Duke of Deception (23 page)

“You can leave now,” he said.

“I haven’t cleaned up yet, honey,” she said. She was saucy, unmindful of my father’s short temper.

“That’s all right,” he said. “Some other time.” He was surprisingly courtly.

The cleaning lady stood up stiffly, as if on her dignity. “It’s not as easy as that, honey,
some other time
 …” She was mocking my father, on Christmas Eve.

“Here, take this,” he said. He gave her a twenty. She blew him a kiss, and left laughing.

I asked my father if he had kissed her.

“Of course not. Jesus, how could you think that?”

“There’s lipstick on your cheek.”

“Oh, that,” he said, touching his cheek, blushing. “Well, yes, there was an office party, pretty girl there, red hair, nice popsie, about twenty-five, just a friendly kiss, very pretty …”

As though “pretty” made a difference. It made a difference.

My father’s work at Boeing was as liaison between design, engineering, and production, just what he had done at Lockheed for the XP-38 and at North American for the XP-51. Now the project was the XB-52, and this was the Atomic Age; aviation had
changed, was all business. My father had not changed, was not all business, and if his easy way with regulations won him admirers who worked under his charge on the mockup and prototype of the bomber, it also drew the attention of people without much sense of humor.

It drew the attention of the FBI. My father was careless with papers and blueprints, and didn’t always lock his desk at night. This was a nuisance, but nothing to cause the heavy trouble about to come down on him after his security check. My father required a “Q” clearance—virtually an atomic clearance—for his work, and the FBI had just accumulated a meticulous record of his life.

It was late August, 1951. I remember because it happened the day after the unlimited hydroplane race near the Floating Bridge. Our Chris-Craft Riviera had just been “repo’d” (my father’s word for “repossessed,” a word he had such frequent occasion to use he abbreviated its three syllables to two), and we were watching the big inboard hydroplanes thunder around the markers from my own little racing runabout,
Y-Knot
. The boats were powered by airplane engines, Allisons and Rolls-Royces, sometimes two engines, and they could surpass two hundred miles per hour. One of the boats back in the pack was a gray, ungainly thing with two supercharged in-line engines, and on a straightaway it began to move up. The engines were winding high, the superchargers screaming, and my father touched my arm.

“Look away,” he said. “That guy’s about to blow.”

I looked sharp, saw the boat hobbyhorsing a little. “What?” I asked my father. “What did you say?”

“He’s pushed those Allisons too far. They won’t take that much. There. He’s gone.”

And I looked where the boat had been, and there wasn’t any boat anymore.

“Let’s go,” my father said. “That’s all she wrote.”

The next day the FBI came to visit. It was Sunday. They identified themselves and my father told me to leave the room. Two of them talked to him. I tried to hear what they said. They were polite, serious. My father didn’t raise his voice. When he said
something, which wasn’t often, they didn’t interrupt him. When they left they shook hands with him, and with me. One of them reminded him not to leave town, they’d be in touch. My father said of course, he’d be at home.

A few hours later he packed the MG and we drove to Port Angeles and took the ferry to Canada: Victoria, on Vancouver Island. My father checked us into the Empress, and I heard him use the name Saunders Ansell. The Empress was huge, and my father knew his way around it. He said that was where he’d been, “with a friend,” when I flew to Seattle from Florida. We had tea with cakes and cookies and crustless sandwiches cut into thirds and quarters. My father looked at me across the tea table in the fancy lobby and said I needed a decent jacket. We went to the best haberdasher in Victoria, where he bought me a Black Watch tartan jacket. It came with brass buttons with a crest stamped on them, and my father insisted that these be removed, and replaced with solid, heavy, plain brass buttons. I was proud of my picture in the mirror. I reminded me of someone who had been raised to eat cucumber sandwiches in the lobby of the Empress.

My father was distracted. The next day we drove out the island to a place called Wilcooma Lodge, perched on the side of a fjord. We ate smoked salmon and looked at the water. My father drank whiskey with Lon Chaney, Jr., a guest, and when he came to bed he woke me up. He sat on the edge of my bed, rocking back and forth, holding his head in his hands. He was drunk, but he wasn’t angry this time. He was sad.

“I’ve done awful things,” he said.

“What things?” I asked him, afraid he might tell me.

“I don’t know.” His hands were in front of his face, held there like a mask. “Jesus, a man like me, power to waste life, engines of destruction … Sometimes, old man, it weighs heavy, believe me. Very, very, very heavy indeed.”

Then he gave me specifics. He had drawn the line with the XB-52, had argued against its development as an atomic bomber. He couldn’t allow another Hiroshima, Nagasaki, he already had “enough blood on his hands.” He was in trouble because of his
anti-atomic position, “deep trouble.” The FBI wasn’t finished with him.

We stayed a week. I was proud of my father’s courage, the risk he was running. We rowed up the fjord, talking about old times. My father put his arm around me a lot, said he wanted me to be anything at all I wanted to be, as long as it served other people. He told me again how important it was that we tell the truth to each other, hang the cost. He told me I was okay, and that was all that mattered to him. He said he thought maybe Rosemary wouldn’t come to Seattle, but that was all right, maybe we’d travel south, see how she and Toby were doing.

He taught me to drive. I got three miles down the gravel driveway of Wilcooma Lodge, shifting pretty well, and then I lost it on an easy right-hander. The left fender and door were goners, but my old man managed to laugh about it, told our English hosts I had “pranged her into a ditch.” He told me “never mind, you’ll get the hang of it.”

That day he made a long call to Seattle, and when he hung up he got a tow truck for his car. We followed in a taxi to the Seattle ferry, and boarded early, after the MG was put in the hold. We watched people come up the gangplank, slowly at first, then more frantically as the ferry prepared to shove off.

“Tell you what,” my father said. “I’ll bet you a buck someone misses the boat.”

“If the boat’s gone, how can we tell?”

“We have to see him miss it.”

“I don’t know …”

“I’ll do you better. Someone has to miss the boat, and be so goddamned mad that he shakes his fist at us, jumps up and down, and throws his hat on the ground.”

“I’ll take it. A buck.”

“If he throws his hat on the ground, and jumps up and down on it, you’ll owe me two bucks, okay?”

“Deal.”

We had the hawsers aboard, were slipping into the channel. “Look,” my father said, pointing. I owed him two bucks, and fifteen years later I paid him.

We stood out on the windward railing all the way to Seattle. It was a clear night, dry and cold, and we saw the sun go down toward Asia and for an instant, like a flashbulb, light up the Olympic range. My father laid his arm over my shoulder. I wanted to comfort him.

“Is it going to be okay?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

And this was so, for the time being. Much later I learned what happened. The FBI had traced him back, stumbling over debts and a few scrapes with the police, some heavy drinking, the kinds of things the FBI finds when it looks. All the way back to his first job at Northrup. Here was a careless man, a good engineer, a patriotic American. Then, abruptly, in 1936, he disappeared. Groton hadn’t heard of him, except to tell someone in Birmingham it hadn’t heard of him. Yale hadn’t heard of him. The Sorbonne didn’t know what the hell it was being asked to verify,
what
school of
aeronautiques?
My father hadn’t, as he claimed, been born in New York, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Who was he? Where had he come from? Here was a man in close proximity to atomic bombers who seemed to have been dropped into this country, a few years before a world war, from nowhere. Here was a man obliged to answer some questions.

He answered them, somehow. Boeing kept him on. I can’t imagine why. Probably cost-plus saved him. Cost-plus government contracts have saved many another. Boeing’s profit was a fixed percentage of its costs; the higher its payroll, the more the company earned. My father was of some use to Boeing, imperfect as he was. And perhaps the FBI decided that even a man with bad character can be a patriot.

A few weeks after our flight to Canada and my father’s return to Boeing, Alice, “Tootie,” my stepmother, arrived.

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With my mother in La Jolla, California, 1941
.

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My father at thirty-six, in a publicity photograph for Bechtel-McCone and Parsons, Birmingham, 1944
.

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