Duke of Deception (36 page)

“Congratulations, son. I’ll tell you, I never thought I’d see this money. You’re a man of your word. Your credit’s good here anytime.”

“No, sir, thanks, I don’t think I’ll be charging any more.”

I cabled twelve hundred fifty to Eastbourne, gathered my
paid-in-fulls
and climbed the steps of Nassau Hall to the assistant dean’s office.

“Welcome home,” he said.

Colonial Club invited me to join, and I joined. I moved into a new suite of rooms in Holder Hall with old friends. I took my novel to Richard Blackmur. The book was three hundred pages about a young man, sometimes called “Tony” and sometimes “Anthony” and sometimes “the boy.” Tony was in Europe coming—as the author of
Certain Half-Deserted Streets
put it—“into season.” He was of a sensitive disposition, an unflagging enemy of vulgarity and convention, tetchy, proud, and quick to dismay. He fell in love (twice he got laid) and refused to respond to letters from his father (whole chapters here), a Bones man, lawyer, OSS hero, blond with fine hair and blue
eyes. He sent Tony timely checks, but as he was a success, a “clothes-wearing man,” Tony regarded him as a fool and villain.

The book was good, I knew it. Had I not sweated it out after a day hauling mail sacks? After cooking and washing dishes? I submitted one copy in application for the F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize (for distinguished undergraduate fiction) and another copy for Richard Blackmur’s consideration. The prize went elsewhere, to my surprise, but Blackmur I knew would love the book. I had a question to ask him: Knopf or Scribners? Oh, I realized that Scribner was a Princeton man and Princeton’s publisher of choice; still, hadn’t the house slipped recently? I saw Blackmur every week for our conference but he never gave me occasion to ask this question, or any other about
Certain Half-Deserted Streets
. Three weeks, four, six … Finally:

“I wonder—have you had a chance to glance at my novel?”

“Of course: I read it.” Blackmur was tiny and exact and mysterious, a heavy drinker at his most lucid before noon and his best after lunch. We were eating lunch at Lahiere’s, at his special table.

“What’s your advice?”

“Put it in your desk drawer.”

“Ah, I know, put it away a few months, come at it fresh.”

“No,” he said, “that is not my advice to you. My advice is to put it in your desk drawer, lock your desk drawer, lose the key to your desk drawer. However, keys are sometimes found, returned to their owners. This could happen, so I would set fire to your desk. I recommend the sole, though the chops are edible.”

Not much of
Certain Half-Deserted Streets
remains. I pretty much followed Blackmur’s counsel, but not before I let
The Nassau Lit
print a couple of sections, including the first chapter, set in England and in Paris, where “the boy” goes to a party:

Hang them, and what they told him. Tony thinks back:

I wrote these words in Newtown, with
Leave It to Beaver
and
Gunsmoke
clamoring in the room beyond the thin wall, where my father, needing a shave, sat in his underpants chain-smoking Camels, fiddling with his Colt automatic.

The last chapter, “A Piece of Bone, a Hank of Hair,” finds Tony in an Italian jail, charged with killing a whore he has thrown down a flight of stairs. In fact she fell, but Tony won’t defend himself. At seventeen he’s “too tired now to care.” He wants only to write his memoirs on a roll of toilet paper, and flush them away. The consul-general wants to help the boy, whose father was his classmate: “Everyone wanted to help the boy save the boy himself.”

The reason I lied as a young man, I think, was the same reason my fiction was so awful: I didn’t know that anything had happened to me; I forced my history, just as my father forced his.
Blackmur made me scruple to form it, to make it count. I cannot overestimate my debt to that man. I was in awe of his precision and his daring. His speech was elliptical, inclining toward the runic, but his lectures were legendary—Poetics in the fall and Aesthetics in the spring, the same course, what he happened to bring to class in his Harvard bookbag—and once an hour he would come awake as from a private reverie with a dazzling penetration of text or motive. To have him as a weekly presence in my life, to meet with him one-to-one every week for two years, was everything. He was the most luminous of the New Critics, and his special province was diction. Words were like rubies, emeralds, diamonds, dogshit. They had their weight, each one, and this was where I learned to begin.

Princeton was wide open to any student who would use it. The English department had its stiffs and tailors’ dummies, but it also had Walt Litz, a courtly Joyce, Eliot, and Stevens scholar with a soft Arkansas accent and a taste for students who were oddballs and outlaws. Larry Holland was the James man, and spoke in the circular rhetoric of The Master, brilliantly, his periods folding into one another like bolts of bright silk. Holland was not a lecturer from whom a student could take notes, and so he wasn’t popular as a lecturer. He saw me through a thesis on the grammar, language, and point of view of
Absalom, Absalom!
written two years after
Certain Half-Deserted Streets;
I did not set fire to the thesis, and can read it without embarrassment. I had come to Faulkner from Fitzgerald and Hemingway, to a preoccupation with words and grammar from Fitzgerald’s artifacts and manners, Hemingway’s rites and codes. My affection for Faulkner represented a deliverance from my father’s affections, and affectations.

My father loved
The Great Gatsby
(he identified with Nick Carraway!) and despised
This Side of Paradise
. But there is a sentence in the Princeton novel about Amory Blaine that fixed my father exactly: “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.” My second shot at Princeton I became what I became by being in the present. My college life was governed by an almost unvarying routine: I rose at twelve-thirty, ate lunch at Colonial, went to an afternoon seminar or to my carrel in the library, ate
dinner and shot pool from six to seven-thirty and returned to the library until it shut at midnight. Then I drank and played poker till dawn, making about three hundred a month at seven-card stud roll ’em and a Princeton invention we called “legs,” draw poker played with three cards. My grades were good, which I hardly noticed. I was lost in books, beside myself with critical measurements.

The first few months back I heard nothing from my father. Then he called me at Colonial during dinner. He was drunk, and told a sad, confused story about a fight with a banker. My father had been hit in the eye with a poker, he said, but I should see the banker, the banker was in the hospital.
How was his eye?
The eye was swollen shut, but it would be okay. The banker was a “nibshit.” My father said he needed to see me, he was in trouble.
Where are you?
My father said he was in Gloversville, New York, would I come up? A couple of my clubmates were waiting to use the telephone. I looked past them to the cheerful fire in the club library, heard quiet voices and serene laughter, realized I had left my dinner on the table, wondered if the waiter had removed it.

“I can’t,” I told my father. “I have a paper due.”

Then I heard my father make a kind of coughing noise, as though he were choking. I realized he was sobbing, or laughing.

“Sure,” I said. “I can come. Tell me where to come.”

My father had hung up. Later I learned about the banker. He had held the note on the Abarth-Zagato and the Delahaye and he hired my father to repossess cars for him,
set a thief to catch a thief
, the banker told my father when he hired him. The banker financed cars for soldiers, who often failed to meet their monthly payments. In return for a one-room shack in Gloversville, expenses on the road and fifty dollars per repossession my father went on bounty hunts in a truck equipped with a tow-bar, with a set of master ignition keys, as far as Virginia. The banker treated my father like an indentured servant, which he was, and finally took an excessive liberty. The Gloversville police wanted my father on an assault charge.

So, like a hurricane that goes out to sea, beyond sight and mind, only to sweep back on shore with redoubled fury, my father blew
back through Princeton. A few days after his call to Colonial I returned to my room to find a letter from Seymour St. John and a bill from Langrock. Later there were bills from Douglas MacDaid, The University Store, Lahiere’s and The Princeton Inn, all my father’s work, “bill my boy.” The letter from St. John said he was “as relieved as I am sure you must be” by my repayment of Eastbourne College, “this evidence of good faith and integrity which involves not only you and your family, but American schools and our country.”

That was the first paragraph. The second paragraph said “I have just had word from one of our local merchants, Mr. Mushinsky, that you owe him a bill for clothes of nearly $500. Is that true? As you know, this sort of thing follows you all your life. Your good name and your credit are more valuable to you than anything else you possess, and you just don’t have it as long as you leave bills outstanding. How any boy could have run up any bill such as that is beyond me.”

I hadn’t. Duke was moving around. I didn’t hear from him again for more than a year. He went west with his Princeton booty, putting in to Chicago’s best hotel, owned by my Choate roommate’s father. He stayed ten days, put everything on the cuff, even his amphetamines. He was running now on Dexamil. When his bill rose past a thousand, the management requested something on account. The Duke said he was waiting for a grain transaction to clear the Chicago Wheat Pit, and flashed some papers that seemed to confirm this fiction. He got my roommate’s endorsement on a few big checks and vanished, leaving a roomful of clothes from Langrock and Mushinsky. He had come into Chicago driving a Triumph sports car and left in a Mercedes sedan. Trading up all the way, heading for the gold fields, “I always had luck in California.”

But I didn’t know then where he was. And after St. John and Dean Lippincott cleared my good name and my credit, “more valuable” to me than “anything” I possessed, I didn’t care a fiddler’s fuck where my father was, alive or dead, as long as he wasn’t near me.

•  •  •

I orphaned myself. I had lost track of my mother and Toby, hadn’t seen nor heard from them for five years. I knew my mother had left Sarasota abruptly and gone to Salt Lake City, where the cost of living was said to be low. (So was the standard of living, but unemployment was high.) Then she had gone to Seattle, then somewhere else, then somewhere else. When people asked about her I was vague, ashamed to admit that I didn’t know where she lived. I used Duke’s techniques of inference, managed to suggest to half the people who asked that she was a Russian princess exiled to Spain, and to the other half that she was a Spanish communist exiled to Russia. She was gone, leave it there.

From the moment I went on my own my situation at Princeton and in the world improved. This is a blunt paradox, but many people, friends, and their parents, took many pains on my behalf. My friends’ mothers and fathers interested me because their enthusiasms and anxieties were fresh for me. I always had a place to spend vacations, usually a sumptuous place. One day, as I stood in the marble-floored entrance hall of Mr. Lippincott’s huge house on the Main Line, I made small talk with a delivery boy who just then noticed an oil portrait of a bewigged eighteenth-century grandee: “Mr. Lippincott, I presume.” How my father would have relished such a confusion! I felt a frisson of loss, as though a cold breeze had made me tremble, but it vanished.

For my part I enjoyed the company of my friends’ fathers because I was accustomed to adults and sought, perhaps, a replacement for my own father. I seemed old for my age and took pains to look even older than I seemed, a custom of the fifties that I pushed too far. I wore double-breasted suits and wire-rimmed glasses. A friend warned me that my affection for maturity was morbid, that I should have a care about inviting death, nature’s way of telling us we are mature enough. People saw me as a blank sheet: be bold, be cautious; settle down, stay in motion. Be a writer, teacher, diplomat, broker, banker, barkeep, spy.

There was no need to listen to them. I was the luckiest boy I knew at college. I owed no one an explanation, was free to come
and go where I could afford, be what I wished to be without regard for anyone’s judgment.

John and I discussed opening a restaurant/bar/art gallery/bookstore in the South of France, and decided not to. I took Foreign Service examinations, passed the written test, and failed the oral in New York. At the time I was spending the summer watching baseball and daytime soap operas on a Princeton roommate’s Gramercy Park television set. We lay on mattresses on the floor of his air-conditioned apartment drinking Bud and letting one day slip into another. We hadn’t twenty bucks between us but a deli at Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street delivered, and his father, in Europe, had an account there. The apartment was as cool as a cave with the shades drawn.