Duke of Deception (2 page)

There was much luxury in my father’s affections, and he hated what was narrow, pinched, or mean. He understood exclusion, mind you, and lived his life believing the world to be divided between a few
us’s
and many
thems
, but I was to understand that aristocracy was a function of taste, courage, and generosity. About two other virtues—candor and reticence—I was confused, for my father would sometimes proselytize the one, sometimes the other.

If Duke’s preoccupation with bloodlines was finite, this did not cause him to be unmindful of his ancestors. He knew whence he had come, and whither he meant me to go. I saw visible evidence of this, a gold signet ring which I wear today, a heavy bit of business inscribed arsy-turvy with lions and flora and a motto,
nulla vestigium retrorsit
. “Don’t look back” I was told it meant.

After Yale—class of late nineteen-twenty something, or early nineteen-thirty something—my father batted around the country, living a high life in New York among school and college chums, flying as a test pilot, marrying my mother, the daughter of a rear admiral. I was born a year after the marriage, in 1937, and three years after that my father went to England as a fighter pilot with Eagle Squadron, a group of American volunteers in the Royal Air Force. Later he transferred to the OSS, and was in Yugoslavia with the partisans; just before the Invasion he was parachuted into Normandy, where he served as a sapper with the Resistance, which my father pronounced
ray-zee-staunce
.

His career following the war was for me mysterious in its particulars; in the service of his nation, it was understood, candor was not always possible. This much was clear: my father mattered in the world, and was satisfied that he mattered, whether or not the world understood precisely why he mattered.

A pretty history for an American clubman. Its fault is that it
was not true. My father was a bullshit artist. True, there were many boarding schools, each less pleased with the little Duke than the last, but none of them was Groton. There was no Yale, and by the time he walked from a room at a mention of Skull and Bones I knew this, and he knew that I knew it. No military service would have him; his teeth were bad. So he had his teeth pulled and replaced, but the Air Corps and Navy and Army and Coast Guard still thought he was a bad idea. The ring I wear was made according to his instructions by a jeweler two blocks from Schwab’s drugstore in Hollywood, and was never paid for. The motto, engraved backwards so that it would come right on a red wax seal, is dog Latin and means in fact “leave no trace behind,” but my father did not believe me when I told him this.

My father was a Jew. This did not seem to him a good idea, and so it was his notion to disassemble his history, begin at zero, and re-create himself. His sustaining line of work till shortly before he died was as a confidence man. If I now find his authentic history more surprising, more interesting, than his counterfeit history, he did not. He would not make peace with his actualities, and so he was the author of his own circumstances, and indifferent to the consequences of this nervy program.

There were some awful consequences, for other people as well as for him. He was lavish with money, with others’ money. He preferred to stiff institutions: jewelers, car dealers, banks, fancy hotels. He was, that is, a thoughtful buccaneer, when thoughtfulness was convenient. But people were hurt by him. Much of his mischief was casual enough: I lost a tooth when I was six, and the Tooth Fairy, “financially inconvenienced” or “temporarily out of pocket,” whichever was then his locution, left under my pillow an IOU, a sight draft for two bits, or two million.

I wish he hadn’t selected from among the world’s possible disguises the costume and credentials of a yacht club commodore. Beginning at scratch he might have reached further, tried something a bit more bold and odd, a bit less inexorably conventional, a bit less calculated to please. But it is true, of course, that a confidence man who cannot inspire confidence in his marks is nothing at all, so perhaps his tuneup of his bloodline, educational
vita
, and war record was merely the price of doing business in a culture preoccupied with appearances.

I’m not even now certain what I wish he had made of himself: I once believed that he was most naturally a fictioneer. But for all his preoccupation with make-believe, he never tried seriously to write it. A confidence man learns early in his career that to commit himself to paper is to court trouble. The successful bunco artist does his game, and disappears himself: Who
was
that masked man? No one, no one at all,
nulla vestigium
[
sic
]
retrorsit
[
sic
], not a trace left behind.

Well, I’m left behind. One day, writing about my father with no want of astonishment and love, it came to me that I am his creature as well as his get. I cannot now shake this conviction, that I was trained as his instrument of perpetuation, put here to put him into the record. And that my father knew this, calculated it to a degree. How else explain his eruption of rage when I once gave up what he and I called “writing” for journalism? I had taken a job as the book critic of
The Washington Post
, was proud of myself; it seemed then like a wonderful job, honorable and enriching. My father saw it otherwise: “You have failed me,” he wrote, “you have sold yourself at discount” he wrote to me, his prison number stamped below his name.

He was wrong then, but he was usually right about me. He would listen to anything I wished to tell him, but would not tell me only what I wished to hear. He retained such solicitude for his clients. With me he was strict and straight, except about himself. And so I want to be strict and straight with him, and with myself. Writing to a friend about this book, I said that I would not now for anything have had my father be other than what he was, except happier, and that most of the time he was happy enough, cheered on by imaginary successes. He gave me a great deal, and not merely life, and I didn’t want to bellyache; I wanted, I told my friend, to thumb my nose on his behalf at everyone who had limited him. My friend was shrewd, though, and said that he didn’t believe me, that I couldn’t mean such a thing, that if I followed out its implications I would be led to a kind of ripe sentimentality, and to mere piety. Perhaps, he wrote me, you
would not have wished him to lie to himself, to lie about being a Jew. Perhaps you would have him fool others but not so deeply trick himself. “In writing about a father,” my friend wrote me about our fathers, “one clambers up a slippery mountain, carrying the balls of another in a bloody sack, and whether to eat them or worship them or bury them decently is never cleanly decided.”

So I will try here to be exact. I wish my father had done more headlong, more elegant inventing. I believe he would respect my wish, be willing to speak with me seriously about it, find some nobility in it. But now he is dead, and he had been dead two weeks when they found him. And in his tiny flat at the edge of the Pacific they found no address book, no batch of letters held with a rubber band, no photograph. Not a thing to suggest that he had ever known another human being.

W
HEN
I was a boy my father introduced me, with ceremony, to a couple of family treasures. There was my great-grandfather’s medical degree from Leyden and a worn leather case, my grandfather’s, fitted with surgical devices. These totems are gone now, lost during one or another last-minute, dark-of-night escape from a house where the rent was seven months overdue, or from a town where a rubber check had just bounced to the D.A.’s desk. But I recollect well enough those gleaming instruments set in blue-velvet cavities.

Not long ago I bought a set of compasses and dividers solely because, snugged in their own blue velvet nests, they returned me to evenings when I sat beside my father at his desk, and he showed me the clamps and probes and trepan and lancet and scalpels. I would hold a piece and examine it, and then return it to its fit place, and promise never again to touch it without my father’s supervision. I was warned that germs and microbes deadly beyond imagining still lurked on the blades, but there was no need to scare me away from them: I had never seen things so mysterious, cold, or menacing.

It was characteristic of my father to impress upon me his family’s artifacts rather than its history. He was reticent about his background. He would mention, with more awe than love, his father’s skills, his huge medical library, his ease with foreign languages.
These references had an abstract quality because my father could not afford, given his wish to unmake his origins, to place Dr. Wolff in the world among kindred named Samuels and Krotoshiner.

I first heard the inventory of family names as I stood with my cousin Bill Haas, a stranger, in Hartford’s Beth Israel Cemetery, above the bones and markers of Beatrice Annette Wolff (August 19, 1894–April 9, 1895) and Harriet Krotoshiner (1867–1944) and Arthur Jacob Wolff (June 5, 1855–June 22, 1936). I was thirty-eight, a latecomer to my family. Bill Haas, and two Ruths—his sister and his cousin—led me through names and places and dates. They showed me photographs; I had never seen a likeness of my father younger than forty, or any at all of my grandmother, grandfather, their parents. For years I had feared them, had thought maybe my father had just cause to hide them. But they looked fine, just like ancestors.

My father Arthur was delivered by his father Arthur at home on Spring Street in Hartford, November 22, 1907. Dr. Wolff took pains to bring his son safely into the world, and then to ease him through it. He was meticulous, almost as exacting with himself as with others, and he and his wife Harriet were unlikely to enjoy another opportunity to perpetuate themselves. She was forty, he was fifty-two. They had had a daughter when Dr. Wolff was thirty-nine, still young enough to believe he could mend anyone. But Beatrice Annette’s scarlet fever was beyond his power to heal, and she died after eight months of life.

My grandfather was born in London in 1855, but some restlessness brought his father to America. He served during the Civil War as surgeon to a French regiment, and after the war moved to Brownsville, Texas, where he practiced medicine for the Army at Fort Brown, across the Rio Grande from Matamoros.

When my father was a schoolboy—and from his inexhaustible reservoir of Micawberisms applying for admission to Yale—he was asked to confide a few particulars of his background. He told Yale that his father had been educated at “Balioll” [
sic
] College, Oxford, and this was not so. My grandfather was removed from
high school at fourteen, and from that age was educated in science, medicine, mathematics, literature, and languages by his father. Four years later he entered Texas Medical College in Galveston, and was graduated in 1876. My father also told Yale that his father had interned at Bellevue. This was true, Bellevue—like Oxford—being an approved institution.

Yale asked for my grandmother’s maiden name, and my father gave them Harriet K. Van Duyn. The “Van Duyn”—in other applications “Van Zandt”—he did not enclose in quotation marks, but it is a fiction. “Harriet” was accurate, and some vestigial attachment to his source caused my father to return to his mother that remnant of her identity in the character
K
, the abbreviation of her name.

Krotoshiner: the family took its name from Krotoschin in the Prussian province of Posnán, “the nice part of Prussia” my cousin Ruth Atkins told me. Now the place is called Krotoszyn by the Poles, who own it. Samuel and Yetta Krotoshiner emigrated from Prussia to Glasgow, where my grandmother Harriet was born. (Ruth Atkins still owns the thistled pin that once secured the folds of the Krotoshiner tartan.) From Glasgow the family sailed to Canada, where Mr. Krotoshiner set up as a “gentleman farmer,” which is what they still call a farmer who knows nothing about farming, and loses his shirt. They moved again, to Brooklyn, where Harriet fell in love with young Dr. Wolff, an
alrightnik
with soft brown eyes and an appetite for excellence who was attracted to the sixteen-year-old girl’s soft good humor.

When Samuel Krotoshiner died, Yetta sold his wine-importing business and moved her three daughters to Hartford, where she established, against the custom of the time, her own business, a fine china shop. Dr. Wolff married Harriet in 1893 in a double wedding with her younger sister. Yetta was doing well enough to give each of her newly married daughters a fur coat and a Bechstein grand piano.

My grandfather was a wonderful doctor, everyone agreed. When Mt. Sinai Hospital was established in Hartford in 1923 he was chief of the medical board and of the medical staff. A sense of his range
may be taken from the fact that he was also the chief of its surgical staff, chief of gynecology and chief of the laboratory. Coincidentally he was municipal bacteriologist of the Hartford Health Department and a medico-legal expert whose microscopic analyses of criminal evidence broke open murder trials in Connecticut and New York.

Yet there were people, and my grandmother was one, who believed that this man, known invariably as The Doctor, should never have practiced medicine. Not that he lacked compassion, but that he lacked humility. The year after he was chosen chief of staff of Mt. Sinai he severed his connection with the hospital. The reason is among the records of his successor: “On opening of the hospital Dr. Wolff assumed a dictatorial attitude and he would allow no one to do major surgery without his consent. This was resented and he resigned.”

His temper was explosive. People have described his rages as “terrifying,” “wild,” “beyond control.” He was brutal with patients who disregarded his instructions. He had a sharp tongue, and from the time he began his association with Hartford’s St. Francis Hospital the year after his marriage, he became notorious for baiting nuns and priests—the former about their absurd and unsanitary costumes, the latter about their preposterous beliefs, and both for interfering with his patients.

His own religious preference was simple: he was an atheist. He believed in evidence and natural law and in Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony developed six hundred years ago by William of Occam that holds that what can be proved with few assumptions is proved in vain with more. He was, that is, an enemy of complication and mystification, yet he held throughout his life to a single irrational (and wonderful) conviction: that every word ever spoken continued, as he said, “to kick around out there in the atmosphere,” and that some day, by the agency of some instrument, could be recovered, like money from a bank. My grandfather was especially eager to attend the conversations of Voltaire with Frederick the Great, and Sir Francis Bacon with anyone at all.