Duke of Deception Read online

  We pulled in lame and broke, and found temporary refuge with a couple who had lived near us in Old Lyme. Melinda had been Duke’s childhood friend in Hartford and had encouraged our move to Mile Creek Road with an uneducated eagerness she did not display upon our arrival in Florida. She was stocky, foulmouthed, tanned butternut, and thought kids were a pestilence.

  She ran a development on Treasure Island called “Pieces of Eight” or “The Black Dog” or somesuch, a residential resort whose houses had names like “Ben Gunn’s” or “Bill Bones’ ” or “Dead Man’s Chest.” The main house was “Long John Silver’s,” and there was a power launch called the Hispaniola, and it was enough to gutter forever my enthusiasm for my favorite book.

  I didn’t like Melinda, her taste in proper nouns, or Florida. The water tasted of sulphur, it was hot, strange things crawled across the sand, mangroves looked ridiculous. Melinda’s kin were Nature’s avant-garde, and walked Treasure Island naked, which I would not do, and I was embarrassed to reveal my priggishness. My mother wore a bathing suit, but to accommodate the spirit of the place where we were guests obliged Toby to go bare-assed. He sat on beach cactus, and cried.

  After a week of this we found a cottage for fifty a month on Siesta Key, near Sarasota. It was only a quarter mile from the Gulf of Mexico but that poorhouse was the meanest place I ever lived. It was tiny, with beaverboard partitions soft as mold from the dampness that penetrated everything always, chilling us and mildewing our clothes. The bare wood floors, painted gray, were slick and cold and loosely joined; they bristled with splinters. The stink of sulphur hung like perpetual fog, sand stuck to bedclothes and vinyl upholstery, the rooms were dark, and I was ashamed to live there.

  Shame encouraged fantasy. I imagined myself elsewhere and otherwise, wished myself into other people’s skins. I had come upon a book called Big Red, about a trapper who worked the Maine woods with his boy and his boy’s red setter. The book attracted me because it was set in a place so unlike Florida, and about a boy alone with his father. I missed my father, and I let my mother know this every half hour or so.

  Duke sent checks, almost adequate for our care, and letters telling about Turkey and his adventures, begging us to be cautious, reminding my mother not to let Toby or me come down with polio. Mother was more interested in his checks than his prose, as I knew. I would study those letters, with his black, thick characters, so grotesquely outsized that he filled a sheet with only sixty or eighty words. They invariably closed with some expression of affectionate longing that caused me to run to my room, slam my door and fall upon my bed. I have never broken myself of the morning jitters for incoming mail—the good news, big break, grand slam—and it began then, waiting for those blue, tissue-thin envelopes (not so many of them, either), covered like a fanatic’s bumper with gummed instructions, warnings, expostulations: FRAGILE … DO NOT BEND … RUSH! … SPECIAL HANDLING … URGENT COPY … EXPEDITE! My father actually believed that special requests received special treatment. In fact, many of his letters never arrived. That is, some checks never arrived. That is, my mother had my father’s assurance that he had sent—PRIORITY—some checks that never arrived. Perhaps they drew too much attention to themselves.

  I wandered a lot, and liked people to strike up talk with me. Most of them were nice, carefree tourists or retired old-timers who missed their grandchildren in Michigan. Sometimes they asked questions:

  “Where are your parents?”

  “My mom’s here in Sarasota.”

  Some would ask then where my father was. Whether they asked or didn’t I told them:

  “My dad’s a trapper in the Maine woods. Next year I’m taking my collie Shep up there to run the traplines with him. We’ll live in a log cabin.”

  People who had asked my father’s whereabouts said really, how curious, how nice for you all, what fascinating work. Other people just stared at me. Later these stories drifted back to my mother, and she asked me with gentle amusement to be truthful, said that I sometimes puzzled people. After my mother spoke with me about this I continued to tell the same story, except to confirm the suspicion, yes, my parents were divorced, and I’d be leaving soon for Maine, my dad and I preferred a cold climate.

  I entered seventh grade in a Quonset hut set behind Sarasota High School. There were no black kids in my class of thirty, but plenty of kids of a kind I had never before seen, boys with torn clothes and sores on their skin, classmates with breasts as big as my mother’s. Ringling Brothers wintered in Sarasota, and midget-sized children of midgets came to my school with regular-sized children of The Tall Man, olive-skinned children of acrobats and animal trainers, and the boastful, tetchy get of wire-walkers. I couldn’t quite catch the drift of the teacher’s Georgia accent. Besides, she was pretty. I was aroused when I stared at her. She blushed when she caught me staring at her, or felt me staring at her back. I blushed too. I asked to be switched to another class; she wanted this too, but neither of us could make our reasons understood to ourselves, let alone the principal, so we were stuck with each other.

  I had stomach cramps every school morning, pains that doubled me over. My mother believed in them, and didn’t believe in them. An internist performed a fluoroscopic examination, and suggested it might be good medicine to bring Shep to Florida.

  I played hooky a lot, hung around the Sarasota municipal pier feeding Old Pete, a broken-winged pelican, and making up stories for the old codgers on the benches. Sometimes I’d hitch-hike back home, and if my mother wasn’t around, and she usually wasn’t, I’d take the key from where she’d hidden it and unlock the cabinet where my pellet rifle was kept and pick my way through the palmettos to Sarasota Bay off the eastern shore of Siesta Key. I’d hide in the mangroves and shoot at cabin cruisers passing by, or at trees, or straight up in the air, to see if I could make a lead pellet fall straight down, on me. When Shep arrived in a crate at the Railway Express depot I put my days to better use, watching him run the Gulf beach, chasing the gulls that teased him till he was almost out of sight, then back the other way, till he was almost out of sight, back and forth till we used up an entire day, an ambition realized.

  I had a friend. Ernie lived in a trailer park just off the Tamiami Trail. Our derelict Schwinns brought us together. He’d ride to my house, or I’d ride to his trailer. I liked his trailer better, and so did he. His father tucked a pack of dirty playing cards, held by a rubber band, beneath some unused handkerchiefs. Ernie’s father was never home, and we always had an extra rubber band, just in case we broke his. The cards were kept in a cigar box with an eight-page Tijuana bible that spelled tit tut, and a thing whose use we couldn’t guess at, what I knew the following year was a French tickler. Ernie was the grungiest kid in class, and it upset my mother that I chose him for my friend. I didn’t choose, he didn’t choose, we were all that was left after the others chose. Ernie told me his father did it every night to his mother, and I told Ernie he was full of it, and told my mother the story to illustrate what dumb people will try to put over on people as smart as I was.

  My mother said I was twelve now, it was time to talk. I said I knew what there was to know. She asked me if I understood that people sometimes made love because it was pleasant, and not merely to have babies. I said I had heard this, and believed it, that dirty people did these things. She told me that many kinds of people did such things, why she herself sometimes did such a thing, just for the hell of it.

  I was stunned. I would have been more stunned had I understood that my mother was speaking not principally, or perhaps at all, about intimacies with my father, that my mother was trying, with good will, to tell me something she thought I should know. I was stunned.

  My mother had met an ex-policeman from Michigan. This man, like Ernie’s father, lived in a trailer, but his was north rather than south of Sarasota on the Tamiami Trail. He was thick-necked and coarse; he had appeared at our cottage once or twice, and on “our” beach, where he let Mother oil his hairy back and belly. I didn’t like h
im, and he didn’t like me, though he pretended he did. Mother knew he was pretending, but didn’t much care.

  These memories are painful for my mother, I know. I think they bear down too heavily for their specific gravity; my mother made mistakes of taste and judgment, but I was a hanging judge.

  “I know my shortcomings as a mother in Florida. I was self-centered, trying to have a good time, regain my youth, be desirable again. Your father had been so imperious about people, who was okay and who was a jerk, and once I was away from him, free to pick people myself, I picked people for friends he wouldn’t have. Maybe he was right. I certainly made dumb choices.”

  I think of Sarasota and I think of sex, and the memories depress rather than excite me. The girl who sat in front of me in class we called Pear-Shape, and I bullied her so relentlessly about her breasts, was so cruel to her for having them at all, was so obviously “troubled” and “in trouble” that Mother was called to the school for a consultation. An inventory was run of my offenses, the principal ticking them off on his fingers. Mother explained that our home life was difficult, money was tight, the father was away on business, we would all try harder, she couldn’t manage me really, she had just begun a job, what could she do? What, damn it, did they suggest?

  It was agreed I was bright. Good intelligence quotient, blah-blah-blah. Alarmingly mature about some things, irregular, even backward, about others. Poor citizenship, bad attitude. Perhaps a hobby would help.

  My mother asked me after the meeting if I would like to try a hobby. I told her I would like to take up boating as a hobby, to drive a Penn Yan dinghy powered by an Evinrude Fastwin with Weedless Drive.

  In fact I had “interests.” After October my chief preoccupation was Christmas, not what I would get but what I would give. I wanted only one thing other than my boat, an electric train, and I knew my mother would not buy me an electric train. She had taken a job as a salesclerk in a swank downtown store for ladies, and I would run her to ground there to beg small change for a movie at the Ritz, or a soda at Rexall’s. She found it awkward to deny me when she was among customers or her employers; she was embarrassed by me and eager to be rid of me, and I knew to the penny the price of being got rid of.

  The purpose of these raids on my mother’s petty cash was in fact devious, perhaps even selfless. Reading by flashlight one autumn night I cast about for something to lose sleep looking at, and found the 1949 Sears Christmas catalogue. I put check marks beside gifts I would buy my mother, beginning with a redwood chest which I set about filling with stuff: a sun hat, beach sandals, a garment called a “halter,” jewelry after the fashion of the Aztecs, a blanket. To pay for these things I accumulated my allowance, plus what I could cadge from my mother at work, plus what I stole from her purse at night. I also baby-sat for the sons of a dentist and his wife, children and parents so exotic in their regular habits and uncomplicated affections that I would sometimes stand mute in their presence, studying them as a naturalist might study unnatural phenomena.

  The coins piled up, and then the gifts. I don’t know what I meant them to mean to her, what I thought I was saying. Maybe I didn’t think at all. I know there was about this something aggressive, and that my zeal for generosity led me to new delinquencies.

  Downtown Sarasota was seedy, and never worse than near Christmas. That was the first year of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and it played ceaselessly on a p.a. system strung with chrome stars and gaudy rubber angels from the aboveground power lines. People took their beneficial rays with ten shopping days left. People with sunburns bought plastic snow for the plastic tree.

  I cased the gift shops and souvenir stores for something special to steal for my mother. I chose a card. It had snow stuck to it, and a message in raised letters, and a silk puffed lavender heart smelling of lavender. I stashed it under my Red Sox jacket, but the envelope fell out near the door and the owner nabbed me. I cried, but this cut no ice with him, and he sent for a cop. The policeman made as though to arrest me, and promised to send me where I could never do harm again. He walked me out of sight down the block, cuffed me behind the ear and told me to go home and be a good boy. I went home.

  We decorated a starveling jack pine. Christmas was cold and damp, and my mother was astonished by her gifts. Where had they come from? Who paid? Why so many? I smiled, was an enigma, knew what I knew. There was an electric train, after all. It wouldn’t run. My mother worked over the wires and connections like someone with one last chance, twenty seconds to unriddle The Meaning of Life. She remembers I was “not a little man” about the silent, motionless train. I remember I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she had bought it for me.

  From Turkey my father had sent me a ceremonial sword, a fez, harem slippers and a chronometer, my first grown-up watch. This told things bearing on tides, dates, and time zones. It divided time into units as large as months and as small as milliseconds, and had three different buttons to be pushed. It had luminous numerals and hands (with two sweep second hands). Its face was black, with three silver sub-faces. It said it was made in Switzerland, had seventeen jewels, and was shock- and water-resistant.

  I wore it to school the day Christmas vacation ended. A wise guy across the aisle, Jimbo, the son of a furniture dealer who hadn’t given my mother a job, also had a new watch, some American thing, a Hamilton, maybe a Bulova. It too claimed to move on jeweled bearings, and to be shock- and waterproof.

  “Your watch isn’t worth shit,” Jimbo told me. “Shocks and water’ll bust it.”

  “Read it. It’s water-resistant, shock too.”

  “Resistant isn’t proof.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Jimbo proposed a lunch-hour watch drop, followed by total immersion. I agreed, unhappily. There were witnesses. Pear-Shape was pulling for Jimbo, and only my pal Ernie for me. We held our watches by the ends of their straps, and one … two … three … dropped them to the floor. Or I did. Jimbo didn’t drop his. Mine broke, and he laughed. My watch never ran again.

  The next day I brought my ceremonial sword to school, and offered to put it in one of his ears and out the other—magic, maybe—if he didn’t drop his watch into a basin filled with water. He did this. His watch was made to be dropped into a basin filled with water.

  Paula Wilson, the prettiest girl in class, who sat behind me where I couldn’t see her, told me after school she was sorry I had broken my watch. So I was sorry that all year I had dropped pencils on the floor so I could wheel my head around at ground level to look up her skirt at her clean white cotton underpants. Paula became my “nice” friend. Her parents lived in a large white mission house, with a red tile roof, near the Ringling Museum. They inexplicably liked me, and let me take Paula to the movies. At the movies we even held hands, but the experience was a little like a week in the country on the arm of the Fresh Air Fund.

  Everything was falling apart. I fought every day after school, and Ernie’s old man decided I was a bad influence on his boy. I was. Ernie and I sometimes took our air rifles to an abandoned construction site to have shootouts like we saw in the Westerns Saturday morning at the Ritz, or the gangster movies we saw weekdays when I could get him to skip school with me. In the beginning we shot at each other from hiding places, potting in the other guy’s general direction and shouting “varmint” or “yellow rat” at each other. But the stakes went up, and finally I got him in the back of the neck when he broke cover to run to another hiding place. He collapsed, I thought I had killed him. When I reached Ernie he was thrashing around in the sand, screaming. Nothing would calm him till I let him shoot me in the back at a hundred paces. It hurt like hell, and we never played together again.

  Duke had been hired and sent to Turkey with his employer’s knowledge that he didn’t like to pay bills, and with the warning that here was a final chance for a gifted, careless man. My father began work in August 1949 with a year’s contract, on a year’s probation. In April, nine months later, he arrived unannounced in Sarasota, in
the MG. (He had stashed it in Harry Atkins’ garage, confiding that it was “hot.” Ruth’s husband Harry, bless him, was a sucker for Duke’s intrigues.)

  My father had been fired. He didn’t explain why. It didn’t matter; we were broke, so my father’s first act was to move us to a more comfortable house, a small, tight, clean cottage down Siesta Key near Midnight Pass. This had better access to a beach, and Toby had a backyard where he could play without being cut by cactus and nettles.

  I cared only that my father was home. He brought with him a trunk filled with toys and curiosities, things for Rosemary from the Istanbul bazaar, for Toby a mechanical monkey that twirled a stick and then climbed it, postcards of bearded horsemen waving swords and antique rifles, a pair of Zeiss field glasses for me. A boat was promised.

  Weeks passed, and my mother wondered aloud how we would eat. Duke grinned; piece of cake, Pan Am had lost his luggage en route from Vienna to Paris. They couldn’t find it, conceded failure, and would buy him off for fifteen hundred dollars, plenty till another job came along.

  I changed when my father came home. My stomach cramps disappeared, I had someone to mediate the bitter disputes between Toby and me. My father came with me sometimes to watch the Red Sox in spring training.

  The Red Sox had been playing exhibition games several weeks when Duke returned, and I had cut school many days to watch them. Walt Dropo was shaping up to be 1950 Rookie of the Year, Billy Goodman was hitting well, but I went to watch Ted Williams, distant and slope-shouldered, alone with himself. I wanted to get Ted Williams’ name on a baseball, an almost unattainable ambition. The team was vulnerable when it crossed an open lot to reach the field from a shower and equipment building. There I tugged sleeves, called names. I had two Spaulding balls, one to be signed by every member of the starting line up except Williams, the other wrapped in tissue paper, virgin, for Him alone. Day after day he shrugged me off, ran beside me without looking at me, once ran over me when I tried to block him. Everyone else smiled and signed.