Duke of Deception (6 page)

And what did his schoolmates think of him? The motto accompanying his photograph in the 1928
Rolling Stone
describes him as “a slave to all the follies of the great.” But he had standing, was a member of Lamba Phi, the snappiest school fraternity. He swam crawl on the school team, and was a tackle on the football team; he played banjo for the jazz band and the orchestra, and was an editor of the yearbook. One classmate remembers “a friendly and likable guy, sociable and humorous.” Another looks at a photograph of the assembled school and finds “Art in the front row, sitting on the ground in knickers and argyles, in his usual sartorial splendor.” His stammer is recalled, and the way he would joke about it. He is remembered as tall, self-assured, articulate and—above all—generous and warm.

He spent weekends in New York with Sidney Wood, a classmate and tennis champion, and at King’s Point with another classmate, Walter Chrysler, Jr. With these and Hartford friends he traveled to Vassar and Smith and Bryn Mawr, and often there were parties in the houses of absent parents whose children were wealthy, idle and without variation Christian, bearing the surnames Griggs, Rice, Glover, Smith, Lester and Gillette. Among these affluent drifters my father was a leader, and where he led trouble followed.

•  •  •

The Doctor’s rhetorical manner has been observed: it was avuncular and aggrieved, laden with the vocabulary of disaster. The martyr’s lament has been a family affliction. It’s a bad tradition: blaming, whining, scolding; my father would indulge in it when he was drunk, which was seldom but memorable. From before the age when my voice changed till after I was old enough to vote I knew there’d be hell to pay if midnight passed and he was not yet home. I’d lie tensed in bed waiting for his return from a party, listening for the crunch of tires on our gravel drive, or the low growl of his voice as he stumbled hanging up his coat. Then I’d hear ice rattle in a glass, and lugubrious mutters, angry cries of unspecified pain. I’d hear my father come toward my room, stand in front of my shut door. I’d lie with my back to the door, feigning sleep, but he’d hear me catch my breath from fear when he opened it and spilled light on me. He’d stand there looking down at me, and grunt a nasty laugh, and then sit heavily at the foot of my bed. He knew I was awake; he knew me inside out. That I was counterfeiting sleep inflamed his resentments, and he’d begin to talk to me, never raising his voice from its exhausted monotone, slurring his words, throwing off static:
worse than your mother … kicked my ass … did everything for you, got nothing back … not worth a nickel never will be … sorrow and abuse … I’m finished … what’s the point … nibshit kid … nibshit …

The next morning, desolate and hungover, he’d recollect what he’d said, joke about it, promise it would never again happen, that what he said when he was drunk was plain crazy, would I forgive him? Please? Of course, of course. Because I believed it
was
plain crazy, a fever he had caught that had now cooled. And because I knew that while it would happen again, it would not happen soon, and so I was relieved, even grateful.

Now, looking over letters about my father from his father, I think I see the source of that awful vitriol, that cruelly inappropriate language of woeful condemnation. Shortly before a Christmas vacation from Roxbury, my father borrowed some money from a school friend to whom he already owed money and hired a car and drove it to Hartford with another friend to meet a couple of girls
at a hotel. He broke, that is, a few school rules, and for this he was punished by Mr. Sheriff, who wrote The Doctor about the episode and its aftermath.

My grandfather was beside himself with fury, and with something else, a lacerating self-pity from which my father could have no possibility of appeal. The Doctor wrote Mr. Sheriff about “my son Arthur’s unmanly and disgraceful conduct. It is more than humiliating to me … I do not know what to say more, for this is such a disgrace to me, and it troubles me so much, as it causes me so much sorrow.”

The headmaster sought to calm The Doctor: “We don’t feel that the boy was guilty of anything but just foolishness.” He was, after all, twenty. But Duke’s father would not hear a word in the boy’s favor, and soon even my grandmother indulged a rare display of temper and anguish: “I cannot bring myself to say Dear Arthur to you.” After this salutation she told her son “your father says that he doesn’t want you home for the Holidays, not after your behavior. He is through with you. I doubt that you are gaining anything out of this treatment of your parents. Perhaps you are happy, we are not.” Then a signature, without valediction: “Your Mother, Alas.”

The matter did not end there. A crime had been committed against The Doctor, who sprayed lamentations and complaints at Mr. Sheriff:

What does this mean? Sense and syntax break before this storm of grief, at once overwrought and stuffy, self-conscious and self-lacerated. These locutions are less the effects of a cause than pathological symptoms. I wonder if such exaggerated expression was ever turned toward my father in praise, pleasure, love? I listened in mute terror as my father listed my torts against him, real and fancied. But I listened, too, when he called me the best, brightest, most loving, most loved, apple of his eye, pride of his life, one to whom all things were open. I wonder if The Doctor ever said healing words to his patient, his son? I want to argue my father’s case to Dr. Wolff, to beg that monster of rectitude, not so terribly injured by his son as his letter imagines:
Ease up a little, old man
.

M
R
. Sheriff gave Yale his opinion of my father, an applicant: “Wolff is a boy with considerable ability and very little backbone. He is amiable and good-natured, but lacks determination and steadfastness.” Perhaps Duke could follow Arthur Samuels (by then editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
, and a personage in the worlds of music, theater, and publishing) to Princeton? Mr. Sheriff was candid—“I wish some way could be found to impress upon him the ridiculousness of his present attitude. He seems to be quite contented to be a featherweight and a buffoon when he might well be intellectually in the van”—and Princeton thought he’d be better off in some other college’s van.

Well, what place
would
have him? One, at least, the classic catchall for sun-struck, rich dumbbells, the University of Miami. Duke entered in the fall of 1928, Miami’s third year as an institution, and right away he was in trouble. Enrolled in seven courses his first semester—three of them in literature, the others Spanish, French, history and economics—he flunked them all—or rather he was obliged to withdraw from them “on account non-attendance classes” in the registrar’s abbreviated style. He managed to exceed even Miami’s liberal notion of fit deportment: my father and some half dozen friends occupied apartments in an off-campus building, where their activities soon scandalized community proprieties, to the extent that the college president, B. F. Ashe, after
warning the scholars that it was “entirely improper” to entertain “young women” in their rooms, sacked my father and three of his friends on the first day of 1929.

Eight weeks later President Ashe was again at his typewriter, this time assuring Miami’s chief of police that Duke and his accomplices, “who did not conduct themselves in a proper fashion,” had no association with his college. The president had been made fretful by word that “these boys are still in town” and by “reports, which may be exaggerated, about their actions.”

The reports were not exaggerated. My father did his first overnight in jail in Miami, for setting off fire alarms, driving drunk in his Chrysler convertible (a gift from The Doctor to celebrate Duke’s admission to Miami) and being a “public nuisance.” While The Doctor and my grandmother were spending a year in Europe, my father remained in Florida. When he wasn’t up to mischief he swam with Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller in an aquatic circus, playing exhibition matches of water polo. He also speculated in racing greyhounds: my father’s ran fast as dogs went, but slower than other greyhounds.

When his parents returned from Europe, Duke, twenty-one, allowed himself to be brought home to Hartford. On the night of the Wolff family reunion my father drove his Chrysler along a sidewalk, and brought it to rest with its grille poking about eighteen inches through an Elm Street shop window. He lived at home the next two years, and what that was like for his parents and for him may be imagined.

During this time Duke began to read with a consuming appetite, which he never satisfied. His first love was French and English fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but he also took up the work of Joyce and Williams and Eliot and Stein and Hemingway; his sense of them as belonging to him in a comfortable way was not the least of his legacies to me.

In late 1930 he had another go at formal education. To paper over his Florida disgraces he or someone got a family friend at G. Fox & Co., Hartford’s best department store, to write
To Whom It May Concern
that during the exact period of his stay in Miami “Mr. Arthur Wolff has been in the employ of this Corporation.
I am pleased to say that he has been most industrious, and shown great application to his work. He is leaving of his own accord.” This was signed, putatively, by Moses Fox, President. The letter accompanied my father’s application to the University of Pennsylvania.

He was not admitted to the university proper but to a program taught by its regular faculty called College Courses for Teachers. He matriculated in January of 1931, enrolled in seven courses. Six of these were divided between English and history, and he received credits (and mediocre grades) in four. The seventh course was in philosophy. Ethics. Duke flunked it.

He lasted a semester, and may or may not have wangled his way into DKE. Duke’s Hartford friend, a bona fide student at the bona fide University of Pennsylvania, thinks he was a Deke: “It was very unusual for a Jew in those days to get into a non-Jewish house. Maybe he didn’t get around to telling anyone he was Jewish.”

I wonder what he wanted. Not simply to be liked, though he was. To partake of the excellence so much discussed at home? Probably. But he had attained nothing, and it must have seemed he never would. Still, he knew how to dress, speak, and carry himself like a gentleman. He stood tall and erect, and wore soft tweeds and a waistcoat with its bottom button undone (fat Henry VIII had begun the custom, he told me) and a gold watch chain looped through its middle buttonhole. (It would have been like a Duke Wolff watch chain to have no timepiece secured to its end.) My father was well-read, sardonic, informed, a declared expert on everything. He had physical courage, collateral to his general disregard of consequences, but not much stamina.

His roommate at the University of Pennsylvania thought he was “just a great guy. He was a good friend to me. I loaned him money, and he always paid it back.”

(I was told this in front of a cousin, Ruth Fassler, and when she heard it she said: “Come off it! He paid you back! Who are you kidding?” But the roommate added encomia to my father: “He took my fur coat once, disappeared with it; I thought it was a goner, but at the end of the weekend he brought it back. He was
okay, really.” And my cousin said: “Great, he wasn’t a thief. A regular gent we have here.”)

While he was loose in Hartford during the Depression many people felt his touch. (Ruth Fassler said: “Duke wasn’t poor. He was broke.”) Bill Haas walked into a downtown shoe store one afternoon and found the usually dour manager grinning ear to ear.

“Why so chipper?” Bill asked him.

“Duke Wolff just borrowed a sawbuck from me.”

“Jesus, that’s nothing to lift a man’s spirits. You’ll never see it again.”

“Yeah, but now I’ve given, he can’t ask me again. I got off cheap, most guys go ten or twenty.”

One of my cousins said: “I always trusted him, and he treated me well. He was a good-looking guy, and good company.”

Another cousin in the room that day said: “He was my friend.”

And a third cousin looked straight at me, and said: “He was a gonif, a schnorrer. He was just a bum. That’s all he ever was.”

No: he was more than that. A college friend recalls that when he told my father his troubles, Duke listened patiently, and gave good advice. Duke loved to give advice. When Bill Haas was in his prime—running a large tobacco business, raising a family—and my father was down and out, on the run from the law and “flat bust” (as he liked to say), Bill saw him, for the first time in years, sitting out a red light on State Street in Hartford. My father waved to his cousin, a man who had his number if anyone had it, and told him: “Your hair’s wrong. Don’t try to cover that bald spot. When you lose hair on your crown you should cut short what’s left, like I do.” The light went green, the old man put his unpaid-for MG in gear and shot a last instruction over its stern: “Don’t let them use electric clippers. Shears only.” And that day Bill Haas had his hair cut short, and it is short today.

I know little about my father’s doings after he left the University of Pennsylvania and before he met my mother five years later. He divided his time between Hartford and New York, with a runaway trip in 1933 to Europe. Years later a raffish character, a bass player,
approached my father in a seedy Los Angeles jazz club, where I had been taken to hear Jack Teagarden. I was thirteen, and interested in the musician’s story, which embarrassed my father. It seems the musician and Duke had shipped out as deckhands on a cattle boat bound for Bremerhaven from Boston. They carried their instruments, bass fiddle for the friend, banjo and four-string guitar for my father. They arrived in Europe broke, without papers, and jumped ship; the plan was to find work as jazzmen. It was not a sound plan, and soon my father collect-wired The Doctor for passage money home. In place of money he got a reply, also sent collect:
DID NOT RECEIVE YOUR CABLE STOP WILL NOT RECEIVE YOUR NEXT CABLE EITHER STOP FATHER
.