Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  Another friend we called Pixie. He missed the consolations of his native California beaches during the long New Jersey winter, and during his senior year emptied his living room of furniture and filled it with sand. He installed a plastic swimming pool that leaked on us living beneath him in 1879 Hall. He drank piña coladas beneath potted palms, and let many sun lamps burn him purple. His roommate, distracted by such perpetual holiday, failed to finish (or to begin) his required thesis. He contrived a Good Plan. He set fire to his room and told the dean his thesis had been consumed in flames ignited by the sun lamps.

  “You have suffered a double tragedy,” the dean told him. “You are without insurance, so you and your family are down the cost of your possessions, your roommate’s possessions and the cost of repairing your room. Also, as your thesis burned, you won’t graduate. Good afternoon.”

  One thing for sure: we would never, like Them, like saps, work. That’s what we promised ourselves, till something changed our minds. The summer of 1960 I stayed with a friend and his parents in Westchester County and commuted to a New York job another friend’s father had secured for me as a “research trainee” at Auchincloss, Parker and Redpath, a brokerage house near Wall Street on Broadway. I was sent to “due diligence” meetings at which executives explained to brokers their company’s business, trying to lie up the price of stock by provoking its recommendation. When I was not at these meetings I was meant to perform a survey of oil investments.

  I shared an office with Pencils and Fast Eddie, at the antipodes of research philosophy. Pencils was an historian of the market; he would tell you where you were going if you would tell him where you had been. He used graphs, charts, econometric models, all in the service of prophecy about a textile stock, Collins & Aikman, which moved from 10 1/2 to 11 to 10, in small blocs, all summer. I plunged for ten shares (Pencils said it was the chance of a lifetime), though I can’t imagine how I afforded them on fifty-seven dollars a week. Given the respectable character of my employment I had bought a broker’s suit, a navy pin-striped worsted three-piecer that sweated off fifteen pounds during subway rides from Grand Central to Wall Street and back. I had tried to charge the suit, but either the name Wolff was known to F.R. Tripler, or I lacked the Duke’s panache. I spent the balance of my salary on commutation, Wall Street Journals and movies. I went to many movies, especially favoring double bills at the Fourteenth Street RKO when I was supposed to be detailing the fortunes of the oil industry.

  Fast Eddie finally explained to me the secret of investment research. His girlfriend, a secretary at a huge brokerage firm, told him by telephone what her boss, also a research wizard, planned to boost the following week. Fast Eddie always got there first, and he wasn’t obliged to know anything about the stock, which always rose on the huge firm’s buying. He had awful contempt for Pencils, and so did I when I sold my Collins & Aikman for what I had paid for it, less commissions coming and going.

  The managing partner of Auchincloss, Parker & Redpath looked over my survey of the oil industry the week before I returned to Princeton for my last year. I hoped he would offer me a place with the firm. He suggested instead that I enter a profession that made no use of numbers. Nevertheless I caught him regarding my suit with undisguised admiration.

  I would miss the cool, clean office and its cool, clean employees. The company letterhead and toll-free calls. You could fall asleep at your desk, or die, and no one would ever disturb you. Before I left Wall Street I got a call from tourists from the state of Washington, friends of my mother who had tracked me down. Could they see me? They had photographs of Toby and Rosemary. We ate at a place frequented by middle-rank brokers poised to become partners. I carried an attaché case filled with novels, and wore my suit with a Panama hat. It was mid-August, touching a hundred, but the tourists stood in such awe of the composite picture I presented that they never asked if I was hot in my wool vest. I showed them “The Exchange” as I called it, and while bells mysteriously clanged I retailed anecdotes and explicated the symbols on “The Big Board,” as I called it. How, asked the head of the family, did a fellow make money on Wall Street?

  “Quite simple, really. I always say: Buy cheap and sell dear.”

  I inventoried my portfolio, suggesting a go with Collins & Aikman. The husband looked thoughtful, and then showed me my mother. Rosemary was standing beside a black Labrador on a hilltop, wearing a buffalo-plaid lumberjack’s shirt, with a high-powered rifle crooked in her arm.

  “She’s a crack shot,” I was told. “A fine woman, everyone loves her.”

  I asked about her husband. I had just that moment learned she was married again. The tourist’s wife shrugged: “I guess she’s happy enough. Look, here’s Jack.”

  It was Toby, with a new name. He was fourteen, looked like I had looked in Seattle, training to be a greaser.

  The tourists took my picture. I wrote my mother on Auchincloss, Parker and Redpath letterhead and enclosed a photocopy of the final chapter of Certain Half-Deserted Streets, the Nassau Lit version of “A Piece of Bone, a Hank of Hair.” Toby says they were impressed, thought I was a financier, I looked like a financier. And the story?

  “Bewildering. I was proud not to be able to understand a word you wrote us.”

  I sent him a Choate T-shirt and Princeton necktie.

  My last day at “work” I ran into Alice, walking with another lady in front of the Biltmore. She pretended she hadn’t seen me from across the street but I yelled at her—“Hey, Toots!”—and there we were. We walked under the clock where I had clotted with other tweedbags during Thanksgiving holidays from Choate. Alice asked me:

  “Aren’t you hot in that wool suit?”

  “Not at all.” I ordered tea. The Palm Court waiter brought iced tea and I sent it back, “I want hot tea.” I decided Alice’s friend was sneering. Alice remarked that she had left my father forever. “Where is he?”

  “In California.”

  “Where?”

  “I really wouldn’t know.”

  “I’d like to know where he is.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Try. Where did you see him last?”

  “I won’t sit here and be cross-examined by you, young man.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Don’t raise your voice.”

  Her friend interrupted: “It so happens that your father is a drug addict.”

  I said: “Fuck you both,” and neither saw nor heard from my stepmother again.

  I was in love that summer with a gangly blonde who spoke in riddles and too softly to be understood. I thought I wanted to marry her; we talked about this and she decided I was too erratic for her taste. I understood, after a while. At first I thought I was heartbroken; maybe I was, but losing her had the effect of driving me deeper into books and work. I prospered at college and soon met a Louisville girl so wild that her previous boyfriend, Hunter Thompson, had given her up as a bad job. She had a flat near Columbia in New York, and studied piano at Juilliard. She would play for me, play away whole afternoons. She had a broken nose and smart eyes. She could tap dance, and because I thought this the most piquant practice I had seen, she tap-danced for me when I asked. She drank a quart of Early Times every day (with a bit of beer and champagne) but she was never more drunk or less than the first time I met her. She kept her flat impeccably clean; we sent out for food, never left the place, laughed, made love and did monologues. She was incapable of conversation. She would listen to six or seven paragraphs, then speak six or seven that had no bearing on mine. Her place was sanctuary. She had the palest skin, as though she had never been outside her room. I loved her Kentucky accent. She chewed bubble-gum, and blew bubbles. We lived together every weekend for several months in complete happiness until she tried to stab me. This was unexpected. She said she was going to march the following weekend with Bertrand Russell to protest nuclear proliferation. From where to where would they march? From somewhere to somewhere. I said I hoped it didn’t rain. She asked w
hy. I said she wouldn’t go if it rained, I knew her, wouldn’t leave her place to march, she was her own prisoner there, who was she kidding? This was our first dialogue, and she tried to stab me that night in bed. She had warned me: “Don’t touch me.” I had touched her foot with mine. The knife shone in its arc through the spill of a streetlamp’s light, so I ducked in time and the blade only tore my pillow apart. I left, and never saw her again. She wrote me once, but I couldn’t decipher her script or her meaning.

  At Princeton I enjoyed a boon companion, Stephen, a great athlete and elegant gent in what we wistfully believed to be the manner of the eighteenth century. Larding our conversations with liberal sirs and quotations from Samuel Johnson—“Most friendships are formed by caprice or by chance—mere confederacies in vice or leagues in folly”—we would watch, over a bottle of rancid port, the television series Hong Kong. This series followed the pleasures and perils of an American intelligence agent masquerading as something he was not, a journalist as I recollect. Stephen and I, sitting in the darkened television room of Colonial Club, watching this fellow so laid back and well-laid, resolved to become him. And by degrees, as senior year progressed and we came to grasp more and more Hong Kong’s manifest superiorities to Mercer County, New Jersey, we swore we would make our fortune abroad as … adventurers! That’s what we called what we would be, living by our wits, which we were confident would carry us far, at least to a house hung from a prominence above Hong Kong, looking across to subtle and perilous Macao. Hang the consequences! We would make a life, Sir!

  To this end we planned to work for a time in a salmon-canning factory in Alaska, where we thought we knew we could quickly knock down huge sums. Then with our bundle to the South Seas, lazing our way from the Marquesas to Tonga in the copra and sisal (whatever they were) trade. And so to Hong Kong, where we would set up as journalists or whatever, and as spies.

  In the event, Stephen met a fine Smith girl from Lake Forest, married her immediately, and fell into the arms of IBM, which instructed him to wear a hat, gloves, and white shirt to his place of employment, which he did, Sir. When Stephen jumped our ship to become a good citizen for “them out there with the eyes and the mouths,” I grabbed the first job that would take me abroad. I was half an hour away from a final interview with the foreign training program of First National City Bank when I got a cable inviting me to teach in Turkey, so Turkey it was.

  I left Princeton with some final advice from Richard Blackmur. I ran into him outside the library late that June afternoon. He had had a long lunch at Lahiere’s, and I told him I was soon away to Turkey. I knew he had lectured there, did he have suggestions, people or places I shouldn’t miss? Perhaps, I thought, he would send me on my way with an epiphany, or at least a rune, words I could study and someday perhaps comprehend.

  “Never,” said Professor Blackmur, “have sexual congress with Near Eastern melons. I’m told they put the foreskin in jeopardy.”

  A friend planned to spend the summer sailing the New England coast on his father’s forty-foot cutter. I was invited to join him, and wanted to. At the end of our first week cruising, Duke tracked me down. There was a message from Princeton at my friend’s house when we called home ship-to-shore, and ship-to-shore I got through to my father in California. Would I come to La Jolla for the rest of the summer?

  “No,” I said.

  But he had heard I was going to Turkey, just as he had gone. It was a last chance to see each other.

  “No,” I said.

  “I have a wonderful job,” he said. “Toby’s coming. Wouldn’t you like to see him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  My father promised to send the air fare at once.

  21

  FATHER. He promised to send Toby bus fare to La Jolla, and after some foot-dragging he finally did; he stiffed me, so I borrowed bus fare from a friend. Toby left first, looking forward to seeing his father after seven years, hard years for my brother. Rosemary had gone here and there across the country, looking always for some improvement in her circumstances, never finding it. Sometimes Duke, or Alice, sent support payments, but usually my mother was on her own.

  She married someone, another of the mean, violent men she seemed drawn to. This one, a house painter in a town of temporary dwellings raised for dam workers near Washington’s Canadian border, mistreated Toby and finally tried to choke my mother to death. Perhaps it was desperation that led her seriously to consider Duke’s proposal, in 1961, that they live together again in California, perhaps even remarry. “I’ve always had sand between my toes,” Mother says. Toby came south as a kind of scout for this improbable arrangement. “He was a blue-sky artist,” Mother says of Father. Mother too.

  Toby was fifteen. A few months earlier he had called me at Princeton and begged me to help get him a scholarship at some boarding school, anything to spring him from Newhalem Camp, Washington, and Concrete High School. I wrote some schools, even Choate, and asked Princeton friends to help. A friend put Toby together with The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and my brother won a full scholarship there, to begin the fall after our La Jolla reunion. I was proud. Eleven years later Toby told me he had won the scholarship by forging letters of recommendation from teachers at Concrete High School and by forging a letter-perfect transcript on a stolen form. The James Gang, The Wolff Boys. Hill was puzzled by his uneven academic performance: he won prizes for his fiction, naturally enough, but could not perform long division or do sums. After two years of puzzlement the school put Toby on its retired list, and he never did get an American high school diploma, though Oxford gave him a First in English.

  But now he was on the brink of rescue, coming south, full of hope for an overdue reunion.

  “All the way down the Pacific coast I bullshitted everyone on the bus,” Toby remembers. “I told them I was a Princeton man, and whatever else I wanted to tell them.”

  When he arrived at the San Diego terminal he looked around for his father, and didn’t see him. He waited on the sidewalk, looking up and down the street till he saw someone who might have been his father, a big, bald man wearing heavy glasses. Toby smiled; the man smiled back. Half an hour later Toby went to the men’s room, and the man followed him.

  “Really,” my brother remembers, “this was so confusing.”

  Duke, when he finally came for his son, was drunk, though Toby didn’t understand this at the time. They went together to a small efficiency apartment near Wind ’n’ Sea Beach, and Duke sat in his underpants, fiddling with a lighter, talking about how Rosemary had “kicked him in the ass, but maybe he’d forgive her.”

  He had a job, of sorts, with General Dynamics Astronautics, manufacturers of the Atlas missile, but it was Toby’s impression that his father hadn’t worked for a while, and the day after his long-absent younger son came “home” he explained that he had to go for a few days to Nevada with a lady friend. He left Toby some cash, a rented Chevrolet, a cupboard filled with Cokes and canned soup, a television set and the telephone number of a Navy officer who would look in on him. Then he drove away in his Abarth-Allemagne, a more expensive and less comfortable and dependable version of his Newtown toy, the Abarth-Zagato.

  “I didn’t know what to make of it all,” Toby says.

  He made use of the rented car, though he didn’t know how to drive; he took it straight down the San Diego highway, almost to Mexico. When he finally figured out how to head it north again he returned to the apartment and waited for me to arrive, or his father to come home.

  I was coming west, also bullshitting the passengers. I taught a marine to play the Princeton poker game called “legs”; in Pittsburgh, where he and I were to part, I stuck with him, continuing the course of instruction. I won two hundred dollars by the time we reached El Paso, and I decided to run with my winnings; I lay over in Juarez, doing a down-and-out-under-the-border-town-volcano routine for a couple of days. I telephoned Toby from a cantina, and he filled me in on our dad. Toby had had another disappointmen
t. The Navy officer had stopped by. He was friendly, very friendly, and Toby had had to lock him out of the apartment. He had tracked our father to a Las Vegas hotel and telephoned him there. Duke sounded annoyed to be disturbed, and suggested that Toby deal with the amorous sailor by shooting him dead: in the bottom drawer of his dresser, under the sweaters, there was a .223 Air Force survival rifle that folded into its stock, Toby could use it on the guy, anything else? Toby told me he hoped I’d hurry west, he’d certainly appreciate some company.

  I got there two days later, just after midday of a Sunday. They were at the bus station, in the Chevrolet. My father looked twenty years older than when I had last seen him on Nassau Street two years back. He had flabby jowls and liver spots on his bare skull. He had lost mass, taken on a pot. He moved awkwardly now, uncertainly. He wore thick-framed eyeglasses like Barry Goldwater’s and his clothes—I couldn’t believe this—were on the flashy side. He was a retired Senior Citizen by the seaside. We embraced, all said how great it was to be together, what a great summer we’d have. Toby was a rube; I looked him over, decided he’d need grooming for The Hill, and some improvement by a tailor.

  Driving to the apartment my father seemed to have lost more than his youth. He was distracted, coarse, not very bright. He seemed like an imposter. We stopped somewhere, at a woman’s small house. She was a shopkeeper or realtor, I forget. It seemed important to my father to have her meet me, at once. She was friendly, but ill at ease. He made me dig out my Princeton diploma.

  “See,” he said, pointing, “summa cum laude. That’s highest honors. Princeton University, like I told you.”

  She counterfeited amazement. I caught Toby’s eye: What was going on? He shrugged. My father told me to take the car and Toby home, he’d be along soon with his friend. I protested, said we should stay together, next day was a workday. Our father waved us away. Toby said the woman had been in Nevada with Duke when the Abarth had some kind of mechanical trouble, it had all been quite unsettling, and unpleasant. We sat for an hour on the beach, catching up; I was avuncular, told Toby he’d have to run fast to catch up at The Hill, that I’d push him along, set him a course of reading. I sounded talking to him as I had wanted Richard Blackmur to sound talking to me.