Duke of Deception (25 page)

The Duke’s New York driver’s license. It gives his address as The Racquet Club (in fact at 370 Park Avenue), a place where he had once or twice been a guest
.

————————

My father, eighteen months before he died
.

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With my boys, holding Justin, photographed by John, who told me my father was dead
.

A
LICE
came in with the century. When I met her in a high corner room of the Olympic Hotel she was fifty-one, and looked older. My father, forty-three, looked her age. She had been twice married, widowed, and then divorced. Her first husband was a chemical magnate (his firm, Sandoz, developed LSD) and a prig. Alice cherished his memory, and was proud that he had considered himself undressed without his spats. He wore pince-nez, and was by all accounts a very serious gentleman.

Her second husband was different. He stroked a Harvard eight that won Henley, was a member of Porcellian and a class marshal. That was about it for him, though. He liked Mexico—the sun, the hours and the spirits—and he spent Alice’s money fast, capital as well as interest. Like my father, he was younger than she.

I liked Alice. She had a musical voice, trained to its vibrato precision by singing coaches and finishing schools. I liked the pretty white hair she wore piled on top of her head, and her formality. She was fastidious, but didn’t seem cold. She was big, I guess “Rubenesque” is the euphemism, and she put on airs, but they were the airs of a schoolmarm, and I found them comfortable, at first. Later, when she pronounced the
is
in “isolate” to rhyme with the
is
in “sis,” I’d straighten her out, and still later I’d mock her. But then, just thirteen, I reckoned she must know something I didn’t know.

My father introduced us with pride; he “knew we’d love each other.” I’d had no warning about Alice, had never heard of her, before he took me to her room. She and my father kissed when she opened the door, but this was friendly, not at all carnal. I don’t know what I thought my father and this woman were to each other, but I didn’t think of their association as a betrayal of my mother.

I was wrong. Later I learned that Duke had known Alice since we lived in Old Lyme. He had met her in Boston, and they had spent much time there together, hobnobbing with her ex-husband’s Harvard friends. They had rendezvoused in Paris while we lived in Sarasota, and my father had been with this nice lady at the Empress in Victoria when I left Sarasota, and at Wilcooma Lodge when I landed in Seattle.

Rosemary was outraged when Duke told her about Alice. I, of course, applied a double standard to my parents, but it was easy to rationalize: There was always between Alice and my father the sense of an arrangement rather than a passion. They liked each other, and then they didn’t, but I never felt ardor ebb or flow between them. But I was a kid, and saw what I wished to see.

I didn’t know, or even sense, that my appearance repelled Alice. I was wearing pale-green gabardine trousers when she met me, and these were held in place by a quarter-inch white patent leather belt. Over a shiny shirt with representations of brown-skinned islanders at play beneath palm trees I wore the tartan jacket my father had so recently bought me, and this jacket she especially despised. She was also disappointed in my table manners. We ate that first night at Canlis’s, a fancy restaurant high on a hill overlooking Lake Union, and I worked through the courses pretty fast. She finally said, “Please don’t wolf your food,” and I said, “I’m a Wolff, why not?” Duke laughed, and told me to slow down. I noticed Alice’s neck go blotchy red, but I didn’t know yet that this was a danger signal,
We Are Not Amused
.

The next morning she took me to the Prep Shop at Frederick & Nelson. The clothes were laughably uncool but I indulged the nice lady, let her trick me out cap-a-pie. I stood firm on the
question of my hair, so the boys at St. Bernard’s and Collegiate, where Alice’s son had been schooled, would not have recognized me as one of their own. That second night we ate in the Cloud Room of the Camlin, and I watched my father’s measured moves with his eating equipment while he talked to me and Alice listened, now and then touching the corner of her linen napkin to the corner of her mouth.

“I spoke with Rosemary this morning.” My father had never called her
Rosemary
to me before, always
your mother
. “We’ve decided that a divorce makes sense, better for her and for me.” He didn’t wait for me to say anything, but there was nothing I wanted to say. “You’ll stay with me, of course.” I nodded, took a bite of roast sirloin. “Toby’ll stay with his mother. He needs her, and it’s fair.” I nodded. “I guess there’s not much more to say about this. You know how she feels?” I nodded. “Well. How would you feel about Alice staying here in Seattle?”

“Duke,” Alice said, motioning him to quit now.

“Living with us, I mean,” my father said.

“Oh, Duke! Give the child time!”

I tried to get a whole asparagus into my mouth without dripping hollandaise on my new flannels. “Okay with me,” I said. “Fine,” I said, smiling at the nice lady across the table.

We moved to a big house on Lake Washington, northeast of the Sand Point Naval Air Station. I got a new, faster boat, specially made for me. I had the whole top floor of the house and could play whatever music pleased me, as loud as I wanted. I didn’t see much of my school friends, and Duke didn’t see much of his Boeing friends. Alice wasn’t comfortable around them. I began to hear how differently they talked, the gaffes they committed. My father wouldn’t wear a tie every night to dinner but I had to, and at first I liked this.

The MG went up on blocks when the cold weather came, and Duke and Alice bought a brand-new Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon, with Brewster green metal, wood trim and Dyna-Flo transmission. They were married in a civil ceremony at home the day his divorce came through, and some of his pals from MG
rallies teased him about the Buick, its automatic transmission and four air holes (“Ventaports”) in the hood. Alice let me sample the fish house punch while I helped her make it, and I enjoyed the lightheaded sensation. Some of Duke’s friends whistled when they saw the house and the spread: smoked salmon, caviar, oysters, a Smithfield ham. I liked the impression we seemed to make, but I saw that my father did not, and that when people told him he “must’ve struck gold” Alice’s neck went red. By now I knew what that meant.

My father got drunk and went to the garage with some friends from the MG club. They ran the engine, talked about old times, bragged about their cars. My father made me sit behind the wheel while he told again how I had “pranged” the car, and I blushed. Then he told his friends that he was keeping the MG for me till my sixteenth birthday, and I was so excited I honked the horn.

After the men and their wives left I was sent to bed. I heard an argument, much worse than anything between Duke and Rosemary, a shouting match. Alice didn’t seem to fear him. He came upstairs, sat on my bed. He was breathing heavily, and I was afraid.

“Did this whole goddamned thing for you.”

“What, Dad?”

“Don’t
what, Dad
me! D’you think I wanted this?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know all right. Just don’t have the guts to take responsibility.”

He sounded as though he hated me. “Tell me what I’ve done,” I asked. I was being a lawyer.

“Jesus,” he said. Then he mimicked me:
“Tell me what I’ve done!
Nothing, kiddo, and you’ll never do anything, either.”

Then he left, slowly negotiating the narrow stairs, swearing. I heard one last thing before he pitched out the front door, and drove away in the Buick:

“That’s all she wrote, Arthur.”

A few weeks later I overheard a discussion between my father and stepmother about money, a temperate discussion about stocks and
shares, annual yield, “the tax picture.” I asked my father who paid for what these days. He didn’t react to the question as though it were delicate. He told me his salary at Boeing was high, he had had a promotion. Moreover, he said, he had finally come into his father’s estate, half a million dollars. I said that was wonderful, we were rich, right? It wasn’t polite to speak of these things, my father explained to me. Gentlemen did not discuss money. Besides, while his was tied up in investments Alice would carry many of the petty household expenses. She was sensitive about these matters, my father explained, so I was never, never, never to speak to my stepmother about money, his or hers. I was to rest assured that there was plenty.

To believe the fable of the inheritance required great will, an appetite for credulity I can now credit only by assuming that I preferred this fabulous notion to the transparent reality that my father was a grifter, living off a woman who didn’t seem inclined to give anything away free. I think I
couldn’t
have believed in the half million. Maybe I didn’t care. I was safe; as my father said, there was plenty now, wherever it came from.

Seattle couldn’t hold them. On the last day of January, two months after they were married, Duke quit his job. Alice had wearied of the provincialism of the “jumping-off-place for Alaska,” and of having water pour on her head every time she stepped outside. My father had been offered a job in Tennessee, with a jet-engine test center. He would have a raise in pay to twelve hundred a month and great responsibility. Incredibly, he had managed to push through the same résumé that had so recently provoked the FBI.