Duke of Deception Read Free Page B

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.