Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  Not long ago I bought a set of compasses and dividers solely because, snugged in their own blue velvet nests, they returned me to evenings when I sat beside my father at his desk, and he showed me the clamps and probes and trepan and lancet and scalpels. I would hold a piece and examine it, and then return it to its fit place, and promise never again to touch it without my father’s supervision. I was warned that germs and microbes deadly beyond imagining still lurked on the blades, but there was no need to scare me away from them: I had never seen things so mysterious, cold, or menacing.

  It was characteristic of my father to impress upon me his family’s artifacts rather than its history. He was reticent about his background. He would mention, with more awe than love, his father’s skills, his huge medical library, his ease with foreign languages. These references had an abstract quality because my father could not afford, given his wish to unmake his origins, to place Dr. Wolff in the world among kindred named Samuels and Krotoshiner.

  I first heard the inventory of family names as I stood with my cousin Bill Haas, a stranger, in Hartford’s Beth Israel Cemetery, above the bones and markers of Beatrice Annette Wolff (August 19, 1894–April 9, 1895) and Harriet Krotoshiner (1867–1944) and Arthur Jacob Wolff (June 5, 1855–June 22, 1936). I was thirty-eight, a latecomer to my family. Bill Haas, and two Ruths—his sister and his cousin—led me through names and places and dates. They showed me photographs; I had never seen a likeness of my father younger than forty, or any at all of my grandmother, grandfather, their parents. For years I had feared them, had thought maybe my father had just cause to hide them. But they looked fine, just like ancestors.

  My father Arthur was delivered by his father Arthur at home on Spring Street in Hartford, November 22, 1907. Dr. Wolff took pains to bring his son safely into the world, and then to ease him through it. He was meticulous, almost as exacting with himself as with others, and he and his wife Harriet were unlikely to enjoy another opportunity to perpetuate themselves. She was forty, he was fifty-two. They had had a daughter when Dr. Wolff was thirty-nine, still young enough to believe he could mend anyone. But Beatrice Annette’s scarlet fever was beyond his power to heal, and she died after eight months of life.

  My grandfather was born in London in 1855, but some restlessness brought his father to America. He served during the Civil War as surgeon to a French regiment, and after the war moved to Brownsville, Texas, where he practiced medicine for the Army at Fort Brown, across the Rio Grande from Matamoros.

  When my father was a schoolboy—and from his inexhaustible reservoir of Micawberisms applying for admission to Yale—he was asked to confide a few particulars of his background. He told Yale that his father had been educated at “Balioll” [sic] College, Oxford, and this was not so. My grandfather was removed from high school at fourteen, and from that age was educated in science, medicine, mathematics, literature, and languages by his father. Four years later he entered Texas Medical College in Galveston, and was graduated in 1876. My father also told Yale that his father had interned at Bellevue. This was true, Bellevue—like Oxford—being an approved institution.

  Yale asked for my grandmother’s maiden name, and my father gave them Harriet K. Van Duyn. The “Van Duyn”—in other applications “Van Zandt”—he did not enclose in quotation marks, but it is a fiction. “Harriet” was accurate, and some vestigial attachment to his source caused my father to return to his mother that remnant of her identity in the character K, the abbreviation of her name.

  Krotoshiner: the family took its name from Krotoschin in the Prussian province of Posnán, “the nice part of Prussia” my cousin Ruth Atkins told me. Now the place is called Krotoszyn by the Poles, who own it. Samuel and Yetta Krotoshiner emigrated from Prussia to Glasgow, where my grandmother Harriet was born. (Ruth Atkins still owns the thistled pin that once secured the folds of the Krotoshiner tartan.) From Glasgow the family sailed to Canada, where Mr. Krotoshiner set up as a “gentleman farmer,” which is what they still call a farmer who knows nothing about farming, and loses his shirt. They moved again, to Brooklyn, where Harriet fell in love with young Dr. Wolff, an alrightnik with soft brown eyes and an appetite for excellence who was attracted to the sixteen-year-old girl’s soft good humor.

  When Samuel Krotoshiner died, Yetta sold his wine-importing business and moved her three daughters to Hartford, where she established, against the custom of the time, her own business, a fine china shop. Dr. Wolff married Harriet in 1893 in a double wedding with her younger sister. Yetta was doing well enough to give each of her newly married daughters a fur coat and a Bechstein grand piano.

  My grandfather was a wonderful doctor, everyone agreed. When Mt. Sinai Hospital was established in Hartford in 1923 he was chief of the medical board and of the medical staff. A sense of his range may be taken from the fact that he was also the chief of its surgical staff, chief of gynecology and chief of the laboratory. Coincidentally he was municipal bacteriologist of the Hartford Health Department and a medico-legal expert whose microscopic analyses of criminal evidence broke open murder trials in Connecticut and New York.

  Yet there were people, and my grandmother was one, who believed that this man, known invariably as The Doctor, should never have practiced medicine. Not that he lacked compassion, but that he lacked humility. The year after he was chosen chief of staff of Mt. Sinai he severed his connection with the hospital. The reason is among the records of his successor: “On opening of the hospital Dr. Wolff assumed a dictatorial attitude and he would allow no one to do major surgery without his consent. This was resented and he resigned.”

  His temper was explosive. People have described his rages as “terrifying,” “wild,” “beyond control.” He was brutal with patients who disregarded his instructions. He had a sharp tongue, and from the time he began his association with Hartford’s St. Francis Hospital the year after his marriage, he became notorious for baiting nuns and priests—the former about their absurd and unsanitary costumes, the latter about their preposterous beliefs, and both for interfering with his patients.

  His own religious preference was simple: he was an atheist. He believed in evidence and natural law and in Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony developed six hundred years ago by William of Occam that holds that what can be proved with few assumptions is proved in vain with more. He was, that is, an enemy of complication and mystification, yet he held throughout his life to a single irrational (and wonderful) conviction: that every word ever spoken continued, as he said, “to kick around out there in the atmosphere,” and that some day, by the agency of some instrument, could be recovered, like money from a bank. My grandfather was especially eager to attend the conversations of Voltaire with Frederick the Great, and Sir Francis Bacon with anyone at all.

  My grandfather was venerated by people who knew him, and he was no enemy of their respect, but his preference was for solitary work. He took up photography because he liked the quiet of his darkroom. He cherished gadgets, built model steam and internal combustion engines from scrap metal, lavishing months of his old age on them, tapping and turning, drilling and polishing their small, precise parts. He built his own microscopes except for their lenses, and liked to correspond with the Royal Society of London about what he saw looking in them. I have one of the contraptions into which he poured time and money, a device to custom-fit eyeglasses.

  His family and friends thought of The Doctor as a whiz of an inventor, but his Big Ideas had the Wolff stamp of improbability upon them. The fixer in him provoked his improvement on the pneumatic tire. He had bought one of Hartford’s first automobiles (and installed one of Hartford’s first telephones, gramophones, X-ray machines), and it offended his sense of economy to replace the car’s tires every thousand or so miles. It is now a family legend that The Doctor’s tire was a good one, and that its design was stolen from him, that he “could have made a million” had he only had “a smart lawyer.”

  The fable of the lost million, every family’s staple! For Wolffs t
he refrain was repeated, with threnodic variations, right to the jailhouse door. There’s the story of the Travelers’ Insurance Company stock, offered in lieu of a fee for a timely job of cutting on the Travelers’ president’s daughter. The Doctor preferred cash, and later the cry was cried, from generation to generation, if only. Other Hartford doctors became millionaires, perhaps by the customary expedient of saving. My grandfather, by contrast, grew poorer as he lived richer, and for this he paid dearly in gall.

  He and Harriet began married life on North Capitol Street in a handsome clapboard house, and then moved to a formidable stone structure on the corner of Spring Street and Asylum Avenue, a valuable location contiguous with St. Francis Hospital. When the Wolffs traded up again, moving to a huge establishment on Collins Street, the hospital pestered The Doctor to sell the Spring Street house to those nuns and priests he had so unmercifully bullied, and they hornswoggled my grandfather—Jewed him down, as a relative put it, without irony—and there went another million. If only he had hung on to that property … can you imagine? Priceless! If only …

  If gentiles suspected Jews of sharp practices, my family now believes that The Doctor was chiseled and finally undone because he was at the mercy of cynical Yankees who used him when he could save their skins, and never fairly paid him for his service. Dr. Wolff is said to have left the staff of St. Francis because a Jew couldn’t get a fair shake from the Catholics.

  Neither were the Jews of my grandfather’s background very tolerant of greenhorns, Jews with accents, Jews from Eastern Europe. German and Western European Jews did not mingle with what a cousin has called “Johnny-come-latelies.” They had different congregations, different lives, different prejudices. Another cousin, stunned that my father would repudiate his blood’s history, can also tell me that “there were only a few old Jewish families like ours in Hartford. The Wolffs were old-timers, here before the Gold Rush; we weren’t proud to mix with gentiles, but newcomers were proud to mix with us.” Exclusion and discrimination were in the air my father breathed.

  He told me one story only that touched the Jewish experience. Dr. Wolff and Harriet were in an Atlantic City hotel, and Dr. Wolff—“incredibly,” in my father’s words—was “mistaken” for a Jew by a desk clerk. This suspicious monitor of the hotel’s reputation as a sanctuary from the bothersome Hebraic element (known even in tour guides of the time as our Israelite brethren) must have observed something extreme in the topography of Dr. Wolff’s nose. He said something, asked something, that offended The Doctor. Who checked in, plugged up the sink and tub, turned on all taps full force, and departed without checking out. My father loved this story. It perplexed me, and caused me to study the size and contour of my father’s nose, and mine.

  But I dwell too morbidly on my grandfather’s losses, disappointments, vices of temper and arrogance. His curiosity, boyishly exuberant to the end, was his signature, and when he died at eighty-one it was what The Hartford Courant remembered in an editorial:

  “Dr. Wolff’s death recalls to many persons a man whose youthful zeal in his exacting work belied his years. The test tube and the microscope were as toys in his hands, so absorbing was their use to his searching mind.”

  Harriet could make him laugh at himself; he was evidently a good laugher, especially at his own jokes. He liked to tease people close to him with diagnoses of fantastical ailments that required fantastical remedies. Was the symptom a runny nose, slight cough, muscle ache? An obvious case of catootus of the cameenus, calling for the force-feeding of oatmeal and amputation of an ear.

  He liked practical jokes, and was known as a wit to his friends in an informal convocation called The Saturday Night Crowd. These friends played bridge, or listened to a recital of music by one or another of them. My grandfather despised gossip, so there was no gossip. Sometimes there was a poker game, husbands and wives playing for high stakes, bets a dollar minimum, pot the limit. But at the game’s end everything was settled a penny on the dollar, a scale of debt resolution that satisfactorily impressed my father, who proposed it to many merchants.

  A couple of years before my father was born a large wedding was given at the Touro Club for my grandmother’s niece, Hannah Samuels, who was marrying William Haas. This was a sunny occasion, and the program for that evening is all I have of a material nature to suggest the comfortable and generally good-willed quality of my grandparents’ lives in their middle age, in 1905. The meal was lavish: oysters and hors d’oeuvres, poached salmon with hollandaise, a filet of beef followed by sherbet. This was followed by roast capon and champagne, then a green salad and glaces fantaisies variées.

  During cordials and cigars the guests listened to The Doctor perform an air of his own composition, done to the beat of “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” a ditty innocent of application to the bride.

  There once was a happy maid,

  Quite stupendous, so they said,

  She always had a smile to give you too;

  She was loving, she was true,

  She could kiss, I think, do you?

  But those were “handed” only to a few.

  This was followed by a chorus:

  Good-bye, Hannah, you must leave us,

  We’ll all miss you, when you’re gone;

  Now, Sweet William, have a care,

  Of our girl, so sweet and rare,

  And return with her to those you’ve left at home.

  Here was no short-winded doggerel: there were six more stanzas, followed by as many repetitions of the chorus, but then who needed to rush? There was all the time in the world to spend on a simple expression of affection. Time for love, time for play, and after passing The Doctor’s nice turns on William and will— Hannah now had a “strong Will of her own”—I’d like to linger for a final stanza:

  From summer dances at the docks,

  She sought seclusion at the rocks,

  Where she watched the tide in ebbing and in flow,

  How much Billing, how much cooing,

  How much time used up in wooing,

  The rocks won’t tell, and we will never know.

  The tide and summer dances were rhythms of Crescent Beach, on Long Island Sound at Niantic. Now the place is seedy, hard by the Boston–New York railroad tracks. The Doctor had begun going there in the nineties, brought by Dr. John McCook, a Hartford personage and friend with whom he established the first laboratory at Saint Francis Hospital. Every summer the Wolffs came down the Connecticut River by steamboat from Hartford to Old Lyme, and traveled (in the early days) the fifteen miles along the shore by oxcart.

  The Samuels families also summered at Crescent Beach, and William Haas built a house next door to The Doctor’s. My grandparents’ house still stands, large, with cedar shingles and a shake roof, with green shutters and a sun deck above a shaded porch furnished with wicker chairs, a rocker and a hammock. The nights there were cool, and the days lazy but sociable. Activities with members of these close-knit families cut without self-consciousness across generations.

  When I was nine and ten and eleven my father would take me on fine winter weekend mornings to Crescent Beach. The place was desolate then; the houses—set close together and helter-skelter back from the beach—were boarded up, and often as we made our way to the rocks at the northeast rim of the beach, below McCook Point, we would kick through ice and snow-crusted seaweed.

  Ostensibly we had come to shoot tin cans my father would fill with sand and set at the water’s edge. When I turned nine he had bought me a bolt-action single-shot Remington .22, and he would let me spend my allowance on a fifty-round box of rim-fire shorts. I would shoot them up in a couple of hours while my father kept one eye on me and the other on a book. Later, walking down the beach, my father would point to the huge gabled McCook house, shared by the families of Dr. John McCook and his brother Anson, a lawyer; my father would tell of its fabulous rooms, and what had passed there and in the gazebo that overlooked the rocks below the point, where we had come to sit. I wanted to climb the ro
cks and see the house close up, but my father respected the integrity of that property, and would not let me.

  Sometimes in my line of fire, if I raised my sights to lead a seagull (a forbidden practice), was a small prominence called Crystal Rock, and my father told me that he was once nearly drowned swimming to it on a dare, but when I pressed him for particulars—where had he lived then, how old was he, what was his connection with the McCook house?—he would distance himself from my curiosity.

  My father did tell me, laughing dryly, that he had once taken his father for a ride in a motorboat Dr. Wolff had just the week before given him. My father, showing off, had brought no oars and had shut off his Johnson Sea Horse to clean its carburetor filter, which fell overboard. Young Arthur had been obliged to face The Doctor’s red and furious face as the tide lapped them toward McCook Point.

  We must have been alone on that beach twenty times, perhaps forty. And we walked each time past the house where my father spent every summer of his life, happily, until he thought he would rather be elsewhere, and was old enough to drive himself away from Crescent Beach. And never did my father tell me that we were together near a sacred family place, or point to the house—its architecture and dimensions less imposing than the McCook Place—that had given his father such pleasure and pride. Of my father’s serial repudiations I find this the most perverse and sad.

  3

  MY father’s cousin Ruth Atkins was thirteen when he was born, and she stood for a time as his older sister. Her father—Louis Samuels—had died when she was four, and The Doctor, fond of his niece, treated her like a daughter. She spent every Saturday night at the Wolff house, and on Sunday mornings he would read the funnies aloud with verve, losing himself in their complications, doing all the voices. “He smelled of cigars, but clean.”