The house was on the five hundred block of Leonard Street, a working-class neighborhood. It had four floors. The front was faced with peeling clapboard and crumbling brick. The entryway was on the ground floor. Mrs. Wolinski eyed Rupert through a keyhole, then let him in. He took off his hat, sealing the deal for her. She was a bad judge of character, showing a childlike reliance on extravagant compliments and florid manners. “Mrs.” was an honorific, like the French “Madame,” belonging to age not status. She had had two children with three men, none of them the marrying kind, none of them still on the scene. “Their fathers were gentlemen,” she told Rupert. “They had refinement. You can see it in my girls. Vera, come here. Meet the new tenant.” Vera glided into the room. At seventeen, she was golden and silky, Greenpoint’s Lana Turner. Her older sister, Daria, lived down the street. She was a plainer version of Vera, already faded at twenty-four, the mother of three children under three. Her husband, an electrician, didn’t beat her when he was drunk, but he was tight-fisted, a skinflint.
Men were always buzzing around Vera, but she knew her value and, for the most part, swatted them away. She wasn’t going to have her mother’s life or her sister’s. She was meant for bigger things. Setting her eyes on Rupert as her mother showed him around the house, she sized him up in a glance. He’s it, she thought. He’s my ticket. She was wearing a cherry-red cotton sundress, which displayed a riveting cleavage. Even as his pulse raced, Rupert recognized the moment as kitsch film noir: the femme fatale meets the sap. His instinct for self-preservation kicked in. He was curt to her, on the border of rude, the Englishman’s standard response to a threat. Any other manner, he knew, would show him to be clueless, feckless, hapless. Mrs. Wolinski approved. He wasn’t interested in Vera, she said to herself; he wouldn’t ruin her. Vera knew better. “We need to Americanize you,” she said. She didn’t smile at him; she didn’t flirt with him. They had to come to her, preferably on their knees. She walked out of the room, brushing his arm with her breast. He lowered his hat to cover his erection.
Rupert spent his first week in Greenpoint walking the neighborhood. He took the GG train to the Fort Greene post office, and rented a PO box in his own name. He found the local Carnegie library, around the corner from the Wolinskis, and took out a card in the name of Robert Fairchild, using a letter from Ruta Wolinski as his identification. The librarians, he discovered, were helpful, especially when he told them he was looking for a church to join. He explained that his father had been an Anglican minister and he wanted to find a church that might offer the kinds of prayer services he was used to. “Do you know of any Episcopal churches with good music?” he asked. “With evensong? With choristers?” He saw that a willingness to ask for help served him, though less successfully than sincerity. What is it with Americans? he thought. They overvalue sincerity. He saw sincerity as a portal to egoism.
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?”