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.
Acknowledgment: Caesura
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.
The writer of the piece said my uncle had never flown the sorties he claimed to have flown during the firebombing of Hamburg. He’d never been in a lightning cloud over Lübeck. The writer had gone up to the RAF Museum in Hendon and found no record of a Poxl West ever having flown sorties in the Lancaster bomber S-Sugar. There were solid records of the crew from that plane, and no Poxl West was on the ledger. Another man, albeit a man with the surprisingly Jewish-sounding name Herman Janowitz, was listed as the plane’s pilot. When the reporter put this to Poxl, seeking a quote for his story, my uncle had broken down immediately.
The piece included a long, difficult description of Poxl’s behavior — erratic outbursts over perfectly made and viscerally described Pimm’s cups and cucumber sandwiches at his apartment in Manhattan. The writer had the gall to ask him to take off his trademark porkpie hat and show the lightning scar atop his head. Poxl demurred and was asked again, until finally he showed his bald pate, atop which was a measly dog bite he’d gotten as a kid. Finally, he gave a tearful confession. The reporter gave a great deal of emphasis to the fact that from the moment he uttered the name Herman Janowitz, something wholly changed in Poxl’s disposition.
Whatever my uncle Poxl might have been through in the war, whatever experiences he’d had then, bombing Hamburg wasn’t among them.
Poxl’s publisher had defended the book in the days after the Times piece — the claim felt unsubstantiated, and Poxl had stood by the fundamental accuracy of the book and its aims. But the editors of The Atlantic promoted the story they’d published through all channels, and given the book’s success, the attention it had garnered, its ascendancy toward the status of instant classic, now it wasn’t just a book; it was a news story. The response to its fall was commensurate with the size of Poxl’s growing fame. The book might not have been a pure critical success on its own terms, but the story of the author of a bestselling memoir, a Jewish RAF pilot, fabricating parts of his story, was. The reporter who’d written the piece made a name for himself with it — he went on NPR’s All Things Considered, was interviewed on 60 Minutes. This was 1986, and there was no CNN crawl. The only way to find information was to seek it out like a historian, or to wait to see what the newspaper or television told you. It was long before the days of a thousand talk shows, in which a story might blare on the sidelines, or an Internet, where it might be trending, news only to those who sought it as news.