Duke of Deception (12 page)

D
UKE
took what he could get, a job way down the greasy pole with Bell Helicopter in Marietta, Georgia. It came with a sixty percent pay cut and a warning: his record was known, he’d be watched closely, he’d better mind his step. My father didn’t complain about his demotion; he was confident he would rise again, and installed us in a few rooms of an ante-bellum house on Peach Tree Battle in Atlanta.

Toby was often sick that pre–air-conditioned August. The heat shoved like steamed towels against our faces. My mother was anxious, and my father was tormented by back pains from an old injury when he was tossed hard by a wave body-surfing in California. Still, he read to me every night—
Robinson Crusoe, Aesop’s Fables, The Arabian Nights, Tales of Uncle Remus
and my favorite,
Treasure Island
—and he bought me a model airplane engine and mounted it with a brass flywheel. Then he took it apart to show me how it worked, and never got it together again.

The first time I saw him upset by an event that didn’t directly touch his family was when he heard “we” had dropped an atomic bomb, and then a second one. A cynic might imagine he felt peevish that he had not been put wise to the character of his work on A-bomb-carrying-B-29s, but I remember his simple shock when he listened to the radio and heard what we had done to them. I recently asked my mother what he had said when he first
saw the reports and photographs from the European death camps.

“I don’t remember anything special about his reaction,” my mother said.

So what did I hope my mother would tell me about my father’s reaction to the camps? That it was “special,” deep? I expect too much.

Bell transferred my father to its Buffalo plant. Mother went north on the train, sitting in coach with Toby on her lap, and Duke and I drove. The Packard was gone, too swell for our means, replaced by a black sedan, an old and cranky Pontiac. The car’s tires were bad, and the clutch was shaky, and my father’s back hurt. We tried to sleep one night high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, my father shaking with cold in the back seat while I trembled and complained in the front.

It was my father’s delusion that once we got north Bell would pay our living expenses while he sought a house, and he decided a suitable resting place under these terms would be the Hotel General Brock, the best on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The four of us checked into a honeymoon suite, and because we had no cash we used room service for all our needs, and ate with newlyweds in the Rainbow Room. Duke calmed the management with frequent assurances that Bell would soon and happily pay, and in this way stretched our welcome to six weeks.

It was an awful time for my parents. Toby had dysentery, and Rosemary soaked his diapers in the bathtub while Duke lay abed, rocking from side to side and crying aloud from pain, till finally he could bear no more, and went to a quack in Buffalo, who shot his spine full of Novocaine.

“Maybe I was too harsh,” my mother remembers, “but I thought much of his trouble was psychosomatic. When things went really to hell his back always seemed to go on the blink.”

I had a lovely time wandering the hotel alone, running the elevators, chatting up the staff. I went afield, learned the lore of the Falls by following tour guides, memorizing their pitch till I could reel off the dates and names and fabulous events, the circumstances of this successful tight-wire walk and that failed barrel
plunge. The town was full of soldiers, and some let me show them around. I trusted people who wore uniforms.

One asked if I’d like to take a little trip with him across Rainbow Bridge to the New York falls, and I said sure, why not? He said his life had been unhappy; when I asked why, he seemed irritated. We passed out of Canada, walking across the Niagara River, and when we reached the American frontier he instructed me to say I was his son. I said I couldn’t do that, that he wasn’t my father, and my father told me never to lie. He said I’d better say I was his son, and I did, and the border man in the uniform let us pass through.

The soldier was young, almost too young to shave, and seemed sad, but sometimes he broke into weird laughter. I thought I’d better not ask questions, just do what he told me. He asked if I trusted him, and I said yes, but I didn’t know what his question meant. He said trust was the most important thing there was, and that he was unhappy because no one trusted him. We were standing at the tip of a promontory, looking at Horseshoe Falls, and at
The Maid of the Mist
steaming close to the eddies, way below. Across the gorge I could see the General Brock, and I wanted to go home. I said I wanted to go home, it was late. The soldier said I could leave after I passed a little test. I asked what he wanted me to do. He didn’t reply, just bent down and grabbed my ankles and picked me up, and lifted me across the chain-link fence, and held me head-down over the misty brink of Rainbow Falls. Not for long. I didn’t even scream, I think, though no one would have heard with the racket of falling water. Then he jerked me back to earth, right-side-up, and said
there
, now you can trust me, goodbye. The man at Rainbow Bridge let me back across; he must have been a sucker for kids.

I wasn’t spanked, or even rebuked. Maybe I wasn’t believed. The next day, though, I was spanked. My mother gave me money to buy drugs for my brother and father, and I spent it instead on a carriage ride around Victoria Park, admission to the Houdini Museum of Great Escapes, and passage on
The Maid of the Mist
My mother spanked me, because my father was too weak from drugs to do it.

He never even saw the Bell plant in Buffalo till after he was fired, and he tried in vain to collect some expense money. He explained, with patient eloquence, that the management of the General Brock depended upon the good will of Bell, and then he explained to the management of the General Brock that he was
sure
the bill would soon be paid, once some red tape was unknotted, but the management had lost confidence in my father’s assurances, so Duke sent my mother and Toby away by bus, and he and I checked out late at night, without much luggage, and without saying goodbye or thank-you to our hosts.

Our destination was New York City, sanctuary with Duke’s friends Hubert and Caroline. He was a Dane, an affable layabout refugee from the war who cared almost as much about progressive jazz as about reefer. His wife had been another of Duke’s Hartford ladies, but she was long reformed from the gentle influence of her finishing school. She wrote for
The Daily Worker
, and her avocation was labor agitation. The Hanishes lived in a cold-water walk-up on East Fifty-seventh near the Third Avenue El; in addition to us there was another rent-free comrade, an Indian with lids always half-hooding his black eyes, and a turban I was privileged to help him wind, and an inscrutable grin that my mother now tells me had much to do with the quality of Hubie Hanish’s weed, which he and his guests called tea; the Indian smoked joint after joint after joint, while he had, seriatim, private epiphanies.

“I did the cleaning,” my mother remembers, “and Caroline cooked. After dinner everyone would go to the front room—it was a railroad flat—and sit on the floor. They’d pass around the dope, but your father wouldn’t touch it. He thought it was goofy, for pansies. He’d drink a quart of Black Horse ale from the bottle, and they’d all listen to records, Fats Navarro, Lester Young, Benny Carter, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum. I tried some dope once: we went to a loft party on the subway, and it was like traveling in a golden chariot. We weren’t, though. We were at absolute bedrock, ground zero. Duke sold the car, and then he hocked his watch.”

I was almost eight. My father didn’t want me to wander New York, but I did. I stayed on Fifty-seventh Street usually, walking east to the river to watch the tugs work against the current, or
hanging out at Fifty-seventh and Third, in front of a deli, listening to hard street talk. I believed that all slang, and especially the word
bucks
, alluded to violent crime.

One night I was in the bedroom I shared with Toby, who was crying; my mother and father were quarreling in the kitchen next door. I was playing with blocks, and my tower fell against the kitchen door. My father came boiling through the doorway in fury; he thought I had been eavesdropping. He hit me across the ear with his open hand, and I went rigid with fear and confusion, and couldn’t even stammer. When Duke was angry past control his face contorted: his cheeks danced, their muscles bouncing spastically, and he touched the tip of his tongue to the front of his upper teeth. He hit my head and arms and legs, never with his fists, shouting from incomprehensible frustration, and finally I found words to beg him to stop, what had I done? He hated eavesdroppers, he said, and I told him I was innocent of eavesdropping, whatever it was, and hated
him
. And that stopped him. His hands fell to his sides, and his shoulders sagged. He didn’t say he was sorry. Toby was screaming, and so was my mother. The Hanishes were improbably giggling in the hall outside, where the Indian stood lost in thought. My father turned his back on me, and left, and shut the door gently behind him. I undressed, and lay under the covers weeping. And five minutes later my father came to the edge of my bed and sat beside me and said we had nothing but each other, just us, nothing else. I said I didn’t care, I still hated him, and I did. And he kissed me gently, on my cheek and then my mouth; I didn’t pull away from him. And then he stood, ran his hand through my hair, and left the room again. I lay there for half an hour after my mother tended my brother, and tucked me in. Then I left my bed and crept down the hall toward the light and broke through the circle of dopeheads to my father, enthroned on the room’s only chair; he was staring ahead, at nothing.

“I don’t hate you! I love you!”

“Of course you do.”

The next day I turned eight, and my father took me up Fifth Avenue on top of a double-decker bus to 125th Street, and back down to F.A.O. Schwarz, where he let me pick a wind-up submarine
from the tank filled with toy warships, steamers, and sloops. Then he took me to lunch at the Edwardian Room of the Plaza, and told me to take good care of my brother and mother. He had that morning taken a job with Pan American Airways to try to find out why the tails fell off some of their airplanes. A couple of days later he left for Lima, Peru, alone.

With Duke’s first paycheck we moved from East Fifty-seventh to the Park Lane, a nod to Duke’s swell London address. We soon ran the well dry again, and so two weeks before Thanksgiving became paid lodgers at a fieldstone farmhouse restored by Doak and Julie Kimball in Essex, Connecticut. Doak was my father’s Hartford friend, and a drunk; his wife had a short and sour temper. They took us in because they needed money. Doak was unlikely to notice we were around, and Julie wished we weren’t.

Toby had dysentery again; many babies died of it after the war, catching it from soldiers returning from Europe. Toby gave it first to me and then to Julie and then to her son Buster. Buster wore Coke-bottle glasses, was as fat as a Norway seal and a year older than I was, and it was his single life-skill and pleasure to beat the bejesus out of me whenever he caught me alone, usually when we walked to and from school every day.

The plan was to stay with the Kimballs till Duke settled in Lima and sent for us, a month or two at most, and Rosemary knew after a couple of days that something less than a month would be her limit. Doak was generally comatose, but at least he smiled a lot; Julie was always angry, and when her son sprained a finger beating his fist against the side of my head, she raised our room and board fee, to defray the cost of her son’s splint.

To earn enough to keep Doak in whiskey she had decided to raise turkeys for the Thanksgiving slaughter, and my earliest memory of Essex is being chased into the living room by one of those disagreeable yardbirds. She butchered them in a barn and made me witness this bloodletting, to learn at first hand the iron realities of life. My mother didn’t dispute with Julie about my education, or much of anything; she was spooked by Toby’s continuing
illnesses, and while I was indisputably unhappy I was also whole and robust, and learning to roll with a punch.

Our bathtub was once again put to a use for which it had not been designed. After Julie slaughtered her turkeys she hung them wrong end up, and their blood did not drain from their bodies; it pooled in their bodies, and turned them lavender, and they weren’t fit to be sold. My mother recalls the situation:

“My God! She plucked them in the kitchen, and every time air slipped through a crack in the walls or floorboards a turkey feather blew into our food. A butcher told her she could rescue the damned things for sale if she soaked them in a bathtub, and guess whose bathtub she soaked them in? I thought I’d never eat another turkey as long as I lived, but I guess you can get used to anything. Still, I never got used to the Kimballs.”

As the winter got colder, Doak got drunker, Julie less satisfied, and Buster bigger and meaner. His mother told my mother that Buster was insecure, and my mother told his mother the boy was merely awful. He’d eat half a dozen eggs and a stack of hotcakes for breakfast, a trencherman’s portion at school, and then my school lunch; then he’d take on fuel before dinner.

Snow fell, silence thickened, and I taught myself to read. I was staring at a comic book,
Plastic Man
, and suddenly the balloons above the art were as palpable as thunderheads, and the words spoke to me.

Christmas came, and was not festive. My mother was restless; we got our passports, had had our shots, which made us suffer; we had done our parts, were owed Peru. The two waking Kimballs often asked when we might be moving along. Rosemary pressed Pan American for a departure date. Pan American told her to sit tight, certain complications had developed. And then in early January my mother got a collect call from Duke. He was in New York, would be at the Saybrook station in a few hours. He had resigned. Okay, so he had been fired. He was
not
drunk. Well, so what if he was?