Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

“You should go as soon as you can,” Percy said. I looked at him in the dark, but I couldn’t quite make out his face. “Listen to me, Poxl,” he said. “You should go to Rotterdam.”

I asked him what he meant.

“The war’s over. I’ll talk to the major. I’ll get it set up. You can take enough time there to see if you can’t find Françoise, see if she’s still there. Still — well, still there’s enough.”

“And what if there’s nothing to find?” I said.

“I’m sure there is,” Percy Smith said. My eyes had adjusted enough to the faint light cast from the Nissen huts across the field that I could now see Percy’s face. There was so much certainty in his eyes when he said it, like it was the surest he’d ever been of anything he’d ever said.

He needed it to be true.

So did I.

And then Percy Smith said something else that I’d needed for so long I didn’t even know I needed it.

“And Poxl,” he said. “If you do find her — when you do find her, see if she’ll forgive you for leaving.”

I would have to press on until I was able to find Françoise, and if I did find her, I would have to tell her everything.

“But just go find her,” Percy said. “Get a transfer, go AWOL. Return to civvy street and catch a flight from free London.

“Go.”

19.

The night Percy Smith told me Schlict’s Hamburg story was filled with the reality of Françoise. Yet again I had no image of her face. I had only the pervasive sense of her absence. Her memory was more present than ever, but her face hadn’t arrived to accompany it.

That void couldn’t remain. I stopped trying. In the moments that followed, in my lightest sleep, a new image came to me in my dreams. Three women were doing something strange a couple hundred yards off. These women were submerging themselves in the Elbe, walking out of the water and then running back in. It wasn’t the German Elbe of Hamburg I’d seen from thirty thousand feet, but the Elbe of my childhood, running through Leitmeritz. Radobyl stood off in the near distance. I kept walking closer, lugubrious, as if my feet were plunged ankle-deep in wet sand. I was stuck to the ground. I had to pick my whole self up with the lassitude of each step. As I walked, those women ran into the water and out, stopped on the banks of the river and then went in again. When I got close, the three women acquired familiar faces.

The nearest was my mother. Each time she got out of the water, she looked down at her hands, looked back up, and then turned back into the water. The other two women were Glynnis and Françoise. Their faces were cachectic, wasted, ashen. Each time they emerged from the water, a blue halo encircled their wrists. They were saying something together I could not make out at first. It kept on, a concatenation, until I could hear. “You can go, but she won’t see you,” they said. “You can go, but she won’t see you.”

Once I understood what they were saying they stopped.

Françoise held her wrists skyward. When she comprehended the blue flames wrapped around them, she turned and ran back into the Elbe. Two contrails of smoke lifted higher and higher in the summer air. None of them saw me. None of them saw one another. They just ran into the Elbe and back out — cachectic, ashen, catching blue fire each time they came up for air.

When I read Hamlet in my thirties, studying it in earnest and reading it for the first time since I’d encountered it in the cave with Mrs. Goldring, I came to find that there is a disagreement among Shakespeare scholars over the nature of the ghost of his father, King Hamlet, who visits him throughout the play. Some believe it is meant to be staged as a physical manifestation: The supernatural has occurred. A ghost has set foot onstage. The Tragedy of Hamlet, in this staging, is the original ghost story. But other scholars believe that it is simply the manifestation of Hamlet’s guilt, the most famous indecision in all of literature: the question of whether Hamlet will act. There is no such thing as a ghost; there is only such thing as Hamlet’s hallucination. To tell a tale, Hamlet famously says, is to “hold a mirror up to nature,” and in the mirror we will never see the face of the dead. It is only our own image we see.

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.

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 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.