Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

William and Françoise Rutherford

128 Park Sheen

Richmond TW 9

England

Heidi gave me a look whose meaning I couldn’t discern. She said, “There’s more to my mother’s state than I’ve told you. There is a more pressing reason I’ve only been in intermittent contact with her in the past few years. In her first year in London, my mother was trapped in a building that was hit by a Luftwaffe bomb. She was blinded.”

“So how does she care for herself?”

“This is why I have ceased writing her, Poxl. She can read only when William Rutherford reads to her. The things I would like to tell her — about having met you, any material private in the least — I cannot write.”

“I could take a letter back to her for you,” I said. “I’ll leave for London soon enough and seek her out.”

Heidi looked down into the cup in front of her. “I’d rather not,” she said. I did not ask further after her meaning. There were some mirrors in which I wasn’t yet ready to gaze upon myself.

For the following days Heidi and I walked around Rotterdam, witnessing the beginning of its attempt to regain itself after a long period of destruction. Piles of rubble, pushed back over their original foundations, lay between buildings with cracked façades. Along the Nieuwe Maas the heads of massive brick windmills lay cracked. We walked blocks, seeing only rubble. Only in Delfshaven had most of the old brick town houses remained intact. By the end of that week, Heidi and I gravitated there each afternoon.

The mind desires order. Perhaps it is that which defines the limits of vengeance: The teleology of the mind is a movement toward order. Where no order can be found there is no retribution. Even justified destruction must trail behind itself resurrection; the only question being how long the lag. Buildings destroyed would be rebuilt or they would become empty space — it was a binary, nothing more. A yes-or-no question. The restoration of a city was uncomplicated in that way. In the years after the war, when cities like Dresden and Berlin would rebuild their wrecked buildings brick by brick, Rotterdam would opt for the opposite — each building erected to replace those lost would be more modern than the next, bearing less and less resemblance to the buildings that had been there before, until they barely even resembled buildings. This city did not attempt to recapitulate herself, but to build something anew, no matter how ugly or jarring.

By our third day together, Heidi and I spent our afternoon sitting on a bench, staring off at an unbroken line of town houses that had stood in Rotterdam since the thirteenth century, the very houses from which those religious pilgrims who would first settle the United States set out in their ships to cross the Atlantic. We rarely talked of the war. I didn’t want to know what Heidi had seen. At a quiet moment on our third afternoon together, Heidi said, “What did you do in the Air Force? You were a medic?”

“I wasn’t,” I told her. “I trained as a pilot on a Lancaster, Perdita,” I said. “A bomber.” I explained it was the most frequently used bomber of the Royal Air Force. Along with me were six other men. The job of these planes was to bomb Germany. Heidi sat back and again stared at the marbled sky. I looked back up, too. Where when I’d looked up when I was in Rotterdam last, I saw the sky overhead, now my brain deciphered tactical meaning: cumulous, probably twelve to eighteen thousand feet. Nimbus likely to follow, and with them rain.

Not a good day for a bombing run.

I suggested to Heidi we should get inside. At some point in the near future, rain was likely. On our way back to my hotel, we stopped for a gelato. The combination of time and the sweets rescued Heidi from her mood.

The rain I’d predicted didn’t come. For the rest of that afternoon and the afternoons that followed we walked those Rotterdam streets, not raising the subject of her mother or of my military service. At week’s end, by those same turbid canals of Delfshaven, a week since I’d arrived, I told Heidi I would return to London. She looked out across the way from the bench where we sat.

“Perdita, I’d like you to come with me to find your mother,” I said. Heidi only continued to look out across the way. This was her home. Perhaps she would visit in due time. I’d gain no truck in attempting to change so confident a person as Heidi of anything, let alone moving to a city where she knew no one but her blind mother and her blind mother’s estranged former lover.

“When you find my mother, be gentle. Be patient. You don’t know how she’ll respond. So much has changed for her since you saw her last, and she does have William.”

I said nothing. From nothing comes nothing. I was to leave Rotterdam. Heidi walked me back to my hotel and I bid her farewell.

“One last question, Poxl,” Heidi said. “Why do you keep calling me Perdita?”

I explained that Perdita was the daughter of Hermione, a Shakespearean queen believed dead sixteen years before a statue sculpted in her likeness was returned to life. She later would marry the prince of Bohemia. I stopped short of telling her that I’d read of Perdita in a cave in the countryside east of London with the mother of another woman I’d almost married. That would be too much to explain.

Something had changed in me, something I might even be able to articulate now looking back on that afternoon: For the first time in my life, I had my own secrets. When I’d met Françoise years before, the text of my life read on just one level. I could tell Françoise the story of my mother’s cheating on my father, for that was all there was to tell. It was left to me to interpret, but it bore no further story. Now I could not narrate all of what had befallen me since leaving Rotterdam those years before.

3.

I set myself up in a room in the Regent London. Niny, who had taken a job with British European Airways, where she and Johana both had parlayed their good standing as WAAFs into work at RAF Northolt, greeted me at her old flat as a returning Odysseus. She laid kisses all across my face. She was wearing the earrings I’d found for her in the midst of the heaviest days of the Blitz.

“I assumed you would stay in Rotterdam with Françoise, that we might never see you in London again.”

I explained what Heidi had told me: Françoise was alive. She was now married, had been blinded, and was living in a flat in Richmond. As Niny took in the implications of all I had told her, she said she would get us some tea. We could talk about what I might do now. When she returned I told her there was essentially nothing for us to discuss — after finding a permanent residence, I would go seek out Françoise.

“Six years have passed,” Niny said. “A woman you fell in love and left with so long ago is now married. You need to prepare yourself for any possibility.”

“I know it,” I said.

“And Poxl. You need to figure out how you’re going to ask for forgiveness.”

“I will take it one step at a time,” I said. Then I told Niny it made sense for me to find a bedsit rather than burden her again. I had Johana in mind. Before I left, Niny suggested there was little trouble for a former RAF pilot to find work flying commercial airlines. She would do what she could to find someone for me to talk to there.

My first week I found a room not in central London, as I’d planned, but not far from Niny’s, either, where it was cheaper, where it would please Niny herself to have me nearby. A job came open for a flight instructor at British European Airways. Before long I was hired. It would be a number of months before the position was to begin.

Two weeks after my return I rode the Underground out to Richmond. It was forty-five minutes out, almost all the way to RAF Northolt. Soon I found myself in a small neighborhood of three-story houses and wide streets. For ten blocks up Church Street, I looked on as men and women went about their daily activities. All of them might well have seen Françoise every day since she’d been there. Up a side street, maybe a quarter mile on the left, was the little neighborhood Heidi had mentioned: Park Sheen.