Duke of Deception (18 page)

“Nothing.”

My father did not care for “nothing” as an answer to his question, and he asked again, sharply. I slapped a ball into the pocket of my Rawlings “Phil Rizutto” glove, and sobbed out the story, without neglecting a reference to yesterday’s double play. My father grew very angry, and he dragged me, against my mother’s protest and my own, to his MG. Along the way he jammed on his head a silly tweed cap, the kind that heel-and-toe downshifters of advanced years still wear. The MG driver’s cockpit was on the wrong side. This was going to be unpleasant. I tried to talk my father into leaving it be, but this made him even angrier: a dumb injustice had been done me, and Duke would set it right.

The teams were at play when we arrived, and Old Lyme was at bat, with Michael taking a lead off third. He looked at me as though he wanted not to know me. The game stopped while my father parked the MG, the
red
MG, six feet from home plate, nowhere near the other parents’ cars, black sedans, maybe a gray coupe for a sport. My father approached Mr. Carver, shouting. My father’s voice rose, and began to stammer. Mr. Carver made the mistake of touching my father’s arm to calm him, and my father cocked his fist so fast Skippy Sheffield ran from the batter’s box. Then my father noticed me, and he didn’t throw the punch. He lowered his voice.

“Put my boy up.”

Mr. Carver explained that there was a batter at the plate.

“I want my boy to bat now.”

I was pushed to the plate. The pitcher was rattled, and walked me. I tried to steal second, was thrown out standing up, and “our” side retired. My father drove me home then, and couldn’t speak to me. I wouldn’t speak to him.

That night Michael and I fought. I began it, picking on him, working him over while we brushed our teeth and got into our
pajamas. I made cracks about his height, his haircut, his clothes, his sisters, his father.

“Your old man’s a fanatic ascetic,” I said quoting Duke, knowing the meaning of neither polysyllabic in the accusation.

“What’s that mean?” Michael asked.

“Don’t you know
anything?
”

Then I said my father thought his father was a cheapskate, and that he didn’t pay my father a fair share of Michael’s costs. So finally I got what I wanted, and we tumbled on the floor, punching and kicking, trying to hurt each other. I swore; Michael was silent when we fought; he meant business. My mother stopped us. She came upstairs because my dog was howling, and when she pried us apart neither of us would say what caused the fight, because for once we both understood exactly what had caused it.

That night we lay silent for a long time on the sleeping porch. Other nights we talked as soon as our lights were out, about sex, about seeing the world together, about school, cars, the stuff Ripley printed in
Believe It Or Not
. That night neither would speak first. Then Shep began to whimper. He was so confused and miserable, and Michael laughed, and called the dog up on his bed. I didn’t say “Shep’s my dog, you can’t have him,” because I didn’t even think to say it. So we were past it, and then we began to talk, and I told Michael he shouldn’t have gone to the game without me, and Michael said he thought I was probably right about that. I didn’t know what else to say, except that I had lied about what my father said about his father.

Michael said, “Jesus! Did you
see
old man Carver’s face when the Duke was about to pop him? It was great, he near peed his pants. Skippy moved pretty quick too.”

Good friend. My father had called his father a cheapskate, though. And not long after he called him a cheapskate Duke rode home from New York in the army surplus jeep Michael’s strange father drove, summer and winter, without a top. This was winter, and it was snowing, and the cockpit was a chaos of noise. Duke chose that time to make his pitch, a labyrinthine hard-luck story with allusions to temporary setbacks in oil shale and uranium investments. Michael’s father pulled to the side of the Merritt
Parkway and opened his glove compartment and peeled three hundred off a bankroll, three times what my father had asked to borrow.

“Here.”

“I’ll pay you back in sixty days, maybe less.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll never pay me back.”

And then Michael’s father drove on into the storm. My father didn’t throw the money in the man’s face, or so I heard from Michael, years later in a letter, and by then I had no reason to doubt him.

Finally, all credit exhausted, we had to leave Old Lyme. “I couldn’t go to a grocery store within twenty miles,” my mother remembers. “Every week someone came to take something away, the furniture, a record player, the stove, even firewood.” Joe Freedman wanted the house itself, and that was that, an escape was planned.

Duke got a job with a New York engineering firm as a consultant to Averell Harriman’s European Co-Operation Administration. He was bound for Turkey, to organize an airline. My mother and Toby and I would go south, to Florida. I was not told these things, but overheard them, and was instructed not to speak of them lest people “misunderstand,” lest tradespeople lynch my mother and father. I wanted to say goodbye to Dr. Von Glaun, but this was not possible; we owed him money; he was not understanding.

I wanted to say goodbye to Michael, whose father had removed him from our house after quarreling with my father about something having no evident bearing on money, a question of politics or child psychology. Later Michael went to Alaska to earn money for college, earned it and was driving home (in a jeep), fell asleep on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (in a blizzard), went off the road and was paralyzed. Much later he fell in his shower, and was terribly burned by hot water while he lay helpless. I heard this a couple of years ago, when I stopped by my old school. I drove to the house where Michael lived when he left us, where he lives now. I parked outside for half an hour, saw curtains move, a face,
perhaps, at the window. I couldn’t open my car door. I drove away, entered the Connecticut Turnpike. I was terrified of my fear, and returned to his house, ran to the front door, rang the bell, waited not nearly long enough for a paralyzed friend to wheel himself to his door, and drove away again. I never said goodbye to Michael when I was eleven, either.

We stole away, my father in the MG to a garage near Hartford where he hid it, my mother and Toby and I in the Ford. A few days later Eaglebrook, trying to put the arm on its alumni and would-be alumni for gifts, tracked Duke to Old Lyme, wrote the postmaster, and got back its letter stamped “moved, left no address.” The dogged school then wrote a town officer, and he wrote back:

O
UR
Ford, like the Joad’s truck in
The Grapes of Wrath
, was burdened by every possession we didn’t leave behind to be picked over by creditors. Nothing stored except the MG and Shep, stuff tied to the roof and fenders like dead deer. By the time we hit southern New Jersey, mid-August, with the temperature in triple figures, the overloaded wagon began to boil over, and the oil pressure began to fall, and there seemed no way the money would stretch as far as Florida.

By Delaware Mother looked crazy. She drove sitting on a pillow to see out the high windshield, and pressed so hard against the door she seemed to want to break through it. Her knuckles were white on the wheel; she stuck her head out the window to dry the sweat from her face and escape the battles raging between Toby and me. I wonder what she promised herself during that damned trip, how close I came to being left in a Myrtle Beach motel room with a note tied around my neck:
Hi! My name is Jeff. All I’ll eat is Stuckey’s pecan stuff. I want a pair of beaded Seminole moccasins and to see a snake ranch. My mother left, looking for a better way to live
.

I nagged my mother for a boat and motor. Excepting Toby, always indifferent to material things, we were a family of material lusts, fixations that came down like fevers, and hung on. My father’s wants were the most varied and capricious: anything
of quality, a novel car, a blackthorn walking stick, folding scissors, a tattersall vest. Mother, with sand between her toes, wanted always to be somewhere warmer and sunnier, and she studied out-of-town newspapers, travel folders and shipping schedules the way Father studied Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues. My desires were fewer than my father’s, but as severe: an outboard-powered dinghy, an outboard-powered runabout, an outboard-powered racing runabout, an outboard-powered racing hydroplane.

A couple of months before we left Old Lyme I had sent away to Evinrude for a catalogue, and would spend an hour and more every night studying it, and especially a picture of a smiling boy and his dad being pushed at dawn along the misty shore of a verdant lake by a three-horsepower Fastwin, with Weedless Drive. I wanted one. My father knew I wanted it, and my mother knew I wanted it. My mother found my wish not at all novel, but beyond possibility. To satisfy my ardor for boating Duke sometimes chartered a leaky gray rowboat, with a Johnson Seahorse on the transom, and let me drive him around in it. This didn’t entirely satisfy my dream, which was to be free not only of land but landsmen, to go somewhere under my own power, alone. Still, my pleasure at the tiller of any outboard was so extreme that Duke yielded to me, and in effect robbed a boat dealer near New Haven of a one-horsepower Evinrude and a Penn Yan dinghy, a gorgeous eight-footer with spruce ribs, mahogany seats and trim, and white canvas topsides. He promised to pay for this after a check cleared, stock was transferred, when his accountant returned from holiday abroad … presently.

Two months later the boat, which I was allowed to drive in the bay at Point o’ Woods while one of my parents watched from the beach, was repossessed. The motor too. I did not witness this. All I knew was that as soon as my father left for Turkey, my boat and motor were gone. My mother spared me the particulars, told me only that there was no room in the car to take the boating gear with us to Florida, but that she would replace it when we got there. This she knew she could not do;
I knew she would not do it, and from the moment I no longer had the boat I had once had, I gave her no peace.

“You beat on me all the way south,” Mother says.

What kind of boat can I get? Another Penn Yan? Cross your heart? Father gave it to me. I miss him. You won’t break your promise? When will I see Shep? Are they feeding him what he likes? Tell Toby to move over, he’s on my half of the seat. I’m hungry. Can we see the Spanish moss place? What’s Spanish moss? I miss Dad. Why did we have to move? Can we buy the boat as soon as we get there? The first day? Promise?

We pulled in lame and broke, and found temporary refuge with a couple who had lived near us in Old Lyme. Melinda had been Duke’s childhood friend in Hartford and had encouraged our move to Mile Creek Road with an uneducated eagerness she did not display upon our arrival in Florida. She was stocky, foulmouthed, tanned butternut, and thought kids were a pestilence.

She ran a development on Treasure Island called “Pieces of Eight” or “The Black Dog” or somesuch, a residential resort whose houses had names like “Ben Gunn’s” or “Bill Bones’ ” or “Dead Man’s Chest.” The main house was “Long John Silver’s,” and there was a power launch called the
Hispaniola
, and it was enough to gutter forever my enthusiasm for my favorite book.

I didn’t like Melinda, her taste in proper nouns, or Florida. The water tasted of sulphur, it was hot, strange things crawled across the sand, mangroves looked ridiculous. Melinda’s kin were Nature’s avant-garde, and walked Treasure Island naked, which I would not do, and I was embarrassed to reveal my priggishness. My mother wore a bathing suit, but to accommodate the spirit of the place where we were guests obliged Toby to go bare-assed. He sat on beach cactus, and cried.

After a week of this we found a cottage for fifty a month on Siesta Key, near Sarasota. It was only a quarter mile from the Gulf of Mexico but that poorhouse was the meanest place I ever lived. It was tiny, with beaverboard partitions soft as mold from the dampness that penetrated everything always, chilling us and mildewing our clothes. The bare wood floors, painted gray, were slick
and cold and loosely joined; they bristled with splinters. The stink of sulphur hung like perpetual fog, sand stuck to bedclothes and vinyl upholstery, the rooms were dark, and I was ashamed to live there.

Shame encouraged fantasy. I imagined myself elsewhere and otherwise, wished myself into other people’s skins. I had come upon a book called
Big Red
, about a trapper who worked the Maine woods with his boy and his boy’s red setter. The book attracted me because it was set in a place so unlike Florida, and about a boy alone with his father. I missed my father, and I let my mother know this every half hour or so.

Duke sent checks, almost adequate for our care, and letters telling about Turkey and his adventures, begging us to be cautious, reminding my mother not to let Toby or me come down with polio. Mother was more interested in his checks than his prose, as I knew. I would study those letters, with his black, thick characters, so grotesquely outsized that he filled a sheet with only sixty or eighty words. They invariably closed with some expression of affectionate longing that caused me to run to my room, slam my door and fall upon my bed. I have never broken myself of the morning jitters for incoming mail—the good news, big break, grand slam—and it began then, waiting for those blue, tissue-thin envelopes (not so many of them, either), covered like a fanatic’s bumper with gummed instructions, warnings, expostulations: FRAGILE … DO NOT BEND … 
RUSH!
 … SPECIAL HANDLING … URGENT COPY … 
EXPEDITE!
My father actually believed that special requests received special treatment. In fact, many of his letters never arrived. That is, some checks never arrived. That is, my mother had my father’s assurance that he had sent—PRIORITY—some checks that never arrived. Perhaps they drew too much attention to themselves.