Duke of Deception (17 page)

The trash was collected once a week by Mr. Dean, a laconic, lantern-jawed, long-time Old-Lymer who drove a dying pickup with rotten wooden slats. As my father grew reckless about paying him, Mr. Dean became indifferent to our accumulations of rubbish, which made my father angry, which made Mr. Dean surly, which made my father furious, which caused me discomfort.

I loved the trashman’s daughter, Margaret, and she did not love me back. I think the intensity of her lack of affection for me may have been aggravated by her father’s experience with my father, but in fairness to everyone I gave her, all by myself, reason enough to avoid my company.

Margaret was tall, intelligent, dignified, reserved. She was
Margaret
always, never
Maggie
. Her dark hair was braided in fastidious pigtails, and she wore long gingham dresses made by a mother or sister or herself to pinch a bit at the waist and flair at the skirt. When she smiled she blushed, and at ten her face had a woman’s structure. During a few warm days in early spring, I dreamt of walking with her and Shep in our woods, and saving her from something. I dreamt of having her in our house for dinner, and keeping her there, forever.

These stirrings were not I think sensual, but they were grave. My mother laughed them off, from the perspective of someone for whom love had temporarily lost its definition. I’m not sure my mother could remember, staked as she was to my father, what first love felt like. My father could, because he had not loved deeply
till he loved my mother, or perhaps because his imagination was more lively than my mother’s. Or perhaps he was simply a better actor.

Anyway, Duke listened to me tell about Margaret Dean, and advised me well. Everyone advises everyone well at these times, and the advice doesn’t vary: be gentle, not thrusting; give time, room, respect; have other interests. And like everyone who asks advice about love, I didn’t follow my father’s. I assaulted Margaret with unsigned notes, and then with signed notes declaring love. I ruined her days in school. Once she brushed past me walking to lunch and said one word: “Please.” I mistook her meaning, and glowed all day. That night I telephoned to ask if she would like to meet my collie. She hung up when I stammered my name. I sent her a note:

“Yesterday you said please to me. I love you.”

A note, for once, came back: “I meant please leave me alone. I don’t like you.”

I had so upset that lovely girl that no one teased me about her, because she couldn’t bring herself even to gossip about my foolishness. But the Christmas of our fifth-grade year I developed a plan. I was given my usual twenty-five dollars to shop in Hartford with Ruth Atkins. This year I bought my mother nothing, my father and brother nothing. It seemed to me my plan could not fail to win me Margaret Dean. The plan hinged upon giving two gifts, one of them commonplace, the other a
coup d’éclat
. The first was a gift to my belovèd of wool mittens from Harry Atkins’ wholesale store. These were selected with dear care. I had stolen Margaret’s own mittens from her cubby while she was at lunch, to learn her size, study her taste and leave her in need of new mittens. I chose a pair embroidered the Scandinavian way.

I was left with twenty-three dollars, and I spent it all on the top-of-the-line Gilbert
“ATOMIC
” chemistry set, powders and liquids and test tubes and scales and retorts fitted in a bright-blue metal box the size of a briefcase. This gift was not for me, nor for anyone in my class, nor for anyone with whom I had ever exchanged a word. It was for the nicest boy in the sixth grade, the best looking, best athlete, most popular—Walter “Walky” Dean.

On the last day of school before Christmas, during the class party, I gave Margaret her mittens, and without reading the card I had illustrated with broken hearts pierced with arrows and sad-eyed snowmen melting away, without opening the package I had wrapped with remnants of paisley taken from my mother’s sewing basket, she dropped the gift in a rubbish bin. I was hurt, but not surprised. I walked across the hall to Mrs. Graves’s sixth-grade classroom. I set the heavy, lavishly wrapped box on the desk of Walter Dean and said “Here. I love your sister. Make her love me back.”

My life was no unbroken series of humiliations, only an almost unbroken series of humiliations. I don’t think I knew this, any more than I understood that we lived an odd life. My mother, like other mothers, belonged to the P.T.A. and the League of Woman Voters, till being among people to whom my father owed money became too painful for her, and she retreated into the house. She hated trying to live the lie that we had standing and means, but she didn’t tighten her belt. What was the use, after all? Duke was resolved to go deeper in debt; she might as well dress and feed herself and her children well.

We shared many acts and interests with regulation Americans of the time, saw the same movies, worried about the Russians and the Bomb, listened every Sunday to Jack Benny and Fred Allen. My mother laughed when others laughed at Senator Claghorn, my father at Mr. Kitzel. Like almost everyone else we celebrated Christmas, and how! The routine those three years in Old Lyme was unvarying: On Christmas Eve Duke would take me to New London to choose a tree, and we would have lunch, and he would drink an eggnog, and another. He would tell me that times were hard, which I knew, and that this year, unlike last year, the horn would pour forth no plenty. I would smile bravely. We would find a tree, always “the best tree we’ve ever had.” Duke would stop on the way home at a roadhouse, for a few drinks to celebrate the season. I would be introduced to bartenders who would grasp my hand too firmly and tell me, shaking their heads, “your dad’s a hell of a good sport, one hell of a guy, you’re a lucky kid, your pop’s
the best, tops, believe me.” Now it was Canadian Club, straight, no rocks, a Canadian Club chaser. I’d be sent off to play pinball or the jukebox. Snow would fall; snow fell every Christmas Eve we lived in Old Lyme. Rarely, a bartender would push familiarity past the limit. I remember a place called The Lobster’s Claw near Niantic, a roadhouse with a husky blond, about twenty-five, behind the bar. I knew enough not to like this bartender, noticed a nasty indifference in his manner. After a few rounds he looked at my father:

“What’ll it be, baldy, same again?”

There was a heavy quiet in The Lobster’s Claw. My father studied his empty glass, and his hands. He beckoned the smirking bartender with his index finger. The bartender, thinking he had created a successful jape, approached my father, who grabbed the young man’s shirt and emptied a full ashtray down its front. Then Duke walked out, holding my hand, and the barkeep shouted after him, “Never come back, you silly-looking bastard.” It was “silly-looking” that bothered me.

On the way home my father would break the rear end of the Ford loose on the slippery roads, to teach me, he said, how to handle a skid. When we hauled the tree, wet with snow, into the living room, my father swore at it. Mother tried not to show her anger. It was Christmas Eve, my night and Toby’s. The roast was overdone and cold. She saw that Duke was drunk, his speech had gone British and his manners were too fastidious. He wanted not to be drunk, but he was, and this made him sad, which made him drink some more. After dinner we tried to trim the tree; one Christmas my father knocked over the tree, and broke ornaments. My mother was always brave on Christmas Eve. She lit a fire, put out the lights, plugged in the tree. Beautiful! My mother managed to smile. I was sent to bed, and did not sleep. I heard voices downstairs, rising, my mother angry now, “please,
Duke, please!
” And then my mother would run upstairs, and my father would stumble after her and bang against the walls heading toward their room, and he would look in on Toby in his crib, and talk heavily at him while he slept. I would lie awake with Shep beside me on the floor, and not once all that one night think of Margaret Dean.

My mother was bone tired Christmas morning, and my father hungover, but they let me at the stuff before dawn, and watched me. It was grotesque, I think. I loved it, tearing at a sixth package before I had finished unwrapping a fifth. The things with cards written by my mother and father I opened first. The year of my presentation to Walky Dean I got just what I had given him; my father was trying to tell me something, or make me feel better. I also got a Flexible Flyer, and that morning, riding it down icy Braggart’s Hill I set my tongue against the metal steering bar, and it stuck; when I tore my tongue away it bled so badly that I had to be taken to Dr. Von Glaun.

Dr. Von Glaun was good to us. I thought I wanted to be a doctor, because that’s what my father told me I wanted to be, and because I wanted such a set of instruments as his father and grandfather had owned. Dr. Von Glaun told me about the rigors of his profession, and let me look into his microscope.

He saved my brother’s life. Toby had a stomach ache, together with a couple of symptoms not by themselves alarming. Dr. Von Glaun managed an inspired diagnosis by telephone of a rare disorder, the small intestine slipping into the large, a process that leads to awful pain and to death when the patient commences to eliminate his own organs. Dr. Von Glaun arranged the operation in New London, had someone come down from Boston with my father, who even paid the specialist.

Toby was a long time recovering. He turned fussy and spoiled during his recuperation and after, and I began to feud with him. He learned to take advantage of an absolute injunction against hitting or pushing him, and my mother took his side in our disputes: he was endangered in a way I was not, he was littler, and he resembled her in appearance and temperament as I resembled my father. Greater distance opened between us. I would swear that Duke did nothing to divide my mother from me, that he never suggested that she wasn’t brilliant or that her taste wasn’t flawless. Yet my mother felt his judgment on her like a weight, and if memory is false, perhaps she and I were nudged, and did not merely drift, apart.

She was dutiful, patient, never harsh. I was scrubbed, dressed,
fed, maintained, given music lessons, brought up better than our means allowed. She was always good for a game of baseball, and could outslug and outrun me and my friends till we reached the sixth grade. Still, something was missing between us. I sometimes felt, watching her look at me, that she wished she were alone. She must have felt I wished I were with someone else.

So, with a sick brother, a pigtailed beloved who would have liked to shazam me from the earth’s face, a mother distracted by bills and lack of love for her husband, I spent much time alone. I read, walked with my dog, read, rode my bike, read. I angled for sunfish, alone, or walked through swarms of deerflies to the mudflats near Duck River, to sit and stare at something other than the pages of a book.

I wasn’t a pariah at school, just an outsider, weird, set apart by my stammer and my father’s elegant taste and manners and my morbid notion of humor and my short haircut. My schoolmates parted their hair, slicked it down like nine-year-old bank presidents.

I had one friend, a classmate. Michael was a good athlete, courteous, quiet and, like me, accustomed to solitude. His mother had left Old Lyme, leaving his father with a son and two daughters. Michael’s father worked at the United Nations as a translator from Japanese into Russian, Russian into English, English into Japanese or any of about a dozen other combinations. He had helped break the Japanese military and diplomatic code just before Pearl Harbor, and his hobbies were mathematical puzzles and cryptograms. Children were for him an uninteresting mystery, and to solve the conundrum of his son’s upkeep he turned to my parents, who welcomed Michael as a lodger, more or less at cost.

My life changed. Michael was respectful to my parents, cool-tempered, a born instructor. He tried to teach me things. He advised me how best to play Margaret Dean (to no effect), how to do long division (to no effect), and how to fend off my mother’s irritation by volunteering small domestic favors so that greater services were not required. He agreed that my dog was beautiful and intelligent beyond all other beings, and that my brother was a pain in the ass. He agreed to these things because he calculated
by his agreement some solace to me and no hurt to him.

Michael was a brother. So we fought sometimes; I began the fights, but never won them. Michael was two inches shorter, but he was a bulldog once he dug in. There was a delicate balance between us: on the one side he lived in my house; on the other he had higher grades, more friends, and was better at baseball.

Baseball occasioned our meanest fight. Even before spring began to lift the load of winter kids in our school would put together hardball games in damp meadows, boys and girls playing together, and in these pre-season games I did okay. I was always reaching for the fences, my father’s son, but at bat I usually got a piece of something. My fielding was uncertain; I threw far and sometimes accurately.

Old Lyme Elementary School had a baseball team, and when the season truly began it played teams from nearby Saybrook and Westbrook and Madison and Essex and Deep River. My mother was a driver for away games, piling as many as eleven kids in the Ford, and to repay her for this service, I guess, the coach sometimes played me. I didn’t like Mr. Carver: he was an ass-slapper and arm-puncher, one for pep talks, a cave of winds.

During my sixth-grade May our team was practicing for the season opener against Deep River, out of town. I was trying out for shortstop, and Skippy Sheffield, a switch-hitting catcher who looked at eleven like he’d for sure be with the Red Sox before I could legally drive, who in fact went nowhere at all, drove a line drive at me. From fear I raised my glove, and the ball slapped into it, and stayed there. Not knowing what else to do with it, I threw it to second, where it was caught, and there was a double play. Mr. Carver, looking elsewhere, did not see this. He did see me lose a pop fly in the sun, and saw the ball hit my forehead.

The next day, Saturday, Mr. Carver was to stop at our house to pick up Michael and me. The Ford had been towed away again, and my father had not yet devised the sweet-talk to get it back. Mr. Carver arrived with a car full of kids and told Michael to get in back and me to go home, he wouldn’t need me today, maybe some other time. Michael didn’t want to leave without me, but he did. I went to the side of the house and stood watching Japanese
beetles, piled six deep, perpetuate themselves with tender leisure. My father was fiddling with an altimeter he needed for his dashboard, and heard what he suspected were tears. He came outside and asked me what was wrong.