By Biddle Duke
The Stowe Guide
Winter 2023-24
I am the fortunate son. My parents reminded me whenever my behavior merited it that I could have been born in a “gutter in Calcutta.” Instead, I was born white, male, to a wealthy family in America in 1962. As if these blessings were not enough, the most blessed and valuable blessing was that I had two good parents.
The impression they left most forcefully on me and everyone who knew them was that their happiness was contingent on everyone else’s—and I mean everyone else’s. They made it their work, their life, their mission, they spoke of it at dinner, and everywhere. When I last spoke to my mother before she died at the age of 92, a woman who never finished high school but lived a life celebrated in prominent obituaries in major American newspapers, she asked me: “Have I done enough?”
She was not asking if she had done enough for me, or my two children, or my brother and sister. She was asking if she had done enough for as many people as she could, so that perhaps she would be leaving a world where evermore people would have the kind of shot at life that she did.
Some years ago, I began to write down stories for an eventual book about growing up with these two remarkable people. About them, about me, about us. This is one of those stories.
••••
When I was very young, 11 or 12, my mother showed up unexpectedly at my school at lunchtime. Mortified at the sight of her waving too eagerly from the entrance to the dining room bustling with my schoolmates, I slid out of my seat and hurried over.
“You have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon,” she said too loudly for the benefit of the head of school, Malcolm Whitehead, who was as surprised as I was to see her.
“This is not customary, Mrs. Duke,” he sniffed.
Knowing Mom, she must have replied with, “Well, we all have to be flexible now and again.”
Parent appearances were rare at the elite Swiss boarding school where I had been deposited in fourth grade at the age of 9. Students, mostly local Swiss children, the children from neighboring European countries and expats like my parents, were left at the beginning of term, and it would not be until school vacations that you were reunited with family. Mine lived across the Channel in England, and my mother visited way more than the school approved and way more than other parents.
Maybe that’s why Mr. Whitehead didn’t like me much. I was a decent student and generally stayed out of trouble, but more than once I’d felt his snarling impatience and short, vicious temper, delivered in an imperious British accent.
“Duke,” he would snap at this or that infraction. “You are not in America!”
On the day of my mother’s visit Mr. Whitehead didn’t have much of a chance. Mom just grabbed my hand and whisked me off, thanking him with an over-the-shoulder glance and “I’ll have him back in time for evening classes.”
“I made up the appointment, sort of,” she explained with a smile as we rolled through the snowy streets in an aging Morris Minor car she kept at a friend’s house. “No doctor, just me,” she added.
That afternoon ski outing some 50 years ago sticks in my memory because it was just the two of us on a little adventure. She could have gone skiing with any number of friends. But she chose me. And, because she lied to make it happen. I would come to know that she would tell occasional—usually, in her mind, necessary—lies. But that lie is the first clear one in my memory.
I also remember thinking: Mom was cool. That afternoon was cool. In broad daylight, together, we were stealing something precious, a bit of fun, right from under the noses of my teachers and schoolmates.
Later that day she would ask that I not say a word to anyone about it.
“Just keep it to yourself,” she said.
Or just lie, I remember thinking.
••••
I knew my mother then only as a child knows a mother. My family’s wealth and privilege enabled us to move through life with apparent lightness and ease and any darkness—there was darkness—was kept from me. I didn’t ask. Away from home for nine months a year from the age of 9, my sense of family and of each of my parents was still mostly a child’s contented illusion.
I didn’t know that I had been, if not an accident, at least unplanned. Some might well have viewed my arrival as entirely planned, by my mother, to capture my father.
“Of course, some people thought that. It wasn’t true,” she told me years later when I asked.
But unquestionably, I crashed into two people’s lives and their five respective children.
“I’m pregnant, Angie,” my mother informed my father in February 1962.
“Well, let’s get married,” he replied. That was it. He was doing the right thing, as he always tried to do. There was to be a love affair, but it came later.
A shotgun wedding in May 1962 ensued. My arrival six months later in November of that year was an outrage. For a time, it severed all communication between Mom and her disapproving, socially conscious mother. What would people think, she snarled to my mother the morning of my birth.
There was also the question of my five half siblings, a complicated brood thrust together only months before. My father brought three from previous marriages, my mother brought two. I would be my parent’s only child. Just how fraught all this was would take me years to comprehend.
When my parents married my father was still, technically, in mourning. Ten months before, his former wife, the mother of two of his children, perished when the small plane in which she was traveling crashed a few miles from LaGuardia Airport in a neighborhood in Queens. All four people on board died. She had been the love of Dad’s life. My brother didn’t speak for months after his mother’s death. To him and his sister my arrival so soon after their mother’s death must have been incomprehensible, perhaps even an affront, and it signaled yet another abrupt and unsettling upheaval: the presence of my take-charge, fiercely ambitious mother in their lives.
There was much I didn’t know about Mom on that afternoon of skiing. That she had been abandoned by her father when she was just a few years older than I was on that day. With no one to pay the bills, Mom dropped out of school her sophomore year in high school to go to work in New York City with her older sister. She was 16 years old.
“At any moment the wolves could be back at the door,” she would tell me later in life.
Those metaphoric wolves always seemed to return. My mother was pregnant with two children at home when her first husband’s career foundered in the early 1950s. With little money and no prospects, she took charge. She found a way to terminate the pregnancy, illegally, and she went back to work, becoming the family’s sole breadwinner. A working woman in the Mad Men world of the 1950s in New York, first as a TV broadcaster, then a broker on Wall Street and an executive for Pepsi.
During those years her father would show up now and again looking for a bed and a TV set to watch the Orioles.
“You can’t live here anymore,” she told him one day.
And with that they didn’t see one another for decades.
What I knew for sure about my mother as a 12-year-old was that she was beautiful, smart, competitive, and athletic. I could sense her power, a power I didn’t understand, I just knew it was there. It would be years before I would grasp how unconventional she was for her time, and how admired she was—and also harshly judged and disliked, told once by none other than Mother Teresa that she would go to hell for championing contraception and abortion rights.
••••
The afternoon was windless, the sun poked through the clouds onto slopes glistening with new snow. It being a weekday, the runs were empty. We traded the lead on laps off a long T-bar.
After an hour or so we boarded a four-person gondola and took it to the summit where she instructed me to follow her through a break in the trees on a narrow track in fresh snow. Eventually she veered off the established route. We glided along for a few minutes until we emerged from the forest in a meadow that dropped away toward some barns in the distance below.
“It’s so quiet,” she marveled. Then, not waiting for a reply, she turned and started down.
I felt a tug of apprehension. Did she know where she was going? I watched as she made one turn after another, tracing a corkscrew through the snow.
I caught up with her at a fence line, a shin-high thread of wire crossing the slope.
“Just step over the wire.”
She pushed off again.
Biddle Duke, waiting for his family at the bottom of the slopes, Andorra, 1966
Mom wasn’t a particularly strong skier. She’d picked it up in her early 20s on weekends in the 1940s when she was working in New York City as a newspaper reporter. Somehow, she would pull together enough money to take the overnight Snow Train north to North Conway, N.H., and other New England villages that had strung up rope tows and brought instructors over from Europe. What she’d learned was a steady, careful style.
She was introduced to skiing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Seeking to lift American spirits and the economy amid the grim shadow of the First World War and the Great Depression, the fair’s theme was “Dawn of a New Day… the World of Tomorrow.” The fair’s bright optimism would soon be crushed by the atrocities and inhumanity unfolding in Europe as it opened.
It was a massive undertaking, drawing exhibitors from 33 countries, showcasing the era’s innovations, and celebrating each country’s culture and art. For the first time in America, television—grainy black and white—was unveiled to the masses at the fair’s RCA pavilion. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech opening the fair was the first appearance of a president on television.
My mother was among the millions who flocked to the fair at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. She would forever talk about the experience. It introduced her to the world, huge and mysterious then, especially for a young woman whose life had extended no further than a triangle between her childhood in Baltimore, summers at the Maryland shore, and New York City.
Visiting one foreign exhibit after another she began to understand the immensity of what was happening across the Atlantic. Hitler’s troops were marching across Europe, countries were collapsing, and every day a new pavilion at the fair was closing its doors, its young delegates returning to Europe to fight the Germans.
The skis at the Polish pavilion caught my mother’s eye, the latest models with metal edges and cable bindings. Alpine and Nordic skiing was sweeping Europe and making inroads in the United States. A spirited athlete as a teenager—swimming and field hockey—she’d heard something about this thrilling winter sport, but the closest she had come was modeling the winter fashions at Lord & Taylor and other department stores where as a teenager she had worked as a floor model.
A few weeks later, when the Polish exhibit was closing, she headed back to Queens and brought the ski equipment home.
She first tried out her new gear on the snow-covered streets of Manhattan. But she would always credit a few group lessons she took with the father of modern-day skiing, the Austrian Hannes Schneider, on Cranmore Mountain in New Hampshire.
My mother was drawn to the sport because it was beautiful and fun and, as someone who never had time for pointless pursuits, she loved that it was wonderfully pointless. The height of luxury. The sport was also drawing an elite, adventurous crowd to which she wanted to belong.
Skiing became a central part of her life. When she announced to her two children from her first marriage that she was engaged to marry my father, my brother Jeffrey considered this news for a moment, then wisely observed: “That’s great, Mom. But is he a skier?”
He was not. Mom made him one.
••••
The last time my mother and I skied together was on a golf course in Vermont. She was 85. We shuffled along behind my little terrier.
“Do you remember that day you took me out of school to ski the powder?”
“Of course!”
“You fibbed to get me out.”
“Did I? Well, do you think Whitehead would have let you go if I’d just told him there was fresh snow and we were going skiing?” she said.
So often, you have to fib to have a little fun—to avoid trouble, to not make people feel left out, or just because not everyone has such privileges. I absorbed this subtle message, and kept it close, the idea of secreting fun, of being discreet about blessings, however you come by them. Just doing something you love—stealing sweet moments just for yourself, away from the public eye—offers deep satisfaction. A mother’s unexpected gift.
Biddle Duke and his mother, Robin Duke, the last time they skied together, in Stowe in 2009. Robin died in 2016.
••••
Some years ago, sensing the corporate and capitalist siege on the soul of skiing—exorbitantly expensive, an industry-wide drive to luxury, many ski areas more crowded than ever with the fun and adventure squeezed out by evermore rules—an editor asked me to search for the soul of our sport and pastime, and to come back to her with what I found. This vague, high-minded assignment was an impossible tease. I’ve wandered around on that search for years.
I’m an admittedly grumpy skier these days. At some point over the past decades, ski areas, particularly in North America, became ski resorts, both in name and in practice. I detest that shift. I’m no fan of resorts, be they beach, golf, sailing, or whatever. Resorts are places of safe leisure, pampered retreats from the world, purpose-built, with needs catered to, with campus maps, guides, and endless rules, with greeters in uniforms and name tags, a business like any other. True soul is fed by the imagination, yet so little at ski resorts inspires the imagination anymore. Something intangibly compelling—adventure, mystery, a touch of magic—is slipping away.
Yet, the soul of skiing (and snowboarding, for that matter) is more elusive these days. But it is there, in plain sight, beyond all the noise, expense, and hassle of the resorts. It’s just a question of paying attention.
I asked an old friend, a mountain guide with whom I have spent hours climbing on skis in silence, about the soul of skiing. He had laughed at first but did not reply. Some days later we were on a chairlift, and he pointed to a woman sitting on a bench on a high snowy walking path, admiring the view, her dog at her side. She had come up to the snow on the train and set off alone from the summit station.
“There is the soul of skiing!” he said.
••••
Ever since that editor’s question I have returned to that day, my first clear memory of Mom the rule breaker and fibber, the risk taker, the seeker, the skier.
At the bottom of the slope, we glided to a road where we slid along, pushing with our poles, until we reached a bus stop by a roadside café.
“What fun,” she said, as we removed our skis, pointing to our tracks emerging from the woods above.
“The bus is coming in a bit,” she assured me.
Soon enough around the bend it came. It took my mother back to her car and me onward back to my school, where I made no mention of our afternoon.