Word: duking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Geoffrey's younger brother described Duke's condition a few months before his death in the San Diego jail cell...
...Duke meanwhile is whooping it up with everyone from the cleaning lady to the glamorous divorcee of a Harvard graduate, but Geoffrey manages to look the other way. In retrospect, Wolff has the sensitivity to concede a double-standard--"I wasn't fair; I always took my father's side"--but he never can bring himself to forsake...
Wolff insists that despite its vile moments, "it had been fun to be my father's son." The joy is not apparent in his depictions of Duke's sick maneuvers. Case in point: an adolescent Geoffrey dubs a well-endowed schoolgirl "pear-shaped." When Duke finds out, he locks his son alone with him in the bedroom, strips him and beats him senseless with his razor strop (a prized possession incidentally, one of Duke's "glittering things"). When the punishment is sufficiently administered, his father Duke picks up his lifeless son, hugs him and whispers, "Be good. Try at least...
...that his father was "a bad man and a good father," and Joseph corrects him, "Don't ever again say your father was a bad man. There are no bad men." Certainly Wolff's description of his father's beatings is proof enough that "bad men" do exist and Duke Wolff is exemplary. Most would call him a bad father also, but perhaps only a son has the right to make that judgement...
Perhaps Geoffrey's brother at last exposed the real Duke, a fumbling, impotent, useless human being, unworthy of eulogy, much less a 270-page memorial. But this stinking jailbird did not bring up Geoffrey. The book is not about the real Duke, but the Duke of Deception, the father who raised a son "to be happier than he had been, to do better." Evidently he accomplished that goal and for that Geoffrey Wolff offers his compassion and his gratitude.Geoffrey Wolff and his children...