Duke of Deception Page 12

  My mother was bone tired Christmas morning, and my father hungover, but they let me at the stuff before dawn, and watched me. It was grotesque, I think. I loved it, tearing at a sixth package before I had finished unwrapping a fifth. The things with cards written by my mother and father I opened first. The year of my presentation to Walky Dean I got just what I had given him; my father was trying to tell me something, or make me feel better. I also got a Flexible Flyer, and that morning, riding it down icy Braggart’s Hill I set my tongue against the metal steering bar, and it stuck; when I tore my tongue away it bled so badly that I had to be taken to Dr. Von Glaun.

  Dr. Von Glaun was good to us. I thought I wanted to be a doctor, because that’s what my father told me I wanted to be, and because I wanted such a set of instruments as his father and grandfather had owned. Dr. Von Glaun told me about the rigors of his profession, and let me look into his microscope.

  He saved my brother’s life. Toby had a stomach ache, together with a couple of symptoms not by themselves alarming. Dr. Von Glaun managed an inspired diagnosis by telephone of a rare disorder, the small intestine slipping into the large, a process that leads to awful pain and to death when the patient commences to eliminate his own organs. Dr. Von Glaun arranged the operation in New London, had someone come down from Boston with my father, who even paid the specialist.

  Toby was a long time recovering. He turned fussy and spoiled during his recuperation and after, and I began to feud with him. He learned to take advantage of an absolute injunction against hitting or pushing him, and my mother took his side in our disputes: he was endangered in a way I was not, he was littler, and he resembled her in appearance and temperament as I resembled my father. Greater distance opened between us. I would swear that Duke did nothing to divide my mother from me, that he never suggested that she wasn’t brilliant or that her taste wasn’t flawless. Yet my mother felt his judgment on her like a weight, and if memory is false, perhaps she and I were nudged, and did not merely drift, apart.

  She was dutiful, patient, never harsh. I was scrubbed, dressed, fed, maintained, given music lessons, brought up better than our means allowed. She was always good for a game of baseball, and could outslug and outrun me and my friends till we reached the sixth grade. Still, something was missing between us. I sometimes felt, watching her look at me, that she wished she were alone. She must have felt I wished I were with someone else.

  So, with a sick brother, a pigtailed beloved who would have liked to shazam me from the earth’s face, a mother distracted by bills and lack of love for her husband, I spent much time alone. I read, walked with my dog, read, rode my bike, read. I angled for sunfish, alone, or walked through swarms of deerflies to the mudflats near Duck River, to sit and stare at something other than the pages of a book.

  I wasn’t a pariah at school, just an outsider, weird, set apart by my stammer and my father’s elegant taste and manners and my morbid notion of humor and my short haircut. My schoolmates parted their hair, slicked it down like nine-year-old bank presidents.

  I had one friend, a classmate. Michael was a good athlete, courteous, quiet and, like me, accustomed to solitude. His mother had left Old Lyme, leaving his father with a son and two daughters. Michael’s father worked at the United Nations as a translator from Japanese into Russian, Russian into English, English into Japanese or any of about a dozen other combinations. He had helped break the Japanese military and diplomatic code just before Pearl Harbor, and his hobbies were mathematical puzzles and cryptograms. Children were for him an uninteresting mystery, and to solve the conundrum of his son’s upkeep he turned to my parents, who welcomed Michael as a lodger, more or less at cost.

  My life changed. Michael was respectful to my parents, cool-tempered, a born instructor. He tried to teach me things. He advised me how best to play Margaret Dean (to no effect), how to do long division (to no effect), and how to fend off my mother’s irritation by volunteering small domestic favors so that greater services were not required. He agreed that my dog was beautiful and intelligent beyond all other beings, and that my brother was a pain in the ass. He agreed to these things because he calculated by his agreement some solace to me and no hurt to him.

  Michael was a brother. So we fought sometimes; I began the fights, but never won them. Michael was two inches shorter, but he was a bulldog once he dug in. There was a delicate balance between us: on the one side he lived in my house; on the other he had higher grades, more friends, and was better at baseball.

  Baseball occasioned our meanest fight. Even before spring began to lift the load of winter kids in our school would put together hardball games in damp meadows, boys and girls playing together, and in these pre-season games I did okay. I was always reaching for the fences, my father’s son, but at bat I usually got a piece of something. My fielding was uncertain; I threw far and sometimes accurately.

  Old Lyme Elementary School had a baseball team, and when the season truly began it played teams from nearby Saybrook and Westbrook and Madison and Essex and Deep River. My mother was a driver for away games, piling as many as eleven kids in the Ford, and to repay her for this service, I guess, the coach sometimes played me. I didn’t like Mr. Carver: he was an ass-slapper and arm-puncher, one for pep talks, a cave of winds.

  During my sixth-grade May our team was practicing for the season opener against Deep River, out of town. I was trying out for shortstop, and Skippy Sheffield, a switch-hitting catcher who looked at eleven like he’d for sure be with the Red Sox before I could legally drive, who in fact went nowhere at all, drove a line drive at me. From fear I raised my glove, and the ball slapped into it, and stayed there. Not knowing what else to do with it, I threw it to second, where it was caught, and there was a double play. Mr. Carver, looking elsewhere, did not see this. He did see me lose a pop fly in the sun, and saw the ball hit my forehead.

  The next day, Saturday, Mr. Carver was to stop at our house to pick up Michael and me. The Ford had been towed away again, and my father had not yet devised the sweet-talk to get it back. Mr. Carver arrived with a car full of kids and told Michael to get in back and me to go home, he wouldn’t need me today, maybe some other time. Michael didn’t want to leave without me, but he did. I went to the side of the house and stood watching Japanese beetles, piled six deep, perpetuate themselves with tender leisure. My father was fiddling with an altimeter he needed for his dashboard, and heard what he suspected were tears. He came outside and asked me what was wrong.

  “Nothing.”

  My father did not care for “nothing” as an answer to his question, and he asked again, sharply. I slapped a ball into the pocket of my Rawlings “Phil Rizutto” glove, and sobbed out the story, without neglecting a reference to yesterday’s double play. My father grew very angry, and he dragged me, against my mother’s protest and my own, to his MG. Along the way he jammed on his head a silly tweed cap, the kind that heel-and-toe downshifters of advanced years still wear. The MG driver’s cockpit was on the wrong side. This was going to be unpleasant. I tried to talk my father into leaving it be, but this made him even angrier: a dumb injustice had been done me, and Duke would set it right.

  The teams were at play when we arrived, and Old Lyme was at bat, with Michael taking a lead off third. He looked at me as though he wanted not to know me. The game stopped while my father parked the MG, the red MG, six feet from home plate, nowhere near the other parents’ cars, black sedans, maybe a gray coupe for a sport. My father approached Mr. Carver, shouting. My father’s voice rose, and began to stammer. Mr. Carver made the mistake of touching my father’s arm to calm him, and my father cocked his fist so fast Skippy Sheffield ran from the batter’s box. Then my father noticed me, and he didn’t throw the punch. He lowered his voice.

  “Put my boy up.”

  Mr. Carver explained that there was a batter at the plate.

  “I want my boy to bat now.”

  I was pushed to the plate. The pitcher was rattled, and walked me. I tried to steal second, w
as thrown out standing up, and “our” side retired. My father drove me home then, and couldn’t speak to me. I wouldn’t speak to him.

  That night Michael and I fought. I began it, picking on him, working him over while we brushed our teeth and got into our pajamas. I made cracks about his height, his haircut, his clothes, his sisters, his father.

  “Your old man’s a fanatic ascetic,” I said quoting Duke, knowing the meaning of neither polysyllabic in the accusation.

  “What’s that mean?” Michael asked.

  “Don’t you know anything?”

  Then I said my father thought his father was a cheapskate, and that he didn’t pay my father a fair share of Michael’s costs. So finally I got what I wanted, and we tumbled on the floor, punching and kicking, trying to hurt each other. I swore; Michael was silent when we fought; he meant business. My mother stopped us. She came upstairs because my dog was howling, and when she pried us apart neither of us would say what caused the fight, because for once we both understood exactly what had caused it.

  That night we lay silent for a long time on the sleeping porch. Other nights we talked as soon as our lights were out, about sex, about seeing the world together, about school, cars, the stuff Ripley printed in Believe It Or Not. That night neither would speak first. Then Shep began to whimper. He was so confused and miserable, and Michael laughed, and called the dog up on his bed. I didn’t say “Shep’s my dog, you can’t have him,” because I didn’t even think to say it. So we were past it, and then we began to talk, and I told Michael he shouldn’t have gone to the game without me, and Michael said he thought I was probably right about that. I didn’t know what else to say, except that I had lied about what my father said about his father.

  Michael said, “Jesus! Did you see old man Carver’s face when the Duke was about to pop him? It was great, he near peed his pants. Skippy moved pretty quick too.”

  Good friend. My father had called his father a cheapskate, though. And not long after he called him a cheapskate Duke rode home from New York in the army surplus jeep Michael’s strange father drove, summer and winter, without a top. This was winter, and it was snowing, and the cockpit was a chaos of noise. Duke chose that time to make his pitch, a labyrinthine hard-luck story with allusions to temporary setbacks in oil shale and uranium investments. Michael’s father pulled to the side of the Merritt Parkway and opened his glove compartment and peeled three hundred off a bankroll, three times what my father had asked to borrow.

  “Here.”

  “I’ll pay you back in sixty days, maybe less.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll never pay me back.”

  And then Michael’s father drove on into the storm. My father didn’t throw the money in the man’s face, or so I heard from Michael, years later in a letter, and by then I had no reason to doubt him.

  Finally, all credit exhausted, we had to leave Old Lyme. “I couldn’t go to a grocery store within twenty miles,” my mother remembers. “Every week someone came to take something away, the furniture, a record player, the stove, even firewood.” Joe Freedman wanted the house itself, and that was that, an escape was planned.

  Duke got a job with a New York engineering firm as a consultant to Averell Harriman’s European Co-Operation Administration. He was bound for Turkey, to organize an airline. My mother and Toby and I would go south, to Florida. I was not told these things, but overheard them, and was instructed not to speak of them lest people “misunderstand,” lest tradespeople lynch my mother and father. I wanted to say goodbye to Dr. Von Glaun, but this was not possible; we owed him money; he was not understanding.

  I wanted to say goodbye to Michael, whose father had removed him from our house after quarreling with my father about something having no evident bearing on money, a question of politics or child psychology. Later Michael went to Alaska to earn money for college, earned it and was driving home (in a jeep), fell asleep on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (in a blizzard), went off the road and was paralyzed. Much later he fell in his shower, and was terribly burned by hot water while he lay helpless. I heard this a couple of years ago, when I stopped by my old school. I drove to the house where Michael lived when he left us, where he lives now. I parked outside for half an hour, saw curtains move, a face, perhaps, at the window. I couldn’t open my car door. I drove away, entered the Connecticut Turnpike. I was terrified of my fear, and returned to his house, ran to the front door, rang the bell, waited not nearly long enough for a paralyzed friend to wheel himself to his door, and drove away again. I never said goodbye to Michael when I was eleven, either.

  We stole away, my father in the MG to a garage near Hartford where he hid it, my mother and Toby and I in the Ford. A few days later Eaglebrook, trying to put the arm on its alumni and would-be alumni for gifts, tracked Duke to Old Lyme, wrote the postmaster, and got back its letter stamped “moved, left no address.” The dogged school then wrote a town officer, and he wrote back:

  The above mentioned person left this town of Old Lyme some time ago, and as I understand it leaving many large and small accounts unsatisfied. These creditors would like to know of his whereabouts also. This is the third such inquiry which this office has answered, perhaps less bluntly heretofore; in any event, we are unaware of this person’s whereabouts, and know no person who is, but many who wish they did. Further inquiry is not desired.

  11

  OUR Ford, like the Joad’s truck in The Grapes of Wrath, was burdened by every possession we didn’t leave behind to be picked over by creditors. Nothing stored except the MG and Shep, stuff tied to the roof and fenders like dead deer. By the time we hit southern New Jersey, mid-August, with the temperature in triple figures, the overloaded wagon began to boil over, and the oil pressure began to fall, and there seemed no way the money would stretch as far as Florida.

  By Delaware Mother looked crazy. She drove sitting on a pillow to see out the high windshield, and pressed so hard against the door she seemed to want to break through it. Her knuckles were white on the wheel; she stuck her head out the window to dry the sweat from her face and escape the battles raging between Toby and me. I wonder what she promised herself during that damned trip, how close I came to being left in a Myrtle Beach motel room with a note tied around my neck: Hi! My name is Jeff. All I’ll eat is Stuckey’s pecan stuff. I want a pair of beaded Seminole moccasins and to see a snake ranch. My mother left, looking for a better way to live.

  I nagged my mother for a boat and motor. Excepting Toby, always indifferent to material things, we were a family of material lusts, fixations that came down like fevers, and hung on. My father’s wants were the most varied and capricious: anything of quality, a novel car, a blackthorn walking stick, folding scissors, a tattersall vest. Mother, with sand between her toes, wanted always to be somewhere warmer and sunnier, and she studied out-of-town newspapers, travel folders and shipping schedules the way Father studied Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues. My desires were fewer than my father’s, but as severe: an outboard-powered dinghy, an outboard-powered runabout, an outboard-powered racing runabout, an outboard-powered racing hydroplane.

  A couple of months before we left Old Lyme I had sent away to Evinrude for a catalogue, and would spend an hour and more every night studying it, and especially a picture of a smiling boy and his dad being pushed at dawn along the misty shore of a verdant lake by a three-horsepower Fastwin, with Weedless Drive. I wanted one. My father knew I wanted it, and my mother knew I wanted it. My mother found my wish not at all novel, but beyond possibility. To satisfy my ardor for boating Duke sometimes chartered a leaky gray rowboat, with a Johnson Seahorse on the transom, and let me drive him around in it. This didn’t entirely satisfy my dream, which was to be free not only of land but landsmen, to go somewhere under my own power, alone. Still, my pleasure at the tiller of any outboard was so extreme that Duke yielded to me, and in effect robbed a boat dealer near New Haven of a one-horsepower Evinrude and a Penn Yan dinghy, a gorgeous eight-footer with spruce ribs, mahogany seats and trim,
and white canvas topsides. He promised to pay for this after a check cleared, stock was transferred, when his accountant returned from holiday abroad … presently.

  Two months later the boat, which I was allowed to drive in the bay at Point o’ Woods while one of my parents watched from the beach, was repossessed. The motor too. I did not witness this. All I knew was that as soon as my father left for Turkey, my boat and motor were gone. My mother spared me the particulars, told me only that there was no room in the car to take the boating gear with us to Florida, but that she would replace it when we got there. This she knew she could not do; I knew she would not do it, and from the moment I no longer had the boat I had once had, I gave her no peace.

  “You beat on me all the way south,” Mother says.

  What kind of boat can I get? Another Penn Yan? Cross your heart? Father gave it to me. I miss him. You won’t break your promise? When will I see Shep? Are they feeding him what he likes? Tell Toby to move over, he’s on my half of the seat. I’m hungry. Can we see the Spanish moss place? What’s Spanish moss? I miss Dad. Why did we have to move? Can we buy the boat as soon as we get there? The first day? Promise?