Duke of Deception (30 page)

“No, you got bigger fish to fry, won’t be thinkin’ ’bout old George.”

“Bullshit, George.”

“Yeah,” George said, the last word from him the last time I saw him.

The night I wrecked my Porsche I had been drinking at Rip’s Lounge. The pianist and organist from Sarasota had opened a nightclub in a shopping center in White Plains. It was as dark as Dick’s hatband in there; the walls were fish tanks, bubbling greenly. Rip wore a white dinner jacket when he played. It set off his brilliantined black hair to good advantage, he thought. I went there with Duke, a Choate friend, and our dates. My date was a plain-talking blonde, Buster Crabbe’s daughter, and when my father said he had been her father’s friend, I didn’t believe him. Her father, after all, had been somebody, Tarzan! Duke had in fact been his friend in Miami, where they swam together in an aquatic circus. Nevertheless, Susie Crabbe preferred my Choate friend, Jack, and so did Jack’s date prefer Jack. I studied this injustice while a wonderful jazz guitarist, Mundell Lowe, played solo. And
when he was finished, Rip, who considered himself the headliner, began to play and I talked, too loudly, to Jack.

“Where do you think we’ll be ten years from now?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “Who knows?”

“Who do you think’s going to do better?”

“What do you mean by better?” Jack asked.

“You know. I know. We’ll know then. Listen, we’ll know.”

My father was annoyed. “Shut up and listen to the music.”

“Tell you what,” I told Jack, “let’s get together in ten years and see what’s happened to us.”

“You’re serious.”

“Bet your ass I’m serious!” My voice had risen. Rip looked hard at our table. Duke looked hard at Rip.

“Okay,” Jack said, “a deal. A hundred I’m happier, better off, further ahead. Ten years from now.”

Our dates giggled as we seized hands. People stared at us. Rip quit “Autumn in New York” abruptly, left the stand. As he passed our table he muttered something, probably to me. My father was drunk now, and pugnacious. Maybe Rip had said something to him, we had disrupted our friend’s set, it was his club. Rip headed downstairs to the men’s room, and I followed him. At the bottom of the stairs he put his arm around me like a buddy, and was about to lecture me, I think, on good manners, when we were spun around by Duke’s shout from the top of the stairs.

“Take your hands off him, greaser!”

“What!” Rip shouted. “What did you say?”

“I know you in and out, pal.” My father was shaking his finger.

“Come down here you fake sonofabitch,” Rip said. “You’re all air, always have been, just a crummy, deadbeat talker, come on down, let’s get this over.”

“I’m no fool,” my father said. “You’ve got a gun.”

“I don’t need it for you.” Rip pulled the revolver from his shoulder holster.

“Don’t shoot me!” my father yelled.

Rip tried to hand it to me, but I backed away. It was the snubnose he had shot at rabbits in Florida. I begged them to stop. Rip threw his pistol on the floor.

“If I come after you,” my father said, “you’ll pick it up; you’re a mob guy, I know all about you.”

Rip picked up the gun, shook out the bullets, threw the gun in a trash basket, beckoned with his hand, said quietly: “Come down here, I don’t want to fight in front of my customers.”

“Fuck yourself,” my father said.

Rip started upstairs fast. I followed, grabbing at his coat, and by the time I reached him he was at the front door of his club, watching my father drive away, leaving rubber. There was no point chasing him, his Ferrari was too fast.

“He’s chickenshit,” Rip said.

“No,” I said, “he isn’t.” But I knew he was.

I was not good to Choate, but neither was Choate good to me. Piety, courtesy, self-importance, smugness, and a killing dose of homily characterized the Choate I knew. Choate’s business was to define and enclose. Alice understood this from her son’s experience, and even before I arrived for summer school she wrote Seymour St. John: “Choate will do wonders for Jeff. Learning to share and also to accept restrictions pleasantly.” Then another letter: “It will help Jeff, he will become accustomed to restrictions.”

Cookie-cutting has its virtues. It’s worth something to be taught that neighbors have rights, that conventions are not prima facie malign, that rules are not always provocative. At Choate, though, cookie-cutting was a fixation. The boys we called “straight arrows” thrived. The rest of us—“negos,” carpers, corner-cutters, and wise-apples—bucked the system, and some had fun. The happy ones knew what they were doing, but I didn’t. I said
no
by reflex, wouldn’t take the bit, see the point, play the game, join the team. I was ashamed of myself, and bitter that Choate didn’t love me. I should have understood that boys who don’t join the team cannot expect to be loved by the team.

Most of the masters at Choate and many of the boys felt I laughed too quickly and too often at things sacred to them: the score of the Deerfield game, the election of class officers, our privilege not to be permitted to smoke. Seymour St. John’s farewell
message to my graduating class, published in the 1955 yearbook,
The Brief
, closed with an unidentified quotation “from one of my heroes.” It is vintage homily, just the kind of stuff we heard at chapel every evening after dinner, and before lunch on Sunday: “The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.”

Perhaps. There were no black students at Choate, and someone once asked the Head why. There were no black students at Choate, said the Reverend St. John, because it was unfair to elevate the aspirations of Negroes by inviting them to a school whose customs, requirements, and academic standards were beyond their reach. Yet, he said, all were equal in the eyes of the Lord. So he invited a black preacher to sermonize to us every year. This was a huge man with a musical voice, a Robeson bass; he had the most cultivated of accents, the product of education at Trinity College, Cambridge. The Head beamed to hear him speak. The last time I heard him, I deployed alarm clocks throughout the chapel, and they rang at five-minute intervals for almost an hour.
Mea culpa
, it was the weak link who did this. My father had done it too, at the Clark School. It was just dumb, easy mischief, not so much the work of an angry young man as of a temperamental brat.

The spring of my fifth-form year I visited the Head for a heart-to-heart. I was in trouble. I had run up bills. From way back, midway through my first year, this had been a problem. Here’s a note from George Steele in 1952: “I have had to write your parents about your Bookshop bill. Now, ere the new year, I expect you to get yourself out of your difficulties.” Then came a wire to my father, with a copy to Steele, from St. George’s Inn, where we were sometimes allowed to eat dinner, and in whose basement some of us smoked, a vice punishable by immediate expulsion:
THE AMOUNT OF
$49.19
ACCRUED BY YOUR SON
JEFFREY WOLFF HAS NOT BEEN PAID. IF IT IS NOT PAID IN FULL BY THE FIFTEENTH OF THIS MONTH WE WILL BE FORCED TO TURN THE ACCOUNT OVER TO OUR ATTORNEY FOR COLLECTION
.

But the immediate cause of my trouble was a breach of school
regulations, sort of. Fifth-formers were obliged to be present at a specified number of meals each week, and attendance was usually recorded by a master, seated at each round table of twelve. At Sunday supper, however, the masters were free, and we signed ourselves in. I came to the dining hall, signed in, bowed my head for the Head’s appreciation of our many bounties, gulped a glass of milk and left for a proper meal at St. George’s. A straight arrow, aware that I had exhausted my outside dining privileges, turned me in to Mr. Steele. The Penguin took the position that I had, in effect, lied, had breached the Honor Code, was subject to the consideration of the Honor Committee.

On the Honor Committee was a boy I knew well. He was as dumb as a shoe. Three weeks earlier he had stolen my sweater. I saw him leave my room with it and retrieved it from his drawer. I had worn it every day since, in front of him. I was wearing it now. He frisked with me, told me there was no place at Choate for liars, that I wasn’t good enough for his wonderful school. Others in the room, the class of the class ahead of me, nodded. I sat silent, no defense, of course they were right, the sweater was nothing weighed against my breach of honor, I was low, a miserable thing, verily.

They were sports. I was let off with a warning. I went to see the Head, and he told me I didn’t deserve to remain in his school. When I left his office I felt soiled, diminished, and beyond reach. I believed the man despised me, and was right to despise me. Now I find a generous memo in my file, a record of our talk:

I left the Head’s office, and wanted to be alone. There was only the chapel. At Choate I was never alone, except there. I loved chapel for this, sang the hymns with gusto, even reverence. Alone in the chapel I banished resentments. I prayed to be better. I tried. My
Brief
biography is illustrated with a poorly drawn cartoon of a boy studying a book titled
Being One of the Boys
. I studied the subject diligently, to my shame. Had myself confirmed by the Head, in the Head’s faith. Joined the Altar Guild and the Scholarship Committee. Sang with the choir, the glee club, and the Maiyeros (pipsqueak Whiffenpoofs). I tried to make the football team: “Fine effort,” the coach said, “willing. Going to be a hard competitor to stop. Fought hard as a guard. Good development.” But I wasn’t good enough, and so I became a cheerleader. Good God! I’d rather confess I was a pickpocket. My friends were amused. I was perplexed.

The Maiyeros gave a concert at Miss Porter’s, in Farmington. I fell in love with a girl from Philadelphia. She liked me, for a while, and visited me for a day and night in Wilton during her Christmas vacation. I had hoped she would stay longer, but she lost interest quickly. She seemed uncomfortable with my father; Duke wasn’t what she knew on the Main Line. She was quiet, reserved, not pretty, handsome, with mannish shoulders. I liked her for good reasons, and as usual I liked her too well. I wanted her to love me; I boasted, labored to charm, dropped names, felt her slip away, heard her telephone the New York, New Haven and Hartford to ask about an earlier train. We drove to the Norwalk station in silence. At the station she told me there was no need to wait for her train, but I did. We waited five minutes together; she pretended to read a book.

That night I wrote her a letter, twenty or thirty pages, maybe fifty. Falsehood on falsehood.
Bons mots
from
Bartlett’s
that I hoped weren’t familiar, because I displayed them as my own. References to my upcoming social season, so busy with coming-out
parties in Boston and New York. The summer looked full too, Pater would be off as usual doing polo at Brandywine and Myopia. I’d be playing the eastern tennis circuit, Longwood, Newport Casino, had a fair chance to advance to a ranking if I could sharpen the backstroke, but squash at the Racquet Club was playing hob with my wrist. And so on and on and on … I even quoted, as a closing epigraph, a line or two from Sophocles, in Greek:
Thus do flies to gods like little boys to men
, or something. I signed off, finally, “affectionately.”

This letter was probably worse than I have represented it here. I know I wrote it on Racquet Club stationery (taken from a cache my father had cadged when Frank Shields took him to lunch to sell him the temporary use of towels), and I know I sealed the envelope with wax from a Christmas candle and stuck Duke’s crest, engraved on a salt shaker he had given Alice as a wedding gift, in the wax.

That night my father found the letter, opened it, read it. He didn’t bring it to me. He destroyed it first, and then came to my room and woke me. He knew the toll, to the penny; he was so gentle. He didn’t quote the letter at me, or refer to it. He told me I was better than I thought, that I didn’t need to add to my sum. I had warmth, he said; warmth and energy were the important things. These were a long time paying off sometimes, but they paid off. Honesty was the crucial thing, he said, knowing who I was, being who I was. What he said was so; I knew it was so. I didn’t even think to turn his words against him, he was trying so hard to save me from something, to turn me back. I had this from him always: compassion, care, generosity, endurance.

I had met another girl at Farmington, Marion Rockefeller; they called her “Pebbles.” Cute, sassy, friendly. She invited me to a dance not long after my father’s talk about the truth. I called for her at an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her father wished to deliver us to the Plaza. As I descended in the elevator with Laurance Rockefeller he asked me if I was kin to the Wolffs at Loeb, Rhodes, fine people. I said I was not. Perhaps then Dr. Wolff (I
brightened), a good heart man at Mt. Sinai? Certainly not, my grandfather
was
a doctor but he was dead; he had practiced at a Catholic hospital somewhere in Connecticut. Mr. Rockefeller had exhausted his interest in my ancestors. I noticed him look down at my feet. I was wearing black loafers with my dinner jacket. He looked at my cummerbund. Mr. Rockefeller also wore a dinner jacket, but with pumps on his feet and a black vest crossed by a delicate gold chain. I thought he looked better than I looked, and I thought he thought so too. I danced a few times with Pebbles, a St. Paul’s boy cut in with a fierce scowl for me and a grin for the pretty girl, and I never saw her again.