Duke of Deception (20 page)

I changed when my father came home. My stomach cramps disappeared, I had someone to mediate the bitter disputes between Toby and me. My father came with me sometimes to watch the Red Sox in spring training.

The Red Sox had been playing exhibition games several weeks when Duke returned, and I had cut school many days to watch them. Walt Dropo was shaping up to be 1950 Rookie of the Year, Billy Goodman was hitting well, but I went to watch Ted Williams, distant and slope-shouldered, alone with himself. I wanted
to get Ted Williams’ name on a baseball, an almost unattainable ambition. The team was vulnerable when it crossed an open lot to reach the field from a shower and equipment building. There I tugged sleeves, called names. I had two Spaulding balls, one to be signed by every member of the starting line up except Williams, the other wrapped in tissue paper, virgin, for Him alone. Day after day he shrugged me off, ran beside me without looking at me, once ran
over
me when I tried to block him. Everyone else smiled and signed.

One day Williams was coming off the field after a powerhouse afternoon against the Tigers in an exhibition game, and there I was again, looking whipped.

“Don’t stand there like a mutt, kid, you’ll never get anything you want.”

What a voice! It said words! To me. I held out the ball, for Williams had stopped beside me, looking down quizzically, as though I might be for sale, something to eat.

“Pen? Haven’t you even got a pen?”

I thrust him a ballpoint. He had to scrape it a few times against the horsehide to get it flowing, putting two runic legends on the ball. But he was signing.

“Ted, would you put
To Jeff from Ted Williams, The Splendid Splinter?
”

“Jesus, what a bozo.”

And then he was gone, tossing the ball back over his shoulder. The ball said
Ted Williams
. And the damned pen had skipped, so most of the characters were broken. At home I studied the ball. It didn’t satisfy me. I closed the breaks in the letters of his signature, making it bold and perfect. Then I practiced his script till I had it better than he had it. And then I wrote on my ball what he would have written had he had time:
For Jeff, A Great Kid, Ted Williams, The Splendid Splinter, Batter Up!

I took my ball to school. Everyone agreed it was a fake. Everyone agreed the
Ted Williams
part was a forgery, too. A few days later Toby took this ball into the backyard and lost it. He admitted this to me, but not to my parents. He told them he had seen me foul it into a mangrove swamp, that I blamed
him for everything. I hit him in the stomach, where I was never to hit him. My mother cuffed me, and I ran away from home for an hour or two.

Things got worse all the time at school, and by May Miss Bartlett couldn’t bear me anymore. I played hooky, was scrappy, profane and never left Pear-Shape in peace. In my campaign against this girl I had followers, and one day, testing the waters, I proposed a class debate on the question of Pear-Shape’s misery. Incredibly, Miss Bartlett agreed. I led the affirmative. Resolved: something like
Gail’s Chest Is Provocative So It Is Okay To Call Her Pear-Shape
. The negative won walking away, but not before my team drove Gail sobbing from the Quonset hut. Miss Bartlett dismissed the class three hours early, and the next day her boyfriend, an alligator-wrestler at Sarasota Jungle Gardens, came to school with her, and took me aside:

“Watch it, bub, I’ll be keeping tabs on you.”

This I found droll, and repeated it several dozen times that morning at Miss Bartlett’s back, with what I took to be an accurate swamp-gas accent. Some of my classmates laughed, fewer each time.

That afternoon my father met me at school in the MG. He had just had a call from my teacher, she wanted to talk with him. I warned him how unfair she was, not to listen to her. My father, in a pleasant humor, said he would judge her fairness for himself. I was to wait for him in the car. The top was down, the sun was vicious, the leather seats stoked up; I had been instructed to sit tight, not even to open the car door. I watched the high school team, the Sarasota Sailors, practice baseball for an hour, and then another hour, and I wondered why I couldn’t be like them, just nice. I was afraid. I saw my father walking toward the car, slowly. He didn’t look angry, merely determined.

“Miss Bartlett told me all about you,” my father said, as we drove away.

“Let me explain,” I said, and then said nothing.

“There’s nothing to it, really. You’re a dime a dozen, just a wiseguy.”

We drove awhile, and I said, “I’ll be better, I won’t be like that anymore.”

“Maybe,” my father said. “I hope so. Because that’s why I’m going to beat you when we get home, so you won’t be like that anymore.”

I was hysterical, my father was calm. I pressed him for specific torts and he shrugged. All he said was one thing: “I’ve mailed three hundred résumés, and no one has answered.”

He showed anger only once, when I resisted going into my bedroom. Then he grabbed my arm so hard I knew he would break it if I didn’t move, and his tongue did that awful curling thing it sometimes did, and I let him put me where he wanted me, on my belly, facing the wall, with my pants and underpants pulled down. Then he began to beat me with his razor strop as hard as he could, whistling strokes that emptied my lungs from the first hit, so I never caught my breath to scream while I lay staring pop-eyed at a wall poster, big fish eating little fish, while my mother on the other side of the locked door did scream:
Let me in! What are you doing, you goddamned awful man, what are you
doing
to him!

Then it stopped, so my mother didn’t drive off to get the police but to make an appointment with a lawyer, she had had enough, that was all she would take. When it was over my father hugged me, and said only this: “Be good. Try, at least. Don’t be like that. Try.”

And then I wept, so ashamed of it all, knowing better what I had done than he knew, Miss Bartlett knew, my mother knew, anyone would know. And when my mother returned, ready to unload on him for the last time, dying to be rid of him forever, wanting to protect me from him, she found him in the bathroom, preparing to shave. Mother saw us through the open door. I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, looking up. My eyes were still red from weeping, but I looked at my father’s thick, muscular legs and broad back, the sweep of his throat, with full admiration and wonder. Peach fuzz had begun to grow on my cheeks. My father was wearing only the baggy Sea Island cotton Brooks Brothers boxer shorts he favored, always pale blue. He had lathered his face with a brush, bone handle and badger bristles, a heavy instrument
I sometimes rubbed dry against my own face. It was as soft as my mother’s fur coat. He swirled the bristles in shaving soap packed in a teak bowl, and lathered his cheeks and then his upper lip, and then his chin, and finally his neck and throat. He stropped his straight razor against the long tongue of dark leather he had just beaten so powerfully against my ass, and he began to shave, sure, daring, straight strokes, first his cheeks, and then his upper lip, and then his chin, talking to me.

“That strop was my father’s, the razor too. His father’s before that … Good blade … Surgical steel … Very sharp blade.”

My father was shaving the side of his neck.

“The Doctor used this every day till he was seventy …”

My father was shaving the other side of his neck.

“One day he was shaving his Adam’s apple …”

My father was shaving his Adam’s apple, stretching back his throat like a hanged man, choking off his words, pulling me forward off the cold edge of the tub to make them out.

“…  and he suddenly realized he wanted to pull the damned razor right across his throat, be done with it. He never used it again, gave it to me.”

My father stood still, stared in the mirror, saw me there, grinned and pulled the razor across his throat. Blood bubbled up slowly from the white foam at my father’s throat. My mouth opened, a choked noise came out of me, and my father turned and looked down and smiled and said gently, “It’s nothing, look.” And it wasn’t much, just a tease, a slight cut, but that wasn’t what he meant by
it’s nothing
. I knew then that if it got too bad for him, he could do it,
it’s nothing
.

It got bad for him. He tried to get work everywhere and no one wanted him. Word was out, I guess. His résumés turned more and more desperate, trying to do the magic they’d done before. I have one from those days, mailed about the time the fifteen hundred for the lost luggage had run out, and the Ford was in the garage for another valve job. Now he spoke, read, and wrote—“fluently”—French, Spanish, Italian, German, Turkish, Persian and, in one of those bravura gestures he could never resist, Burmese. The Sorbonne
degree now came from “
Lá Únivèrsité de Sorbónne, Ecóle Aeronautìque
,” his italics and accents. His employment in Birmingham was described, in part, like this:

He said in his résumé that he had been well paid for such one-man-band play, never less than eighteen thousand a year since 1940, half again as much for the job from which he had just been sacked, from which he did not say he had just been sacked. However: “I am eager to return to aviation work, and will consider any salary above $8,000. per year.” This gambit of generosity was declined, my mother believes, by as many as two hundred companies, most of which were hiring in those days of Red Scare and cost-plus contracts.

My father was drinking a lot, usually whiskey but sometimes his Big Trouble drink, hundred and fifty-one proof Hudson Bay rum. He argued at night with Rosemary, and one morning she appeared at breakfast with a bruise on her cheek. She wouldn’t speak to my father, and this caused me to pity him rather than her, she was so intractable and he was so eager to be forgiven.

Sometimes they had fun. At the Ringling Hotel they met a young piano and organ player named Rip. He was an odd bird, short and wiry, a pocket-sized Rory Calhoun with dark curls, an awful temper, and a gentle wife. After Rip finished playing, the two couples went to the Tropicana, a Siesta Key roadhouse, where a drunk for no clear reason called Duke a “Hebe sonofabitch.” My father beat the man badly, and Rip wanted to shoot him dead in
the parking lot, but didn’t, and the next day Rip took me to the lockup where my father proudly confessed to assault, and was released with a pat on the back by the genial Sarasota police.

Rip’s mother owned a huge establishment three hours away on Lake Wales, and one night after work he and Duke and I drove up there in his van. Rip would slam on his brakes every time he saw a rabbit, park wherever the van came to rest, grab a snubnosed .32 from his glove compartment and chase the animal into the brush, shouting and shooting at it. Like many things this puzzled me, but I assumed I was puzzled because I was inexperienced in the ways of the world, so I did not ask Rip or my father why our host was so angry at rabbits.

To reach the lakefront estate we passed through a gate, with a gatehouse guarded by a sullen fellow who might once have played tackle if he could remember whether to go right or left. The house was surrounded by a stone wall, with broken bottles imbedded along its top. My father asked why all the caution, and Rip laid his index finger ninety degrees to his lips.

We arrived at dawn, and mist was coming off the lake. Rip asked me at breakfast if it would interest me to see the boathouse, and I said it would. There, ready to be launched by a geared lift, was an outboard hydroplane, a class-B Jacoby, canvas and varnished mahogany plywood, with a ten-horse Mercury hurricane hung on the transom.

“Keep it under forty, and wear the lifejacket,” Rip told me.

I drove till they made me stop, after sundown. Rip’s mother took us to a simple riverside restaurant where we ate catfish, and everyone made a great fuss over her. This was the happiest day I had ever had till my father began to drink rum, and fell silent, and stared at Rip’s mother hard, and told Rip his mother bullied him.

“Don’t spoil it, Duke,” Rip said. “Careful now.”

He was looking hard at my father, who suddenly laughed and said, “What the hell!”

“That’s right,” Rip said, and did not laugh. “What the hell.”
When I turned twelve my mother had urged me to join the Boy Scouts, hoping I would be reformed by their decent program. After my father beat me for uselessness and bad manners I became a paradigm Scout, shooting up through the ranks, almost to the top. I was obsessed. I was a wonder. I had never before been a wonder, and I liked it. I beat the system, found the accessible angle. The only merit badge required for Eagle not on my full drape was Pioneering, the fundamental badge demanding forest lore, the felling of trees and construction of fires, competence in the woods.

My certificates of merit were concentrated elsewhere, in the sedentary, domestic, and commercial arts, nursing (First Aid), communications (Morse Code and Journalism), home economics (Cooking and Dog Care). While my fellow Scouts came relaxed to monthly ceremonies, where they got a badge or maybe two with a handshake, I came flushed and eager, taking them five at a clip: Personal Management (which required my father’s supervision while I drew up a budget, and explained to him why it was better that one live within one’s means, and why a hundred dollars was put to better use working for America in a savings bond than hid under a mattress. “Talk over with parents or guardian how family funds are spent to meet day-to-day and long-term needs. Tell how you can help with the family budget.” Another requirement my father happily helped me fulfill was to prepare myself to tell my Scoutmaster “how important credit and installment buying are to our economy. Find out and tell what you must do to establish a good ‘credit rating.’ ”)