Duke of Deception (39 page)

While we prepared for bed my father called. He wanted me at once, at the jailhouse. He told me over the phone that he had been “wronged.” I found him in a holding tank among hookers, sailors, the usual Saturday night gang in a municipal jail. He explained: he had made an illegal U-turn and a cop had pulled him over. He had just bought some bacon and eggs, my father said, check for myself, they were in the car, he was just shopping for breakfast
food for my guest. The cop had been abusive, so my father had stammered at him, abusively. The policeman assumed that my father was drunk, which he was not. It was surprising that my father was not drunk, but in truth he was not.

The police evidently now believed that my father had not been drunk, and they prepared to give him back to me. It would be a few minutes, the desk sergeant said. I explained this to my Princeton friend, waiting outside in his Cadillac hearse. He seemed befuddled, asked several times where we were, what was going on. I didn’t understand then how far gone my friend was, that in a couple of years it would take weeks to dry him out in the violent ward at Bellevue, that he had been walking the line since freshman year. I thought he was just like me, a fun-loving, spit-in-their-eye kind of chap, an outlaw like my father at our age.

The police called Sacramento. They checked routinely on everyone they booked; it was regulation procedure. They seemed sheepish about the episode, “just a misunderstanding.” My father, I thought, was unusually indifferent to the injustice, unusually willing to let bygones be bygones and be on his way.

The call to Sacramento was answered with urgency. My father was—resonant word—“wanted.” There was a warrant outstanding for his arrest; the charge was Grand Theft Auto. The auto was an Abarth-Allemagne, “so pretty” my father explained, nine thousand 1961 dollars. He had done his car scam after all. He had bought the thing off a showroom floor with a check. The check had his true name stamped on it but otherwise, in the assurances it made—the implication that the Bank of America had some loose association with my father and would exchange the piece of paper for cash—the piece of paper was misleading. Just as my father had predicted, the salesman and dealer had struggled against their better instincts when he faced them with a choice: I’ll take the car now, at once, for this check. Or I won’t take it at all. Consumers in the San Diego area had been learning to get through one week and then another without owning Abarth-Allemagnes; greed had triumphed over prudence, once again. My father had taken the car into Nevada as soon as he “bought” it, when Toby
arrived. He had driven it flat out till it caught on fire, and then its pretty paint was sandblasted by a desert storm. The car, now in the hands of the dealer, was a disappointment to the dealer.

Most of this I learned from the police. My father was returned to the tank, and I talked to him through the sturdy wire mesh, above the bedlam of San Diego street folk. I asked my father if the story I had just heard was true. He shrugged. I asked again, and again he shrugged. “Never explain, never apologize”; he liked to say that. I told him that what he had done was wrong. I had many times suggested such things to him with sullenness and despairing sighs, but I had never before directly charged him with doing wrong. When I told my father that what he had done was wrong he stared at me, as though I had at last truly puzzled him.

“Don’t you understand me at all?” he asked. “Do you think I care what they think is wrong?”

I spoke with a bail bondsman. I would be obliged to guarantee my father’s appearance in court. I would remain in California, right? But I was due at a job ten days later, out of the state, half way around the world, as far from the San Diego jail as it was possible to travel and still stay on this earth. This was not interesting to the bail bondsman, who repeated his conditions.

I woke up my Princeton friend. He still didn’t know where he was, and didn’t understand the dilemma except that it was serious. He began to moan, as though he had a terrible bellyache, so I let him sleep it off in the back of the hearse, untroubled by this particular complication.

I yelled at my father through the mesh. Would he appear in court if I stood bail for him? I explained to him the bind I was in, the bind he had put me in. He did not seem sympathetic. Like the bondsman, he did not seem interested in the delicate character of my choice. I asked him bluntly: If I went to the edge for him, would he promise to come to court? He would promise nothing. He said I should do as I pleased, that he owed me no promises, he owed me nothing.

I did not make bail. I crossed the country with my Princeton friend, and flew away to Turkey. My father conned the bondsman out of ten thousand, plus ten percent, the bondsman’s vigorish.
Then he jumped jurisdiction, and was caught. And he was punished. They paid him back with interest for the space he had occupied, the airs he had put on, the fictions he had enacted. He had told me he hoped I’d never be a reviewer, a critic. I understand. Out in the real world the critics have teeth, and use them.

I
TAUGHT
two years in Turkey, at Robert College and Istanbul University. I couldn’t have asked for a better hideout. I read and sent long letters home which, taken together, made the best fiction I had written. I sailed in Greece, skied in Austria, spent the summer of 1962 in Paris, house-sitting a flat at 50 rue Jacob. My father reached me there with a letter forwarded from Turkey: he was free, what could I do for him? He wanted money, a job, a place to live. What were my plans for him?

I tried. I telephoned friends and their parents. I wrote Sikorsky. I asked the Princeton placement office for help. I sent a little money. But the case was hopeless, no one could help my father. I wrote him a letter brimming with fond recollections, but without my return address in Paris. I had a friend mail the letter from Italy. Still, I expected him any minute, waited for his knock. Waiting spoiled my Paris holiday. Tough luck. I had come to the Left Bank to write. I wore a beard and rheumy eyes; I dressed in tatters, drove a black motorcycle. After my father’s letter I took to wasting hours at a stretch, whole days. I played solitaire sitting cross-legged on the parquet floor of my drawing-room, while outside the world went about its sunny city business. Smoking hashish, I’d listen to the Jazz Messengers or the MJQ,
No Sun in Venice
. At such moments my mind was as empty as I could will it to be, but it was never empty of my father. A letter to my mother
from this period sighs that “every backward look reveals a body hanging from the family tree.” I think I must have stolen the line. It doesn’t sound like mine, and it has too much zip for the time of its composition.

In the winter of 1963 I shaved off my beard the better to impress a Fulbright interviewer at the American consulate in Istanbul. When I met the interviewer he was wearing a beard like the Great Emancipator’s. He gave me the Fulbright anyway, and I went to England, to Cambridge, to study with George Steiner. My father was proud of this attainment, and when he congratulated me on it he told me the book he was most enjoying in prison (he was back) was
The Wind in the Willows
. I had sent it to him to cheer him up; he especially liked Mr. Toad’s escape from jail in the disguise of a washerwoman. In response to my father’s letter of congratulation I asked him a simple question: was he a Jew? He wrote back: “I am weary unto death of that dumb question. Don’t ask it again.”

It was by now a serious question. During a visit home to New York at the end of my first semester at Cambridge I had met someone I wanted to marry, who wanted to marry me. Her parents did not approve, for many reasons. They had noticed dirt beneath my fingernails when I dined with them, they knew I had nothing to commend me other than a scholarship at a foreign university, they knew my father was a yardbird, and they believed I was a Jew.

Their daughter and I wished to prevail, and finally we did. But her parents were relentless in their opposition. I nevertheless gave George Steiner our good news. My wife has the Yankee Christian name Priscilla, and a New England surname.

“Is she a gentile?”

“Yes,” I answered, puzzled by Steiner’s question.

“Well,” he said, “don’t underestimate the difficulties.”

“What difficulties?”

“Of a Jew marrying a gentile.” Steiner was not legendary for his patience with slow thinkers, and he was losing patience with me.

“I’m not a Jew,” I said.

“Of course you are.”

“No,” I said. “My father says I’m not.”

Steiner laughed. “I don’t care what he says. I’m a Jew, and so are you. Anyone can see it. Don’t be silly. Of course you’re a Jew.”

“My mother is Irish, and she says my father is not a Jew.”

“Your mother is mistaken.”

And then Steiner, thank Christ, changed the subject to tragic literature.

I left Cambridge after a year. I don’t know why I left. I meant to return after a summer working at
The Washington Post
, but the summer ended, and I didn’t leave. My mother now lived in Washington, and so did Toby, sent down from The Hill to a public high school. I had last seen my mother when I was fifteen and she was thirty-four; now she was forty-five and I was twenty-six going on forty. Our first night together, as soon as the dinner dishes were cleared away, I began to ask questions:

“Is my father a Jew?”

“Not that I know of. He never went to a synagogue.”

“Was his father a Jew?”

“Not in the regular sense. He didn’t believe in God.”

“That isn’t what I mean. You know what I mean.”

“Well, roughly speaking, I guess you could call him a Jew, yes. But not your grandmother, I’m quite sure of that, so you’re only a quarter Jewish.”

“My grandmother wasn’t a Jew?”

“Well, maybe she was. Yes, I guess she was. She was in Hadassah, a wonderful lady.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I promised your father I wouldn’t.”

“But
why
, dammit!”

“I don’t know, maybe to spare you the pain he felt. There never seemed to be a right time for it. When you were with me you were so young. Then it was his problem. I don’t know.”

Even before he knew what
schlemiel
meant Toby announced that he wanted to leave for Israel and a kibbutz; later he said he wanted to fight Arabs in the Six-Day War, but then the sixth day came, and the seventh, and he was still here. I went around for a few weeks after my talk with my mother telling all my friends
I was a Jew. I thought I was; I had long ago converted to Jewish habits of mind, as I understood them from books: melancholy, acid humor, skepticism. These attitudes suited me, just as British manners had suited my father. When I told my friends I was a Jew most of them said
sure, of course, so what?

A member of Priscilla’s family flew four hundred miles to tell her, a month before we were married, that if she didn’t care herself about the consequences of a “mixed marriage,” she should “think of the children.” They’d never be welcome in Hobe Sound, or Delray, or some other place on the Atlantic coast of Florida. My wife laughed, and became my wife.

Ten years later my older son, Nicholas, came home from school with a question I had asked my father:

“Am I a Jew? What’s a Jew?”

I tried to answer him seriously. I explained that Jews didn’t think of me as a Jew because I didn’t worship as a Jew and wasn’t raised as one. Israel didn’t think of me as a Jew: under the Law of Return you are a Jew only if your mother is a Jew. My mother was Irish Catholic …

“You’re talking about Granny?”

“Yes.”

Then I explained to Nicholas that his paternal great-grandparents were a German-Jewish believer born in Scotland and an atheist Jew born in England. His mother’s people were of gentile English stock. His question was difficult to answer. But he answered it, telling his little brother, who had been listening:

“Hey, Justin, you’re a mutt.”

“You too,” Justin said.

“Me too,” I said.

My mother and brother were at our wedding; my father was in prison again, bad checks or grand theft or defrauding an innkeeper. Toby was in the Army. I sent my father rent money, one hundred fifty a month when he was free, and California merchants dunned me for his debts. I bought a used Volvo to get me to work at
The Washington Post
, where my father wrote telling me he wanted a BMW, “a damned sensible vehicle.” He could get one
with only a thousand miles on it, a “demo.” I could make the down payment, carry the monthlies, what did I say? I said no, and stopped writing. The letters kept coming in from strangers around Los Angeles. My father set beds on fire in the fleabags where he lit from time to time. An ex-cellmate called me at the office collect to sell me information, he knew a “fairy actor” who knew who killed Kennedy, how much was it worth, “your old man said to call.”

I got a letter from Mrs. Ira Levenson. She had known all us Wolffs during the war, when we lived in Manhattan Beach and shopped at her husband’s grocery store. She had just seen my father: