time become the successful memoir of his time flying Lancaster bombers for the RAF. Maybe they assumed that because he had owned a number of houses and apartments, he had a certain familiarity with ownership. Maybe people just assumed from listening to his confident tone that my uncle Poxl knew what he was talking about.

  He was falling behind in grading for his classes, and in the early spring he would hit the road for his book tour, but something hadn’t let him give up this neighbor’s case.

  “Then today,” Uncle Poxl said as Steve Grogan missed a receiver with a pass, “the deus ex machina!”

  I had no idea what he meant at the time—I was barely fifteen, and what mattered back then were the Patriots and the Red Sox, a girl named Rachel Rothstein I was after in my Hebrew class who couldn’t have cared less for some wizened British war hero. But that Sunday I was too drawn in by his unerring voice, its dry gravity and utter self-belief, not to find out what happened to his neighbor’s sons. Somehow his voice had found the only register that could drown out the game’s clamorous announcers.

  “Willie, the younger son, asked me if I’d help pack,” Uncle Poxl said. “He figured he’d give the books away.”

  Poxl had noted my eyes on him now, not just my parents’. The volume of his wry voice rose perceptibly.

  “We were a dozen books in when I dropped Saul Bellow’s Herzog. I picked it up, and a crisp hundred fluttered to the ground. Willie and I looked at it like it was—well, like it was a rabbi on a football field.”

  He looked at me. The Bears scored. I missed the play and the replay.

  “Julian had used hundred-dollar bills as bookmarks in every one of his books. He’d get paid two hundred dollars a review, and put half back into the books. They hadn’t counted it all yet, but there must have been near to a hundred thousand dollars in those books—he didn’t write a review every week, but he wrote for that paper regularly, and others. Maybe he thought his sons would find it all. Willie doubted it, and I did, too—we were a pile of cardboard boxes away from handing his estate to the Harvard Coop!”

  Uncle Poxl kept talking, hauled along by the wonder of the thing. I’d rarely seen him so animated. This was the first time we’d spent alone with him since he’d finalized copyedits on his memoir, and his appearance at our house was a surprise, given the frigid air and snow outside. We’d assumed we wouldn’t see him again until his first reading, here in Boston, scheduled for the week after the book’s publication date. I’d been longing to see him, my eccentric European uncle who’d lived so much life. But now the Patriots were in the Super Bowl for the first time, and my tongue buzzed like it did after I woke from a nap. My mother changed the subject, and by then I’d stopped caring about the game. Would the contents of a book ever carry the same meaning again?

  This image of hundred-dollar bills spilling out of the pages of books would plague me for years. I tried to watch the end of the football game, but Grogan was awful, and a three-hundred-pound Bears lineman known as “the Refrigerator” scored a touchdown, and I couldn’t set my mind to anything but my uncle Poxl and when I’d finally get to read his stories between bound pages.

  * * *

  As I say, my uncle Poxl would reach the apex of his own literary success in the months ahead, after his book finally made its way into the world. Every season for as long as I could remember, Poxl had taken me to the opera, the symphony, to the Wang Center to see plays and musicals. If there was a performance of Shakespeare anywhere in our city, Poxl would find a way to take me. This wasn’t the kind of thing that should have interested me—a trip to Fenway was my idea of a cultural outing—but my uncle Poxl was built like a power forward and moved as fluidly as a Bruin, and he was everything the other Jewish authority figures in my life weren’t. On Monday and Wednesday afternoons I suffered two hours of Hebrew school, where our aging teachers would ply us with tales of woe, melancholy stories of the survivors of death camps and ghettoization. I remember seeing for the first time, when I was only ten, the black numbers tattooed on a classmate’s grandmother’s wrist. I can see even now my young brain being tattooed with anxiety and pensive fear. My grandfather had survived that period and reached the States—only to die before I’d gotten to know him. It compounded my sense then that history was some untrammeled force acting upon us, leveling any hope of heroism like some insuperable glacier flattening mountains to plains.

  Even the new young rabbi at our synagogue, Rabbi Ben Schine, who had come straight from Berkeley with a nappy beard and hair past his shoulders, calling us dude and trying to get us to talk Jewish mysticism, sat nodding solemnly as these stories were recited, fingertips tracing his copy of Night. I recognize now, of course, why we were being inundated with these truths. But I was fifteen, and what I needed was a hero—and hope. We might be able to see God’s body in the Kabbalah’s ten Sefirot, but it was 1986, barely forty years since our grandparents’ generation sat desperate and fated in their East European neighborhoods. Never again, our teachers incanted to us Monday after Monday, Wednesday after Wednesday. But when I picture myself in those rooms in the basement of our shul, even now I can only hear the incantation’s reciprocal: It will happen again. Beware. Be always aware. But I was growing to see myself as an exception then, too, for I was learning on those outings with Poxl West that I had an antidote in my family: There was
more thunder in my uncle Poxl’s senescent face than in one strand of Rabbi Ben’s unkempt mane. Trailing him like the sweet whiff of cherry tobacco from a pipe smoker’s coat was the fact that he’d been a pilot for the Royal Air Force, a Jewish war hero, the only one I’d ever heard of.

  I would’ve followed his broad shoulders into the ballet without embarrassment.

  Though his teaching job held a certain prestige, Uncle Poxl was an aspiring writer when we started on our trips. It was all he’d wanted in his later years, to get down stories based on recollections of his youth, and all he did with his free time. But in more than a decade, three novels had been rejected by New York editors. No matter how proud he was, his shoulders slumped a bit farther forward with each turning away. Regardless, my parents felt it an inherent good that Uncle Poxl serve as my monthly Virgil through the vague cultural life of downtown Boston—no accrual of rejections in New York could undo cultural currency in our small city, and any time spent with Poxl would do me good, they said.

  What I learned from my uncle Poxl on those outings didn’t come as we listened to Daniel Barenboim play the Moonlight Sonata. After each event Uncle Poxl would drive us out to Newtonville, where over sundaes at Cabot’s he would read passages to me from his latest project, this one not a novel but a memoir. After his return from a trip to London for the funeral of a captain he’d served alongside in the RAF, he’d finally decided he would write a memoir of his life during that time. He’d felt more comfortable writing fiction, but if it was a memoir the world needed, he’d write it. It wasn’t much different from the novels he’d read to me from in the past. They were full of strange, awkward depictions of sex, scenes that, looking back, I now realize I was too young to be hearing. This new book felt overwrought at times, a feeling I wasn’t too young to pick up on. But with this new project, suddenly the scenes he’d written were vibrant, absent the hesitations and wanderings of his earlier works. The sex scenes, while still graphic, were somehow easier to hear. Even today I feel a pride that borders on embarrassment intuiting that those scenes were crafted to make my younger self accept them.

  “This next section,” Poxl said one night after four long hours of Don Giovanni, “is the most gripping scene of all, when the reader sees what we were really up against. The story of when the ‘S-Sugar’ bomber went down in a lightning storm.”

  His hands flew up near his curly auburn hair. Uncle Poxl had one of those pointy red Ashkenazi faces whose very shape carries confidence and import. The bridge of his nose was so thin it simply faded into his high red brow. Atop his head he wore a trademark porkpie hat, the brown felt of which was always brushed. The hat’s name wasn’t lost on him: “It’s the closest to anything trayf I ever come,” he said. Out from the hat’s sides stuck shocks of his remaining translucent hair, which took light like a polished garnet. Lambent crimson ran to his cheeks through gossamer veins. But there was nothing varicose about my uncle Poxl’s face: He was hale and lissome, a man of indeterminate age but whose virility was discernible in the very color of his cheeks. He wore a black tweed Brooks Brothers suit with narrow lapels and a collar he’d popped against the Boston winter. He saw no need to smooth it down now that we were inside spooning pralines and cream.

  “My squadron flew into a thundercloud over Lübeck,” he said. “That’s when the S-Sugar began to fly into the thundercloud, too. Crack, boom, blue lightning! You’ve never seen anything like it.” I asked him to read it to me instead of telling me about it—he’d written it down, after all, and I wanted to hear—and so he put his face to the loose pages before him and read. The world around us dropped away as I listened to my uncle Poxl read from his book. His hands spun dense nimbus clouds in the air between us as he narrated the bomber’s bravery. This was an entirely different kind of war story than the ones we read at Hebrew school—a story not of survival, but of action. It was as if he was crafting his great account before my very eyes, and I don’t know that I’ve been so close to history since. My uncle Poxl was born in a small city north of Prague but he had a diplomat’s accent—his cars had r’s, his parks, too, and unlike the living survivors we met or whose books we read in Hebrew school, his tongue wasn’t thick and muddy with Slavic consonants. As he described in the middle chapters of his book—I’d heard each of them as we talked over fudge and whipped cream—he had been sent to London by way of a year in Rotterdam. By the time the Luftwaffe began bombing the East End, he was enlisted as a squaddie. Poxl was a Jew who had flown for the Royal Air Force during the war and lived to write about it. Though he carried in his broad shoulders the complicated burden of his own actions in those days, he had wrested his fate from the inevitable bearing down of history upon his fellow Ashkenazi Jews. And not only that but he’d lived to write about it, too.

  And write about it he did. Each time he finished a new chapter he would take me somewhere new and recount to me his finest similes, the clearest arisen memory, the complicated feeling that arose as he remembered things he’d obviously spent most of his adulthood trying to forget—all for the sake of literature. For the sake of those who came after him. We talked about the fact that this is why men wrote: to leave behind their stories for those who would come years later.

  “The pages are flowing from me faster than ever before,” Poxl said one afternoon. We’d just gone to stare at the Renoirs at the Museum of Fine Arts. He had an innate knack for spotting celebrity, and that afternoon, like two little kids spying on the neighbor’s wife, we watched Katharine Hepburn as she studied the great painter’s brushstrokes. But now we were again at Cabot’s, and he had promised to read to me from the middle of the book, pages he’d only recently completed. I asked him what the new scenes were about.

  “Well, until I started writing, I’d entirely forgotten about the day I enlisted. The officer called me into his office,” Poxl said. “‘Weisberg,’ the officer said, ‘we need to talk. If you’re shot down over Jerry soil, a man with a Jew name like yours will be torn to pieces.’ So that’s how they came to call me Poxl West—the kind of name men remember.” He looked at me, and I looked back. I implored him just to read to me, and as he always did, he shuffled the pages in front of him and settled back into his tale.

  I sat and stared at my uncle as if he were the only hero we’d seen that day. Who needed some prune-faced old actress I’d never even seen in a movie when my uncle Poxl was there to recite his stories? Even when he stopped midsentence and stared at the shimmering window behind me, an odd blankness coming over his face, as if he might stop, I felt I could read the story he was telling in the ageless lines of his sharp red face.

  By the time I was a sophomore in high school he had finished the book. As I’ve said, this one quickly found a publisher. A small but prestigious press bought it, offering a respectable advance. A book tour was arranged, he completed his copyedits, the first edition was printed, and before he even had a chance to give that first reading in Boston—not three short months since that moment when he’d come to my parents’ house and interrupted the Super Bowl—the book began to get real notice. Before we saw him again we read the review on page twenty-three of The New York Times Book Review. The reviewer was laudatory and honest: “Skylock is not a perfect book. There are some odd formalities in its language at times, and its second half is stronger than its first. But the story Poxl West has to tell is truly unique, a history we need, and there’s something undeniable about the quality of its details, the precision of its observation. Having finished it, I don’t think I’ve been so moved by a book in recent memory.” Without even talking with him I could imagine my uncle Poxl’s response: “There are some criticisms in there, Eli, sure. Even The Great Gatsby isn’t a perfect book. But my book! Reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times!”

  I imagined the glint in his eye over a sundae we would share later that year. I knew even if I chided him, nothing would sway Uncle Poxl’s new, implacable optimism in the wake of its publication. He’d received an advance against fut
ure royalties, and notice in the paper of record.

  Now my uncle Poxl was a writer.

  Before the ink had dried on the newsprint in the Times, Poxl had moved out of his tiny apartment in Somerville and rented an apartment in Manhattan—the place was in Spanish Harlem, but it was a place in New York. Though he held no Ph.D., having been ABD for longer than I’d been conscious, he was offered an adjunct class at Columbia in the fall. He planned to take a leave from his job teaching ninth-grade English. He had syllabi to write and readings to conduct. He’d called my father one afternoon when I was at a basketball game, and I can still feel how my skin prickled with jealousy that I hadn’t been the one to answer. I could only hope and imagine he’d honed those very passages of his book on those Cabot’s trips of ours. Somehow I’d been a part of the writing of this book—I’d touched history, fame, and heroism all in one small passive reach, and though it later nudged me down my path, it gave me no solace at the time. Uncle Poxl was to be a known writer, but as a result our Brahmin cultural outings were to take a hiatus.

  I wrote him a letter congratulating him and briefly bemoaning not seeing him or the Rodins at the museum for a while. He wrote back with the promise of complimentary copies of his book—which we wouldn’t receive until we saw him for his reading in Boston. Those books hadn’t arrived. I allowed myself to assume he was simply too busy to send them along, or his publisher had forgotten to fulfill his request, but my parents could see the disappointment on my face each time mail arrived without copies of his book. I tried to remember what Poxl had written, but there were so many gaps to be filled, and what is the memory of words compared with reading the pages of a book? I longed to hold the object. I wanted to see Poxl West’s name on the cover.

  But what I did get was that letter. I hadn’t flown his mind entirely. It was written on stationery, at the top of which was embossed The Algonquin Hotel in red letters, the color of which matched his face.