Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  For, in my view, the atmosphere of Chehaw’s claustrophobic little waiting room was enough to discourage even a blind street musician from picking out blues on his guitar, no matter how tedious his wait for a train. Biased toward disaster by bruised feelings, my imagination pictured the vibrations set in motion by the winding of a trumpet within that drab, utilitarian structure: first shattering, then bringing its walls “a-tumbling down”—like Jericho’s at the sounding of Joshua’s priest-blown ram horns.

  True, Tuskegee possessed a rich musical tradition, both classical and folk, and many music lovers and musicians lived or moved through its environs, but—and my regard for Miss Harrison notwithstanding—Chehaw Station was the last place in the area where I would expect to encounter a connoisseur lying in wait to pounce upon some rash, unsuspecting musician. Sure, a connoisseur might hear the haunting, blues-echoing, train-whistle rhapsodies blared by fast express trains as they thundered past—but the classics? Not a chance!

  So as Miss Harrison watched to see the effect of her words, I said with a shrug, “Yes, ma’am.”

  She smiled, her prominent eyes a-twinkle.

  “I hope so,” she said. “But if you don’t just now, you will by the time you become an artist. So remember the little man behind the stove.”

  With that, seating herself at her piano, she began thumbing through a sheaf of scores—a signal that our discussion was ended.

  So, I thought, you ask for sympathy and you get a riddle. I would have felt better if she had said, “Sorry, baby, I know how you feel, but after all, I was there, I heard you; and you treated your audience as though you were some kind of confidence man with a horn. So forget it, because I will not violate my own standards by condoning sterile musicianship.” Some such reply, by reaffirming the “sacred principles” of art to which we were both committed, would have done much to supply the emotional catharsis for which I was appealing. By refusing, she forced me to accept full responsibility and thus learn from my offense. The condition of artistic communication is, as the saying goes, hard but fair…

  Three years later, after having abandoned my hope of becoming a musician, I had just about forgotten Miss Harrison’s mythical little man behind the stove. Then, in faraway New York, concrete evidence of his actual existence arose and blasted me like the heat from an internally combusted ton of coal.

  As a member of the New York Writers’ Project, I was spending a clammy, late fall afternoon of freedom circulating a petition in support of some now long-forgotten social issue that I regarded as indispensable to the public good. I found myself inside a tenement building in San Juan Hill, a Negro district that disappeared with the coming of Lincoln Center. Starting on the top floor of the building, I had collected an acceptable number of signatures and, having descended from the ground floor to the basement level, was moving along the dimly lit hallway toward a door through which I could hear loud voices. They were male Afro-American voices, raised in violent argument. The language was profane, the style of speech a southern idiomatic vernacular such as was spoken by formally uneducated Afro-American workingmen. Reaching the door, I paused, sounding out the lay of the land before knocking to present my petition.

  But my delay led to indecision. Not, however, because of the loud, unmistakable anger sounding within; being myself a slum dweller, I knew that voices in slums are often raised in anger, but that the rhetoric of anger, being in itself cathartic, is not necessarily a prelude to physical violence. Rather, it is frequently a form of symbolic action, a verbal equivalent of fisticuffs. No, I hesitated because I realized that behind the door a mystery was unfolding. A mystery so incongruous, outrageous, and surreal that it struck me as a threat to my sense of rational order. It was as though a bizarre practical joke had been staged and its perpetrators were waiting for me, its designated but unknowing scapegoat, to arrive; a joke designed to assault my knowledge of American culture and its hierarchal dispersal. At the very least, it appeared that my pride in my knowledge of my own people was under attack.

  For the angry voices behind the door were proclaiming an intimate familiarity with a subject of which, by all the logic of their linguistically projected social status, they should have been oblivious. The subject of their contention confounded all my assumptions regarding the correlation between educational levels, class, race, and the possession of conscious culture. Impossible as it seemed, these foulmouthed black workingmen were locked in verbal combat over which of two celebrated Metropolitan Opera divas was the superior soprano!

  I myself attended the opera only when I could raise the funds, and I knew full well that opera going was far from the usual cultural pursuit of men identified with the linguistic style of such voices. And yet, confounding such facile logic, they were voicing (and loudly) a familiarity with the Met far greater than my own. In their graphic, irreverent, and vehement criticism they were describing not only the sopranos’ acting abilities but were ridiculing the gestures with which each gave animation to her roles, and they shouted strong opinions as to the ranges of the divas’ vocal equipment. Thus, with such a distortion of perspective being imposed upon me, I was challenged either to solve the mystery of their knowledge by entering into their midst or to leave the building with my sense of logic reduced forever to a level of college-trained absurdity.

  So challenged, I knocked. I knocked out of curiosity, I knocked out of outrage. I knocked in fear and trembling. I knocked in anticipation of whatever insights—malicious or transcendent, I no longer cared which—I would discover beyond the door.

  For a moment there was an abrupt and portentous silence; then came the sound of chair legs thumping dully upon the floor, followed by further silence. I knocked again, loudly, with an authority fired by an impatient and anxious urgency.

  Again silence—until a gravel voice boomed an annoyed “Come in!”

  Opening the door with an unsteady hand, I looked inside, and was even less prepared for the scene that met my eyes than for the content of their loud-mouthed contention.

  In a small, rank-smelling, lamp-lit room, four huge black men sat sprawled around a circular dining-room table, looking toward me with undisguised hostility. The sooty-chimneyed lamp glowed in the center of the bare oak table, casting its yellow light upon four water tumblers and a half-empty pint of whiskey. As the men straightened in their chairs I became aware of a fireplace with a coal fire glowing in its grate, and leaning against the ornate marble facing of its mantelpiece, I saw four enormous coal scoops.

  “All right,” one of the men said, rising to his feet. “What the hell can we do for you?”

  “And we ain’t buying nothing, buddy,” one of the seated men added, his palm slapping the table.

  Closing the door, I moved forward, holding my petition like a flag of truce before me, noting that the men wore faded blue overalls and jumper jackets, and becoming aware that while all were of dark complexion, their blackness was accentuated in the dim lamplight by the dust and grime of their profession.

  “Come on, man, speak up,” the man who had arisen said. “We ain’t got all day.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but I thought you might be interested in supporting my petition,” and began hurriedly to explain.

  “Say,” one of the men said, “you look like one of them relief investigators. You’re not out to jive us, are you?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” I said. “I happen to work on the Writers’ Project….”

  The standing man leaned toward me. “You on the Writers’ Project?” he said, looking me up and down.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m a writer.”

  “Now is that right?” he said. “How long you been writing?”

  I hesitated. “About a year,” I said.

  He grinned, looking at the others. “Y’all hear that? Ole Homeboy here has done up and jumped on the gravy train! Now that’s pretty good. Pretty damn good! So what did you do before that?” he said.

  “I studied music,” I said, �
��at Tuskegee.”

  “Hey, now!” the standing man said. “They got a damn good choir down there. Y’all remember back when they opened Radio City? They had that fellow William L. Dawson for a director. Son, let’s see that paper.”

  Relieved, I handed him the petition, watching him stretch it between his hardened hands. After a moment of soundlessly mouthing the words of its appeal, he gave me a skeptical look and turned to the others.

  “What the hell,” he said, “signing this piece of paper won’t do no good, but since Home here’s a musician, it won’t do us no harm to help him out. Let’s go along with him.”

  Fishing a blunt-pointed pencil from the bib of his overalls, he wrote his name and passed the petition to his friends, who followed suit.

  This took some time, and as I watched the petition move from hand to hand, I could barely contain myself or control my need to unravel the mystery that had now become far more important than just getting their signatures on my petition.

  “There you go,” the last one said, extending the petition toward me. “Having our names on there don’t mean a thing, but you got ’em.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  They watched me with amused eyes, expecting me to leave, but, clearing my throat nervously, I stood in my tracks, too intrigued to leave and suddenly too embarrassed to ask my question.

  “So what’er you waiting for?” one of them said. “You got what you came for. What else do you want?”

  And then I blurted it out. “I’d like to ask you just one question,” I said.

  “Like what?” the standing one said.

  “Like where on earth did you gentlemen learn so much about grand opera?”

  For a moment he stared at me with parted lips; then, pounding the mantelpiece with his palm, he collapsed with a roar of laughter. As the laughter of the others erupted like a string of giant firecrackers I looked on with growing feelings of embarrassment and insult, trying to grasp the handle to what appeared to be an unfriendly joke. Finally, wiping coal-dust-stained tears from his cheeks, he interrupted his laughter long enough to initiate me into the mystery.

  “Hell, son,” he laughed, “we learned it down at the Met, that’s where…”

  “You learned it where?”

  “At the Metropolitan Opera, just like I told you. Strip us fellows down and give us some costumes and we make about the finest damn bunch of Egyptians you ever seen. Hell, we been down there wearing leopard skins and carrying spears or waving things like palm leafs and ostrich-tail fans for years!”

  Now, purged by the revelation, and with Hazel Harrison’s voice echoing in my ears, it was my turn to roar with laughter. With a shock of recognition I joined them in appreciation of the hilarious American joke that centered on the incongruities of race, economic status, and culture. My sense of order restored, my appreciation of the arcane ways of American cultural possibility was vastly extended. The men were products of both past and present; were both coal heavers and Met extras; were both workingmen and opera buffs. Seen in the clear, pluralistic, melting-pot light of American cultural possibility there was no contradiction. The joke, the apparent contradiction, sprang from my attempting to see them by the light of social concepts that cast less illumination than an inert lump of coal. I was delighted, because during a moment when I least expected to encounter the little man behind the stove (Miss Harrison’s vernacular music critic, as it were), I had stumbled upon four such men. Not behind the stove, it is true, but even more wondrously, they had materialized at an even more unexpected location: at the depth of the American social hierarchy and, of all possible hiding places, behind a coal pile. Where there’s a melting pot there’s smoke, and where there’s smoke it is not simply optimistic to expect fire, it’s imperative to watch for the phoenix’s vernacular, but transcendent, rising.

  GEOFFREY WOLFF (1937- )

  Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father describes one of the most vital characters in American literature. A con man, grifter, thief, jailbird, drunk, and all-round fraud, Arthur Wolff (“Duke”) passed himself off as whatever sort of man the occasion demanded. Usually he claimed to be a Yale graduate and a member of the Skull and Bones society. Memorably, he worked as a project engineer during and after the war at North American Aviation, Lockheed, Northrup, Bell Helicopter, Rohn Aviation, and Boeing. He was not an engineer. The École aeronautiques at the Sorbonne, where he claimed to have earned his engineering degree, never existed.

  The Duke of Deception is a vigorous, dark, and warm book. “There was nothing to him but lies, and love,” Geoffrey Wolff writes. “I had this from him always: compassion, care, generosity, endurance.”

  Geoffrey Wolff is primarily a novelist, the author of Bad Debts (1969), The Sightseer (1974), Inklings (1977), Providence (1986), The Final Club (1990), and The Age of Consent (1995). His essays are in A Day at the Beach (1992).

  In this memoir section, the author is a Princeton undergraduate who has a temporary job at Sikorsky helicopters in Connecticut. He needs tuition for the coming year. Alice is his rich stepmother, who periodically leaves.

  from THE DUKE OF DECEPTION

  My father was a mystery, or as crazy as crazy can be. His schemes were insane. He would go to law school, become an expert on wheat speculations, advise the Algerians or Venezuelans on oil refining. He decided the jazz pianist at The Three Bears in Wilton was a genius, as good as King Cole. During the early forties in California he had “discovered” Cole playing piano in a bowling alley, and the King, responding to my father’s enthusiasm, asked the Duke to manage him. My father had laughed at the notion. This chance my father wouldn’t miss, he would produce a record for this pianist, they’d both have it made. He brought the man home, recorded his work on our out-of-tune upright using a top dollar Ampex, shot publicity snaps with a Rollei (white dinner jacket, pencil-line mustache, and rug), and led him to the mountain top. The man was my father’s age, with more or less my father’s prospects, with one greater skill and one greater vice. The piano player could play the piano better, but he was always drunk; my father was drunk only once—maybe twice—a week.

  Duke charged ahead. He charged and charged ahead. There was something about him, what he wanted he got. Salesmen loved him, he was the highest evolution of consumer. Discriminating, too: he railed against shoddy goods and cheapjack workmanship. He would actually return, for credit, an electric blender or an alpine tent that didn’t perform, by his lights, to specification. He demanded the best, and never mind the price. As for debts, they didn’t bother him at all. He said that merchants who were owed stayed on their toes, aimed to please. Dunning letters meant nothing to him. He laughed off the vulgar thrustings of the book and record clubs, with their absurd threats to take him to law. People owed a bundle, who brought out their heavy artillery, got my father’s Samuel Johnson remark: “Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound; great debts are like cannon, of loud noise but little danger.” He was slippery: he used the telephone to persuade the telephone company he should be allowed a sixth month of non-payment without suffering disconnection, because he needed to call people long distance to borrow money from them to pay his telephone bills. He was cool, but not icy. He owed a Westport barkeep a couple of hundred, and when the man died in a car accident my father was sorry, and told his widow about the debt, not that he ever paid her.

  Finally it got out of hand. It had nowhere to go but out of hand. I wearied of telling people on our stoop or through the phone that they had the wrong Arthur Wolff, that my father had just left for the hospital, or the Vale of Kashmir, or Quito. I tired of asking “How do I know you’re who you say you are?” when people asked questions about my father’s whereabouts and plans. I hated it, wanted to flee.

  It was October; there were months still to get through, too many months but too few to cobble up a miracle of loaves and find the twenty-five hundred dollars to
buy my way back into Princeton.

  My father and I were watching the Giants play the Colts in the snow for the championship when two Connecticut State troopers arrived during the first sudden death overtime. They watched with us till the game ended, and then took my father to the lockup in Danbury. He had left a bad check at The Three Bears; they were pressing charges. I found a mouthpiece who went bail, made good the check and got the charges dropped. Duke had talked with him. The old man hadn’t lost his touch at all, only with me. With me he had lost his touch.

  A week before my birthday he wrecked my Delahaye. I loved the dumb car. I was in bed when I heard him climb the driveway cursing. He was blind drunk, drunker than I’d ever seen him. He railed at me as soon as he came in, called me a phony. I feigned sleep, he burst through the room, blinded me with the overhead light, told me I was full of crap, a zero, zed, cipher, blanko, double-zero.

  “I’m leaving you,” he said.

  I laughed: “In what?”

  A mistake. His face reddened. I sat up, pretending to rub sleep from my eyes while he swore at my car, said it had damned near killed him swerving into the ditch, it could rot there for all he cared. He was usually just a finger-wagger, but I still feared him. Now he poked my bare chest with his stiff yellow finger, for punctuation. It hurt. I was afraid. Then I wasn’t afraid; I came off my bed naked, cocked my fist at my father, and said: “Leave me alone.”

  My father moved fast to his room, shut the door, and locked it. I was astounded. I don’t believe he was afraid of me; I believe he was afraid of what he might do to me. I sat on the edge of my bed, shaking with anger. He turned on his television set loud: Jack Paar. He hated Paar. There was a shot, a hollow noise from the .45. I had heard that deep, awful boom before, coming from the black cellar in Birmingham, a bedroom in Saybrook. I thought my father would kill me. That was my first thought. Then that he would kill himself, then that he had already killed himself. I heard it again, again, again. He raged, glass broke, again, again. The whole clip. Nothing. Silence from him, silence from Paar. A low moan, laughter rising to a crescendo, breaking, a howl, sobs, more laughter. I called to my father.