Duke of Deception Page 3

  She recollects especially the big house on Collins Street to which The Doctor and Harriet moved after my father was born. (Cousin Ruth’s brother, Arthur Samuels, a New York editor and wit, had been named for The Doctor, and my father was called Arthur Samuels Wolff to return the compliment; he upclassed this to Arthur Saunders Wolff.) Ruth’s favorite room was the library, dark and formidable, dominated by The Doctor’s huge desk. There was also a music room, a drawing room paneled in oak, and a kitchen in the care of a Norwegian cook. There was a maid, and a chauffeur in charge of several Pierce-Arrows and a couple of Rolls-Royces as the years passed. When The Doctor drove himself he drove at a constant speed, whatever he encountered; people were meant to move aside for him.

  As Ruth grew older she ceased spending every Saturday night in The Doctor’s house, but she would stop off most afternoons after school to find him reading the New York Journal. If she had missed a couple of days between visits my grandfather would pout: “I didn’t know you were still alive.”

  Probably better than anyone, she understood my father’s childhood: “Duke was beyond imagination spoiled. I remember going to his room, filled with every single thing made for a child, and the room looked like a hurricane had come through it; you couldn’t walk across it without breaking a toy because there was no room on the floor for them all. It was grotesque, and cruel.”

  And then Ruth, shaking her head, recollecting her love for my father and the anger that caused her to tear to shreds every photograph she owned that included him—grinning in a sailor’s suit, rolling a hoop, catching a baseball, Beau Brummel in a white three-piece suit among fraternity chums—looked down, and dropped her voice: “He never had a chance.”

  Why not? To be born the third Arthur Wolff didn’t seem to be bad luck. His parents were comfortable and respected. My father’s health was studied and maintained, he was petted and adored. The little boy was even allowed to attend his father in his laboratory and workshop, providing he held his tongue. Yet almost from the beginning there was trouble. Bill Haas, six months younger than my father, remembers him as a “toy-breaker.” The Haas and Wolff families celebrated Christmas, presumably as a secular occasion, to exchange gifts: “If I got to Collins Street on Christmas afternoon or early the next day, there’d be something left to play with. A couple of days later, all broken.”

  Perhaps my father was an unexpected boon to a busy professional man past middle age. Certainly The Doctor begrudged his son time, and instead of time preferred to give him things, forgetting the attention and education lavished on him by his own father. For whatever reason, an old and sad story began to unwind, of love’s shortcut through stuff. My father spent time, the truly precious gift, on me; but even so he thought of possessions as the fundamental, material manifestations of love. If I mentioned that I would like to collect tin soldiers I would the next day have a hundred tin soldiers. If coins or stamps were my interest of the moment I would get albums, the things already fixed in place. Thus was the nature of desire blindly perverted. To be thrust upon as my father was thrust upon, as he thrust things upon me, was crucially unsettling.

  Yet I knew that my father poured goods on me because he loved me. Did my father think of himself as similarly loved? I don’t know. Ruth believes that her cousin’s dominant sensation in the presence of The Doctor was fear. That, until he died, he sucked his thumb in sleep from fear. That he stammered from fear. Ruth and Bill both recollect The Doctor’s insane tantrums around his son: they remember him chasing the boy, trying to hit him with a chair, threatening to kill him with it, but they don’t remember why.

  My grandmother Harriet doted on her little boy, dressed him like a doll and praised him ceaselessly in her low, gentle voice. Her son loved her back, but he was awful when he was crossed or denied, capable of tantrums, pipsqueak imitations of his father’s. These she would hide from The Doctor. It was not that she was afraid, or mousy—she knew her mind as her husband knew his—but that she liked to keep the peace.

  My father was thought by his friends and cousins to be generous, talented, bright and charming. His charm disarmed them and his mother, but never his father. To please The Doctor required attainments his son was too young to possess, so my father must very early have become a student of evasion, plotting ways around the judgment and daunting standards of someone sixty-five when he was thirteen.

  How hard it must have been to grow up under the measuring gaze of that father! From the beginning my father heard talk about the best of this, the best of that: the best neighborhood, school, automobile, mind, family. And if Jews with educations and without accents were better than Jews with accents and without educations, couldn’t it follow that best of all was to be no Jew at all?

  Even as a child my father expressed an amused disdain for the Jews he had chanced to fall among, and Bill Haas remembers Duke, only nine or ten, overhearing The Doctor remark that Temple Beth Israel had been built too close to the sidewalk; my father gestured at the Gothic structure on Charter Oak Avenue and muttered: “Yeah, about a m-mile too c-c-close.”

  Bill was treated generously by my father except on the single occasion when he mocked his stammer, and my father hit him, hard. They played together at Crescent Beach, where they lived summers next door to each other, and Duke taught him dirty jokes, and bragged to him about fictional sexual conquests, and to the best of his ability led the younger boy astray. Duke was an excellent swimmer; he was courageous and amusing. He was also moody, eager to lose himself in fantasies of accomplishment, and in books. “Your father read real stuff, not crap like I read but literature, Melville and Dickens and Swift.”

  He was thought by The Doctor’s neighbors to be a “wild boy.” He broke windows, and charged petty items to his mother’s account at the neighborhood drugstore, without her permission. At grade school he cadged petty cash from his classmates. As he grew worse, but surely not awful, his mother withdrew into a pacific acceptance of his condition, and his father gave more time to his inventions and medical research.

  Today my father’s punishments are more vividly remembered than his crimes. What did the child do? He wasn’t a bully, didn’t steal, was kind to animals, loved his mother, was awed by his father. Because he exhibited none of the superiority so precious to The Doctor, he pretended to it. My grandfather finally gave up on his son when my father was thirteen.

  Duke’s first boarding school was Deerfield Academy, sixty miles up the Connecticut River Valley from Hartford, in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Headmaster and usually benevolent tyrant from 1902 till 1968, Dr. Frank Boyden had a reputation for tolerance, for mending boys rather than tossing them aside. It was the legend that he would not kick any boy out of Deerfield, but my father was sent packing after a single semester in 1921.

  He was brought by Dr. Wolff to see the school and be seen by Dr. Boyden. Among the headmaster’s notes from the time of my father’s first visit to the school are his impressions of another applicant, with “a funny head. It comes to a peak. Lips. A silly boy. Too fine-bred for us. Mother has too many ideas about education.” (So did The Doctor. His son had previously studied at Hartford’s public West Middle School whose teachers, responding to Dr. Wolff’s theories of educational practice, often visited my grandfather at home in Hartford, and spent weekends with him at Crescent Beach. Dr. Boyden was not one to place himself on so intimate a footing with a Hartford surgeon, no great personage by Deerfield’s measure.)

  Another contemporary applicant revealed himself to Dr. Boyden’s judgment: “stubby fingers. Sloppy. A big nose.” What the headmaster thought of young Arthur—who stammered and wore glasses, whose curly hair was unruly, who sometimes wore a goofy Groucho Marx-like leer—can be imagined. My father was neither cute nor assured. He was young, but had already been trained to believe he wasn’t of much use to the world. Dr. Boyden described the child’s semester at Deerfield offhandedly: “He was a well-meaning boy who had practically no preparation. Also, he had never done any real work.”

&n
bsp; So he was sent along to the Eaglebrook Lodge School for younger boys, also in Deerfield and established coincidentally with my father’s entrance in 1922 by Howard B. Gibbs, who had taught for Dr. Boyden. The main building was set high up on Mount Pocumtuck, beside a brook. It had been built as a private retreat in the 1890s, and during a stay there of several weeks Rudyard Kipling wrote Captains Courageous, a circumstance retailed to the boys to inspire them.

  My father was one of twenty-six students, and happy, at first. The inaugural year was easygoing, and the school nurse remembers that “if Mr. Gibbs decided he wanted to eat dinner in town we all went to eat dinner in town.” Gibbs knew boys to be savage as well as noble, and for all that managed to love them. He obliged them to shake hands firmly, to speak audibly and with candor. A graduate recollects that Gibbs was “of the old school. If someone did something wrong, he would haul off and bang him one.”

  My father once ran away from school with another boy, probably from motives other than homesickness, and the matter was reduced to a boy’s scale, with a boy’s punishment given for a boy’s crime. Mr. Gibbs collected the pair by car and brought them back to the Lodge, and remarked that as they seemed to enjoy long distance hikes, they could hike five hours, nonstop, around the school’s circular driveway.

  Very early each morning, fall and winter and spring, the boys were led in sets of exercises. At night ghost stories were told beside the fireplace. In the spring there were hikes to the summit of Mount Pocumtuck, and in the winter the children descended iced chutes on toboggans, and skied downhill and cross-country and off jumps.

  The children came from families of all qualities and conditions (many with old New England surnames), who had in common mostly their ability to pay the tuition. (This was evidently a hardship for The Doctor, who sold the Collins Street house in 1922, and built a smaller place at 217 North Beacon Street that nevertheless had a huge workshop out back.) Eaglebrook boys were wealthy orphans, children of divorce, children of Americans abroad. The son of a Boston mortician arrived for the first time at Eaglebrook in the back of a hearse, asleep, and a fourteen-year-old Japanese boy with an allowance of twenty thousand a year always took an instructor with him to Bermuda during the holidays.

  Before my father went home for his first Christmas break the boys and their masters walked to Deerfield, the paradigm of New England villages. They walked on snowshoes, carrying lit candles, and stopped at each house to sing carols. When I think of my father, an old man in a California prison, I sometimes think of him too as a young boy singing a celebration in the snow.

  His grades at Eaglebrook were for the first and almost last time almost respectable: he flunked math, which would plague him from then on, whether he was pretending to draft an airfoil for Lockheed or listing his assets and liabilities; he got a 65 in French. But his 78 in Latin was fine, and his grade in English was the highest in his class.

  But something happened; I don’t know what, and Eaglebrook either can’t or won’t tell. My father was sent home to his father, who sent him away to St. John’s School, a military academy in Manlius, New York, near Syracuse. This was the kind of place that advertises in the back pages of The New York Times Magazine, showing a stiff-backed adolescent cadet with his chin jammed against his chest. Duke was sent there by the intercession of his uncle Lambert Cain, the husband of one of The Doctor’s sisters, a West Point graduate and career Army officer. My father appeared at St. John’s in the autumn of 1923, at fifteen, to have his character built, or beaten, into him.

  During my father’s first few weeks at school he burst out of the blocks, doing excellently in all his subjects, even algebra and geometry, winning a reputation as a bright young man. Once his intelligence was beyond dispute, he began to backslide. He despised the grinding earnestness of the place, and chafed at St. John’s regulations. The upperclassmen—cadet officers—were bullies, and the teachers taught by the principle of rote. By late November of my father’s first year The Doctor had received a letter from St. John’s principal, General William Verbeck, complaining about the boy’s indolence and concluding with a threat: “If he will not respond to our demand for a good grade of scholastic work he is really wasting time at Manlius.”

  What a lament this caused in Hartford, what virtuoso hand-wringing! The Doctor wrote his son:

  You may easily understand my astonishment in finding that you are repeating the great source of serious trouble you are giving both your mother and myself. I had been hopeful that you would try to be a dutiful son, and be faithful to the trust we have all put in you, and it is very disappointing. You are now a young man, and you have not much time to make good. I am so sad about it all that I hardly know what to say to you. You promised so much to us all, and fair words and loving kindness do not seem to impress you in the least. My heart is so full, and my disappointment is so great that it is difficult to put in words what I feel is the result of your thoughtlessness and the wicked manner in which you are using up the patience I have had with you. Now, my dear boy, I want you to ask yourself if it is not time to leave your wicked and foolish ways. You will never have another such chance to make good, and to be properly prepared for the life you must follow when I am gone, and if you will not do what you should do with the chances we have given you, what will the result be then? It makes me sick at heart every time I think of it.

  After much more of the same, The Doctor signed off “your affectionate Father,” and then added a grim postscript, reminding his boy that in a few weeks it would be “just one year ago that you were sent home from Eaglebrook, and I beg of you not to have this repeated.”

  It is important to restore some proportion to this matter. The Doctor’s letter followed a slip in his son’s academic standing from very high to medium rank. At the time it was written my father had had no disciplinary troubles, but he soon would. At the time it was written he played the banjo in the school band, swam on the team, and was conspicuously good-willed. The school barber, called Mac, still remembers him: “Sure, Duke Wolff, big boy, handsome, plenty smart. His dad would get mad as blazes at him, he’d tell me about it. Say this for him, all the boys liked him, he could always raise a laugh at something silly or himself. That counts for something, you know, to be able to lift people out of the dumps with a laugh.”

  But The Doctor and The General fed each other’s appetites for rancor, and devised increasingly sophisticated methods of settling Duke’s hash. If he wouldn’t do his work “as a soldier should do it,” as The Doctor told his son, he must not be allowed trips with the other boy-soldiers to Syracuse, as The Doctor told The General. This particular punishment, if that is the description for an embargo on Syracuse, had a further purpose: The Doctor explained that he would like his son kept on campus “because of Arthur’s impulsive nature and extravagant ideas, and I feel that it is time now to teach him something of the value of money, and the commodity it may purchase.”

  When my father returned to St. John’s in 1924 he set about failure with a will. By year’s end he had flunked or dropped every subject he took, and spent three weeks in April hospitalized for “nervous exhaustion,” even then a euphemism for deep distress, and had run away from school three times.

  My father mentioned St. John’s to me only once, calling it “Manlius,” as though he could not bring himself to say its proper name. From those crucial years of his boyhood he retained a single memory he would share, and it was appropriately bleak. Two cadets—was he one?—had set a small fire in the school gymnasium, and The General gathered the boys there at night, with the fire out but still smoking. He knew two boys had done the deed, and asked them to come forward and confess. When they did not he told the assembled cadets that they would remain in the gymnasium till he had a confession; they were free to mill about as they pleased, but not to leave the building. He watched them for several hours and then, as though by magic, named the guilty ones, two who had stuck fast to each other, speaking to no other boy. I guess I believe my father set fire to
that gym, but whether he did or not, St. John’s expelled him by the spring of 1925.

  Under the influence of his cousin Arthur Samuels, an idol, my father had always assumed he would go to Princeton, where Samuels, ’09, had been president of both the Triangle and Cottage Clubs. But now something drew him to the simplicity of Dartmouth as a first choice. Accordingly, The Doctor exiled his son in the fall of 1925 to The Clark School, in Holderness, New Hampshire, a place of even lower academic prominence than that from which he had just descended, a school where many dense Dartmouth hopefuls had been prepped.

  The Clark School’s memory of my father’s academic year there is not happy. The headmaster wrote the headmaster of Duke’s next institution (one school’s trash is another school’s treasure): “I am sorry that it is necessary for me to send you the grades of Arthur S. Wolff as they do not reflect much credit upon his work with us.” (English: 62; geometry: 46; French: 28.) To add to the mess, The Doctor had a financial dispute with Dr. Clark, the school’s owner and headmaster, over the recovery of fees after his son was sent down from Holderness.

  At home at 217 North Beacon Street the summer of 1926, by now aged eighteen, my father got in hot water with the neighbors for making passes, some successful, at their maids and daughters. But his most serious offenses were financial: “He had gorgeous taste,” Ruth remembers, and he liked to exercise it.

  When he was as young as sixteen my father would travel to New York for “the best.” He’d buy hand-knit sweaters and socks, have his shirts custom-tailored at Saks or Brooks Brothers or Triplers, and bill what he bought to his mother. He was generous, would give his friends expensive clothes they, like their benefactor, would soon outgrow. He’d also bounce checks, but in amounts small enough for his mother to cover from her household account. As usual, he pushed his scams past the limit, and his father caught him. The Doctor frequently used gold in his laboratory, and one day his supply house received a call from someone who, after identifying himself as Dr. Wolff, placed an unusually large order, saying his son would soon appear to take delivery of it. Young Arthur got the gold, and his father got the bill.