Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  Of course, as I tumidly instructed my father, Bad Debts is a fiction. Freeman should not be imagined as a replica of Wolff. After all, Freeman is an anti-Semitic Jew passing as an Anglican, and Wolff was not much of an anti-Semite. Bad Debts, I explained to my father, “is both kind and cruel.” I told him by mail I hoped it was more kind than cruel, and was encouraged in this hope by an advance reading in which James Baldwin admired the novel’s “loving lack of pity.” How I hung to that reading, wanting Baldwin’s judgment to be right on the money. Three months before publication I tried to justify myself to my father:

  I don’t know whether you will like my book. Parts of it will infuriate you, I’m sure. It is, for example, in part a story about being Jewish and not wanting to be. It could cause you pain. You will reflect that this or that is not “true” which is precisely, of course, the point of the exercise. It is not you, or even about you—it is about a single problem that has troubled me for a long while. This: I have for some years taken an obsessive interest in truth. Bullshit drives me wild with anger, from whatever quarter it comes. I am not sure, to be blunt, that truth, qua truth, deserves such affection. At one point in my book Freeman shouts at his son that truth is a bully and a fraud. Freeman has a history wholly of his own invention, and it is a solace to him. The problem is this: be careful who you pretend you are lest you wind up becoming your pretense.

  For example (let me be blunt, again): who you in fact are is someone far greater than the person you have, from time to time, pretended to be. Yale graduates are a dime a dozen. Your history is more interesting, has more spice and wit and reach. Suppose for a moment, thinking back to your fictions, that you could will them to be true. Would this make you happy?

  It wasn’t till much later that I realized where I had first heard some of these locutions: Who you in fact are is someone far greater than the person you have, from time to time, pretended to be … Your history is more interesting … My father had told me these things to save me from crucial turns toward falsehood, and in these terms precisely.

  To my question—Would this make you happy?—I got no answer. I never heard from my father again. He died a year after I mailed this letter. The letter was inside his copy of Bad Debts. He had told me to write a novel. He had read this one. There are coffee rings on some of the pages, and the corners of many other pages have been folded down. The letter and the book, together with twelve of my checks for one hundred fifty dollars—a check a month, all uncashed—were stored in the basement of his apartment building at 2420 Manhattan Avenue in Manhattan Beach. They were in a shoe box with some fake driver’s licenses and identification papers and a couple of bills. One bill was from an irate Hong Kong tailor, Jimmy Sung (“Gentleman, We wrote on 20 October last year for which we have not as yet have your reaction. We expect US$299.25 from you. US$150 means returned check drawn on Bank of New York because of ‘signature unknown’ and US$149.25 being balance if it has not paid to Jimmy. Hoping to hear from you soonest …”) and the other was from his milkman for US$123.38 for sixty-seven quarts of white milk, two pounds of butter, four gallons of orange juice, six dozen eggs and an ice-cream bar.

  The milkman, smelling something unpleasant, found him on the last day of July, 1970. Later my father’s neighbors remembered that they too had smelled something unpleasant. No one knows precisely when he died. The official estimate held that he had been dead about two weeks when he was found. No one had missed him while he lay there falling apart. He had no friends, and when no one called him anymore he had had his telephone number unlisted, just like Benjamin Freeman.

  Through the Open Door

  I HAD never seen kindred dying or dead. No one I knew well was killed in a car or a war. None drowned, or fell from a great height, or was shot hunting. My dead were strangers. When I was a cub on the night police beat for The Washington Post I was sent to a tough neighborhood near Howard University to look at someone who had been hurt. It was raining, late at night. A cop said something about knife wounds, and gestured. The thing lay covered by a piece of oilskin, with its feet in a brimming gutter. The cop obligingly pulled back the poncho, for the merest instant, like a stripper flashing the last bit just at the blackout. He grinned at me while I scribbled in my notebook: coal in a croker sack … blood: pretty, a dash of red on a blackbird’s wing. (I assumed the corpse was black: the bad street, the knife, the late hour, the law’s indifference, even the rain suggested that the corpse was black, and it was.) I returned to the newsroom to compose a memorial drenched in mist and metaphysics, but the night city editor was interested only in the man’s name and address, age and occupation, and I knew none of these. I should at least have asked his name.

  And once I saw a stain on Route 301, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It was said by gawkers to have been a man changing a tire. A truck highballing north had whacked him; the stain was still wet in the low October sun, more rust than red, and greasy. The remains of the man who had been changing his tire formed an imperfect disc, about four feet across. The first rain would clean him away.

  Just those two experiences of death, or just those two close up. One of my best friends killed himself a few days after I had spent a merry week with him. I had come to America from Cambridge to visit him at the Harvard Business School, where he was a student and not performing as well as he had expected himself to perform. A few days after he announced his engagement to a girl he seemed to love, who seemed to love him back, he parked his car near the emergency room of a hospital near his family’s house. He lay across the front seat, stuck the muzzle of a pump gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his toe. I had come home for the engagement party but was back in England when he did it.

  I don’t know why he shot himself. People spoke of a dark history I knew nothing about, and a few mentioned the confusions of love, but most people believed he was disappointed by his performance at the business school. None of these reasons seemed much like reasons to me.

  Now, driving home from Kay’s terrace where I had just learned of my father’s death, trying to think of my father, I thought instead of Kay’s husband. He wore a wooden leg, got around well on it, elaborated jokes about it. He had flown wearing it in the Air Corps, and had escaped from a German POW camp wearing it. People who knew this man loved him, while he was alive. But he shot himself in a spectacularly cruel way, perhaps not calculated to do maximum hurt to his four children and three stepchildren, but having that end, and the damage he did to his wife was incalculable. Driving to my in-laws’ house I thought of that suicide. Why would anyone choose so casually to empty so much life from himself?

  There was a message to telephone the police in California. There would be an autopsy; they suspected suicide. In the room where my father died, the police told me on the telephone, were many empty liquor bottles and empty barbiturate pillboxes. Much later the police told me that the general squalor of the scene—my father lying on his stomach naked, his head under a chair, “legs and feet together pointing eastward” in the language of the death report—combined with the awful smell in the dank, tiny room to argue, even to case-hardened cops, hopelessness. This suicide was no mystery. It made sense to me. I thought my father had every reason to welcome death, and I had always assumed he would try to control his history to the very end. It’s nothing. But the autopsy a few days later revealed a death from congestion of his arteries; probably, when he died, he wanted to live forever.

  From my in-laws’ house I telephoned my mother, and told her as much as I knew, and for the first time I heard my mother weep. I telephoned Ruth Atkins, and when I had finished with the telephone about suppertime, Priscilla asked me if I wanted to eat. I said I wasn’t hungry. She said she was sleepy, and would go to bed. I followed her to the guest room, expecting her to mourn with me. She wouldn’t. I grew angry to the point of violence. I didn’t understand her coldness, but I do now.

  I had felt ashamed of my father in her father’s house, and now I was ashamed of my sh
ame, and ashamed to be there at all, under that roof. It was as though to accept their hospitality were to collaborate in their judgment of my father. I thought I knew what they thought of him, and I knew what they thought of me. Sometimes in that house I felt Priscilla look at me through her parents’ eyes, and I thought that house in Narragansett was a place where my father would not have been made to feel welcome. I tried to forget the night of his death that neither had he been welcome those past ten years in my own house, and in my eagerness to forget this I repudiated all of them, my wife and her parents, and now Priscilla says she has never seen me so cold or so angry. She withdrew, would not dishonor any of us by seeming to feel what she did not. I wanted her to love my father now. I wanted to love my father now. How could she, if I could not? She had never seen him, had heard his voice once across telephone wires. We had promised him and ourselves a visit to California, but we never went. Every time we settled on a date to show my father his first grandson, and then his second, something happened, he got put away again or pulled a fast move on me or we decided we’d rather visit Madrid, ski in Austria.

  I think that for a few hours that night I hated my wife. I drove to a seedy Narragansett roadhouse, a rough bar with a tropical motif where surfers hung out. I wanted a fight. I sat at the bar drinking whiskey chased by beer, scowling and muttering at friendly strangers wearing cut-offs and clean, jokey T-shirts. The beachboys were tan, pacific, easy; surfers had no beef with me. I shut the place down and drove flat out to Kay’s house. I wanted to explain to her, at once, why I had thanked God that my father was dead. I wanted her to know that my words were not an atheist’s unfelt exclamation, and that they did not only display relief that my children were alive. They also meant what they seemed to mean, that I thanked someone that my father had been delivered from the world, and I had been delivered from him.

  I woke my friend three hours before dawn. I had first met Kay at her California ranch nine years earlier, the day after I left my father in the San Diego jail. Two of her daughters were Priscilla’s lifelong friends, and one of them I had courted. Like everyone who knew him I had idolized her husband, and he and I had traveled in Spain together. One night he had crawled out the bedroom window of our Madrid hotel room, swaying drunk on a narrow ledge ten floors above the street because I had just told him a sad story. A couple of his children helped me snag his good leg and haul him to safety, and the way they looked at him that night I guessed they had had to save him from himself many times before. A few days before he shot himself, with his wife and children as witnesses, Kay had written me to wish me well in my courtship of Priscilla, and her letter was full of energy, wit, love, and delight with the future.

  It was too cold to sit on the terrace, but my friend lit the Japanese lanterns out there so we could see them from the living room. Above the fireplace a motto was cut into the mantel: Kind friend, around this hearthstone speak no evil of any creature.

  The morning with Kay changed me. She spoke of her dead husband and I told of my dead father; we traded scandal for scandal, and soon we were laughing. I told how my father despised prudence, savings accounts, the idea of savings accounts, the fact of savings accounts, looks before leaps. Yes, her husband too, hobbling along the pitching deck of a sailboat he had chartered to sail solo before he taught himself to sail. It had been fun to be her husband’s wife, and my father’s son. This was important to understand.

  Kay led me through my father’s history, let me begin to apprehend him as a critic of the conventions, a man who caricatured what he despised. Is it Yale men you like? Okay, I’m a Yale man, see how easy it is? Nothing to it but will and nerve. My friend led me to understand how lucky I was to be free, that there was a benign side to my father’s dishonor, that I had never had to explain or apologize to him any more than he had had to explain or apologize to me. Much of this, of course, was casuistry. I don’t believe now that my father was truly a critic of society, or that his life was any more happy than it was defiant.

  Never mind. I had come into that night alienated. I was becoming handy with repudiations of every kind, and learning to nurture anger solicitously. I had felt betrayed by my father, and wanted to betray him. Kay turned my course. She had the authority of someone who had passed through the worst of fires. I listened to her. I saw again what I had seen when I was a child, in love with my father as with no one else. He had never repudiated me or seen in my face intimations of his own mortality. He had never let me think he wished to be rid of me or the burden of my judgment, even when I had hounded him about his history, had quibbled with its details like a small-print artist, like a reviewer, for God’s sake! He didn’t try to form me in his own image. How could he? Which image to choose? He had wanted me to be happier than he had been, to do better. He had taught me many things, some of which were important, some of which he meant, some of which were true. The things he told me were the right things to tell a son, usually, and by the time I understood their source in mendacity they had done what good they could. I had been estranged from my father by my apprehension of other people’s opinions of him, and by a compulsion to be free of his chaos and destructions. I had forgotten I loved him, mostly, and mostly now I missed him. I miss him.

  When I finally left Kay’s house I felt these things, some for the first time. I drove home slowly, and stopped at stop signs. The door to the room I shared with Priscilla was open when I came in, but I didn’t go through that door that night. I went to my children’s room. I stood above Justin, looking down at him. And then my son Nicholas began to moan, quietly at first. They did not know their grandfather was dead; they knew nothing about their grandfather. There would be time for that. I resolved to tell them what I could, and hoped they would want to know as much as I could tell. Nicholas cried out in his sleep, as he had so many times before, dragging me out of nightmares about his death with his own nightmares about his death, his dreams of cats with broken legs, broken-winged screaming birds, deer caught in traps, little boys hurt and crying, beyond the range of their parents’ hearing. Sometimes I dreamt of my son bleeding to death from some simple wound I had neglected to learn to mend.

  Now I smoothed his forehead as my father had smoothed mine when I was feverish. Justin breathed deeply. I crawled in bed beside my sweet Nicholas and took him in my arms and began to rock him in time to Justin’s regular breaths. I stunk of whiskey and there was blood on my face from a fall leaving Kay’s house, but I knew I couldn’t frighten my son. He ceased moaning, and I rocked him in my arms till light came down on us, and he stirred awake in my arms as I, in his, fell into a sleep free of dreams.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Geoffrey Wolff was born in Los Angeles in 1937. In addition to his biography of Harry Crosby, Black Sun (1976), he is the author of four novels: Bad Debts (1969), The Sightseer (1974), Inklings (1978), and, most recently, Providence (1986). Mr. Wolff lives in Jamestown, Rhode Island.