Duke of Deception (11 page)

They wheeled me in for ether with my mother beside me promising ice cream when it was over, and my father promising a new bike, and when I awoke there was the ice cream, and there was the bike; I was used to good care and kept promises.

In the next room was a kid about my age, who had been there almost a year. He had accidentally set fire to himself, and his face was grotesquely disfigured, like the face of the pilot shot down over Rabal. My father would stop to talk with the burned kid, and while I was too young to understand all the intricate twists of courage, I knew that boy was special, like the pilot with the trains, and when my father talked with the boy I sometimes caught my father looking at me, measuring himself, I guess, or maybe me, wondering how we’d do.

Sometimes that summer my parents would take me with them to wrestling matches. My father knew the wrestling impresario, a woman who smoked cigars and could tease him. There was a trick to teasing Duke. It was okay, quite merry, up to a point. If the line was crossed into what he perceived as presumption or malice, he’d blow.

Once only as a kid was I humiliated for him, and that time he wasn’t humiliated at all, just confused. It was at a factory softball game, engineers versus grease monkeys. They had asked my old man to be plate umpire. I sat in the bleachers behind home with two friends and my mother, and at first I was proud. Then the game heated up, and some calls were disputed, and it was clear
now that my father didn’t know much about baseball, and thought of the event as better-humored than it was. Some people in the stands shouted at him, wisecracking about his eyesight and his attention span. Then someone yelled “kill the umpire” and I turned to the general source of the noise and screamed at no one in particular to shut up, and my mother shushed me, but my anger amused the crowd, which began to chant in unison KILL THE UMPIRE KILL THE UMPIRE KILL THE UMPIRE. Then my father called what was probably a ball a third strike, and the batter wheeled on him and shook his fist at my father’s face which I couldn’t see behind his mask. I began to cry, and my mother took me away. My friends were afraid to speak all the way home, and none of us mentioned that softball game again.

M
Y
mother, married to Duke more than eight years, had never loved him. And yet: “I never thought of leaving him.” In Birmingham Rosemary changed her attitude toward status quo. Two circumstances converged: Duke met a woman who fell in love with him, and Rosemary met a man who fell in love with her. The story comes from my mother.

Duke’s lover was young and pretty, a talented painter from Mississippi who worked in the design department of Bechtel, McCone and Parsons. Rosemary learned about her in 1944 at a friend’s Thanksgiving party. She was asked where Duke was, and said he was shooting wild turkeys upstate, and a couple of married men laughed, and so the last to hear heard. A few weeks later she came face to face with Betty, after Duke had promised never to see her again. My mother had come by bus to prowl through downtown department stores; it was the middle of Duke’s workday, and my mother was surprised to see the Packard parked at a store entrance, and just as she saw my father, he saw her. He was alarmed, but beckoned her to join him in the car.

“Why should I? I’m shopping. Why are you here?”

My mother knew why he was there, and just then saw Betty, a pale redhead, leave the store my mother had been about to enter. Rosemary climbed into the Packard, and my father began to drive away when a woman’s voice followed them:

“Duke! Where are you going? Wait!”

To his marginal credit my father stepped on the brake instead of the gas. My mother remembers the rest:

“She opened the door of the Packard before she noticed me. She recognized me from the plant, and clapped her hand over her mouth and said ‘Oh, my God!’ It was funny, like something at a play. Duke recovered fast. He climbed out of the car, and came to my side to help me out, and introduced us quite properly, without even stammering. Then he said to me, ‘Let’s go home.’ But I said no, I wasn’t finished shopping. And then I walked away. I felt smug; I knew I’d handled myself well. When I arrived home I found him in the library. You were on his lap, bathed, fed, and in your trap-door Doctor Dentons. Duke was reading you a poem from
Now We Are Six
, ‘The Knight Whose Armour Didn’t Squeak.’ It was a lovely, sweet domestic portrait. When he saw me he smiled and said, ‘Look, Mummy’s home, give Mummy a kiss.’ When I headed upstairs to my room he dumped you off his lap, without ceremony, and ran after me: ‘Now wait a minute, this isn’t what you think …’ ”

My mother had been busy, too. She did volunteer work for the Red Cross, winding bandages, packing parachutes and driving for the motor corps, giving rides to soldiers who came into town. She met many pilots.

“I was the first human they saw when they stepped off the wing, and I guess they figured it didn’t hurt to try, so most of them asked me for dates. I’d laugh and say no; it didn’t bother me, gave my ego a boost. But this one, a lieutenant, young and handsome, struck a responsive chord in me, and I gave him my name and phone number. That was the first time.”

My mother and father were at a movie, and when they came home they found a note from the maid beside the telephone, Lieutenant Sullivan had called Rosemary.

“Duke was outraged that I would give my number to a pilot, of all people! I laughed in his face: ‘Come off it! Do you really want to get into all that with me?’ ”

They fought. Then Mother went to a lawyer, and he served papers on my father. Rosemary saw all she wished of Lieutenant
Sullivan, and Betty tried to see Duke, and gave him an ultimatum: someone had asked to marry her, she would rather marry my father, what did he want to do? He wanted to heal things with my mother, who couldn’t understand why.

“Betty was pretty, and bright and very refined. There would have been financial considerations, of course, but I wouldn’t have made trouble for them.”

My father advised Betty to marry her admirer, and begged my mother to reconsider, but she was adamant, maybe in love, maybe not in love. In any case, they were dead-ended, and the time had come to tell me what was what.

We sat on the steps of the back porch at Hastings Place about dusk of a breezy evening in early summer. My mother and father spoke gently and precisely. There were no storms, and they led to the hard news slowly, but I saw it coming from miles off. Any kid can see it coming. Maybe I tried to argue with them, and probably I cried, but mostly I remember trying to swallow. I remember too my father saying, truly, that he didn’t want this. So I knew my mother did, and there opened between us a separation, not her fault, certainly, but there.

They left me alone finally, sitting on the bottom step. I threw a stone, hard, at a bird hopping across the backyard. I missed it, and didn’t throw another.

Father and Mother agreed that she’d take me to Martha’s Vineyard for a couple of months, to visit friends. We went to Oak Bluffs, and I spent hours every day walking the beach alone, or haunting the penny arcade and missing my father. Twenty years later I drove through that gingerbread town on a bright day, and my good humor vanished as though a shade had been drawn across the present.

My father wrote my mother every day, elegant pleas for her to come home, promises of reform. Lieutenant Sullivan wrote letters, too, from Dallas, where he was now stationed at Love Field, and they had greater effect than my father’s. I would lie awake in the little cottage where Rosemary and I were guests of Duke’s friends, a husband and wife who had once worked for him, and I’d hear
the names—
Duke … Sully …
—and sometimes laughter, and sometimes what sounded to my straining and uncomprehending senses like a plot that did not mean my father well.

Rosemary decided to join her lover in Dallas. We made a hellish late August journey on troop trains, traveling by coach from Boston to Chicago without a dining car, and my mother fueled me with cookies and Cokes, and when we reached Chicago I was failing. I threw up on the railroad platform, and while we waited for the Dallas train my mother took me to a tearoom, because it had no provocative smell of food.

“We had to wait forever, because soldiers had priority. I was wearing a brand-new green silk dress, because I wanted to knock Sully’s eyes out when we reached Dallas. I ordered you tea, and it came up right away, all over the dress. I jumped away from the table, so angry and upset; I knew it wasn’t your fault, but you were the one who ruined it, and I began shouting at you, and you were crying. So of course this waitress charged over: ‘It’s not his fault!’ She looked at me as though I was such a bitch. I don’t know; just another low moment, I guess.”

It was like hellfire going south; the windows wouldn’t open, and we had to stand most of the way. The soldiers took me up as a mascot, and taught me their high school songs.

Dallas was no more gratifying than the train that brought us there. Lieutenant Sullivan was four years younger than Rosemary, who was twenty-seven. He had proposed marriage, but the first time he took her dating to the officers’ club at Love Field, where they were joined by his friends and their teen-aged dates, he and my mother decided they weren’t destined for each other after all, and that was that; they never met again.

My father didn’t know where we were, although Rosemary was once again boarding with a couple of his friends, who worked for North American Aviation in Fort Worth. I was left with a sitter by day, and often by night, and I never lay off pestering her,
I want my daddy
. Telling me this now my mother assumes that I missed Birmingham because our life in Texas was so mean; when I suggest that I missed my father she looks puzzled.

She sought a job, without luck. “I tried Neiman-Marcus, as a
salesgirl, but I guess I wasn’t glamorous enough. Finally I was offered a job as a hostess in a restaurant, twenty dollars a week, but your sitter cost me that much, and I realized I was banging my head against a stone wall, and so I called Duke, and I guess I led him on, and got him to say he loved me and wanted me back, and I said I’d come back. Then a friend found me a job at North American, and I could have kicked myself, because I’d promised you we were going home, and we had to. But I always wondered what would have happened if I’d stayed. Oh, well.”

My brother was born nine months after the homecoming night. Duke had arranged a party:

“We had a wingding,” Mother says, “and I felt emotional, thinking I’d cut off all my chances for happiness, forever, and I got loaded, and that night Toby was conceived.”

Another “mistake,” another “accident.” The fragility of life, the bleak hazard and blind luck! My brother came as I came, an unwelcome surprise, and we were told this offhandedly, as though coming here or not coming here were all one, two simple facts.

The names are absurd.
Arthur
for a legendary English king, pattern of honor.
Geoffrey
(with its awful monosyllabic abbreviation), an olde monniker to seal the Duke’s connection with that scepter’d isle, blessèd plot, other Eden, homeland of Purdey, Garrard, Harrod’s and The Connaught. Then
Toby
, not, God knows, the Tobias of the Old Testament and not even Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, but Toby as in Toby jugs, those ghastly ceramic knickknacks that my father collected, favoring Dickensian “characters.” These curios, so very British, he held in as high esteem as his hunting prints, so Toby was lovingly titled.

“Bud Bowser put the skids to your dad.”

He worked for my father, who had brought him to Birmingham from California. Mother and I returned to Hastings Place to find him living in the guest room. He was a little guy, with overhanging teeth and a pencil-line mustache, and he developed an unpleasant affection for my mother, who didn’t return it.

“He wouldn’t stop making passes, and finally I told your father,
who tossed him out on his ear. He didn’t hit Bowser—I asked him not to—but he frightened the weasel half to death.”

So Bowser wrote Yale, requesting a copy of my father’s transcript, and the blank sheet he got back he took to Duke’s superiors. They didn’t fire him just then; there was a war to be won. But my father was rubbing their fur the wrong way: the affair with Betty had violated office proprieties, and every week someone telephoned trying to put a lien on my father’s salary, and when he drank too much he became abusive, and he had no respect for paperwork. All he could do was modify airplanes.

One day Joe Freedman received a call from Birmingham. Freedman had been a friend and attorney to The Doctor: he was the first mayor of West Hartford, a stage Jew who smoked cigars, told risqué (which he called “risky”) jokes in Pullman cars, wore a pinky ring, and knew his way around. His brother Max was counsel to the Marx Brothers, and the Freedman Brothers played spectacular poker, and called all women “broads.” Joe was on retainer, for life and no pay, to my father, who loved him. The call to my father’s Hartford attorney came from a high executive officer of Bechtel, McCone and Parsons. Look, the man said, Mr. Wolff has huge debts in Birmingham, and has drawn thousands of dollars against his salary.

Joe Freedman whistled.

Well, said Duke’s superior, the matter is awkward, of course, but he tells us not to fret, that his trust fund will come available in six months.

Freedman laughed. “What trust fund?”

There was an uncomfortable silence at the other end of the telephone.

“Hey, what you have here is a man stiffed you. You guys are in business, haven’t you ever met a deadbeat?”

The silent one on the other end spoke to confess that he had heard of such a creature.

“Now you know one close up, Duke Wolff. Why don’t you can him?”

“Because he’s a genius,” said the man on the other end.

But when V-E Day came, that executive fired The Duke, gave
him an hour to clear out his desk, and assured him he was washed up in aviation. Seventeen years later, a week after the Bay of Pigs invasion, my old man, Saunders Ansell-Wolff III, applied for a position as an investment consultant. He gave as a professional and character reference the man who fired him that day, John McCone, Director of the CIA.