Read Online Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff - Free Book Online

flannels and no socks. He was not an impressive figure.”
    My mother was put off by a car filled with people—Walter and Nervy and Piggy and Jack and Duke—who seemed to have known one another forever, who traded private jokes that excluded her. They had all been drinking, and my mother didn’t much like to drink. Still, she went with them to the Hueblein. Rosemary liked to be a good sport.
    When she got to the hotel, and went upstairs to Duke’s room, he offered her a drink. Was he her blind date? She never found out. To my father’s astonishment Rosemary declined a cup filled withwarm gin, just as an Air Corps colonel emerged from an adjoining bedroom buttoning his fly and grinning. Rosemary said she would like to be returned home.
    Her innocence, pep, and girlish beauty—alone or in combination—powerfully attracted my father, and he asked to see her again, named a night. She said she would be baby-sitting then, so he asked if he could sit with her and talk. Without knowing exactly why, Rosemary accepted this proposal.
    When my mother told me this story a couple of years ago, speaking with her measured, flat, accentless voice, I had just finished reading “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Delmore Schwartz’s autobiographical imagining of his parents’ courtship, a premonition of their bitter divisions. The story’s narrator slumps in a shabby theater, where he watches his parents come together in a crude movie which he tries betimes to interrupt, disturbing the audience. He calls out to the figures jittering across the screen: “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”
    As my mother began her story of disappointment, humiliation and want, infrequently relieved by affection and satisfaction, I didn’t feel that way at all. I sat across from her, cheering my father on, cheering her on, marveling at the chance conjunction that joined them, made my brother, made me, shaped us all. My mother talked, her voice low, even, calm and resigned, anxious to get the facts right.
    (Before I began to work on this book there had for many years been a great distance between my mother and me, a chilling formality. My mother is not cold, and she is not stiff. She has been unfailingly warm and loving with my boys, and with my wife. She laughs a lot, teases, likes to be teased. But neither of us, I think, trusted the other’s love.
    There is much we don’t know about each other. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I saw my mother three times, for a total of about ten days. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six I never saw her. When I was twelve my mother was thirty-two, stillunfinished, not yet what she would become. I had known her under terrible pressure, but when the pressure was relieved, or she learned to live with it, my mother returned to her natural gaiety and energy. During the years I did not see my mother she was a community leader, a joiner, an advice-giver, a sportswoman, a political activist.
    When my mother and I had discussed my childhood in the past, we had never gotten very far before one did the other some unintended injury. I once mentioned to my mother a barbecue restaurant “we” had liked, and my mother replied: “I used to go there, too.” To her
we
meant simply my father and me, which is what it usually meant to me, but not at that moment. Against such stupid barriers, then, we stumbled, again and again, and we learned, despite mutual good will, to defend ourselves with distance.
    When my mother agreed to help me with this book, when she put her life in my hands, I decided to interview her with a tape recorder, in the hope that by talking to it my mother could lose sight of me, forget that a judge sat listening. This cold instrument worked wonders for us. My mother opened up while the spools turned, reached into her memory with self-assurance and