Duke of Deception (26 page)

It was decided that we would make a proper trip of it, ship our household things and the MG and my boat and motor (this time, for sure, they went where I went), and drive southeast in the Buick. Alice and I would come to know each other, my father thought, if we traveled three thousand miles together in an automobile. We got to know each other.

There were pleasant moments. We drove south along the coast to Los Angeles, putting into the Benson in Portland, the Palace
in San Francisco and the Bel Air in Los Angeles. I took on a patina of sophistication, and when Alice treated me to dancing at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador, where we listened to Gordon MacRae and I drank crème de menthe frappé, I decided that here was a life to suit me. I saved menus (Chasen’s, Romanoff’s—where my father, for a sawbuck, seemed to be known by the owner—The Brown Derby and the Polo Lounge). I went alone to
Mister Roberts
, my first live play, and expressed opinions about it. My father took me to hear Billie Holiday at a simple club near Watts, and then Jack Teagarden, whose bass player called out to him when the set ended, “Duke, you old scoundrel.” This was the musician who had shipped out to Europe with my father after he got the boot from the University of Pennsylvania, “after your dad left college.” He let Duke buy him drinks. Alice—who wanted me to call her “Tootie,” which I couldn’t—went back to the Bel Air. The bass player said my dad could have been okay on guitar if he’d stuck with it. I kept a matchbook from that place.

The next morning my father and stepmother drove me to the coast somewhere near Venice, where Elgin Gates now had his own boat and motor dealership and his own Caddy. Gates offered to let me drive his D-class hydro, good for sixty and more, a marvel of a boat, if I came back the next day. Duke and Alice were happy to take me back, but I was more interested in the city now. I thought I’d like to be a night owl, studied the way my father dressed, bought
Confidential
to read about scandals in places like the Coconut Grove and not just to study pictures of Abbe Lane’s cleavage.

I learned to eat salad with a salad fork. To order oil and vinegar rather than Thousand Island. To accept cheese, and to order meat rare rather than well done. I was almost ready for an artichoke.

They showed me Carlsbad Caverns and the Grand Canyon, but I wasn’t much interested. New Orleans lay ahead, jazz and Brennan’s. My father was amused, for a while, and then not so amused. My wisdom was gaining too fast on his own. Somewhere in Texas
we passed a car in a ditch, with an ambulance and state troopers at hand. Two miles down the road my father said, as though to himself:

“That was a Roadmaster, just like this one.”

“No,” I said a mile later, “it was a Super. It only had three holes.”

We traveled another ten miles. “You argue too much; it’s getting to be a habit, and you’re wrong most of the time.”

Alice was asleep in the back seat. We were trying to make Dallas before dark.

“I’m not arguing, just telling you it was a Super. It had three holes. Roadmaster has four. Like ours.”

My father pulled to the side of the road. Sighed. “We’ve come about twenty miles past that car,” he said. “If I go back it’ll cost us forty miles, an hour out of our day, our lives. It’s not necessary. It’s not even interesting. The car was a Roadmaster, that’s all.”

“I’ll bet you ten bucks it was a Super. I looked right at it, three holes.”

My father didn’t take my bet. He turned us around and headed us west, into the sun. The sun woke up Alice. She asked questions; I answered them. My father was silent. She said she couldn’t believe a grown man would let his child run him all over the map this way. I thought I didn’t like her. I had begun to think this earlier, hearing my stepmother make notional pronouncements about me when she knew I was well within earshot. My father drove on. He was silent. Alice was disgusted. I was happy, couldn’t wait to make them count those three damned Ventaports, and get this sorted out. I almost mentioned my father’s glasses to him, but something made me think this was a bad idea. When we reached the place where the Buick Super had gone into the ditch it was gone. A Texas highway patrolman was measuring a skid mark. My father asked where they had taken the wreck. The patrolman told him: the town was off the highway, five miles down yonder dirt road.

“Just ask him what kind of car it was,” Alice said.

“Yeah,” I said, “ask him, he’ll tell you.”

My father said nothing. He drove five miles to a crossroads gas station and let me sit for a minute looking out my window at the wrecked Buick Roadmaster. I figured that Alice had switched cars on me. It was just like her, and by then I knew that money could get any job done.

D
UKE’S
work brought us to central Tennessee, about sixty miles south of Nashville. This was Walking Horse and blue-grass country, pacific and Baptist. Now Tullahoma is booming, but when we arrived in the early spring of 1952 it had nothing but a whiskey distillery, some farms, a modest place in Civil War history as the winter camp of General Braxton Bragg following the Battle of Stones River and, still under construction, the Arnold Engineering Development Center, a jet engine and rocket test facility with ultrasonic wind tunnels where my father was plant manager.

Shelbyville, about eighteen miles away, was the town of choice. I was sent there to Bedford County Central High School, a segregated congregation of hospitable boys and girls who quickly accepted me as a novelty item whose accent and clothes were wonders. I signed up for spring football practice, and to my surprise held up, didn’t cry or run the first time I was hit hard. I played end, had fair hands, no speed or judgment. I played just well enough to get dates with almost any girl I asked.

You could drive at fourteen in Shelbyville, and I was fourteen, but I couldn’t drive. Duke and Alice wouldn’t let me. I was sure Alice wouldn’t let Duke let me. My stepmother and I argued a lot; it was a stern, bloody war, hard looks and sneers, unexplained jokes and whispers. My father let me get away with too much of
this, and sometimes he was my accomplice in disrespect. I had Alice down for a phony.

She did put on false airs, overvalued “breeding” and convention, the correct sentiment, the expected. When we moved into a three-bedroom white clapboard ranch house on Lynchburg Boulevard in the “nice” part of Shelby ville, Alice brought her treasures out of New York storage, and jammed every square foot of the place with heavy pieces of mahogany upholstered with brocade and velvet. There was a huge, complicated clock from Tiffany, that told time by putative magic, that told no time at all, because the movers had broken it. There was a Sheraton dining table, and around this we ate a roast every Sunday, and delicate things other nights. I missed the meat loaf and croquettes and tuna casseroles of childhood, but Alice, if she was in fact a phony, was not the only phony in the house.

I had turned my bedroom into a shrine to café society. I pinned matchbooks from San Francisco nightclubs and menus from New Orleans restaurants to my walls, and dropped to my trusting friends the names of people I had just met in
The New Yorker
and
Quick
. I read John O’Hara and J.P. Marquand. I amplified Duke’s airs and Tootie’s (I called her “Toots,” enraging her), and when my father traded in the MG (
my
MG!) on a gray Jaguar XK
-120
roadster with red leather seats, I explained his extravagance by telling Tommy Ray, who let me drive his little Morris Minor when the police and my parents weren’t looking, that Duke held controlling shares in General Electric, and worked merely to have a “hobby.”

My father gave this very impression to his colleagues. Gaylord Newton, who had hired him away from Boeing, wrote me that my father was talented and energetic, at first, but “I soon found he was taking quite a bit of time off for travel around Tennessee with Alice. However, he had good ideas and built up quite a bit of enthusiasm in the men who worked for him. His only fault at that time was the impression he gave that he really did not need the job, from a financial standpoint.”

Apart from my feuds with Alice, whose principal vice was the elemental vice of not being my mother, life in Shelbyville was soft:
soft air, nights, voices, the soft back seat of Tommy’s Mamma’s Caddy sedan at the drive-in movie or burger joint, with a soft girl in my arms.

When
Y-Knot
arrived I ran her up and down the narrow Duck River, drawing complaints from people who lived nearby and winning some useful notoriety. The local paper ran my picture with a couple of friends I let drive my boat. They were my pit crew at races on TVA lakes near Knoxville. Duke drove us, towing the boat behind the Jag even though the Buick made more sense. He told Alice he preferred the Jag because it “got better mileage.”

He loved that car, and drove it flat out, a hundred and twenty, between Shelbyville and Tullahoma. A policeman came to our house one night during dinner and told my father “fair’s fair, I won’t run you in if I cain’t ketch you, but look out now, you might come ‘round a corner one mornin’ find a ‘dozer middle of the road, slow down now, drive safe, evenin’, ma’am.”

One night I stole it. It was late April, hot enough for my parents’ new Carrier air conditioner, a conversation piece in 1952. I lay awake planning how to do it, just as I had night after night the past few weeks. Coast it down the gravel drive to the street, start it, drive it a block and park awhile, see if lights came on. I never thought I’d actually do it, but there I was, sitting in the driveway in the damned thing, my hand on the wheel. It was a still night, except for the noise of crickets. A dark night, except for the fireflies. I heard the air conditioner humming in their bedroom, bringing the temperature down into the low sixties before its solenoid tripped and it shushed to quiet fanning, then cut into a loud hum again. That was the moment, and I released the emergency brake and let the car roll, crunching. Jesus, it was a long way, fifty yards, and then I was there, blocking the road under a streetlamp. Moths beat against the yellow light so hard I thought they would wake my father. I twisted the key and the engine turned over, caught. No lights. I managed not to stall it when I popped the clutch out, but my knees were trembling so I barely made it down the block. Cut it. The house was dark. I figured I could come just this far, and still tell the truth. It would go hard for me, but I could tell my father what I had done. He’d done this
much himself. He told me. Not quite this much: he had driven the Rolls only to the end of his father’s driveway, but that driveway was longer. The house was still dark. I drove away, got it up to one hundred twenty on a straight country road, slowing to ten for the craves, lugging away from them in fourth. I played the radio loud, got some jazz from Atlanta, my old man’s taste. Parked in front of the pool hall, where my tough school buddies hung out. I waited with the engine running till one of them came out. I cadged a smoke from him.

“Your Pa let you take her?”

“Nope. Stole her.”

“Figures. Them’s pretty pj’s.”

I drove the Jag home, and right up the driveway. Wasn’t scared at all. Went to bed happy, slept like a baby. The next morning I realized the car was facing the wrong way. My father always backed it up the drive. He didn’t notice, I guess, or only scratched his head when he found it after breakfast. Nine years later I confessed, and he fell into a great rage. He must have wondered in what other ways I had betrayed his trust all those years he had believed me.

Not so many ways. Finally, though, I lied to him for the first time. Alice caught me, but I bluffed it through, making an awful mess for a few days. On my way out for an evening’s cruise around Shelbyville in Tommy’s mother’s Caddy (which we were allowed to use in return for worshiping at the First Baptist Church every Sunday, and singing in the choir, and passing time shooting the bird with what we took to be exquisite subtlety at other indentured worshipers) I removed my father’s hip-shaped cigarette case from his bureau drawer. I was not meant to smoke, but my father, who smoked, did not grill me on this matter. When I returned from my night on the town’s streets, my father was in a frenzy, searching for his missing case.

“Have you seen it?” Alice asked me. My father assumed that she had lost it.

“No,” I said. There was still time to amend this, without penalty, to add
not exactly
, but the wrong person had asked me; I didn’t mind lying to Alice.

“He says he hasn’t seen it,” my stepmother told my father. “If he says he hasn’t seen it, then he hasn’t seen it,” my father said.

Now I was frightened. I put the case in the drawer of a living-room table, and immediately found it there.

“Here it is,” I happily told Alice, “right here, see? Good news, Dad, I found it!”

“I just looked there,” Alice said. “I think you put it there.”

“I don’t lie,” I lied.

“Geoffrey never lies,” my father said.

“He lied just now,” my stepmother said.

I went to my room, slammed my door. My father followed me but I lay dressed on my bed with my back to him.

“She’s too cocksure,” my father said. “Hates to admit she’s wrong. She’s okay. You’ll forgive her tomorrow, you’re too hard on each other.”

I said nothing, listened to my heart whack away at my chest, didn’t know what to say, now I’d done it, crossed the line. I wondered why I was the way I was. I fell asleep, finally, to the sound of them fighting about me. Alice’s voice lost its finish when she shouted, and my father lost his stammer when anger controlled him, as it did that night.

A former Boeing colleague, Joel Ferrell, worked with my father in Tennessee at the propulsion laboratory. “Because of his physical size, his stammer, and his outgoing personality, your father commanded attention and discussion” in Tullahoma and Shelbyville. “He was generous and loving to a fault.”

Ferrell’s letter to me about my father was a good letter to get: “I felt enriched through knowing Duke because he brought humor and spice to our lives, and he was a very intelligent and capable man.” Ferrell remembered that in Tullahoma’s sleepy days the only place nearby to eat lunch was Archie’s, and that he and Duke were finishing their main course there when a motorcade passed. Ferrell realized it was General Jimmy Doolittle, come to inspect the facility on behalf of the Air Force. He and my father were expected to greet the
general, they’d better leave at once. “Let’s finish our dessert,” Duke said, “we’ll make it.” Ferrell recollects: