Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  We spent the summer on the Cape, in a big drafty house at North Chatham. I played tennis, sailed a Beetle cat, contemplated girls. A Choate friend came to visit. We drank a quart of my father’s Canadian Club while he and my stepmother were at a party. We’d each have a jigger and refill the bottle with two jiggers of water. We quit when the whiskey was as transparent as gin. Alice was furious. My father thought our hangovers were piquant.

  From North Chatham I wrote Mr. Steele:

  My conscience has been bothering me about that weekend which I asked for. I stated that I was going to stay at my Grandmothers. That statement was untrue. I can assure you that nothing of that nature shall ever occure again.

  I never imagined that anything could mean as much to me as Choate does. I sincerely hope that this weekend business has not narrowed my chances of getting back into Choate.

  I really am very ashamed of the lie which I told you and I hope you believe me when I say it will never happen again. I look forward to returning to Choate in the fall.

  How did “Grandmothers” and “occure” get past my father’s edit?

  I hadn’t been back at school eight weeks when I let my father down. He had opened an office in New York as a management consultant, and would bring a potential client, a retired Air Force general, to the Yale-Harvard game. He invited me to meet them there, with a friend.

  My friend was the son of a hotel owner, and at fourteen he had discovered his father’s chief bellman running whores. He had confronted the pimp, and they had reached an accommodation, or so my friend assured me. He didn’t tell his daddy what he knew, and he got whatever hookers he liked, superior room service, what he called “a sweetheart deal.” He told me about his sweetheart deal driving by taxi to the Yale-Harvard game. The cabby had bought us a pint of Mount Gay, which my father had learned to like in Barbados. My friend’s father had gone to Yale. Like Duke. But before I’d say what a coincidence, Dad went there too I asked my friend’s father’s class, college, and fraternity. 1925, Pierson, Fence, Wolf’s Head. Oh, they wouldn’t have known each other, Dad was 1930, Saybrook, Deke, Bones.

  Outside a portal to the fifty yard-line on the Yale side of the Bowl I puked on the camel’s-hair topcoat of the retired Air Force general. My father didn’t slap me, then. He put me to bed in a tiny room at the Taft, and when I woke up he slapped me.

  His office at 270 Park, a block north of Grand Central, overlooked a restaurant in the courtyard. My father used to give me lunch at The Marguery, where I learned to enjoy vichyssoise, and pronounce it. If the captain said the Dover sole was fresh I asked how it was prepared, and, whatever the reply, ordered it. I usually finished my meal with sherbet, or perhaps Brie if it hadn’t been refrigerated, wasn’t overripe. My father let me use his account there and at Brooks, Abercrombie & Fitch, J. Press, Chipp and Sulka.

  His office had on its door a varnished ash plaque made by a woodcarver at Minneford’s yacht yard on City Island:

  ARTHUR SAUNDERS WOLFF III

  Management & Engineering Consultant

  This was quite large for the small door of a small office. There was a single room, exquisitely furnished but overwhelmed by my father’s desk, eight feet long. I once slept on the desk, with seven friends scattered on the couch and the floor, after a dance at the St. Regis Roof. We were swell.

  My father had a series of secretaries. The first was gorgeous and efficient. But Duke’s hours were erratic, and so were his demands. I don’t mean to imply that they were in the conventional sense improper, but he spent his office hours ordering stuff, and his secretary spent her time picking up the stuff he ordered, or explaining why it hadn’t yet been paid for; she soon began to suspect that my father’s work was transient. After she quit another came, and another, and another, each less beguiling than the one before, less polished and pretty, till at the end there was an answering service that always said my father was at a meeting.

  He had brochures printed, bound and mailed to hundreds of companies. The paper—thick, creamy, thirty-pound stock, hundred percent cotton—came from Cartier. My father’s name was raised, engraved in dark gray in the typographical style of The New Yorker. Good address, good telephone exchange (PLAZA 5-6640), good typeface. His finishing trick was to bind the brochures in Mark Cross leather.

  The résumé retailed the usual crap, but now he had added a rubric, PUBLICATIONS: “Articles in regard to management, plant site selection, plant-planning and plant layout, management and administrative procedures, and several studies of maintenance procedures published by McGraw-Hill and others.” The format didn’t conform to common bibliographic practice, but Duke was ever a pioneer of forms.

  The pitch was divided into sections divided by titled leather tabs:

  A PERSONAL APPROACH: It is obvious that a camera is no better than its lens; so, too, is the final result of a consultant’s effort no better than the calibre of the man who actually performs the task to be accomplished.

  AN AID TO MANAGEMENT: I exercise no organizational authority in assisting clients except as directed; the value of my services being inherent in recommendations which must be acceptable on the basis of obvious benefits, sound facts and in the form of presentations which are graphic and self-revealing. SCOPE OF OPERATIONS: My clients retain [the subjunctive or indefinite future would have been the better tense] my services for aid in improving operating effectiveness and reducing costs in connection with the following business activities:

  Management

  Organization

  Manufacturing and Operations

  Personnel Management and Labor Relations

  Marketing Distribution and Merchandising

  The client is assured of the highest standard and quality of service, regardless of the location or the scope of his business. METHOD OF OPERATION: My work is directly with top management and retention of my service is negotiated through a principal or partner. Thus my approach is realistic in scope. I make no attempt to revolutionize. Too, I have no pat solutions or systems, my recommendations being custom-tailored for each client. Having a keen regard for the human factor in personnel relations, I work with a client’s employees on the basis of understanding and cooperation. This ensures that, by actually participating in the project to be accomplished, they accept the program.

  SPECIFIC SERVICES: Executive Reports, Budget Control, Cost Accounting, Financial and Operating Statements, Stockholders’ and Employees’ Reports.

  PROFESSIONAL ARRANGEMENTS: Fees are on a per diem basis, although an annual retainer may also be arranged.

  This document—which promised to straighten out any muddle, cause employees to love their work and their bosses, enhance productivity and reduce production costs, analyze markets, design aptitude tests, cure colic, goiters, and the pox, return capitalists to their golf carts and capitalism to its rightful eminence—my father sent to Ford, GM, GE, Chase, The Bank of New York, Bethlehem Steel, Sears, Roebuck & Co., McGraw-Hill (!), International Harvester, United Fruit, North American Aviation and many lesser members of Fortune’s Five Hundred.

  Not one replied. My father did hear from the ex-tennis champs, Frank Shields and Sidney Wood, friends from Roxbury. They were in the laundry business, and wanted to sell him their towel service.

  By now I knew my father was a phony. I wasn’t dead sure about Yale, but I was sure he was a phony. My father’s lesson had taken: he had tried to bring me up valuing precision of language and fact. So around him I became a tyrant of exactitude, not at all what he had meant me to be. Unable to face him down with the gross facts of his case I nattered at him about details, the actual date of the Battle of Hastings, the world’s coldest place, the distance between the moon and the sun, the number of vent-holes in a Buick Special. I became a small-print artist.

  I was harder on my father after I had the goods on him than he had ever been on me. He had always had the goods on me. And he had never made cruel use of them.

  After my father set up his office in New York we lived for
a while at One Fifth Avenue. From there I sallied forth during vacations to jazz clubs and dances. I was levered on a list of eligibles by the mother of a Choate friend, and attended The Holidays, The Collegiate, The Get-Togethers, and The Metropolitan, The Hols, The Cols, The Gets, and the Mets, as we called them. I’d stand along the edge of the dance floor, a hand resting at the hip of a dinner jacket, an elbow disdainfully projected to keep strangers at a distance, looking over the talent. Casual. I went to dances, but I didn’t dance at them, because I couldn’t, despite Alice’s instruction, dance. Weenie.

  The summer of 1953 we returned to Connecticut, first to Weston, then to a small, beautiful house in Wilton, then to a big, old house on Nod Hill Road in Wilton. When my father’s lease expired at 270 Park he brought his “office” home to Wilton. He had time aplenty on his hands and used it to shop and fend off creditors. Cartier, he later told me, was especially sporting, asked him only twice to pay and then assumed that he preferred not to, and left him in peace. We still listened to jazz together when I was home from Choate, but now I knew more than my father. I explained to him (sometimes patiently) why Dave Brubeck was a better pianist than Art Tatum. He wouldn’t lose his temper with me but once, when I corrected him on some trivial matter of jazz fact, he left the living room, paused at the door, turned to me:

  “Geoffrey, I love you. I love you because you’re my son, of course. But I love you beyond that. I want good things to come to you. I want you to be happy. I want these things for you and sometimes I would rather be with you than with anyone. But not now. Not these days. These days you know too much. You talk like a barber, and you bore me to death, and I hate to be in the same room with you most of the time. I hope this changes.”

  Many grown-ups at Choate shared my father’s judgment of me. The Head told me, in the rhythms of the pulpit oratory he so favored, that I was “the weak link in an otherwise strong Choate chain.” A housemaster reported to him that “Geoff is certainly the biggest problem in the Woodhouse.” My goodness: “He can be counted on to try any shortcut around any work, to dodge responsibility and to take advantage of any privilege granted him. He seems to have a completely false set of values.” Only this by way of amelioration: “He is well poised; he is fiercely loyal to family and friends.” I was loyal to my father behind his back. I was a scourge to his face but I wouldn’t hear a word said against him by anyone else.

  • • •

  During Christmas vacation of my first year at Choate I was sent to Sarasota for a few days with my mother and brother. I flew into Tampa with greater self-certitude than when I flew out to Seattle three years earlier. See how I had changed: taller, with trained hair; grander, with a Brooks Brothers tweed jacket, Brooks Brothers blue button-down shirt, Brooks Brothers tie. True, the tweed jacket and flannel trousers weren’t just the things for sunshine and eighty degrees, but I was consoled by the picture I presented to my astonished mother: a young gentleman, a buck.

  On the flight down I had thought much about the impression I wished to convey. Prosperity, control, worldliness. “You seemed quite worldly,” my mother admits. “You let me know that you were no longer a virgin.” My mother was indifferent to the significance of this fiction. “I didn’t feel I had much part in your life. You had grown up independent of me; I felt I had no responsibility for your diet, health, morals, anything. I had no right to care.”

  While Toby gawked at his wised-up brother on the drive from Tampa to Sarasota, I confessed my imaginary sins. I had exhausted the inventory by the time we were downtown. The place had changed. Now Sarasota was spruced up, the Athens of the Gulf Coast, with live theater! I told my mother that I rather enjoyed the theater, perhaps I would treat her to a night out, dinner at the Ringling Hotel after the curtain fell.

  “Shep’s gone,” my mother told me.

  “He got bitten by a snake,” Toby said. “Maybe eaten by an alligator.”

  “Maybe he ran away,” my mother said. “Maybe someone stole him. He was so friendly.”

  I stared out the window, away from my mother’s face and my brother’s. I didn’t want them to see me now. The town was just the same, seedy.

  My mother and Toby lived in a basement apartment downtown. It was tiny, damp, dark. Mother worked long hours, still at the Dairy Queen. Her ex-policeman, like the German woman’s G.I., came by of an evening to scream at her, threaten to choke, shoot, or knife her. His reasons at least during my brief visit, were obscure. While my mother worked at the Dairy Queen I stayed with Toby, behind locked doors.

  On Christmas Mother gave me a radio with a cream plastic case, AM and FM. No gift ever touched me deeper. It represented a huge sacrifice, thirty hours work at the Dairy Queen. I knew its price to the penny, but my mother did not show what it cost her. She just wanted me to have it. The next day at La Guardia a woman jostled me and the radio fell and broke. My father replaced it with a more expensive model. He would have been kinder to replace it exactly, or not at all.

  Six months later I went to Arlington, Virginia to visit my mother and her brother Steve. Mother was on the run from the ex-policeman. She sent Toby from Washington to New York to see his father an hour before I flew in. I was to spend a night in Arlington at Uncle Steve’s, and a day sightseeing in Washington. The following afternoon I would fly to Maine for a week with a girl I had met at Choate.

  Steve was a bureaucrat at the Pentagon, and the very image of his father, but taller. Unlike his father and like my mother he had a ready laugh. I liked him, and knew my father liked him. My father had done things for him, the small acts of generosity and kindness that older members of a family like to do for younger members, inviting them for weekends, making introductions. So I was stunned at dinner to hear my uncle make what seemed to me cruel remarks about my father, in front of me, as though I weren’t there. The remarks were factual, I think, references to Duke’s debts, mendacity, dependence upon Alice, heavy drinking. But the remarks were also purposeless and unearned, and I was enraged. My uncle thought I was too young at fifteen to show rage to a grown-up. Then my mother laughed, shrugged, said “What’s the fuss? Steve’s right about Duke, he’s a faker.”

  In all my life I had never heard my father speak unkindly of my mother or her brother. That night a call came to Steve, putatively from the Georgia State Police. It was a message for Rosemary. The Michigan ex-policeman had been in an accident driving north to search for her, and his last words had been of their love. Mother was troubled: “I lay in bed thinking of him, half-relieved to be done with him and half-sorry he was dead.” He wasn’t dead, or hurt. He had just had a bit of fun with my mother.

  While my mother fretted that night, thinking the man dead, I sulked. I sulked flying to Bangor. I was met at the airport by the girl and her nice mummy and daddy in their sensible Pontiac station wagon. I had spent two hours with the girl when she came to sing at Choate with the Ethel Walker glee club. After the concert we had walked behind the chapel, and to my astonishment she asked me to kiss her. Now I held her hand in the dark back seat while her parents drove us toward Blue Hill, asking me questions. I couldn’t get Steve or my mother off my mind, except when I wondered if the Ethel Walker girl would let me touch one of her wonderful breasts. She noticed my contemplativeness, knew I had just visited my divorced mother.

  “Do you see your mother often?” she asked me.

  “I used to,” I said.

  “But of course you’ll see her again soon,” the girl’s mother said.

  “No,” I said. “My mother died last night.”

  What the hell had I done now? Silence, dead silence. I don’t know whether they believed me in the front seat, but the girl squeezed my hand hard and pushed her leg against mine. So that was one of the reasons I had said it. The other was to kill my mother, a simple case of murder, real hatred now. She shouldn’t have let her little brother say such awful, true things about my father.

  I mooned around the girl’s stately waterfront house for a week, playing the mourner for her
parents, who many times asked if there was anything they could do, wouldn’t I rather be with my father?

  “No,” I said, “this is better, to be away from all that, to sort things out.”

  Shouldn’t I return for the funeral?

  “We buried her the morning after she passed away. She wanted it that way.”

  They couldn’t have believed me! But they were relentlessly thoughtful. The girl’s father had owned a haberdashery called The English Shop in a small college town in Massachusetts. He sang the college’s praises and I could think only about opening an account at his store, how easy it would have been with a good connection. I told the girl’s father that he had definitely changed my mind about college: Yale was too big, New Haven too dirty and noisy, his little college was the place for me, absolutely. It was better not to try to step into my father’s huge boots at Yale.

  The man beamed. He trusted me with his daughter. On their catboat, in their Pontiac, and on their couch I tried to feel her up. The girl wouldn’t let me. This was grim business. I put aspirin in her Coca-Cola, a known specific against frigidity, and still she wouldn’t let me.

  “This Coke tastes awful,” she said. “It tastes like aspirin.”

  My mother had just died, for God’s sake! I had just put my mother in the ground! I was owed! I had three hands, moving them from the girl’s breasts to her thighs in a random assault, praying that she’d fumble a defensive move and let me slip in there, let me unbuckle it, touch it, squeeze. I told her she had given me “blue balls, lover’s nuts.” This interested her and I took advantage of her distraction to run my hand up her stocking, past her garter, inside that soft, damp thigh, against those slick pants. Wham! Her legs locked together. “Take me home!” she yelled.

  Driving home, hunched over the wheel, I pouted: “I guess you don’t like me.”

  “That isn’t it,” she said, “you’re not fair.”

  “You’re the one who isn’t fair,” I said. “Listen, let me touch you, just five minutes. Just this once and I promise I’ll never feel you up again.”