Duke of Deception Read Free Page A

“Van Duyn”—in other applications “Van Zandt”—he did not enclose in quotation marks, but it is a fiction. “Harriet” was accurate, and some vestigial attachment to his source caused my father to return to his mother that remnant of her identity in the character
K
, the abbreviation of her name.
    Krotoshiner: the family took its name from Krotoschin in the Prussian province of Posnán, “the nice part of Prussia” my cousin Ruth Atkins told me. Now the place is called Krotoszyn by the Poles, who own it. Samuel and Yetta Krotoshiner emigrated from Prussia to Glasgow, where my grandmother Harriet was born. (Ruth Atkins still owns the thistled pin that once secured the folds of the Krotoshiner tartan.) From Glasgow the family sailed to Canada, where Mr. Krotoshiner set up as a “gentleman farmer,” which is what they still call a farmer who knows nothing about farming, and loses his shirt. They moved again, to Brooklyn, where Harriet fell in love with young Dr. Wolff, an
alrightnik
with soft brown eyes and an appetite for excellence who was attracted to the sixteen-year-old girl’s soft good humor.
    When Samuel Krotoshiner died, Yetta sold his wine-importing business and moved her three daughters to Hartford, where she established, against the custom of the time, her own business, a fine china shop. Dr. Wolff married Harriet in 1893 in a double wedding with her younger sister. Yetta was doing well enough to give each of her newly married daughters a fur coat and a Bechstein grand piano.
    My grandfather was a wonderful doctor, everyone agreed. When Mt. Sinai Hospital was established in Hartford in 1923 he was chief of the medical board and of the medical staff. A sense of his rangemay be taken from the fact that he was also the chief of its surgical staff, chief of gynecology and chief of the laboratory. Coincidentally he was municipal bacteriologist of the Hartford Health Department and a medico-legal expert whose microscopic analyses of criminal evidence broke open murder trials in Connecticut and New York.
    Yet there were people, and my grandmother was one, who believed that this man, known invariably as The Doctor, should never have practiced medicine. Not that he lacked compassion, but that he lacked humility. The year after he was chosen chief of staff of Mt. Sinai he severed his connection with the hospital. The reason is among the records of his successor: “On opening of the hospital Dr. Wolff assumed a dictatorial attitude and he would allow no one to do major surgery without his consent. This was resented and he resigned.”
    His temper was explosive. People have described his rages as “terrifying,” “wild,” “beyond control.” He was brutal with patients who disregarded his instructions. He had a sharp tongue, and from the time he began his association with Hartford’s St. Francis Hospital the year after his marriage, he became notorious for baiting nuns and priests—the former about their absurd and unsanitary costumes, the latter about their preposterous beliefs, and both for interfering with his patients.
    His own religious preference was simple: he was an atheist. He believed in evidence and natural law and in Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony developed six hundred years ago by William of Occam that holds that what can be proved with few assumptions is proved in vain with more. He was, that is, an enemy of complication and mystification, yet he held throughout his life to a single irrational (and wonderful) conviction: that every word ever spoken continued, as he said, “to kick around out there in the atmosphere,” and that some day, by the agency of some instrument, could be recovered, like money from a bank. My grandfather was especially eager to attend the conversations of Voltaire with Frederick the Great, and Sir Francis Bacon with anyone at all.
    My grandfather was venerated by people who knew him, andhe was no enemy of their respect, but his preference was for