by Susan Rieger
Talking to the librarians gave him practice talking to women, though all of them were old enough to be his mother. Or maybe my grandmother, he thought. One of the librarians, Betty Frost, took him on as a special project. She called the Episcopal Diocesan office. A priest in the office recommended St. Thomas. “Best music in New York. No question.” She reported back to Rupert. “St. Thomas is the church for you. There’s a choir school and a men’s and boys’ choir. They must take their worship”—she paused—“if not their religion, seriously.” Miss Frost took her religion seriously. “If you don’t like it,” she said, “cross the street and try St. Patrick’s.” Rupert was moved. There are people who like being helpful, he thought, people who like doing favors for others. His old world had been so dog-eat-dog. Those who had been helpful to him he saw as extreme altruists, like Father Falkes. In the librarians, he recognized a new category of human being: the matter-of-fact, neither kind nor unkind, useful person. He ascribed it to the American character. He would do his best to be that kind of American.
Rupert called the British consulate. He said he was looking to play cricket in New York; could anyone help him? He was passed along to John Earlham, a young officer who pronounced his r’s like w’s. Rupert wondered if it was an affectation, an aspirational impediment. Probably not, he decided. The Diplomatic service preferred the real thing. Earlham was cool until Rupert had established his bona fides: Longleat cricket, King’s College Cambridge cricket. “What are you doing in New York?” Earlham asked. “Not sure yet,” Rupert said. Earlham would have liked a straighter answer, but he invited Rupert to play the following Sunday at Walker Park on Staten Island. Rupert was making his way. He had found a church and a cricket team.
By the end of his second week, Rupert had made three decisions. First, he would go to law school, he would be a lawyer; lawyers, even solicitors, were respected in America and they made good money. Second, he would find a working-class job, as a waiter or bartender, a job that wasn’t taxing, a job that gave him free time in the day, that paid off the books. Third, he would get laid, preferably without having to pay for it. He fell asleep at night thinking of Vera. He asked Miss Frost about law schools. She suggested Fordham and St. John’s. “Are you trying to convert me,” he said, when he found out they were Catholic schools. “Yes,” she said. “You’re too good to be a Protestant.” He smiled at her, shaking his head. “I need your help. Don’t let me down,” he said. She gave him a list of top law schools. “What is the Ivy League?” he asked a day later. “What is a standardized test?”
In between his law school research, he read Nip Ahoy, a book on mixing cocktails. He learned forty of the most popular. Six years of memorizing Latin cases at Longleat turned out to have its uses. The first drink he was ever paid to make was a Beam and Coke. “Right,” he said, suppressing the impulse to offer a Manhattan instead. He never understood the popularity of Coke drinks: the Cuba Libre, Jack and Coke, CCC. The English sweet tooth hadn’t yet swerved to sugary cocktails. The English still liked their drinks warm, rough, and alcoholic.
In his fourth American week, he found a job as a bartender at Farrell’s in Windsor Terrace. It was out of the neighborhood but on the GG line, an easy commute. He wanted a crash course on America; a bar was the place to find it. He’d talk to strangers. He’d break up fights. He’d be sincere. Bartending was a time-out occupation, a postwar non–Grand Tour adventure. It had more cachet than waiting tables. He could say, “I finished Cambridge. I wanted a break. I’m discovering America from the ground up.” Earlham, the real thing it turned out, a baron’s son and not a bad sort, seemed envious. “I have to learn to speak French to stay in the Service. Tell me how I’m to do that when I can’t pronounce my r’s?”
—
Rupert opened a bank account in Fort Greene, in his own name, the day after he got his first week’s pay. He had worked thirty-two hours, earning twenty-four dollars in wages and twenty-four in tips, all of it in cash. The work was tiring. Listening was the most tiring. It will get easier, he thought. He worried about money. He’d spent a hundred and sixty dollars in five weeks, though that included two months’ rent. He took twenty dollars and bought himself a pair of khakis, two white shirts, two white T-shirts, underwear, and a pair of tan suede desert boots. He deposited the rest of his inheritance, three hundred and fifty dollars, in a savings account. He was living on the edge. He had worked out a monthly budget: sixty dollars for rent, eight dollars for subway fares, thirty dollars for lunches and snacks, bringing his expenses, not including toothpaste and a movie, to ninety-eight dollars. His monthly income, he calculated, was two hundred dollars. He wanted to save a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month for law school. He wondered whether he could get by some days on two meals. He doubted it. Mrs. Wolinski’s meals were missing essential food groups. She piled on the rice, potatoes, and noodles, lubricating them with margarine and tiny dollops of gamey meat whose provenance was doubtful. Rupert suspected horse; he’d eaten it often during the war. Vegetables, when she served them, were turnips, sprouts, and parsnips, boiled for thirty minutes. Dessert was a butter cookie and canned peaches or pineapple slices. Fresh fruit never entered her house. Breakfast was always the same, scrambled eggs and sausage and a fried tomato, out of a can. Dinner, in theory, had a fourteen-day rotation, but it seemed always the same, barely better than the sodden meals served at his English schools. Mrs. Wolinski was also living on the edge.
There was another lodger, an old Polish man, in his late sixties, who came out of his room only for dinner. He paid an extra five dollars a week to have Vera and not Ruta clean his room. For ten dollars a week, Vera let him grope her breasts above her clothes as she dusted. She didn’t tell her mother, but Ruta knew and collected another five dollars a week in hush money. “Vera’s jailbait,” Ruta would remind the groper. “I’d hate to have to report you to the vice squad.”
As the days passed, Rupert found Vera almost blindingly distracting. He had never known such longing. Meals were a trial, the worst part of his days. Vera always sat next to him. “The old Pole is so disgusting,” she’d say. “You don’t mind, do you, Robbie?” He inhaled her even as he stared down at his plate. Sometimes, reaching across him for the salt or mustard, she grazed his chest with her hand. At other times, she turned toward him, brushing her breast against his arm. He fought the attraction by ignoring her, never looking at her directly, never speaking to her. Miss Frost stepped outside her librarian’s role and warned him against the Wolinskis. “Don’t stay too long. There’ll be a baby and it will be yours no matter who the father is.”
After eight weeks, Vera, gauging that his will was greater than his desire, decided to make a move. He got home from work at two thirty a.m. Everyone else in the house was asleep. She listened as he washed up, then went to his door and waited until he had turned out the light. She stepped silently into his room. She slipped off her nightie and slithered between the sheets. Rupert froze; his heart raced. “Go away,” he said. Vera took his hand and placed it on her breast. “I want you to make love to me,” she said. He took his hand back. “No,” he said. “I can’t.” “Yes, yes, you can,” she said. “I’m not a virgin.” Afraid to look at her, Rupert spoke to the ceiling. “Virgin or no, you’re only seventeen. Come back when you’re eighteen if you want to.” Vera got out of the bed. She pulled back the sheet to look at his erection. She leaned over and kissed it, as she might a baby’s head. “Until my birthday then,” she said.
Rupert had been tested and had survived. He knew he wouldn’t survive a second test. He went to a drugstore near Farrell’s and bought ten condoms. “One girl? Ten girls?” the pharmacist said. Taking Miss Frost’s warning, Rupert sounded out the bar owner about the possibility of sleeping in the bar’s back room. It had a bed, a sink, and a lightbulb. He could use the bar’s restroom and shower at the Brooklyn Y. He explained he was likely to lose his lease in a few months. The owner said he could have it. “Five bucks a week. Get your own linens. And locks.”
Rupert began to grow less afraid of Vera. She was becoming fawning in her attention to him. Staying up one evening until he came home from the bar, she leapt up as the door closed. “What do you do when you go out at night?” she asked him. “I see friends,” he said. “Do you see women?” she asked. He didn’t answer but walked up the stairs to his room. Despite his inexperience with women, he saw his advantage. He would let her pursue him. She was experienced. He didn’t want a virgin; one in the bed was enough. Not to show his ignorance at the hour, he went to pornographic movies on Forty-Second Street. They mystified him as much as they aroused him. He understood the nun fantasies but not the men who kept their clothes on. He would try it. He wondered if he’d like to bugger a woman. The movies made it exciting for the man and he was never physically repelled by girls or women, the way he was with boys and men. He thought of visiting a prostitute, but he was afraid of the clap. Vera was so clean, so young. He would wait for her.
The evening of her eighteenth birthday, Vera went out with friends. She didn’t go to Rupert’s room. He knew it was her birthday; there was a cake with candles at dinner. The old Pole bought her a gold bracelet. A weight had been lifted; he might paw Vera without the threat of the vice squad. Mrs. Wolinski raised his rent the next week to eighty dollars a month. Vera also raised her rate, to twenty dollars a week, and let him grope her under her blouse. She stopped cleaning his room.
A week passed, then two. Vera stayed away. Rupert ignored her. Finally, in the third week, he found her one evening in his bed when he got back from work. She was naked under the covers. He pulled back the blanket. He had never seen anything so beautiful. “Do you like what you see?” she said. “I do,” he said. “Stand in the middle of the room, for me,” he said. “I want to look at all of you.” She did as he asked. He walked around her. She was flawless. “Don’t you want to touch me?” she said. “Everywhere,” he said. She lay down on the bed on her back and crooked her finger at him. He unzipped his fly and put on a condom. “Come lie on me,” she said. “I’ll make you happy.” The porn instruction manual in his head, he lay on top of her. It was over in thirty seconds, leaving him exhilarated and exhausted. He rolled off her. “I think you should go,” he said. “Your mother might come in.”
“Only once,” she said. “That was like lightning. Don’t you want to do it again? And again?”
Rupert flushed in the dark. He thought only men in porn movies did it more than once a night. He didn’t know how long it would take him to recover. He leaned over and felt her breasts. “Let’s take your clothes off,” she said, unbuttoning his shirt.
Over the next three hours, he and Vera went at it in every way he could think of. The porn movies had been instructive enough, and Vera was also instructive. He used two more condoms and would have gone on all day if she hadn’t worried that her mother might find them. Rupert was past worrying when she left at five a.m. She had to wrench herself out of his arms. “Stay, stay,” he said. “I must have you again.” He lay in bed in a state of perilous ecstasy. He understood for the first time all the Church’s fulminations against sex. A man might ruin himself for sex. He knew he would do almost anything asked of him to have sex again with Vera.
Vera stayed away the next two nights. When she showed up on the third night, he told her to go away. “Why did you stay away?” he said. “I don’t want to play games with you. Games are for the Pole.” Vera took off her blouse and bra. He didn’t move. She took off her skirt and underpants. “Take me,” she said.
“No games,” he said.
“No games,” she said.
“Can I believe you?” he said. He turned his back to her, not wanting her to see his erection. She came up close behind him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t do it again.” He turned to face her. “What will you do?” he said. “Anything you want,” she said, and placed his hands on her breasts. He almost came standing there. He led her to the bed and lay down. He unzipped his fly and put on a condom. “Would you get on top of me?” he said. “I want to look at your beautiful breasts.”
—
Rupert decided to look at Columbia Law School. He would aim high. His brief residence in America had shown him that his accent would open doors that were shut to the huddled masses. He found his way to the admissions office, guessing it was the admittance office.
“I was wondering if I might speak to someone,” he said to the receptionist. “I’m a foreigner and I’m not sure at all of the procedures for applying to the law school.” He spoke in a clipped voice, pruned of all ingratiating notes and implying, ever so slightly, that the procedures and not his ignorance were the problem. “Let me check, sir,” the receptionist said, in spite of herself.
The director of admissions met with Rupert. Rupert told him he had an honors BA from Cambridge. The director mumbled “very good, very good,” not wishing to display his ignorance of English university degrees. When Rupert asked him if he’d have to take the LSAT exam, the director said he didn’t think it would be necessary. “I’ve never taken a standardized exam,” Rupert said. “I haven’t a clue what they’re like. What do they tell you about the candidate?” The director smiled, without answering, as if they both knew the answer. The director said he’d look out for Rupert’s application. They shook hands and parted.
Rupert’s research had identified Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and Michigan as the top law schools in the country. After his visit to Columbia, he thought he should look at one of the out-of-town schools; he decided on Yale as the cheapest train ticket. On a damp, drizzly November morning, he caught an early train to New Haven. He took along, to keep him occupied on the train, a copy of Karl Llewellyn’s The Bramble Bush, a grating and canny handbook on the study of law. The train was crowded. He found a seat in the last car, next to a shortish, balding man, with shrewd, crinkly eyes and ears that stuck out. Rupert took out his book.
“Are you a law student?” his neighbor asked, looking over at the book’s title.
“Embryonic,” Rupert said. “At least, I hope so.”
“Brit?”
“Yes,” Rupert said.
“Where are you going now?”
“New Haven. I want to look at Yale Law School.”
“Are they expecting you?”
“No. I’ll look around and see if I might beard someone.”
“Where were you at university?”
Rupert looked at his interrogator with interest. Americans never went to university; they went to college.
“I was at Cambridge, King’s,” he said, testing to see if his shorthand answer would answer.
“Ha,” the man said. “I was there in ’33, ’34, on a fellowship. Never so cold in my life. Chilblains.” He held up his left hand. “See this, permanent damage.” All Rupert could see was a prominent writer’s bump on his middle finger. The man smiled at Rupert as if they shared a secret. Rupert smiled back; for all the man’s friendliness, he knew he was being coolly appraised, as if he were a racehorse of doubtful pedigree. Well, of course, I am, Rupert thought. He waited for the verdict. It came seconds later, expressed in a small “hmmph” of satisfaction, as if once again the man’s instincts had proved him right. “Gene Rostow,” the man said, holding out his hand to Rupert, “dean of Yale Law.”
Rupert’s heart started beating wildly. O God, Thou art the father of the fatherless…The orphan’s prayer came to him unbidden. “Rupert Falkes,” he said, shaking the dean’s hand, “illegal alien.”
The dean smiled again, as if the last bit of information had been part of his calculations. “Shall we do some business?” he said.
Rupert told him he had read for the Historical Tripos and had come away with a double first.
“Good, good,” Rostow said. “Do you know any American history?”
“Scant and invidious. Puritans, the Tea Party, a written Constitution, cotton, slavery, Lincoln, the slaughter of Indians, Manifest Destiny, Jim Crow, Hiroshima, McCarthy. We English are sore losers.”
“I’ve read Carlyle on the French Revolution and Guizot on English history. Oh, and Tocqueville,” Rupert said. “He approved of all your charities. I hope to be a beneficiary.” Rupert had never before spoken so unreservedly to anyone. His usual offensive with men was to retreat into watchful silence, letting the other person fill up the space. Rostow, with his charm and warmth and interest, had made him, or let him, drop his guard. He looked down at his book as though he might have dropped it in his lap. He felt uneasy in his ease, worried he was showing himself to be a chatterer and a show-off and an egoist. He looked up at the dean, who was still smiling at him. He would go on; this was his best shot. “I’m not only illegal, I’m an orphan, a foundling.”
Dean Rostow agreed that Rupert shouldn’t have to take the LSAT. “It’s a test that tests standardized test-taking ability,” the dean said. “You’d be terrible at it.” Money was the big problem. “You need a full ride,” the dean said, “and living expenses too.” Rupert nodded. “Tuitions and fees are approaching a thousand dollars a year. You’ll get that. In addition, for room and board—we’ll put you in the dorms, if you don’t mind—we can provide a hundred and fifty dollars a month. You’ll have to get summer jobs after the first and second years. I’ll help you. Will that do it for you?” Rupert nodded again. His heart was racing; he could feel it pounding in his rib cage. His mouth was dry; he couldn’t speak. “Oh, yes,” the dean said, “green card. We’ll help you with that.”
The dean looked at him, locking his eyes on Rupert’s. “You’re capable of having a distinguished career. I’m counting on it.”
