Duke of Deception (33 page)

St. John answered compassionately. He was relieved to report that my father had assured him a check was in the mail. It must have gone astray. I paid the debt three years later. But meantime, to mark the “disgrace to my family and country,” I got falling-down drunk and was shaken awake on the steps of Palmer Physics Laboratory by a student, on his way to a 7:40
A.M
. engineering class, who half carried me to the infirmary. It was thought that I had fallen from a height, but I had in fact fallen my own height, to lie six hours in the mid-October rain. A doctor noticed that I was incoherent; perhaps there had been a blow to the head? There were X-rays, a blood test. I was drunk. The following morning I was still drunk. That afternoon I was sent to the Assistant Dean of Students. He observed that there was a pattern here of self-destruction. I saw that this was so, and said it was so. How did I explain it? I tried, I really tried to explain it. I explained about predetermination, being a father’s son. The dean explained fresh starts, clean slates. Self-pity blocked my ears; also, a fast slide downhill is sometimes exhilarating.

I began to run up bills, why not? I couldn’t travel to Poughkeepsie and Northampton wearing rags. We’d drive eleven hours in a roommate’s ancient and illegally registered Buick convertible, in violation of Princeton’s injunction against student driving, so I could take a Smith girl to Rahars and three hours later kiss her (maybe) on the steps of her house, while her housemother watched, an hour before midnight. Then we’d spend the night on
someone’s cousin’s friend’s floor at Amherst, and the next day drive back through the rain. This we called “dating.”

My other “dates” were perquisites of my baritone crooning with a singing group called The Tigertones, a close harmony chorus of a dozen or so. We sang funny songs and we sang sad songs. During the winter of my freshman year I had Langrock fit me with a suit of tails, so I could sing at coming-out parties. Spring vacation we Tigertones flew to Bermuda to sing at the Belmont Manor. There were fewer girls than boys in Bermuda when we were there. Surprisingly, singers did not seduce them. Football players, in Bermuda ostensibly to play Rugby but in fact for spring football practice, seduced them. Football players shaved their ankles before they taped them. That was how you recognized them as football players, by their shaved ankles. I shaved my ankles. This was a metaphor, the kind my father had understood for many years. I was learning, nothing to it, soap and a razor, jubilee.

That summer I went to Colorado with a quartet of Princeton singers, The Boomerangs. We sang “Sweet Adeline!,” “Mavourneen,” “Bandoleros” (“We are brave and happy Ban-do-laaaay-rose;/ We conquer, or diiie!”) and “Teasin’.” We wore striped jackets and boaters. The bass, son of an undertaker, taught me to drink martinis in the Mineshaft Bar near Central City, where we sang at the Glory Hole Saloon for meals and tips. We didn’t sing very well, in part because of the martinis. We went broke and broker, and now when we passed the boater for tips we salted it with a fiver, till one night we got it back with less than two dollars. I borrowed money first from the second tenor, and then from the first. I was supposed to bring back at least a thousand to help me through Princeton my second year. I came back empty-handed, with a hangover. My friends helped me, and wanted me to be other than who I was. Who? There was a saying at Princeton they should have embroidered on samplers and sold at the U-Store: “Be yourself at all times, and if that isn’t good enough—be someone else.”

The fall of my sophomore year a friend from Philadelphia came to our house in Wilton. Duke was about to get the gate for nonpayment
of rent, and he wanted to shut down in style, with a party. It was the weekend of the Yale game, and some of us went. Yale won. When we returned from the game Duke said he was sorry for Princeton but happy on his own account.

My Philadelphia friend was an oddly tenacious fellow; he was inquisitive, and willing to bore in for answers to his questions. He was not exactly a snob and not exactly not, a St. Paul’s man who despised social fakers, and loved to ferret them out. I knew this. When my father made his harmless remark about Yale’s victory I said to my friend:

“Dad went to Yale. Right, Dad?”

My father blushed. He had not invited this.

“He was Deke, Bones too. Right?”

“Bones men don’t discuss Bones,” my father said.

My friend was interested. “Which one is Skull and Bones? The Palladian or the Georgian building?”

My father was silent.

“How about Deke? Where’s it located?”

My father said nothing, and began to shake his head. His face was deep red. My friend, almost seven feet tall, was not in the least intimidated by my father’s frown.

“Which college faces Trumbull Street?”

“Saybrook,” my father said.

“You’re wrong,” my friend said. For all he or I or Duke knew, my father was right.

“It’s been a long time,” my father said. “The memory’s not so hot.”

“The truth is,” my friend said, as my father walked away, “he didn’t go to Yale.”

He said this loud enough for my father to hear it. My father left the house, walking slowly and erect, with his shoulders back. My friend, anxious not to embarrass me further, turned his back to me. I hated them both. I hated myself.

The section from
This Side of Paradise
called “Spires and Gargoyles” is Princeton’s public shame and private pride. It accurately evokes a certain Princeton of my day, lush and soft, delicate,
beyond the grip of time. Fitzgerald characterizes the eating clubs:

At the end of sophomore fall semester my friends and roommates didn’t dream of Tiger Inn, and even less of Cap and Gown, though these were two of the Big Five of twenty-some eating clubs on Prospect Street. They had eyes for the Big Three, Ivy, Cottage and Colonial, in that order, though there were sometimes crossovers by men bid by Ivy who went to Cottage or Colonial because of a father’s or brother’s membership, or to hold together in one club a band of friends.

The process of club selection, known as “Bicker,” was complex and debasing. After the night of Architectural Tour (the first time underclassmen were meant to have seen the clubs), groups of roommates were visited in their dormitory “suites” by clubmen. Every club came once at least to every suite, but the winnowing was quick and ruthless. Club members recognized their types, and after each interview gave a grade to the sophomore, from the highest (1: “ace”) to the lowest (7: flagrant neglect, “fleg-neg,” “lunchmeat,” “banana,” “wonk,” “wombat,” “turkey”). It frequently happened that from a room of six sophomores only one was wanted by a particular club, or three were wanted, or five. The desirables were courted avidly, sometimes double-teamed, while the unwanted was treated to small talk by a specialist at dumping.

“Are you a legacy anywhere?” (Did your father, grandfather, cousin belong to a Princeton club, other than ours?) “No? Pity. Where did your father go to college?
Maybe
Yale? Never heard that one before. Say, could I have a glass of water? What do
I
major in? I thought I was asking the questions. Oh, well, I major in English. Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. Do you like sports? Yes? That’s nice. Where did you get the jacket? New, isn’t it? Well, I’ll
say this: you’ve taken good care of it, it looks brand-new to me. Really, you
never
use wire hangers? Good idea, I guess wire hangers
do
stretch the shoulders out of shape, thanks for the tip, time to roll, I guess the other guys are talked out too.”

My roommates were: the son of a diplomat, son of a textile magnate, son of the senior partner of an investment banking house, son of an insurance company president. They were very much wanted by Ivy, Cottage, Colonial, for many reasons. The other clubs recognized these men to be beyond their dreams, and quit their visitations to us. Sometimes when visiting Ivies, Cottages, and Colonials left our room we heard loud laughter from beyond the shut door. This was not understood to bear on my roommates. People, friends, whispered in my ear that I was thought “odd,” not “serious” about the enterprise of Bicker, not “polite.” It was accurately rumored that on the night of Architectural Tour I had told the president of Cottage that I would like less to see the library, dining room, pool tables, and television room than the kitchen, basement, plumbing, heating plant, and circuit boxes. And that when I left I told the Cottage president: “It’s sound; I’ll buy it.” This had not been a politic jape. It was said that I had a reputation for savage, and sometimes conspicuous, drunkenness, for want of purpose. It was said I had run up debts. I was held to laugh abruptly, from no evident or reasonable motive.

After a week only three clubs came to our room, and I was spending five and six hours a day in small talk with imperious and condescending young gentlemen. There would be another ten days and nights of this. Not for me there wouldn’t.

I walked away from a chat with a Grosse Point Ivy boy who wondered aloud, again, how the hockey team would “fare” this year. I explained, again, that I couldn’t skate and didn’t care. He could not believe that I could not skate and did not care. I just took a walk, enough now. It was January, snowing. I followed Washington Road toward Route One. Every dormitory window was lit. Washington Road was dark. I stopped at the corner of Prospect Street, considered putting a brick through an Ivy window, something dumb like that. It was cold. I walked downhill
about a mile, to the bridge over Lake Carnegie. The snow was falling thick; far off I could see the spires, imagine the gargoyles. My roommates would worry; they had worried for days, unable to look straight at me or think what to do. They wouldn’t patronize me. I stood on the bridge looking into the dark below. I thought this was it, end of the road, end indeed of Prospect. The bridge railing was wide and low, and I stood on it, then sat on the edge looking down into the water I couldn’t see. Now and then a car passed, throwing dirty light on the hunched figure so out of place and expectation. A car stopped. A man asked if I was all right, did I need a ride? I waved him away. I couldn’t see the water, but it was down there, almost nine feet below me, three feet of water covering a foot of muck. I thought of my grandfather Loftus’ suicide attempt in the reflecting pool in Washington. I wouldn’t drown, for sure. I wouldn’t even freeze: I was wearing a coonskin coat; Duke had given it to me for Christmas, had told me it had been his “at university.” I began to laugh. I shook with the laughter from my chest. I couldn’t stop the laughter; it almost rolled me off the bridge. I lay on my back on the bridge, letting the snow hit my face. Then I lay in the middle of Washington Road. I’d lie there till the count of a hundred. That was it: let someone else decide. Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four … forty-one, forty-two … I was counting fast … f’r six, sen … I saw low beams coming out of Princeton, past Prospect Street. I stopped counting, held my breath, stood slowly with plenty of time to spare, and walked home to my room. I shared a six-pack with my friends, who looked at one another relieved as I told them my decision. They didn’t argue with it. I packed, and the next day withdrew.

The deans were kindness itself. I’d be welcome back anytime after twelve months had passed, on condition I settled my outstanding accounts. Counting my debt to Eastbourne, I owed twenty-five hundred, give or take a hundred. I said I might not be back, ever, but I’d pay my bills. I wasn’t a college boy, I said. Well, they said, you may feel differently later. Good luck.

Duke drove down to get me. He kissed me, and said whatever I wanted was fine with him, “fuck ’em.” Would I live with him?
I didn’t have to, of course, but he hoped I would, he had missed me. Sure, I said, sure. Was Alice at home? No, she’d just left again that morning. Oh, I said, she didn’t look forward to her stepson’s return? Not that at all, he said, just one of those things, you know Alice.

My father was aces that day. He took me to “21” for dinner, and paid in cash. People made a fuss over me, he must have kept his account there current. He told me I had done the just, wise, courageous, defiant, honorable, only possible thing.

A couple of weeks later he ran into his cousin Ruth Atkins in Hartford. Her late brother Art Samuels, president of Cottage half a century back, came into their conversation.

“Tried to get Geoffrey to go Cottage for the family’s sake,” my father told Ruth. “No dice, he went Ivy, wanted to stick by his friends, what can I say?”

T
HE
new place was in Newtown, on Birch Hill Road. There were no birches in sight, but it perched on a hill my father’s car couldn’t climb my first snow-blown night home. The sprawling ranch house was unfinished, as though its builder-owner, two weeks before the house-warming, had remembered he had forgotten his hat in a restaurant somewhere and had been looking for it ever since.

A swimming pool out back was full to the three-foot mark with rain water, now skimmed with ice and dirty snow. With the spring thaws, mud sluiced down Birch Hill and dammed up along the neighbors’ sagging snow fences. I never met anyone who lived in a house contiguous with ours until I went with my father to court. A neighbor had charged him with dumping garbage beside our road, and this was true. He was fingered by his name on the envelopes of unopened bills, fined fifty dollars, and scolded. I paid the fine.

I paid for everything that year. Food (after our grocery accounts were closed), rent (for the first few months, a hundred ten a month), cigarettes, and booze. I didn’t want to pay. I wanted to save what I earned to settle my debts. But if I didn’t pay, no one would.

It was the time of the Eisenhower recession; Newtown is near Danbury, a depressed community if ever there was one, and at first
I couldn’t find work. My father got it for me at Sikorsky, a helicopter manufacturer in Bridgeport for whom he had twice worked. He got me my job, he said, by selflessly withdrawing his own job application there, making room for me. Five years later, taking a leaf from my father’s résumés, I described my work at Sikorsky to a prospective employer: