Duke of Deception Read Online Free PDF Page B

1923, at fifteen, to have his character built, or beaten, into him.
    During my father’s first few weeks at school he burst out of the blocks, doing excellently in all his subjects, even algebra and geometry, winning a reputation as a bright young man. Once his intelligence was beyond dispute, he began to backslide. He despised the grinding earnestness of the place, and chafed at St. John’s regulations. The upperclassmen—cadet officers—were bullies, and the teachers taught by the principle of rote. By late November of my father’s first year The Doctor had received a letter from St. John’s principal, General William Verbeck, complaining about the boy’s indolence and concluding with a threat: “If he will not respond to our demand for a good grade of scholastic work he is really wasting time at Manlius.”
    What a lament this caused in Hartford, what virtuoso hand-wringing! The Doctor wrote his son:
    You may easily understand my astonishment in finding that you are repeating the great source of serious trouble you are giving both your mother and myself. I had been hopeful that you would try to be a dutiful son, and be faithful to the trust we have all put in you, and it is very disappointing. You are now a young man, and you have not much time to make good. I am so sad about it all that I hardly know what to say to you. You promised so much to us all, and fair words and loving kindness do not seem to impress you in the least. My heart is so full, and my disappointment is so great that it is difficult to put in words what I feel is the result of your thoughtlessness and the wicked manner in which you are using up the patience I have had with you. Now, my dear boy, I want you to ask yourself if it is not time to leave your wicked and foolish ways. You will never have another such chance to make good, and to be properly prepared for the life you must follow when I am gone, and if you will not do what you should do with the chanceswe have given you, what will the result be then? It makes me sick at heart every time I think of it.
    After much more of the same, The Doctor signed off “your affectionate Father,” and then added a grim postscript, reminding his boy that in a few weeks it would be “just one year ago that you were sent home from Eaglebrook, and I beg of you not to have this repeated.”
    It is important to restore some proportion to this matter. The Doctor’s letter followed a slip in his son’s academic standing from very high to medium rank. At the time it was written my father had had no disciplinary troubles, but he soon would. At the time it was written he played the banjo in the school band, swam on the team, and was conspicuously good-willed. The school barber, called Mac, still remembers him: “Sure, Duke Wolff, big boy, handsome, plenty smart. His dad would get mad as blazes at him, he’d tell me about it. Say this for him, all the boys liked him, he could always raise a laugh at something silly or himself. That counts for something, you know, to be able to lift people out of the dumps with a laugh.”
    But The Doctor and The General fed each other’s appetites for rancor, and devised increasingly sophisticated methods of settling Duke’s hash. If he wouldn’t do his work “as a soldier should do it,” as The Doctor told his son, he must not be allowed trips with the other boy-soldiers to Syracuse, as The Doctor told The General. This particular punishment, if that is the description for an embargo on Syracuse, had a further purpose: The Doctor explained that he would like his son kept on campus “because of Arthur’s impulsive nature and extravagant ideas, and I feel that it is time now to teach him something of the value of money, and the commodity it may purchase.”
    When my father returned to St. John’s in 1924 he set about failure with a will. By year’s end he had flunked or dropped every subject he took, and spent three weeks in April hospitalized for “nervous