Duke of Deception (38 page)

Toby was fifteen. A few months earlier he had called me at Princeton and begged me to help get him a scholarship at some boarding school, anything to spring him from Newhalem Camp, Washington, and Concrete High School. I wrote some schools, even Choate, and asked Princeton friends to help. A friend put
Toby together with The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and my brother won a full scholarship there, to begin the fall after our La Jolla reunion. I was proud. Eleven years later Toby told me he had won the scholarship by forging letters of recommendation from teachers at Concrete High School and by forging a letter-perfect transcript on a stolen form. The James Gang, The Wolff Boys. Hill was puzzled by his uneven academic performance: he won prizes for his fiction, naturally enough, but could not perform long division or do sums. After two years of puzzlement the school put Toby on its retired list, and he never did get an American high school diploma, though Oxford gave him a First in English.

But now he was on the brink of rescue, coming south, full of hope for an overdue reunion.

“All the way down the Pacific coast I bullshitted everyone on the bus,” Toby remembers. “I told them I was a Princeton man, and whatever else I wanted to tell them.”

When he arrived at the San Diego terminal he looked around for his father, and didn’t see him. He waited on the sidewalk, looking up and down the street till he saw someone who might have been his father, a big, bald man wearing heavy glasses. Toby smiled; the man smiled back. Half an hour later Toby went to the men’s room, and the man followed him.

“Really,” my brother remembers, “this was so confusing.”

Duke, when he finally came for his son, was drunk, though Toby didn’t understand this at the time. They went together to a small efficiency apartment near Wind ’n’ Sea Beach, and Duke sat in his underpants, fiddling with a lighter, talking about how Rosemary had “kicked him in the ass, but maybe he’d forgive her.”

He had a job, of sorts, with General Dynamics Astronautics, manufacturers of the Atlas missile, but it was Toby’s impression that his father hadn’t worked for a while, and the day after his long-absent younger son came “home” he explained that he had to go for a few days to Nevada with a lady friend. He left Toby some cash, a rented Chevrolet, a cupboard filled with Cokes and canned soup, a television set and the telephone number of a Navy officer who would look in on him. Then he drove away in his
Abarth-Allemagne, a more expensive and less comfortable and dependable version of his Newtown toy, the Abarth-Zagato.

“I didn’t know what to make of it all,” Toby says.

He made use of the rented car, though he didn’t know how to drive; he took it straight down the San Diego highway, almost to Mexico. When he finally figured out how to head it north again he returned to the apartment and waited for me to arrive, or his father to come home.

I was coming west, also bullshitting the passengers. I taught a marine to play the Princeton poker game called “legs”; in Pittsburgh, where he and I were to part, I stuck with him, continuing the course of instruction. I won two hundred dollars by the time we reached El Paso, and I decided to run with my winnings; I lay over in Juarez, doing a down-and-out-under-the-border-town-volcano routine for a couple of days. I telephoned Toby from a cantina, and he filled me in on our dad. Toby had had another disappointment. The Navy officer had stopped by. He was friendly, very friendly, and Toby had had to lock him out of the apartment. He had tracked our father to a Las Vegas hotel and telephoned him there. Duke sounded annoyed to be disturbed, and suggested that Toby deal with the amorous sailor by shooting him dead: in the bottom drawer of his dresser, under the sweaters, there was a .223 Air Force survival rifle that folded into its stock, Toby could use it on the guy, anything else? Toby told me he hoped I’d hurry west, he’d certainly appreciate some company.

I got there two days later, just after midday of a Sunday. They were at the bus station, in the Chevrolet. My father looked twenty years older than when I had last seen him on Nassau Street two years back. He had flabby jowls and liver spots on his bare skull. He had lost mass, taken on a pot. He moved awkwardly now, uncertainly. He wore thick-framed eyeglasses like Barry Goldwater’s and his clothes—I couldn’t believe this—were on the flashy side. He was a retired Senior Citizen by the seaside. We embraced, all said how great it was to be together, what a great summer we’d have. Toby was a rube; I looked him over, decided he’d need grooming for The Hill, and some improvement by a tailor.

Driving to the apartment my father seemed to have lost more
than his youth. He was distracted, coarse, not very bright. He seemed like an imposter. We stopped somewhere, at a woman’s small house. She was a shopkeeper or realtor, I forget. It seemed important to my father to have her meet me, at once. She was friendly, but ill at ease. He made me dig out my Princeton diploma.

“See,” he said, pointing, “
summa cum laude
. That’s highest honors. Princeton University, like I told you.”

She counterfeited amazement. I caught Toby’s eye: What was going on? He shrugged. My father told me to take the car and Toby home, he’d be along soon with his friend. I protested, said we should stay together, next day was a workday. Our father waved us away. Toby said the woman had been in Nevada with Duke when the Abarth had some kind of mechanical trouble, it had all been quite unsettling, and unpleasant. We sat for an hour on the beach, catching up; I was avuncular, told Toby he’d have to run fast to catch up at The Hill, that I’d push him along, set him a course of reading. I sounded talking to him as I had wanted Richard Blackmur to sound talking to me.

We waited in the one-room flat for our father to come home for dinner. We waited. Toby didn’t know the woman’s name or telephone number. We waited. We decided we couldn’t find her house and cooked dinner, and waited. The landlord came to see us. The rent hadn’t been paid for months; we’d have to leave in the morning. The telephone rang. The woman was hysterical.

“I can’t get him to leave! He won’t even leave that chair he was sitting in when you left. He won’t move. He won’t talk. He just rocks back and forth crying. I don’t know what to do with him. Get him out of here, help me.”

I telephoned the police. They were there when I arrived, without Toby. It was as she had said. My father was catatonic, sobbing, terrified even to move from the chair. He couldn’t speak, or wouldn’t. He moved only to shake his head,
no no no no no no
 … The police were gentle, practiced. They called an ambulance, held everything low key. The woman calmed herself, said she hoped there would be nothing in the papers, she was divorcing her husband, her husband could be difficult. I noticed her
earrings, silver and turquoise, with complicated loops and pendants, the kind of jewelry my father despised. She said my father had been
very
difficult. So I could see.

“A man with his educational attainments, what a pity!”

“Yes,” I said. “It is a pity.”

They led my father to the ambulance. He was not too far gone to walk. The woman said she thought he might have been using pills, maybe tranquilizers. He had been drinking a great deal in Nevada. The ambulance attendants and the police wrote down the woman’s musings.

But my father didn’t seem drunk, or drugged. He seemed dead. I followed the ambulance to a hospital in La Jolla. The police came in with me, asked if they could help in any way. They told me my father was probably just overtired.

I signed him in. He was snuffling like a baby, shaking his head like a baby refusing to eat or sleep or stop doing something. Back and forth, deliberately, no … no … The next day, about eleven, my father could talk. He wore what soldiers call a thousand-yard stare, but he could talk. He said he wanted to see the woman, and I called her. She said she’d rather not see my father, didn’t want “to open that can of worms again. He really spooked me last night,” she said. “He’s one sick guy.”

I told my father that the woman would not be able to see him that morning, maybe a little later. My father began to weep.

“She’s wonderful. I need her.”

My father didn’t ask how Toby was getting along, or where he was, or what we would all do with our lives here in La Jolla. He was past caring about these things now. Now he was deep in the woods, and he knew it, and no use pretending he knew the way home.

I took him to a sanitarium south of San Diego. It was bucolic, high in the hills looking down on the Pacific. The patients were mostly self-admitted, like my father. The question of payment was raised, and dropped when my father produced a Blue Cross card. Surprisingly, he was covered. He seemed happy to be removed from me by a nice young orderly. He asked, before he disappeared
into a ward, when he could expect to see the woman he wished to see.

“Soon,” I lied to him. “She’ll be in touch soon.”

I borrowed another couple of hundred from another friend back east, and this got us out of one apartment and into another, even closer to Wind ’n’ Sea Beach. I gave the Chevrolet back to Budget, who had missed it, and bought a Ford convertible with no money down off a used car lot. I drove it to General Dynamics Astronautics, and walked out after half an hour in the personnel department with a job as an engineering writer, eight hundred a month, cost-plus again. It was the job my father had had, at less than eight hundred a month.

There was a training program. I was put in front of a movie about the marvels of rocket technology and then told by an executive that America could, if America wished, put an Atlas slap into Khruschev’s bathtub. I saw one of them on the assembly line, a stainless-steel thermos, fifteen stories high.

My work, what they called my work, was done in a hangar with about two hundred other engineering writers. We sat in rows translating English into technical jargon. The engineering reports were given to us with certain words underlined, and these words were to be replaced with other words, which were listed in a loose-leaf dictionary. The single skill required for my job was a knowledge of the alphabet, and I finished a day’s labor in about two hours. The other six I sat at my desk, staring at my hands. I was not permitted to bring anything—a book, say—into the hangar. I was to be at my desk from punch-in to punch-out, in case government inspectors came around to check on the cost-plus arrangements.

While I was at the missile works I obliged Toby to read a book a day and write a thousand words. I must say he was sporting about this intrusion into his holiday hours. But then, as I often reminded him, I was paying the rent and buying the food. I had a feeling sometimes that Toby wished he were elsewhere, but I was too angry about the outcome of our reunion to care what Toby wished.

Toby had my father’s gestures and facial tics, and certain maneuvers with his hands and voice that made him resemble our old man more than I did, as he still does.

“It scares me to death,” he says.

We visited our father in the sanitarium. He was placid, capable of gallows humor. He didn’t mention the woman now, a couple of weeks after his treatment had begun. He said he had been “tuckered out.” He didn’t apologize for having put us to some inconvenience, but he was friendly enough. I did think he showed unfeeling indifference toward Toby, but he was beyond the reach of our judgment now, and I thought Toby understood this, though had I reflected a bit I would have realized that this was asking a lot of understanding of my fifteen-year-old brother.

Duke had a couple of new friends. One was a Milton scholar getting electric shock therapy. He was a skinny, red-haired fellow, very cheerful, said it wasn’t all that bad. He read
Paradise Lost
once a week now, every time as though for the first time. All the patients were nice, like a sewing circle of the damned. My father made me a briefcase out of leather, and burned my initials into it. It took him a week to make, and he was proud of it. I assured him his job was waiting for him when he got out; I had been instructed by my father’s therapist to tell this lie. My father only made me tell it once; I think he knew the truth.

Two things obsessed him during our twice-weekly visits: his car (which had been repossessed) and a silver cigarette lighter he said had been given to him in England by RAF friends. My father described this to me with affectionate care, and said Jimmy Little’s and Mike Crosley’s names were inscribed on it.

“You remember it, don’t you? I always kept it with me.”

I didn’t remember it, was sure I had never seen it. My father said this object had been in the apartment we had had to vacate. I asked Toby if he remembered it and he said no, he had never seen it. My father wanted it. He was very firm about this. He asked his doctor to instruct his sons to look hard for it. He needed it.

Toby helped me look for it, in the new apartment and the old, in the rental car we had returned, through every box and pocket and drawer. We couldn’t find it. I decided it had never been, and
even if it had existed was just a fake inscribed with some sentiment of my father’s own devising and names off a roll of lost friends and scant acquaintances. Finally, the day my father was released, five weeks after Toby had arrived, we reached the bottom of this mystery. Toby confessed under my father’s inquisition that he had lost it; he had taken the lighter while my father was in Nevada and left it on the beach. He had been afraid to tell us, of course. The old man broke down in rage, and so did I, remembering the hours Toby had let me spend with him while he pretended to look for the damned thing, while he gave helpful suggestions where to look for it. I saw then, in a stroke, how much Toby must hate us both, and why. We put him on a bus north the next morning and my father and I spent two days and nights together looking at each other, rarely speaking.

He asked once if I would give up my job in Turkey to stay with him till he got back on his feet. He asked me when he was drunk, and I soberly said no.

The last time I saw my father was in the San Diego jail. He had borrowed my Ford while I sat around drinking and trading summer stories with a Princeton friend who had just driven across Mexico in a Cadillac hearse. My friend had started off with five fellow travelers, and now was alone. He had frightened off the others with serious drinking, a quart a day first of gin and then tequila and then mescal. There had been consequential mischief: my friend had spent a week in a Mazatlán jail after a misunderstanding with a pack of mariachis and a taxi driver, and he had a deep cut under his eye when he rolled in tired, drunk, hungry, and broke.