Modern American Memoirs (36 page)

“So what'er you waiting for?” one of them said. “You got what you came for. What else do you want?”

And then I blurted it out. “I'd like to ask you just one question,” I said.

“Like what?” the standing one said.

“Like where on earth did you gentlemen learn so much about grand opera?”

For a moment he stared at me with parted lips; then, pounding the mantelpiece with his palm, he collapsed with a roar of laughter. As the laughter of the others erupted like a string of giant firecrackers I looked on with growing feelings of embarrassment and insult, trying to grasp the handle to what appeared to be an unfriendly joke. Finally, wiping coal-dust-stained tears from his cheeks, he interrupted his laughter long enough to initiate me into the mystery.

“Hell, son,” he laughed, “we learned it down at the Met, that's where…”

“You learned it
where?
”

“At the Metropolitan Opera, just like I told you. Strip us fellows down and give us some costumes and we make about the finest damn bunch of Egyptians you ever seen. Hell, we been down there
wearing leopard skins and carrying spears or waving things like palm leafs and ostrich-tail fans for
years!
”

Now, purged by the revelation, and with Hazel Harrison's voice echoing in my ears, it was my turn to roar with laughter. With a shock of recognition I joined them in appreciation of the hilarious American joke that centered on the incongruities of race, economic status, and culture. My sense of order restored, my appreciation of the arcane ways of American cultural possibility was vastly extended. The men were products of both past
and
present; were both coal heavers
and
Met extras; were both workingmen
and
opera buffs. Seen in the clear, pluralistic, melting-pot light of American cultural possibility there was no contradiction. The joke, the apparent contradiction, sprang from my attempting to see them by the light of social concepts that cast less illumination than an inert lump of coal. I was delighted, because during a moment when I least expected to encounter the little man behind the stove (Miss Harrison's vernacular music critic, as it were), I had stumbled upon four such men. Not behind the stove, it is true, but even more wondrously, they had materialized at an even more unexpected location: at the depth of the American social hierarchy and, of all possible hiding places, behind a coal pile. Where there's a melting pot there's smoke, and where there's smoke it is not simply optimistic to expect fire, it's imperative to watch for the phoenix's vernacular, but transcendent, rising.

Geoffrey Wolff's
The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father
describes one of the most vital characters in American literature. A con man, grifter, thief, jailbird, drunk, and all-round fraud, Arthur Wolff (“Duke”) passed himself off as whatever sort of man the occasion demanded. Usually he claimed to be a Yale graduate and a member of the Skull and Bones society. Memorably, he worked as a project engineer during and after the war at North American Aviation, Lockheed, Northrup, Bell Helicopter, Rohn Aviation, and Boeing. He was not an engineer. The
École aeronautiques
at the Sorbonne, where he claimed to have earned his engineering degree, never existed
.

The Duke of Deception
is a vigorous, dark, and warm book. “There was nothing to him but lies, and love,” Geoffrey Wolff writes. “I had this from him always: compassion, care, generosity, endurance
.”

Geoffrey Wolff is primarily a novelist, the author of
Bad Debts
(1969)
, The Sightseer
(1974)
, Inklings
(1977)
, Providence
(1986)
, The Final Club
(1990), and
The Age of Consent
(1995). His essays are in
A Day at the Beach
(1992)
.

In this memoir section, the author is a Princeton undergraduate who has a temporary job at Sikorsky helicopters in Connecticut. He needs tuition for the coming year. Alice is his rich stepmother, who periodically leaves
.

 

from T
HE
D
UKE OF
D
ECEPTION

M
y father was a mystery, or as crazy as crazy can be. His schemes were insane. He would go to law school, become an expert on wheat speculations, advise the Algerians or Venezuelans on oil refining. He decided the jazz pianist at The Three Bears in Wilton was a genius, as good as King Cole. During the early forties in California he had “discovered” Cole playing piano in a bowling alley, and the King, responding to my father's enthusiasm, asked the Duke to manage him. My father had laughed at the notion.
This
chance my father
wouldn't miss, he would produce a record for this pianist, they'd both have it made. He brought the man home, recorded his work on our out-of-tune upright using a top dollar Ampex, shot publicity snaps with a Rollei (white dinner jacket, pencil-line mustache, and rug), and led him to the mountain top. The man was my father's age, with more or less my father's prospects, with one greater skill and one greater vice. The piano player could play the piano better, but he was always drunk; my father was drunk only once—maybe twice—a week.

 

Duke charged ahead. He charged and charged ahead. There was something about him, what he wanted he got. Salesmen loved him, he was the highest evolution of consumer. Discriminating, too: he railed against shoddy goods and cheapjack workmanship. He would actually return, for credit, an electric blender or an alpine tent that didn't perform, by his lights, to specification. He demanded the best, and never mind the price. As for debts, they didn't bother him at all. He said that merchants who were owed stayed on their toes, aimed to please. Dunning letters meant nothing to him. He laughed off the vulgar thrustings of the book and record clubs, with their absurd threats to take him to law. People owed a bundle, who brought out their heavy artillery, got my father's Samuel Johnson remark: “Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound; great debts are like cannon, of loud noise but little danger.” He was slippery: he used the telephone to persuade the telephone company he should be allowed a sixth month of non-payment without suffering disconnection, because he needed to call people long distance to borrow money from them to pay his telephone bills. He was cool, but not icy. He owed a Westport barkeep a couple of hundred, and when the man died in a car accident my father was sorry, and told his widow about the debt, not that he ever paid her.

Finally it got out of hand. It had nowhere to go but out of hand. I wearied of telling people on our stoop or through the phone that they had the wrong Arthur Wolff, that my father had just left for the hospital, or the Vale of Kashmir, or Quito. I tired of asking “How do I know you're who you say you are?” when people asked questions about my father's whereabouts and plans. I hated it, wanted to flee.

It was October; there were months still to get through, too many months but too few to cobble up a miracle of loaves and find the twenty-five hundred dollars to buy my way back into Princeton.

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 every thing. 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 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.