Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  We waited in the one-room flat for our father to come home for dinner. We waited. Toby didn’t know the woman’s name or telephone number. We waited. We decided we couldn’t find her house and cooked dinner, and waited. The landlord came to see us. The rent hadn’t been paid for months; we’d have to leave in the morning. The telephone rang. The woman was hysterical.

  “I can’t get him to leave! He won’t even leave that chair he was sitting in when you left. He won’t move. He won’t talk. He just rocks back and forth crying. I don’t know what to do with him. Get him out of here, help me.”

  I telephoned the police. They were there when I arrived, without Toby. It was as she had said. My father was catatonic, sobbing, terrified even to move from the chair. He couldn’t speak, or wouldn’t. He moved only to shake his head, no no no no no no … The police were gentle, practiced. They called an ambulance, held everything low key. The woman calmed herself, said she hoped there would be nothing in the papers, she was divorcing her husband, her husband could be difficult. I noticed her earrings, silver and turquoise, with complicated loops and pendants, the kind of jewelry my father despised. She said my father had been very difficult. So I could see.

  “A man with his educational attainments, what a pity!”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is a pity.”

  They led my father to the ambulance. He was not too far gone to walk. The woman said she thought he might have been using pills, maybe tranquilizers. He had been drinking a great deal in Nevada. The ambulance attendants and the police wrote down the woman’s musings.

  But my father didn’t seem drunk, or drugged. He seemed dead. I followed the ambulance to a hospital in La Jolla. The police came in with me, asked if they could help in any way. They told me my father was probably just overtired.

  I signed him in. He was snuffling like a baby, shaking his head like a baby refusing to eat or sleep or stop doing something. Back and forth, deliberately, no … no … The next day, about eleven, my father could talk. He wore what soldiers call a thousand-yard stare, but he could talk. He said he wanted to see the woman, and I called her. She said she’d rather not see my father, didn’t want “to open that can of worms again. He really spooked me last night,” she said. “He’s one sick guy.”

  I told my father that the woman would not be able to see him that morning, maybe a little later. My father began to weep.

  “She’s wonderful. I need her.”

  My father didn’t ask how Toby was getting along, or where he was, or what we would all do with our lives here in La Jolla. He was past caring about these things now. Now he was deep in the woods, and he knew it, and no use pretending he knew the way home.

  I took him to a sanitarium south of San Diego. It was bucolic, high in the hills looking down on the Pacific. The patients were mostly self-admitted, like my father. The question of payment was raised, and dropped when my father produced a Blue Cross card. Surprisingly, he was covered. He seemed happy to be removed from me by a nice young orderly. He asked, before he disappeared into a ward, when he could expect to see the woman he wished to see.

  “Soon,” I lied to him. “She’ll be in touch soon.”

  I borrowed another couple of hundred from another friend back east, and this got us out of one apartment and into another, even closer to Wind ’n’ Sea Beach. I gave the Chevrolet back to Budget, who had missed it, and bought a Ford convertible with no money down off a used car lot. I drove it to General Dynamics Astronautics, and walked out after half an hour in the personnel department with a job as an engineering writer, eight hundred a month, cost-plus again. It was the job my father had had, at less than eight hundred a month.

  There was a training program. I was put in front of a movie about the marvels of rocket technology and then told by an executive that America could, if America wished, put an Atlas slap into Khruschev’s bathtub. I saw one of them on the assembly line, a stainless-steel thermos, fifteen stories high.

  My work, what they called my work, was done in a hangar with about two hundred other engineering writers. We sat in rows translating English into technical jargon. The engineering reports were given to us with certain words underlined, and these words were to be replaced with other words, which were listed in a loose-leaf dictionary. The single skill required for my job was a knowledge of the alphabet, and I finished a day’s labor in about two hours. The other six I sat at my desk, staring at my hands. I was not permitted to bring anything—a book, say—into the hangar. I was to be at my desk from punch-in to punch-out, in case government inspectors came around to check on the cost-plus arrangements.

  While I was at the missile works I obliged Toby to read a book a day and write a thousand words. I must say he was sporting about this intrusion into his holiday hours. But then, as I often reminded him, I was paying the rent and buying the food. I had a feeling sometimes that Toby wished he were elsewhere, but I was too angry about the outcome of our reunion to care what Toby wished.

  Toby had my father’s gestures and facial tics, and certain maneuvers with his hands and voice that made him resemble our old man more than I did, as he still does.

  “It scares me to death,” he says.

  We visited our father in the sanitarium. He was placid, capable of gallows humor. He didn’t mention the woman now, a couple of weeks after his treatment had begun. He said he had been “tuckered out.” He didn’t apologize for having put us to some inconvenience, but he was friendly enough. I did think he showed unfeeling indifference toward Toby, but he was beyond the reach of our judgment now, and I thought Toby understood this, though had I reflected a bit I would have realized that this was asking a lot of understanding of my fifteen-year-old brother.

  Duke had a couple of new friends. One was a Milton scholar getting electric shock therapy. He was a skinny, red-haired fellow, very cheerful, said it wasn’t all that bad. He read Paradise Lost once a week now, every time as though for the first time. All the patients were nice, like a sewing circle of the damned. My father made me a briefcase out of leather, and burned my initials into it. It took him a week to make, and he was proud of it. I assured him his job was waiting for him when he got out; I had been instructed by my father’s therapist to tell this lie. My father only made me tell it once; I think he knew the truth.

  Two things obsessed him during our twice-weekly visits: his car (which had been repossessed) and a silver cigarette lighter he said had been given to him in England by RAF friends. My father described this to me with affectionate care, and said Jimmy Little’s and Mike Crosley’s names were inscribed on it.

  “You remember it, don’t you? I always kept it with me.”

  I didn’t remember it, was sure I had never seen it. My father said this object had been in the apartment we had had to vacate. I asked Toby if he remembered it and he said no, he had never seen it. My father wanted it. He was very firm about this. He asked his doctor to instruct his sons to look hard for it. He needed it.

  Toby helped me look for it, in the new apartment and the old, in the rental car we had returned, through every box and pocket and drawer. We couldn’t find it. I decided it had never been, and even if it had existed was just a fake inscribed with some sentiment of my father’s own devising and names off a roll of lost friends and scant acquaintances. Finally, the day my father was released, five weeks after Toby had arrived, we reached the bottom of this mystery. Toby confessed under my father’s inquisition that he had lost it; he had taken the lighter while my father was in Nevada and left it on the beach. He had been afraid to tell us, of course. The old man broke down in rage, and so did I, remembering the hours Toby had let me spend with him while he pretended to look for the damned thing, while he gave helpful suggestions where to look for it. I saw then, in a stroke, how much Toby must hate us both, and why. We put him on a bus north the next morning and my father and I spent two days and nights together looking at each other, rarely speaking.

  He asked once if I would give up my job in Turkey to stay with h
im till he got back on his feet. He asked me when he was drunk, and I soberly said no.

  The last time I saw my father was in the San Diego jail. He had borrowed my Ford while I sat around drinking and trading summer stories with a Princeton friend who had just driven across Mexico in a Cadillac hearse. My friend had started off with five fellow travelers, and now was alone. He had frightened off the others with serious drinking, a quart a day first of gin and then tequila and then mescal. There had been consequential mischief: my friend had spent a week in a Mazatlán jail after a misunderstanding with a pack of mariachis and a taxi driver, and he had a deep cut under his eye when he rolled in tired, drunk, hungry, and broke.

  While we prepared for bed my father called. He wanted me at once, at the jailhouse. He told me over the phone that he had been “wronged.” I found him in a holding tank among hookers, sailors, the usual Saturday night gang in a municipal jail. He explained: he had made an illegal U-turn and a cop had pulled him over. He had just bought some bacon and eggs, my father said, check for myself, they were in the car, he was just shopping for breakfast food for my guest. The cop had been abusive, so my father had stammered at him, abusively. The policeman assumed that my father was drunk, which he was not. It was surprising that my father was not drunk, but in truth he was not.

  The police evidently now believed that my father had not been drunk, and they prepared to give him back to me. It would be a few minutes, the desk sergeant said. I explained this to my Princeton friend, waiting outside in his Cadillac hearse. He seemed befuddled, asked several times where we were, what was going on. I didn’t understand then how far gone my friend was, that in a couple of years it would take weeks to dry him out in the violent ward at Bellevue, that he had been walking the line since freshman year. I thought he was just like me, a fun-loving, spit-in-their-eye kind of chap, an outlaw like my father at our age.

  The police called Sacramento. They checked routinely on everyone they booked; it was regulation procedure. They seemed sheepish about the episode, “just a misunderstanding.” My father, I thought, was unusually indifferent to the injustice, unusually willing to let bygones be bygones and be on his way.

  The call to Sacramento was answered with urgency. My father was—resonant word—“wanted.” There was a warrant outstanding for his arrest; the charge was Grand Theft Auto. The auto was an Abarth-Allemagne, “so pretty” my father explained, nine thousand 1961 dollars. He had done his car scam after all. He had bought the thing off a showroom floor with a check. The check had his true name stamped on it but otherwise, in the assurances it made—the implication that the Bank of America had some loose association with my father and would exchange the piece of paper for cash—the piece of paper was misleading. Just as my father had predicted, the salesman and dealer had struggled against their better instincts when he faced them with a choice: I’ll take the car now, at once, for this check. Or I won’t take it at all. Consumers in the San Diego area had been learning to get through one week and then another without owning Abarth-Allemagnes; greed had triumphed over prudence, once again. My father had taken the car into Nevada as soon as he “bought” it, when Toby arrived. He had driven it flat out till it caught on fire, and then its pretty paint was sandblasted by a desert storm. The car, now in the hands of the dealer, was a disappointment to the dealer.

  Most of this I learned from the police. My father was returned to the tank, and I talked to him through the sturdy wire mesh, above the bedlam of San Diego street folk. I asked my father if the story I had just heard was true. He shrugged. I asked again, and again he shrugged. “Never explain, never apologize”; he liked to say that. I told him that what he had done was wrong. I had many times suggested such things to him with sullenness and despairing sighs, but I had never before directly charged him with doing wrong. When I told my father that what he had done was wrong he stared at me, as though I had at last truly puzzled him.

  “Don’t you understand me at all?” he asked. “Do you think I care what they think is wrong?”

  I spoke with a bail bondsman. I would be obliged to guarantee my father’s appearance in court. I would remain in California, right? But I was due at a job ten days later, out of the state, half way around the world, as far from the San Diego jail as it was possible to travel and still stay on this earth. This was not interesting to the bail bondsman, who repeated his conditions.

  I woke up my Princeton friend. He still didn’t know where he was, and didn’t understand the dilemma except that it was serious. He began to moan, as though he had a terrible bellyache, so I let him sleep it off in the back of the hearse, untroubled by this particular complication.

  I yelled at my father through the mesh. Would he appear in court if I stood bail for him? I explained to him the bind I was in, the bind he had put me in. He did not seem sympathetic. Like the bondsman, he did not seem interested in the delicate character of my choice. I asked him bluntly: If I went to the edge for him, would he promise to come to court? He would promise nothing. He said I should do as I pleased, that he owed me no promises, he owed me nothing.

  I did not make bail. I crossed the country with my Princeton friend, and flew away to Turkey. My father conned the bondsman out of ten thousand, plus ten percent, the bondsman’s vigorish. Then he jumped jurisdiction, and was caught. And he was punished. They paid him back with interest for the space he had occupied, the airs he had put on, the fictions he had enacted. He had told me he hoped I’d never be a reviewer, a critic. I understand. Out in the real world the critics have teeth, and use them.

  22

  I TAUGHT two years in Turkey, at Robert College and Istanbul University. I couldn’t have asked for a better hideout. I read and sent long letters home which, taken together, made the best fiction I had written. I sailed in Greece, skied in Austria, spent the summer of 1962 in Paris, house-sitting a flat at 50 rue Jacob. My father reached me there with a letter forwarded from Turkey: he was free, what could I do for him? He wanted money, a job, a place to live. What were my plans for him?

  I tried. I telephoned friends and their parents. I wrote Sikorsky. I asked the Princeton placement office for help. I sent a little money. But the case was hopeless, no one could help my father. I wrote him a letter brimming with fond recollections, but without my return address in Paris. I had a friend mail the letter from Italy. Still, I expected him any minute, waited for his knock. Waiting spoiled my Paris holiday. Tough luck. I had come to the Left Bank to write. I wore a beard and rheumy eyes; I dressed in tatters, drove a black motorcycle. After my father’s letter I took to wasting hours at a stretch, whole days. I played solitaire sitting cross-legged on the parquet floor of my drawing-room, while outside the world went about its sunny city business. Smoking hashish, I’d listen to the Jazz Messengers or the MJQ, No Sun in Venice. At such moments my mind was as empty as I could will it to be, but it was never empty of my father. A letter to my mother from this period sighs that “every backward look reveals a body hanging from the family tree.” I think I must have stolen the line. It doesn’t sound like mine, and it has too much zip for the time of its composition.

  In the winter of 1963 I shaved off my beard the better to impress a Fulbright interviewer at the American consulate in Istanbul. When I met the interviewer he was wearing a beard like the Great Emancipator’s. He gave me the Fulbright anyway, and I went to England, to Cambridge, to study with George Steiner. My father was proud of this attainment, and when he congratulated me on it he told me the book he was most enjoying in prison (he was back) was The Wind in the Willows. I had sent it to him to cheer him up; he especially liked Mr. Toad’s escape from jail in the disguise of a washerwoman. In response to my father’s letter of congratulation I asked him a simple question: was he a Jew? He wrote back: “I am weary unto death of that dumb question. Don’t ask it again.”

  It was by now a serious question. During a visit home to New York at the end of my first semester at Cambridge I had met someone I wanted to marry, who wanted to marry me. H
er parents did not approve, for many reasons. They had noticed dirt beneath my fingernails when I dined with them, they knew I had nothing to commend me other than a scholarship at a foreign university, they knew my father was a yardbird, and they believed I was a Jew.

  Their daughter and I wished to prevail, and finally we did. But her parents were relentless in their opposition. I nevertheless gave George Steiner our good news. My wife has the Yankee Christian name Priscilla, and a New England surname.

  “Is she a gentile?”

  “Yes,” I answered, puzzled by Steiner’s question.

  “Well,” he said, “don’t underestimate the difficulties.”

  “What difficulties?”

  “Of a Jew marrying a gentile.” Steiner was not legendary for his patience with slow thinkers, and he was losing patience with me.

  “I’m not a Jew,” I said.

  “Of course you are.”

  “No,” I said. “My father says I’m not.”

  Steiner laughed. “I don’t care what he says. I’m a Jew, and so are you. Anyone can see it. Don’t be silly. Of course you’re a Jew.”

  “My mother is Irish, and she says my father is not a Jew.”

  “Your mother is mistaken.”

  And then Steiner, thank Christ, changed the subject to tragic literature.

  I left Cambridge after a year. I don’t know why I left. I meant to return after a summer working at The Washington Post, but the summer ended, and I didn’t leave. My mother now lived in Washington, and so did Toby, sent down from The Hill to a public high school. I had last seen my mother when I was fifteen and she was thirty-four; now she was forty-five and I was twenty-six going on forty. Our first night together, as soon as the dinner dishes were cleared away, I began to ask questions: