Duke of Deception (15 page)

Stephen Loftus
(seated far right).
My grandfather holds his nephew and poses with his parents, his sister
(standing)—
later a Sister of Mercy—and his luckless brothers. Six months after the picture was taken in Denver, Colorado, my great-grandmother Mary
(seated third from left),
died
.

Rosemary Loftus, my mother, ten, before her First Communion
.

My mother at fourteen, a would-be movie star, vamping
.

My mother at sixteen, in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki Beach, at a happy time in her life
.

A
FEW
days after we moved into our house my father furnished it. At W & J Sloane in New York he came upon a model house, a full-scale furnished replica of a salt-box. A salesman asked if he could be of help, and my father said yes indeed, he’d like to take it.

“Take what?” asked the puzzled fellow.

“The whole ball of wax,” my father said.

“The whole
house?
”

No, my father patiently explained, just the furniture. And so upon the fixture of Duke’s signature to a document making many improbable promises, we were Early-Americanized, with pewter mugs, a pine corner cupboard, many pieces made of maple, hooked rugs and Currier & Ives winterscapes. (Above my parents’ bed my father hung two watercolors painted by his lover Betty during the Thanksgiving weekend she spent with Duke in Mississippi. My mother didn’t protest: they were pretty watercolors, nicely framed.)

That summer my father found a job in nearby New London, designing plant layout for a moribund manufacturer of printing presses. On weekends my mother and Duke would picnic or dine with some Hartford friends, Jack Lester, who lived in Essex with his wife Connie, and Warren and Georgiana Rice, a bit up Mile Creek Road from our place. Duke was comfortable with these old
friends, who never challenged his version of himself; though he was broke and they were not, he didn’t borrow money from them, or at least they never loaned him any.

My father’s friend Gifford Pinchot was a sailor; he kept a Dragon—a venerable racing sloop of thirty feet with huge overhang, narrow beam and low freeboard—at the Essex Yacht Club. I had been pestering my father to take me boating, and Pinchot suggested that Duke charter a powerboat for a weekend to give me a taste of salt water. My father said he despised “stinkpots.”

“Boating is sailing, period,” my father said.

“I didn’t know you sailed,” Pinchot said.

“Of course I sail.”

“Then take the Dragon.”

Affixed to the transom of this delicate, impeccably varnished mahogany boat was a five-horsepower outboard, used to navigate the Connecticut River against unfavorable winds or currents. The motor did indeed stink when it ran, and it was noisy and it vibrated. During three days of clear weather and twelve-knot winds it was our only means of locomotion, up the coast to Stonington, past McCook Point, which my father warned me was treacherous, but seemed nothing much to think about as we left it to port. I asked my father why we didn’t sail, and he explained that the halyard was broken. When we returned the boat to Pinchot he asked how everything had gone, and my father said “aces.” Later, in the car, I asked my father why he hadn’t mentioned Pinchot’s broken halyard, and he said he had fixed it.

“Why didn’t we sail, after you fixed it?”

My father said nothing, and I understood that I had asked the wrong question. I searched this experience to unriddle what I had said wrong, but couldn’t puzzle it out. It never occurred to me that my father lied.

I spent the summer with Albert Payson Terhune’s books. Reading about his noble collies Bruce, Lad, Treve, and Wolf I was gripped by a fixation; I had to have a collie, and not just any collie, but one who looked like Buff, with a white mane, broad head, golden body, alert ears, and sad eyes.

I got the dog in August, for twenty dollars, the value of an immature war bond my grandmother gave me on my first birthday. The pup was six weeks old. My father drove us home from Norwich, where we found him, with the dog in my lap, sleeping, pissing, crying and licking my face. I named him Shep, of course. We slept together the first night home on a second-floor screened porch, my favorite place in the house. I didn’t really sleep, at first. Thunder was booming far off, and lightning broke on the horizon, somewhere over Long Island Sound. Lying in my damp sheets, with the apple tree scratching against the screen, I tried to comfort my dog, and at length he fell asleep, and then I could.

To have something small and loved within my power was bracing and frightening, and still is. During the first few days after I got my pup I would carry him to the side of the house, where he explored the lawn I mowed, and a gravel path, and the edge of the overgrown garden. In the garden was a well, girdled by a decrepit bench. The well was no longer in use; it was said to be very deep, at least five hundred feet, and it was covered by a heavy wagon wheel. No child could fall or squeeze between the wheel’s spokes, but stones could be dropped through, and I liked to listen to them bang against the side of the well as they fell, rattling dully till somewhere near China they’d splash, a hollow, final thud.

My dog could fit through the interstices between the spokes, and I sat with him in my lap while he licked my hands; my hands trembled to thrust him through, and hold him above the mouth of the well. My hands were to blame, not my head. My hands were curious. I had no wish to hear my puppy fall like a stone against the side of the well, to hear him cry and splash. I did not long to mourn him. It was not pleasant to overcome the will of my hands with my head, but it seemed necessary. Once I held Shep above the wagon wheel, thought I would put him through the wheel’s open wedges and hold him, as I had been held above Niagara Falls, and return him to safety, as I had been returned. But I did not put him through the wheel, and after a few days my hands settled down, and the temptation to test my life with another life never returned. Years later I tried to talk with some college friends about this experience. We were drunk, with a confessional fit upon
us, and we had all recently read Camus,
The Rebel
and
The Stranger
. I told my story about Shep at the well, and waited to hear their stories, but they had none. They had had nothing in the way of such a temptation, or nothing they wished to share with me, and so I never again mentioned the experience, till now.

When my dog was a year old I did hurt him, badly. I threw a cherry bomb into our meadow when I thought he was safe in the house, and he tried to bring it back to me, and it blew up in his mouth. He recovered, but from then on he was spooked by loud noises, but he never thought to distrust me.

I recently drove through Old Lyme, and stopped at the grade school, a pretty tree-shaded stone building with a graceful slate roof, on Main Street of a pretty tree-shaded town with a famously graceful Congregational Church. The school’s exterior proportions corresponded with my recollection. It surprised me to see that things aren’t always evanescent and diminished; Old Lyme was where I had left it a quarter century ago.