“She hates him and she loves him,” the cop told my mother, winking. “He must have something she likes, whaddya think?”
A few days after my father drove away, my mother took a job at a Dairy Queen on the Tamiami Trail, dealing cones for fifty dollars a week, wearing a paper cap. I asked when we would leave for Seattle.
“Never. We’re not leaving here. I’m going to divorce your father.”
This was not Birmingham now, where a little boy was led gently to the realities. My mother described her wishes, but didn’t justify them. She had had thirteen years to think about leaving her husband. She was thirty-two, and it must have seemed like a now-or-never option. I guess I asked her why she had misled my father, who had left Sarasota believing his wife would follow him west. If I asked her she didn’t tell me, she was too busy to answer my questions. My mother worked ten hours a day, six days a week at the Dairy Queen, and at night she took typing lessons, to better herself. I wanted to telephone my father, but Mother said she couldn’t afford long distance calls; besides, she didn’t know his number.
I hitch-hiked downtown a lot, and haunted travel agents. They were indulgent to a twelve-year-old kid, business was slow. They told me the fare to Seattle, train and bus, one way. I kept the fares in my head. One agent asked why didn’t I fly, so I got the dope on planes too.
I told my mother I’d find the money to go west to my father. Somehow. She’d stare at me then, and I’d ride my bike to Midnight Pass, and fish in the swift current between the tail of Siesta Key and the head of Casey Key. I’d walk the beach with Shep. It was deserted except for jelly fish left by the ebbing tide, and the gnawed hulks of horseshoe crabs, buzzing with sandflies.
School would begin in two weeks. Next door the man in the pickup wheedled his wife into opening the door. They laughed for a while, played the radio loud. Then he beat her up. The little girl must have slept through it; I never heard her voice. So the days and nights went.
The last night I lay in bed sweating, listening to frogs croak out back. There had been much rain that summer, and this had brought a red tide and a plague of frogs. There were so many frogs near our house that cars speeding to Midnight Pass at night sometimes skidded on them. Midnight Pass was a makeout spot. I lay awake thinking about girls. My mother was supposed to be at typing class, and I was minding Toby. I left my bed. I wanted to lie in the living room, where it was cooler. A window fan hummed in the living room. I had lit a lamp for my mother in there, and light leaked beneath the crack of the door shut between the living room and the hall outside my bedroom. I opened the door, but they didn’t see me. I didn’t see everything, just my mother and a cop’s gun hanging holstered from a rocking chair in front of the door I had opened. I shut the door, returned to bed, fell asleep. It was all over.
I told my mother next morning I wanted to go to my father. She didn’t argue. Okay, she said, you’d better fly, it’s safer, I don’t want you crossing the country alone on a bus or a train. We’ll have to find out what it costs, and when the planes leave. I know the cost, I said. Delta, I told my mother, left Tampa that night, stopped in Atlanta, went on to Chicago. There’d be a long layover at Midway, then Northwest to Bismarck, Great Falls, Spokane and Seattle. Okay, she said, okay, you can go tonight.
No malice, tears, promises, yelling, apologies. I hitched to Sarasota that afternoon to buy a boat and outboard, told the dealer to put them on my account, just like Duke would say it, and send them to me air freight, care of Boeing. The dealer ran his hand through my hair before he laughed me out of the shop. The plane left on time from Tampa. Before I boarded, Mother stuffed twenty dollars in my pocket, and reminded me that we’d first driven into Sarasota a year and a day ago. I didn’t hate her, and she didn’t hate me. But except for three brief meetings I didn’t see her again till I was twenty-six.
Not long after I left for Seattle Ruth Atkins, who had promised my grandmother on her deathbed to keep an eye on me, tracked Rosemary to the Dairy Queen, and broke in line ahead of the customers. She challenged the pretty blond lady in the paper cap:
“How could you have sent him away? To that awful father! What were you thinking of?”
And what could my mother say? That I wanted to go, which was true. What she said in fact was this: “It was just too much for me. I couldn’t keep it going.”
It still hurts her: “Sending you to Seattle was a dreadful business on my part, because I hadn’t contacted him before you left.” So the arrival was messy. I spent twenty hours at Midway, eating hot dogs and drinking root beer, and I arrived sick in Seattle. There was no one there to meet me. My father had left on a two-week vacation three weeks after he began work. He couldn’t be found. Travelers’ Aid took me in hand, got hold of my mother and gave me for a few days to a Boeing colleague of my father’s.
It was all right, I wasn’t scared. I was happy. I was where I wanted to be, it would be fine, I knew it. But for my mother it still requires explanation, and she offers it: “I didn’t call to tell him you were coming till after you left Chicago because I didn’t know what he’d do. Maybe he’d come back to get me. Maybe he wouldn’t take you.”
12
IT was what I longed for, but I can’t reconstruct our reunion scene. I remember my father disapproved of our lie that I was eleven, to get a half-price airplane ticket, but he disapproved even more of our having paid cash for it. So unquestioning was my trust in this man that it had never occurred to me, when I landed in Seattle and he was not there, that he would not find me, soon.
Perhaps my father told me, when he came for me after a few days, where he had been. Probably he was cast down by the news that my mother was quits with him. But I remember no despair, no anger. He seemed unambiguously happy to see me. Right away he looked to my needs. I had landed in Seattle with a single gladstone, a bag my father called a “bulldog,” a battered leather satchel with worn brass hardware that had belonged to his father. The day after my father picked me up at his colleague’s Mercer Island house he bought me clothes and a white runabout powered by a five-horse Evinrude, just muscle enough to lift the hull on a plane. The boat was mine to use as I wanted, as long as I promised my father, honor-bright, to wear my life jacket. I kept the promise; I understood that my father would forgive me anything except a broken promise or a lie. Truth, he told me, was our most powerful bond. I knew never, never to lie to him. The truth made everything between us possible, he told me. I believed what my father said, but I had to train myself in casuistry to distinguish between the crucial truths he told me and the petty farragoes he sometimes used—necessarily?—to confound shopkeepers and clerks, people outside our lives.
It must have rained sometimes during the eighteen months I lived in Seattle; they say it never stops, except now and then in August. But I remember only sun and snow, Mt. Rainier looking down on Lake Washington and Puget Sound. I must have had trouble in school: my transcripts describe a bothersome boy with shabby grades and a terrible stammer who frequently visited the principal, the speech therapist, and the psychological counselor to account for his many Cs and Ds, his Fs in Latin and metalworking. I remember friendly school chums, teachers with pale, broad Scandinavian faces, who taught without accents at the spanking new junior high, Nathan Eckstein.
Nathan Eckstein was not only new, with electronic learning aids and a gym whose basketball hoops had nets, it was also said to be the “best” junior high in Seattle, with the “nicest” boys and girls, and to send me there Duke endured a tough commute from the University District in northeast Seattle way south to Boeing. Maybe he didn’t mind; he still loved to drive the MG, especially since he had installed an exhaust cutout for a straight pipe that made a daunting noise when police weren’t around to hear it.
At first we lived in a rooming house in the University District. We camped out in a clean single room, sleeping in a double-decker, my father on the bottom. Before school started I spent the few hours when I wasn’t exploring Lake Union and Portage Bay in my new boat
reading magazines: I became engrossed in Sports Afield and True and Argosy and Field & Stream, especially the rifle ads. I thought I wanted a lever-action deer rifle, one of the Marlin or Winchester 30-30s I studied in full-page four-color ads. My father assured me I was wrong, I didn’t want to kill deer.
“Okay,” I said, “can I kill a rockchuck? A smaller rifle will do it, with a scope.”
My father asked me what a rockchuck was, and I explained it was a little woodchuck that lived among rocks, in the mountains. My father told me of course I couldn’t shoot at a rockchuck, so I never got to be a hunter.
I read Argosy, True, Yachting (which paid some slight attention to motorboats) and two others, Quick and Confidential, which I hid in the foot of my sleeping bag. Offsetting these periodical revelations of an impure world was the influence of some students who roomed in our building, with whom my father was friendly. They were good to me, as entertained by my show of sophistication as by my innocence. One was Ted Holzknecht, captain of the University of Washington football team, a Collier’s All-American center. He brought me to a couple of Husky practices, where I told Ted’s teammates that I was tight with Ted Williams, the guy who played for the Red Sox. Perhaps they knew of him? I had a ball signed by him, somewhere in Florida.
If I told my father the truth, I lied to others by inadvertence, or before I could call back my words. The inadvertent lies were passed along like contagious diseases from Duke to me to someone else. My father had played football for Yale, swum for Yale, flown fighter planes for England. My own inventions were fantasies usually, sometimes evasions. When people asked about my mother I never told the plain truth, just as I never told the plain truth in Sarasota when I was asked where my father was. I told people who asked where my mother lived that she was driving west with my collie dog and older brother, would arrive any minute now.
Duke’s only rival for my esteem was Elgin Gates. Weekdays, Gates worked as shop foreman for an outboard dealer on Lake Union, tuning racing motors. I kept my boat where he worked, and he let me run errands for him. On weekends in season he raced big C- and D-class hydroplanes; he was the best in the Northwest, which in 1950 meant best in the country. I saw him break a couple of world speed records, and thought that was something I would like to do.
I had never had a hero, other than my father and Ted Williams, till I found Gates. He had all the virtues: he was available, he had skills I wanted to have, people acknowledged his ascendancy, he had presence. Best of all, his respect for me came grudgingly, but it came. At first he shooed me away from his shop, then he tolerated me, then talked to me, then instructed me to fetch him coffee. One day he asked me to hand him a quarter-inch crescent wrench, without telling me what one looked like. A bit later he asked for a valve puller, then told me to remove the lower unit from one of his own motors and fix it to another. I was his pitman.
He drank beer two gulps to the bottle, and when his wife—who wore lots of lipstick and had big ones—came around to ask for money, she flirted with me. Gates would dig into his wallet while she tossed her red hair out of her eyes:
“Why didn’t I wait for you, honey?” she’d say. “Why didn’t I wait for you!”
Elgin Gates taught me about the class system:
“The bosses always screw the working stiff.” He’d talk to me while he cleaned his hands with Lava soap, dug the grease from beneath his nails with a slim silver knife. “I sweat, the man upstairs drives the Caddie. I sleep in a trailer, his wife farts through silk. Get an education, kid; hand me that beer. Want a sip? I said a sip, not a whole goddamned chug.”
“Shit, Elgin …”
“Don’t cuss around me. You’re still a pup, don’t know shit from shine about anything but boats and motors, don’t know all that much about them, either.”
I learned. After a few months Duke let me trade the Evinrude for a class-A Mercury, with a Quicksilver lower unit. Now I had wheel steering on the runabout, and a dead man’s throttle. I entered a race during Seattle Seafair, a hundred miles of laps around Mercer Island on Lake Washington. Eighty boats started the marathon, twenty finished. Drivers dropped out not because of the rigors of the weather or the course but because for grown-ups it must have seemed, after a few laps, a mindless way to put in hours, going in circles all day, kneeling in the wet, greasy bilges of a small boat, being shaken and screamed at by a small motor. I finished near the bottom of the survivors, but not plumb at the bottom. The first thing I said to my grinning father, who had stood four hours at the end of a dock watching my boat come into view a mile away and recede, amused him:
“I can win with a lighter hull.”
Duke bought me a lighter boat. I began to win races. I tuned my own motor at Elgin Gates’s shop, but my father got his Boeing pals to design and build a breakthrough refueling system for marathon races. Boeing also painted my motor cherry red, and ran various propeller configurations through its computers to find just the right prop for my boat, motor, and weight. I weighed less than a hundred pounds, so I went fast, and I was dumb enough to drive as fast as I could every second of every race. Duke took me to any race within a day’s drive, and cheered me on. Whatever I wanted to do, as long as I wanted to do it badly enough, he wanted me to do.
After a month in the rooming house we moved to three rooms on the ground floor of a big lakefront house in Laurelhurst, the Lake Forest or Grosse Point of Seattle. By now I was accustomed to the gross shifts of circumstance and fortune that seemed to govern our lives. I didn’t question our habitation of a room in a boarding house, or our habitation of this swank place. I knew for sure there was always food enough—always had been and would be—and just money enough. And when there wasn’t money enough, Duke bought what he wanted anyway. He “bought” a Chris-Craft Riviera, a seventeen-foot varnished mahogany runabout with red leather seats. The varnish blasted the sun back in my eyes when I drove it around Lake Washington. We kept that boat tied to a dock jutting from a stone bulkhead at the foot of our front lawn, and I liked to sit just staring at it, wondering how long such a lucky streak could last.
Many of my schoolmates at Nathan Eckstein (few of whom had last names like Eckstein or Wolff) owned boats like mine, or my father’s. Everyone at school was handsome or pretty: “neat” was the adverb that included all possible virtues. In Sarasota I had favored blue jeans, with wide sloppy cuffs, and plaid-dyed cotton shirts, ersatz flannel. Now I wore suntans, with blade-sharp creases, and in place of my Buster Browns oxblood loafers, buffed every night till my wrists ached. I tried to work my hair into a duckass, but not when my father was around.
After school I hung out at the Bar-Bee-Cue in the U-District, and drank cherry Cokes and fed the juke, listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford, “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” I knew enough not to pay to hear Vaughn Monroe’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” At home, after I folded my “neat” maroon V-neck Lord Jeff sweater, hung up my rayon sports shirt, and combed the duckass out of my hair, I set the table and made our beds. When my father came home we cooked something taken from a can. After dinner my father read, while I pretended to do homework.
My homeroom teacher taught me both Latin and Washington history, and for her the fall of Rome and the War of Charles Griffin’s Pig—a one-shot war on Washington territory, without bloodshed, that lasted from 1859 to 1871—were events of equivalent magnitude. Even I knew better than this; my father didn’t pretend that Washington history mattered all that much to my future, so I was by inference licensed to neglect my studies, and to act according to the assumption that all I needed ever to know, I knew. This must have troubled my homeroom teacher, but she didn’t show it, and I remember her as gentle and patient, featureless, unprovocative, the lady who called the roll and gave me three Ds and an F.
I was a serious student of jazz, however, my father’s pupil. I listened to him play blues changes on a four-string guitar, and Bix’s key of C piano thing, “In a Mist,” on a rented upright. For at least an hour every night we were home we li
stened to records—Jack Teagarden, Art Tatum, Joe Venuti, and Eddie Lang. The first record Duke gave me was by these last-named two, who called themselves the Mound City Blue Blowers; the record had “Kickin’ the Dog” on one side, “Beatin’ the Cat” on the flip. My father told me what to listen for, and I loved those sessions with him, listening to the record spin, staring down at the label (Blue Note, Commodore, Jazz Victor) and then, when someone began really to drive, looking at each other, shaking our heads from the wonder of it: Jesus, wasn’t that chorus something!
Dixie Thompson was blond and clean, wore glasses, had wonderful grades and the school’s best smile. Her father, a doctor, drove a Packard. Because he drove a Packard, an automobile my father respected, he became our doctor. I spent a lot of time with Dixie, always with other people around. I wished it otherwise, but Dixie was sociable. In her freshman year at the University of Washington, where she called herself Dixie Jo, she was runner-up Queen of Frosh Day, losing—incredibly—to Twink Goss. Senior year she was president of the Husky YWCA and a member of an honorary sorority that “raised funds for a scholarship by selling candy canes at Christmas.”
Dixie may be remembered by others for her good heart, good will, and good works, but I remember her face. I carried its picture in my mind seventeen years, and once in New York, after a long night at Newsweek and three hours boozing at the Lion’s Head, I returned to my hotel room dead beat and drunk; at four in the morning there was nowhere to get another drink, and I was resigned to calling it a night when I felt a presence in my room. It was Dixie. I even switched on the television, to see if she was there. I found her in the telephone book, listed just like this: Thompson, Dixie. I dialed, got a sleepy roommate, said “wake her up, it’s Geoffrey Wolff from Seattle, Nathan Eckstein, tell her Jeff, she’ll remember Jeff Wolff.” After an argument the woman woke her friend, and I spilled memories on Dixie, who finally spoke:
Duke of Deception Page 15