The Last Flight of Poxl West (32 page)

“Pocksall.”

The airy cold breath of a ghost seemed to huff against my neck. My head felt light, and then my father said, “Eli, come give me a hand here,” and I had no choice but to put the book down. Before I left that night, I put it in my backpack. That book would be mine.

We packed twenty-three boxes with Poxl's books that evening. I put eighteen copies of his book into a single box and with a fat Magic Marker labeled it:

“Nonfiction.”

Before taping the box up, I turned to the back of the last copy I encountered. My name was still there, typed in black ink. Just above it was a paragraph I'd never paid much attention to before—I'm sure I must have read it, put the words through my head—how could I not have?—but I'd never really taken in. Every time I'd turned to that page, and I must have done so a thousand times, maybe more, my eyes went reflexively for that place where my name was in print, simply skimming everything before and after it. I'd been acknowledged, and when you've been acknowledged, it's hard to pay much attention to anything else.

“For my love, Victoria, the last I lost,” it read. “All these stories came after you.”

My father passed in the hall outside. I flipped the book shut so hastily it fell from my hands with a clamor before I could keep it from hitting Poxl's hardwood floor.

 

ACT FIVE

1.

Françoise hosted me weekly for chamomile tea. She never accepted any help with the preparation of the tea, or of the traditional British foods she'd learned to serve William Rutherford's guests—cucumber finger sandwiches, scones and heavy cream with strawberries and currants—foods she'd rarely encountered when I first knew her, but which now were central to her existence. Once a week, on Wednesday afternoons, she gathered our teacups, lit the gas and passed her hand over that open flame on her stovetop, and then ran cold water on her singed palm.

With time Françoise allowed the range of our conversation to broaden. She sat before me and fingered her teacup. Now her face was somehow less dynamic and a far greater mystery than it had been those years earlier. One depends so much on the subtle movements of another's eyes to perceive her thoughts—the face is so much more than simply the façade of a building.

Françoise's thoughts were now entirely her own. What her mouth didn't say, her eyes couldn't reveal.

What Françoise would say was only that she was interested in current events. She allowed me to tell her what had transpired in the Pacific Theater, what was in the papers, in the political decisions which followed from the treaties at Yalta and a conference at Potsdam, in the austere postwar days of rationing and bedsit living in London. Within a year I was working three days a week as a flight instructor for British European Airways, as it was then known. Wednesdays were not a possibility, and as an RAF veteran, I was given no trouble with this request. I first set out as well on attaining an A.B., for which I was able to apply some of the courses at Leathersellers College early in the war. Much later, in the evenings after work, I was able to attain an M. Phil. I went on to a program for a Ph.D. in English literature, with a specialty in Elizabethan drama, and completed the course work and began a dissertation on Shakespeare. With the focus I've given to writing this memoir—and then to teaching, and to life—to this day I've not completed it. I still hope one day I will.

During this same period Richmond began to call me with ever greater frequency and, its being in the direction of RAF Northolt, was a natural way station on my daily commute. For a period a lull in training at British European Airways allowed for Fridays off as well.

On those days the bench outside Françoise's window beckoned. I sat and waited for her to open her curtains. There were blackout curtains installed during the Blitz. William left their flat at nine in the morning, and at ten Françoise stood at her second-story window—not looking out, of course, for she couldn't see, but standing with the sun on her face. She had changed so acutely since those days in Rotterdam. The deep scars around her eyes seemed to shift the whole manner of her person. She had now a slick burn mark across her brown left cheek. Her front teeth no longer had their gap—they'd been replaced.

I wondered how extensive the damage to her body was. Her hair was still so long and dark, her frame so full. Her nose was still flat, the most prominent feature on her face, and it still bore those brown islets her eyes had lost.

For five minutes, maybe ten, Françoise would stand by that window. At some point she would recede back into her room. I don't know what my purpose was during those days, only that being granted a view again of Françoise, what I'd wanted for so long, I had no interest in leaving. It wasn't clear to me what my love for her was now. I knew only that Park Sheen was the sole venue where I might discover what it had become. I would sit on the bench and read plays and sonnets, and often when my eyes grew tired, I'd move to the center of the courtyard to deadhead the gardenias, pull off hollyhock blooms that were beginning to suffer from rust, so the whole plant would not be infected.

Sometimes the tremolo and woof of a mandolin would arise from Françoise's window. Her muscles had not forgotten how to make chords, how to pick that instrument. I would sit very still, and in not moving, I could hear her voice. It was much quieter now, but it still carried that warble I remembered from her days performing with the Tennessee Sisters. I listened as she sang Bill Monroe's “What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?” If it occurred to me then that I might be cuckolding this William Rutherford as my mother's painter had once done my father, it had not stopped me.

One day while I was in the midst of my deadheading in Françoise's garden, an old man approached and inquired after my interest in those flowers.

“I have a certain fascination with making things grow,” I told him. He suggested that he could provide a small fee for my looking after those plants.

Soon, on the Fridays when British European Airways wasn't in need, I would go to Park Sheen and, in khaki pants and knee pads, with a spade and a shovel, some fish emulsion procured from the receptacles out back of the local seafood market, and some gloves, I would look after those flowers. At lunch it was the bench and Mrs. Goldring's old copy of Shakespeare, and awaiting Françoise's drawing back her curtains so I might listen to her singing; after she'd let them fall again, I would read a single act of one of the plays, or half a dozen sonnets, and then return to gardening. Some days, William Rutherford even waddled past in his Falstaffian way, but he never acknowledged me.

The gardener is an unseen force. The better he is at his job—the better he is at making things grow and making it appear as if they've grown on their own—the less he is seen. He is wholly unlike the bomber, whose nacelles cried out for miles across the German countryside, and in whose wake lay only irrevocable destruction.

2.

I'd like to pause for a moment before this life history draws to its natural conclusion, to say a thing or two about my life after returning to find Françoise in London, which needn't be mysterious any longer. She and I did not reconcile. We did not marry. She stayed with William Rutherford, and I had no choice but to leave.

I believe to this day that Françoise and I were very much in love, that I never stopped loving her even after I was forced to abandon any dream of a life with her again, maybe even after I married, even after I left London for good for a life in the United States. But there are some events in our lives that
do
change irrevocably who we can be, what we can be. The damage I'd done in leaving Françoise, the years we'd had apart sitting on those indiscretions, had caused too great a chasm. It took some time for me to comprehend that, but in time I did. I don't know to this day if Françoise loved William Rutherford. I do know now that it was her life and she would live it. It was not mine.

Once or twice in the years since that initial postwar period, I've gotten my horns locked with older survivors of that war and its attendant atrocities, survivors with whom I've joined groups in the interest of solidarity, those middle-aged men like myself who in the forties experienced things they can't really bring themselves to speak of. They, like me, might have a manuscript locked away in a closet somewhere, reams running through a typewriter, pages they're likely to show only to their family—or pages they have no interest in showing anyone, which they'll then share only with the utmost reticence. Those memories are far from mind most days, and yet the scratch of their talon leaves its unalterable mark on the skin of daily life.

We are sometimes willing to talk about those times. Generally we simply play bridge or discuss some history we're reading, but at times someone will begin to tell a story and find himself unable to stop until he's finished. Once or twice, on a bad year, I'll provide a truncated version of my loss in exchange. They'll hear some expurgated version of my story, hear that I flew a Lancaster bomber. Usually they'll say, “What I've heard described—firebombing over Germany—you say it was a total destruction by fire. How do you handle it? Thinking of it? Speaking of it?”

I understand their implication. We all live with what we live with. What you know, you know.

There were decades ahead for me after I returned to London. Freed from trying to find Françoise, I traveled to Leitmeritz to see the remains of Brüder Weisberg. It had fallen badly into disrepair. Seeing it so made me somehow happy. I traveled to Vienna. In the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, I saw a portrait of my mother as a young girl hanging alongside the most famous Schieles and Klimts. Some people fought to get paintings like this one back. I liked that it hung where anyone could see it.

Like every one of the things I'd lost in that period, I couldn't have it back.

At times, always unexpected, the flames of the past will come and burn a hole in my day. I read a lot of poetry in my summers when I've got some free space in my head and I return to the poetry written during that time when I first met Françoise. I knew then that T. S. Eliot had been a fire watcher in one of those central London stations near where Clive Pillsbury and I worked as squaddies. Perhaps I saw him once. Perhaps I passed him on the street that night in December when I first met Glynnis Goldring. Perhaps I saw Françoise in those last months before she lost her sight, simply passing her on the street somewhere, seeking out fires and not seeing her because I wasn't looking. Running around all of London in those last days before I decided to fly sorties to kill tens of thousands. Perhaps if I'd found her then, before her life settled in Richmond, I could have won her back, could have had her as my wife.

I came through those years of war wanting only one thing. But I understand now that it wasn't Françoise. It was the Françoise I knew before I left her, before I'd made the worst decision I'd ever made in my life, one that I regret today more than anything I've ever done. The Françoise I'd met in Rotterdam before I left for London, as she was then. I could not return to Leitmeritz and take over Brüder Weisberg; I could not go back and choose to attempt to help my mother and father reconcile. I could not go back and sit out the bombing of Rotterdam by Françoise's side, allowing her whatever she needed to be allowed. But I had found her, and now she was in fact William Rutherford's wife and she was going to stay, bodily, William Rutherford's wife.

3.

I have written a book through the scrim of memory, seeking a freedom that can be attained only through acknowledgment. I do not know if I've succeeded. But allow me to back up just once more and recount to you one last memory, to return to one moment before things were settled with Françoise, in want of liberation.

One Wednesday in 1947, in the winter months, during which British European Airways and the weather kept me from Françoise's garden and before it was settled that she'd continue on in her life with William Rutherford, I arrived at 128 Park Sheen, only to find no answer at the door.

A week later I returned. Again I found the flat vacant. Mail lay piled at the door, letters Françoise couldn't have read if she'd wanted to. I wondered if one even arrived from Heidi. But I would never know. I was alone for so much of those years after I left my home in Leitmeritz, but never in all that time was I as alone as I was during those weeks. They began to accrete: I'd lost forever the sedentary love of my parents. I was certain at that time I'd been all but disabused of the hope for romantic love.

Still I returned each week to Park Sheen with the hope Françoise might admit me again for tea. On the fifth Wednesday after Françoise had ceased to answer, I knocked, and she answered. She saw me in. She took me to her kitchen as if no time had passed. In the span of our relationship, I suppose it hadn't.

She took out the teacups, lit the flame, cooled her palm in the sink, and served our tea. Sweat began to collect on my brow. I was about to say something when I looked at Françoise and recognized she was about to speak. This fact was signaled by a tightening around her eyes.

“My ophthalmologist is in Vienna,” she said. “I was being checked out. William set it up. He knows a man there. There's scar tissue behind my left eye. My right eye is gone. Just glass. But the scar tissue behind the left must be cleared from time to time. While we were there we stayed to see
Don Giovanni
and to see a psychotherapist I've come to trust.

“Well, not see, after all. But.

“I had reason to talk with him this past month. There appeared to be some chance of restoring sight to my left eye. There was response from the optic nerve after the scar tissue was cleared this time.”

“You might have mentioned you'd be going,” I said.

I didn't say it particularly kindly.