Duke of Deception Read Free

introduced me, with ceremony, to a couple of family treasures. There was my great-grandfather’s medical degree from Leyden and a worn leather case, my grandfather’s, fitted with surgical devices. These totems are gone now, lost during one or another last-minute, dark-of-night escape from a house where the rent was seven months overdue, or from a town where a rubber check had just bounced to the D.A.’s desk. But I recollect well enough those gleaming instruments set in blue-velvet cavities.
    Not long ago I bought a set of compasses and dividers solely because, snugged in their own blue velvet nests, they returned me to evenings when I sat beside my father at his desk, and he showed me the clamps and probes and trepan and lancet and scalpels. I would hold a piece and examine it, and then return it to its fit place, and promise never again to touch it without my father’s supervision. I was warned that germs and microbes deadly beyond imagining still lurked on the blades, but there was no need to scare me away from them: I had never seen things so mysterious, cold, or menacing.
    It was characteristic of my father to impress upon me his family’s artifacts rather than its history. He was reticent about his background. He would mention, with more awe than love, his father’s skills, his huge medical library, his ease with foreign languages.These references had an abstract quality because my father could not afford, given his wish to unmake his origins, to place Dr. Wolff in the world among kindred named Samuels and Krotoshiner.
    I first heard the inventory of family names as I stood with my cousin Bill Haas, a stranger, in Hartford’s Beth Israel Cemetery, above the bones and markers of Beatrice Annette Wolff (August 19, 1894–April 9, 1895) and Harriet Krotoshiner (1867–1944) and Arthur Jacob Wolff (June 5, 1855–June 22, 1936). I was thirty-eight, a latecomer to my family. Bill Haas, and two Ruths—his sister and his cousin—led me through names and places and dates. They showed me photographs; I had never seen a likeness of my father younger than forty, or any at all of my grandmother, grandfather, their parents. For years I had feared them, had thought maybe my father had just cause to hide them. But they looked fine, just like ancestors.
    My father Arthur was delivered by his father Arthur at home on Spring Street in Hartford, November 22, 1907. Dr. Wolff took pains to bring his son safely into the world, and then to ease him through it. He was meticulous, almost as exacting with himself as with others, and he and his wife Harriet were unlikely to enjoy another opportunity to perpetuate themselves. She was forty, he was fifty-two. They had had a daughter when Dr. Wolff was thirty-nine, still young enough to believe he could mend anyone. But Beatrice Annette’s scarlet fever was beyond his power to heal, and she died after eight months of life.
    My grandfather was born in London in 1855, but some restlessness brought his father to America. He served during the Civil War as surgeon to a French regiment, and after the war moved to Brownsville, Texas, where he practiced medicine for the Army at Fort Brown, across the Rio Grande from Matamoros.
    When my father was a schoolboy—and from his inexhaustible reservoir of Micawberisms applying for admission to Yale—he was asked to confide a few particulars of his background. He told Yale that his father had been educated at “Balioll” [
sic
] College, Oxford, and this was not so. My grandfather was removed fromhigh school at fourteen, and from that age was educated in science, medicine, mathematics, literature, and languages by his father. Four years later he entered Texas Medical College in Galveston, and was graduated in 1876. My father also told Yale that his father had interned at Bellevue. This was true, Bellevue—like Oxford—being an approved institution.
    Yale asked for my grandmother’s maiden name, and my father gave them Harriet K. Van Duyn. The