Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  They were sports. I was let off with a warning. I went to see the Head, and he told me I didn’t deserve to remain in his school. When I left his office I felt soiled, diminished, and beyond reach. I believed the man despised me, and was right to despise me. Now I find a generous memo in my file, a record of our talk:

  Jeff Wolff came in June 3rd to say that he had just recently had a change of heart and hoped he might have an opportunity to prove himself in the year ahead. As nearly as I could judge, Jeff was completely sincere and not motivated—primarily at least—by a fear that he would not be allowed to continue at Choate next year. He admits that he has been less than honest, sloppy, and generally useless in his approach to School life. I told him he would have to be 100% in every way in his Sixth Form year or we just could not keep him. I suggested that this might be more of a challenge than Jeff wanted to accept, but he insisted that this was just the way he wanted it to be.

  I left the Head’s office, and wanted to be alone. There was only the chapel. At Choate I was never alone, except there. I loved chapel for this, sang the hymns with gusto, even reverence. Alone in the chapel I banished resentments. I prayed to be better. I tried. My Brief biography is illustrated with a poorly drawn cartoon of a boy studying a book titled Being One of the Boys. I studied the subject diligently, to my shame. Had myself confirmed by the Head, in the Head’s faith. Joined the Altar Guild and the Scholarship Committee. Sang with the choir, the glee club, and the Maiyeros (pipsqueak Whiffenpoofs). I tried to make the football team: “Fine effort,” the coach said, “willing. Going to be a hard competitor to stop. Fought hard as a guard. Good development.” But I wasn’t good enough, and so I became a cheerleader. Good God! I’d rather confess I was a pickpocket. My friends were amused. I was perplexed.

  The Maiyeros gave a concert at Miss Porter’s, in Farmington. I fell in love with a girl from Philadelphia. She liked me, for a while, and visited me for a day and night in Wilton during her Christmas vacation. I had hoped she would stay longer, but she lost interest quickly. She seemed uncomfortable with my father; Duke wasn’t what she knew on the Main Line. She was quiet, reserved, not pretty, handsome, with mannish shoulders. I liked her for good reasons, and as usual I liked her too well. I wanted her to love me; I boasted, labored to charm, dropped names, felt her slip away, heard her telephone the New York, New Haven and Hartford to ask about an earlier train. We drove to the Norwalk station in silence. At the station she told me there was no need to wait for her train, but I did. We waited five minutes together; she pretended to read a book.

  That night I wrote her a letter, twenty or thirty pages, maybe fifty. Falsehood on falsehood. Bons mots from Bartlett’s that I hoped weren’t familiar, because I displayed them as my own. References to my upcoming social season, so busy with coming-out parties in Boston and New York. The summer looked full too, Pater would be off as usual doing polo at Brandywine and Myopia. I’d be playing the eastern tennis circuit, Longwood, Newport Casino, had a fair chance to advance to a ranking if I could sharpen the backstroke, but squash at the Racquet Club was playing hob with my wrist. And so on and on and on … I even quoted, as a closing epigraph, a line or two from Sophocles, in Greek: Thus do flies to gods like little boys to men, or something. I signed off, finally, “affectionately.”

  This letter was probably worse than I have represented it here. I know I wrote it on Racquet Club stationery (taken from a cache my father had cadged when Frank Shields took him to lunch to sell him the temporary use of towels), and I know I sealed the envelope with wax from a Christmas candle and stuck Duke’s crest, engraved on a salt shaker he had given Alice as a wedding gift, in the wax.

  That night my father found the letter, opened it, read it. He didn’t bring it to me. He destroyed it first, and then came to my room and woke me. He knew the toll, to the penny; he was so gentle. He didn’t quote the letter at me, or refer to it. He told me I was better than I thought, that I didn’t need to add to my sum. I had warmth, he said; warmth and energy were the important things. These were a long time paying off sometimes, but they paid off. Honesty was the crucial thing, he said, knowing who I was, being who I was. What he said was so; I knew it was so. I didn’t even think to turn his words against him, he was trying so hard to save me from something, to turn me back. I had this from him always: compassion, care, generosity, endurance.

  I had met another girl at Farmington, Marion Rockefeller; they called her “Pebbles.” Cute, sassy, friendly. She invited me to a dance not long after my father’s talk about the truth. I called for her at an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her father wished to deliver us to the Plaza. As I descended in the elevator with Laurance Rockefeller he asked me if I was kin to the Wolffs at Loeb, Rhodes, fine people. I said I was not. Perhaps then Dr. Wolff (I brightened), a good heart man at Mt. Sinai? Certainly not, my grandfather was a doctor but he was dead; he had practiced at a Catholic hospital somewhere in Connecticut. Mr. Rockefeller had exhausted his interest in my ancestors. I noticed him look down at my feet. I was wearing black loafers with my dinner jacket. He looked at my cummerbund. Mr. Rockefeller also wore a dinner jacket, but with pumps on his feet and a black vest crossed by a delicate gold chain. I thought he looked better than I looked, and I thought he thought so too. I danced a few times with Pebbles, a St. Paul’s boy cut in with a fierce scowl for me and a grin for the pretty girl, and I never saw her again.

  My nose was thickening and curving. My lips were bigger, my hair darker. A friend at Choate asked if I was a Jew. I said I thought I was not. I had asked my mother this question once, and she had said of course not! I had asked my stepmother; she had laughed: don’t be silly! Now, a month after my father sat on my bed telling me that truth is all we need, identity is a treasure, I asked him:

  “Am I a Jew?”

  “Of course not. You’re a baptized, confirmed Episcopalian.”

  “I don’t mean that. That doesn’t count. Are you a Jew?”

  “I’m a confirmed Anglican.”

  “Was your mother a Jew?”

  “She was Dutch, Van Zandt, fine family, Lutherans, I think.”

  “Your father?”

  “Atheist.”

  “I’m not asking about religion. I’m asking what I am.”

  “For Christ’s sake! You know I’m not an anti-Semite. I wouldn’t be ashamed to be a Jew, if I was. I’m not, that’s all. Why would I lie to you? Wolff is a German name, Prussian. Your grandfather and grandmother were English. That’s all.”

  So when people asked me, and they asked quite often, I explained that Wolff was a German name, Prussian. Someone at Choate began to call me “Kraut.” In Modern European History we read about Himmler’s chief of staff, S.S. Major General Karl Wolff. And when I came to class the morning after that reading assignment, half a dozen boys stood and gave me a Nazi salute, Sieg Heil! After a week or so the salutes stopped, but “Kraut” stuck. It’s right there, in The Brief:

  GEOFFREY ANSELL WOLFF

  “Art” … “Porfirio” … “Kraut”

  17

  GOOD grief, why so gloomy? My life was not all sitting on the edges of beds, plumbing the verities. I laughed, graduated, learned. My fourth-form year at Choate I discovered Louis Untermeyer’s anthology of American poetry and I read it ragged, till its sturdily bound pages fell away from the spine, and I replaced it. Frost, Dickinson, Whitman, Crane, Pound, Stevens, Williams, Eliot: I had Eliot by rote as I never learned Eskimo Nell. On my sixteenth birthday and at Christmas I got Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. Then it was Hemingway, who taught me the manners and codes my father had lost the authority to teach me, whose manners and codes meshed perfectly with my father’s affectations and deepest convictions. O’Neill! The Iceman Cometh was my Book of Revelations; there was my father with his pipe dreams; Alice was Hickey, the “Iceman of Death,” or I was Hickey, hearing my father’s boozy litany, or Choate was Hickey, hearing my blowhard asseverations: Tomorrow I’ll pull it together, get my suit cleaned, find a job, leave Alice, be
at the act into shape, shave, sell the Ferrari, work out a budget, lay off the sauce, reform, make the football team, be a cheerleader, team player, Choatie, good …

  We weren’t meant to read O’Neill. We were meant to read Whittier, Hardy, Cooper, Irving. But I kept wandering off the reservation, reading rule-breakers to puzzle out how they did it. I carried my Untermeyer anthology in the plain brown wrapper of a geometry textbook dust jacket, but my sixth-form English master had my number:

  Geof has been building up a resistance to the work we have been doing, feeling that a diet of James Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Gertrude Stein and others would inspire greater interest and value than Hardy and the other classics we have been studying. I think Geof would be better off to stop dreaming about college courses in English and undertake the mastery of something that he doesn’t think taxes his abilities enough. To sound a loud alarm I talked to him straight from the shoulder, alone; I must say I have no criticism at all of his behavior for the last two weeks. I really think that alarm, or my really sound common sense, dictated his quiet but thoughtful attentiveness during this last part of the year. He still felt it necessary occasionally to exhibit his greater knowledge and sophistication to his admirers in the class, but he was very careful to keep to himself his former criticisms of the course.

  To this memo the Head responded: “It’s spelled Geoff!” Yes, I was quiet. Yes, I studied my master. This man who made his way by books despised books. He didn’t despise me, he despised Joyce and Stein.

  John Joseph was another kind of master. He was swarthy, with heavy features, and we called him “The Arab.” The other masters mostly had diminutives: Cappy, Ploopy, Porky, Snoopy, Stubby … The Arab was serious, tough-headed, irreverent, exacting, ceremonial. He cooked civilized meals for his friends, and treated me like a friend. He opened books for me. Long after I left Choate Mr. Joseph wrote asking about my doings, and closed his letter asking what had become of my “dapper and youngish sportive father with a sports car.” I answered that he was dead, “a bad man and a good father.” Mr. Joseph said: “Don’t ever again say your father was a ‘bad man’: there are no ‘bad men.’ ” Now I wish I could believe this.

  Mr. Joseph was Boston-born and Harvard-educated. He told me I reminded him of Dexter, in Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams.” I had never heard of Fitzgerald, but I found “Winter Dreams” and didn’t know what to make of it, didn’t realize till years later that Mr. Joseph had given a judgment neither flattering nor derogatory, just accurate. He saw that I was on the outside of the window looking in, and he knew that this was uncomfortable. Dexter “wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people—he wanted the glittering things themselves. Often he reached out for the best without knowing why he wanted it—and sometimes he ran up against the mysterious denials and prohibitions in which life indulges.”

  Years later Mr. Joseph confided in me how deeply he hated the “thingness” of American life, our appetites for “glittering things,” my father’s ruling vice. But I took other lessons from Fitzgerald then, and took him as my master. I read “The Rich Boy” and bought first editions of All the Sad Young Men, Tales of the Jazz Age, The Beautiful and the Damned, and of course This Side of Paradise. Duke hoped I’d go to New Haven for him, together with more than forty of my hundred thirty classmates; it never entered my mind after I read Fitzgerald, who said that Yale was for bond salesmen, to go there. Mr. Joseph urged Harvard, but that could not be, to Paradise I would go. I visited there, met the great R. P. Blackmur, who spoke to me of his friend Cummings, of his defects, as though I were a colleague in letters. Oh, yes: Princeton.

  But before I entered the class of 1960 as a freshman I first spent a post-graduate year in England, at Eastbourne College on the Sussex coast, an hour by train from London. My father was drunk much of the summer of my graduation, and he quarreled with me and with Alice. There were nice moments, playing tennis together, watching tennis at Forest Hills. He had gorgeous style, but never won a set against me. At Forest Hills he favored the oddballs. I rooted for Tony Trabert and Vic Seixas, sobersides who played always to win. Duke liked Sven Davidson and Art Larsen, clowns who broke training but sometimes surprised everyone with a big set or two, seldom three.

  The more time I spent near my father the worse I stammered. As I liked him less and less I became more and more like him. I felt trapped, didn’t care for myself or Alice, who didn’t care for me. I wanted to go far away, but Alice wouldn’t send me. She had sent me to Choate and where had it got her? She made plans to leave my father. It was obvious he would never work again, just diddle away the allowance she doled out. The first time she broke camp was over a toy he had ordered from Hoffritz, a tool that had a wrench on one end, pliers on the other and blades and scissors and screwdrivers between. She opened the package, and turned the thing this way and that, and began to laugh, dangerously. She didn’t laugh often those days; my father was running her account dry.

  She left for New York. I felt premonitions of squalor, and worse—of chaos. I didn’t want to be alone with my father. I wanted to be alone with myself. Before Alice returned I remembered my grandmother’s legacy. It would free me to go to England for a post-graduate school year with about twenty other American schoolboys, under the eye of the English-Speaking Union.

  There was a year! Eastbourne was a new school, less than a hundred years old. No Great Men had gone there, unless you counted the son of Lloyd George, and no one at Eastbourne bothered to count him. The trustees were mostly commoners, with a few men recently knighted. The masters were hard-headed, thick-skinned, and just. The school worked by code rather than common law: the price of everything was given and exacted. Twenty-seven of twenty-eight masters were Oxford or Cambridge men, snobs for merit rather than class. I was their first American and they told me right off that I didn’t know anything important.

  At Choate I had learned to make a sentence; Eastbourne taught me to make a paragraph, and sense. I wrote as many as six essays a week, and they came back, at first, with insults in the margins: “What can this mean, boy?” I had six classes a day, three in history, three in English. An hour of Shakespeare every day, and only two plays all year, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry IV, Part Two. We were never obliged to memorize but couldn’t help having the plays by rote, and the syntax and meter of blank verse sunk into our own grammars. After class our speech was laced with Shakespeare’s conceits: our insults were Falstaff’s to Pistol, our teases Antony’s of Lepidus.

  We read Paradise Lost. We read it again to have it down cold for the examinations we would face that coming summer, in competition with everyone else in England who aspired to admission to Oxford or Cambridge. For me the examinations were nominally inconsequential, but to pass them mattered to me supremely.

  The World was all before them, where to choose

  Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

  They hand and hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

  Through Eden took thir solitary way.

  To know something was to be cast into Eden. History was wonderful, the dates were wonderful, accuracy was wonderful. We shared the masters’ scorn for ignorant personages, their delight in the charge against James II, booted off his throne for consorting with Jesuits and other wicked people. Quite.

  Eastbourne was a curious setting for Eden. A summer resort with hotels of faded grandeur along the beachfront, the town was left to its population of retired clergymen and civil servants when the season ended and school began. There was a cooking school in town, where middle-class girls learned the domestic arts. I met many of them in the town’s tea shops and parks, and walked them to Beachy Head to snog in the heather and gorse. Janet, do you remember me? We went to the park at night, even in winter. We would meet and kiss, say not a word. You would sit on my lap, and let me reach under your raincoat and your skirt. Why didn’t we ever say anything? Janet was ashamed of her Yorkshire accent, I think, and I was afraid to break the spell. Did I really wear, in accordanc
e with school regulations, a straw boater? Even then, at night, in the park?

  I was seventeen, weighed ten stone, boxed for the school, played rugger. Reports went home to the Duke. The housemaster of School House noted that he had made me a house prefect, “which alone is enough to show that we all think well of him.” Everything that year surprised me. I was not, for example, ashamed of myself.

  A Choate classmate, a blond straight-arrow and football star, ran away from his school in England; he couldn’t stand up to the ragging. Other Americans drifted home. I was never homesick, never lonely. My stammer disappeared. I was in love with being in love with a girl I had met coming east on the Queen Elizabeth; she was a Denver heiress my age, traveling first class with her mother. They invited me to spend Christmas with them in Florence. Another report went home: “He has made a useful House Prefect and has thrown himself into a host of school activities. He has played vigorous Rugger for the School, scoring often and crucially.” My paragraphs seemed to have a reason to exist: “He holds enthusiastically and provocatively to his opinions about literature, and at last is beginning to know enough to justify them. He is learning to write.” The headmaster—who described himself as a “benevolent dictator, we have none of your absurd democracy in my school, hope you see things just my way”—let me go to London for weekends.

  The food was foul, of course, and the weather. There was no central heating, and the windows we were required to leave open let the fog drift in. Mercifully it obscured the nights’ dramas: we slept thirty to a dormitory, and it shocked me at first to awaken and see twelve empty beds, and everyone present. I wrote letters, ten and more a day; I took piano lessons, learned to use a camera and darkroom. I made lists of things I had done, thoughts I had thought, girls I had kissed, boys punched, cars driven, books read, places seen, anything I had done, anything that had weight and mass and reality, anything that added up. Now I knew I was a survivor, in for the long haul.