Duke of Deception Read Online Free PDF Page A

His charm disarmed them and his mother, but never his father. To please The Doctor required attainments his son was too young to possess, so my father must very early have become a student of evasion, plotting ways around the judgment and daunting standards of someone sixty-five when he was thirteen.
    How hard it must have been to grow up under the measuring gaze of that father! From the beginning my father heard talk about the best of this, the best of that: the best neighborhood, school, automobile, mind, family. And if Jews with educations and without accents were better than Jews with accents and without educations, couldn’t it follow that best of all was to be no Jew at all?
    Even as a child my father expressed an amused disdain for the Jews he had chanced to fall among, and Bill Haas remembers Duke, only nine or ten, overhearing The Doctor remark that Temple Beth Israel had been built too close to the sidewalk; myfather gestured at the Gothic structure on Charter Oak Avenue and muttered: “Yeah, about a m-mile too c-c-close.”
    Bill was treated generously by my father except on the single occasion when he mocked his stammer, and my father hit him, hard. They played together at Crescent Beach, where they lived summers next door to each other, and Duke taught him dirty jokes, and bragged to him about fictional sexual conquests, and to the best of his ability led the younger boy astray. Duke was an excellent swimmer; he was courageous and amusing. He was also moody, eager to lose himself in fantasies of accomplishment, and in books. “Your father read real stuff, not crap like I read but literature, Melville and Dickens and Swift.”
    He was thought by The Doctor’s neighbors to be a “wild boy.” He broke windows, and charged petty items to his mother’s account at the neighborhood drugstore, without her permission. At grade school he cadged petty cash from his classmates. As he grew worse, but surely not awful, his mother withdrew into a pacific acceptance of his condition, and his father gave more time to his inventions and medical research.
    Today my father’s punishments are more vividly remembered than his crimes. What did the child do? He wasn’t a bully, didn’t steal, was kind to animals, loved his mother, was awed by his father. Because he exhibited none of the superiority so precious to The Doctor, he pretended to it. My grandfather finally gave up on his son when my father was thirteen.
    Duke’s first boarding school was Deerfield Academy, sixty miles up the Connecticut River Valley from Hartford, in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Headmaster and usually benevolent tyrant from 1902 till 1968, Dr. Frank Boyden had a reputation for tolerance, for mending boys rather than tossing them aside. It was the legend that he would not kick any boy out of Deerfield, but my father was sent packing after a single semester in 1921.
    He was brought by Dr. Wolff to see the school and be seen by Dr. Boyden. Among the headmaster’s notes from the time of my father’s first visit to the school are his impressions of another applicant, with “a funny head. It comes to a peak. Lips. A sillyboy. Too fine-bred for us. Mother has too many ideas about education.” (So did The Doctor. His son had previously studied at Hartford’s public West Middle School whose teachers, responding to Dr. Wolff’s theories of educational practice, often visited my grandfather at home in Hartford, and spent weekends with him at Crescent Beach. Dr. Boyden was not one to place himself on so intimate a footing with a Hartford surgeon, no great personage by Deerfield’s measure.)
    Another contemporary applicant revealed himself to Dr. Boyden’s judgment: “stubby fingers. Sloppy. A big nose.” What the headmaster thought of young Arthur—who stammered and wore glasses, whose curly hair was unruly, who sometimes wore a goofy Groucho Marx-like leer—can be imagined. My father was neither cute nor assured. He was young, but had already been