Duke of Deception Page 5

  This troubles you, however, and I should not pour out my soul to such a busy man as you are, and I hope you will forgive this outcry against the pain my wounds are causing me.

  What does this mean? Sense and syntax break before this storm of grief, at once overwrought and stuffy, self-conscious and self-lacerated. These locutions are less the effects of a cause than pathological symptoms. I wonder if such exaggerated expression was ever turned toward my father in praise, pleasure, love? I listened in mute terror as my father listed my torts against him, real and fancied. But I listened, too, when he called me the best, brightest, most loving, most loved, apple of his eye, pride of his life, one to whom all things were open. I wonder if The Doctor ever said healing words to his patient, his son? I want to argue my father’s case to Dr. Wolff, to beg that monster of rectitude, not so terribly injured by his son as his letter imagines: Ease up a little, old man.

  4

  MR. Sheriff gave Yale his opinion of my father, an applicant: “Wolff is a boy with considerable ability and very little backbone. He is amiable and good-natured, but lacks determination and steadfastness.” Perhaps Duke could follow Arthur Samuels (by then editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and a personage in the worlds of music, theater, and publishing) to Princeton? Mr. Sheriff was candid—“I wish some way could be found to impress upon him the ridiculousness of his present attitude. He seems to be quite contented to be a featherweight and a buffoon when he might well be intellectually in the van”—and Princeton thought he’d be better off in some other college’s van.

  Well, what place would have him? One, at least, the classic catchall for sun-struck, rich dumbbells, the University of Miami. Duke entered in the fall of 1928, Miami’s third year as an institution, and right away he was in trouble. Enrolled in seven courses his first semester—three of them in literature, the others Spanish, French, history and economics—he flunked them all—or rather he was obliged to withdraw from them “on account non-attendance classes” in the registrar’s abbreviated style. He managed to exceed even Miami’s liberal notion of fit deportment: my father and some half dozen friends occupied apartments in an off-campus building, where their activities soon scandalized community proprieties, to the extent that the college president, B. F. Ashe, after warning the scholars that it was “entirely improper” to entertain “young women” in their rooms, sacked my father and three of his friends on the first day of 1929.

  Eight weeks later President Ashe was again at his typewriter, this time assuring Miami’s chief of police that Duke and his accomplices, “who did not conduct themselves in a proper fashion,” had no association with his college. The president had been made fretful by word that “these boys are still in town” and by “reports, which may be exaggerated, about their actions.”

  The reports were not exaggerated. My father did his first overnight in jail in Miami, for setting off fire alarms, driving drunk in his Chrysler convertible (a gift from The Doctor to celebrate Duke’s admission to Miami) and being a “public nuisance.” While The Doctor and my grandmother were spending a year in Europe, my father remained in Florida. When he wasn’t up to mischief he swam with Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller in an aquatic circus, playing exhibition matches of water polo. He also speculated in racing greyhounds: my father’s ran fast as dogs went, but slower than other greyhounds.

  When his parents returned from Europe, Duke, twenty-one, allowed himself to be brought home to Hartford. On the night of the Wolff family reunion my father drove his Chrysler along a sidewalk, and brought it to rest with its grille poking about eighteen inches through an Elm Street shop window. He lived at home the next two years, and what that was like for his parents and for him may be imagined.

  During this time Duke began to read with a consuming appetite, which he never satisfied. His first love was French and English fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but he also took up the work of Joyce and Williams and Eliot and Stein and Hemingway; his sense of them as belonging to him in a comfortable way was not the least of his legacies to me.

  In late 1930 he had another go at formal education. To paper over his Florida disgraces he or someone got a family friend at G. Fox & Co., Hartford’s best department store, to write To Whom It May Concern that during the exact period of his stay in Miami “Mr. Arthur Wolff has been in the employ of this Corporation. I am pleased to say that he has been most industrious, and shown great application to his work. He is leaving of his own accord.” This was signed, putatively, by Moses Fox, President. The letter accompanied my father’s application to the University of Pennsylvania.

  He was not admitted to the university proper but to a program taught by its regular faculty called College Courses for Teachers. He matriculated in January of 1931, enrolled in seven courses. Six of these were divided between English and history, and he received credits (and mediocre grades) in four. The seventh course was in philosophy. Ethics. Duke flunked it.

  He lasted a semester, and may or may not have wangled his way into DKE. Duke’s Hartford friend, a bona fide student at the bona fide University of Pennsylvania, thinks he was a Deke: “It was very unusual for a Jew in those days to get into a non-Jewish house. Maybe he didn’t get around to telling anyone he was Jewish.”

  I wonder what he wanted. Not simply to be liked, though he was. To partake of the excellence so much discussed at home? Probably. But he had attained nothing, and it must have seemed he never would. Still, he knew how to dress, speak, and carry himself like a gentleman. He stood tall and erect, and wore soft tweeds and a waistcoat with its bottom button undone (fat Henry VIII had begun the custom, he told me) and a gold watch chain looped through its middle buttonhole. (It would have been like a Duke Wolff watch chain to have no timepiece secured to its end.) My father was well-read, sardonic, informed, a declared expert on everything. He had physical courage, collateral to his general disregard of consequences, but not much stamina.

  His roommate at the University of Pennsylvania thought he was “just a great guy. He was a good friend to me. I loaned him money, and he always paid it back.”

  (I was told this in front of a cousin, Ruth Fassler, and when she heard it she said: “Come off it! He paid you back! Who are you kidding?” But the roommate added encomia to my father: “He took my fur coat once, disappeared with it; I thought it was a goner, but at the end of the weekend he brought it back. He was okay, really.” And my cousin said: “Great, he wasn’t a thief. A regular gent we have here.”)

  While he was loose in Hartford during the Depression many people felt his touch. (Ruth Fassler said: “Duke wasn’t poor. He was broke.”) Bill Haas walked into a downtown shoe store one afternoon and found the usually dour manager grinning ear to ear.

  “Why so chipper?” Bill asked him.

  “Duke Wolff just borrowed a sawbuck from me.”

  “Jesus, that’s nothing to lift a man’s spirits. You’ll never see it again.”

  “Yeah, but now I’ve given, he can’t ask me again. I got off cheap, most guys go ten or twenty.”

  One of my cousins said: “I always trusted him, and he treated me well. He was a good-looking guy, and good company.”

  Another cousin in the room that day said: “He was my friend.”

  And a third cousin looked straight at me, and said: “He was a gonif, a schnorrer. He was just a bum. That’s all he ever was.”

  No: he was more than that. A college friend recalls that when he told my father his troubles, Duke listened patiently, and gave good advice. Duke loved to give advice. When Bill Haas was in his prime—running a large tobacco business, raising a family—and my father was down and out, on the run from the law and “flat bust” (as he liked to say), Bill saw him, for the first time in years, sitting out a red light on State Street in Hartford. My father waved to his cousin, a man who had his number if anyone had it, and told him: “Your hair’s wrong. Don’t try to cover that bald spot. When you lose hair on your crown you should cut short what’s left, like I do.” The ligh
t went green, the old man put his unpaid-for MG in gear and shot a last instruction over its stern: “Don’t let them use electric clippers. Shears only.” And that day Bill Haas had his hair cut short, and it is short today.

  I know little about my father’s doings after he left the University of Pennsylvania and before he met my mother five years later. He divided his time between Hartford and New York, with a runaway trip in 1933 to Europe. Years later a raffish character, a bass player, approached my father in a seedy Los Angeles jazz club, where I had been taken to hear Jack Teagarden. I was thirteen, and interested in the musician’s story, which embarrassed my father. It seems the musician and Duke had shipped out as deckhands on a cattle boat bound for Bremerhaven from Boston. They carried their instruments, bass fiddle for the friend, banjo and four-string guitar for my father. They arrived in Europe broke, without papers, and jumped ship; the plan was to find work as jazzmen. It was not a sound plan, and soon my father collect-wired The Doctor for passage money home. In place of money he got a reply, also sent collect: DID NOT RECEIVE YOUR CABLE STOP WILL NOT RECEIVE YOUR NEXT CABLE EITHER STOP FATHER.

  My father borrowed his way home, and worked at menial jobs around Hartford, even picking tobacco for cigar wrappers with stoop-labor migrants for a few weeks. Broke, he nevertheless learned to fly, and fell in love for good with airplanes, but again his father, without malice or intention, diluted his pride. The week after my father’s first solo flight there was a headline in the Hartford Times: PHYSICIAN PILOTS PLANE AT 77: “Always possessed of an adventurous and inquiring spirit, Dr. Wolff piloted an airplane at the age of 77 without any previous instruction. While riding in a plane over Brainard Field, he took over the controls.”

  Not long after, Bill Haas heard Duke tell someone he had had a trying day, flying the mail from Hartford to Boston through a thunderstorm. Haas called my father on his fiction, told listeners that Duke could fly, but not that well, and had never flown the mail. My father exploded at this betrayal with the hurt anger of someone truly wronged, and he left Haas with the burden of believing that, yes, he had wronged his cousin: “I shouldn’t have butted in,” he told me.

  The closest Duke could come to a job in aviation was to clean engine parts at Pratt & Whitney for two bits an hour. While he was at this work Duke’s comrades struck the plant, and my father was used, successfully, as the workers’ and managers’ go-between. He was not in later life ashamed of this work, so I learned of it from him, but that is almost all of his Hartford life I do know from him. He worked elbow-deep in bins of gunk that cut grease and carbon from odds and ends of airplane engines due for overhaul. He’d then take his lunch from a fitted wicker picnic basket that held sandwiches with their crusts removed by the Norwegian cook, a linen napkin, and a fruit knife to pare an apple’s scrubbed skin. He did not discourage these dandy airs, just as he liked to be called Duke and allowed himself to be driven to a strike meeting by his father’s chauffeur in his father’s Rolls-Royce.

  In 1932, at twenty-four, he tried to enlist in the Navy, and was rejected for his stammer. Two years later he was tentatively accepted for Army officers’ training school until a major in the personnel office at Governor’s Island, New York, where Duke had enlisted, received a reply to his routine query to Manlius for confirmation of my father’s accomplishments there: “Mr. Wolff did not complete four years of R.O.T.C., nor was he a Second Lieutenant of the machine gun company while at this institution.”

  So until 1936 my father mostly drank too much at parties, played the banjo and piano, read novels and poems, became a fabled clothes-wearing man, and waited for something to happen to him.

  5

  ROSEMARY Loftus, my mother, met Duke during the great Hartford flood of March 1936. The Connecticut River’s excitement had stopped the city dead, and my father with half a dozen of his sidekicks had holed up in a couple of suites at the Hueblein Hotel, where they ran out of girls before they ran out of gin. My mother was nineteen, with time on her hands. After Sunday mass a “fast” friend asked if she’d like a blind date and my mother, bored, said sure, she’d take potluck.

  The first time my mother saw him, my father was sitting in the back seat of a friend’s new convertible, with a handsome girl giggling on his lap. My father was too informal for my mother’s taste: “He seemed tight, and he needed a shave. He was wearing battered sneakers and white flannels and no socks. He was not an impressive figure.”

  My mother was put off by a car filled with people—Walter and Nervy and Piggy and Jack and Duke—who seemed to have known one another forever, who traded private jokes that excluded her. They had all been drinking, and my mother didn’t much like to drink. Still, she went with them to the Hueblein. Rosemary liked to be a good sport.

  When she got to the hotel, and went upstairs to Duke’s room, he offered her a drink. Was he her blind date? She never found out. To my father’s astonishment Rosemary declined a cup filled with warm gin, just as an Air Corps colonel emerged from an adjoining bedroom buttoning his fly and grinning. Rosemary said she would like to be returned home.

  Her innocence, pep, and girlish beauty—alone or in combination—powerfully attracted my father, and he asked to see her again, named a night. She said she would be baby-sitting then, so he asked if he could sit with her and talk. Without knowing exactly why, Rosemary accepted this proposal.

  When my mother told me this story a couple of years ago, speaking with her measured, flat, accentless voice, I had just finished reading “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Delmore Schwartz’s autobiographical imagining of his parents’ courtship, a premonition of their bitter divisions. The story’s narrator slumps in a shabby theater, where he watches his parents come together in a crude movie which he tries betimes to interrupt, disturbing the audience. He calls out to the figures jittering across the screen: “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

  As my mother began her story of disappointment, humiliation and want, infrequently relieved by affection and satisfaction, I didn’t feel that way at all. I sat across from her, cheering my father on, cheering her on, marveling at the chance conjunction that joined them, made my brother, made me, shaped us all. My mother talked, her voice low, even, calm and resigned, anxious to get the facts right.

  (Before I began to work on this book there had for many years been a great distance between my mother and me, a chilling formality. My mother is not cold, and she is not stiff. She has been unfailingly warm and loving with my boys, and with my wife. She laughs a lot, teases, likes to be teased. But neither of us, I think, trusted the other’s love.

  There is much we don’t know about each other. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I saw my mother three times, for a total of about ten days. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six I never saw her. When I was twelve my mother was thirty-two, still unfinished, not yet what she would become. I had known her under terrible pressure, but when the pressure was relieved, or she learned to live with it, my mother returned to her natural gaiety and energy. During the years I did not see my mother she was a community leader, a joiner, an advice-giver, a sportswoman, a political activist.

  When my mother and I had discussed my childhood in the past, we had never gotten very far before one did the other some unintended injury. I once mentioned to my mother a barbecue restaurant “we” had liked, and my mother replied: “I used to go there, too.” To her we meant simply my father and me, which is what it usually meant to me, but not at that moment. Against such stupid barriers, then, we stumbled, again and again, and we learned, despite mutual good will, to defend ourselves with distance.

  When my mother agreed to help me with this book, when she put her life in my hands, I decided to interview her with a tape recorder, in the hope that by talking to it my mother could lose sight of me, forget that a judge sat listening. This cold instrument worked wonders for us. My mother
opened up while the spools turned, reached into her memory with self-assurance and ease, relaxed her defenses.

  It wasn’t until I transcribed her words, twelve hours of talk, that I appreciated the full force of her gift to me. I had been prepared to save my mother from those little gaffes of speech that everyone commits, errors of tense and number and parallelism, the ahs and ughs and I-means and you-knows that deface interviews. And because my mother is not an articulate woman I had expected to give her special protection against her infelicities of speech. But I was wrong about what I thought I had heard her say to my tape recorder; perhaps I have been wrong about what I heard her say as long as I have known her. For here were finished sentences and paragraphs, calculated and precise. We have no documents in our family to restore my mother’s past with my father to the present, and that was what my mother wished to do. She had thought hard about it, and wanted me to have it, as it was, plain. When I asked a hard question, my mother paused, and tried hard to answer it. If I didn’t know what to ask, my mother asked for me.

  I believe she may have paid a heavy toll for her precision and honesty, that her speech in this book may appear cold, unfeeling. It is no such thing. It is respectful of particulars, without false piety or sentiment. What my mother told me of our history brought us together again, and we had a long way to journey from there to here.)

  Duke appeared at the house where Rosemary was baby-sitting, and behaved himself. He sat across a coffee table from her and told stories at his own expense, entertained and charmed her. “But he didn’t attract me.”

  When my mother met him, my father was living at home. The Doctor was dying of stomach cancer, and Duke spent much time with him. What could they have said to each other, so late in the season? Duke got by on a dollar a day and all he could borrow; his friends Gifford Pinchot and Nervy Smith and Wellington Glover and Jack Lester and Piggy Gillette all had plenty, enough for everyone, and soon my mother began going with my father and these people to parties in Hartford and New York and Boston and New Haven.