Duke of Deception (10 page)

He liked British manners and the mumbly, marble-chewing accent of the upper class. He couldn’t get enough of understatement, the self-deprecation of the squadron leader who had just returned from his ninth flight of the day with his Spitfire shot full of holes and three ME-109S confirmed killed,
Fox gave us rather of a chase, never mind, rum job for him
.

I wonder how much he tried to sneak past them. Americans, socially insecure, will believe anything. Hints about “Sent Pawl’s” and “Bones” register without challenge; I heard my father tell a Yale man that they were together in the same class at Yale, in the same entry of the same college, and the man was ashamed of his memory lapse rather than suspicious. The English work differently:
Duke, is it? Duke of what, old man? Oh quite, I see, Duke of nothing then, rilly. At Eton were you? What years? Then you know Bamber Lushington? No? Then you weren’t at Eton, were you?

If Arthur III stepped delicately through the minefields of British social complication, he ran amok with easy credit. Field boots from Lobb, lighters and pipes from Dunhill, tobacco from Fribourg & Treyer, a collapsible silver drinking cup from Garrard.
Hawes & Curtis made his shirts, Huntsman his hacking jacket. Holland and Holland contributed a matched pair of guns, Foyle’s threw in a few first editions, and North American Aviation—advised that their Duke was blitzing Mayfair and Belgravia—brought my father home and fired him.

When he came home in disgrace, with a steamer trunk filled with booty and no end of entertaining routines about life under the bombs, he tried at once to enlist in the Air Corps. Everything went against him: his eyes were weak, he stammered, he had a bad back, his teeth were unsatisfactory. The Navy wouldn’t have him either, but the Army said his teeth made the worst case against him, so he had all his uppers pulled, and after he got a plate Mother and I drove him to Fort Ord, where he tried one last time to enlist, and was turned away. I remember his blank silence, and for the first time he frightened me. He drove us home to Hermosa Beach and disappeared into Mexico. Mother bailed him out of jail three days later in Tijuana. The charge was drunk and disorderly.

He got a job soon enough with Rohr Aircraft. Jobs were easy then, and no one took time to meditate on the character of prospective employees; if men were sane, American, and exempt from military service, they were just fine.

My parents bought a new-built tract house in Chula Vista as soon as Rohr signed Duke on. The house hadn’t been painted, the front lawn hadn’t been seeded, when he was offered a better job as chief engineer of a B-24 and B-29 modification center in Birmingham, Alabama. We had owned and lived in that little house less than three weeks when my father sold it, and our last night there my mother read me the fable of Pandora’s box, and I lay awake staring at my father’s locked steamer trunk.

My father was paid more than a thousand a month in Birmingham, a lot of money then. The plant where he worked was run by an engineering firm called Bechtel, McCone and Parsons, and my father’s principal superiors were Ralph Parsons and John McCone, neither of whom approved of Duke’s character, both of whom recognized his energy and resourcefulness.

The plant Duke supervised was a huge network of hangars
beside the airport to which bombers fresh off assembly lines were flown by ferry pilots to Birmingham for changes or additions to their bombsights, armaments, navigational gear, or interiors. As soon as they were modified, other ferry pilots flew them to Guam or England or India. The pace of work was hectic, the pressure to perform extreme, the cost of error mortal.

It was among Duke’s inspirations in Birmingham to hire midgets to work the tight places inside wings and fuselages, to rivet joints and lead wires through places inaccessible to grosser persons. To round them up, my father sent hiring scouts with contracts and pockets filled with money to cities across America, where they hung around race tracks and booking agencies and penny arcades and carnivals, and within a few weeks a new labor force was on the case. (Later, when the war was winding down, just before my father was fired, his midgets were laid off, and I saw them protesting, milling in their city clothes with signs and sandwich boards outside the locked chain-link gate of the dismal plant, protesting how things were with a single word: UNFAIR!)

At the beginning in Birmingham my father rode high, and so did Rosemary: “I was drunk with all that money.” We spent a few weeks in a suite at the Tutweiler Hotel, looking for suitable quarters for a chief engineer, and then moved into a showplace on Beechwood Road, directly across the street from the entrance to the Mountain Brook Club.

The house was white, with a columned slate terrace surrounded by lilac and magnolia trees. Live oaks grew from an acre and more of lawn that sloped down to a boxwood hedge, and there was a formal garden out back, and a Victory Garden for vegetables, and to tend these growing things a gardener was employed, an old black man with one arm who ingratiated himself to Duke by holding open the Packard’s door when my father left for work, saying “Mornin’, Cunnel Woof.” The rest of the day the gardener napped under a shadetree, with a Mason jar of my mother’s lemonade beside him, watching the grass grow, and sometimes shooing away flies with his good arm.

I remembered this house as about the size of Mount Vernon, with race horses gamboling along a mile-long split-rail fence.
When I saw it recently it had shrunk, in beauty as well as scale, but it drove my mother and father into the poorhouse. Although the rent was only two hundred per month (my parents had never before paid half as much) and the gardener and fulltime maid together cost fifteen dollars a week, the house was unfurnished, and its many rooms were a challenge to the Wolffs’ extravagance.

My mother and father had fun. There were many friends, a rootless assortment such as war and natural calamity can throw together: artists who drew the modifications my father required, pilots, inventors, mechanics, gunsmiths, mathematicians. These people came together without histories, and were peculiarly alive to the present. The house on Beechwood Road was open to anyone passing through Birmingham who had anything to do with airplanes.

A pilot stayed with us. He had been shot down over Rabal, and was horribly burned. Natives brought him back to life and hid him from the Japanese, and he escaped on a raft. The pilot gave me a Japanese bayonet, and told me never to call Japanese people Japs. He also told me my dad was “one hell of a man.” He set up his dozen or so electric trains in our basement, with an insane network of HO gauge tracks, Gordian crossovers and model alpine villages and engines that whistled and blew steam. Where this pilot went his trains went, and when he prepared to fly his Dukefied B-29 to Guam, I saw the trains, packed in wooden crates, loaded into the plane’s bomb bay. He wore dark glasses and a flight hat with sheepskin earmuffs, and gave me the thumbs-up just before he revved his engines and rolled away.

The gardener let me draw a puff from his cigar, but my neighborhood chums wouldn’t believe this. While two of them sat listening, I telephoned the Mountain Brook Drug Store.

“My father wants to know if you sell cigars.”

(They did.)

“My father wants me to get him three cigars.”

(What kind?)

“Cheap cigars. Can I get three for a nickel? I only have a nickel.”

We took them to a stream beside our house, and smoked them down to the butts, fast. My friends puked into the stream; we were five and six. They went home to take their lickings. I didn’t feel all that bad, considering, and came to the dining room for supper. Mother frowned. Father was hearty:

“How are you, old sport, hungry?

Not very hungry, I admitted.

“Have a cigar. Something to whet the appetite?”

My father offered me something longer and finer than the thing I had just smoked, and I said I thought I would rather not, no cigar, thanks anyway.

“Oh,” my father said. “I think so. Here. Take it.”

I shook my head, but he stuck it in my mouth, and lit it, and made me smoke it to the stump, even though he and Mother hated the smell of the things. He wasn’t angry, not the least bit.

When I was recently in Birmingham a white-haired retired judge spoke of a lady recently married into an “old Buminham famly” as being of “unsuttun or-i-gin,” by which he meant, I think, that she was a Jew. I’m not sure what kind of society Birmingham claims; the city was infertile cotton land when the Civil War ended, and any place proud to call itself The Pittsburgh of the South might govern its pretensions. The city’s landmark, atop a hump of red clay called Red Mountain, is a statue of Vulcan, not as the god of war but in his subsidiary role as god of iron; he is advertised to be “the largest iron man in the world”—iron and coal make Birmingham go. Vulcan holds aloft what looks like a popsicle, but this is in fact a torch, lit red if there has been a traffic fatality within the previous twenty-four hours, green if not.

Whatever passed for “society” in Birmingham neglected my father, but it was at a rare and now inexplicable visit to the Mountain Brook Club that three extraordinary events converged. Driving to the club my father told me our bulldog had died, and at the club my father learned that his mother had also died, and as he walked toward me with this news I jumped from the diving board into the pool, and in that way, before my anguished father or mother could reach me, learned
to swim. This achievement interested me more than the death of my grandmother.

When Duke’s mother fell sick at seventy-eight with pneumonia, a complication of heart disease, he insisted that she be treated at St. Francis rather than Mt. Sinai Hospital. He laid it on thick with the staff: Hattie was to have the biggest room, best treatment, no expense spared, here was the widow of The Doctor.

But he stayed in Birmingham till she died on the last day of January, 1944, three days after she entered the hospital, and left Ruth Atkins and Bill Haas to keep the vigil at her bedside. The funeral was at Bill’s house, and Duke came home for it—too late some people said, too soon by half most said. When the bills were presented by St. Francis my father said screw ’em; as the nuns and priests did unto The Doctor, so The Duke would do unto them.

There were harsh words at the funeral. My grandmother had left her most cherished things to Ruth and to Bill and to other cousins, and nothing to her son. At The Doctor’s funeral Duke had been ashamed and chastened, had promised reform. Now he was pugnacious. He considered himself a man of attainments, and was insulted that his own mother had not trusted him to administer the measly two thousand, all the cash she left, placed in trust for my education. His mother willed Ruth Atkins her furniture and jewelry, Bill Haas her bull’s-eye mirror, and Bill’s mother the grandfather clock. What remained after the two thousand was put aside for me, beyond Duke’s reach, was to go to him four years later, when he reached forty. But nothing remained. My father didn’t know exactly whom never to forgive, so he chose never to forgive all of Hartford.

After his return from the funeral, the financial pressure built quickly to an intolerable level, and my parents moved to 2800 Hastings Place in Mountain Brook, a large corner house giving, in contrast to the Beechwood Road establishment, the illusion of modesty.

During the move I went with my mother to gather the last of her clothes. The front door was open, and this alarmed her, and
as we crept along the hallway to the circular stairs she paused, and held her fingers to her lips, and I held my breath. We heard nothing, climbed the stairs to my parents’ bedroom, and I saw something brown and wet on the banister, but was too terrified to say anything. We looked into the bedroom and saw Mother’s clothes heaped on the floor, and blood on the quilt, blood on the pale-blue curtains, on the doorknob three inches from my mother’s hand; she squeezed my arm and pulled me with her down the stairs.

She telephoned my father before she called the police; after all she knew about him she still trusted him to know what things meant, what to do. Duke came to the house carrying the Air Corps Colt .45 he had been issued in London and had never returned. He found a broken window back of the house, and went through the front door and down the basement stairs and emptied a clip of big medicine into four dark and deserted corners of the cellar. That was where the police found him, maddened by the outrage to his wife and son, shouting for some phantom son of a bitch to show himself and have it out. But the intruder was gone with a few unpaid-for goods and his story.

Father had the jitters for a long time after the break-in. A couple of months later he came home from work to find me sitting cross-legged on the front lawn at Hastings Place, working with a hammer, a nail and an unexploded .50 caliber machine-gun bullet a neighborhood kid had swapped me for a boat in a bottle. I had been trying, with increasing determination, to hit the firing pin hard enough to make something happen. My father saw me from his car, ten yards away, and spoke to me just loud enough to be understood clearly:

“Put down the hammer and nail, put them down now. Put down the bullet, come over here. Good, that’s good.”

Then he came out of the car fast, and ran toward me so violently I thought he would run me down, and took me in his arms and held me so tightly I thought he meant to hurt me.

After dinner that night I sat on the bottom step of the back porch. I picked up a stone and idly pegged it at a robin tugging
at a worm, just as I had hundreds of times before. This robin I hit, and he beat his wings once or twice, and then he died. I buried him, and began to have a care.

The Doctor, after the death of his daughter, had been attentive to his son’s health, but my father was obsessive about mine. Like a lot of kids I had been born with a heart murmur, nothing that much worried doctors, but it tormented my old man. The merest earache or fever or sore throat would bring a medic with his bag, generally past midnight; perhaps to ease his own discomfort our family doctor suggested that my tonsils and adenoids be removed at the close of my first-grade year.