Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff Page A

Ethics. Duke flunked it.
    He lasted a semester, and may or may not have wangled his way into DKE. Duke’s Hartford friend, a bona fide student at the bona fide University of Pennsylvania, thinks he was a Deke: “It was very unusual for a Jew in those days to get into a non-Jewish house. Maybe he didn’t get around to telling anyone he was Jewish.”
    I wonder what he wanted. Not simply to be liked, though he was. To partake of the excellence so much discussed at home? Probably. But he had attained nothing, and it must have seemed he never would. Still, he knew how to dress, speak, and carry himself like a gentleman. He stood tall and erect, and wore soft tweeds and a waistcoat with its bottom button undone (fat Henry VIII had begun the custom, he told me) and a gold watch chain looped through its middle buttonhole. (It would have been like a Duke Wolff watch chain to have no timepiece secured to its end.) My father was well-read, sardonic, informed, a declared expert on everything. He had physical courage, collateral to his general disregard of consequences, but not much stamina.
    His roommate at the University of Pennsylvania thought he was “just a great guy. He was a good friend to me. I loaned him money, and he always paid it back.”
    (I was told this in front of a cousin, Ruth Fassler, and when she heard it she said: “Come off it! He paid you back! Who are you kidding?” But the roommate added encomia to my father: “He took my fur coat once, disappeared with it; I thought it was a goner, but at the end of the weekend he brought it back. He wasokay, really.” And my cousin said: “Great, he wasn’t a thief. A regular gent we have here.”)
    While he was loose in Hartford during the Depression many people felt his touch. (Ruth Fassler said: “Duke wasn’t poor. He was broke.”) Bill Haas walked into a downtown shoe store one afternoon and found the usually dour manager grinning ear to ear.
    “Why so chipper?” Bill asked him.
    “Duke Wolff just borrowed a sawbuck from me.”
    “Jesus, that’s nothing to lift a man’s spirits. You’ll never see it again.”
    “Yeah, but now I’ve given, he can’t ask me again. I got off cheap, most guys go ten or twenty.”
    One of my cousins said: “I always trusted him, and he treated me well. He was a good-looking guy, and good company.”
    Another cousin in the room that day said: “He was my friend.”
    And a third cousin looked straight at me, and said: “He was a gonif, a schnorrer. He was just a bum. That’s all he ever was.”
    No: he was more than that. A college friend recalls that when he told my father his troubles, Duke listened patiently, and gave good advice. Duke loved to give advice. When Bill Haas was in his prime—running a large tobacco business, raising a family—and my father was down and out, on the run from the law and “flat bust” (as he liked to say), Bill saw him, for the first time in years, sitting out a red light on State Street in Hartford. My father waved to his cousin, a man who had his number if anyone had it, and told him: “Your hair’s wrong. Don’t try to cover that bald spot. When you lose hair on your crown you should cut short what’s left, like I do.” The light went green, the old man put his unpaid-for MG in gear and shot a last instruction over its stern: “Don’t let them use electric clippers. Shears only.” And that day Bill Haas had his hair cut short, and it is short today.
    I know little about my father’s doings after he left the University of Pennsylvania and before he met my mother five years later. He divided his time between Hartford and New York, with a runaway trip in 1933 to Europe. Years later a raffish character, a bass player,approached my father in a seedy Los Angeles jazz club, where I had been taken to hear Jack Teagarden. I was thirteen, and interested in the musician’s story, which embarrassed my father. It seems the musician and Duke had shipped out as deckhands on a cattle boat