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 always thought history should be taught from texts written by a country’s enemies,” Rostow said. “American exceptionalism does invite taking us down a peg or two.”