Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  When I returned to my old school to ask what had become of my classmates and teachers I sat talking in the principal’s office with his secretary; she had worked at the school when I was a student there, and didn’t agree with me that a very long time had passed since then. She knew almost all my classmates by name, but she didn’t remember Marion. Marion entered Miss Champion’s fifth-grade class a month late. We gave him a rough time, because of his name, because he was a new boy, and because his father drove a Studebaker, which our fathers said looked like it was going when it was coming. Marion came to our class Halloween party got up as Superboy. What a costume his mother had put together, and hang the cost! Blue velvet tights under crimson shorts cinched with a sun-gold belt. The cape was silk, he said, probably rayon, and in place of the regulation chest insignia—red S on a velvet field—Marion showed a lightning bolt.

  This gear raised Marion in our esteem, and he must have enjoyed the sensation, for he wore the costume to school the following day, and the day after that. Miss Champion suggested that he might retire it for a year, but he said he couldn’t, that this was what he wore, it was what Superboy son of Superman wore, that he was Superboy and it was what he wore.

  Even Miss Champion laughed at the idea, Superman in a Studebaker. But Marion held to his claim, even placing in evidence his dad’s thick glasses, a point of similarity with Clark Kent’s. We were not persuaded, and it went hard with Marion. And then he offered to demonstrate his powers. He would fly. He would not, he said, fly far, because he wished only to prove a small point. He would fly the following afternoon, while his mother was elsewhere playing bridge. He would launch himself from the roof of his house, beside the public library.

  The next afternoon we assembled in his front yard. From the refuge of his attic Marion watched us gather, like a lynch mob. We felt foolish and put-upon, and I was surprised to see Marion crawl through a dormer window and climb to the peak of his roof, almost three stories above us. He inched along the roof to its edge. The wind tugged his wonderful cape, and the sun hit its violent colors—royal blue, crimson, gold—and it was almost possible to believe. Marion, patient but condescending, looked down and asked us: “Are you ready?” The girls especially seemed to stir and blush, and one of them called out, “Fly, Marion,” and he did. Off the roof, and the cape spread, and he hit the frozen lawn, and gasped and rolled to his stomach. Someone fetched the librarian, and she sent for Dr. Von Glaun, and he shooed us all home and set Marion’s leg.

  The next week Superboy came to school in civvies and on crutches, and until his father and mother took him away in a new Hudson Hornet to another school in another town, no one teased him. He had said he would fly, and to our satisfaction he had flown.

  My father heard about Marion, of course, and admired the boy’s spunk. But he used the experience as an occasion for proscription: Don’t boast, don’t lie, don’t be bullied into dares, “use the old bean, use the noodle.”

  I was too young then to know that my father told me many things about himself that were not so, but I sensed that he might have once been the kind of boy who would tell his friends that he could fly, and that he might have been the kind who would crawl out a high window and go to the edge of the roof. But now I knew he would not jump off that roof.

  My father instructed me. He taught me to catch and to throw a football, and didn’t tire of our games of toss before I did. He taught me to swim properly, but never with the easy grace he showed in the water, everything moving with power and certainty, his long arms entering the water with his elbows bent just so. It was satisfying to watch him swim straight out from the water’s edge, and notice people on the beach notice him. He wasn’t showing off. What he did well he took for granted. What he could not do, or had not done, he held in esteem.

  He was particular about teaching me to shoot, and to clean my rifle after every use, and to carry it empty, on “safe,” with the bolt open, in the crook of my arm. One Sunday he was sitting on a log high up the beach below McCook Point, reading The New York Times. I was between him and the water, where I was meant to be. I had built a sand castle and was shooting at this rather than at the tin cans my father had set by the water’s edge. As I destroyed the castle from its front, I began to shoot at it from other angles. My father didn’t notice as I moved around till my back was to the water. I took aim at a high turret, and my eyes were indifferent to the background of my target till I pulled the trigger, and saw what I had just done. The bullet dusted away the sand turret, and thucked into the log six inches from my father’s thigh.

  He didn’t confiscate my rifle. He didn’t beat me. He didn’t shout at me. He comforted me, but he also let me know something consequential had just happened; this did not upset the balance between us, but affirmed it. For several years after I pulled that trigger I did not argue with my father’s judgments.

  He spanked me twice in Old Lyme, both times for showing my mother insufficient respect. Once Rosemary told me to clean my room, and I stuck up my middle finger, shot her the bird. Her back was to me, I had noticed. That she was standing in front of a mirror, I had not noticed. My father next spanked me the night before a Cub Scout meeting. Rosemary, then inclining toward good works and civic-mindedness, was our den mother and had set us Cubs a project to complete with pipe cleaners and paper. We were to build teepees and populate them with Indians. At bedtime I showed her a small company of human figures, standing like tripods.

  “They’re cute, Jeffie, but why do they have three legs?”

  I laughed, was proud of myself, called for my father. I sometimes misjudged him, and in just such a way, thinking he would wish to be my accomplice in an act of wiseacre mischief, a pornographic tableau for his wife’s den of Cubs. My father was beside himself with disappointment at my disrespect for my mother, for something she did only to help me take pride in her. He hit me hard that night, with his shaving strop. I had committed a slight offense, a bit of dumb salaciousness, but now I know he was wise in his fury. I was inclining toward a belief that I was apart from other people; I had begun to sneer a little, and Duke despised the sneer above all facial gestures, all expressions of character.

  We began life in Old Lyme with a 1937 Ford station wagon, a woodie with cream metal and a dark-brown leather interior. Then Duke “bought” an MG. It was the first sports car Old Lyme had ever seen, and it embarrassed me and made everyone else in town laugh. It was necessary that we have two cars because every month or so one or the other was towed away by the sheriff. The Ford was the more frequently attached: the dealer in Saybrook had serially repaired all its moving parts, and sometimes liked to be paid. The Essex Boat Yard replaced the body’s wood with ash and cherry and teak; the car was such a beauty I imagine the yard owner thought he might as well keep it while he waited for my father to make some small deposit on account. Somehow or other Duke always found a way to bail out his cars, which meant more to him than anything, except us, and my mother sometimes wondered aloud whether they didn’t matter more to him than we did.

  My father found his work in New London beneath him. During my fifth-grade year he commuted to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where he designed a maintenance program for Lukens Steel. He did well, and minded his manners on weekdays while he lived with a genteel English couple on a horse farm in Paoli. He came home weekends, bearing gifts. When he finished his work for Lukens he helped design and supervise the construction of a supersonic wind tunnel at M.I.T., and then he stayed on in Boston, working for Stone and Webster. No one fired him during those years; he worked hard. I don’t think he was paid very much, or was high up the organizational charts of his companies, but this helped keep his profile low. He lived in Boston at the Engineers’ Club, and sometimes I’d take the train up to see him, and he would take me to dinner at Locke-Ober’s or the Ritz-Carlton after a Red Sox game.

  While my father lived well in Boston, and I mourned his absence, my mother fended off druggists, grocers, snowplowers, heating oil dealers, phone and electric
companies, everyone who sold something locally that my father needed or wanted. Usually she pleaded ignorance (“My husband does the finances”), sometimes she lied (“Check’s in the mail”), and sometimes she begged (“We’ll freeze … starve … be snowed in … get sick …”). She never wept, though. I cannot remember having seen my mother weep. This must be a failure of memory. I’m sure my mother must have wept in front of me. I can imagine why, but can’t remember when.

  It was a hard time for her. I was increasingly difficult to manage, and my father’s presence in Old Lyme on weekends was as unpleasant for Rosemary as his absence weekdays was inconvenient. He’d lie abed of a Saturday or Sunday morning, reading and resting. He liked to be waited upon, was always courteous in his requests (“While you’re up could you get me a beer … the paper … a sandwich … my glasses … my lighter … a small screwdriver …”), but he expected his courtesy to be answered with immediate action. One rainy afternoon, soaking in a hot tub, he called downstairs to my mother, asked her to move the electric heater a bit closer to the tub, he was feeling a slight chill. She climbed the stairs, stood above him, held the heater over the brimming bath water.

  “Perhaps you’d be more comfortable,” she said, “if I put the heater right in there with you.”

  My father stared at her. “You wouldn’t.” My mother smiled, feinted with the glowing heater. “Jesus,” he said, “you wouldn’t do that!” She didn’t.

  “He’d arrive on Friday night with a present for you, a present for Toby, and a bag of dirty laundry for me,” my mother remembers, smiling now.

  He took no interest in the house after furnishing it and watching W & J Sloane unfurnish it a few pieces at a time. He lavished energy on his gadgets. Like his father, he cherished small, expensive, precise things. He never just sat, with his hands at rest. He tinkered with a shotgun, clock, collapsible this or inflatable that. He always cleaned his possessions—polished his boots or oiled a rifle—but never the mess he made cleaning them.

  He was generous on my behalf with his weekends. Autumn Saturdays he’d take me to Yale football games, and in the spring to the circus: we’d go early to New London to see the tent raised and wander the Ringling Brothers menagerie and freak show before the main events. Every third Saturday I was taken to New London to be scalped at the barber shop of the Mohecan Hotel, getting my crew cut according to my father’s instructions. This ordeal was usually followed by lunch downtown, an occasion for talk about manners and codes, and then a hunt for something that had attracted my father’s interest. I noticed him change when he raided the shops. There was bluster in his voice, a forward, aggressive lean to him that disarmed the obsequious merchants who urged my father on even as they must have suspected he would never pay them. Salesmen like to sell; Duke understood this, perfectly.

  When we returned from his sprees my mother sometimes tried to talk with him about the bills, what were they to do about them? Duke would flush with anger, pout, refuse to have his weekend spoiled by small beer. The bills, which she stacked on his desk, and on the floor where the desk used to be after a visit from W & J Sloane, he tossed unopened in the trash.

  The trash was collected once a week by Mr. Dean, a laconic, lantern-jawed, long-time Old-Lymer who drove a dying pickup with rotten wooden slats. As my father grew reckless about paying him, Mr. Dean became indifferent to our accumulations of rubbish, which made my father angry, which made Mr. Dean surly, which made my father furious, which caused me discomfort.

  I loved the trashman’s daughter, Margaret, and she did not love me back. I think the intensity of her lack of affection for me may have been aggravated by her father’s experience with my father, but in fairness to everyone I gave her, all by myself, reason enough to avoid my company.

  Margaret was tall, intelligent, dignified, reserved. She was Margaret always, never Maggie. Her dark hair was braided in fastidious pigtails, and she wore long gingham dresses made by a mother or sister or herself to pinch a bit at the waist and flair at the skirt. When she smiled she blushed, and at ten her face had a woman’s structure. During a few warm days in early spring, I dreamt of walking with her and Shep in our woods, and saving her from something. I dreamt of having her in our house for dinner, and keeping her there, forever.

  These stirrings were not I think sensual, but they were grave. My mother laughed them off, from the perspective of someone for whom love had temporarily lost its definition. I’m not sure my mother could remember, staked as she was to my father, what first love felt like. My father could, because he had not loved deeply till he loved my mother, or perhaps because his imagination was more lively than my mother’s. Or perhaps he was simply a better actor.

  Anyway, Duke listened to me tell about Margaret Dean, and advised me well. Everyone advises everyone well at these times, and the advice doesn’t vary: be gentle, not thrusting; give time, room, respect; have other interests. And like everyone who asks advice about love, I didn’t follow my father’s. I assaulted Margaret with unsigned notes, and then with signed notes declaring love. I ruined her days in school. Once she brushed past me walking to lunch and said one word: “Please.” I mistook her meaning, and glowed all day. That night I telephoned to ask if she would like to meet my collie. She hung up when I stammered my name. I sent her a note:

  “Yesterday you said please to me. I love you.”

  A note, for once, came back: “I meant please leave me alone. I don’t like you.”

  I had so upset that lovely girl that no one teased me about her, because she couldn’t bring herself even to gossip about my foolishness. But the Christmas of our fifth-grade year I developed a plan. I was given my usual twenty-five dollars to shop in Hartford with Ruth Atkins. This year I bought my mother nothing, my father and brother nothing. It seemed to me my plan could not fail to win me Margaret Dean. The plan hinged upon giving two gifts, one of them commonplace, the other a coup d’éclat. The first was a gift to my belovèd of wool mittens from Harry Atkins’ wholesale store. These were selected with dear care. I had stolen Margaret’s own mittens from her cubby while she was at lunch, to learn her size, study her taste and leave her in need of new mittens. I chose a pair embroidered the Scandinavian way.

  I was left with twenty-three dollars, and I spent it all on the top-of-the-line Gilbert “ATOMIC” chemistry set, powders and liquids and test tubes and scales and retorts fitted in a bright-blue metal box the size of a briefcase. This gift was not for me, nor for anyone in my class, nor for anyone with whom I had ever exchanged a word. It was for the nicest boy in the sixth grade, the best looking, best athlete, most popular—Walter “Walky” Dean.

  On the last day of school before Christmas, during the class party, I gave Margaret her mittens, and without reading the card I had illustrated with broken hearts pierced with arrows and sad-eyed snowmen melting away, without opening the package I had wrapped with remnants of paisley taken from my mother’s sewing basket, she dropped the gift in a rubbish bin. I was hurt, but not surprised. I walked across the hall to Mrs. Graves’s sixth-grade classroom. I set the heavy, lavishly wrapped box on the desk of Walter Dean and said “Here. I love your sister. Make her love me back.”

  My life was no unbroken series of humiliations, only an almost unbroken series of humiliations. I don’t think I knew this, any more than I understood that we lived an odd life. My mother, like other mothers, belonged to the P.T.A. and the League of Woman Voters, till being among people to whom my father owed money became too painful for her, and she retreated into the house. She hated trying to live the lie that we had standing and means, but she didn’t tighten her belt. What was the use, after all? Duke was resolved to go deeper in debt; she might as well dress and feed herself and her children well.

  We shared many acts and interests with regulation Americans of the time, saw the same movies, worried about the Russians and the Bomb, listened every Sunday to Jack Benny and Fred Allen. My mother laughed when others laughed at Senator Claghorn, my father at Mr. Kitzel. Like almos
t everyone else we celebrated Christmas, and how! The routine those three years in Old Lyme was unvarying: On Christmas Eve Duke would take me to New London to choose a tree, and we would have lunch, and he would drink an eggnog, and another. He would tell me that times were hard, which I knew, and that this year, unlike last year, the horn would pour forth no plenty. I would smile bravely. We would find a tree, always “the best tree we’ve ever had.” Duke would stop on the way home at a roadhouse, for a few drinks to celebrate the season. I would be introduced to bartenders who would grasp my hand too firmly and tell me, shaking their heads, “your dad’s a hell of a good sport, one hell of a guy, you’re a lucky kid, your pop’s the best, tops, believe me.” Now it was Canadian Club, straight, no rocks, a Canadian Club chaser. I’d be sent off to play pinball or the jukebox. Snow would fall; snow fell every Christmas Eve we lived in Old Lyme. Rarely, a bartender would push familiarity past the limit. I remember a place called The Lobster’s Claw near Niantic, a roadhouse with a husky blond, about twenty-five, behind the bar. I knew enough not to like this bartender, noticed a nasty indifference in his manner. After a few rounds he looked at my father:

  “What’ll it be, baldy, same again?”

  There was a heavy quiet in The Lobster’s Claw. My father studied his empty glass, and his hands. He beckoned the smirking bartender with his index finger. The bartender, thinking he had created a successful jape, approached my father, who grabbed the young man’s shirt and emptied a full ashtray down its front. Then Duke walked out, holding my hand, and the barkeep shouted after him, “Never come back, you silly-looking bastard.” It was “silly-looking” that bothered me.

  On the way home my father would break the rear end of the Ford loose on the slippery roads, to teach me, he said, how to handle a skid. When we hauled the tree, wet with snow, into the living room, my father swore at it. Mother tried not to show her anger. It was Christmas Eve, my night and Toby’s. The roast was overdone and cold. She saw that Duke was drunk, his speech had gone British and his manners were too fastidious. He wanted not to be drunk, but he was, and this made him sad, which made him drink some more. After dinner we tried to trim the tree; one Christmas my father knocked over the tree, and broke ornaments. My mother was always brave on Christmas Eve. She lit a fire, put out the lights, plugged in the tree. Beautiful! My mother managed to smile. I was sent to bed, and did not sleep. I heard voices downstairs, rising, my mother angry now, “please, Duke, please!” And then my mother would run upstairs, and my father would stumble after her and bang against the walls heading toward their room, and he would look in on Toby in his crib, and talk heavily at him while he slept. I would lie awake with Shep beside me on the floor, and not once all that one night think of Margaret Dean.