Duke of Deception (35 page)

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My father and I were watching the Giants play the Colts in the snow for the championship when two Connecticut State troopers arrived during the first sudden death overtime. They watched with us till the game ended, and then took my father to the lockup in Danbury. He had left a bad check at The Three Bears; they were pressing charges. I found a mouthpiece who went bail, made good the check and got the charges dropped. Duke had talked with him. The old man hadn’t lost his touch at all, only with me. With me he had lost his touch.

A week before my birthday he wrecked my Delahaye. I loved the dumb car. I was in bed when I heard him climb the driveway cursing. He was blind drunk, drunker than I’d ever seen him. He railed at me as soon as he came in, called me a phony. I feigned sleep, he burst through the room, blinded me with the overhead light, told me I was full of crap, a zero, zed, cipher, blanko, double-zero.

“I’m leaving you,” he said.

I laughed: “In what?”

A mistake. His face reddened. I sat up, pretending to rub sleep from my eyes while he swore at my car, said it had damned near killed him swerving into the ditch, it could rot there for all he cared. He was usually just a finger-wagger, but I still feared him. Now he poked my bare chest with his stiff yellow finger, for punctuation. It hurt. I was afraid. Then I wasn’t afraid; I came off my bed naked, cocked my fist at my father, and said: “Leave me alone.”

My father moved fast to his room, shut the door, and locked it. I was astounded. I don’t believe he was afraid of me; I believe he was afraid of what he might do to me. I sat on the edge of my bed, shaking with anger. He turned on his television set loud: Jack Paar. He hated Paar. There was a shot, a hollow noise from the .45. I had heard that deep, awful boom before, coming from the black cellar in Birmingham, a bedroom in Saybrook. I thought my father would kill me. That was my first thought. Then that he would kill himself, then that he had already killed himself. I heard it again, again, again. He raged, glass broke, again, again. The
whole clip. Nothing. Silence from him, silence from Paar. A low moan, laughter rising to a crescendo, breaking, a howl, sobs, more laughter. I called to my father.

“Shit fire,” he answered, “now I’ve done it, now I’ve
done
it!”

He had broken. No police, the phone was finally disconnected. I tried the door. Locked. Shook it hard. Locked fast. I moved back to shoulder through and as in a comic movie, it opened.

My father had shot out Jack Paar; bits of tubes and wires were strewn across the floor. He had shot out the pretty watercolors painted by Betty during their Mississippi rendezvous. He had shot out himself in the mirror. Behind the mirror was his closet, and he was looking into his closet at his suits. Dozens of bespoke suits, symmetrically hung, and through each suit a couple of holes in both pant-legs, a couple in the jacket. Four holes at least in each suit, six in the vested models.

“Hell of a weapon,” my father said.

“Oh, yes,” I said.
“Hell
of a weapon!”

November fifth I turned twenty-one. My father had a present for me, two presents really, a present and its wrapping. He gave me his gold signet ring, the one I wear today—lions and fleurs-de-lis,
nulla vestigium retrorsit
—wrapped in a scrap of white paper, a due bill signed
Dad
, witnessed and notarized by a Danbury real estate agent:
I
.
O.U. Princeton
.

“How?” I asked.

“Piece of cake,” my father said, “done and done.”

I was due at Princeton January 15th. By then the Abarth had been repossessed and the Delahaye was still and forever a junker. I rode to Sikorsky with Nick, who drove twenty miles out of his way to pick me up and return me in his Edsel. After work the day following New Year’s I found a rented black Buick in the driveway. My father told me to help him pack it, we were leaving pronto and for good; what didn’t come with us we’d never see again. I asked questions. I got no answers, except this:

“It’s Princeton time. We’re going by way of Boston.”

I almost believed him. We packed, walked away from everything.
I wish I had the stuff now, letters, photographs, a Boy Scout merit badge sash, Shep’s ribbon:
Gentlest in Show
at the Old Lyme grade school fair. My father had had his two favorite suits rewoven; he left the rest behind with most of his shoes, umbrellas, hats, accessories. He left behind the model Bentley that cost him half a year to build. He brought his camera, the little Minox he always carried and never used (“handy if someone whacks you with his car, here’s the old evidence machine,” he’d say, tapping the silly chain on the silly camera). I brought my typewriter and my novel. While my father had watched television I had written a novel. I worked on it every night, with my bedroom door shut; my father treated it like a rival, which it was, a still, invented place safe from him. He made cracks about The Great Book, and resented me for locking it away every night when I finished with it, while he shut down the Late Show, and then the Late Late. I made much of not showing it to him.

On the way to Boston we stopped by Stratford, where Sikorsky had moved. I quit, told the personnel department where to send my final check, said goodbye to no one. When I returned to the car my father said to me:

“Fiction is the thing for you. Finish Princeton if you want, but don’t let them turn you into a goddamned professor or a critic. Write make-believe. You’ve got a feel for it.”

Had he read my stuff? “Why, do you think?”

“I know you.”

We drove directly to Shreve, Crump & Low, Boston’s finest silversmith. Duke double-parked on Boylston Street and asked me to help him unload two canvas duffels from the trunk. He called them “parachute bags”; maybe that’s what they were, parachute bags. They were heavy as corpses; we had to share the load.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s in here?”

“Never mind. Help me.”

We sweated the bags into the store, past staring ladies and gentlemen to the manager. My father opened a zipper and there was Alice’s flat silver: solid silver gun-handle knives, instruments to cut fish and lettuce, dessert spoons and lobster forks, three-tined
forks and four-tined forks, every imaginable implement, service for sixteen. In the other bag were teapots, coffeepots, creamers, saltcellars, Georgian treasure, the works polished by my father, piles gleaming dangerously in the lumpy canvas sacks.

The manager examined a few pieces. He was correct; he looked from my face to my father’s while he spoke.

“These are very nice, as you know. I could perhaps arrange a buyer … This will take time. If you’re in no rush …”

“I want money today,” my father said.

“This will be quite impossible,” the manager said.

“I won’t quibble,” my father said. “I know what the silver is worth, but I’m pinched, I won’t quibble.”

“You don’t understand,” the manager said.

“Let’s not play games,” my father said.

“This is quite impossible,” the manager said. “I think you’d best take this all away now.”

“Won’t you make an offer?”

“No,” the manager said.

“Nothing?” my father asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re a fool,” my father told the manager of Shreve, Crump & Low.

“I think not,” said the manager of Shreve, Crump & Low. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

We reloaded the car. I said nothing to my father, and he said nothing to me. There we were. It was simple, really, where everything had been pointing, right over the line. This wasn’t mischief. This wouldn’t make a funny story back among my college pals. This was something else. We drove to a different kind of place. This one had cages on the windows, and the neighborhood wasn’t good. The manager here was also different.

“You want to pawn all this stuff?”

“Yes,” my father said.

“Can you prove ownership?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” the pawnbroker said. He sorted through it, scratched a few pieces and touched them with a chemical.

“It’s solid silver,” my father said.

“Yes,” the man said, “it is.”

“What will you loan us, about?”

I heard the
us
. I looked straight at my father, and he looked straight back.

“Will you reclaim it soon?” My father shrugged at this question. “Because if you don’t really need it, if you’d sell it, I’d buy. We’re talking more money now, about four times what I’d loan you.”

“What would you do with it?” my father asked. “Sell it?”

“No,” the man said. “I’d melt it down.”

My father looked at me: “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

My father nodded. While he signed something the man took cash from a huge floor safe. He counted it out, twenties bound in units of five hundred dollars. I looked away, didn’t want to know the bottom line on this one. There were limits, for me, I thought.

We checked into the Ritz-Carlton. Looked at each other and smiled. I felt all right, pretty good, great. I felt great.

“What now?” I asked my father.

Years later I read about the Philadelphia cobbler and his twelve-year-old son said to have done such awful things together, robbing at first, breaking and entering. Then much worse, rape and murder. I wondered if it could have kept screwing tighter that way for us, higher stakes, lower threshold of
this, but not that
. I thought that day in the Ritz, sun setting, that we might wind up with girls, together in the same room with a couple of girls. But as in Seattle I had misread my father.

“Let’s get some champers and fish-eggs up here,” he said.

So we drank Dom Perignon and ate Beluga caviar and watched night fall over Boston Common. Then we took dinner at Joseph’s and listened to Teddy Wilson play piano at Mahogany Hall. Back at the Ritz, lying in clean linen in the quiet room, my father shared with me a scheme he had been a long time hatching.

“Here’s how it works. I think I can make this work, I’m sure I can. Here’s how it goes. Okay, I go to a medium-size town, check into a hotel, not the worst, not the best. I open an account at the
local bank, cash a few small checks, give them time to clear. I go to a Cadillac showroom just before closing on Friday, point to the first car I see and say I’ll buy it, no road test or questions, no haggling.”

My father spoke deliberately, doing both voices in the dark. When he spoke as an ingratiating salesman he flattened his accent, and didn’t stammer:

“How would you care to pay, sir? Will you be financing your purchase? Do you want to trade in your present automobile?”

“This is a cash purchase. (The salesman beams.) I’m paying by check. (The salesman frowns a little.) On a local bank, of course. (The salesman beams again.)”

“Fine, sir. We’ll have the car registered and cleaned. It’ll be ready Monday afternoon.”

“At this I bristle. I bristle well, don’t you think?”

“You are probably the sovereign bristler of our epoch,” I told my father.

He would tell the salesman he wanted the car now or not at all, period. There would be a nervous conference, beyond my father’s hearing, with the dealer. The dealer would note Duke’s fine clothes and confident bearing; now or never was this customer’s way,
carpe diem
, here was an
easy
sale, car leaving town, maybe just maybe this was kosher. Probably not, but how many top-of-the-line cars can you sell right off the floor, no bullshit about price, color, or options? Now the dealer was in charge, the salesman wasn’t man enough for this decision. The dealer would telephone Duke’s hotel and receive lukewarm assurances. Trembling, plunging, he would take Duke’s check. My father would drive to a used car dealer a block or two away, offer to sell his fine new automobile for whatever he was offered, he was in a rush, yeah, three thousand was okay. A telephone call would be made to the dealer. Police would arrive. My father would protest his innocence, spend the weekend in a cell. Monday the check would clear. Tuesday my father would retain the services of a shyster, if the dealer hadn’t already settled. With the police he would never settle. False arrest would put him on Easy Street. How did I like it?

“Nice sting. It might work.” The Novice.

“Of course it will work.” The Expert.

The next morning we checked out and my father mailed the Buick’s keys to a Hertz agent in Stamford, telling him where to find his car. Then a VW bus materialized. My father had taken it for a test drive; maybe he paid for it later, and maybe he forgot to pay for it later. My father called this “freeloading.”

We drove to Princeton in the bus, with my novel on the back seat beside a cooler filled with cracked ice and champagne, a cash purchase from S.S. Pierce. We reached Princeton about four and parked on Nassau Street, outside the Annex Grill, across from Firestone Library.

“How much did you give me last year?”

“About twenty-five hundred,” I said, “but a lot of that was for my own keep.”

“I don’t charge my boy room and board,” my father said. He pulled clumps of twenties from a manila envelope. Five packets, twenty-five hundred dollars, there it was, every penny, just as he had promised, precisely what I owed. “And here’s another five hundred to get you started.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Where will you go now?”

“New York for a while. Then, I don’t know. Maybe California. I always had luck in California.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” I said. “Stay in touch,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Do well, Geoffrey. Be good.”

“Sure,” I said. “I won’t screw up this time.”

“No,” he said, “you probably won’t. Now don’t be
too
good. There’s such a thing as too good.”

“Don’t worry,” I said laughing, wanting this to end.

“Don’t forget your book,” my father said, while I unloaded the van. “I’ll be reading it someday, I guess. I’ll be in touch, you’ll hear from me, hang in there.”

He was gone. An illegal turn on Nassau headed him back where he had come from.

M
Y
first afternoon back in Princeton I walked the streets paying debts, peeling off banknotes, getting receipts and handshakes.