Duke of Deception (22 page)

If I told my father the truth, I lied to others by inadvertence, or before I could call back my words. The inadvertent lies were passed along like contagious diseases from Duke to me to someone else. My father had played football for Yale, swum for Yale, flown fighter planes for England. My own inventions were fantasies usually, sometimes evasions. When people asked about my mother I never told the plain truth, just as I never told the plain truth in Sarasota when I was asked where my father was. I told people who asked where my mother lived that she was driving west with my collie dog and older brother, would arrive any minute now.

Duke’s only rival for my esteem was Elgin Gates. Weekdays, Gates worked as shop foreman for an outboard dealer on Lake Union, tuning racing motors. I kept my boat where he worked, and he let me run errands for him. On weekends in season he raced big C- and D-class hydroplanes; he was the best in the Northwest, which in 1950 meant best in the country. I saw him break a couple of world speed records, and thought that was something I would like to do.

I had never had a hero, other than my father and Ted Williams, till I found Gates. He had all the virtues: he was available, he had skills I wanted to have, people acknowledged his ascendancy, he had presence. Best of all, his respect for me came grudgingly, but it came. At first he shooed me away from his shop, then he
tolerated me, then talked to me, then instructed me to fetch him coffee. One day he asked me to hand him a quarter-inch crescent wrench, without telling me what one looked like. A bit later he asked for a valve puller, then told me to remove the lower unit from one of his own motors and fix it to another. I was his pitman.

He drank beer two gulps to the bottle, and when his wife—who wore lots of lipstick and had big ones—came around to ask for money, she flirted with me. Gates would dig into his wallet while she tossed her red hair out of her eyes:

“Why didn’t I wait for you, honey?” she’d say. “Why didn’t I wait for
you!
”

Elgin Gates taught me about the class system:

“The bosses always screw the working stiff.” He’d talk to me while he cleaned his hands with Lava soap, dug the grease from beneath his nails with a slim silver knife. “I sweat, the man upstairs drives the Caddie. I sleep in a trailer, his wife farts through silk. Get an education, kid; hand me that beer. Want a sip? I said a sip, not a whole goddamned chug.”

“Shit, Elgin …”

“Don’t cuss around me. You’re still a pup, don’t know shit from shine about anything but boats and motors, don’t know all that much about them, either.”

I learned. After a few months Duke let me trade the Evinrude for a class-A Mercury, with a Quicksilver lower unit. Now I had wheel steering on the runabout, and a dead man’s throttle. I entered a race during Seattle Seafair, a hundred miles of laps around Mercer Island on Lake Washington. Eighty boats started the marathon, twenty finished. Drivers dropped out not because of the rigors of the weather or the course but because for grown-ups it must have seemed, after a few laps, a mindless way to put in hours, going in circles all day, kneeling in the wet, greasy bilges of a small boat, being shaken and screamed at by a small motor. I finished near the bottom of the survivors, but not plumb at the bottom. The first thing I said to my grinning father, who had stood four hours at the end of a dock watching my boat come into view a mile away and recede, amused him:

“I can win with a lighter hull.”

Duke bought me a lighter boat. I began to win races. I tuned my own motor at Elgin Gates’s shop, but my father got his Boeing pals to design and build a breakthrough refueling system for marathon races. Boeing also painted my motor cherry red, and ran various propeller configurations through its computers to find just the right prop for my boat, motor, and weight. I weighed less than a hundred pounds, so I went fast, and I was dumb enough to drive as fast as I could every second of every race. Duke took me to any race within a day’s drive, and cheered me on. Whatever I wanted to do, as long as I wanted to do it badly enough, he wanted me to do.

After a month in the rooming house we moved to three rooms on the ground floor of a big lakefront house in Laurelhurst, the Lake Forest or Grosse Point of Seattle. By now I was accustomed to the gross shifts of circumstance and fortune that seemed to govern our lives. I didn’t question our habitation of a room in a boarding house, or our habitation of this swank place. I knew for sure there was always food enough—always had been and would be—and just money enough. And when there wasn’t money enough, Duke bought what he wanted anyway. He “bought” a Chris-Craft Riviera, a seventeen-foot varnished mahogany runabout with red leather seats. The varnish blasted the sun back in my eyes when I drove it around Lake Washington. We kept that boat tied to a dock jutting from a stone bulkhead at the foot of our front lawn, and I liked to sit just staring at it, wondering how long such a lucky streak could last.

Many of my schoolmates at Nathan Eckstein (few of whom had last names like Eckstein or Wolff) owned boats like mine, or my father’s. Everyone at school was handsome or pretty: “neat” was the adverb that included all possible virtues. In Sarasota I had favored blue jeans, with wide sloppy cuffs, and plaid-dyed cotton shirts, ersatz flannel. Now I wore suntans, with blade-sharp creases, and in place of my Buster Browns oxblood loafers, buffed every night till my wrists ached. I tried to work my hair into a duckass, but not when my father was around.

After school I hung out at the Bar-Bee-Cue in the U-District,
and drank cherry Cokes and fed the juke, listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford, “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” I knew enough not to pay to hear Vaughn Monroe’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” At home, after I folded my “neat” maroon V-neck Lord Jeff sweater, hung up my rayon sports shirt, and combed the duckass out of my hair, I set the table and made our beds. When my father came home we cooked something taken from a can. After dinner my father read, while I pretended to do homework.

My homeroom teacher taught me both Latin and Washington history, and for her the fall of Rome and the War of Charles Griffin’s Pig—a one-shot war on Washington territory, without bloodshed, that lasted from 1859 to 1871—were events of equivalent magnitude. Even I knew better than this; my father didn’t pretend that Washington history mattered all that much to my future, so I was by inference licensed to neglect my studies, and to act according to the assumption that all I needed ever to know, I knew. This must have troubled my homeroom teacher, but she didn’t show it, and I remember her as gentle and patient, featureless, unprovocative, the lady who called the roll and gave me three
D
s and an
F
.

I was a serious student of jazz, however, my father’s pupil. I listened to him play blues changes on a four-string guitar, and Bix’s key of C piano thing, “In a Mist,” on a rented upright. For at least an hour every night we were home we listened to records—Jack Teagarden, Art Tatum, Joe Venuti, and Eddie Lang. The first record Duke gave me was by these last-named two, who called themselves the Mound City Blue Blowers; the record had “Kickin’ the Dog” on one side, “Beatin’ the Cat” on the flip. My father told me what to listen for, and I loved those sessions with him, listening to the record spin, staring down at the label (Blue Note, Commodore, Jazz Victor) and then, when someone began really to drive, looking at each other, shaking our heads from the wonder of it: Jesus, wasn’t that chorus
something!

Dixie Thompson was blond and clean, wore glasses, had wonderful grades and the school’s best smile. Her father, a doctor, drove a Packard. Because he drove a Packard, an automobile my father
respected, he became our doctor. I spent a lot of time with Dixie, always with other people around. I wished it otherwise, but Dixie was sociable. In her freshman year at the University of Washington, where she called herself Dixie Jo, she was runner-up Queen of Frosh Day, losing—incredibly—to Twink Goss. Senior year she was president of the Husky YWCA and a member of an honorary sorority that “raised funds for a scholarship by selling candy canes at Christmas.”

Dixie may be remembered by others for her good heart, good will, and good works, but I remember her face. I carried its picture in my mind seventeen years, and once in New York, after a long night at
Newsweek
and three hours boozing at the Lion’s Head, I returned to my hotel room dead beat and drunk; at four in the morning there was nowhere to get another drink, and I was resigned to calling it a night when I felt a presence in my room. It was Dixie. I even switched on the television, to see if she was there. I found her in the telephone book, listed just like this:
Thompson, Dixie
. I dialed, got a sleepy roommate, said “wake her up, it’s Geoffrey Wolff from Seattle, Nathan Eckstein, tell her Jeff, she’ll remember Jeff Wolff.” After an argument the woman woke her friend, and I spilled memories on Dixie, who finally spoke:

“It’s almost five o’clock in the morning. Some people work.”

Then she hung up. I still think she should have talked a couple of minutes. I wrote her next morning, told her all about myself, my kids, my wife. She wasn’t all that interested, I guess, because I haven’t heard back, and it’s been almost ten years.

My father didn’t fret about my mother’s decision to stay in Sarasota. He simply didn’t believe she meant to leave him. Oh, she’d try it for a while on her own, just as she had tried to leave him in Birmingham, but she’d come to her senses. There was condescension in his lack of doubt: my father didn’t believe my mother could survive without his help. He thought she’d sink, and then he’d save her. He was a sentimental man, and I think he believed that because he loved my mother, he could make her love him back. He believed too in The Family, that we all belonged together.

So he telephoned her often, to no end at all, and I always talked with her and Toby. My mother tells me that during one of these calls I asked to return to her and she said no, I couldn’t travel back and forth across country at my pleasure. I can’t believe I asked to return to Sarasota, but my mother has lied to me seldom, except about being the son of a Jew, and perhaps my father had been drunk and frightened me. Anything is possible, but I just don’t believe that I wanted to leave Seattle for Sarasota.

I wasn’t fair; I always took my father’s side. When he returned from Turkey my mother begged me not to tell him about the ex-policeman from Michigan, about what she called her “indiscretions,” and for a while I didn’t. But then I did. I couldn’t keep secrets from my father. I hope that was the only reason I told him, and not to watch what happened once he knew.

I didn’t think of my father as sensual, like my mother. My father had “an eye for a leg,” as he said, and liked to talk with pretty girls; but I thought of him then as true to my mother from marriage till death. Now I wonder what it was like for him to take me to the movies with a thirteen-year-old girl squeezed between us in the MG, the girl giggling and flirting with my father. She sat beside me in the dark, beside him too, and he smelled the same hair I smelled. He was always a father, always correct, just like any father.

One afternoon I got a glimpse of something different, what could happen if my father decided not to be like everyone’s dad, if I pushed us closer together as accomplices and violated the natural order of things. It was a summer Sunday, a few months before I turned fourteen, and my father and I were sitting on our lawn watching sailboats. A Lightning capsized nearby, knocked down by a gust. Its mast broke, and my father towed the boat and two girls sailing it to our dock. They were eighteen, maybe twenty, and shivering from cold and fright. Duke gave them dry clothes, and made them tea while they used our phone. Soon they were laughing indiscriminately, and especially at the sight of each other rattling around
in my father’s poplin Burma shorts and extra-large polo shirts.

Duke asked if they’d like rum in their tea, and they looked at each other, and said yes, giggling. My father played them records, and soon they were drinking rum without tea. They made a fuss over me, one of them especially, and it came to me suddenly, when her friend made another call and said to someone in a whisper not to worry, “we’ll get a ride home when our clothes are dry,” that something was about to happen to me. Two boys, two girls; that was how the girls seemed to see it. Maybe I had it all wrong; maybe the girl who was so sweet to me was just sweet, fond of kids, with a little brother of her own. But it seemed to me that what I had been dreaming about nights was about to be done to me.

I began to search for details that would verify this miracle to my friends. That I was to be done rather than doer nagged slightly, so to add a few years to my age, pronto, I asked my father if I could have a beer. He stared at me hard and said okay, he didn’t see that a beer could do much harm. The girls giggled at this, and I sat silent and sullen for a few minutes while Duke played “In a Mist” for them. Then I took another liberty, walked to the piano and opened my father’s silver cigarette case, lit a cigarette with his silver Dunhill, took a practiced drag, inhaled it. My father was beginning the final eight bars, his best section, but when I lit the cigarette he came off the piano bench fast, and slapped the cigarette out of my mouth.

“That’s too much. I’d spank you if we didn’t have guests. The party’s over, ladies, my little boy has forgotten his manners, and his age.”

The girls dressed and straggled away in their damp clothes, and waited at the end of the driveway for their friend. I went to bed. I know my father was too hard on me. Something might have triggered his jealousy, but I think probably I had enraged him by my material liberty with his cigarette case. That night I lay awake wondering why I couldn’t ever seem to learn where my father’s edge was; one step on terra firma, the next off and tumbling into space.

•  •  •

My father never had dates while we lived alone together in Seattle, or he had none that I knew about. I didn’t wonder why. He was saving himself for my mother. But once he surprised me. It was the day before Christmas, and he hired a cleaning lady to scrub our rooms. Before she arrived from the referral service he sent me away to a double feature downtown. I arrived home before I was expected. The cleaning lady’s instruments of work were leaning against the back porch railing, and the house was just as I had left it. The cleaning lady, maybe sixty, was as skinny as a broom, and drunk. She pinched me on the cheek. I wasn’t friendly. She joshed my father. There was a smudge of lipstick on his cheek, and his necktie was loose. He looked to me like a clown, but he couldn’t know why, couldn’t see the lipstick on him. He could see the cleaning lady’s smudged lips, though, and right away he opened great distance between her and himself.