Duke of Deception (13 page)

We moved to Saybrook’s Pease House, a summer hotel beside the Connecticut River that had long ago gone fleabag. One night Duke woke from drunkenness and heard what he thought was a
prowler and was probably a cat, and he filled the beaverboard walls with .45 slugs, and the next morning we packed our bags again.

We moved a few blocks to a rooming house on Main Street. We all slept in one room and shared a bathroom and kitchen and dining room with the other lodgers, old women. One ate at the table from her rocker, lurching forward to her mashed food, forking it at the still point of her swing, rocking back. She was a victim of fits, and frequently fell from her chair entirely, provoking shouts of consternation. My father would carry her to her room. Another old lady liked to lift her skirt above her waist whenever I came near her.

I would sit after school by the river, watching the ice break and flow toward Cornfield Point and Long Island Sound. When the ice finally melted I tried to fish from the end of a condemned ferry dock. Duke used me to test a fishing device he and a local barfly had designed in our bedroom over teacups of dark rum. The contraption had an elaborately springed red flag that was hoisted when a fish took a line hanging from a float. It was going to make my father and his friend rich, and they had drawn plans for the patent. It didn’t work on the river. Duke was also the second-in-command on a two-man assembly line for a lampshade manufacturer who was in and out of business in less than three weeks. We were poor. Finally my father found work at Pratt & Whitney, his first employer, at a job not unlike his first job.

“I was resigned to Duke,” my mother remembers. “I saw no alternative to life with him; I was dragging my feet.” But one night she unloaded on him, detailed her opinion of her life. He commuted in an ancient sixteen-cylinder Cadillac, rose at five to punch in at eight in Hartford, returned after dark and after dinner. This day, payday, he came home cold and tired and dirty and drunk. It was March. My mother was waiting:

“I was sitting at the foot of the bed, and he was sitting in a chair, taking off his shoes. We were close together, about as close as I am to you now. I said terrible things to him, and he hauled off and slapped me, very hard. He had never done anything like that before, and it stunned me, and I hit my head against the side of
the bed. It raised a lump, and when I showed him what he had done he was miserable, and he promised … well, you know how he was.”

Soon after this battle my mother complained to the owner of the rooming house about bedbugs, and she said there weren’t any bedbugs in her house, and my mother said there were, and the woman said there weren’t either, and my father warned the old lady not to call his wife a liar, and she said who are you to talk about respect, you don’t pay your rent and you beat your wife and your little boy uses the most
awful
language in front of the other lodgers and if there are bedbugs here I know who brought them. We were out on our ears again.

Duke decided it was time to trade up, there being no place to fall from the rooming house. He drove to Hartford, and huddled with his counsel. Joe Freedman, for an absolute first claim on everything we would ever own or earn, plus rights to our souls and whatever chemicals and spare parts could be taken from our bodies, advanced a down payment on a two-floor frame house on Mile Creek Road in Old Lyme, across the Connecticut River from Saybrook. Freedman’s generosity testifies either to my father’s persuasive powers or to … Freedman’s generosity. This was understood to be my father’s final call on his attorney’s indulgence.

The place was a pleasant, brown-shingled farmhouse previously owned by a German pathologist obsessed with things Japanese. He had imported Japanese bamboo, which had fructified insanely, and had turned his property into a Japanese beetle ranch. This we did not know in April, before the bamboo and beetle season were fully upon Connecticut. My parents instead saw twelve pretty acres, a large red barn, a disused tennis court, and a house free of turkeys and lodgers and bedbugs, with wide floorboards. It was a wonderful house, and there I lived, from eight to eleven, what I thought was a commonplace childhood.

With my father and mother at a Los Angeles country club, 1940
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The first of three Wolff houses in Hartford, where my grandparents lived from their marriage until their deaths. Grandmother Harriet, called “Hattie,” stands to the right, smiling slightly. In 1886 she was nineteen
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Hartford: The Doctor leans from the window of an unidentified house. His wife touches his dark suit as though his arm were a talisman. 1893, a year before the birth of their daughter, Beatrice Annette
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At the shore, Crescent Beach, Niantic, about 1890. Dr. Wolff is at the left, with mutton chops and shined shoes. Hattie, among cousins and in-laws, leans against his rocker
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The Saturday Night Bunch, listening to The Doctor’s new wireless in the Collins Street parlor
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