Duke of Deception (34 page)

Sikorsky called me “Engineering Communications Co-Ordinator.” I was the mail boy, at two-seventy a month; I dressed for work in overalls, and lugged dusty canvas sacks from place to place. My résumé was accurate, to a point. I had encouraged at least one procedural change, that someone be hired to help me. Nick—a tall, proud Pole about my age—got twenty dollars a month less than I, and toted heavier loads, so he looked up to me. He covered for me while I read novels in the can, and I covered for him while he slept there. He didn’t mind that I read my employers’ private communications, and I didn’t mind when he threw into the shredder letters he didn’t wish to deliver.

My immediate supervisor was an émigré Russian prince who hired me because his son was at Choate, which had improbably written him testifying to my “excellent character.” Sikorsky made the ubiquitous H-58 helicopter, choice of the Armies, Navies, and Air Forces of our country and others’. Many blueprints and parts diagrams were required, with notations in dozens of languages. It was in part my responsibility to guard the blueprint cage and ensure that diagrams were returned and replaced in their proper folders after they had been checked out. There were so many drawings that many of them seemed to me frivolous or expendable, and the diagrams I least highly prized I tucked beneath my shirt and took home. There I boiled them. They were gelatin on cloth, made to survive eternity, and when the coating had been boiled off its Irish linen backing, one was left with glue stuck to
the sides of a pot and with handkerchiefs twelve inches square, soft and tightly woven.

My father taught me this trick. So I owed him, as he owed me. Our arrangement—his arrangement—did not comfort me. I was to keep an account of what I earned (twelve months times two-thirty or so, after witholding), give it all to him to use as he wished, and in twelve months he would repay me in full. Sure. My situation seemed to me hopeless. I would care for him, as Alice had, and there would be an end to it.

Our days and nights in Newtown settled into routine. We rarely saw anyone or went anywhere. Sikorsky was more than an hour’s drive; as I was due at the plant by eight I rose at six, while my father slept, and came home after dark, just as he had in Saybrook, when he worked at Sikorsky. Birch Hill’s elevation gave us irreproachable television reception, and we watched Westerns, cops, game shows, anything. That winter of 1958–59, my father drank and played with his toys, an electric train and a gruesomely expensive model of a supercharged Bentley he built during six months of spare time. Since all his time was spare time, he invested a lot in the car.

We burned up time. We smoked Camels, and I remember fumbling drunk with their cellophane wrappers, swearing at them. The beast on the Camel logo was mysteriously reduced and paled, made less aggressive in response to marketing advice. We were enraged, and wrote R.J. Reynolds so scalding a letter that they returned their camel to its dark color, and full complement of humps.

My father was meant to clean the house and cook, but didn’t. I cooked TV dinners and hash out of cans, and he complained about the food. We listened to Bessie Smith—“Gimmee a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer” and “Up on Black Mountain”—and my father played an upright in the storeroom. The storeroom was cold, and as time passed it filled with stacks of magazines and the garbage no one would collect because we didn’t pay to have it collected, and finally it got too high in there, especially in warm weather, to enjoy music.

Sometimes I’d announce that I had a date in New York for the weekend, or wanted to go alone to a movie, or have a drink with Nick after work. Then my father would pout, and get ugly-drunk, and visit my bed to tell me how I’d screwed up his life, how he’d given up everything to get me through Choate, had married a woman he couldn’t bear to send me to Choate. And what had I done? I’d kicked his ass, that’s what I’d done. Then he’d talk big, he was pulling out, he didn’t need me or Alice or anyone, he had put up with all the crap he could take, he’d had it, and this time he really meant it, he was washing his hands of me, see how I did on my own, for a change …

Some nights we would read quietly, and be friends. Other nights, listening to rain leak through the roof into plastic buckets, we’d laugh and fume and be friends; we’d telephone the landlord (owed four months’ rent) to complain about his shoddy upkeep of the place. Dishes piled up in the sink, and empty bottles everywhere.

“Tomorrow,” my father would tell me, “I’m going to get cracking.”

We listened to
Sounds of Sebring
. Yes: racing car engines recorded winding up at Sebring. We also listened to
Sounds of Monaco
and
Sounds of Silverstone
. We listened to
Whistles in the Night
, trains going from somewhere to elsewhere, till the power company cut the switch on us.

Alice returned briefly in April. She and my father quarreled at once, but she cleaned the house anyway, and seemed to dig in. She let me borrow her car; it was a chance to get off Birch Hill, and I took some time off from work
(sorry, got the grippe)
to drive north to Stowe to ski with Princeton friends. I slept in the parking lot of their lodge and met John, a Harvard boy. He was my first hipster and I was his, he thought. I had never taken to anyone as quickly, and he became the chief witness to that Newtown year, for when I returned home Tootie packed and left, yelling: “All you do is read! The trouble with both of you is your damned books!”

No, that was not
the
trouble with us. I saw my stepmother two years later for the last time; I’d like to see her again, if she’s alive,
and tell her I know she deserved better from her golden years than what she got from my father and me, but when she left her husband for good, while he lay sick with pneumonia in California, she went to deep cover, where no Wolff could find her.

Only one girl visited the place in Newtown. I had met her about the time I left Princeton, in Philadelphia, where her mother asked the father of my roommate during lunch at the Gulph Mills Club whether his houseguest, that young man so interested in her daughter, was a “gentleman or a Jew.” My roommate’s father said he didn’t understand the question, its purpose or its
either/or
construction. (Still, I learned of the question, and his response, from him.)

This girl, whom I had busily courted at Smith, washed up at our house by an unexpected circumstance, a missed train from New Haven, a phone call to me, a ride from New Haven to Newtown with my father. It was May. When she arrived I was shoveling leaves and frogs from the swimming pool. There was something else in there, too. This was a woodchuck, I think, a long time dead. I was fishing for it when my love arrived with my father, who had stopped for “fortifications” at a joint called The Three Bears Inn. I was paddling with the shovel, my trousers rolled up to my knees, and then I had it, something soft, white, rancid, unspeakable that I flung down the hill toward the neighbors who had complained about my father’s garbage disposal. I greeted the girl and went inside to clean up.

The wonderful, tall, skinny, sporting, rebellious Smith sophomore did not wrinkle up her nose at dinner (chicken croquettes with instant mashed), but I could smell the dead thing on myself. My father was peppy, told college jokes on himself, anecdotes about stolen bell clappers and painted sundials and saplings murdered by sophomores—“no names, please”—who pissed out windows upon them. These were
my
stories. My father had become so careless in his fictions, so indifferent to them, that he forgot their provenance. I looked at him sharply, and he blushed. Drinking a demitasse with my pinky extended crooked, I used the word “attractive.”

“Jesus!” my father roared.
“Attractive!
What a word! Scottsdale
is ‘attractive,’ Mimsy is ‘attractive.’ Mimsy has an ‘attractive’ dog, polo pony, husband, chess set …”

The lovely girl was abruptly “fagged out, done in, dead tired.” I put her in the “guest room” and slept with my father. He snored, and sucked his thumb. I lay awake. I went to the bathroom, saw what the girl had seen, my father’s false upper teeth (“choppers,” he called them) stewing in an effervescent broth in a pewter beer mug beside the sink. I noticed the fake brass towel rings that swiveled through Neptune’s mouth. I drove that girl to the Bridgeport station next morning wearing my work clothes.

No. I wanted better. I wanted to escape to Princeton, from my father. I wanted not to be like him, to let him sink alone. I wrote Princeton, and Princeton welcomed me back come January, just pay the bills. I didn’t tell my father about this exchange of letters, but he sensed it. He knew me.

John came often to visit. He liked my father; my father liked him. John didn’t like Harvard, or the conventions. He had been raised in a huge Lake Forest house at the water’s edge, and lived summers in another huge house with its own beach on Martha’s Vineyard. John wanted something different—Bohemia—and Newtown provided it, definitely.

Cars united the three of us. John owned an Austin-Healey with a Corvette engine, and tinkered with it in our garage. Duke had a folly called an Abarth-Zagato, a tiny maroon coupe that cost many thousands of someone else’s dollars. It could uncomfortably seat two and was capable, when it ran, of the top speed of a stock Chevvy six. Its 850cc Fiat Toppolino engine had been bored out from 600cc, which raised its compression ratio so high it often blew head gaskets. When they blew the head had to be shaved to seat the new gasket, which raised the compression ratio higher, which provoked another blown gasket. The car seldom ran.

Which was just as well, for my father and I owned between us a single set of license plates, and these had been stolen from yet a third party, my stepmother. We moved the plates from car to
car according to need, a procedure that John regarded as pleasingly subversive, my father as routine, and I as a nuisance.

I had my own folly, a 1937 Delahaye, a car longer than a Cadillac, with a cockpit smaller than the Abarth-Zagato’s. Its fifty-five gallon gas tank gave it a range of about three hundred miles, and it had four speeds in reverse. This was a car for the
corniche
drives between Nice and Monte, but my father chose it as just the car to carry me from Newtown to Bridgeport and back. When it went at all it would not self-start, which made our birchless prominence a necessary convenience; in the parking lot at Sikorsky, armed with jumper cables, I was at the mercy of strangers with twelve-volt electrical systems and a few moments to spare.

John invited my father and me to Martha’s Vineyard for a summer week. I was apprehensive. John’s father was Ike’s Secretary of the Air Force, and I dreaded the opportunities this would afford my father for self-celebration. So John adjusted the invitation to include my father out, but he showed up anyway toward the end of the week. He brought along a suitcase made of wood; when this was unfolded it became a boat, which he paddled around the harbor at Vineyard Haven, serving me right, I know.

My father was a mystery, or as crazy as crazy can be. His schemes were insane. He would go to law school, become an expert on wheat speculations, advise the Algerians or Venezuelans on oil refining. He decided the jazz pianist at The Three Bears in Wilton was a genius, as good as King Cole. During the early forties in California he had “discovered” Cole playing piano in a bowling alley, and the King, responding to my father’s enthusiasm, asked the Duke to manage him. My father had laughed at the notion.
This
chance my father wouldn’t miss, he would produce a record for this pianist, they’d both have it made. He brought the man home, recorded his work on our out-of-tune upright using a top dollar Ampex, shot publicity snaps with a Rollei (white dinner jacket, pencil-line mustache, and rug), and led him to the mountain top. The man was my father’s age, with more or less my father’s prospects, with one greater skill and one greater vice. The
piano player could play the piano better, but he was always drunk; my father was drunk only once—maybe twice—a week.

Duke charged ahead. He charged and charged ahead. There was something about him, what he wanted he got. Salesmen loved him, he was the highest evolution of consumer. Discriminating, too: he railed against shoddy goods and cheapjack workmanship. He would actually return, for credit, an electric blender or an alpine tent that didn’t perform, by his lights, to specification. He demanded the best, and never mind the price. As for debts, they didn’t bother him at all. He said that merchants who were owed stayed on their toes, aimed to please. Dunning letters meant nothing to him. He laughed off the vulgar thrustings of the book and record clubs, with their absurd threats to take him to law. People owed a bundle, who brought out their heavy artillery, got my father’s Samuel Johnson remark: “Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound; great debts are like cannon, of loud noise but little danger.” He was slippery: he used the telephone to persuade the telephone company he should be allowed a sixth month of nonpayment without suffering disconnection, because he needed to call people long distance to borrow money from them to pay his telephone bills. He was cool, but not icy. He owed a Westport barkeep a couple of hundred, and when the man died in a car accident my father was sorry, and told his widow about the debt, not that he ever paid her.

Finally it got out of hand. It had nowhere to go but out of hand. I wearied of telling people on our stoop or through the phone that they had the wrong Arthur Wolff, that my father had just left for the hospital, or the Vale of Kashmir, or Quito. I tired of asking “How do I know you’re who you say you are?” when people asked questions about my father’s whereabouts and plans. I hated it, wanted to flee. It was October; there were months still to get through, too many months but too few to cobble up a miracle of loaves and find the twenty-five hundred dollars to buy my way back into Princeton.