Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  My father introduced us with pride; he “knew we’d love each other.” I’d had no warning about Alice, had never heard of her, before he took me to her room. She and my father kissed when she opened the door, but this was friendly, not at all carnal. I don’t know what I thought my father and this woman were to each other, but I didn’t think of their association as a betrayal of my mother.

  I was wrong. Later I learned that Duke had known Alice since we lived in Old Lyme. He had met her in Boston, and they had spent much time there together, hobnobbing with her ex-husband’s Harvard friends. They had rendezvoused in Paris while we lived in Sarasota, and my father had been with this nice lady at the Empress in Victoria when I left Sarasota, and at Wilcooma Lodge when I landed in Seattle.

  Rosemary was outraged when Duke told her about Alice. I, of course, applied a double standard to my parents, but it was easy to rationalize: There was always between Alice and my father the sense of an arrangement rather than a passion. They liked each other, and then they didn’t, but I never felt ardor ebb or flow between them. But I was a kid, and saw what I wished to see.

  I didn’t know, or even sense, that my appearance repelled Alice. I was wearing pale-green gabardine trousers when she met me, and these were held in place by a quarter-inch white patent leather belt. Over a shiny shirt with representations of brown-skinned islanders at play beneath palm trees I wore the tartan jacket my father had so recently bought me, and this jacket she especially despised. She was also disappointed in my table manners. We ate that first night at Canlis’s, a fancy restaurant high on a hill overlooking Lake Union, and I worked through the courses pretty fast. She finally said, “Please don’t wolf your food,” and I said, “I’m a Wolff, why not?” Duke laughed, and told me to slow down. I noticed Alice’s neck go blotchy red, but I didn’t know yet that this was a danger signal, We Are Not Amused.

  The next morning she took me to the Prep Shop at Frederick & Nelson. The clothes were laughably uncool but I indulged the nice lady, let her trick me out cap-a-pie. I stood firm on the question of my hair, so the boys at St. Bernard’s and Collegiate, where Alice’s son had been schooled, would not have recognized me as one of their own. That second night we ate in the Cloud Room of the Camlin, and I watched my father’s measured moves with his eating equipment while he talked to me and Alice listened, now and then touching the corner of her linen napkin to the corner of her mouth.

  “I spoke with Rosemary this morning.” My father had never called her Rosemary to me before, always your mother. “We’ve decided that a divorce makes sense, better for her and for me.” He didn’t wait for me to say anything, but there was nothing I wanted to say. “You’ll stay with me, of course.” I nodded, took a bite of roast sirloin. “Toby’ll stay with his mother. He needs her, and it’s fair.” I nodded. “I guess there’s not much more to say about this. You know how she feels?” I nodded. “Well. How would you feel about Alice staying here in Seattle?”

  “Duke,” Alice said, motioning him to quit now.

  “Living with us, I mean,” my father said.

  “Oh, Duke! Give the child time!”

  I tried to get a whole asparagus into my mouth without dripping hollandaise on my new flannels. “Okay with me,” I said. “Fine,” I said, smiling at the nice lady across the table.

  We moved to a big house on Lake Washington, northeast of the Sand Point Naval Air Station. I got a new, faster boat, specially made for me. I had the whole top floor of the house and could play whatever music pleased me, as loud as I wanted. I didn’t see much of my school friends, and Duke didn’t see much of his Boeing friends. Alice wasn’t comfortable around them. I began to hear how differently they talked, the gaffes they committed. My father wouldn’t wear a tie every night to dinner but I had to, and at first I liked this.

  The MG went up on blocks when the cold weather came, and Duke and Alice bought a brand-new Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon, with Brewster green metal, wood trim and Dyna-Flo transmission. They were married in a civil ceremony at home the day his divorce came through, and some of his pals from MG rallies teased him about the Buick, its automatic transmission and four air holes (“Ventaports”) in the hood. Alice let me sample the fish house punch while I helped her make it, and I enjoyed the lightheaded sensation. Some of Duke’s friends whistled when they saw the house and the spread: smoked salmon, caviar, oysters, a Smithfield ham. I liked the impression we seemed to make, but I saw that my father did not, and that when people told him he “must’ve struck gold” Alice’s neck went red. By now I knew what that meant.

  My father got drunk and went to the garage with some friends from the MG club. They ran the engine, talked about old times, bragged about their cars. My father made me sit behind the wheel while he told again how I had “pranged” the car, and I blushed. Then he told his friends that he was keeping the MG for me till my sixteenth birthday, and I was so excited I honked the horn.

  After the men and their wives left I was sent to bed. I heard an argument, much worse than anything between Duke and Rosemary, a shouting match. Alice didn’t seem to fear him. He came upstairs, sat on my bed. He was breathing heavily, and I was afraid.

  “Did this whole goddamned thing for you.”

  “What, Dad?”

  “Don’t what, Dad me! D’you think I wanted this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know all right. Just don’t have the guts to take responsibility.”

  He sounded as though he hated me. “Tell me what I’ve done,” I asked. I was being a lawyer.

  “Jesus,” he said. Then he mimicked me: “Tell me what I’ve done! Nothing, kiddo, and you’ll never do anything, either.”

  Then he left, slowly negotiating the narrow stairs, swearing. I heard one last thing before he pitched out the front door, and drove away in the Buick:

  “That’s all she wrote, Arthur.”

  A few weeks later I overheard a discussion between my father and stepmother about money, a temperate discussion about stocks and shares, annual yield, “the tax picture.” I asked my father who paid for what these days. He didn’t react to the question as though it were delicate. He told me his salary at Boeing was high, he had had a promotion. Moreover, he said, he had finally come into his father’s estate, half a million dollars. I said that was wonderful, we were rich, right? It wasn’t polite to speak of these things, my father explained to me. Gentlemen did not discuss money. Besides, while his was tied up in investments Alice would carry many of the petty household expenses. She was sensitive about these matters, my father explained, so I was never, never, never to speak to my stepmother about money, his or hers. I was to rest assured that there was plenty.

  To believe the fable of the inheritance required great will, an appetite for credulity I can now credit only by assuming that I preferred this fabulous notion to the transparent reality that my father was a grifter, living off a woman who didn’t seem inclined to give anything away free. I think I couldn’t have believed in the half million. Maybe I didn’t care. I was safe; as my father said, there was plenty now, wherever it came from.

  Seattle couldn’t hold them. On the last day of January, two months after they were married, Duke quit his job. Alice had wearied of the provincialism of the “jumping-off-place for Alaska,” and of having water pour on her head every time she stepped outside. My father had been offered a job in Tennessee, with a jet-engine test center. He would have a raise in pay to twelve hundred a month and great responsibility. Incredibly, he had managed to push through the same résumé that had so recently provoked the FBI.

  It was decided that we would make a proper trip of it, ship our household things and the MG and my boat and motor (this time, for sure, they went where I went), and drive southeast in the Buick. Alice and I would come to know each other, my father thought, if we traveled three thousand miles together in an automobile. We got to know each other.

  There were pleasant moments. We drove south along the coast to Los Angeles, putting in
to the Benson in Portland, the Palace in San Francisco and the Bel Air in Los Angeles. I took on a patina of sophistication, and when Alice treated me to dancing at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador, where we listened to Gordon MacRae and I drank crème de menthe frappé, I decided that here was a life to suit me. I saved menus (Chasen’s, Romanoff’s—where my father, for a sawbuck, seemed to be known by the owner—The Brown Derby and the Polo Lounge). I went alone to Mister Roberts, my first live play, and expressed opinions about it. My father took me to hear Billie Holiday at a simple club near Watts, and then Jack Teagarden, whose bass player called out to him when the set ended, “Duke, you old scoundrel.” This was the musician who had shipped out to Europe with my father after he got the boot from the University of Pennsylvania, “after your dad left college.” He let Duke buy him drinks. Alice—who wanted me to call her “Tootie,” which I couldn’t—went back to the Bel Air. The bass player said my dad could have been okay on guitar if he’d stuck with it. I kept a matchbook from that place.

  The next morning my father and stepmother drove me to the coast somewhere near Venice, where Elgin Gates now had his own boat and motor dealership and his own Caddy. Gates offered to let me drive his D-class hydro, good for sixty and more, a marvel of a boat, if I came back the next day. Duke and Alice were happy to take me back, but I was more interested in the city now. I thought I’d like to be a night owl, studied the way my father dressed, bought Confidential to read about scandals in places like the Coconut Grove and not just to study pictures of Abbe Lane’s cleavage.

  I learned to eat salad with a salad fork. To order oil and vinegar rather than Thousand Island. To accept cheese, and to order meat rare rather than well done. I was almost ready for an artichoke.

  They showed me Carlsbad Caverns and the Grand Canyon, but I wasn’t much interested. New Orleans lay ahead, jazz and Brennan’s. My father was amused, for a while, and then not so amused. My wisdom was gaining too fast on his own. Somewhere in Texas we passed a car in a ditch, with an ambulance and state troopers at hand. Two miles down the road my father said, as though to himself:

  “That was a Roadmaster, just like this one.”

  “No,” I said a mile later, “it was a Super. It only had three holes.”

  We traveled another ten miles. “You argue too much; it’s getting to be a habit, and you’re wrong most of the time.”

  Alice was asleep in the back seat. We were trying to make Dallas before dark.

  “I’m not arguing, just telling you it was a Super. It had three holes. Roadmaster has four. Like ours.”

  My father pulled to the side of the road. Sighed. “We’ve come about twenty miles past that car,” he said. “If I go back it’ll cost us forty miles, an hour out of our day, our lives. It’s not necessary. It’s not even interesting. The car was a Roadmaster, that’s all.”

  “I’ll bet you ten bucks it was a Super. I looked right at it, three holes.”

  My father didn’t take my bet. He turned us around and headed us west, into the sun. The sun woke up Alice. She asked questions; I answered them. My father was silent. She said she couldn’t believe a grown man would let his child run him all over the map this way. I thought I didn’t like her. I had begun to think this earlier, hearing my stepmother make notional pronouncements about me when she knew I was well within earshot. My father drove on. He was silent. Alice was disgusted. I was happy, couldn’t wait to make them count those three damned Ventaports, and get this sorted out. I almost mentioned my father’s glasses to him, but something made me think this was a bad idea. When we reached the place where the Buick Super had gone into the ditch it was gone. A Texas highway patrolman was measuring a skid mark. My father asked where they had taken the wreck. The patrolman told him: the town was off the highway, five miles down yonder dirt road.

  “Just ask him what kind of car it was,” Alice said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “ask him, he’ll tell you.”

  My father said nothing. He drove five miles to a crossroads gas station and let me sit for a minute looking out my window at the wrecked Buick Roadmaster. I figured that Alice had switched cars on me. It was just like her, and by then I knew that money could get any job done.

  14

  DUKE’S work brought us to central Tennessee, about sixty miles south of Nashville. This was Walking Horse and blue-grass country, pacific and Baptist. Now Tullahoma is booming, but when we arrived in the early spring of 1952 it had nothing but a whiskey distillery, some farms, a modest place in Civil War history as the winter camp of General Braxton Bragg following the Battle of Stones River and, still under construction, the Arnold Engineering Development Center, a jet engine and rocket test facility with ultrasonic wind tunnels where my father was plant manager.

  Shelbyville, about eighteen miles away, was the town of choice. I was sent there to Bedford County Central High School, a segregated congregation of hospitable boys and girls who quickly accepted me as a novelty item whose accent and clothes were wonders. I signed up for spring football practice, and to my surprise held up, didn’t cry or run the first time I was hit hard. I played end, had fair hands, no speed or judgment. I played just well enough to get dates with almost any girl I asked.

  You could drive at fourteen in Shelbyville, and I was fourteen, but I couldn’t drive. Duke and Alice wouldn’t let me. I was sure Alice wouldn’t let Duke let me. My stepmother and I argued a lot; it was a stern, bloody war, hard looks and sneers, unexplained jokes and whispers. My father let me get away with too much of this, and sometimes he was my accomplice in disrespect. I had Alice down for a phony.

  She did put on false airs, overvalued “breeding” and convention, the correct sentiment, the expected. When we moved into a three-bedroom white clapboard ranch house on Lynchburg Boulevard in the “nice” part of Shelby ville, Alice brought her treasures out of New York storage, and jammed every square foot of the place with heavy pieces of mahogany upholstered with brocade and velvet. There was a huge, complicated clock from Tiffany, that told time by putative magic, that told no time at all, because the movers had broken it. There was a Sheraton dining table, and around this we ate a roast every Sunday, and delicate things other nights. I missed the meat loaf and croquettes and tuna casseroles of childhood, but Alice, if she was in fact a phony, was not the only phony in the house.

  I had turned my bedroom into a shrine to café society. I pinned matchbooks from San Francisco nightclubs and menus from New Orleans restaurants to my walls, and dropped to my trusting friends the names of people I had just met in The New Yorker and Quick. I read John O’Hara and J.P. Marquand. I amplified Duke’s airs and Tootie’s (I called her “Toots,” enraging her), and when my father traded in the MG (my MG!) on a gray Jaguar XK-120 roadster with red leather seats, I explained his extravagance by telling Tommy Ray, who let me drive his little Morris Minor when the police and my parents weren’t looking, that Duke held controlling shares in General Electric, and worked merely to have a “hobby.”

  My father gave this very impression to his colleagues. Gaylord Newton, who had hired him away from Boeing, wrote me that my father was talented and energetic, at first, but “I soon found he was taking quite a bit of time off for travel around Tennessee with Alice. However, he had good ideas and built up quite a bit of enthusiasm in the men who worked for him. His only fault at that time was the impression he gave that he really did not need the job, from a financial standpoint.”

  Apart from my feuds with Alice, whose principal vice was the elemental vice of not being my mother, life in Shelbyville was soft: soft air, nights, voices, the soft back seat of Tommy’s Mamma’s Caddy sedan at the drive-in movie or burger joint, with a soft girl in my arms.

  When Y-Knot arrived I ran her up and down the narrow Duck River, drawing complaints from people who lived nearby and winning some useful notoriety. The local paper ran my picture with a couple of friends I let drive my boat. They were my pit crew at races on TVA lakes near Knoxville. Duke drove us, towing the boat behind the
Jag even though the Buick made more sense. He told Alice he preferred the Jag because it “got better mileage.”

  He loved that car, and drove it flat out, a hundred and twenty, between Shelbyville and Tullahoma. A policeman came to our house one night during dinner and told my father “fair’s fair, I won’t run you in if I cain’t ketch you, but look out now, you might come ‘round a corner one mornin’ find a ‘dozer middle of the road, slow down now, drive safe, evenin’, ma’am.”

  One night I stole it. It was late April, hot enough for my parents’ new Carrier air conditioner, a conversation piece in 1952. I lay awake planning how to do it, just as I had night after night the past few weeks. Coast it down the gravel drive to the street, start it, drive it a block and park awhile, see if lights came on. I never thought I’d actually do it, but there I was, sitting in the driveway in the damned thing, my hand on the wheel. It was a still night, except for the noise of crickets. A dark night, except for the fireflies. I heard the air conditioner humming in their bedroom, bringing the temperature down into the low sixties before its solenoid tripped and it shushed to quiet fanning, then cut into a loud hum again. That was the moment, and I released the emergency brake and let the car roll, crunching. Jesus, it was a long way, fifty yards, and then I was there, blocking the road under a streetlamp. Moths beat against the yellow light so hard I thought they would wake my father. I twisted the key and the engine turned over, caught. No lights. I managed not to stall it when I popped the clutch out, but my knees were trembling so I barely made it down the block. Cut it. The house was dark. I figured I could come just this far, and still tell the truth. It would go hard for me, but I could tell my father what I had done. He’d done this much himself. He told me. Not quite this much: he had driven the Rolls only to the end of his father’s driveway, but that driveway was longer. The house was still dark. I drove away, got it up to one hundred twenty on a straight country road, slowing to ten for the craves, lugging away from them in fourth. I played the radio loud, got some jazz from Atlanta, my old man’s taste. Parked in front of the pool hall, where my tough school buddies hung out. I waited with the engine running till one of them came out. I cadged a smoke from him.