Not one thing I could have said then would have been right.
I know that now.
I was a teenager back then, and Poxl West had been a red old Ashkenazi Jew in his dotage. What he needed from me he needed from me. I was lucky he needed anything from me at all. Luckier than I could have expressed. Luckier than I can conceive even now, no matter what percentage of it was fact. Maybe that’s the one thing I do know of that time: Whatever pain or confusion it brought then and brings still, I wouldn’t give back a minute of the time I’d spent with the hero, the writer, my uncle Poxl West.
Finally I picked up the chair and took it down to the U-Haul. We lifted and lugged. We didn’t say anything more about Poxl.
All through the evening I kept eyeing his library. I had forbearance of some kind, by then twenty and not a kid watching a Super Bowl, and not yet the man I am now. As I say, my uncle Poxl’s stories stuck with me over the years, and though I flirted with a degree in art history, I don’t have that kind of visual memory — not like Poxl — and the images didn’t take hold. History did. I took my Ph.D. in nineteenth-century European history. I’ve always had a hard time answering why that period was the one I settled on. Maybe I’ve known all along: There’s a comfort in living with the period before all the tumult Poxl lived through. Eighteen forty-eight wasn’t 1944. It was a period of wars and revolutions and upheaval, but distant enough to be history and stay history. It had no living survivors.
When we finally did come to dealing with Uncle Poxl’s library later that evening, even after all I’d just learned, my palms prickled — desirous, intemperate. Only the day before I had seen Jules and Willie, whose father had failed as a novelist before scraping by as a book reviewer, but who had filled his books with bills. What might Poxl West’s books hold? What lessons had his neighbor taught my uncle all those years before, my uncle Poxl, whose brief fame had fled and left him in penury, an old man on a bench staring at Schieles and confessing his most public trespasses to a teenage kid while still hiding his sharpest pains?
I pulled his old Shakespeare, the very copy Mrs. Goldring must have left for him in that cave east of London, off the shelf. It was travel-worn and smelled of mildew. Its leaves fell against one another with a whish. They flapped, heavy with possibility.
Nothing.
I turned the book to inspect it further, All’s Well That Ends Well to The Winter’s Tale only to find so many notes covering those pages, it was rendered nearly illegible. I remembered the notes Poxl had written about, notes Mrs. Goldring had made in that book decades ago, and a knot drew up in my throat as I turned to King Lear. Here I was about to find evidence of a lie or a truth on the pages in his book, a verifiable, incontrovertible truth. Or lie. I turned to Act 1, and on the second page, when Cordelia has just so unwisely shunned her father’s love, when she has publicly shamed him for refusing to say she loved him most, there it was. Next to the Lear lines, in a wavering pen but clear and distinct:
“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.