The wonderful, tall, skinny, sporting, rebellious Smith sophomore did not wrinkle up her nose at dinner (chicken croquettes with instant mashed), but I could smell the dead thing on myself. My father was peppy, told college jokes on himself, anecdotes about stolen bell clappers and painted sundials and saplings murdered by sophomores—“no names, please”—who pissed out windows upon them. These were my stories. My father had become so careless in his fictions, so indifferent to them, that he forgot their provenance. I looked at him sharply, and he blushed. Drinking a demitasse with my pinky extended crooked, I used the word “attractive.”
“Jesus!” my father roared. “Attractive! What a word! Scottsdale is ‘attractive,’ Mimsy is ‘attractive.’ Mimsy has an ‘attractive’ dog, polo pony, husband, chess set …”
The lovely girl was abruptly “fagged out, done in, dead tired.” I put her in the “guest room” and slept with my father. He snored, and sucked his thumb. I lay awake. I went to the bathroom, saw what the girl had seen, my father’s false upper teeth (“choppers,” he called them) stewing in an effervescent broth in a pewter beer mug beside the sink. I noticed the fake brass towel rings that swiveled through Neptune’s mouth. I drove that girl to the Bridgeport station next morning wearing my work clothes.
No. I wanted better. I wanted to escape to Princeton, from my father. I wanted not to be like him, to let him sink alone. I wrote Princeton, and Princeton welcomed me back come January, just pay the bills. I didn’t tell my father about this exchange of letters, but he sensed it. He knew me.
John came often to visit. He liked my father; my father liked him. John didn’t like Harvard, or the conventions. He had been raised in a huge Lake Forest house at the water’s edge, and lived summers in another huge house with its own beach on Martha’s Vineyard. John wanted something different—Bohemia—and Newtown provided it, definitely.
Cars united the three of us. John owned an Austin-Healey with a Corvette engine, and tinkered with it in our garage. Duke had a folly called an Abarth-Zagato, a tiny maroon coupe that cost many thousands of someone else’s dollars. It could uncomfortably seat two and was capable, when it ran, of the top speed of a stock Chevvy six. Its 850cc Fiat Toppolino engine had been bored out from 600cc, which raised its compression ratio so high it often blew head gaskets. When they blew the head had to be shaved to seat the new gasket, which raised the compression ratio higher, which provoked another blown gasket. The car seldom ran.
Which was just as well, for my father and I owned between us a single set of license plates, and these had been stolen from yet a third party, my stepmother. We moved the plates from car to car according to need, a procedure that John regarded as pleasingly subversive, my father as routine, and I as a nuisance.
I had my own folly, a 1937 Delahaye, a car longer than a Cadillac, with a cockpit smaller than the Abarth-Zagato’s. Its fifty-five gallon gas tank gave it a range of about three hundred miles, and it had four speeds in reverse. This was a car for the corniche drives between Nice and Monte, but my father chose it as just the car to carry me from Newtown to Bridgeport and back. When it went at all it would not self-start, which made our birchless prominence a necessary convenience; in the parking lot at Sikorsky, armed with jumper cables, I was at the mercy of strangers with twelve-volt electrical systems and a few moments to spare.
John invited my father and me to Martha’s Vineyard for a summer week. I was apprehensive. John’s father was Ike’s Secretary of the Air Force, and I dreaded the opportunities this would afford my father for self-celebration. So John adjusted the invitation to include my father out, but he showed up anyway toward the end of the week. He brought along a suitcase made of wood; when this was unfolded it became a boat, which he paddled around the harbor at Vineyard Haven, serving me right, I know.
My father was a mystery, or as crazy as crazy can be. His schemes were insane. He would go to law school, become an expert on wheat speculations, advise the Algerians or Venezuelans on oil refining. He decided the jazz pianist at The Three Bears in Wilton was a genius, as good as King Cole. During the early forties in California he had “discovered” Cole playing piano in a bowling alley, and the King, responding to my father’s enthusiasm, asked the Duke to manage him. My father had laughed at the notion. This chance my father wouldn’t miss, he would produce a record for this pianist, they’d both have it made. He brought the man home, recorded his work on our out-of-tune upright using a top dollar Ampex, shot publicity snaps with a Rollei (white dinner jacket, pencil-line mustache, and rug), and led him to the mountain top. The man was my father’s age, with more or less my father’s prospects, with one greater skill and one greater vice. The piano player could play the piano better, but he was always drunk; my father was drunk only once—maybe twice—a week.
Duke charged ahead. He charged and charged ahead. There was something about him, what he wanted he got. Salesmen loved him, he was the highest evolution of consumer. Discriminating, too: he railed against shoddy goods and cheapjack workmanship. He would actually return, for credit, an electric blender or an alpine tent that didn’t perform, by his lights, to specification. He demanded the best, and never mind the price. As for debts, they didn’t bother him at all. He said that merchants who were owed stayed on their toes, aimed to please. Dunning letters meant nothing to him. He laughed off the vulgar thrustings of the book and record clubs, with their absurd threats to take him to law. People owed a bundle, who brought out their heavy artillery, got my father’s Samuel Johnson remark: “Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound; great debts are like cannon, of loud noise but little danger.” He was slippery: he used the telephone to persuade the telephone company he should be allowed a sixth month of nonpayment without suffering disconnection, because he needed to call people long distance to borrow money from them to pay his telephone bills. He was cool, but not icy. He owed a Westport barkeep a couple of hundred, and when the man died in a car accident my father was sorry, and told his widow about the debt, not that he ever paid her.
Finally it got out of hand. It had nowhere to go but out of hand. I wearied of telling people on our stoop or through the phone that they had the wrong Arthur Wolff, that my father had just left for the hospital, or the Vale of Kashmir, or Quito. I tired of asking “How do I know you’re who you say you are?” when people asked questions about my father’s whereabouts and plans. I hated it, wanted to flee. It was October; there were months still to get through, too many months but too few to cobble up a miracle of loaves and find the twenty-five hundred dollars to buy my way back into Princeton.
• • •
My father and I were watching the Giants play the Colts in the snow for the championship when two Connecticut State troopers arrived during the first sudden death overtime. They watched with us till the game ended, and then took my father to the lockup in Danbury. He had left a bad check at The Three Bears; they were pressing charges. I found a mouthpiece who went bail, made good the check and got the charges dropped. Duke had talked with him. The old man hadn’t lost his touch at all, only with me. With me he had lost his touch.
A week before my birthday he wrecked my Delahaye. I loved the dumb car. I was in bed when I heard him climb the driveway cursing. He was blind drunk, drunker than I’d ever seen him. He railed at me as soon as he came in, called me a phony. I feigned sleep, he burst through the room, blinded me with the overhead light, told me I was full of crap, a zero, zed, cipher, blanko, double-zero.
“I’m leaving you,” he said.
I laughed: “In what?”
A mistake. His face reddened. I sat up, pretending to rub sleep from my eyes while he swore at my car, said it had damned near killed him swerving into the ditch, it could rot there for all he cared. He was usually just a finger-wagger, but I still feared him. Now he poked my bare chest with his stiff yellow finger, for punctuation. It hurt. I was afraid. Then I wasn’t afraid; I came off my bed naked, cocked my fist at my
father, and said: “Leave me alone.”
My father moved fast to his room, shut the door, and locked it. I was astounded. I don’t believe he was afraid of me; I believe he was afraid of what he might do to me. I sat on the edge of my bed, shaking with anger. He turned on his television set loud: Jack Paar. He hated Paar. There was a shot, a hollow noise from the .45. I had heard that deep, awful boom before, coming from the black cellar in Birmingham, a bedroom in Saybrook. I thought my father would kill me. That was my first thought. Then that he would kill himself, then that he had already killed himself. I heard it again, again, again. He raged, glass broke, again, again. The whole clip. Nothing. Silence from him, silence from Paar. A low moan, laughter rising to a crescendo, breaking, a howl, sobs, more laughter. I called to my father.
“Shit fire,” he answered, “now I’ve done it, now I’ve done it!”
He had broken. No police, the phone was finally disconnected. I tried the door. Locked. Shook it hard. Locked fast. I moved back to shoulder through and as in a comic movie, it opened.
My father had shot out Jack Paar; bits of tubes and wires were strewn across the floor. He had shot out the pretty watercolors painted by Betty during their Mississippi rendezvous. He had shot out himself in the mirror. Behind the mirror was his closet, and he was looking into his closet at his suits. Dozens of bespoke suits, symmetrically hung, and through each suit a couple of holes in both pant-legs, a couple in the jacket. Four holes at least in each suit, six in the vested models.
“Hell of a weapon,” my father said.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Hell of a weapon!”
November fifth I turned twenty-one. My father had a present for me, two presents really, a present and its wrapping. He gave me his gold signet ring, the one I wear today—lions and fleurs-de-lis, nulla vestigium retrorsit—wrapped in a scrap of white paper, a due bill signed Dad, witnessed and notarized by a Danbury real estate agent: I.O.U. Princeton.
“How?” I asked.
“Piece of cake,” my father said, “done and done.”
I was due at Princeton January 15th. By then the Abarth had been repossessed and the Delahaye was still and forever a junker. I rode to Sikorsky with Nick, who drove twenty miles out of his way to pick me up and return me in his Edsel. After work the day following New Year’s I found a rented black Buick in the driveway. My father told me to help him pack it, we were leaving pronto and for good; what didn’t come with us we’d never see again. I asked questions. I got no answers, except this:
“It’s Princeton time. We’re going by way of Boston.”
I almost believed him. We packed, walked away from everything. I wish I had the stuff now, letters, photographs, a Boy Scout merit badge sash, Shep’s ribbon: Gentlest in Show at the Old Lyme grade school fair. My father had had his two favorite suits rewoven; he left the rest behind with most of his shoes, umbrellas, hats, accessories. He left behind the model Bentley that cost him half a year to build. He brought his camera, the little Minox he always carried and never used (“handy if someone whacks you with his car, here’s the old evidence machine,” he’d say, tapping the silly chain on the silly camera). I brought my typewriter and my novel. While my father had watched television I had written a novel. I worked on it every night, with my bedroom door shut; my father treated it like a rival, which it was, a still, invented place safe from him. He made cracks about The Great Book, and resented me for locking it away every night when I finished with it, while he shut down the Late Show, and then the Late Late. I made much of not showing it to him.
On the way to Boston we stopped by Stratford, where Sikorsky had moved. I quit, told the personnel department where to send my final check, said goodbye to no one. When I returned to the car my father said to me:
“Fiction is the thing for you. Finish Princeton if you want, but don’t let them turn you into a goddamned professor or a critic. Write make-believe. You’ve got a feel for it.”
Had he read my stuff? “Why, do you think?”
“I know you.”
We drove directly to Shreve, Crump & Low, Boston’s finest silversmith. Duke double-parked on Boylston Street and asked me to help him unload two canvas duffels from the trunk. He called them “parachute bags”; maybe that’s what they were, parachute bags. They were heavy as corpses; we had to share the load.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s in here?”
“Never mind. Help me.”
We sweated the bags into the store, past staring ladies and gentlemen to the manager. My father opened a zipper and there was Alice’s flat silver: solid silver gun-handle knives, instruments to cut fish and lettuce, dessert spoons and lobster forks, three-tined forks and four-tined forks, every imaginable implement, service for sixteen. In the other bag were teapots, coffeepots, creamers, saltcellars, Georgian treasure, the works polished by my father, piles gleaming dangerously in the lumpy canvas sacks.
The manager examined a few pieces. He was correct; he looked from my face to my father’s while he spoke.
“These are very nice, as you know. I could perhaps arrange a buyer … This will take time. If you’re in no rush …”
“I want money today,” my father said.
“This will be quite impossible,” the manager said.
“I won’t quibble,” my father said. “I know what the silver is worth, but I’m pinched, I won’t quibble.”
“You don’t understand,” the manager said.
“Let’s not play games,” my father said.
“This is quite impossible,” the manager said. “I think you’d best take this all away now.”
“Won’t you make an offer?”
“No,” the manager said.
“Nothing?” my father asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re a fool,” my father told the manager of Shreve, Crump & Low.
“I think not,” said the manager of Shreve, Crump & Low. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”
We reloaded the car. I said nothing to my father, and he said nothing to me. There we were. It was simple, really, where everything had been pointing, right over the line. This wasn’t mischief. This wouldn’t make a funny story back among my college pals. This was something else. We drove to a different kind of place. This one had cages on the windows, and the neighborhood wasn’t good. The manager here was also different.
“You want to pawn all this stuff?”
“Yes,” my father said.
“Can you prove ownership?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” the pawnbroker said. He sorted through it, scratched a few pieces and touched them with a chemical.
“It’s solid silver,” my father said.
“Yes,” the man said, “it is.”
“What will you loan us, about?”
I heard the us. I looked straight at my father, and he looked straight back.
“Will you reclaim it soon?” My father shrugged at this question. “Because if you don’t really need it, if you’d sell it, I’d buy. We’re talking more money now, about four times what I’d loan you.”
“What would you do with it?” my father asked. “Sell it?”
“No,” the man said. “I’d melt it down.”
My father looked at me: “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
My father nodded. While he signed something the man took cash from a huge floor safe. He counted it out, twenties bound in units of five hundred dollars. I looked away, didn’t want to know the bottom line on this one. There were limits, for me, I thought.
We checked into the Ritz-Carlton. Looked at each other and smiled. I felt all right, pretty good, great. I felt great.
“What now?” I asked my father.
Years later I read about the Philadelphia cobbler and his twelve-year-old son said to have done such awful things together, robbing at first, breaking and entering. Then much worse, rape and murder. I wondered if it could have kept screwing tighter that way for us, higher stakes, lower thresho
ld of this, but not that. I thought that day in the Ritz, sun setting, that we might wind up with girls, together in the same room with a couple of girls. But as in Seattle I had misread my father.
“Let’s get some champers and fish-eggs up here,” he said.
So we drank Dom Perignon and ate Beluga caviar and watched night fall over Boston Common. Then we took dinner at Joseph’s and listened to Teddy Wilson play piano at Mahogany Hall. Back at the Ritz, lying in clean linen in the quiet room, my father shared with me a scheme he had been a long time hatching.
“Here’s how it works. I think I can make this work, I’m sure I can. Here’s how it goes. Okay, I go to a medium-size town, check into a hotel, not the worst, not the best. I open an account at the local bank, cash a few small checks, give them time to clear. I go to a Cadillac showroom just before closing on Friday, point to the first car I see and say I’ll buy it, no road test or questions, no haggling.”
My father spoke deliberately, doing both voices in the dark. When he spoke as an ingratiating salesman he flattened his accent, and didn’t stammer:
“How would you care to pay, sir? Will you be financing your purchase? Do you want to trade in your present automobile?”
“This is a cash purchase. (The salesman beams.) I’m paying by check. (The salesman frowns a little.) On a local bank, of course. (The salesman beams again.)”
“Fine, sir. We’ll have the car registered and cleaned. It’ll be ready Monday afternoon.”
“At this I bristle. I bristle well, don’t you think?”
“You are probably the sovereign bristler of our epoch,” I told my father.
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