Duke of Deception (42 page)

When I finally left Kay’s house I felt these things, some for the first time. I drove home slowly, and stopped at stop signs. The door to the room I shared with Priscilla was open when I came in, but I didn’t go through that door that night. I went to my children’s room. I stood above Justin, looking down at him. And then my son Nicholas began to moan, quietly at first. They did not know their grandfather was dead; they knew nothing about their grandfather. There would be time for that. I resolved to tell them what I could, and hoped they would want to know as much as I could tell. Nicholas cried out in his sleep, as he had so many times before, dragging me out of nightmares about his death with his own nightmares about his death, his dreams of cats with broken legs, broken-winged screaming birds, deer caught in traps, little boys hurt and crying, beyond the range of their parents’ hearing. Sometimes I dreamt of my son bleeding to death from some simple wound I had neglected to learn to mend.

Now I smoothed his forehead as my father had smoothed mine when I was feverish. Justin breathed deeply. I crawled in bed beside my sweet Nicholas and took him in my arms and began to rock him in time to Justin’s regular breaths. I stunk of whiskey and there was blood on my face from a fall leaving Kay’s house, but I knew I couldn’t frighten my son. He ceased moaning, and I rocked him in my arms till light came down on us, and he stirred awake in my arms as I, in his, fell into a sleep free of dreams.

Geoffrey Wolff was born in Los Angeles in 1937. In addition to his biography of Harry Crosby,
Black Sun
(1976), he is the author of four novels:
Bad Debts
(1969),
The Sightseer
(1974),
Inklings
(1978), and, most recently,
Providence
(1986). Mr. Wolff lives in Jamestown, Rhode Island.