Free Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff

to leave, and he died without a friend, or even an enemy.
    My mother was born with pneumonia in Chicago while her father was at sea in the Dardanelles. The birth was hard on her mother, but there was money for a nurse, and later a maid, and my grandmother, a pacific woman, didn’t complain, and gave her daughter love in abundance when they both recovered from the birth.
    The Navy moved the Loftus family to San Diego, Paterson, N.J., Bremerton (where my uncle Stephen was born eight years after my mother), and then, for a long stay, to Honolulu. Mrs. Loftus had been instructed to have no more children after my mother was born, but her husband wanted a son, and she wanted to oblige. The boy was delivered by the principles of Christian rather than medical science because her husband decided his wife’s illnesses were symptoms of a failure of spirit and will.
    My mother grew up a tomboy in Honolulu, and as happy as she would ever be. She mothered her baby brother, surfed, studied at Punahou and had boyfriends who put her to no other use than as a companion.
    When she went to the Mainland at fourteen, and to Beverly Hills High, she was screen-struck. (My mother has always been a dreamer; this is not the least of her virtues; she believes in the Big Break, the bank-busting lottery ticket, the grand prize in the sweepstakes, the place with the perfect climate. Now, past sixty, she says that if her ship ever comes in she’ll buy the biggest goddamned Winnebago anyone ever saw, and laugh herself to death wheeling it back and forth across the country.) While she was at Beverly Hills High, waiting to be discovered by the movies,boys discovered her. They didn’t use her very well; few of them ever would. She was saucy and cute, made herself up to look like Carole Lombard, and at fifteen was queen of a Rose Bowl float; right there, head of the parade, was her pretty face in a newsreel close-up! She waited for a studio to call; none called.
    When Rosemary was sixteen the family moved to Hartford, where her mother died. Mae never had the strength of other people. My mother would not flat out accuse her father of murder, but something awful went on in Hartford, some pain was permitted to continue because of that man’s stubborn preference for Christian Science, and his lack of compassion. Oh, he was a special case: he spanked my mother after dinner every night on the principle that while he didn’t wish to trouble himself with specifics, she must have been guilty of
some
misdemeanor that day. She soon learned to take advantage of the inevitability of her punishment by deserving it: having a smoke, fooling with the boys, stealing change from her father’s pockets, lying to him.
    When his wife died my grandfather insisted at once that Rosemary quit William Hall High School to care for his son and his household. So at a stroke, my mother lost everything—mother, love, school and hope. Even money: during the late twenties there had been plenty around, the fruit of her father’s investments at a time when dancing bears could make stock market killings, but during The Great Sorting Out of 1929, he had been sorted out.
    There was something else, too: “At night Daddy always wanted to kiss me goodnight, and he’d hold me much too close. The relationship was not at all what I thought it should be, between a father and a daughter.”
    My mother persuaded this man to let her visit some old school friends in Hollywood for a couple of weeks. She went west by train, and meant never to come back. She dreamt of becoming a dress designer, but couldn’t get a job even as a salesclerk in that Depression year of 1934. She moved in with some “fast” girls who advised her to sell herself. She thought about it, seriously. She was hungry. Her father had encouraged her to smoke to keep her appetite and the food bills in check, and one day in a drugstore she took a deep drag on a cigarette and fainted from hunger.
    Then a man made promises he didn’t