Duke of Deception (3 page)

My grandfather was venerated by people who knew him, and
he was no enemy of their respect, but his preference was for solitary work. He took up photography because he liked the quiet of his darkroom. He cherished gadgets, built model steam and internal combustion engines from scrap metal, lavishing months of his old age on them, tapping and turning, drilling and polishing their small, precise parts. He built his own microscopes except for their lenses, and liked to correspond with the Royal Society of London about what he saw looking in them. I have one of the contraptions into which he poured time and money, a device to custom-fit eyeglasses.

His family and friends thought of The Doctor as a whiz of an inventor, but his Big Ideas had the Wolff stamp of improbability upon them. The fixer in him provoked his improvement on the pneumatic tire. He had bought one of Hartford’s first automobiles (and installed one of Hartford’s first telephones, gramophones, X-ray machines), and it offended his sense of economy to replace the car’s tires every thousand or so miles. It is now a family legend that The Doctor’s tire was a good one, and that its design was stolen from him, that he “could have made a million” had he only had “a smart lawyer.”

The fable of the lost million, every family’s staple! For Wolffs the refrain was repeated, with threnodic variations, right to the jailhouse door. There’s the story of the Travelers’ Insurance Company stock, offered in lieu of a fee for a timely job of cutting on the Travelers’ president’s daughter. The Doctor preferred cash, and later the cry was cried, from generation to generation,
if only
. Other Hartford doctors became millionaires, perhaps by the customary expedient of saving. My grandfather, by contrast, grew poorer as he lived richer, and for this he paid dearly in gall.

He and Harriet began married life on North Capitol Street in a handsome clapboard house, and then moved to a formidable stone structure on the corner of Spring Street and Asylum Avenue, a valuable location contiguous with St. Francis Hospital. When the Wolffs traded up again, moving to a huge establishment on Collins Street, the hospital pestered The Doctor to sell the Spring Street house to those nuns and priests he had so unmercifully bullied, and they hornswoggled my grandfather—
Jewed him
down
, as a relative put it, without irony—and there went another million. If only he had hung on to that property … can you imagine? Priceless!
If only …

If gentiles suspected Jews of sharp practices, my family now believes that The Doctor was chiseled and finally undone because he was at the mercy of cynical Yankees who used him when he could save their skins, and never fairly paid him for his service. Dr. Wolff is said to have left the staff of St. Francis because a Jew couldn’t get a fair shake from the Catholics.

Neither were the Jews of my grandfather’s background very tolerant of greenhorns, Jews with accents, Jews from Eastern Europe. German and Western European Jews did not mingle with what a cousin has called “Johnny-come-latelies.” They had different congregations, different lives, different prejudices. Another cousin, stunned that my father would repudiate his blood’s history, can also tell me that “there were only a few old Jewish families like ours in Hartford. The Wolffs were old-timers, here before the Gold Rush; we weren’t proud to mix with gentiles, but newcomers were proud to mix with us.” Exclusion and discrimination were in the air my father breathed.

He told me one story only that touched the Jewish experience. Dr. Wolff and Harriet were in an Atlantic City hotel, and Dr. Wolff—“incredibly,” in my father’s words—was “mistaken” for a Jew by a desk clerk. This suspicious monitor of the hotel’s reputation as a sanctuary from the bothersome
Hebraic element
(known even in tour guides of the time as
our Israelite brethren
) must have observed something extreme in the topography of Dr. Wolff’s nose. He said something, asked something, that offended The Doctor. Who checked in, plugged up the sink and tub, turned on all taps full force, and departed without checking out. My father loved this story. It perplexed me, and caused me to study the size and contour of my father’s nose, and mine.

But I dwell too morbidly on my grandfather’s losses, disappointments, vices of temper and arrogance. His curiosity, boyishly exuberant to the end, was his signature, and when he died at
eighty-one it was what
The Hartford Courant
remembered in an editorial:

“Dr. Wolff’s death recalls to many persons a man whose youthful zeal in his exacting work belied his years. The test tube and the microscope were as toys in his hands, so absorbing was their use to his searching mind.”

Harriet could make him laugh at himself; he was evidently a good laugher, especially at his own jokes. He liked to tease people close to him with diagnoses of fantastical ailments that required fantastical remedies. Was the symptom a runny nose, slight cough, muscle ache? An obvious case of
catootus of the cameenus
, calling for the force-feeding of oatmeal and amputation of an ear.

He liked practical jokes, and was known as a wit to his friends in an informal convocation called The Saturday Night Crowd. These friends played bridge, or listened to a recital of music by one or another of them. My grandfather despised gossip, so there was no gossip. Sometimes there was a poker game, husbands and wives playing for high stakes, bets a dollar minimum, pot the limit. But at the game’s end everything was settled a penny on the dollar, a scale of debt resolution that satisfactorily impressed my father, who proposed it to many merchants.

A couple of years before my father was born a large wedding was given at the Touro Club for my grandmother’s niece, Hannah Samuels, who was marrying William Haas. This was a sunny occasion, and the program for that evening is all I have of a material nature to suggest the comfortable and generally good-willed quality of my grandparents’ lives in their middle age, in 1905. The meal was lavish: oysters and hors d’oeuvres, poached salmon with hollandaise, a filet of beef followed by sherbet. This was followed by roast capon and champagne, then a green salad and
glaces fantaisies variées
.

During cordials and cigars the guests listened to The Doctor perform an air of his own composition, done to the beat of “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” a ditty innocent of application to the bride.

This was followed by a chorus:

Here was no short-winded doggerel: there were six more stanzas, followed by as many repetitions of the chorus, but then who needed to rush? There was all the time in the world to spend on a simple expression of affection. Time for love, time for play, and after passing The Doctor’s nice turns on
William
and
will—
Hannah now had a “strong Will of her own”—I’d like to linger for a final stanza:

The tide and summer dances were rhythms of Crescent Beach, on Long Island Sound at Niantic. Now the place is seedy, hard by the Boston–New York railroad tracks. The Doctor had begun going there in the nineties, brought by Dr. John McCook, a Hartford personage and friend with whom he established the first laboratory at Saint Francis Hospital. Every summer the Wolffs
came down the Connecticut River by steamboat from Hartford to Old Lyme, and traveled (in the early days) the fifteen miles along the shore by oxcart.

The Samuels families also summered at Crescent Beach, and William Haas built a house next door to The Doctor’s. My grandparents’ house still stands, large, with cedar shingles and a shake roof, with green shutters and a sun deck above a shaded porch furnished with wicker chairs, a rocker and a hammock. The nights there were cool, and the days lazy but sociable. Activities with members of these close-knit families cut without self-consciousness across generations.

When I was nine and ten and eleven my father would take me on fine winter weekend mornings to Crescent Beach. The place was desolate then; the houses—set close together and helter-skelter back from the beach—were boarded up, and often as we made our way to the rocks at the northeast rim of the beach, below McCook Point, we would kick through ice and snow-crusted seaweed.

Ostensibly we had come to shoot tin cans my father would fill with sand and set at the water’s edge. When I turned nine he had bought me a bolt-action single-shot Remington .22, and he would let me spend my allowance on a fifty-round box of rim-fire shorts. I would shoot them up in a couple of hours while my father kept one eye on me and the other on a book. Later, walking down the beach, my father would point to the huge gabled McCook house, shared by the families of Dr. John McCook and his brother Anson, a lawyer; my father would tell of its fabulous rooms, and what had passed there and in the gazebo that overlooked the rocks below the point, where we had come to sit. I wanted to climb the rocks and see the house close up, but my father respected the integrity of that property, and would not let me.

Sometimes in my line of fire, if I raised my sights to lead a seagull (a forbidden practice), was a small prominence called Crystal Rock, and my father told me that he was once nearly drowned swimming to it on a dare, but when I pressed him for particulars—where had he lived then, how old was he, what was
his connection with the McCook house?—he would distance himself from my curiosity.

My father did tell me, laughing dryly, that he had once taken his father for a ride in a motorboat Dr. Wolff had just the week before given him. My father, showing off, had brought no oars and had shut off his Johnson Sea Horse to clean its carburetor filter, which fell overboard. Young Arthur had been obliged to face The Doctor’s red and furious face as the tide lapped them toward McCook Point.

We must have been alone on that beach twenty times, perhaps forty. And we walked each time past the house where my father spent every summer of his life, happily, until he thought he would rather be elsewhere, and was old enough to drive himself away from Crescent Beach. And never did my father tell me that we were together near a sacred family place, or point to the house—its architecture and dimensions less imposing than the McCook Place—that had given his father such pleasure and pride. Of my father’s serial repudiations I find this the most perverse and sad.

M
Y
father’s cousin Ruth Atkins was thirteen when he was born, and she stood for a time as his older sister. Her father—Louis Samuels—had died when she was four, and The Doctor, fond of his niece, treated her like a daughter. She spent every Saturday night at the Wolff house, and on Sunday mornings he would read the funnies aloud with verve, losing himself in their complications, doing all the voices. “He smelled of cigars, but clean.”

She recollects especially the big house on Collins Street to which The Doctor and Harriet moved after my father was born. (Cousin Ruth’s brother, Arthur Samuels, a New York editor and wit, had been named for The Doctor, and my father was called Arthur Samuels Wolff to return the compliment; he upclassed this to Arthur Saunders Wolff.) Ruth’s favorite room was the library, dark and formidable, dominated by The Doctor’s huge desk. There was also a music room, a drawing room paneled in oak, and a kitchen in the care of a Norwegian cook. There was a maid, and a chauffeur in charge of several Pierce-Arrows and a couple of Rolls-Royces as the years passed. When The Doctor drove himself he drove at a constant speed, whatever he encountered; people were meant to move aside for him.

As Ruth grew older she ceased spending every Saturday night in The Doctor’s house, but she would stop off most afternoons
after school to find him reading the
New York Journal
. If she had missed a couple of days between visits my grandfather would pout: “I didn’t know you were still alive.”

Probably better than anyone, she understood my father’s childhood: “Duke was beyond imagination spoiled. I remember going to his room, filled with every single thing made for a child, and the room looked like a hurricane had come through it; you couldn’t walk across it without breaking a toy because there was no room on the floor for them all. It was grotesque, and cruel.”

And then Ruth, shaking her head, recollecting her love for my father and the anger that caused her to tear to shreds every photograph she owned that included him—grinning in a sailor’s suit, rolling a hoop, catching a baseball, Beau Brummel in a white three-piece suit among fraternity chums—looked down, and dropped her voice: “He never had a chance.”

Why not? To be born the third Arthur Wolff didn’t seem to be bad luck. His parents were comfortable and respected. My father’s health was studied and maintained, he was petted and adored. The little boy was even allowed to attend his father in his laboratory and workshop, providing he held his tongue. Yet almost from the beginning there was trouble. Bill Haas, six months younger than my father, remembers him as a “toy-breaker.” The Haas and Wolff families celebrated Christmas, presumably as a secular occasion, to exchange gifts: “If I got to Collins Street on Christmas afternoon or early the next day, there’d be something left to play with. A couple of days later, all broken.”

Perhaps my father was an unexpected boon to a busy professional man past middle age. Certainly The Doctor begrudged his son time, and instead of time preferred to give him things, forgetting the attention and education lavished on him by his own father. For whatever reason, an old and sad story began to unwind, of love’s shortcut through stuff. My father spent time, the truly precious gift, on me; but even so he thought of possessions as the fundamental, material manifestations of love. If I mentioned that I would like to collect tin soldiers I would the next day have a hundred tin soldiers. If coins or stamps were my interest of the moment I would get albums, the things already fixed in
place. Thus was the nature of desire blindly perverted. To be thrust upon as my father was thrust upon, as he thrust things upon me, was crucially unsettling.