Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“An Italian thug,” said Vance. “And these guys…”

Goombahs. Oh, give me one fucking break, Vancerman, thought Hoyt. My dad would have eaten your goombahs for breakfast. As Hoyt remembered him, his dad, George Thorpe, was handsome and a half, with a thick stand of dark hair, a strong, square jaw, and a cleft chin. His old man loved it when people said he looked “just like Cary Grant.” He spoke through his nose with a New York Honk accent that intimated a boarding school background. He made oblique references, stuck inside relative clauses, to his days at Princeton, and his dad’s before him, too, not to mention his stint with the Special Forces in Vietnam, where he had seen, literally seen, swarms of AK-47 bullets coming straight at him at five times the speed of sound. They looked like green bees. But since he had been a member of the elite of the elite, Delta Force, he couldn’t really go into details. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t even have told his family he was in Delta Force. It was that elite. On the strength of these New York Honked-out credentials, he managed to gain membership in the Brook Club. There was no more socially solid club in New York. With the Brook escutcheon on his shield, he gained entry to four more swell clubs of the Old New York sort. Thus established, he recruited club brethren into three esoteric hedge funds he had set up based on a strategy of selling corporate bonds short. This was during the Wall Street bond boom of the 1980s. In the late eighties, he changed his legal name from George B. Thorpe to Armistead G. Thorpe. Even at age eight Hoyt found that strange, but both his dad and his mother explained that Armistead was his dad’s mother’s—his grandmother’s—maiden name and he had loved her profoundly, and Hoyt swallowed it.

Hoyt’s mother, the former Peggy Springs, a pretty, brunette, washed-out, submissive lab rabbit of a woman, was a certified public accountant with a master’s degree in economics from her alma mater, the University of Southern Illinois. She cooked George B. Thorpe’s books for him and Armistead G. Thorpe’s, too, backed up his stories even when they became so tall they collapsed of their own lack of foundation, and was willing to keep her timid Peggy Rabbit self at home, at his suggestion, when he went trolling for investors over lunches and dinners at his clubs.

Hoyt always hung on to the assumption that his father’s intentions had been on the up and up. But not even a son could fail to see that toward the end his father had been setting up the new hedge funds for no purpose other than to get cash with which to assuage the investors in the old ones who were getting cranky and threatening to sue. He had even convinced a bank teller—a twenty-four-year-old Estonian girl who had grown up on an island in Maine called Vinalhaven, a lissome little blonde he liked to flirt with when he was at the bank—to invest all her savings, a $20,000 Treasury bond her parents, a night watchman and a nurse’s aide, had given her on her twenty-first birthday, in a hedge fund based on selling futures on bond sales short. It was complicated stuff but absolute dynamite…She should think of it as a “hedge against a hedge with a multiplier or ‘whip’ effect”…Bango! He told Peggy to print up the necessary letterhead stationery, contract, and prospectus using computer fonts, tout de suite, and open a commercial bank account to receive her check. This was one of but many last desperate contortions before all of his funds crashed in a pile.

Hoyt and his parents were living at the time in a house built originally by the old cowboy movie star Bill Hart in the Belle Haven section of Greenwich, Connecticut, close to Long Island Sound. George Thorpe now found it advisable to disappear for “a while,” until things smoothed over. Ever mindful of the potential wrath of his creditors and investors, he had long since put the house in passive Peggy’s name. Now he wanted the title back—fast. For the first time Hoyt’s mother allowed her brain to take over from her faint heart. She stalled and stalled and stalled. She knew her husband’s “things” inside out, and there was no way they were going to smooth over this time. One Thursday morning, he mentioned, in the Oh-I-didn’t-tell-you? mode, a weekend real estate conference he was going to on Sea Island, Georgia. That afternoon he packed two garment bags and headed off to La Guardia Airport. They never saw him again. The bankers, insurance companies, and investors descended on Peggy. She gave them nothing but an innocent, clueless face and managed to hang on to the house. She got a job in the accounting department at Stanley Tool in nearby Stamford and was able to bring home just enough honest dollars to pay the mortgage installments. But Hoyt’s days at the pricey Greenwich Country Day School were over.

In the course of settling George’s affairs, Peggy called the Princeton alumni office for some amplification of his record there, but they couldn’t find his name, or that of his father, Linus Thorpe. Similarly, the army drew a blank on Captain George Thorpe. Peggy found a cache of aging, intimate letters from women—addressed to George Thornton, George Thurlow, and George Thorsten.

In short, she never found a single documented record of her husband’s background—or of his existence on this earth, come to think of it. Hoyt, being only sixteen, explained all doubts away. To him the old man remained—he had to remain—a tough, aggressive military hero. It all had to do with Delta Force being a secret unit of the Special Forces. They probably had to destroy records.

When Hoyt had moved from the lower school to the middle school at Greenwich Country Day, he was a short, slight boy, and two outsize bullies in the class above him picked him out for special torment. Their favorite torture was to lock him up in a janitor’s broom closet in a seldom-used hallway and leave it up to him to shout and bang on the door until he got somebody’s attention. He had missed entire classes that way, to the detriment of his academic standing. Naturally, there was no way he could explain to the teachers what had happened, because there was nothing—nothing—worse than a boy being a snitch. After three weeks of the ordeal, he finally told his mother about it, first making her swear not to tell his father, which of course was the first thing Peggy did. His father gave Hoyt his grimmest Vietnam search-and-destroy look and said he was going to the school tomorrow and lift the headmaster up by his shirtfront, if necessary, and tell him that this bullshit will cease. “Bullshit” was the word, since George regarded sharing vulgarities, father and son, as a part of helping the son grow up as a man’s man.

Oh God, no! Tell the headmaster? There was something worse than being a snitch; it was having Mommy or Daddy being a snitch for you.

In that case, said the old man, you’ve got to make a choice. Hoyt could either give one or both of the bullies a good pop on the nose—Dad demonstrated by administering an imaginary clout, not with his fist but his forearm (which Hoyt assumed must be the Delta commando way)—or he, the old man, would head straight for the headmaster. But such a pop on the nose was impossible! They were bigger than he was! They’d destroy him! Not so, said his father. One good pop on the nose, especially if it drew blood, and they would never bother him again; and neither would anybody else at that school. Not only that, but from then on, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you’ll be able to dominate every confrontation with nothing more than an intimidating stare and a couple of give-a-shit words. “Give-a-shit” he shared, too.

But—but—there was no way it could work out like that!

His father shrugged and said okay then, you’ve got a big problem. You’re gonna have one totally pissed-off—“pissed-off”—parent storming into that school and raising holy hell.