Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  The plant Duke supervised was a huge network of hangars beside the airport to which bombers fresh off assembly lines were flown by ferry pilots to Birmingham for changes or additions to their bombsights, armaments, navigational gear, or interiors. As soon as they were modified, other ferry pilots flew them to Guam or England or India. The pace of work was hectic, the pressure to perform extreme, the cost of error mortal.

  It was among Duke’s inspirations in Birmingham to hire midgets to work the tight places inside wings and fuselages, to rivet joints and lead wires through places inaccessible to grosser persons. To round them up, my father sent hiring scouts with contracts and pockets filled with money to cities across America, where they hung around race tracks and booking agencies and penny arcades and carnivals, and within a few weeks a new labor force was on the case. (Later, when the war was winding down, just before my father was fired, his midgets were laid off, and I saw them protesting, milling in their city clothes with signs and sandwich boards outside the locked chain-link gate of the dismal plant, protesting how things were with a single word: UNFAIR!)

  At the beginning in Birmingham my father rode high, and so did Rosemary: “I was drunk with all that money.” We spent a few weeks in a suite at the Tutweiler Hotel, looking for suitable quarters for a chief engineer, and then moved into a showplace on Beechwood Road, directly across the street from the entrance to the Mountain Brook Club.

  The house was white, with a columned slate terrace surrounded by lilac and magnolia trees. Live oaks grew from an acre and more of lawn that sloped down to a boxwood hedge, and there was a formal garden out back, and a Victory Garden for vegetables, and to tend these growing things a gardener was employed, an old black man with one arm who ingratiated himself to Duke by holding open the Packard’s door when my father left for work, saying “Mornin’, Cunnel Woof.” The rest of the day the gardener napped under a shadetree, with a Mason jar of my mother’s lemonade beside him, watching the grass grow, and sometimes shooing away flies with his good arm.

  I remembered this house as about the size of Mount Vernon, with race horses gamboling along a mile-long split-rail fence. When I saw it recently it had shrunk, in beauty as well as scale, but it drove my mother and father into the poorhouse. Although the rent was only two hundred per month (my parents had never before paid half as much) and the gardener and fulltime maid together cost fifteen dollars a week, the house was unfurnished, and its many rooms were a challenge to the Wolffs’ extravagance.

  My mother and father had fun. There were many friends, a rootless assortment such as war and natural calamity can throw together: artists who drew the modifications my father required, pilots, inventors, mechanics, gunsmiths, mathematicians. These people came together without histories, and were peculiarly alive to the present. The house on Beechwood Road was open to anyone passing through Birmingham who had anything to do with airplanes.

  A pilot stayed with us. He had been shot down over Rabal, and was horribly burned. Natives brought him back to life and hid him from the Japanese, and he escaped on a raft. The pilot gave me a Japanese bayonet, and told me never to call Japanese people Japs. He also told me my dad was “one hell of a man.” He set up his dozen or so electric trains in our basement, with an insane network of HO gauge tracks, Gordian crossovers and model alpine villages and engines that whistled and blew steam. Where this pilot went his trains went, and when he prepared to fly his Dukefied B-29 to Guam, I saw the trains, packed in wooden crates, loaded into the plane’s bomb bay. He wore dark glasses and a flight hat with sheepskin earmuffs, and gave me the thumbs-up just before he revved his engines and rolled away.

  The gardener let me draw a puff from his cigar, but my neighborhood chums wouldn’t believe this. While two of them sat listening, I telephoned the Mountain Brook Drug Store.

  “My father wants to know if you sell cigars.”

  (They did.)

  “My father wants me to get him three cigars.”

  (What kind?)

  “Cheap cigars. Can I get three for a nickel? I only have a nickel.”

  We took them to a stream beside our house, and smoked them down to the butts, fast. My friends puked into the stream; we were five and six. They went home to take their lickings. I didn’t feel all that bad, considering, and came to the dining room for supper. Mother frowned. Father was hearty:

  “How are you, old sport, hungry?

  Not very hungry, I admitted.

  “Have a cigar. Something to whet the appetite?”

  My father offered me something longer and finer than the thing I had just smoked, and I said I thought I would rather not, no cigar, thanks anyway.

  “Oh,” my father said. “I think so. Here. Take it.”

  I shook my head, but he stuck it in my mouth, and lit it, and made me smoke it to the stump, even though he and Mother hated the smell of the things. He wasn’t angry, not the least bit.

  When I was recently in Birmingham a white-haired retired judge spoke of a lady recently married into an “old Buminham famly” as being of “unsuttun or-i-gin,” by which he meant, I think, that she was a Jew. I’m not sure what kind of society Birmingham claims; the city was infertile cotton land when the Civil War ended, and any place proud to call itself The Pittsburgh of the South might govern its pretensions. The city’s landmark, atop a hump of red clay called Red Mountain, is a statue of Vulcan, not as the god of war but in his subsidiary role as god of iron; he is advertised to be “the largest iron man in the world”—iron and coal make Birmingham go. Vulcan holds aloft what looks like a popsicle, but this is in fact a torch, lit red if there has been a traffic fatality within the previous twenty-four hours, green if not.

  Whatever passed for “society” in Birmingham neglected my father, but it was at a rare and now inexplicable visit to the Mountain Brook Club that three extraordinary events converged. Driving to the club my father told me our bulldog had died, and at the club my father learned that his mother had also died, and as he walked toward me with this news I jumped from the diving board into the pool, and in that way, before my anguished father or mother could reach me, learned to swim. This achievement interested me more than the death of my grandmother.

  When Duke’s mother fell sick at seventy-eight with pneumonia, a complication of heart disease, he insisted that she be treated at St. Francis rather than Mt. Sinai Hospital. He laid it on thick with the staff: Hattie was to have the biggest room, best treatment, no expense spared, here was the widow of The Doctor.

  But he stayed in Birmingham till she died on the last day of January, 1944, three days after she entered the hospital, and left Ruth Atkins and Bill Haas to keep the vigil at her bedside. The funeral was at Bill’s house, and Duke came home for it—too late some people said, too soon by half most said. When the bills were presented by St. Francis my father said screw ’em; as the nuns and priests did unto The Doctor, so The Duke would do unto them.

  There were harsh words at the funeral. My grandmother had left her most cherished things to Ruth and to Bill and to other cousins, and nothing to her son. At The Doctor’s funeral Duke had been ashamed and chastened, had promised reform. Now he was pugnacious. He considered himself a man of attainments, and was insulted that his own mother had not trusted him to administer the measly two thousand, all the cash she left, placed in trust for my education. His mother willed Ruth Atkins her furniture and jewelry, Bill Haas her bull’s-eye mirror, and Bill’s mother the grandfather clock. What remained after the two thousand was put aside for me, beyond Duke’s reach, was to go to him four years later, when he reached forty. But nothing remained. My father didn’t know exactly whom never to forgive, so he chose never to forgive all of Hartford.

  After his return from the funeral, the financial pressure built quickly to an intolerable level, and my parents moved to 2800 Hastings Place in Mountain Brook, a large corner house giving, in contrast to the Beechwood Road establishment, the illusion of modesty.

  During the move I went with my mother to gath
er the last of her clothes. The front door was open, and this alarmed her, and as we crept along the hallway to the circular stairs she paused, and held her fingers to her lips, and I held my breath. We heard nothing, climbed the stairs to my parents’ bedroom, and I saw something brown and wet on the banister, but was too terrified to say anything. We looked into the bedroom and saw Mother’s clothes heaped on the floor, and blood on the quilt, blood on the pale-blue curtains, on the doorknob three inches from my mother’s hand; she squeezed my arm and pulled me with her down the stairs.

  She telephoned my father before she called the police; after all she knew about him she still trusted him to know what things meant, what to do. Duke came to the house carrying the Air Corps Colt .45 he had been issued in London and had never returned. He found a broken window back of the house, and went through the front door and down the basement stairs and emptied a clip of big medicine into four dark and deserted corners of the cellar. That was where the police found him, maddened by the outrage to his wife and son, shouting for some phantom son of a bitch to show himself and have it out. But the intruder was gone with a few unpaid-for goods and his story.

  Father had the jitters for a long time after the break-in. A couple of months later he came home from work to find me sitting cross-legged on the front lawn at Hastings Place, working with a hammer, a nail and an unexploded .50 caliber machine-gun bullet a neighborhood kid had swapped me for a boat in a bottle. I had been trying, with increasing determination, to hit the firing pin hard enough to make something happen. My father saw me from his car, ten yards away, and spoke to me just loud enough to be understood clearly:

  “Put down the hammer and nail, put them down now. Put down the bullet, come over here. Good, that’s good.”

  Then he came out of the car fast, and ran toward me so violently I thought he would run me down, and took me in his arms and held me so tightly I thought he meant to hurt me.

  After dinner that night I sat on the bottom step of the back porch. I picked up a stone and idly pegged it at a robin tugging at a worm, just as I had hundreds of times before. This robin I hit, and he beat his wings once or twice, and then he died. I buried him, and began to have a care.

  The Doctor, after the death of his daughter, had been attentive to his son’s health, but my father was obsessive about mine. Like a lot of kids I had been born with a heart murmur, nothing that much worried doctors, but it tormented my old man. The merest earache or fever or sore throat would bring a medic with his bag, generally past midnight; perhaps to ease his own discomfort our family doctor suggested that my tonsils and adenoids be removed at the close of my first-grade year.

  They wheeled me in for ether with my mother beside me promising ice cream when it was over, and my father promising a new bike, and when I awoke there was the ice cream, and there was the bike; I was used to good care and kept promises.

  In the next room was a kid about my age, who had been there almost a year. He had accidentally set fire to himself, and his face was grotesquely disfigured, like the face of the pilot shot down over Rabal. My father would stop to talk with the burned kid, and while I was too young to understand all the intricate twists of courage, I knew that boy was special, like the pilot with the trains, and when my father talked with the boy I sometimes caught my father looking at me, measuring himself, I guess, or maybe me, wondering how we’d do.

  Sometimes that summer my parents would take me with them to wrestling matches. My father knew the wrestling impresario, a woman who smoked cigars and could tease him. There was a trick to teasing Duke. It was okay, quite merry, up to a point. If the line was crossed into what he perceived as presumption or malice, he’d blow.

  Once only as a kid was I humiliated for him, and that time he wasn’t humiliated at all, just confused. It was at a factory softball game, engineers versus grease monkeys. They had asked my old man to be plate umpire. I sat in the bleachers behind home with two friends and my mother, and at first I was proud. Then the game heated up, and some calls were disputed, and it was clear now that my father didn’t know much about baseball, and thought of the event as better-humored than it was. Some people in the stands shouted at him, wisecracking about his eyesight and his attention span. Then someone yelled “kill the umpire” and I turned to the general source of the noise and screamed at no one in particular to shut up, and my mother shushed me, but my anger amused the crowd, which began to chant in unison KILL THE UMPIRE KILL THE UMPIRE KILL THE UMPIRE. Then my father called what was probably a ball a third strike, and the batter wheeled on him and shook his fist at my father’s face which I couldn’t see behind his mask. I began to cry, and my mother took me away. My friends were afraid to speak all the way home, and none of us mentioned that softball game again.

  8

  MY mother, married to Duke more than eight years, had never loved him. And yet: “I never thought of leaving him.” In Birmingham Rosemary changed her attitude toward status quo. Two circumstances converged: Duke met a woman who fell in love with him, and Rosemary met a man who fell in love with her. The story comes from my mother.

  Duke’s lover was young and pretty, a talented painter from Mississippi who worked in the design department of Bechtel, McCone and Parsons. Rosemary learned about her in 1944 at a friend’s Thanksgiving party. She was asked where Duke was, and said he was shooting wild turkeys upstate, and a couple of married men laughed, and so the last to hear heard. A few weeks later she came face to face with Betty, after Duke had promised never to see her again. My mother had come by bus to prowl through downtown department stores; it was the middle of Duke’s workday, and my mother was surprised to see the Packard parked at a store entrance, and just as she saw my father, he saw her. He was alarmed, but beckoned her to join him in the car.

  “Why should I? I’m shopping. Why are you here?”

  My mother knew why he was there, and just then saw Betty, a pale redhead, leave the store my mother had been about to enter. Rosemary climbed into the Packard, and my father began to drive away when a woman’s voice followed them:

  “Duke! Where are you going? Wait!”

  To his marginal credit my father stepped on the brake instead of the gas. My mother remembers the rest:

  “She opened the door of the Packard before she noticed me. She recognized me from the plant, and clapped her hand over her mouth and said ‘Oh, my God!’ It was funny, like something at a play. Duke recovered fast. He climbed out of the car, and came to my side to help me out, and introduced us quite properly, without even stammering. Then he said to me, ‘Let’s go home.’ But I said no, I wasn’t finished shopping. And then I walked away. I felt smug; I knew I’d handled myself well. When I arrived home I found him in the library. You were on his lap, bathed, fed, and in your trap-door Doctor Dentons. Duke was reading you a poem from Now We Are Six, ‘The Knight Whose Armour Didn’t Squeak.’ It was a lovely, sweet domestic portrait. When he saw me he smiled and said, ‘Look, Mummy’s home, give Mummy a kiss.’ When I headed upstairs to my room he dumped you off his lap, without ceremony, and ran after me: ‘Now wait a minute, this isn’t what you think …’ ”

  My mother had been busy, too. She did volunteer work for the Red Cross, winding bandages, packing parachutes and driving for the motor corps, giving rides to soldiers who came into town. She met many pilots.

  “I was the first human they saw when they stepped off the wing, and I guess they figured it didn’t hurt to try, so most of them asked me for dates. I’d laugh and say no; it didn’t bother me, gave my ego a boost. But this one, a lieutenant, young and handsome, struck a responsive chord in me, and I gave him my name and phone number. That was the first time.”

  My mother and father were at a movie, and when they came home they found a note from the maid beside the telephone, Lieutenant Sullivan had called Rosemary.

  “Duke was outraged that I would give my number to a pilot, of all people! I laughed in his face: ‘Come off it! Do you really want to get into all that with me?’ ”

/>   They fought. Then Mother went to a lawyer, and he served papers on my father. Rosemary saw all she wished of Lieutenant Sullivan, and Betty tried to see Duke, and gave him an ultimatum: someone had asked to marry her, she would rather marry my father, what did he want to do? He wanted to heal things with my mother, who couldn’t understand why.

  “Betty was pretty, and bright and very refined. There would have been financial considerations, of course, but I wouldn’t have made trouble for them.”

  My father advised Betty to marry her admirer, and begged my mother to reconsider, but she was adamant, maybe in love, maybe not in love. In any case, they were dead-ended, and the time had come to tell me what was what.

  We sat on the steps of the back porch at Hastings Place about dusk of a breezy evening in early summer. My mother and father spoke gently and precisely. There were no storms, and they led to the hard news slowly, but I saw it coming from miles off. Any kid can see it coming. Maybe I tried to argue with them, and probably I cried, but mostly I remember trying to swallow. I remember too my father saying, truly, that he didn’t want this. So I knew my mother did, and there opened between us a separation, not her fault, certainly, but there.

  They left me alone finally, sitting on the bottom step. I threw a stone, hard, at a bird hopping across the backyard. I missed it, and didn’t throw another.

  Father and Mother agreed that she’d take me to Martha’s Vineyard for a couple of months, to visit friends. We went to Oak Bluffs, and I spent hours every day walking the beach alone, or haunting the penny arcade and missing my father. Twenty years later I drove through that gingerbread town on a bright day, and my good humor vanished as though a shade had been drawn across the present.

  My father wrote my mother every day, elegant pleas for her to come home, promises of reform. Lieutenant Sullivan wrote letters, too, from Dallas, where he was now stationed at Love Field, and they had greater effect than my father’s. I would lie awake in the little cottage where Rosemary and I were guests of Duke’s friends, a husband and wife who had once worked for him, and I’d hear the names—Duke … Sully …—and sometimes laughter, and sometimes what sounded to my straining and uncomprehending senses like a plot that did not mean my father well.