Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

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.

There was a fairly impressive array of flowers. 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 101st Street between West End and Broadway 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.