Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff

Author:Geoffrey Wolff [Wolff, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78447-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

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 Ds and an F.

I was a serious student of jazz, however, my father’s pupil. I listened to

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