Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  Our bathtub was once again put to a use for which it had not been designed. After Julie slaughtered her turkeys she hung them wrong end up, and their blood did not drain from their bodies; it pooled in their bodies, and turned them lavender, and they weren’t fit to be sold. My mother recalls the situation:

  “My God! She plucked them in the kitchen, and every time air slipped through a crack in the walls or floorboards a turkey feather blew into our food. A butcher told her she could rescue the damned things for sale if she soaked them in a bathtub, and guess whose bathtub she soaked them in? I thought I’d never eat another turkey as long as I lived, but I guess you can get used to anything. Still, I never got used to the Kimballs.”

  As the winter got colder, Doak got drunker, Julie less satisfied, and Buster bigger and meaner. His mother told my mother that Buster was insecure, and my mother told his mother the boy was merely awful. He’d eat half a dozen eggs and a stack of hotcakes for breakfast, a trencherman’s portion at school, and then my school lunch; then he’d take on fuel before dinner.

  Snow fell, silence thickened, and I taught myself to read. I was staring at a comic book, Plastic Man, and suddenly the balloons above the art were as palpable as thunderheads, and the words spoke to me.

  Christmas came, and was not festive. My mother was restless; we got our passports, had had our shots, which made us suffer; we had done our parts, were owed Peru. The two waking Kimballs often asked when we might be moving along. Rosemary pressed Pan American for a departure date. Pan American told her to sit tight, certain complications had developed. And then in early January my mother got a collect call from Duke. He was in New York, would be at the Saybrook station in a few hours. He had resigned. Okay, so he had been fired. He was not drunk. Well, so what if he was?

  We moved to Saybrook’s Pease House, a summer hotel beside the Connecticut River that had long ago gone fleabag. One night Duke woke from drunkenness and heard what he thought was a prowler and was probably a cat, and he filled the beaverboard walls with .45 slugs, and the next morning we packed our bags again.

  We moved a few blocks to a rooming house on Main Street. We all slept in one room and shared a bathroom and kitchen and dining room with the other lodgers, old women. One ate at the table from her rocker, lurching forward to her mashed food, forking it at the still point of her swing, rocking back. She was a victim of fits, and frequently fell from her chair entirely, provoking shouts of consternation. My father would carry her to her room. Another old lady liked to lift her skirt above her waist whenever I came near her.

  I would sit after school by the river, watching the ice break and flow toward Cornfield Point and Long Island Sound. When the ice finally melted I tried to fish from the end of a condemned ferry dock. Duke used me to test a fishing device he and a local barfly had designed in our bedroom over teacups of dark rum. The contraption had an elaborately springed red flag that was hoisted when a fish took a line hanging from a float. It was going to make my father and his friend rich, and they had drawn plans for the patent. It didn’t work on the river. Duke was also the second-in-command on a two-man assembly line for a lampshade manufacturer who was in and out of business in less than three weeks. We were poor. Finally my father found work at Pratt & Whitney, his first employer, at a job not unlike his first job.

  “I was resigned to Duke,” my mother remembers. “I saw no alternative to life with him; I was dragging my feet.” But one night she unloaded on him, detailed her opinion of her life. He commuted in an ancient sixteen-cylinder Cadillac, rose at five to punch in at eight in Hartford, returned after dark and after dinner. This day, payday, he came home cold and tired and dirty and drunk. It was March. My mother was waiting:

  “I was sitting at the foot of the bed, and he was sitting in a chair, taking off his shoes. We were close together, about as close as I am to you now. I said terrible things to him, and he hauled off and slapped me, very hard. He had never done anything like that before, and it stunned me, and I hit my head against the side of the bed. It raised a lump, and when I showed him what he had done he was miserable, and he promised … well, you know how he was.”

  Soon after this battle my mother complained to the owner of the rooming house about bedbugs, and she said there weren’t any bedbugs in her house, and my mother said there were, and the woman said there weren’t either, and my father warned the old lady not to call his wife a liar, and she said who are you to talk about respect, you don’t pay your rent and you beat your wife and your little boy uses the most awful language in front of the other lodgers and if there are bedbugs here I know who brought them. We were out on our ears again.

  Duke decided it was time to trade up, there being no place to fall from the rooming house. He drove to Hartford, and huddled with his counsel. Joe Freedman, for an absolute first claim on everything we would ever own or earn, plus rights to our souls and whatever chemicals and spare parts could be taken from our bodies, advanced a down payment on a two-floor frame house on Mile Creek Road in Old Lyme, across the Connecticut River from Saybrook. Freedman’s generosity testifies either to my father’s persuasive powers or to … Freedman’s generosity. This was understood to be my father’s final call on his attorney’s indulgence.

  The place was a pleasant, brown-shingled farmhouse previously owned by a German pathologist obsessed with things Japanese. He had imported Japanese bamboo, which had fructified insanely, and had turned his property into a Japanese beetle ranch. This we did not know in April, before the bamboo and beetle season were fully upon Connecticut. My parents instead saw twelve pretty acres, a large red barn, a disused tennis court, and a house free of turkeys and lodgers and bedbugs, with wide floorboards. It was a wonderful house, and there I lived, from eight to eleven, what I thought was a commonplace childhood.

  With my father and mother at a Los Angeles country club, 1940.

  The first of three Wolff houses in Hartford, where my grandparents lived from their marriage until their deaths. Grandmother Harriet, called “Hattie,” stands to the right, smiling slightly. In 1886 she was nineteen.

  Hartford: The Doctor leans from the window of an unidentified house. His wife touches his dark suit as though his arm were a talisman. 1893, a year before the birth of their daughter, Beatrice Annette.

  At the shore, Crescent Beach, Niantic, about 1890. Dr. Wolff is at the left, with mutton chops and shined shoes. Hattie, among cousins and in-laws, leans against his rocker.

  The Saturday Night Bunch, listening to The Doctor’s new wireless in the Collins Street parlor.

  My father, Arthur Samuels Wolff, with his mother, 1909.

  Uncle Bill Hass (left), with my father. Crescent Beach, about 1912.

  Eaglebrook Lodge School, Deerfield, Massachusetts, the first class picture. My father is in the back row, far left, leering.

  The first student body, spring 1923. Front row: George Rogers, Robert B. Garey, Allen N. Swain, Jr., George M. Cook, Robert Collins, Whitney S. Stoddard, John W. Bennett, Roscoe H. Philbrook, Jr. Middle row: John Brooks, Charles Parks, Paul W. Tripp, Richard M. Twitchell, Henry Hinckley, Robert P. Read, Reul Van Buren, David Wells. Back row: Arthur Wolff, Gordon Wood, Lowell S. Trowbridge, Alfred P. Putnam, Alden Mason. Not shown: John A. Allen, James H. Berenson, Steven Davol, Eben Tisdale.

  Cadet A. S. Wolff, St. John’s Military Academy, Manlius, New York, 1923.

  My father, nineteen, at Roxbury Academy, Cheshire, Connecticut, the last of his five boarding schools.

  “Duke” Wolff, third from the right, gussied up to play mandolin for the Roxbury jazz band.

  Stephen Loftus (seated far right). My grandfather holds his nephew and poses with his parents, his sister (standing)—later a Sister of Mercy—and his luckless brothers. Six months after the picture was taken in Denver, Colorado, my great-grandmother Mary (seated third from left), died.

  Rosemary Loftus, my mother, ten, before her First Communion.

  My mother at fourteen, a would-be movie star, vamping.

&nbs
p; My mother at sixteen, in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki Beach, at a happy time in her life.

  10

  A FEW days after we moved into our house my father furnished it. At W & J Sloane in New York he came upon a model house, a full-scale furnished replica of a salt-box. A salesman asked if he could be of help, and my father said yes indeed, he’d like to take it.

  “Take what?” asked the puzzled fellow.

  “The whole ball of wax,” my father said.

  “The whole house?”

  No, my father patiently explained, just the furniture. And so upon the fixture of Duke’s signature to a document making many improbable promises, we were Early-Americanized, with pewter mugs, a pine corner cupboard, many pieces made of maple, hooked rugs and Currier & Ives winterscapes. (Above my parents’ bed my father hung two watercolors painted by his lover Betty during the Thanksgiving weekend she spent with Duke in Mississippi. My mother didn’t protest: they were pretty watercolors, nicely framed.)

  That summer my father found a job in nearby New London, designing plant layout for a moribund manufacturer of printing presses. On weekends my mother and Duke would picnic or dine with some Hartford friends, Jack Lester, who lived in Essex with his wife Connie, and Warren and Georgiana Rice, a bit up Mile Creek Road from our place. Duke was comfortable with these old friends, who never challenged his version of himself; though he was broke and they were not, he didn’t borrow money from them, or at least they never loaned him any.

  My father’s friend Gifford Pinchot was a sailor; he kept a Dragon—a venerable racing sloop of thirty feet with huge overhang, narrow beam and low freeboard—at the Essex Yacht Club. I had been pestering my father to take me boating, and Pinchot suggested that Duke charter a powerboat for a weekend to give me a taste of salt water. My father said he despised “stinkpots.”

  “Boating is sailing, period,” my father said.

  “I didn’t know you sailed,” Pinchot said.

  “Of course I sail.”

  “Then take the Dragon.”

  Affixed to the transom of this delicate, impeccably varnished mahogany boat was a five-horsepower outboard, used to navigate the Connecticut River against unfavorable winds or currents. The motor did indeed stink when it ran, and it was noisy and it vibrated. During three days of clear weather and twelve-knot winds it was our only means of locomotion, up the coast to Stonington, past McCook Point, which my father warned me was treacherous, but seemed nothing much to think about as we left it to port. I asked my father why we didn’t sail, and he explained that the halyard was broken. When we returned the boat to Pinchot he asked how everything had gone, and my father said “aces.” Later, in the car, I asked my father why he hadn’t mentioned Pinchot’s broken halyard, and he said he had fixed it.

  “Why didn’t we sail, after you fixed it?”

  My father said nothing, and I understood that I had asked the wrong question. I searched this experience to unriddle what I had said wrong, but couldn’t puzzle it out. It never occurred to me that my father lied.

  I spent the summer with Albert Payson Terhune’s books. Reading about his noble collies Bruce, Lad, Treve, and Wolf I was gripped by a fixation; I had to have a collie, and not just any collie, but one who looked like Buff, with a white mane, broad head, golden body, alert ears, and sad eyes.

  I got the dog in August, for twenty dollars, the value of an immature war bond my grandmother gave me on my first birthday. The pup was six weeks old. My father drove us home from Norwich, where we found him, with the dog in my lap, sleeping, pissing, crying and licking my face. I named him Shep, of course. We slept together the first night home on a second-floor screened porch, my favorite place in the house. I didn’t really sleep, at first. Thunder was booming far off, and lightning broke on the horizon, somewhere over Long Island Sound. Lying in my damp sheets, with the apple tree scratching against the screen, I tried to comfort my dog, and at length he fell asleep, and then I could.

  To have something small and loved within my power was bracing and frightening, and still is. During the first few days after I got my pup I would carry him to the side of the house, where he explored the lawn I mowed, and a gravel path, and the edge of the overgrown garden. In the garden was a well, girdled by a decrepit bench. The well was no longer in use; it was said to be very deep, at least five hundred feet, and it was covered by a heavy wagon wheel. No child could fall or squeeze between the wheel’s spokes, but stones could be dropped through, and I liked to listen to them bang against the side of the well as they fell, rattling dully till somewhere near China they’d splash, a hollow, final thud.

  My dog could fit through the interstices between the spokes, and I sat with him in my lap while he licked my hands; my hands trembled to thrust him through, and hold him above the mouth of the well. My hands were to blame, not my head. My hands were curious. I had no wish to hear my puppy fall like a stone against the side of the well, to hear him cry and splash. I did not long to mourn him. It was not pleasant to overcome the will of my hands with my head, but it seemed necessary. Once I held Shep above the wagon wheel, thought I would put him through the wheel’s open wedges and hold him, as I had been held above Niagara Falls, and return him to safety, as I had been returned. But I did not put him through the wheel, and after a few days my hands settled down, and the temptation to test my life with another life never returned. Years later I tried to talk with some college friends about this experience. We were drunk, with a confessional fit upon us, and we had all recently read Camus, The Rebel and The Stranger. I told my story about Shep at the well, and waited to hear their stories, but they had none. They had had nothing in the way of such a temptation, or nothing they wished to share with me, and so I never again mentioned the experience, till now.

  When my dog was a year old I did hurt him, badly. I threw a cherry bomb into our meadow when I thought he was safe in the house, and he tried to bring it back to me, and it blew up in his mouth. He recovered, but from then on he was spooked by loud noises, but he never thought to distrust me.

  I recently drove through Old Lyme, and stopped at the grade school, a pretty tree-shaded stone building with a graceful slate roof, on Main Street of a pretty tree-shaded town with a famously graceful Congregational Church. The school’s exterior proportions corresponded with my recollection. It surprised me to see that things aren’t always evanescent and diminished; Old Lyme was where I had left it a quarter century ago.

  The classrooms did seem reduced, with lower ceilings and water fountains and much smaller desks, and there was no ink in the inkwells. But the fourth grade sat learning where my fourth grade sat, past the principal’s office, left down the hall, second door on the right. The school had me in its records, beginning with my first day, a notation by Miss Mueller: “Jeff’s father brought him to school. They seem unusually close. Both stutter.”

  My father told me we were lucky to stammer, that it gave us more time to think between words, that people paid close attention to us because we stammered. Attention was what I wanted least my first day of school in Old Lyme.

  “Now, children, some of you are new to us. So that we all know one another’s names, I would like each of you to stand, beginning with Marilyn and moving from right to left across each row of desks, and say your name. My name is Miss Mueller, and I’m certain we’ll have a good year and all be friends.”

  Marilyn Mather stood, and said her name, followed by Carl Gerr and Skippy Sheffield, then Eliot and Norman and Lionel and Dorothy and Margaret Dean and it was my turn, and I stood, blushing. I stood that day gasping, laboring to pry out two syllables, Jeff Wolff, not much of a trick, except for a stammerer. That first day, like the first day at every new school, they wouldn’t come. I squirmed, forced gutturals, gulped air and grunted it out, and nothing would come.

  “Just say your name,” Miss Mueller said, not unkindly.

  “Juh-juh-juh I can’t.”

  There was laughter. I would have been happier with less laughter
, or more. Miss Mueller asked how it was that I could not say my name, but could so simply say I can’t. It seemed even then like a reasonable question, but it was not a question I could answer, any more than I could tell those children my name. So I was marked special, perhaps dangerous, maybe dumb. I resolved to by God disabuse them of dumb.

  Miss Mueller told them my name, and welcomed me to Old Lyme. She was a good woman. From her I learned where copra grew (but not what it was), the crucial importance of sisal to the peoples of several faraway lands, and that places where zinc and tungsten are mined are colored dark blue and maroon on some maps. I learned that we Americans were the most wonderful things that ever were, and the sight of Margaret Dean, an eight-year-old American girl one row ahead and two desks to the left, confirmed this judgment.

  Miss Mueller was the niece or grand-niece or third cousin of a President of the United States. She confessed this shyly during a rest period, and not in the least boastfully. I think the ancestor was Millard Fillmore, but he may have been Chester Alan Arthur. Miss Mueller also had a proprietary interest in a political Tyler, I think, because the first patriotic exclamation we learned was Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!