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

He served during two world wars and never, whether from luck or cunning, heard a shot fired in anger. Once he was court-martialed for having cut with water a few thousand bottles of ketchup. He was a chief mess officer at Pearl Harbor then and had found a way to shave costs. For his offense he got a reprimand: he hadn’t pocketed the savings, wasn’t venal, was just a bootlicker. He was hated by his men and a joke to his fellow officers, who endured him for his efficiency and unwavering conviction that military regulations were divinely inspired.
    And what a tyrant he was at home! He married Mary Lucille Powers in 1915, a year before my mother was born. My grandmother, called Mae, was sweet, with gentle Irish good looks, raven hair, high color on high cheeks, blue eyes. She was twenty-five—a Denver telephone operator with a weak heart from rheumatic fever—when she married the up-and-coming sailor. Rosemary’s mother was the daughter of a domestic servant and a manual laborer on the Denver and Rio Railroad who had stowed away from Ireland, where he got himself in political trouble.
    The heart has its mysteries. Stephen Loftus, awful as he was,was handsome in a frosty, stiff-backed way. He was a good dancer, ambitious, cocksure. My only memory of him is set near Atlantic City, in Margate, New Jersey, where he had retired from the Navy. I was nine, and he had just taught me to tie my shoes the Navy way. I am in his debt for this, only this. My shoes have never come untied since. Pleased with his powers of instruction, he took me for a brisk stroll, what he called a “constitutional,” along the boardwalk. His shoes were tiny, and he clicked his heels in a metronomic beat against the rotting planks as we walked. I paused for a moment to watch the Atlantic rollers break against the beach, and he gripped my shoulder, just a bit harder than he should have gripped it.
    “You’re like your father,” he told me. “Wasting your time, dreaming it away.”
    Then he sat me down on a bench, and gave me a stubby pencil and a three-by-five spiral notebook, and instructed me to record verbatim all that he was about to tell me, that what he was going to say could turn my life off its reef-bound course, out toward the open waters of success. We sat hunched together. He was so clean, I remember, as smooth as a new tombstone, and his skin was pale as skimmed milk. He wore a thick, black wool greatcoat, even on that sunny day. His breath was foul as he confided in me, and corrected my spelling as I transcribed his secrets. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, something about the tidal rhythms of the stock market, and the nutritional benefits of un-cracked wheat. He would speak, and tap the notebook’s pages while the wind whipped at us, perceptibly lifting his hairpiece. I had never before seen a hairpiece, didn’t comprehend what was happening to the top of this man’s head. His fingers were long and delicate, and their nails were manicured. He was, perhaps, simply crazy. Later, when my mother took me to see Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger dive into a swimming pool off a high board at the end of the Steel Pier, I ask her why her father seemed so angry all the time. When she laughed too long and too hysterically at my question, I failed to guess that at that moment, so near that awful man, she was probably a little crazy, too.
    Later the commander tried to kill himself. He waded into thereflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial wearing dress blues and his sword. The water was ten inches deep, and he came out wet and puzzled. The park police told my mother he wept when they fished him out, and helped dry him off. She wouldn’t believe that her father could weep. He died in a Navy hospital, sometimes sticky with false and desperate sentiment, and sometimes mean. He lay hooked up to pipes and wires by people indifferent to his character, and threatened to cut everyone out of his will when in truth he hadn’t a thing