Duke of Deception (29 page)

Steve was a bureaucrat at the Pentagon, and the very image of his father, but taller. Unlike his father and like my mother he had a ready laugh. I liked him, and knew my father liked him. My father had done things for him, the small acts of generosity and kindness that older members of a family like to do for younger members, inviting them for weekends, making introductions. So I was stunned at dinner to hear my uncle make what seemed to me cruel remarks about my father, in front of me, as though I weren’t there. The remarks were factual, I think, references to Duke’s debts, mendacity, dependence upon Alice, heavy drinking. But the remarks were also purposeless and unearned, and I was enraged. My uncle thought I was too young at fifteen to show rage to a grown-up. Then my mother laughed, shrugged, said “What’s the fuss? Steve’s right about Duke, he’s a faker.”

In all my life I had never heard my father speak unkindly of my mother or her brother. That night a call came to Steve, putatively from the Georgia State Police. It was a message for Rosemary. The Michigan ex-policeman had been in an accident driving north to search for her, and his last words had been of their love. Mother was troubled: “I lay in bed thinking of him, half-relieved to be
done with him and half-sorry he was dead.” He wasn’t dead, or hurt. He had just had a bit of fun with my mother.

While my mother fretted that night, thinking the man dead, I sulked. I sulked flying to Bangor. I was met at the airport by the girl and her nice mummy and daddy in their sensible Pontiac station wagon. I had spent two hours with the girl when she came to sing at Choate with the Ethel Walker glee club. After the concert we had walked behind the chapel, and to my astonishment she asked me to kiss her. Now I held her hand in the dark back seat while her parents drove us toward Blue Hill, asking me questions. I couldn’t get Steve or my mother off my mind, except when I wondered if the Ethel Walker girl would let me touch one of her wonderful breasts. She noticed my contemplativeness, knew I had just visited my divorced mother.

“Do you see your mother often?” she asked me.

“I used to,” I said.

“But of course you’ll see her again soon,” the girl’s mother said.

“No,” I said. “My mother died last night.”

What the hell had I done now? Silence, dead silence. I don’t know whether they believed me in the front seat, but the girl squeezed my hand hard and pushed her leg against mine. So that was one of the reasons I had said it. The other was to kill my mother, a simple case of murder, real hatred now. She shouldn’t have let her little brother say such awful, true things about my father.

I mooned around the girl’s stately waterfront house for a week, playing the mourner for her parents, who many times asked if there was anything they could do, wouldn’t I rather be with my father?

“No,” I said, “this is better, to be away from all that, to sort things out.”

Shouldn’t I return for the funeral?

“We buried her the morning after she passed away. She wanted it that way.”

They couldn’t have believed me! But they were relentlessly thoughtful. The girl’s father had owned a haberdashery called The English Shop in a small college town in Massachusetts. He sang
the college’s praises and I could think only about opening an account at his store, how easy it would have been with a good connection. I told the girl’s father that he had definitely changed my mind about college: Yale was too big, New Haven too dirty and noisy, his little college was the place for me, absolutely. It was better not to try to step into my father’s huge boots at Yale.

The man beamed. He trusted me with his daughter. On their catboat, in their Pontiac, and on their couch I tried to feel her up. The girl wouldn’t let me. This was grim business. I put aspirin in her Coca-Cola, a known specific against frigidity, and still she wouldn’t let me.

“This Coke tastes awful,” she said. “It tastes like aspirin.”

My mother had just died, for God’s sake! I had just put my mother in the ground! I was owed! I had three hands, moving them from the girl’s breasts to her thighs in a random assault, praying that she’d fumble a defensive move and let me slip in there, let me unbuckle it, touch it, squeeze. I told her she had given me “blue balls, lover’s nuts.” This interested her and I took advantage of her distraction to run my hand up her stocking, past her garter, inside that soft, damp thigh, against those slick pants. Wham! Her legs locked together. “Take me home!” she yelled.

Driving home, hunched over the wheel, I pouted: “I guess you don’t like me.”

“That isn’t it,” she said, “you’re not fair.”

“You’re the one who isn’t fair,” I said. “Listen, let me touch you, just five minutes. Just this once and I promise I’ll never feel you up again.”

She began to cry. I suspected fake tears. Pulled over. Brought her head to my chest, so understandingly. She stopped sobbing, lay against my chest. I ran my hand through her hair, gently, kept it far away from
there
and
there
. She could trust me. I touched her throat, didn’t reach down her blouse. She could trust me.

Dear God
, I prayed,
make her fall asleep and I’ll believe in You. I’ll have myself confirmed. Give me just this one on the cuff
. She was asleep. Her legs were slightly apart. I unbuckled her bra one-handed, a skill I had practiced on one of my stepmother’s garments, installed around a pillow. The girl breathed evenly. This
was it, the point of life. Suddenly she sat up straight, refastened her armor, said “Okay, that’s enough, let’s go home.”

That night I wrote a letter to my Choate roommate:
Had a great time with my mater in D. C. Dined at the Mayflower. Plenty of nook up here in Maine. Went the distance last night with that babe from Walker’s, huge hooters, HOT! Wheeled around in her old man’s car, told him I had a license, scored in the back seat
.

I sealed the envelope, addressed and stamped it. But I left it in the guest bedroom when I returned to Connecticut the next day. That night I telephoned the girl, such a sweet girl, I missed her. Her father answered the phone:

“My daughter doesn’t want to hear your voice again, and neither do I. And I’d advise you to apply to Yale. Maybe they’ll be dumb enough to take you.”

T
OBY
was eight when he flew to New York to spend the summer with us. My father met him at the airport and took him to “21” for lunch.

“He introduced me to ginger beer, and the waiter knew him and seemed to like him. I was just knocked out by it all.”

Toby noticed that his father “apparently didn’t work,” because he had all the time in the world to spend on his son. “Still, the old man had an air, even at his most idle, of great business afoot, of busyness. There were always errands to run, gloves to be selected, an umbrella to be repaired.”

They never talked together about anything personal, until at summer’s end Toby said that he’d like to stay in Connecticut with Duke and Tootie. “It was so nice there, just a lot nicer.” Father said no, it wouldn’t be fair. Besides, Rosemary would never permit it. Toby asked if he could come back the following summer, and did. He loved his stepmother: “Tootie was aces. She was generous about Mother, made me write her, said nice things about their talks on the telephone. You seemed like an alien in the house. I thought you hated being around Duke, Tootie, me. I looked up to you, of course. But things were not good between us, our feelings were complicated.”

Then, the summers of 1953 and 1954, Toby reminded me of myself at eight and nine, and for reasons I cannot even now
understand those memories were painful. I wasn’t ashamed of the bumpkin. On the contrary: a little brother was a nice thing to have, like a crash linen jacket. I liked to show Toby off to my Choate friends. There were always plenty of Choate friends around our Connecticut houses.

When the school year ended there was a round of dances during Tennis Week at the Manursing Island Club, American Yacht Club, Greenwich Country Club, Wee Burn Country Club … I was invited to some of these; most I crashed. My roommate Frank stayed with us often in Wilton; he stammered too, and could laugh with my father as I could not about their afflictions. The less I respected my father, the more my friends cherished him. He wasn’t like their fathers, had different toys, a different vocabulary.

He owned the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
—just like the grandparents of my schoolmates—but he also had books of dirty limericks and could recite, first verse to last,
Eskimo Nell
. My father owned things with mother-of-pearl handles, wore pigskin gloves. There were lamps in our house made from pieces of old sailing ships. We bathed with Pear’s soap. Ordinary. Extraordinary was my father’s set of French caricatures,
Twenty-One Ways of Committing Suicide
, black, sardonic studies of final solutions.

I was surprised how wonderful my school friends found my father’s things to be; but they did, and more and more of them, more and more often, found excuses to stay with us. They enjoyed Duke’s speech. A girl was a
popsie
, and if she was comely and ardent she was
fux deluxe
. My father’s glasses were
specs
, and when he was tired he was
worn to the nubbins
. When my friends and I
gussied up
to go to a dance my father begged me to lay off the
gaspers
, though I smoked them anyway, black, gold-tipped Balkan Sobranies. My father thought they were vulgar, and they were. My stepmother thought my father’s diction was vulgar, but it was not.

My father’s vocabulary was a schoolboy’s vocabulary because among us he was among schoolboys. He was a chameleon. He gave his clients what he thought they wanted: companies got his constipated management jargon, headmasters got piety, car salesmen
got bank references, car mechanics got engineering lore. He was a lie, through and through. There was nothing to him but lies, and love.

The housemaster who noted that I seemed “to have a completely false set of values” added that this sad state was “partially induced by such things as receiving a sports car for Christmas.” My first nickname at Choate had been “Art,” because my friends identified me entirely with my father, but soon after I turned sixteen they changed me to “Porfirio,” after Porfirio Rubirosa, the playboy racing-car driver killed in the Bois de Boulogne. The week after my sixteenth birthday I got my Connecticut driver’s license, traded my racing boat for a 1948 Austin sedan, and wrecked it three days later. Five weeks after my sixteenth birthday I was given a new Porsche 1300 convertible, and by then was smoking and drinking at will in my father’s presence.

I drove the Porsche flat out along Nod Hill Road, just as my father drove his Ferrari, a three-liter Ghia-bodied roadster he had “bought” when he “bought” my Porsche, using the third Jaguar in his stable as a down payment for both cars and promising to make killer monthly payments, which he never made. Alice was by now resolute in her antagonism to his financial caprices, and would have no part of his toys or the debts he accumulated on behalf of his toys. She was rightly aghast when she first saw the Porsche, and this further alienated me from her.

One night, with fog drifting across Nod Hill Road, my father and I nearly hit head on. We were drunk, and just managed to nose our cars into opposite ditches. We met in the middle of the road at the sharp right-hander near the wall of a sheep pasture and hugged and laughed: wouldn’t that have been something, setting the old lady free of us and our damned cars at a single swipe!

My father finally did bang his Ferrari into that stone wall and three weeks later, sixteen and a half, I rolled my Porsche over a different stone wall. The girl with me was thrown clear and got off cheap, with five stitches behind her ear. I smashed my nose, had it stitched together by a sleepy intern in South Norwalk, and
tried to sleep off a concussion. My father sat by my bed slapping me awake. I laughed at him walking around in his pajamas in a public building, but he wasn’t laughing anymore. I was a tinhorn “Porfirio” with a “completely false set of values.”

It was decided I should work that summer before my last year at Choate. The previous summer I had been fired for indolence after three weeks cutting grass and trimming hedges as an apprentice to Raymond Massey’s Wilton grounds keeper, but this was to be a serious enterprise. I was hired by Tolm Motors in Darien, where Duke had his cars and mine tuned and repaired. (He had now traded himself down from the Ferrari to a Mercedes 190SL, and me from the wreckage of the Porsche to a VW.) He owed Tolm so much that he muscled me into my summer job: they were nice to me so that if he ever paid any bills he might pay them first. My job at seventy-five cents an hour was pleasant and educational. I washed and waxed the sports cars of clients who had brought them for repair. My partner in this work was a black bachelor, George, about forty-five. In light of his superior experience he was paid two bits more an hour than I was paid. We became friendly; I talked to him about Choate and he listened, and soon knew the names of my teachers and friends, answering strophe with anti-strophe:

“George, I’ve had it up to here with Bill Morse.”

“That boy too damned big for his britches. A nice one ‘longside the head bring him down to size, yessir.”

I resolved to teach George about the great jazz musicians who had enriched the culture of his people, but when I got permission to bring a record player to the garage where we worked alone with hoses and brushes and chamois cloth, George said he didn’t cotton to jazz, he preferred the classics, Kostelanetz and Ezio Pinza. Never mind, it was my machine, and I arbitrated a settlement, two picks for me, one for him, thus: “Rockin’ Chair,” “Struttin’ with Some Barbeque,” “Some Enchanted Evening.”

One day I suggested that George come to dinner at home in Wilton and then blow it out with my father and me in Westport.

“Shit,” he said, “you don’t know nothin’.”

For reasons beyond my understanding I was trusted by Tolm
to take delivery of its new Jaguars, Triumphs, and Mercedes from distributors in New York. Once or twice a week I’d come to work dressed like a Choatie, wearing a bow tie, saddle shoes, and a seersucker jacket, and take the train to New York to fetch a car. The last car I picked up was a gray gull-winged Mercedes 300SL, still covered with dock grime and shipping grease. The seats were black glove leather. It was explained that the car’s speed during break-in was governed by a restraint on the accelerator that prevented me from exceeding eighty in top gear, but this could be overridden in an emergency, breaking a lead seal and placing in peril the car’s warranty. Coming down the long hill at Stamford on the Merritt Parkway there was an emergency. I wanted urgently to drive Tolm Motors’ new car a hundred and fifty, and I did. Tolm Motors, finding the lead seal broken, was cross and fired me, cutting its losses and resigning itself to a place at the bottom of Duke’s action pile. I said goodbye to George, promised to stay in touch.