Duke of Deception Read online

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1990

  Copyright © 1979 by Geoffrey Wolff

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1979.

  Library of Congress-in-Publication Data

  Wolff, Geoffrey, 1937–

  The Duke of deception: memories of my father/Geoffrey Wolff.—1st

  Vintage Books ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78447-6

  1. Wolff, Geoffrey, 1937- —Biography—Youth. 2. Wolff, Arthur Samuels, 1907– . 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Fathers and sons—United States—Biography. 5. Impostors and imposture—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  [PS3573.053Z463 1990]

  813′.54—dc20 89-40437

  [B]

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  The excerpt from Certain Half-Deserted Streets by Geoffrey Wolff was originally printed in The Nassau Literary Review.

  The material from Bad Debts by Geoffrey Wolff was first published by Simon & Schuster.

  Copyright © 1969 by Geoffrey Wolff.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  79B86

  v3.1_r1

  This story is for

  Justin and Nicholas

  I wish to acknowledge the generous

  help given to me during the writing

  of this book by the John Simon Guggenheim

  Memorial Foundation.

  G. W.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgement

  Opening the Door

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  photo insert

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  photo insert

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Through the Open Door

  About the Author

  Opening the Door

  ON a sunny day in a sunny humor I could sometimes think of death as mere gossip, the ugly rumor behind that locked door over there. This was such a day, the last of July at Narragansett on the Rhode Island shore.

  My wife’s grandmother was a figure of legend in Rhode Island, a tenacious grandam near ninety with a classic New Englander’s hooked and broken beak, six feet tall in her low-heeled, sensible shoes. A short time ago she had begun a career as a writer; this had brought her satisfaction and some small local celebrity. She spent her summers in Narragansett surrounded by the houses of her five children and by numberless cousins and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One of these, my son Nicholas, not quite four, had just left for a ride with her. As old as she was she liked to drive short distances in her black Ford sedan, but she maintained a lively regard for her survival, and had cinched in her seat belt, tight.

  Nicholas’s little brother Justin was with his mother at the beach. I was with my wife’s brother-in-law on a friend’s shaded terrace. Kay’s house was old and shingled, impeccably neglected. It was almost possible to disbelieve in death that day, to put out of mind a son’s unbuckled seat belt and the power of surf at the water’s edge. I looked past trimmed hedges at the rich lawn; beyond the lawn a shelf of clean rocks angled to the sea. Sitting in an overstuffed wicker chair, gossiping with Kay and a couple of her seven children, protected from the sun, glancing at sailboats beating out to Block Island, listening to bees hum, smelling roses and fresh-cut grass, I felt drowsy, off-guard.

  We had been drinking rum. Not too much, but enough; our voices were pitched low. Usually the house was loud with laughter and recorded music—all those children, after all—but this was a subdued moment. We were drinking black rum with tonic and lime; I remember chewing the lime’s tart flesh.

  In my memory now, as in some melodrama, I hear the phone ring, but I didn’t hear it then. The phone in that house seemed always to be ringing. My wife’s brother-in-law John was called to the telephone; I guessed it was my wife’s sister, fetching us home to our mother-in-law’s. We always lingered too long with Kay.

  John returned to the terrace. He stood thirty feet from where I sat supporting my drink on my shirt. I remember the icy feel of the glass against my chest. John was smirking, shifting from one foot to the other. John was a man to stand still, with fixed serenity, and my chest cramped. As I stared down the terrace at him, Kay and her children quit talking, and John’s cheeks began to dance. I looked at the widow Kay, she looked away, and I knew what I knew. I walked down that terrace to learn which of my boys was dead.

  Justin was as sturdy as a fireplug: he once ate an orange-juice glass down to its stem; it didn’t seem to trouble him. Another time was different: Running across a meadow he tripped, gave a choked cry, nothing out of the way. We walked toward him casually, paying no attention. We were annoyed to find him face foward in the mud. His mother said, “Get up,” but he didn’t. He liked to tease us. I rolled him over, and his face was gray patched with pale green. His eyes had rolled back in his head: His brother began to cry; he had understood before we had, and his rage was awful. I tried to breathe life into my son, but in my clumsiness I neglected to pinch shut his nose. I blew and wept into his mouth, and tried to pry it open wider, just to do something, but mostly I wept on his face. My wife shouted at no one to call a doctor, but she knew it was useless. He was dead, any fool could see, and we didn’t know why. Then he opened his eyes, went stiff with fear, began to cry. And upon the stroke of our deliverance I began to tremble. We are naked, all of us, I know, and it is cold. But Justin, it seemed then, was invulnerable.

  So it was Nicholas.

  John said: “Your father is dead.”

  And I said: “Thank God.”

  John recoiled from my words. I heard someone behind me gasp. The words did not then strike a blow above my heart, but later they did, and there was no calling them back, there is no calling them back now. All I can do now is try to tell what they meant.

  1

  I LISTEN for my father and I hear a stammer. This was explosive and unashamed, not a choking on words but a spray of words. His speech was headlong, edgy, breathless: there was neither room in his mouth nor time in the day to contain what he burned to utter. I have a remnant of that stammer, and I wish I did not; I stammer and blush, my father would stammer and grin. He depended on a listener’s good will. My father depended excessively upon people’s good will.

  As he spoke straight at you, so did he look at you. He could stare down anyone, though this was a gift he rarely practiced. To me, everything about him seemed outsized. Doing a school report on the Easter Islanders I found in an encyclopedia pictures of their huge sculptures, and there he was, massive head and nose, nothing subtle or delicate. He was in fact (and how diminishing those words, in fact, look to me now) an inch or two above six feet, full bodied, a man who lumbered from here to there with deliberation. When I was a child I noticed that people were respectful of the cubic feet my father occupied; later I understood that I had confused respect with resentment.<
br />
  I recollect things, a gentleman’s accessories, deceptively simple fabrications of silver and burnished nickel, of brushed Swedish stainless, of silk and soft wool and brown leather. I remember his shoes, so meticulously selected and cared for and used, thin-soled, with cracked uppers, older than I was or could ever be, shining dully and from the depths. Just a pair of shoes? No: I knew before I knew any other complicated thing that for my father there was nothing he possessed that was “just” something. His pocket watch was not “just” a timepiece, it was a miraculous instrument with a hinged front and a representation on its back of porcelain ducks rising from a birch-girt porcelain pond. It struck the hour unassertively, musically, like a silver tine touched to a crystal glass, no hurry, you might like to know it’s noon.

  He despised black leather, said black shoes reminded him of black attaché cases, of bankers, lawyers, look-before-you-leapers anxious not to offend their clients. He owned nothing black except his dinner jacket and his umbrella. His umbrella doubled as a shooting-stick, and one afternoon at a polo match at Brandywine he was sitting on it when a man asked him what he would do if it rained, sit wet or stand dry? I laughed. My father laughed also, but tightly, and he did not reply; nor did he ever again use this quixotic contraption. He took things, things, seriously.

  My father, called Duke, taught me skills and manners; he taught me to shoot and to drive fast and to read respectfully and to box and to handle a boat and to distinguish between good jazz music and bad jazz music. He was patient with me, led me to understand for myself why Billie Holiday’s understatements were more interesting than Ella Fitzgerald’s complications. His codes were not novel, but they were rigid, the rules of decorum that Hemingway prescribed. A gentleman kept his word, and favored simplicity of sentiment; a gentleman chose his words with care, as he chose his friends. A gentleman accepted responsibility for his acts, and welcomed the liberty to act unambiguously. A gentleman was a stickler for precision and punctilio; life was no more than an inventory of small choices that together formed a man’s character, entire. A gentleman was this, and not that; a man did, did not, said, would not say.

  My father could, however, be coaxed to reveal his bona fides. He had been schooled at Groton and passed along to Yale. He was just barely prepared to intimate that he had been tapped for “Bones,” and I remember his pleasure when Levi Jackson, the black captain of Yale’s 1948 football team, was similarly honored by that secret society. He was proud of Skull and Bones for its hospitality toward the exotic. He did sometimes wince, however, when he pronounced Jackson’s Semitic Christian name, and I sensed that his tolerance for Jews was not inclusive; but I never heard him indulge express bigotry, and the first of half a dozen times he hit me was for having called a neighbor’s kid a guinea.

  There was much luxury in my father’s affections, and he hated what was narrow, pinched, or mean. He understood exclusion, mind you, and lived his life believing the world to be divided between a few us’s and many thems, but I was to understand that aristocracy was a function of taste, courage, and generosity. About two other virtues—candor and reticence—I was confused, for my father would sometimes proselytize the one, sometimes the other.

  If Duke’s preoccupation with bloodlines was finite, this did not cause him to be unmindful of his ancestors. He knew whence he had come, and whither he meant me to go. I saw visible evidence of this, a gold signet ring which I wear today, a heavy bit of business inscribed arsy-turvy with lions and flora and a motto, nulla vestigium retrorsit. “Don’t look back” I was told it meant.

  After Yale—class of late nineteen-twenty something, or early nineteen-thirty something—my father batted around the country, living a high life in New York among school and college chums, flying as a test pilot, marrying my mother, the daughter of a rear admiral. I was born a year after the marriage, in 1937, and three years after that my father went to England as a fighter pilot with Eagle Squadron, a group of American volunteers in the Royal Air Force. Later he transferred to the OSS, and was in Yugoslavia with the partisans; just before the Invasion he was parachuted into Normandy, where he served as a sapper with the Resistance, which my father pronounced ray-zee-staunce.

  His career following the war was for me mysterious in its particulars; in the service of his nation, it was understood, candor was not always possible. This much was clear: my father mattered in the world, and was satisfied that he mattered, whether or not the world understood precisely why he mattered.

  A pretty history for an American clubman. Its fault is that it was not true. My father was a bullshit artist. True, there were many boarding schools, each less pleased with the little Duke than the last, but none of them was Groton. There was no Yale, and by the time he walked from a room at a mention of Skull and Bones I knew this, and he knew that I knew it. No military service would have him; his teeth were bad. So he had his teeth pulled and replaced, but the Air Corps and Navy and Army and Coast Guard still thought he was a bad idea. The ring I wear was made according to his instructions by a jeweler two blocks from Schwab’s drugstore in Hollywood, and was never paid for. The motto, engraved backwards so that it would come right on a red wax seal, is dog Latin and means in fact “leave no trace behind,” but my father did not believe me when I told him this.

  My father was a Jew. This did not seem to him a good idea, and so it was his notion to disassemble his history, begin at zero, and re-create himself. His sustaining line of work till shortly before he died was as a confidence man. If I now find his authentic history more surprising, more interesting, than his counterfeit history, he did not. He would not make peace with his actualities, and so he was the author of his own circumstances, and indifferent to the consequences of this nervy program.

  There were some awful consequences, for other people as well as for him. He was lavish with money, with others’ money. He preferred to stiff institutions: jewelers, car dealers, banks, fancy hotels. He was, that is, a thoughtful buccaneer, when thoughtfulness was convenient. But people were hurt by him. Much of his mischief was casual enough: I lost a tooth when I was six, and the Tooth Fairy, “financially inconvenienced” or “temporarily out of pocket,” whichever was then his locution, left under my pillow an IOU, a sight draft for two bits, or two million.

  I wish he hadn’t selected from among the world’s possible disguises the costume and credentials of a yacht club commodore. Beginning at scratch he might have reached further, tried something a bit more bold and odd, a bit less inexorably conventional, a bit less calculated to please. But it is true, of course, that a confidence man who cannot inspire confidence in his marks is nothing at all, so perhaps his tuneup of his bloodline, educational vita, and war record was merely the price of doing business in a culture preoccupied with appearances.

  I’m not even now certain what I wish he had made of himself: I once believed that he was most naturally a fictioneer. But for all his preoccupation with make-believe, he never tried seriously to write it. A confidence man learns early in his career that to commit himself to paper is to court trouble. The successful bunco artist does his game, and disappears himself: Who was that masked man? No one, no one at all, nulla vestigium [sic] retrorsit [sic], not a trace left behind.

  Well, I’m left behind. One day, writing about my father with no want of astonishment and love, it came to me that I am his creature as well as his get. I cannot now shake this conviction, that I was trained as his instrument of perpetuation, put here to put him into the record. And that my father knew this, calculated it to a degree. How else explain his eruption of rage when I once gave up what he and I called “writing” for journalism? I had taken a job as the book critic of The Washington Post, was proud of myself; it seemed then like a wonderful job, honorable and enriching. My father saw it otherwise: “You have failed me,” he wrote, “you have sold yourself at discount” he wrote to me, his prison number stamped below his name.

  He was wrong then, but he was usually right about me. He would listen to anything
I wished to tell him, but would not tell me only what I wished to hear. He retained such solicitude for his clients. With me he was strict and straight, except about himself. And so I want to be strict and straight with him, and with myself. Writing to a friend about this book, I said that I would not now for anything have had my father be other than what he was, except happier, and that most of the time he was happy enough, cheered on by imaginary successes. He gave me a great deal, and not merely life, and I didn’t want to bellyache; I wanted, I told my friend, to thumb my nose on his behalf at everyone who had limited him. My friend was shrewd, though, and said that he didn’t believe me, that I couldn’t mean such a thing, that if I followed out its implications I would be led to a kind of ripe sentimentality, and to mere piety. Perhaps, he wrote me, you would not have wished him to lie to himself, to lie about being a Jew. Perhaps you would have him fool others but not so deeply trick himself. “In writing about a father,” my friend wrote me about our fathers, “one clambers up a slippery mountain, carrying the balls of another in a bloody sack, and whether to eat them or worship them or bury them decently is never cleanly decided.”

  So I will try here to be exact. I wish my father had done more headlong, more elegant inventing. I believe he would respect my wish, be willing to speak with me seriously about it, find some nobility in it. But now he is dead, and he had been dead two weeks when they found him. And in his tiny flat at the edge of the Pacific they found no address book, no batch of letters held with a rubber band, no photograph. Not a thing to suggest that he had ever known another human being.

  2

  WHEN I was a boy my father introduced me, with ceremony, to a couple of family treasures. There was my great-grandfather’s medical degree from Leyden and a worn leather case, my grandfather’s, fitted with surgical devices. These totems are gone now, lost during one or another last-minute, dark-of-night escape from a house where the rent was seven months overdue, or from a town where a rubber check had just bounced to the D.A.’s desk. But I recollect well enough those gleaming instruments set in blue-velvet cavities.