Duke of Deception (27 page)

Ferrell also remembers that my father traveled to Birmingham to hire engineers away from Hayes Aircraft, what used to be Bechtel-McCone when Duke worked there. An old employee of my father’s, and chief engineer after my father was fired, said he hoped his old boss wasn’t in town to proselytize employees. “Hell,” my father said, “I can’t even say p-proselytize, let alone do it.”

“He used to send flowers to Alice every day,” Ferrell recalls. “As a consequence, the florist bills were quite high. There were discussions concerning those bills when Duke left this area.”

My father didn’t bend to his work with the gravity that was expected of him, and the less hard he worked the less respect he showed his superior. He decided that Gaylord Newton was self-important and incompetent, and he said so one night when he was drunk. The next day Newton fired him. “I am sorry all of this happened,” Newton wrote me recently. “Duke was courteous in accepting the situation and realized there was no other recourse. About two years later I met him in New York, by accident, on Park Avenue, and we had a friendly conversation, which surprised me in light of what had happened. He said he was making out okay.”

He thought he was. In fact he was on the backside of the peak. He thought his roller coaster wasn’t like the others, that it would just keep climbing.

D
UKE
didn’t tell me they fired him. He said he had quit, to begin a business, its nature unspecified, for himself. At the time, August of 1952, I was at Choate summer school, trying to make verbs agree in tense and number, training my flat-top to lie down like a Yale man’s, scruffing my new white bucks, learning tennis. This was to be a major rehab, and could have only one of two outcomes: a quick study was
casual
, a slow study was a
weenie
. I did not wish to be a weenie.

During the previous May my father had taken one of his frequent breaks from AEDC to drive me north to look at New England schools. He now agreed with Alice that it would “do me worlds of good” to leave home. My stepmother met us at the Plaza, where we stayed, and took me dancing at the hotel’s Rendezvous Room and the Stork Club. After lunch next day at “21” we all scrunched in the Jaguar and drove to Deerfield. There were pleasantries with Dr. Boyden, who affected remembering my father, placing him:
how did this one turn out?
My father’s hands shook as we sat at Boyden’s desk beneath the stairs of the main building where the headmaster could watch his boys climb and descend every day, all year, with clumsiness or grace, preparing for later, for
life
. My father abruptly left us, and Boyden asked how I spent my summers. I said I raced motorboats. I don’t think he flinched, he’d heard it all by then.

I found Alice and Duke outside after my meeting with Dr. Boyden. We were meant to lie over at the Deerfield Inn and meet next morning with masters and administrators, but my father said, “You’re not going to Deerfield. Let’s get out of here.”

He climbed the hill smartly to Eaglebrook, showing me a four-wheel drift through one of the tight bends. Alice was annoyed. The people at Eaglebrook were nice to my father, begged him to keep in touch, fussed over me. I said I’d like to go there, but the headmaster said I was too old, alas, and smiled politely.

We looked at Andover, but the school frightened me, all business. The director of admissions took no interest in my summer pastimes, but asked me why I’d failed Latin, and how I felt about plane geometry.

Choate was the place. We arrived on a beautiful green day; I saw a class being taught beneath an elm tree. Everyone looked clean in white linen jackets and seersucker suits and white shirts with frayed collars. The admissions officer was like a kind uncle; his face was ruddy, and he remembered Alice, whose son Bill had gone there and played football well. Ruth Atkins’s son had recently graduated too, but the alumni whose names I heard that first day were Andrew and Paul Mellon, Chester Bowles, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy.

The director of admissions sent a memo after we left to his brother Seymour St. John, the headmaster:

During our interview Wardell St. John asked me what sports I enjoyed. I said “football, boats …” Before I could inventory my motorboating trophies my father interrupted: “He loves to row,
wants to try crew in the spring.” Mr. St. John nodded approvingly: “We can always use a good oar.” “Well,” I said, “I’d like to be one.”

On the application form Duke explained that I was, like himself, Episcopalian and would probably follow him to Yale. There was some confusion on this latter point for I had told Mr. St. John that I would go to Johns Hopkins, and be a surgeon, but my father explained that I was referring to graduate school, after Yale.

I told Mr. St. John that I wanted to be a Choatie. My father counterfeited good-natured anger that I had chosen Choate over its arch-rival Deerfield, “my own school,” but he resigned himself to my choice. Mr. St. John sent me to the Mellon Library for some tests. His memo recovers the episode:

And how! I couldn’t punctuate or do accurate sums and takeaways. Here is the opening paragraph of my first letter to Choate: “A belated note of thanks for my jacquet” (which I had left behind). “Indeed it arrived in tyme for the ‘warm’ weather!” My idiosyncratic spelling of jacket came either from Society’s French airs, or from my fondness for the saxophone work of a tenor man, Illinois Jacquet.

Never mind, verbal and mathematical skills weren’t everything in 1952. There was a place on the application form to list relatives and close friends who had been at Choate and my father, making no reference to his cousin Buzzy Atkins, let my stepmother pile name upon name. Under the rubric
Financial Reference
he gave The Bank of New York, which returned to the school’s inquiry a most artfully discreet reply:

A few days after Choate got this letter, I was in. I returned for six weeks to Shelbyville, strutted, swam in the pools of a couple of the town’s rich kids (son of a pencil manufacturer, son of a corrugated box manufacturer), and promised two girls (daughter of the Chrysler dealer, daughter of the Mercury dealer) that if either would let me reach under her sweater she could dance with me at Choate Festivities. They couldn’t imagine what I was trying to say, and instructed me to keep my hands in my lap.

Before I left for summer school my father offered advice. Choose friends with care, don’t boast or lie. Study hard, listen, be polite, don’t neglect the fingernails. Be brave. Dress with care but without ostentation. Neither a borrower nor a lender be …

I flew north to New York in early July, and boarded for a day and night with a school classmate of Alice’s who lived—just as I once had!—on East Fifty-seventh. She, though, lived between Park and Madison, in a duplex. She had a daughter my age. The woman talked like Alice, like Tallulah Bankhead in the movies but an octave higher, trilling her notes, punctuating her observations with parentheticals,
but don’t you see, dear boy, what an absolute desert Alice has had to wander in, Seattle and now (where is she again, my sweet?) … Ah, of course, Shelbyville! Well, wherever …

The lady gave a cocktail party the evening I arrived. I was meant to go to a musical comedy with her daughter, but I didn’t wish to. Her daughter was as fancy as her mother but with braces which caused her to lisp. Nor was the daughter attracted to me, whose hair, growing long in training for a part, stuck up straight,
as though I’d been plugged into a high-voltage socket. The daughter went to the musical with another boy, and I stayed with the grown-ups. The lady drank a great amount, and instructed me to sit beside her on a sofa. She smelled wonderful; her skin was white as milk. She took my hand, and I blushed. The guests thinned out, and then left, except for a gentleman with thick white hair and a white brigadier’s mustache. He also blushed. The woman instructed him to mix her a drink, and when he turned his back to us she put my hand against her soft small breast and then between her skinny thighs, against her black silk dress. She said to me, no whisper, a statement:

“You’re darling. I’m going to let you make me happy.”

Then the white-haired man, whose red face was now very red, took the woman away to dinner, but before they left she kissed me (“Open your mouth, dear, don’t pinch it shut”) and said she’d be back soon. I lay in bed waiting for her. The daughter came home, argued with her date, a door was slammed. Her mother returned about four, and thirty minutes later I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, tried to make my hair lie down and stood outside her bedroom door listening to my heart pound. The door was open a crack, or carelessly shut. I opened it. I stood beside her, above her. A pillow covered her head. The room smelled of gin, tonic, lime, flowers. It smelled too of the woman. I touched the pillow, said nothing, touched it again. She rolled over. She was my stepmother’s age, fifty-two. She wore a black mask over her eyes. I had never seen such a sight. She raised the mask, stared at me, blinked, lowered it. Said into her pillow:

“Oh, it’s you. Go to bed.”

Sometimes I smell her perfume on the street and I turn this way and that, looking for her. Now she’s almost eighty, or dead.

When Duke was fired he and Tootie lit out for The Colony Club on Barbados to recover from the trauma of having to leave Bedford County, Tennessee. They traveled around the Caribbean while I tried to translate myself from a Lothario of the drive-ins to an ivy-draped lounge lizard. I made friends easily enough, the kinds my father had warned me against making too easily, boys
who liked to tell dirty jokes, sneak a coffin nail or a hit off a pint of Four Roses after lights-out, laugh a lot, figure the angles.

A young English teacher taught me to parse a sentence, break it down like a machine rather than by magic, the way a boot-camper learns to strip his M-16 in the dark. All summer I charted sentences, fifty a day; the work was either perfect or it was wrong, flunk, your weapon won’t work, you’re dead. The teacher wasn’t friendly, didn’t charm. He didn’t seem much to care whether I got the sentences diagramed right or didn’t. But he did care; I eventually learned sentences.

A rich kid invited me to Greenwich for a weekend at his house while his parents were away. I told the dean, George Steele, “The Penguin,” that my grandmother had asked me to spend the weekend with her in New York, where she lived at Hampshire House, might I go? she was enfeebled, needed me. Mr. Steele said I could not go; he neither smiled nor explained.

My record at summer’s end was mixed. One master called me “a nuisance in the house.” Another noticed I had “walked out of exam early.” Another said that I was “the best boy in class, good inspiration.” Another: “Will need much following up. Undisciplined.” Mr. Steele knew everything about all of us, and he knew me: “Jeff is a pleasant youngster, good mature ability, but very poor study habits, and he’s easily distracted. My thought is that he’s a bit ‘old’ for his years. A little too sophisticated for his own good, and ought to be held down.”

After school I met my parents at the Plaza. They were deeply tanned, appeared prosperous. They looked like the parents of most of my schoolmates, except not quite so deeply tanned or prosperous, and not as finely chiseled. My stepmother’s neck was not as swanlike as some I had seen around the Choate campus, and her arms were flabby. I noticed my father’s bald head and heavy features. A waiter at the Plaza told me with a Spanish accent that I looked just like my papa, and for the first time this was not something I wanted to hear.

I went with a Choate friend to Jimmy Ryan’s, just west of “21”
(which I pointed out when we passed it as a place I sometimes lunched) on Fifty-second Street. Now I was Earl Wilson. We listened to Wilbur DeParis and drank rye and ginger ale. I kept the band’s beat with a plastic swizzle stick, beating it against the ashtray I stole.

Our last night in New York I spent with my father and stepmother. The woman in the black silk dress came to our room for drinks with her friend Alice. I sat mute, staring at her. She had too much to drink. I had not told my father anything. The woman sat beside him, whispered something to him. He scowled. Maybe she had whispered something about me, maybe about him. Maybe it was nothing at all. My father had also had much to drink. He turned on the woman: