Duke of Deception Read online

  “Although I was not what you’d call innocent, I had never run around with people who were quite so open about their mischief. Your father led this group; he seemed, then, to prefer weak friends.”

  If Rosemary’s feeling for Duke was so tepid, why did she bother with him?

  “The pressure at home was terrible.”

  Yes, it was. At the funeral of Commander Stephen A. Loftus my brother wept. My mother, his mother, the commander’s only daughter, asked why. “What’s so sad?” (In fact my brother was moved to tears not by a dead man in a box but by the occasion, a military ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. My brother was in the Army, and liked the guns and uniforms and flags, was moved to tears by rows of crosses.)

  My mother’s father was a time-serving prig and bully; he was narrow, envious, bigoted, self-important, peacock-proud and snake-mean. His parents had come to America from Ireland during the potato famines, and he and several brothers were born here in awful poverty.

  A family photograph taken at the turn of the century, where they fetched up, shows weathered peasants, the teenagers looking forty, dressed in shiny black worsted church clothes. The brothers’ wrists hang from frayed, stiff jacket cuffs, and the sleeves are too short. Everyone but the eldest brother wears a hand-me-down, and far down the line comes Mother’s father, the only Loftus with clean fingernails. My mother pointed to his brothers: This one died in Ludlow in the mines, a strike or a cave-in, can’t remember which; that one killed a railroad bull, and went to prison; this gentle-looking boy just disappeared …

  The second youngest, Stephen, went to sea in 1903 as a cabin boy, and came out of the Navy a commander in 1944. He was what they call a Mustang, a man with brilliantly spit-shined shoes who pulled himself up through the ranks. He served during two world wars and never, whether from luck or cunning, heard a shot fired in anger. Once he was court-martialed for having cut with water a few thousand bottles of ketchup. He was a chief mess officer at Pearl Harbor then and had found a way to shave costs. For his offense he got a reprimand: he hadn’t pocketed the savings, wasn’t venal, was just a bootlicker. He was hated by his men and a joke to his fellow officers, who endured him for his efficiency and unwavering conviction that military regulations were divinely inspired.

  And what a tyrant he was at home! He married Mary Lucille Powers in 1915, a year before my mother was born. My grandmother, called Mae, was sweet, with gentle Irish good looks, raven hair, high color on high cheeks, blue eyes. She was twenty-five—a Denver telephone operator with a weak heart from rheumatic fever—when she married the up-and-coming sailor. Rosemary’s mother was the daughter of a domestic servant and a manual laborer on the Denver and Rio Railroad who had stowed away from Ireland, where he got himself in political trouble.

  The heart has its mysteries. Stephen Loftus, awful as he was, was handsome in a frosty, stiff-backed way. He was a good dancer, ambitious, cocksure. My only memory of him is set near Atlantic City, in Margate, New Jersey, where he had retired from the Navy. I was nine, and he had just taught me to tie my shoes the Navy way. I am in his debt for this, only this. My shoes have never come untied since. Pleased with his powers of instruction, he took me for a brisk stroll, what he called a “constitutional,” along the boardwalk. His shoes were tiny, and he clicked his heels in a metronomic beat against the rotting planks as we walked. I paused for a moment to watch the Atlantic rollers break against the beach, and he gripped my shoulder, just a bit harder than he should have gripped it.

  “You’re like your father,” he told me. “Wasting your time, dreaming it away.”

  Then he sat me down on a bench, and gave me a stubby pencil and a three-by-five spiral notebook, and instructed me to record verbatim all that he was about to tell me, that what he was going to say could turn my life off its reef-bound course, out toward the open waters of success. We sat hunched together. He was so clean, I remember, as smooth as a new tombstone, and his skin was pale as skimmed milk. He wore a thick, black wool greatcoat, even on that sunny day. His breath was foul as he confided in me, and corrected my spelling as I transcribed his secrets. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, something about the tidal rhythms of the stock market, and the nutritional benefits of un-cracked wheat. He would speak, and tap the notebook’s pages while the wind whipped at us, perceptibly lifting his hairpiece. I had never before seen a hairpiece, didn’t comprehend what was happening to the top of this man’s head. His fingers were long and delicate, and their nails were manicured. He was, perhaps, simply crazy. Later, when my mother took me to see Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger dive into a swimming pool off a high board at the end of the Steel Pier, I ask her why her father seemed so angry all the time. When she laughed too long and too hysterically at my question, I failed to guess that at that moment, so near that awful man, she was probably a little crazy, too.

  Later the commander tried to kill himself. He waded into the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial wearing dress blues and his sword. The water was ten inches deep, and he came out wet and puzzled. The park police told my mother he wept when they fished him out, and helped dry him off. She wouldn’t believe that her father could weep. He died in a Navy hospital, sometimes sticky with false and desperate sentiment, and sometimes mean. He lay hooked up to pipes and wires by people indifferent to his character, and threatened to cut everyone out of his will when in truth he hadn’t a thing to leave, and he died without a friend, or even an enemy.

  My mother was born with pneumonia in Chicago while her father was at sea in the Dardanelles. The birth was hard on her mother, but there was money for a nurse, and later a maid, and my grandmother, a pacific woman, didn’t complain, and gave her daughter love in abundance when they both recovered from the birth.

  The Navy moved the Loftus family to San Diego, Paterson, N.J., Bremerton (where my uncle Stephen was born eight years after my mother), and then, for a long stay, to Honolulu. Mrs. Loftus had been instructed to have no more children after my mother was born, but her husband wanted a son, and she wanted to oblige. The boy was delivered by the principles of Christian rather than medical science because her husband decided his wife’s illnesses were symptoms of a failure of spirit and will.

  My mother grew up a tomboy in Honolulu, and as happy as she would ever be. She mothered her baby brother, surfed, studied at Punahou and had boyfriends who put her to no other use than as a companion.

  When she went to the Mainland at fourteen, and to Beverly Hills High, she was screen-struck. (My mother has always been a dreamer; this is not the least of her virtues; she believes in the Big Break, the bank-busting lottery ticket, the grand prize in the sweepstakes, the place with the perfect climate. Now, past sixty, she says that if her ship ever comes in she’ll buy the biggest goddamned Winnebago anyone ever saw, and laugh herself to death wheeling it back and forth across the country.) While she was at Beverly Hills High, waiting to be discovered by the movies, boys discovered her. They didn’t use her very well; few of them ever would. She was saucy and cute, made herself up to look like Carole Lombard, and at fifteen was queen of a Rose Bowl float; right there, head of the parade, was her pretty face in a newsreel close-up! She waited for a studio to call; none called.

  When Rosemary was sixteen the family moved to Hartford, where her mother died. Mae never had the strength of other people. My mother would not flat out accuse her father of murder, but something awful went on in Hartford, some pain was permitted to continue because of that man’s stubborn preference for Christian Science, and his lack of compassion. Oh, he was a special case: he spanked my mother after dinner every night on the principle that while he didn’t wish to trouble himself with specifics, she must have been guilty of some misdemeanor that day. She soon learned to take advantage of the inevitability of her punishment by deserving it: having a smoke, fooling with the boys, stealing change from her father’s pockets, lying to him.

  When his wife died my grandfather insisted at once that Rosemary quit William Hall High
School to care for his son and his household. So at a stroke, my mother lost everything—mother, love, school and hope. Even money: during the late twenties there had been plenty around, the fruit of her father’s investments at a time when dancing bears could make stock market killings, but during The Great Sorting Out of 1929, he had been sorted out.

  There was something else, too: “At night Daddy always wanted to kiss me goodnight, and he’d hold me much too close. The relationship was not at all what I thought it should be, between a father and a daughter.”

  My mother persuaded this man to let her visit some old school friends in Hollywood for a couple of weeks. She went west by train, and meant never to come back. She dreamt of becoming a dress designer, but couldn’t get a job even as a salesclerk in that Depression year of 1934. She moved in with some “fast” girls who advised her to sell herself. She thought about it, seriously. She was hungry. Her father had encouraged her to smoke to keep her appetite and the food bills in check, and one day in a drugstore she took a deep drag on a cigarette and fainted from hunger.

  Then a man made promises he didn’t mean to keep, and my mother discovered she was pregnant, and didn’t know where to turn. So she came home to her father, who arranged an abortion. And he pushed his interest in his daughter even further than before:

  “He excused what he did, what he tried to do, by saying he was just testing me after my trouble in California, to see how oversexed I was. I was eighteen. It was the sort of thing you just don’t forget. Ever. Every time after that night when he came near me I stiffened, which is why when he was old and senile, helpless and dying and in pain, I didn’t feel anything.”

  When she met my father, a couple of promising affairs with young Hartford gentlemen had come unstuck. My mother didn’t understand why, all she knew for sure was that she was anxious to live with a man other than her father, “any man.” She had no ambitions now for a career: “In those days, the only way out was to get married and hope you got a better life than the one you had before.”

  By those standards my father was okay, marginal. Rosemary could see that he loved her, and she let him press ahead with a kind of courtship. The Doctor died in June of the year my parents met, and my mother never saw him, but soon after the funeral my grandmother Harriet invited Rosemary and her brother and father to dinner at 217 North Beacon Street. The Navy man, humiliated that his daughter would traffic with a Jewboy, went with contemptuous reluctance. My cousin Ruth was there; it was an important occasion for my father. Ruth despised my grandfather on sight, saw that he was a bully, that his young son was terrified of him. She noticed his awful table manners, at once fastidious and incorrect, and his banal conversation and the skinny, mean wrists poking from his starched cuffs.

  Ruth liked my mother immediately, saw in her a relentless innocence and willingness to pick herself up to try again. “But there must have been something wrong with her if she would marry Duke.” Ruth’s too hard on them; they were trying for something better than what they had known.

  They were married in January of 1937, rain-drenched, standing in the parlor of a Westchester County justice of the peace. My mother calls the occasion “that ridiculous ceremony.” A gang of Duke’s married friends had tagged along: “All they cared about was that Duke got married so that he’d be as bad off as they were, trapped like them.”

  My mother tells me this placidly, without bitterness or much regret, with no evident sense that it touches me, this “ridiculous ceremony.” I ask my mother:

  “Did you love my father, ever?”

  She studies this question with a kind of disinterested curiosity: “No, I never loved him. Not in the conventional sense. I never could understand what my feelings were toward him. We had some good times together, and there was some affection. But I never loved him. The act of making love, for example, I did not enjoy. So he probably didn’t, either.”

  From some joyless union, a month after my parents were married, I was conceived. My mother once told me I was a “mistake,” and another time she told me I wasn’t, and then again that I was. I guess I was a “mistake.” My mother seldom measures her words, is capable of the most startling bursts of candor, and I guess I was what she told me fifteen years ago I was.

  This should not surprise me: Duke and Rosemary lived in a Milford apartment after they were married, and they were as close as close can be to flat broke. Duke worked for a while at Sikorsky Aircraft in Bridgeport; my mother doesn’t remember what he did, only that he wore overalls to work, earned fifteen dollars a week and was fired for absenteeism. An employment agency then got him a job as a night rewrite man on The Bridgeport Telegram, and again he was fired for absenteeism, for which read hangovers. My mother earned a dollar a day from a Bridgeport welcome wagon, and threw up every morning.

  My father stayed home reading, and waited for the settlement of The Doctor’s estate. “I’m sure he was bored to death with me,” my mother remembers. “Every night someone came down from Hartford to entertain him. I wasn’t good company. I used to sulk and pout. He didn’t like to be criticized by me. His friends didn’t criticize him; they had no conversation except what had happened the night before. Nothing very interesting had happened the night before.”

  When my grandfather died his obituary ran down two columns of the front page of the June 22 Hartford Times; the following day the Courant ran an editorial memorializing The Doctor’s “service to humanity.”

  The pallbearers were Hartford Jews, old-timers in the city, a drygoods wholesaler, a plumbing contractor and former health commissioner, a wine merchant, a tobacco grower. These men disapproved of my father. He understood. He told Bill Haas: “I’ve been a rotten son. I’m going to make it up to Mother.” The funeral service was small and private, without flowers, and so was the burial at Beth Israel cemetery. I wonder if my father said Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer read by a son for his dead father? I wonder if my father knew what Kaddish was? He never told me, and so made certain I could never say such a prayer above his grave.

  It was assumed that my grandfather’s will, drawn when Duke was twenty, would reflect The Doctor’s disapproval of his spendthrift son. This did not prove to be so. It was the least vindictive of documents. From the sum of his cash and securities my grandmother was to take the first fifty thousand dollars. My father was to have the next fifty, and all that was left was to go to his widow. When she died, her estate was to be held in trust for my father till he was thirty, and was then to go to him without condition.

  Fifty thousand was then a mighty sum, and it seemed that my parents were presently to be elevated from their low estate in Milford. But when the affairs of The Doctor were plumbed, and their tangles unraveled, it became evident that Duke’s deliverance to Number One Easy Street was to be delayed. There was no fifty thousand, not for him and not for his mother.

  The Doctor had without Harriet’s knowledge mortgaged their house on North Beacon Street for twenty-five thousand dollars in order to treat them both to a final and very grand tour of Europe during 1929 and 1930. The house was sold, and the mortgage paid off. Then the toys and furnishings of a lifetime went on the block. When the sales ended there was enough to purchase my grandmother a modest annuity. She rented a tiny flat on Farmington Avenue, and was as ever chipper. So my father inherited fifty thousand dollars, but didn’t, from his spendthrift father; he finally understood that he had no net beneath the wire he was walking.

  Shortly after the estate was settled there was, in the way of these things, a bitter dispute between my father and some of his cousins. Duke had either sold some of The Doctor’s optical equipment entrusted to him by his mother, or he had taken it without her permission. Whatever happened (and even now the principals won’t discuss it) caused my father to look west. My mother, no lover of Connecticut and a dreamer of sun-dreams, was happy to try her luck elsewhere.

  My grandmother bought them a new car, a Ford phaeton, and sent them away with her blessing. And so they lit out for the Pacific�
�with me in my mother’s belly, making her sick—without reason to hope that anything good could possibly come of their move. But as both would later tell me, they were almost happy.

  6

  I WAS born in Hollywood. Was a baby in Redondo Beach and a little squirt in Palos Verdes. Drove east at four in a twelve-cylinder Packard convertible to New York. Father went to England. I heard the radio tell about Pearl Harbor, my second or third memory, at the Elm Tree Inn, Farmington, Connecticut. Mother drove us to Colorado Springs, to see her brother. The mountains bored her, we returned to California, Hermosa Beach. Father came home. He bought a tract house in Chula Vista, where we lived a few weeks. Cross-country to Birmingham, Alabama, a huge, four-columned Greek Revival manse. I began school. Mother took me away, north to Oak Bluffs, south to Dallas. Then Atlanta, a rooming house on Peach Tree Battle where Mother interrupted Father, who was reading Treasure Island aloud, to tell him a bomb had been dropped somewhere, the war was over. Up to Niagara Falls, the honeymoon suite of the General Brock, on the Canadian side. Down to New York, a cold-water walk-up on East Fifty-seventh. Father went to Lima, Peru. School again in Connecticut, where we lived in a Saybrook fleabag called The Pease House, and bought a domesticated farmhouse in Old Lyme. Father went to Turkey. Top-secret escape from creditors, south with Mother to Sarasota, a drafty, damp cabin. At twelve, flight alone cross-country to Seattle, where Father and I lived together in a tiny boardinghouse in the University District and where I lived with my father and stepmother in a huge house beside Lake Washington. Southeast by Buick Roadmaster to Bell Buckle and Shelby ville, Tennessee. Sent north to Choate. Home for vacations—a rambling shingled house in North Chatham on the Cape, to the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, One Fifth Avenue in New York, Weston and Wilton, Connecticut. At seventeen to school in England, and back to Princeton. After my mother dropped off the carrousel so did my stepmother. Father disappeared. I found him at the edge of the continent, slipping off the shelf of the first place he ran to after his father died leaving him only the eternal reproach of a well-lived life.