Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  He would tell the salesman he wanted the car now or not at all, period. There would be a nervous conference, beyond my father’s hearing, with the dealer. The dealer would note Duke’s fine clothes and confident bearing; now or never was this customer’s way, carpe diem, here was an easy sale, car leaving town, maybe just maybe this was kosher. Probably not, but how many top-of-the-line cars can you sell right off the floor, no bullshit about price, color, or options? Now the dealer was in charge, the salesman wasn’t man enough for this decision. The dealer would telephone Duke’s hotel and receive lukewarm assurances. Trembling, plunging, he would take Duke’s check. My father would drive to a used car dealer a block or two away, offer to sell his fine new automobile for whatever he was offered, he was in a rush, yeah, three thousand was okay. A telephone call would be made to the dealer. Police would arrive. My father would protest his innocence, spend the weekend in a cell. Monday the check would clear. Tuesday my father would retain the services of a shyster, if the dealer hadn’t already settled. With the police he would never settle. False arrest would put him on Easy Street. How did I like it?

  “Nice sting. It might work.” The Novice.

  “Of course it will work.” The Expert.

  The next morning we checked out and my father mailed the Buick’s keys to a Hertz agent in Stamford, telling him where to find his car. Then a VW bus materialized. My father had taken it for a test drive; maybe he paid for it later, and maybe he forgot to pay for it later. My father called this “freeloading.”

  We drove to Princeton in the bus, with my novel on the back seat beside a cooler filled with cracked ice and champagne, a cash purchase from S.S. Pierce. We reached Princeton about four and parked on Nassau Street, outside the Annex Grill, across from Firestone Library.

  “How much did you give me last year?”

  “About twenty-five hundred,” I said, “but a lot of that was for my own keep.”

  “I don’t charge my boy room and board,” my father said. He pulled clumps of twenties from a manila envelope. Five packets, twenty-five hundred dollars, there it was, every penny, just as he had promised, precisely what I owed. “And here’s another five hundred to get you started.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Where will you go now?”

  “New York for a while. Then, I don’t know. Maybe California. I always had luck in California.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” I said. “Stay in touch,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Do well, Geoffrey. Be good.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I won’t screw up this time.”

  “No,” he said, “you probably won’t. Now don’t be too good. There’s such a thing as too good.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said laughing, wanting this to end.

  “Don’t forget your book,” my father said, while I unloaded the van. “I’ll be reading it someday, I guess. I’ll be in touch, you’ll hear from me, hang in there.”

  He was gone. An illegal turn on Nassau headed him back where he had come from.

  20

  MY first afternoon back in Princeton I walked the streets paying debts, peeling off banknotes, getting receipts and handshakes.

  “Congratulations, son. I’ll tell you, I never thought I’d see this money. You’re a man of your word. Your credit’s good here anytime.”

  “No, sir, thanks, I don’t think I’ll be charging any more.”

  I cabled twelve hundred fifty to Eastbourne, gathered my paid-in-fulls and climbed the steps of Nassau Hall to the assistant dean’s office.

  “Welcome home,” he said.

  Colonial Club invited me to join, and I joined. I moved into a new suite of rooms in Holder Hall with old friends. I took my novel to Richard Blackmur. The book was three hundred pages about a young man, sometimes called “Tony” and sometimes “Anthony” and sometimes “the boy.” Tony was in Europe coming—as the author of Certain Half-Deserted Streets put it—“into season.” He was of a sensitive disposition, an unflagging enemy of vulgarity and convention, tetchy, proud, and quick to dismay. He fell in love (twice he got laid) and refused to respond to letters from his father (whole chapters here), a Bones man, lawyer, OSS hero, blond with fine hair and blue eyes. He sent Tony timely checks, but as he was a success, a “clothes-wearing man,” Tony regarded him as a fool and villain.

  The book was good, I knew it. Had I not sweated it out after a day hauling mail sacks? After cooking and washing dishes? I submitted one copy in application for the F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize (for distinguished undergraduate fiction) and another copy for Richard Blackmur’s consideration. The prize went elsewhere, to my surprise, but Blackmur I knew would love the book. I had a question to ask him: Knopf or Scribners? Oh, I realized that Scribner was a Princeton man and Princeton’s publisher of choice; still, hadn’t the house slipped recently? I saw Blackmur every week for our conference but he never gave me occasion to ask this question, or any other about Certain Half-Deserted Streets. Three weeks, four, six … Finally:

  “I wonder—have you had a chance to glance at my novel?”

  “Of course: I read it.” Blackmur was tiny and exact and mysterious, a heavy drinker at his most lucid before noon and his best after lunch. We were eating lunch at Lahiere’s, at his special table.

  “What’s your advice?”

  “Put it in your desk drawer.”

  “Ah, I know, put it away a few months, come at it fresh.”

  “No,” he said, “that is not my advice to you. My advice is to put it in your desk drawer, lock your desk drawer, lose the key to your desk drawer. However, keys are sometimes found, returned to their owners. This could happen, so I would set fire to your desk. I recommend the sole, though the chops are edible.”

  Not much of Certain Half-Deserted Streets remains. I pretty much followed Blackmur’s counsel, but not before I let The Nassau Lit print a couple of sections, including the first chapter, set in England and in Paris, where “the boy” goes to a party:

  The two apaches sectionated towards one another from opposite sides of the loft. One was a gargantuan buck nigger with a toosmall head and serpentine grace; the other a French girl, surly, with bobbed hair and neither chest nor waist. Her skin was very white. So very white.

  They danced not with but at each other. Soon it was over and they parted without a word. It was not always that way, but one must not think back. That is what they have told me. I must not think back.

  Hang them, and what they told him. Tony thinks back:

  There is an old waiter at the Ritz Hotel and his name is Albert. He had brought me tall glasses of lemonade and drops of water from the condensation had fallen ouch! on my bare knee when I was short trousers years old. And I had been with my father and I had loved him. And I remembered going through the lobby with him and the whole world had loved looking at us. He was so big and I was so little and I had almost to run to keep up with him and I am still running but now I am very tired and not keeping up so well.

  I wrote these words in Newtown, with Leave It to Beaver and Gunsmoke clamoring in the room beyond the thin wall, where my father, needing a shave, sat in his underpants chain-smoking Camels, fiddling with his Colt automatic.

  The last chapter, “A Piece of Bone, a Hank of Hair,” finds Tony in an Italian jail, charged with killing a whore he has thrown down a flight of stairs. In fact she fell, but Tony won’t defend himself. At seventeen he’s “too tired now to care.” He wants only to write his memoirs on a roll of toilet paper, and flush them away. The consul-general wants to help the boy, whose father was his classmate: “Everyone wanted to help the boy save the boy himself.”

  Why don’t you mind your business? All of you. The girl is dead … very dead … I understand … and I suppose it was my fault. So why don’t you just leave me alone and let me sleep here in peace till the trial is over and then they can do whatever they want to do with me. I don’t care. I really just don’t care …

  The reason I lied as a young man, I think, was the same reaso
n my fiction was so awful: I didn’t know that anything had happened to me; I forced my history, just as my father forced his. Blackmur made me scruple to form it, to make it count. I cannot overestimate my debt to that man. I was in awe of his precision and his daring. His speech was elliptical, inclining toward the runic, but his lectures were legendary—Poetics in the fall and Aesthetics in the spring, the same course, what he happened to bring to class in his Harvard bookbag—and once an hour he would come awake as from a private reverie with a dazzling penetration of text or motive. To have him as a weekly presence in my life, to meet with him one-to-one every week for two years, was everything. He was the most luminous of the New Critics, and his special province was diction. Words were like rubies, emeralds, diamonds, dogshit. They had their weight, each one, and this was where I learned to begin.

  Princeton was wide open to any student who would use it. The English department had its stiffs and tailors’ dummies, but it also had Walt Litz, a courtly Joyce, Eliot, and Stevens scholar with a soft Arkansas accent and a taste for students who were oddballs and outlaws. Larry Holland was the James man, and spoke in the circular rhetoric of The Master, brilliantly, his periods folding into one another like bolts of bright silk. Holland was not a lecturer from whom a student could take notes, and so he wasn’t popular as a lecturer. He saw me through a thesis on the grammar, language, and point of view of Absalom, Absalom! written two years after Certain Half-Deserted Streets; I did not set fire to the thesis, and can read it without embarrassment. I had come to Faulkner from Fitzgerald and Hemingway, to a preoccupation with words and grammar from Fitzgerald’s artifacts and manners, Hemingway’s rites and codes. My affection for Faulkner represented a deliverance from my father’s affections, and affectations.

  My father loved The Great Gatsby (he identified with Nick Carraway!) and despised This Side of Paradise. But there is a sentence in the Princeton novel about Amory Blaine that fixed my father exactly: “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.” My second shot at Princeton I became what I became by being in the present. My college life was governed by an almost unvarying routine: I rose at twelve-thirty, ate lunch at Colonial, went to an afternoon seminar or to my carrel in the library, ate dinner and shot pool from six to seven-thirty and returned to the library until it shut at midnight. Then I drank and played poker till dawn, making about three hundred a month at seven-card stud roll ’em and a Princeton invention we called “legs,” draw poker played with three cards. My grades were good, which I hardly noticed. I was lost in books, beside myself with critical measurements.

  The first few months back I heard nothing from my father. Then he called me at Colonial during dinner. He was drunk, and told a sad, confused story about a fight with a banker. My father had been hit in the eye with a poker, he said, but I should see the banker, the banker was in the hospital. How was his eye? The eye was swollen shut, but it would be okay. The banker was a “nibshit.” My father said he needed to see me, he was in trouble. Where are you? My father said he was in Gloversville, New York, would I come up? A couple of my clubmates were waiting to use the telephone. I looked past them to the cheerful fire in the club library, heard quiet voices and serene laughter, realized I had left my dinner on the table, wondered if the waiter had removed it.

  “I can’t,” I told my father. “I have a paper due.”

  Then I heard my father make a kind of coughing noise, as though he were choking. I realized he was sobbing, or laughing.

  “Sure,” I said. “I can come. Tell me where to come.”

  My father had hung up. Later I learned about the banker. He had held the note on the Abarth-Zagato and the Delahaye and he hired my father to repossess cars for him, set a thief to catch a thief, the banker told my father when he hired him. The banker financed cars for soldiers, who often failed to meet their monthly payments. In return for a one-room shack in Gloversville, expenses on the road and fifty dollars per repossession my father went on bounty hunts in a truck equipped with a tow-bar, with a set of master ignition keys, as far as Virginia. The banker treated my father like an indentured servant, which he was, and finally took an excessive liberty. The Gloversville police wanted my father on an assault charge.

  So, like a hurricane that goes out to sea, beyond sight and mind, only to sweep back on shore with redoubled fury, my father blew back through Princeton. A few days after his call to Colonial I returned to my room to find a letter from Seymour St. John and a bill from Langrock. Later there were bills from Douglas MacDaid, The University Store, Lahiere’s and The Princeton Inn, all my father’s work, “bill my boy.” The letter from St. John said he was “as relieved as I am sure you must be” by my repayment of Eastbourne College, “this evidence of good faith and integrity which involves not only you and your family, but American schools and our country.”

  That was the first paragraph. The second paragraph said “I have just had word from one of our local merchants, Mr. Mushinsky, that you owe him a bill for clothes of nearly $500. Is that true? As you know, this sort of thing follows you all your life. Your good name and your credit are more valuable to you than anything else you possess, and you just don’t have it as long as you leave bills outstanding. How any boy could have run up any bill such as that is beyond me.”

  I hadn’t. Duke was moving around. I didn’t hear from him again for more than a year. He went west with his Princeton booty, putting in to Chicago’s best hotel, owned by my Choate roommate’s father. He stayed ten days, put everything on the cuff, even his amphetamines. He was running now on Dexamil. When his bill rose past a thousand, the management requested something on account. The Duke said he was waiting for a grain transaction to clear the Chicago Wheat Pit, and flashed some papers that seemed to confirm this fiction. He got my roommate’s endorsement on a few big checks and vanished, leaving a roomful of clothes from Langrock and Mushinsky. He had come into Chicago driving a Triumph sports car and left in a Mercedes sedan. Trading up all the way, heading for the gold fields, “I always had luck in California.”

  But I didn’t know then where he was. And after St. John and Dean Lippincott cleared my good name and my credit, “more valuable” to me than “anything” I possessed, I didn’t care a fiddler’s fuck where my father was, alive or dead, as long as he wasn’t near me.

  • • •

  I orphaned myself. I had lost track of my mother and Toby, hadn’t seen nor heard from them for five years. I knew my mother had left Sarasota abruptly and gone to Salt Lake City, where the cost of living was said to be low. (So was the standard of living, but unemployment was high.) Then she had gone to Seattle, then somewhere else, then somewhere else. When people asked about her I was vague, ashamed to admit that I didn’t know where she lived. I used Duke’s techniques of inference, managed to suggest to half the people who asked that she was a Russian princess exiled to Spain, and to the other half that she was a Spanish communist exiled to Russia. She was gone, leave it there.

  From the moment I went on my own my situation at Princeton and in the world improved. This is a blunt paradox, but many people, friends, and their parents, took many pains on my behalf. My friends’ mothers and fathers interested me because their enthusiasms and anxieties were fresh for me. I always had a place to spend vacations, usually a sumptuous place. One day, as I stood in the marble-floored entrance hall of Mr. Lippincott’s huge house on the Main Line, I made small talk with a delivery boy who just then noticed an oil portrait of a bewigged eighteenth-century grandee: “Mr. Lippincott, I presume.” How my father would have relished such a confusion! I felt a frisson of loss, as though a cold breeze had made me tremble, but it vanished.

  For my part I enjoyed the company of my friends’ fathers because I was accustomed to adults and sought, perhaps, a replacement for my own father. I seemed old for my age and took pains to look even older than I seemed, a custom of the fifties that I pushed too far. I wore double-breasted suits and wire-rimmed glasses. A friend warned me that my affection for matur
ity was morbid, that I should have a care about inviting death, nature’s way of telling us we are mature enough. People saw me as a blank sheet: be bold, be cautious; settle down, stay in motion. Be a writer, teacher, diplomat, broker, banker, barkeep, spy.

  There was no need to listen to them. I was the luckiest boy I knew at college. I owed no one an explanation, was free to come and go where I could afford, be what I wished to be without regard for anyone’s judgment.

  John and I discussed opening a restaurant/bar/art gallery/bookstore in the South of France, and decided not to. I took Foreign Service examinations, passed the written test, and failed the oral in New York. At the time I was spending the summer watching baseball and daytime soap operas on a Princeton roommate’s Gramercy Park television set. We lay on mattresses on the floor of his air-conditioned apartment drinking Bud and letting one day slip into another. We hadn’t twenty bucks between us but a deli at Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street delivered, and his father, in Europe, had an account there. The apartment was as cool as a cave with the shades drawn.

  That summer we read Lucky Jim, saw Look Back in Anger and wallowed in The Ginger Man. “I think we are the natural aristocrats of the race,” the Ginger Man tells his horny sidekick Kenneth. “Come before our time. Born to be abused by them out there with the eyes and the mouths.” How we loved that, cocking a snoot at Them as we drank ruinously expensive and flat bitter at Churchill’s, where we tried to scandalize ladies. We wanted to be bully boys, but were merely naughty. Only a couple of friends took gas, were deep-sixed from Princeton prematurely and against their wishes. One was addicted to television Westerns—he watched them wearing chaps, spurs, a black ten-gallon hat, a spangled vest, and a six-shooter. He learned to raise the volume by hitting a dial with his bullwhip, and he shot himself in the foot quick-drawing a Colt Peacemaker in the basement shower. When Princeton sent him home to his mom and dad he left us with a homily from Maverick: “Never forget,” he said, “a coward dies a thousand deaths; a brave man dies but one—thousand to one odds are pretty good.”