Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  She began to cry. I suspected fake tears. Pulled over. Brought her head to my chest, so understandingly. She stopped sobbing, lay against my chest. I ran my hand through her hair, gently, kept it far away from there and there. She could trust me. I touched her throat, didn’t reach down her blouse. She could trust me.

  Dear God, I prayed, make her fall asleep and I’ll believe in You. I’ll have myself confirmed. Give me just this one on the cuff. She was asleep. Her legs were slightly apart. I unbuckled her bra one-handed, a skill I had practiced on one of my stepmother’s garments, installed around a pillow. The girl breathed evenly. This was it, the point of life. Suddenly she sat up straight, refastened her armor, said “Okay, that’s enough, let’s go home.”

  That night I wrote a letter to my Choate roommate: Had a great time with my mater in D. C. Dined at the Mayflower. Plenty of nook up here in Maine. Went the distance last night with that babe from Walker’s, huge hooters, HOT! Wheeled around in her old man’s car, told him I had a license, scored in the back seat.

  I sealed the envelope, addressed and stamped it. But I left it in the guest bedroom when I returned to Connecticut the next day. That night I telephoned the girl, such a sweet girl, I missed her. Her father answered the phone:

  “My daughter doesn’t want to hear your voice again, and neither do I. And I’d advise you to apply to Yale. Maybe they’ll be dumb enough to take you.”

  16

  TOBY was eight when he flew to New York to spend the summer with us. My father met him at the airport and took him to “21” for lunch.

  “He introduced me to ginger beer, and the waiter knew him and seemed to like him. I was just knocked out by it all.”

  Toby noticed that his father “apparently didn’t work,” because he had all the time in the world to spend on his son. “Still, the old man had an air, even at his most idle, of great business afoot, of busyness. There were always errands to run, gloves to be selected, an umbrella to be repaired.”

  They never talked together about anything personal, until at summer’s end Toby said that he’d like to stay in Connecticut with Duke and Tootie. “It was so nice there, just a lot nicer.” Father said no, it wouldn’t be fair. Besides, Rosemary would never permit it. Toby asked if he could come back the following summer, and did. He loved his stepmother: “Tootie was aces. She was generous about Mother, made me write her, said nice things about their talks on the telephone. You seemed like an alien in the house. I thought you hated being around Duke, Tootie, me. I looked up to you, of course. But things were not good between us, our feelings were complicated.”

  Then, the summers of 1953 and 1954, Toby reminded me of myself at eight and nine, and for reasons I cannot even now understand those memories were painful. I wasn’t ashamed of the bumpkin. On the contrary: a little brother was a nice thing to have, like a crash linen jacket. I liked to show Toby off to my Choate friends. There were always plenty of Choate friends around our Connecticut houses.

  When the school year ended there was a round of dances during Tennis Week at the Manursing Island Club, American Yacht Club, Greenwich Country Club, Wee Burn Country Club … I was invited to some of these; most I crashed. My roommate Frank stayed with us often in Wilton; he stammered too, and could laugh with my father as I could not about their afflictions. The less I respected my father, the more my friends cherished him. He wasn’t like their fathers, had different toys, a different vocabulary.

  He owned the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—just like the grandparents of my schoolmates—but he also had books of dirty limericks and could recite, first verse to last, Eskimo Nell. My father owned things with mother-of-pearl handles, wore pigskin gloves. There were lamps in our house made from pieces of old sailing ships. We bathed with Pear’s soap. Ordinary. Extraordinary was my father’s set of French caricatures, Twenty-One Ways of Committing Suicide, black, sardonic studies of final solutions.

  I was surprised how wonderful my school friends found my father’s things to be; but they did, and more and more of them, more and more often, found excuses to stay with us. They enjoyed Duke’s speech. A girl was a popsie, and if she was comely and ardent she was fux deluxe. My father’s glasses were specs, and when he was tired he was worn to the nubbins. When my friends and I gussied up to go to a dance my father begged me to lay off the gaspers, though I smoked them anyway, black, gold-tipped Balkan Sobranies. My father thought they were vulgar, and they were. My stepmother thought my father’s diction was vulgar, but it was not.

  My father’s vocabulary was a schoolboy’s vocabulary because among us he was among schoolboys. He was a chameleon. He gave his clients what he thought they wanted: companies got his constipated management jargon, headmasters got piety, car salesmen got bank references, car mechanics got engineering lore. He was a lie, through and through. There was nothing to him but lies, and love.

  The housemaster who noted that I seemed “to have a completely false set of values” added that this sad state was “partially induced by such things as receiving a sports car for Christmas.” My first nickname at Choate had been “Art,” because my friends identified me entirely with my father, but soon after I turned sixteen they changed me to “Porfirio,” after Porfirio Rubirosa, the playboy racing-car driver killed in the Bois de Boulogne. The week after my sixteenth birthday I got my Connecticut driver’s license, traded my racing boat for a 1948 Austin sedan, and wrecked it three days later. Five weeks after my sixteenth birthday I was given a new Porsche 1300 convertible, and by then was smoking and drinking at will in my father’s presence.

  I drove the Porsche flat out along Nod Hill Road, just as my father drove his Ferrari, a three-liter Ghia-bodied roadster he had “bought” when he “bought” my Porsche, using the third Jaguar in his stable as a down payment for both cars and promising to make killer monthly payments, which he never made. Alice was by now resolute in her antagonism to his financial caprices, and would have no part of his toys or the debts he accumulated on behalf of his toys. She was rightly aghast when she first saw the Porsche, and this further alienated me from her.

  One night, with fog drifting across Nod Hill Road, my father and I nearly hit head on. We were drunk, and just managed to nose our cars into opposite ditches. We met in the middle of the road at the sharp right-hander near the wall of a sheep pasture and hugged and laughed: wouldn’t that have been something, setting the old lady free of us and our damned cars at a single swipe!

  My father finally did bang his Ferrari into that stone wall and three weeks later, sixteen and a half, I rolled my Porsche over a different stone wall. The girl with me was thrown clear and got off cheap, with five stitches behind her ear. I smashed my nose, had it stitched together by a sleepy intern in South Norwalk, and tried to sleep off a concussion. My father sat by my bed slapping me awake. I laughed at him walking around in his pajamas in a public building, but he wasn’t laughing anymore. I was a tinhorn “Porfirio” with a “completely false set of values.”

  It was decided I should work that summer before my last year at Choate. The previous summer I had been fired for indolence after three weeks cutting grass and trimming hedges as an apprentice to Raymond Massey’s Wilton grounds keeper, but this was to be a serious enterprise. I was hired by Tolm Motors in Darien, where Duke had his cars and mine tuned and repaired. (He had now traded himself down from the Ferrari to a Mercedes 190SL, and me from the wreckage of the Porsche to a VW.) He owed Tolm so much that he muscled me into my summer job: they were nice to me so that if he ever paid any bills he might pay them first. My job at seventy-five cents an hour was pleasant and educational. I washed and waxed the sports cars of clients who had brought them for repair. My partner in this work was a black bachelor, George, about forty-five. In light of his superior experience he was paid two bits more an hour than I was paid. We became friendly; I talked to him about Choate and he listened, and soon knew the names of my teachers and friends, answering strophe with anti-strophe:

  “George, I�
��ve had it up to here with Bill Morse.”

  “That boy too damned big for his britches. A nice one ‘longside the head bring him down to size, yessir.”

  I resolved to teach George about the great jazz musicians who had enriched the culture of his people, but when I got permission to bring a record player to the garage where we worked alone with hoses and brushes and chamois cloth, George said he didn’t cotton to jazz, he preferred the classics, Kostelanetz and Ezio Pinza. Never mind, it was my machine, and I arbitrated a settlement, two picks for me, one for him, thus: “Rockin’ Chair,” “Struttin’ with Some Barbeque,” “Some Enchanted Evening.”

  One day I suggested that George come to dinner at home in Wilton and then blow it out with my father and me in Westport.

  “Shit,” he said, “you don’t know nothin’.”

  For reasons beyond my understanding I was trusted by Tolm to take delivery of its new Jaguars, Triumphs, and Mercedes from distributors in New York. Once or twice a week I’d come to work dressed like a Choatie, wearing a bow tie, saddle shoes, and a seersucker jacket, and take the train to New York to fetch a car. The last car I picked up was a gray gull-winged Mercedes 300SL, still covered with dock grime and shipping grease. The seats were black glove leather. It was explained that the car’s speed during break-in was governed by a restraint on the accelerator that prevented me from exceeding eighty in top gear, but this could be overridden in an emergency, breaking a lead seal and placing in peril the car’s warranty. Coming down the long hill at Stamford on the Merritt Parkway there was an emergency. I wanted urgently to drive Tolm Motors’ new car a hundred and fifty, and I did. Tolm Motors, finding the lead seal broken, was cross and fired me, cutting its losses and resigning itself to a place at the bottom of Duke’s action pile. I said goodbye to George, promised to stay in touch.

  “No, you got bigger fish to fry, won’t be thinkin’ ’bout old George.”

  “Bullshit, George.”

  “Yeah,” George said, the last word from him the last time I saw him.

  The night I wrecked my Porsche I had been drinking at Rip’s Lounge. The pianist and organist from Sarasota had opened a nightclub in a shopping center in White Plains. It was as dark as Dick’s hatband in there; the walls were fish tanks, bubbling greenly. Rip wore a white dinner jacket when he played. It set off his brilliantined black hair to good advantage, he thought. I went there with Duke, a Choate friend, and our dates. My date was a plain-talking blonde, Buster Crabbe’s daughter, and when my father said he had been her father’s friend, I didn’t believe him. Her father, after all, had been somebody, Tarzan! Duke had in fact been his friend in Miami, where they swam together in an aquatic circus. Nevertheless, Susie Crabbe preferred my Choate friend, Jack, and so did Jack’s date prefer Jack. I studied this injustice while a wonderful jazz guitarist, Mundell Lowe, played solo. And when he was finished, Rip, who considered himself the headliner, began to play and I talked, too loudly, to Jack.

  “Where do you think we’ll be ten years from now?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “Who knows?”

  “Who do you think’s going to do better?”

  “What do you mean by better?” Jack asked.

  “You know. I know. We’ll know then. Listen, we’ll know.”

  My father was annoyed. “Shut up and listen to the music.”

  “Tell you what,” I told Jack, “let’s get together in ten years and see what’s happened to us.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Bet your ass I’m serious!” My voice had risen. Rip looked hard at our table. Duke looked hard at Rip.

  “Okay,” Jack said, “a deal. A hundred I’m happier, better off, further ahead. Ten years from now.”

  Our dates giggled as we seized hands. People stared at us. Rip quit “Autumn in New York” abruptly, left the stand. As he passed our table he muttered something, probably to me. My father was drunk now, and pugnacious. Maybe Rip had said something to him, we had disrupted our friend’s set, it was his club. Rip headed downstairs to the men’s room, and I followed him. At the bottom of the stairs he put his arm around me like a buddy, and was about to lecture me, I think, on good manners, when we were spun around by Duke’s shout from the top of the stairs.

  “Take your hands off him, greaser!”

  “What!” Rip shouted. “What did you say?”

  “I know you in and out, pal.” My father was shaking his finger.

  “Come down here you fake sonofabitch,” Rip said. “You’re all air, always have been, just a crummy, deadbeat talker, come on down, let’s get this over.”

  “I’m no fool,” my father said. “You’ve got a gun.”

  “I don’t need it for you.” Rip pulled the revolver from his shoulder holster.

  “Don’t shoot me!” my father yelled.

  Rip tried to hand it to me, but I backed away. It was the snubnose he had shot at rabbits in Florida. I begged them to stop. Rip threw his pistol on the floor.

  “If I come after you,” my father said, “you’ll pick it up; you’re a mob guy, I know all about you.”

  Rip picked up the gun, shook out the bullets, threw the gun in a trash basket, beckoned with his hand, said quietly: “Come down here, I don’t want to fight in front of my customers.”

  “Fuck yourself,” my father said.

  Rip started upstairs fast. I followed, grabbing at his coat, and by the time I reached him he was at the front door of his club, watching my father drive away, leaving rubber. There was no point chasing him, his Ferrari was too fast.

  “He’s chickenshit,” Rip said.

  “No,” I said, “he isn’t.” But I knew he was.

  I was not good to Choate, but neither was Choate good to me. Piety, courtesy, self-importance, smugness, and a killing dose of homily characterized the Choate I knew. Choate’s business was to define and enclose. Alice understood this from her son’s experience, and even before I arrived for summer school she wrote Seymour St. John: “Choate will do wonders for Jeff. Learning to share and also to accept restrictions pleasantly.” Then another letter: “It will help Jeff, he will become accustomed to restrictions.”

  Cookie-cutting has its virtues. It’s worth something to be taught that neighbors have rights, that conventions are not prima facie malign, that rules are not always provocative. At Choate, though, cookie-cutting was a fixation. The boys we called “straight arrows” thrived. The rest of us—“negos,” carpers, corner-cutters, and wise-apples—bucked the system, and some had fun. The happy ones knew what they were doing, but I didn’t. I said no by reflex, wouldn’t take the bit, see the point, play the game, join the team. I was ashamed of myself, and bitter that Choate didn’t love me. I should have understood that boys who don’t join the team cannot expect to be loved by the team.

  Most of the masters at Choate and many of the boys felt I laughed too quickly and too often at things sacred to them: the score of the Deerfield game, the election of class officers, our privilege not to be permitted to smoke. Seymour St. John’s farewell message to my graduating class, published in the 1955 yearbook, The Brief, closed with an unidentified quotation “from one of my heroes.” It is vintage homily, just the kind of stuff we heard at chapel every evening after dinner, and before lunch on Sunday: “The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.”

  Perhaps. There were no black students at Choate, and someone once asked the Head why. There were no black students at Choate, said the Reverend St. John, because it was unfair to elevate the aspirations of Negroes by inviting them to a school whose customs, requirements, and academic standards were beyond their reach. Yet, he said, all were equal in the eyes of the Lord. So he invited a black preacher to sermonize to us every year. This was a huge man with a musical voice, a Robeson bass; he had the most cultivated of accents, the product of education at Trinity College, Cambridge. The Head beamed to hear him speak. The last tim
e I heard him, I deployed alarm clocks throughout the chapel, and they rang at five-minute intervals for almost an hour. Mea culpa, it was the weak link who did this. My father had done it too, at the Clark School. It was just dumb, easy mischief, not so much the work of an angry young man as of a temperamental brat.

  The spring of my fifth-form year I visited the Head for a heart-to-heart. I was in trouble. I had run up bills. From way back, midway through my first year, this had been a problem. Here’s a note from George Steele in 1952: “I have had to write your parents about your Bookshop bill. Now, ere the new year, I expect you to get yourself out of your difficulties.” Then came a wire to my father, with a copy to Steele, from St. George’s Inn, where we were sometimes allowed to eat dinner, and in whose basement some of us smoked, a vice punishable by immediate expulsion: THE AMOUNT OF $49.19 ACCRUED BY YOUR SON JEFFREY WOLFF HAS NOT BEEN PAID. IF IT IS NOT PAID IN FULL BY THE FIFTEENTH OF THIS MONTH WE WILL BE FORCED TO TURN THE ACCOUNT OVER TO OUR ATTORNEY FOR COLLECTION.

  But the immediate cause of my trouble was a breach of school regulations, sort of. Fifth-formers were obliged to be present at a specified number of meals each week, and attendance was usually recorded by a master, seated at each round table of twelve. At Sunday supper, however, the masters were free, and we signed ourselves in. I came to the dining hall, signed in, bowed my head for the Head’s appreciation of our many bounties, gulped a glass of milk and left for a proper meal at St. George’s. A straight arrow, aware that I had exhausted my outside dining privileges, turned me in to Mr. Steele. The Penguin took the position that I had, in effect, lied, had breached the Honor Code, was subject to the consideration of the Honor Committee.

  On the Honor Committee was a boy I knew well. He was as dumb as a shoe. Three weeks earlier he had stolen my sweater. I saw him leave my room with it and retrieved it from his drawer. I had worn it every day since, in front of him. I was wearing it now. He frisked with me, told me there was no place at Choate for liars, that I wasn’t good enough for his wonderful school. Others in the room, the class of the class ahead of me, nodded. I sat silent, no defense, of course they were right, the sweater was nothing weighed against my breach of honor, I was low, a miserable thing, verily.