“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 stilclass="underline" 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.
“So after Grandpa died, when Poxl asked if he could take you into town to see plays, to go to the museum, to go out and listen to him at Cabot’s even, of course we always said yes. Like I said, he and his wife had never had kids. I think it fulfilled something for him, spending that time with you. I’m sure there was something in those outings that let him talk about one long, momentous period of his life that had previously been too hard to remember. Lots of those from his generation didn’t want to talk about it, but now Poxl did. We felt it had to be a good thing. I’m sure writing it down in that memoir, having it acknowledged — his love, his experiences, no matter what he fabricated — must have freed something in him.”
“Well, why the shit didn’t he ever tell me that?” I said. When I started talking I was sure I would feel the anger of its having been kept from me. But there wasn’t enough air in my lungs. I felt light as a cirrus cloud, jittery. The question came out thin — so lacking in conviction, my father could hear it.
“We did, Eli,” my father said. “I think you just didn’t hear it.”
“He could have talked to me about it.”
“Could he have? Talked to a fifteen-year-old about the pain of losing his wife after years of marriage, a memory that stayed so present it was as if it wasn’t past? That’s different from telling war stories. Maybe war stories are easier to tell than simple tragedies. Or harder. I don’t know. I guess in the end it was easier for your uncle to tell the stories from back then — Nazis killed his kin and so he tried to kill them back. That might not even have been quite how it was, but he could remember it that way. Why would he have told you about a car up and hitting his wife, years later? That’s a different kind of story altogether. It would take a whole other novel to tell it.”
I started to say that he was wrong. Or that he was right. Or that as I thought about it now, I wished that my uncle Poxl would have loved me enough or trusted me enough to have confided that pain. I could quote three dozen historiographers and theorists to him now, but not one of them would have helped me to have something to say that evening. It would take years of trying to process what Poxl West meant to me in those days and even after all those years; the best I could hope for was a glimpse of the truth of a feeling I’d had when I was a teenager. Is that a truth best gazed at up close, pretending the tectonic weight of years hadn’t passed deep below the surface? Or from the other end of a telescope, one big world made round as a shooting marble by distance, and a trick of light? Neither of those have made it knowable to me.