Duke of Deception (28 page)

“You’re a bad one, get out.”

“But …” she started to say.

“But …” Alice started to say.

“OUT!” he yelled, and she left.

I studied this with my head cocked. I was impressed.

We spent the summer on the Cape, in a big drafty house at North Chatham. I played tennis, sailed a Beetle cat, contemplated girls. A Choate friend came to visit. We drank a quart of my father’s Canadian Club while he and my stepmother were at a party. We’d each have a jigger and refill the bottle with two jiggers of water. We quit when the whiskey was as transparent as gin. Alice was furious. My father thought our hangovers were piquant.

From North Chatham I wrote Mr. Steele:

How did “Grandmothers” and “occure” get past my father’s edit?

I hadn’t been back at school eight weeks when I let my father down. He had opened an office in New York as a management consultant, and would bring a potential client, a retired Air Force general, to the Yale-Harvard game. He invited me to meet them there, with a friend.

My friend was the son of a hotel owner, and at fourteen he had discovered his father’s chief bellman running whores. He had confronted the pimp, and they had reached an accommodation, or so my friend assured me. He didn’t tell his daddy what he knew, and he got whatever hookers he liked, superior room service, what he called “a sweetheart deal.” He told me about his sweetheart deal driving by taxi to the Yale-Harvard game. The cabby had bought us a pint of Mount Gay, which my father had learned to like in Barbados. My friend’s father had gone to Yale. Like Duke. But before I’d say
what a coincidence, Dad went there too
I asked my friend’s father’s class, college, and fraternity. 1925, Pierson, Fence, Wolf’s Head.
Oh, they wouldn’t have known each other, Dad was 1930, Saybrook, Deke, Bones
.

Outside a portal to the fifty yard-line on the Yale side of the Bowl I puked on the camel’s-hair topcoat of the retired Air Force general. My father didn’t slap me, then. He put me to bed in a tiny room at the Taft, and when I woke up he slapped me.

His office at 270 Park, a block north of Grand Central, overlooked a restaurant in the courtyard. My father used to give me lunch at The Marguery, where I learned to enjoy vichyssoise, and pronounce it. If the captain said the Dover sole was fresh I asked how it was prepared, and, whatever the reply, ordered it. I usually finished my meal with sherbet, or perhaps Brie if it hadn’t been refrigerated, wasn’t overripe. My father let me use his account
there and at Brooks, Abercrombie & Fitch, J. Press, Chipp and Sulka.

His office had on its door a varnished ash plaque made by a woodcarver at Minneford’s yacht yard on City Island:

A
RTHUR
S
AUNDERS
W
OLFF
III
Management & Engineering Consultant

This was quite large for the small door of a small office. There was a single room, exquisitely furnished but overwhelmed by my father’s desk, eight feet long. I once slept on the desk, with seven friends scattered on the couch and the floor, after a dance at the St. Regis Roof. We were swell.

My father had a series of secretaries. The first was gorgeous and efficient. But Duke’s hours were erratic, and so were his demands. I don’t mean to imply that they were in the conventional sense improper, but he spent his office hours ordering stuff, and his secretary spent her time picking up the stuff he ordered, or explaining why it hadn’t yet been paid for; she soon began to suspect that my father’s work was transient. After she quit another came, and another, and another, each less beguiling than the one before, less polished and pretty, till at the end there was an answering service that always said my father was at a meeting.

He had brochures printed, bound and mailed to hundreds of companies. The paper—thick, creamy, thirty-pound stock, hundred percent cotton—came from Cartier. My father’s name was raised, engraved in dark gray in the typographical style of
The New Yorker
. Good address, good telephone exchange (
PLAZA
5-6640), good typeface. His finishing trick was to bind the brochures in Mark Cross leather.

The résumé retailed the usual crap, but now he had added a rubric,
PUBLICATIONS:
“Articles in regard to management, plant site selection, plant-planning and plant layout, management and administrative procedures, and several studies of maintenance procedures published by McGraw-Hill and others.” The format didn’t conform to common bibliographic practice, but Duke was ever a pioneer of forms.

The pitch was divided into sections divided by titled leather tabs:

This document—which promised to straighten out any muddle, cause employees to love their work and their bosses, enhance productivity and reduce production costs, analyze markets, design aptitude tests, cure colic, goiters, and the pox, return capitalists to their golf carts and capitalism to its rightful eminence—my father sent to Ford, GM, GE, Chase, The Bank of New York, Bethlehem Steel, Sears, Roebuck & Co., McGraw-Hill (!), International Harvester, United Fruit, North American Aviation and many lesser members of
Fortune’s
Five Hundred.

Not one replied. My father did hear from the ex-tennis champs, Frank Shields and Sidney Wood, friends from Roxbury. They were in the laundry business, and wanted to sell him their towel service.

By now I knew my father was a phony. I wasn’t dead sure about Yale, but I was sure he was a phony. My father’s lesson had taken: he had tried to bring me up valuing precision of language and fact. So around him I became a tyrant of exactitude, not at all what he had meant me to be. Unable to face him down with the gross facts of his case I nattered at him about details, the
actual
date of the Battle of Hastings, the world’s coldest place, the distance between the moon and the sun, the number of vent-holes in a Buick Special. I became a small-print artist.

I was harder on my father after I had the goods on him than he had ever been on me. He had always had the goods on me. And he had never made cruel use of them.

After my father set up his office in New York we lived for a while at One Fifth Avenue. From there I sallied forth during vacations to jazz clubs and dances. I was levered on a list of eligibles by the mother of a Choate friend, and attended The Holidays, The Collegiate, The Get-Togethers, and The Metropolitan,
The Hols, The Cols, The Gets, and the Mets
, as we called them. I’d stand along the edge of the dance floor, a hand resting at the hip of a dinner
jacket, an elbow disdainfully projected to keep strangers at a distance, looking over the talent. Casual. I went to dances, but I didn’t dance at them, because I couldn’t, despite Alice’s instruction, dance. Weenie.

The summer of 1953 we returned to Connecticut, first to Weston, then to a small, beautiful house in Wilton, then to a big, old house on Nod Hill Road in Wilton. When my father’s lease expired at 270 Park he brought his “office” home to Wilton. He had time aplenty on his hands and used it to shop and fend off creditors. Cartier, he later told me, was especially sporting, asked him only twice to pay and then assumed that he preferred not to, and left him in peace. We still listened to jazz together when I was home from Choate, but now I knew more than my father. I explained to him (sometimes patiently) why Dave Brubeck was a better pianist than Art Tatum. He wouldn’t lose his temper with me but once, when I corrected him on some trivial matter of jazz fact, he left the living room, paused at the door, turned to me:

“Geoffrey, I love you. I love you because you’re my son, of course. But I love you beyond that. I want good things to come to you. I want you to be happy. I want these things for you and sometimes I would rather be with you than with anyone. But not now. Not these days. These days you know too much. You talk like a barber, and you bore me to death, and I hate to be in the same room with you most of the time. I hope this changes.”

Many grown-ups at Choate shared my father’s judgment of me. The Head told me, in the rhythms of the pulpit oratory he so favored, that I was “the weak link in an otherwise strong Choate chain.” A housemaster reported to him that “Geoff is certainly the biggest problem in the Woodhouse.” My goodness: “He can be counted on to try any shortcut around any work, to dodge responsibility and to take advantage of any privilege granted him. He seems to have a completely false set of values.” Only this by way of amelioration: “He is well poised; he is fiercely loyal to family and friends.” I was loyal to my father behind his back. I was a scourge to his face but I wouldn’t hear a word said against him by anyone else.

•  •  •

During Christmas vacation of my first year at Choate I was sent to Sarasota for a few days with my mother and brother. I flew into Tampa with greater self-certitude than when I flew out to Seattle three years earlier. See how I had changed: taller, with trained hair; grander, with a Brooks Brothers tweed jacket, Brooks Brothers blue button-down shirt, Brooks Brothers tie. True, the tweed jacket and flannel trousers weren’t just the things for sunshine and eighty degrees, but I was consoled by the picture I presented to my astonished mother: a young gentleman, a buck.

On the flight down I had thought much about the impression I wished to convey. Prosperity, control, worldliness. “You seemed quite worldly,” my mother admits. “You let me know that you were no longer a virgin.” My mother was indifferent to the significance of this fiction. “I didn’t feel I had much part in your life. You had grown up independent of me; I felt I had no responsibility for your diet, health, morals, anything. I had no right to care.”

While Toby gawked at his wised-up brother on the drive from Tampa to Sarasota, I confessed my imaginary sins. I had exhausted the inventory by the time we were downtown. The place had changed. Now Sarasota was spruced up, the Athens of the Gulf Coast, with live theater! I told my mother that I rather enjoyed the theater, perhaps I would treat her to a night out, dinner at the Ringling Hotel after the curtain fell.

“Shep’s gone,” my mother told me.

“He got bitten by a snake,” Toby said. “Maybe eaten by an alligator.”

“Maybe he ran away,” my mother said. “Maybe someone stole him. He was so friendly.”

I stared out the window, away from my mother’s face and my brother’s. I didn’t want them to see me now. The town was just the same, seedy.

My mother and Toby lived in a basement apartment downtown. It was tiny, damp, dark. Mother worked long hours, still at the Dairy Queen. Her ex-policeman, like the German woman’s G.I., came by of an evening to scream at her, threaten to choke, shoot, or knife her. His reasons at least during
my brief visit, were obscure. While my mother worked at the Dairy Queen I stayed with Toby, behind locked doors.

On Christmas Mother gave me a radio with a cream plastic case, AM and FM. No gift ever touched me deeper. It represented a huge sacrifice, thirty hours work at the Dairy Queen. I knew its price to the penny, but my mother did not show what it cost her. She just wanted me to have it. The next day at La Guardia a woman jostled me and the radio fell and broke. My father replaced it with a more expensive model. He would have been kinder to replace it exactly, or not at all.

Six months later I went to Arlington, Virginia to visit my mother and her brother Steve. Mother was on the run from the ex-policeman. She sent Toby from Washington to New York to see his father an hour before I flew in. I was to spend a night in Arlington at Uncle Steve’s, and a day sightseeing in Washington. The following afternoon I would fly to Maine for a week with a girl I had met at Choate.