Duke of Deception (16 page)

The classrooms did seem reduced, with lower ceilings and water fountains and much smaller desks, and there was no ink in the inkwells. But the fourth grade sat learning where my fourth grade sat, past the principal’s office, left down the hall, second door on the right. The school had me in its records, beginning with my first day, a notation by Miss Mueller: “Jeff’s father brought him to school. They seem unusually close. Both stutter.”

My father told me we were lucky to stammer, that it gave us more time to think between words, that people paid close attention to us because we stammered. Attention was what I wanted least my first day of school in Old Lyme.

“Now, children, some of you are new to us. So that we all know one another’s names, I would like each of you to stand, beginning with Marilyn and moving from right to left across each row of desks, and say your name. My name is Miss Mueller, and I’m certain we’ll have a good year and all be friends.”

Marilyn Mather stood, and said her name, followed by Carl Gerr and Skippy Sheffield, then Eliot and Norman and Lionel and Dorothy and Margaret Dean and it was my turn, and I stood,
blushing. I stood that day gasping, laboring to pry out two syllables,
Jeff Wolff
, not much of a trick, except for a stammerer. That first day, like the first day at every new school, they wouldn’t come. I squirmed, forced gutturals, gulped air and grunted it out, and nothing would come.

“Just say your name,” Miss Mueller said, not unkindly.

“Juh-juh-juh I can’t.”

There was laughter. I would have been happier with less laughter, or more. Miss Mueller asked how it was that I could not say my name, but could so simply say
I can’t
. It seemed even then like a reasonable question, but it was not a question I could answer, any more than I could tell those children my name. So I was marked special, perhaps dangerous, maybe dumb. I resolved to by God disabuse them of dumb.

Miss Mueller told them my name, and welcomed me to Old Lyme. She was a good woman. From her I learned where copra grew (but not what it was), the crucial importance of sisal to the peoples of several faraway lands, and that places where zinc and tungsten are mined are colored dark blue and maroon on some maps. I learned that we Americans were the most wonderful things that ever were, and the sight of Margaret Dean, an eight-year-old American girl one row ahead and two desks to the left, confirmed this judgment.

Miss Mueller was the niece or grand-niece or third cousin of a President of the United States. She confessed this shyly during a rest period, and not in the least boastfully. I think the ancestor was Millard Fillmore, but he may have been Chester Alan Arthur. Miss Mueller also had a proprietary interest in a political Tyler, I think, because the first patriotic exclamation we learned was
Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!

When I returned to my old school to ask what had become of my classmates and teachers I sat talking in the principal’s office with his secretary; she had worked at the school when I was a student there, and didn’t agree with me that a very long time had passed since then. She knew almost all my classmates by name, but she didn’t remember Marion. Marion entered Miss Champion’s fifth-grade
class a month late. We gave him a rough time, because of his name, because he was a new boy, and because his father drove a Studebaker, which our fathers said looked like it was going when it was coming. Marion came to our class Halloween party got up as Superboy. What a costume his mother had put together, and hang the cost! Blue velvet tights under crimson shorts cinched with a sun-gold belt. The cape was silk, he said, probably rayon, and in place of the regulation chest insignia—red
S
on a velvet field—Marion showed a lightning bolt.

This gear raised Marion in our esteem, and he must have enjoyed the sensation, for he wore the costume to school the following day, and the day after that. Miss Champion suggested that he might retire it for a year, but he said he couldn’t, that this was what he wore, it was what Superboy son of Superman wore, that he was Superboy and it was what he wore.

Even Miss Champion laughed at the idea, Superman in a Studebaker. But Marion held to his claim, even placing in evidence his dad’s thick glasses, a point of similarity with Clark Kent’s. We were not persuaded, and it went hard with Marion. And then he offered to demonstrate his powers. He would fly. He would not, he said, fly far, because he wished only to prove a small point. He would fly the following afternoon, while his mother was elsewhere playing bridge. He would launch himself from the roof of his house, beside the public library.

The next afternoon we assembled in his front yard. From the refuge of his attic Marion watched us gather, like a lynch mob. We felt foolish and put-upon, and I was surprised to see Marion crawl through a dormer window and climb to the peak of his roof, almost three stories above us. He inched along the roof to its edge. The wind tugged his wonderful cape, and the sun hit its violent colors—royal blue, crimson, gold—and it was almost possible to believe. Marion, patient but condescending, looked down and asked
us:
“Are you ready?” The girls especially seemed to stir and blush, and one of them called out, “Fly, Marion,” and he did. Off the roof, and the cape spread, and he hit the frozen lawn, and gasped and rolled to his stomach. Someone fetched the librarian,
and she sent for Dr. Von Glaun, and he shooed us all home and set Marion’s leg.

The next week Superboy came to school in civvies and on crutches, and until his father and mother took him away in a new Hudson Hornet to another school in another town, no one teased him. He had said he would fly, and to our satisfaction he had flown.

My father heard about Marion, of course, and admired the boy’s spunk. But he used the experience as an occasion for proscription: Don’t boast, don’t lie, don’t be bullied into dares, “use the old bean, use the noodle.”

I was too young then to know that my father told me many things about himself that were not so, but I sensed that he might have once been the kind of boy who would tell his friends that he could fly, and that he might have been the kind who would crawl out a high window and go to the edge of the roof. But now I knew he would not jump off that roof.

My father instructed me. He taught me to catch and to throw a football, and didn’t tire of our games of toss before I did. He taught me to swim properly, but never with the easy grace he showed in the water, everything moving with power and certainty, his long arms entering the water with his elbows bent just so. It was satisfying to watch him swim straight out from the water’s edge, and notice people on the beach notice him. He wasn’t showing off. What he did well he took for granted. What he could not do, or had not done, he held in esteem.

He was particular about teaching me to shoot, and to clean my rifle after every use, and to carry it empty, on “safe,” with the bolt open, in the crook of my arm. One Sunday he was sitting on a log high up the beach below McCook Point, reading
The New York Times
. I was between him and the water, where I was meant to be. I had built a sand castle and was shooting at this rather than at the tin cans my father had set by the water’s edge. As I destroyed the castle from its front, I began to shoot at it from other angles. My father didn’t notice as I moved around till my back was
to the water. I took aim at a high turret, and my eyes were indifferent to the background of my target till I pulled the trigger, and saw what I had just done. The bullet dusted away the sand turret, and thucked into the log six inches from my father’s thigh.

He didn’t confiscate my rifle. He didn’t beat me. He didn’t shout at me. He comforted me, but he also let me know something consequential had just happened; this did not upset the balance between us, but affirmed it. For several years after I pulled that trigger I did not argue with my father’s judgments.

He spanked me twice in Old Lyme, both times for showing my mother insufficient respect. Once Rosemary told me to clean my room, and I stuck up my middle finger, shot her the bird. Her back was to me, I had noticed. That she was standing in front of a mirror, I had not noticed. My father next spanked me the night before a Cub Scout meeting. Rosemary, then inclining toward good works and civic-mindedness, was our den mother and had set us Cubs a project to complete with pipe cleaners and paper. We were to build teepees and populate them with Indians. At bedtime I showed her a small company of human figures, standing like tripods.

“They’re cute, Jeffie, but why do they have three legs?”

I laughed, was proud of myself, called for my father. I sometimes misjudged him, and in just such a way, thinking he would wish to be my accomplice in an act of wiseacre mischief, a pornographic tableau for his wife’s den of Cubs. My father was beside himself with disappointment at my disrespect for my mother, for something she did only to help me take pride in her. He hit me hard that night, with his shaving strop. I had committed a slight offense, a bit of dumb salaciousness, but now I know he was wise in his fury. I was inclining toward a belief that I was apart from other people; I had begun to sneer a little, and Duke despised the sneer above all facial gestures, all expressions of character.

We began life in Old Lyme with a 1937 Ford station wagon, a woodie with cream metal and a dark-brown leather interior. Then Duke “bought” an MG. It was the first sports car Old Lyme had ever seen, and it embarrassed me and made everyone else in town
laugh. It was necessary that we have two cars because every month or so one or the other was towed away by the sheriff. The Ford was the more frequently attached: the dealer in Saybrook had serially repaired all its moving parts, and sometimes liked to be paid. The Essex Boat Yard replaced the body’s wood with ash and cherry and teak; the car was such a beauty I imagine the yard owner thought he might as well keep it while he waited for my father to make some small deposit on account. Somehow or other Duke always found a way to bail out his cars, which meant more to him than anything, except us, and my mother sometimes wondered aloud whether they didn’t matter more to him than we did.

My father found his work in New London beneath him. During my fifth-grade year he commuted to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where he designed a maintenance program for Lukens Steel. He did well, and minded his manners on weekdays while he lived with a genteel English couple on a horse farm in Paoli. He came home weekends, bearing gifts. When he finished his work for Lukens he helped design and supervise the construction of a supersonic wind tunnel at M.I.T., and then he stayed on in Boston, working for Stone and Webster. No one fired him during those years; he worked hard. I don’t think he was paid very much, or was high up the organizational charts of his companies, but this helped keep his profile low. He lived in Boston at the Engineers’ Club, and sometimes I’d take the train up to see him, and he would take me to dinner at Locke-Ober’s or the Ritz-Carlton after a Red Sox game.

While my father lived well in Boston, and I mourned his absence, my mother fended off druggists, grocers, snowplowers, heating oil dealers, phone and electric companies, everyone who sold something locally that my father needed or wanted. Usually she pleaded ignorance (“My husband does the finances”), sometimes she lied (“Check’s in the mail”), and sometimes she begged (“We’ll freeze … starve … be snowed in … get sick …”). She never wept, though. I cannot remember having seen my mother weep. This must be a failure of memory. I’m sure my mother must have wept in front of me. I can imagine why, but can’t remember when.

It was a hard time for her. I was increasingly difficult to manage, and my father’s presence in Old Lyme on weekends was as unpleasant for Rosemary as his absence weekdays was inconvenient. He’d lie abed of a Saturday or Sunday morning, reading and resting. He liked to be waited upon, was always courteous in his requests (“While you’re up could you get me a beer … the paper … a sandwich … my glasses … my lighter … a small screwdriver …”), but he expected his courtesy to be answered with immediate action. One rainy afternoon, soaking in a hot tub, he called downstairs to my mother, asked her to move the electric heater a bit closer to the tub, he was feeling a slight chill. She climbed the stairs, stood above him, held the heater over the brimming bath water.

“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable,” she said, “if I put the heater right in there with you.”

My father stared at her. “You wouldn’t.” My mother smiled, feinted with the glowing heater. “Jesus,” he said, “you wouldn’t do
that!
” She didn’t.

“He’d arrive on Friday night with a present for you, a present for Toby, and a bag of dirty laundry for me,” my mother remembers, smiling now.

He took no interest in the house after furnishing it and watching W & J Sloane unfurnish it a few pieces at a time. He lavished energy on his gadgets. Like his father, he cherished small, expensive, precise things. He never just sat, with his hands at rest. He tinkered with a shotgun, clock, collapsible this or inflatable that. He always cleaned his possessions—polished his boots or oiled a rifle—but never the mess he made cleaning them.

He was generous on my behalf with his weekends. Autumn Saturdays he’d take me to Yale football games, and in the spring to the circus: we’d go early to New London to see the tent raised and wander the Ringling Brothers menagerie and freak show before the main events. Every third Saturday I was taken to New London to be scalped at the barber shop of the Mohecan Hotel, getting my crew cut according to my father’s instructions. This ordeal was usually followed by lunch downtown, an occasion for talk about manners and codes, and then a hunt for something that
had attracted my father’s interest. I noticed him change when he raided the shops. There was bluster in his voice, a forward, aggressive lean to him that disarmed the obsequious merchants who urged my father on even as they must have suspected he would never pay them. Salesmen like to sell; Duke understood this, perfectly.

When we returned from his sprees my mother sometimes tried to talk with him about the bills, what were they to do about them? Duke would flush with anger, pout, refuse to have his weekend spoiled by small beer. The bills, which she stacked on his desk, and on the floor where the desk used to be after a visit from W & J Sloane, he tossed unopened in the trash.