Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  “It’s almost five o’clock in the morning. Some people work.”

  Then she hung up. I still think she should have talked a couple of minutes. I wrote her next morning, told her all about myself, my kids, my wife. She wasn’t all that interested, I guess, because I haven’t heard back, and it’s been almost ten years.

  My father didn’t fret about my mother’s decision to stay in Sarasota. He simply didn’t believe she meant to leave him. Oh, she’d try it for a while on her own, just as she had tried to leave him in Birmingham, but she’d come to her senses. There was condescension in his lack of doubt: my father didn’t believe my mother could survive without his help. He thought she’d sink, and then he’d save her. He was a sentimental man, and I think he believed that because he loved my mother, he could make her love him back. He believed too in The Family, that we all belonged together.

  So he telephoned her often, to no end at all, and I always talked with her and Toby. My mother tells me that during one of these calls I asked to return to her and she said no, I couldn’t travel back and forth across country at my pleasure. I can’t believe I asked to return to Sarasota, but my mother has lied to me seldom, except about being the son of a Jew, and perhaps my father had been drunk and frightened me. Anything is possible, but I just don’t believe that I wanted to leave Seattle for Sarasota.

  I wasn’t fair; I always took my father’s side. When he returned from Turkey my mother begged me not to tell him about the ex-policeman from Michigan, about what she called her “indiscretions,” and for a while I didn’t. But then I did. I couldn’t keep secrets from my father. I hope that was the only reason I told him, and not to watch what happened once he knew.

  I didn’t think of my father as sensual, like my mother. My father had “an eye for a leg,” as he said, and liked to talk with pretty girls; but I thought of him then as true to my mother from marriage till death. Now I wonder what it was like for him to take me to the movies with a thirteen-year-old girl squeezed between us in the MG, the girl giggling and flirting with my father. She sat beside me in the dark, beside him too, and he smelled the same hair I smelled. He was always a father, always correct, just like any father.

  One afternoon I got a glimpse of something different, what could happen if my father decided not to be like everyone’s dad, if I pushed us closer together as accomplices and violated the natural order of things. It was a summer Sunday, a few months before I turned fourteen, and my father and I were sitting on our lawn watching sailboats. A Lightning capsized nearby, knocked down by a gust. Its mast broke, and my father towed the boat and two girls sailing it to our dock. They were eighteen, maybe twenty, and shivering from cold and fright. Duke gave them dry clothes, and made them tea while they used our phone. Soon they were laughing indiscriminately, and especially at the sight of each other rattling around in my father’s poplin Burma shorts and extra-large polo shirts.

  Duke asked if they’d like rum in their tea, and they looked at each other, and said yes, giggling. My father played them records, and soon they were drinking rum without tea. They made a fuss over me, one of them especially, and it came to me suddenly, when her friend made another call and said to someone in a whisper not to worry, “we’ll get a ride home when our clothes are dry,” that something was about to happen to me. Two boys, two girls; that was how the girls seemed to see it. Maybe I had it all wrong; maybe the girl who was so sweet to me was just sweet, fond of kids, with a little brother of her own. But it seemed to me that what I had been dreaming about nights was about to be done to me.

  I began to search for details that would verify this miracle to my friends. That I was to be done rather than doer nagged slightly, so to add a few years to my age, pronto, I asked my father if I could have a beer. He stared at me hard and said okay, he didn’t see that a beer could do much harm. The girls giggled at this, and I sat silent and sullen for a few minutes while Duke played “In a Mist” for them. Then I took another liberty, walked to the piano and opened my father’s silver cigarette case, lit a cigarette with his silver Dunhill, took a practiced drag, inhaled it. My father was beginning the final eight bars, his best section, but when I lit the cigarette he came off the piano bench fast, and slapped the cigarette out of my mouth.

  “That’s too much. I’d spank you if we didn’t have guests. The party’s over, ladies, my little boy has forgotten his manners, and his age.”

  The girls dressed and straggled away in their damp clothes, and waited at the end of the driveway for their friend. I went to bed. I know my father was too hard on me. Something might have triggered his jealousy, but I think probably I had enraged him by my material liberty with his cigarette case. That night I lay awake wondering why I couldn’t ever seem to learn where my father’s edge was; one step on terra firma, the next off and tumbling into space.

  • • •

  My father never had dates while we lived alone together in Seattle, or he had none that I knew about. I didn’t wonder why. He was saving himself for my mother. But once he surprised me. It was the day before Christmas, and he hired a cleaning lady to scrub our rooms. Before she arrived from the referral service he sent me away to a double feature downtown. I arrived home before I was expected. The cleaning lady’s instruments of work were leaning against the back porch railing, and the house was just as I had left it. The cleaning lady, maybe sixty, was as skinny as a broom, and drunk. She pinched me on the cheek. I wasn’t friendly. She joshed my father. There was a smudge of lipstick on his cheek, and his necktie was loose. He looked to me like a clown, but he couldn’t know why, couldn’t see the lipstick on him. He could see the cleaning lady’s smudged lips, though, and right away he opened great distance between her and himself.

  “You can leave now,” he said.

  “I haven’t cleaned up yet, honey,” she said. She was saucy, unmindful of my father’s short temper.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Some other time.” He was surprisingly courtly.

  The cleaning lady stood up stiffly, as if on her dignity. “It’s not as easy as that, honey, some other time …” She was mocking my father, on Christmas Eve.

  “Here, take this,” he said. He gave her a twenty. She blew him a kiss, and left laughing.

  I asked my father if he had kissed her.

  “Of course not. Jesus, how could you think that?”

  “There’s lipstick on your cheek.”

  “Oh, that,” he said, touching his cheek, blushing. “Well, yes, there was an office party, pretty girl there, red hair, nice popsie, about twenty-five, just a friendly kiss, very pretty …”

  As though “pretty” made a difference. It made a difference.

  My father’s work at Boeing was as liaison between design, engineering, and production, just what he had done at Lockheed for the XP-38 and at North American for the XP-51. Now the project was the XB-52, and this was the Atomic Age; aviation had changed, was all business. My father had not changed, was not all business, and if his easy way with regulations won him admirers who worked under his charge on the mockup and prototype of the bomber, it also drew the attention of people without much sense of humor.

  It drew the attention of the FBI. My father was careless with papers and blueprints, and didn’t always lock his desk at night. This was a nuisance, but nothing to cause the heavy trouble about to come down on him after his security check. My father required a “Q” clearance—virtually an atomic clearance—for his work, and the FBI had just accumulated a meticulous record of his life.

  It was late August, 1951. I remember because it happened the day after the unlimited hydroplane race near the Floating Bridge. Our Chris-Craft Riviera had just been “repo’d” (my father’s word for “repossessed,” a word he had such frequent occasion to use he abbreviated its three syllables to two), and we were watching the big inboard hydroplanes thunder around the markers from my own little racing runabout, Y-Knot. The boats were powered by airplane engines, Allisons and Rolls-Royces, sometimes two engines,
and they could surpass two hundred miles per hour. One of the boats back in the pack was a gray, ungainly thing with two supercharged in-line engines, and on a straightaway it began to move up. The engines were winding high, the superchargers screaming, and my father touched my arm.

  “Look away,” he said. “That guy’s about to blow.”

  I looked sharp, saw the boat hobbyhorsing a little. “What?” I asked my father. “What did you say?”

  “He’s pushed those Allisons too far. They won’t take that much. There. He’s gone.”

  And I looked where the boat had been, and there wasn’t any boat anymore.

  “Let’s go,” my father said. “That’s all she wrote.”

  The next day the FBI came to visit. It was Sunday. They identified themselves and my father told me to leave the room. Two of them talked to him. I tried to hear what they said. They were polite, serious. My father didn’t raise his voice. When he said something, which wasn’t often, they didn’t interrupt him. When they left they shook hands with him, and with me. One of them reminded him not to leave town, they’d be in touch. My father said of course, he’d be at home.

  A few hours later he packed the MG and we drove to Port Angeles and took the ferry to Canada: Victoria, on Vancouver Island. My father checked us into the Empress, and I heard him use the name Saunders Ansell. The Empress was huge, and my father knew his way around it. He said that was where he’d been, “with a friend,” when I flew to Seattle from Florida. We had tea with cakes and cookies and crustless sandwiches cut into thirds and quarters. My father looked at me across the tea table in the fancy lobby and said I needed a decent jacket. We went to the best haberdasher in Victoria, where he bought me a Black Watch tartan jacket. It came with brass buttons with a crest stamped on them, and my father insisted that these be removed, and replaced with solid, heavy, plain brass buttons. I was proud of my picture in the mirror. I reminded me of someone who had been raised to eat cucumber sandwiches in the lobby of the Empress.

  My father was distracted. The next day we drove out the island to a place called Wilcooma Lodge, perched on the side of a fjord. We ate smoked salmon and looked at the water. My father drank whiskey with Lon Chaney, Jr., a guest, and when he came to bed he woke me up. He sat on the edge of my bed, rocking back and forth, holding his head in his hands. He was drunk, but he wasn’t angry this time. He was sad.

  “I’ve done awful things,” he said.

  “What things?” I asked him, afraid he might tell me.

  “I don’t know.” His hands were in front of his face, held there like a mask. “Jesus, a man like me, power to waste life, engines of destruction … Sometimes, old man, it weighs heavy, believe me. Very, very, very heavy indeed.”

  Then he gave me specifics. He had drawn the line with the XB-52, had argued against its development as an atomic bomber. He couldn’t allow another Hiroshima, Nagasaki, he already had “enough blood on his hands.” He was in trouble because of his anti-atomic position, “deep trouble.” The FBI wasn’t finished with him.

  We stayed a week. I was proud of my father’s courage, the risk he was running. We rowed up the fjord, talking about old times. My father put his arm around me a lot, said he wanted me to be anything at all I wanted to be, as long as it served other people. He told me again how important it was that we tell the truth to each other, hang the cost. He told me I was okay, and that was all that mattered to him. He said he thought maybe Rosemary wouldn’t come to Seattle, but that was all right, maybe we’d travel south, see how she and Toby were doing.

  He taught me to drive. I got three miles down the gravel driveway of Wilcooma Lodge, shifting pretty well, and then I lost it on an easy right-hander. The left fender and door were goners, but my old man managed to laugh about it, told our English hosts I had “pranged her into a ditch.” He told me “never mind, you’ll get the hang of it.”

  That day he made a long call to Seattle, and when he hung up he got a tow truck for his car. We followed in a taxi to the Seattle ferry, and boarded early, after the MG was put in the hold. We watched people come up the gangplank, slowly at first, then more frantically as the ferry prepared to shove off.

  “Tell you what,” my father said. “I’ll bet you a buck someone misses the boat.”

  “If the boat’s gone, how can we tell?”

  “We have to see him miss it.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “I’ll do you better. Someone has to miss the boat, and be so goddamned mad that he shakes his fist at us, jumps up and down, and throws his hat on the ground.”

  “I’ll take it. A buck.”

  “If he throws his hat on the ground, and jumps up and down on it, you’ll owe me two bucks, okay?”

  “Deal.”

  We had the hawsers aboard, were slipping into the channel. “Look,” my father said, pointing. I owed him two bucks, and fifteen years later I paid him.

  We stood out on the windward railing all the way to Seattle. It was a clear night, dry and cold, and we saw the sun go down toward Asia and for an instant, like a flashbulb, light up the Olympic range. My father laid his arm over my shoulder. I wanted to comfort him.

  “Is it going to be okay?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  And this was so, for the time being. Much later I learned what happened. The FBI had traced him back, stumbling over debts and a few scrapes with the police, some heavy drinking, the kinds of things the FBI finds when it looks. All the way back to his first job at Northrup. Here was a careless man, a good engineer, a patriotic American. Then, abruptly, in 1936, he disappeared. Groton hadn’t heard of him, except to tell someone in Birmingham it hadn’t heard of him. Yale hadn’t heard of him. The Sorbonne didn’t know what the hell it was being asked to verify, what school of aeronautiques? My father hadn’t, as he claimed, been born in New York, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Who was he? Where had he come from? Here was a man in close proximity to atomic bombers who seemed to have been dropped into this country, a few years before a world war, from nowhere. Here was a man obliged to answer some questions.

  He answered them, somehow. Boeing kept him on. I can’t imagine why. Probably cost-plus saved him. Cost-plus government contracts have saved many another. Boeing’s profit was a fixed percentage of its costs; the higher its payroll, the more the company earned. My father was of some use to Boeing, imperfect as he was. And perhaps the FBI decided that even a man with bad character can be a patriot.

  A few weeks after our flight to Canada and my father’s return to Boeing, Alice, “Tootie,” my stepmother, arrived.

  ————————

  With my mother in La Jolla, California, 1941.

  ————————

  My father at thirty-six, in a publicity photograph for Bechtel-McCone and Parsons, Birmingham, 1944.

  ————————

  My fourth-grade spring, Old Lyme, 1947.

  ————————

  At Choate graduation, 1955, seventeen.

  ————————

  With Tommy Ray (left) and Bobby Shearin (right), my pit crew, preparing Y-Knotfor a race in Tennessee, 1952. (Shelbyville Times-Gazette)

  ————————

  Princeton suite-mates, 1959. I am to the left of the young gentleman wearing a tam-o’shanter, a disdainful expression and a bear’s claw.

  ————————

  My brother Toby, sixteen, guessing ages and weights at the Seattle World’s Fair, 1962, the summer following our La Jolla reunion.

  ————————

  Left: Skiing with friends in St. Anton, 1962.

  ————————

  Arthur Samuels Wolff—a.k.a. Arthur “Saunders” Wolff “III,” a.k.a. “Saunders Ansell” –Wolff “III” –had many “checking accounts.”

  ————————

  The Duke’s New York driver’s license. It gives his address as The Racquet Club (in fact at 370 Park Avenue), a plac
e where he had once or twice been a guest.

  ————————

  My father, eighteen months before he died.

  ————————

  With my boys, holding Justin, photographed by John, who told me my father was dead.

  13

  ALICE came in with the century. When I met her in a high corner room of the Olympic Hotel she was fifty-one, and looked older. My father, forty-three, looked her age. She had been twice married, widowed, and then divorced. Her first husband was a chemical magnate (his firm, Sandoz, developed LSD) and a prig. Alice cherished his memory, and was proud that he had considered himself undressed without his spats. He wore pince-nez, and was by all accounts a very serious gentleman.

  Her second husband was different. He stroked a Harvard eight that won Henley, was a member of Porcellian and a class marshal. That was about it for him, though. He liked Mexico—the sun, the hours and the spirits—and he spent Alice’s money fast, capital as well as interest. Like my father, he was younger than she.

  I liked Alice. She had a musical voice, trained to its vibrato precision by singing coaches and finishing schools. I liked the pretty white hair she wore piled on top of her head, and her formality. She was fastidious, but didn’t seem cold. She was big, I guess “Rubenesque” is the euphemism, and she put on airs, but they were the airs of a schoolmarm, and I found them comfortable, at first. Later, when she pronounced the is in “isolate” to rhyme with the is in “sis,” I’d straighten her out, and still later I’d mock her. But then, just thirteen, I reckoned she must know something I didn’t know.