Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  After this incident my grandfather decided that he could not, would not, have his son at home, it was out of the question. At seventy-one he had earned some peace and self-respect, he wouldn’t have under his roof a boy who troubled the neighbors’ daughters and maids, who dressed like a popinjay and stayed out till all hours, who stole from his own father. So, after a few hard summer months in 1926, Dr. Wolff bundled up his son one last time and essayed to install him in a place where he would be someone else’s problem, and might even be reformed.

  The school this time was near home, in Cheshire, Connecticut, and was called Roxbury Academy, now Cheshire Academy. It had been established in the eighteenth century and had educated such Hartford personages as J.P. Morgan, but in the past few years had been in the hands of a venerated headmaster named Arthur Sheriff, who had turned the place into a tutoring school. Roxbury was especially popular with boys bound for Yale, and many of these were thick-headed but quick-footed and cleverhanded scholar-athletes whose very high tuition was paid by loyal sons of Eli. Students received instruction from tutors one-to-one, so Roxbury was mostly a school for the rich.

  My father—now known to his friends as Duke, for his noble airs—was offered to Mr. Sheriff in August of 1926, and he told the headmaster that Princeton, not Yale, would suit him. After his interview it was noted that Arthur S. Wolff II (as he chose to know himself, despising the modifier Jr. even as his father must have despised it, with its suggestion of close kinship between the men) “has not studied but now means to get to work. The boy stutters somewhat, though not badly enough to affect his success, I think.”

  Soon Mr. Sheriff and Dr. Wolff were communicating on friendly terms regarding the fate of the delinquent young Duke. The Doctor was invited to lecture Roxbury boys on his work as a medical expert at murder trials, and he made a hit, showing lantern slides of the most grisly details of man’s inhumanity to man. Mr. Sheriff frequently dined in Hartford with The Doctor, whose principal ambition was that the headmaster serve as my father’s father.

  Mr. Sheriff felt obliged to consult with The Doctor on many matters touching the school’s policies toward the boy, now, at nineteen, almost a young man. One of these was delicate, a matter involving Jesus Himself. My grandmother, devout as she was, would impose her beliefs on no one, and my father had not been inside the Temple Beth Israel since he was a child. At Deerfield and at Eaglebrook he had been assimilated, or assimilated himself, attending with more regularity than fervor the Congregational Church in Deerfield where Dr. Boyden chose to worship. At St. John’s my father announced himself to be a Unitarian, and now at Roxbury had asked to attend the Episcopal church in Cheshire. Mr. Sheriff asked to know my grandfather’s wishes regarding his son’s religious preferences. Dr. Wolff said the boy should worship where he wished, should “have some discretion in this matter.”

  (During my fifth-form year at Choate I joined a confirmation class offered by the headmaster, the Rev. Seymour St. John, to the end of leading his sheep into an Episcopal heaven, that most exclusive of elective clubs. I may have been brought every Sunday morning to the reverend headmaster’s feet by some sensation approximating faith, but I was certainly there to enjoy the God-sent opportunity to challenge his authority. This, then, was no small pleasure, to be licensed to argue fine letters of ecclesiastical law and chop logic—putatively as his equal—with The Head. One Sunday, however, a piper was to be paid, and I found myself on my knees at the altar of the Choate Chapel spouting the Apostle’s Creed, testifying to my faith in the Trinity, and the Resurrection, even as a congregation of boys who knew me better than did the Lord giggled and made fart noises at my rigid back. In the front row sat my father, showing a thin smile. After the ceremony, the performance, he gave me a silver cigarette case, curved like a flask, a thoughtful gift for a new communicant at a school where smoking was punished by instant banishment from Choate’s campus, records, and memory. Inscribed on the gold-washed interior of this case was a sentiment: For Christ’s Sake!)

  One of the first items to enter my father’s file at Roxbury was an IOU scribbled in pencil on a calling card: Received of Eddie O’Donnell 1 Yale vs Harvard football ticket—November 20, 1926. Documentation of my father’s liabilities multiplied, and by June of 1927 the motto captioning Duke’s photograph in the yearbook Rolling Stone (O tempora! O mores!) was this, perhaps itself on loan from another: “All that he fails to borrow is knowledge.”

  A New Haven haberdasher, White, one of many who traveled to such schools as Roxbury to seduce boys with a display of garments, wrote Mr. Sheriff bluntly: “We have tried and tried but without success. He has never kept any of his promises. I believe he will never pay this bill. In the five years we have been showing at the Roxbury School I can safely say that he is the only boy who doesn’t want to pay his bills.”

  Remedies were tried. My father was immediately put on a tight allowance, administered by Mr. Sheriff. But before The Doctor had an opportunity to settle his son’s account at White’s, only twelve days after the letter was mailed, Duke responded to that merchant’s wavering faith with a procedure that became his signature. He called it, after one of the Oxbridge locutions he favored, “flogging the wogs”: When a creditor whined too bitterly or rudely about one’s debt, a chap had to show the flag, turn the screws a bit more, wot? So my father entered White’s emporium across from the Taft Hotel for a bit of shopping the afternoon of a Yale baseball game, and drove up his debt from $45.50 to a bit over seventy-three dollars. White wrote again to Mr. Sheriff that young Mr. Wolff “wanted to purchase a pair of hose. He actually took the hose without the permission of our salesman and left the store. In other words, he took the hose without our permission.”

  There were suchlike episodes at Joseph Hardy, Inc., J. Press, John Howard, Inc.—plenty of places. There were letters like White’s in great number in my father’s Roxbury file, and I could read them With my eyes closed: there was astonishment that a cheeky pup would break his word to his elders, anger that he played his game even after its transparently unfair rules were known, wonder that he couldn’t be chastened, wouldn’t learn his place, continued to trick himself out like a gentleman fastidious about his person while he remained careless of his character. Among his classmates he made an impression as a “natty dresser.”

  As I read about the debts of that “natty dresser” I felt shame, decided he was merely a bad man, with shabby, canted values. Not complicated, simply off base. Or rather that is what I felt I ought to feel. It was my father, though, who taught me that we should distinguish in this life between what we feel and what we feel we should feel. That if we can distinguish between these things we may have access to some truths about ourselves.

  The truth is that as I moved through the record of my father’s debts and evasions I felt less shamed by it than diminished by its predictability. And then I fell on a letter from a clothier, Langrock, that put a new spin on my experience of my old man, and took my breath away. At first glance the thing looked run of the mill, a letter to Mr. Sheriff asking him to dun The Doctor for about seventy-five dollars. My grandfather got the letter but, at the end of his string, refused to pay the debt. Mr. Sheriff then wrote my father’s father: “So far as I can see the Langrock people took a chance and have only themselves to blame.”

  Thirty years later, an undergraduate at Princeton, I had run up a bill of several hundred dollars at Langrock, and couldn’t pay it. I had other debts, quite a few, and was not too innocent to have an inkling where this would end. So, with the encouragement of several deans of behavior, I left college for a year of manual labor, to earn money to settle my accounts. Settle them, after misadventures, I did; my good name was restored to the books at Langrock, but I made no use of my account there. Nevertheless, one day I returned to my room to find a bill from Langrock. I opened the envelope and whistled: the bill was a leviathan, more than a thousand dollars. Less angry than amused I telephoned to explain that here was a case of mistaken something-or-other.


  No, Langrock assured me, here was a simple case of debt. Certain suits and shirts and outergarments had been purchased from the Nassau Street store by Arthur S. Wolff III (he had now grown beyond those skimpy double pillars—II—yet accurately judged IV to be patently bogus, and mocked a classmate of mine who fashioned himself the IVth Someone of Akron), who wished them charged to his son.

  My father, with his purchases, was long gone, to parts unknown to me. And so I made my speedy and unhappy way to the office of William D’Olier Lippincott, Princeton’s Dean of Students. And Lippincott decided that I owed Langrock neither a legal nor a moral debt, and told me, with the adjustment of a word or two, “so far as I can see the Langrock people took a chance and have only themselves to blame.”

  Soon after my father began his studies at Roxbury he sat for an examination in English history, and I have a blue book with “Duke” scribbled in his hand at the top. The first sections were questions of fact, asking for place names and dates, and these he got wrong. Then he turned to a required essay on a British prime minister: “Benjamin Disraeli was a Jew, born in London in 1809. He was the son of a Jew who had turned Christian and received a careful private education. Disraeli was an English gentleman, and even the Queen, the late Victoria, thought well of him, even if he was a Jew …”

  My father’s studies, despite his own “careful private education,” were not going well. So Mr. Sheriff wrote The Doctor one of those letters he was by now so used to reading:

  Arthur’s instructors, in general, report that he has a good mind woefully lacking in training. His understanding and his power of original thought are good. On the other hand, in concentration and thoroughness he is poor, and his memory is unreliable. This means that if he makes a conscious effort to overcome his mental weaknesses he can certainly be successful; but if he does not make the effort he must reconcile himself to having second-rate ability for the rest of his life.

  I am writing this frankly, knowing that you will show the letter to Arthur and have a chance to discuss it with him. I wish to say for Arthur that I have found him always willing—almost too willing—to accept criticism, even though adverse; and have found also that the mistakes he has made are due more to thoughtlessness than to premeditation. Nevertheless, in his case, the very amiability of his faults is a bad thing, because it is largely indicative of instability of character. I have tried my best to impress this upon Arthur during the past two or three months, and do believe that to some extent I have succeeded.

  It perhaps would be good for Arthur to know the impressions he makes upon his instructors, and to a certain extent upon the boys. One master, for example, says that “in the classroom he is inattentive and unstable.” Another states that he is perhaps unintentionally rude in manner and lacks discipline of mind and tongue, and that he has superior ability but fails to do himself justice. Another states that he insists upon bluffing his way through and does not use his ability. Still another mentions the fact that he has ability but that he is hazy and inaccurate because of superficiality. And from another instructor I find that Arthur is “noisy, restless and too assertive.”

  I quote these impressions of the masters so frankly so that Arthur may be able to see cold written the impressions he gives of himself. It would be comical if it were not also tragic to think how far Arthur has allowed himself to be led astray by his instinct for buffoonery. It is not only among the masters that he makes such impressions as these but among many of the boys as well, much as they like him in spite of his faults; certainly not for the reasons he may think. I think that fundamentally he is a boy well worth saving. I think that he has it in him to be a very good, capable man …

  The headmaster, winding down his summary of my father’s prospects and vices, did not neglect the usual issue: “This carelessness of Arthur in incurring debt is perhaps his worst fault.”

  In short, Duke wouldn’t climb aboard the train. He never would. Nothing in Mr. Sheriff’s report sounds to me out of character except the words “amiability” and “buffoonery,” and these represent, I think, a misreading of Duke’s manner. My father was capable of violent anger when he was faced with someone’s cruelty, or what he perceived as cruelty. But his deepest rebellion was quiet, a Bartleby-like refusal to play ball, a preference for the declined gambit. So untroubled was he by negation that he could afford his amiable manner, which came not from an eagerness to please but from a cooling, in early age, of those fevers that provoke young men to run fast to mount that very train my father had no wish to ride.

  And what did his schoolmates think of him? The motto accompanying his photograph in the 1928 Rolling Stone describes him as “a slave to all the follies of the great.” But he had standing, was a member of Lamba Phi, the snappiest school fraternity. He swam crawl on the school team, and was a tackle on the football team; he played banjo for the jazz band and the orchestra, and was an editor of the yearbook. One classmate remembers “a friendly and likable guy, sociable and humorous.” Another looks at a photograph of the assembled school and finds “Art in the front row, sitting on the ground in knickers and argyles, in his usual sartorial splendor.” His stammer is recalled, and the way he would joke about it. He is remembered as tall, self-assured, articulate and—above all—generous and warm.

  He spent weekends in New York with Sidney Wood, a classmate and tennis champion, and at King’s Point with another classmate, Walter Chrysler, Jr. With these and Hartford friends he traveled to Vassar and Smith and Bryn Mawr, and often there were parties in the houses of absent parents whose children were wealthy, idle and without variation Christian, bearing the surnames Griggs, Rice, Glover, Smith, Lester and Gillette. Among these affluent drifters my father was a leader, and where he led trouble followed.

  • • •

  The Doctor’s rhetorical manner has been observed: it was avuncular and aggrieved, laden with the vocabulary of disaster. The martyr’s lament has been a family affliction. It’s a bad tradition: blaming, whining, scolding; my father would indulge in it when he was drunk, which was seldom but memorable. From before the age when my voice changed till after I was old enough to vote I knew there’d be hell to pay if midnight passed and he was not yet home. I’d lie tensed in bed waiting for his return from a party, listening for the crunch of tires on our gravel drive, or the low growl of his voice as he stumbled hanging up his coat. Then I’d hear ice rattle in a glass, and lugubrious mutters, angry cries of unspecified pain. I’d hear my father come toward my room, stand in front of my shut door. I’d lie with my back to the door, feigning sleep, but he’d hear me catch my breath from fear when he opened it and spilled light on me. He’d stand there looking down at me, and grunt a nasty laugh, and then sit heavily at the foot of my bed. He knew I was awake; he knew me inside out. That I was counterfeiting sleep inflamed his resentments, and he’d begin to talk to me, never raising his voice from its exhausted monotone, slurring his words, throwing off static: worse than your mother … kicked my ass … did everything for you, got nothing back … not worth a nickel never will be … sorrow and abuse … I’m finished … what’s the point … nibshit kid … nibshit …

  The next morning, desolate and hungover, he’d recollect what he’d said, joke about it, promise it would never again happen, that what he said when he was drunk was plain crazy, would I forgive him? Please? Of course, of course. Because I believed it was plain crazy, a fever he had caught that had now cooled. And because I knew that while it would happen again, it would not happen soon, and so I was relieved, even grateful.

  Now, looking over letters about my father from his father, I think I see the source of that awful vitriol, that cruelly inappropriate language of woeful condemnation. Shortly before a Christmas vacation from Roxbury, my father borrowed some money from a school friend to whom he already owed money and hired a car and drove it to Hartford with another friend to meet a couple of girls at a hotel. He broke, that is, a few school rules, and for this he was punished by Mr. Sheriff, who wrote The Doctor about th
e episode and its aftermath.

  My grandfather was beside himself with fury, and with something else, a lacerating self-pity from which my father could have no possibility of appeal. The Doctor wrote Mr. Sheriff about “my son Arthur’s unmanly and disgraceful conduct. It is more than humiliating to me … I do not know what to say more, for this is such a disgrace to me, and it troubles me so much, as it causes me so much sorrow.”

  The headmaster sought to calm The Doctor: “We don’t feel that the boy was guilty of anything but just foolishness.” He was, after all, twenty. But Duke’s father would not hear a word in the boy’s favor, and soon even my grandmother indulged a rare display of temper and anguish: “I cannot bring myself to say Dear Arthur to you.” After this salutation she told her son “your father says that he doesn’t want you home for the Holidays, not after your behavior. He is through with you. I doubt that you are gaining anything out of this treatment of your parents. Perhaps you are happy, we are not.” Then a signature, without valediction: “Your Mother, Alas.”

  The matter did not end there. A crime had been committed against The Doctor, who sprayed lamentations and complaints at Mr. Sheriff:

  This whole thing greatly mortifies me, and to be in a position such as this is very painful, for I assure you I do not deserve it, and it seems I have no shelter to which I can apply for comfort, for I fear that Arthur by his lack of attention to what is right shuts his heart to the echoes of those sounds against which he shuts his ears. His disobedience still becomes more poignant when it is conducted in such a manner as to give no opportunity of protest until it is a fait accompli, or when it is so blended with good humor and external decorum as to think that no one can see it but the conscious victim.