Duke of Deception (7 page)

My father borrowed his way home, and worked at menial jobs around Hartford, even picking tobacco for cigar wrappers with stoop-labor migrants for a few weeks. Broke, he nevertheless learned to fly, and fell in love for good with airplanes, but again his father, without malice or intention, diluted his pride. The week after my father’s first solo flight there was a headline in the
Hartford Times:
PHYSICIAN PILOTS PLANE AT
77: “Always possessed of an adventurous and inquiring spirit, Dr. Wolff piloted an airplane at the age of 77 without any previous instruction. While riding in a plane over Brainard Field, he took over the controls.”

Not long after, Bill Haas heard Duke tell someone he had had a trying day, flying the mail from Hartford to Boston through a thunderstorm. Haas called my father on his fiction, told listeners that Duke could fly, but not that well, and had never flown the mail. My father exploded at this betrayal with the hurt anger of someone truly wronged, and he left Haas with the burden of believing that, yes, he
had
wronged his cousin: “I shouldn’t have butted in,” he told me.

The closest Duke could come to a job in aviation was to clean engine parts at Pratt & Whitney for two bits an hour. While he was at this work Duke’s comrades struck the plant, and my father was used, successfully, as the workers’ and managers’ go-between. He was not in later life ashamed of this work, so I learned of it from him, but that is almost all of his Hartford life I do know from
him. He worked elbow-deep in bins of gunk that cut grease and carbon from odds and ends of airplane engines due for overhaul. He’d then take his lunch from a fitted wicker picnic basket that held sandwiches with their crusts removed by the Norwegian cook, a linen napkin, and a fruit knife to pare an apple’s scrubbed skin. He did not discourage these dandy airs, just as he liked to be called Duke and allowed himself to be driven to a strike meeting by his father’s chauffeur in his father’s Rolls-Royce.

In 1932, at twenty-four, he tried to enlist in the Navy, and was rejected for his stammer. Two years later he was tentatively accepted for Army officers’ training school until a major in the personnel office at Governor’s Island, New York, where Duke had enlisted, received a reply to his routine query to Manlius for confirmation of my father’s accomplishments there: “Mr. Wolff did not complete four years of R.O.T.C., nor was he a Second Lieutenant of the machine gun company while at this institution.”

So until 1936 my father mostly drank too much at parties, played the banjo and piano, read novels and poems, became a fabled clothes-wearing man, and waited for something to happen to him.

R
OSEMARY
Loftus, my mother, met Duke during the great Hartford flood of March 1936. The Connecticut River’s excitement had stopped the city dead, and my father with half a dozen of his sidekicks had holed up in a couple of suites at the Hueblein Hotel, where they ran out of girls before they ran out of gin. My mother was nineteen, with time on her hands. After Sunday mass a “fast” friend asked if she’d like a blind date and my mother, bored, said sure, she’d take potluck.

The first time my mother saw him, my father was sitting in the back seat of a friend’s new convertible, with a handsome girl giggling on his lap. My father was too informal for my mother’s taste: “He seemed tight, and he needed a shave. He was wearing battered sneakers and white flannels and no socks. He was not an impressive figure.”

My mother was put off by a car filled with people—Walter and Nervy and Piggy and Jack and Duke—who seemed to have known one another forever, who traded private jokes that excluded her. They had all been drinking, and my mother didn’t much like to drink. Still, she went with them to the Hueblein. Rosemary liked to be a good sport.

When she got to the hotel, and went upstairs to Duke’s room, he offered her a drink. Was he her blind date? She never found out. To my father’s astonishment Rosemary declined a cup filled with
warm gin, just as an Air Corps colonel emerged from an adjoining bedroom buttoning his fly and grinning. Rosemary said she would like to be returned home.

Her innocence, pep, and girlish beauty—alone or in combination—powerfully attracted my father, and he asked to see her again, named a night. She said she would be baby-sitting then, so he asked if he could sit with her and talk. Without knowing exactly why, Rosemary accepted this proposal.

When my mother told me this story a couple of years ago, speaking with her measured, flat, accentless voice, I had just finished reading “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Delmore Schwartz’s autobiographical imagining of his parents’ courtship, a premonition of their bitter divisions. The story’s narrator slumps in a shabby theater, where he watches his parents come together in a crude movie which he tries betimes to interrupt, disturbing the audience. He calls out to the figures jittering across the screen: “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

As my mother began her story of disappointment, humiliation and want, infrequently relieved by affection and satisfaction, I didn’t feel that way at all. I sat across from her, cheering my father on, cheering her on, marveling at the chance conjunction that joined them, made my brother, made me, shaped us all. My mother talked, her voice low, even, calm and resigned, anxious to get the facts right.

(Before I began to work on this book there had for many years been a great distance between my mother and me, a chilling formality. My mother is not cold, and she is not stiff. She has been unfailingly warm and loving with my boys, and with my wife. She laughs a lot, teases, likes to be teased. But neither of us, I think, trusted the other’s love.

There is much we don’t know about each other. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I saw my mother three times, for a total of about ten days. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six I never saw her. When I was twelve my mother was thirty-two, still
unfinished, not yet what she would become. I had known her under terrible pressure, but when the pressure was relieved, or she learned to live with it, my mother returned to her natural gaiety and energy. During the years I did not see my mother she was a community leader, a joiner, an advice-giver, a sportswoman, a political activist.

When my mother and I had discussed my childhood in the past, we had never gotten very far before one did the other some unintended injury. I once mentioned to my mother a barbecue restaurant “we” had liked, and my mother replied: “I used to go there, too.” To her
we
meant simply my father and me, which is what it usually meant to me, but not at that moment. Against such stupid barriers, then, we stumbled, again and again, and we learned, despite mutual good will, to defend ourselves with distance.

When my mother agreed to help me with this book, when she put her life in my hands, I decided to interview her with a tape recorder, in the hope that by talking to it my mother could lose sight of me, forget that a judge sat listening. This cold instrument worked wonders for us. My mother opened up while the spools turned, reached into her memory with self-assurance and ease, relaxed her defenses.

It wasn’t until I transcribed her words, twelve hours of talk, that I appreciated the full force of her gift to me. I had been prepared to save my mother from those little gaffes of speech that everyone commits, errors of tense and number and parallelism, the
ahs
and
ughs
and
I
-
means
and
you-knows
that deface interviews. And because my mother is not an articulate woman I had expected to give her special protection against her infelicities of speech. But I was wrong about what I thought I had heard her say to my tape recorder; perhaps I have been wrong about what I heard her say as long as I have known her. For here were finished sentences and paragraphs, calculated and precise. We have no documents in our family to restore my mother’s past with my father to the present, and that was what my mother wished to do. She had thought hard about it, and wanted me to have it, as it was, plain. When I asked a hard question, my mother paused, and tried
hard to answer it. If I didn’t know what to ask, my mother asked for me.

I believe she may have paid a heavy toll for her precision and honesty, that her speech in this book may appear cold, unfeeling. It is no such thing. It is respectful of particulars, without false piety or sentiment. What my mother told me of our history brought us together again, and we had a long way to journey from there to here.)

Duke appeared at the house where Rosemary was baby-sitting, and behaved himself. He sat across a coffee table from her and told stories at his own expense, entertained and charmed her. “But he didn’t attract me.”

When my mother met him, my father was living at home. The Doctor was dying of stomach cancer, and Duke spent much time with him. What could they have said to each other, so late in the season? Duke got by on a dollar a day and all he could borrow; his friends Gifford Pinchot and Nervy Smith and Wellington Glover and Jack Lester and Piggy Gillette all had plenty, enough for everyone, and soon my mother began going with my father and these people to parties in Hartford and New York and Boston and New Haven.

“Although I was not what you’d call innocent, I had never run around with people who were quite so open about their mischief. Your father led this group; he seemed, then, to prefer weak friends.”

If Rosemary’s feeling for Duke was so tepid, why did she bother with him?

“The pressure at home was terrible.”

Yes, it was. At the funeral of Commander Stephen A. Loftus my brother wept. My mother, his mother, the commander’s only daughter, asked why. “What’s so sad?” (In fact my brother was moved to tears not by a dead man in a box but by the occasion, a military ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. My brother was in the Army, and liked the guns and uniforms and flags, was moved to tears by rows of crosses.)

My mother’s father was a time-serving prig and bully; he was
narrow, envious, bigoted, self-important, peacock-proud and snake-mean. His parents had come to America from Ireland during the potato famines, and he and several brothers were born here in awful poverty.

A family photograph taken at the turn of the century, where they fetched up, shows weathered peasants, the teenagers looking forty, dressed in shiny black worsted church clothes. The brothers’ wrists hang from frayed, stiff jacket cuffs, and the sleeves are too short. Everyone but the eldest brother wears a hand-me-down, and far down the line comes Mother’s father, the only Loftus with clean fingernails. My mother pointed to his brothers:
This one died in Ludlow in the mines, a strike or a cave-in, can’t remember which; that one killed a railroad bull, and went to prison; this gentle-looking boy just disappeared …

The second youngest, Stephen, went to sea in 1903 as a cabin boy, and came out of the Navy a commander in 1944. He was what they call a Mustang, a man with brilliantly spit-shined shoes who pulled himself up through the ranks. He served during two world wars and never, whether from luck or cunning, heard a shot fired in anger. Once he was court-martialed for having cut with water a few thousand bottles of ketchup. He was a chief mess officer at Pearl Harbor then and had found a way to shave costs. For his offense he got a reprimand: he hadn’t pocketed the savings, wasn’t venal, was just a bootlicker. He was hated by his men and a joke to his fellow officers, who endured him for his efficiency and unwavering conviction that military regulations were divinely inspired.

And what a tyrant he was at home! He married Mary Lucille Powers in 1915, a year before my mother was born. My grandmother, called Mae, was sweet, with gentle Irish good looks, raven hair, high color on high cheeks, blue eyes. She was twenty-five—a Denver telephone operator with a weak heart from rheumatic fever—when she married the up-and-coming sailor. Rosemary’s mother was the daughter of a domestic servant and a manual laborer on the Denver and Rio Railroad who had stowed away from Ireland, where he got himself in political trouble.

The heart has its mysteries. Stephen Loftus, awful as he was,
was handsome in a frosty, stiff-backed way. He was a good dancer, ambitious, cocksure. My only memory of him is set near Atlantic City, in Margate, New Jersey, where he had retired from the Navy. I was nine, and he had just taught me to tie my shoes the Navy way. I am in his debt for this, only this. My shoes have never come untied since. Pleased with his powers of instruction, he took me for a brisk stroll, what he called a “constitutional,” along the boardwalk. His shoes were tiny, and he clicked his heels in a metronomic beat against the rotting planks as we walked. I paused for a moment to watch the Atlantic rollers break against the beach, and he gripped my shoulder, just a bit harder than he should have gripped it.

“You’re like your father,” he told me. “Wasting your time, dreaming it away.”

Then he sat me down on a bench, and gave me a stubby pencil and a three-by-five spiral notebook, and instructed me to record verbatim all that he was about to tell me, that what he was going to say could turn my life off its reef-bound course, out toward the open waters of success. We sat hunched together. He was so clean, I remember, as smooth as a new tombstone, and his skin was pale as skimmed milk. He wore a thick, black wool greatcoat, even on that sunny day. His breath was foul as he confided in me, and corrected my spelling as I transcribed his secrets. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, something about the tidal rhythms of the stock market, and the nutritional benefits of un-cracked wheat. He would speak, and tap the notebook’s pages while the wind whipped at us, perceptibly lifting his hairpiece. I had never before seen a hairpiece, didn’t comprehend what was happening to the top of this man’s head. His fingers were long and delicate, and their nails were manicured. He was, perhaps, simply crazy. Later, when my mother took me to see Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger dive into a swimming pool off a high board at the end of the Steel Pier, I ask her why her father seemed so angry all the time. When she laughed too long and too hysterically at my question, I failed to guess that at that moment, so near that awful man, she was probably a little crazy, too.