The Paper Chase

by John Osborn

  He caught a drink from a passing tray, maneuvered himself around the groups, avoiding the clutter of furniture – dainty hardwood tables with little silver objects on them holding cigarettes, matches and candies.

  Ford’s back was to him, but he knew it was Ford. No sport coat, no tie, looking intently at a print on the wall behind a sofa.

  “Jesus, if this is supposed to give us closer contact with the faculty, someone has made a terrible mistake,” Ford said. “Did you know that Kingsfield has been giving these parties for the last twenty years? He does it for every first year class.”

  “It makes me nervous,” Hart said.

  “It shouldn’t,” Ford replied. “Everyone is getting bombed, or trying to kiss Kingsfield’s ass. No one will remember anything. Just imagine that you can vanish or materialize any time you want. Have you said hello to Kingsfield yet?”

  “He’s over in the corner. It looks too crowded,” Hart said, nodding in the direction of the group around the sitting figure.

  “No, that’s his daughter.” Ford smiled. “Can you believe that Kingsfield has a daughter? He’s in the study, running this party like he runs the class: fear, and trying to make us feel that we’re lucky to be here. He’s with his pictures of the Law Review of 1929, his casebooks and a big leather chair. He needs the setting. But I’ll tell you something, I like him. He’s an asshole, but at least you can grab onto him.”

  Hart would have been content to stay there, but Ford put his glass into Hart’s hand- “you can keep it,” he said -and disappeared.

  Hart walked to the throng in the corner. The students were thick around her. A couple of very well dressed confident-looking boys dominated the inner circle. Then Hart felt it. He came into the circle, pushed through the back lines and stopped where he could look down into the chair. It was an electric shock, a sonic boom, the middle of an atomic blast. There in the chair, where Kingsfield’s daughter should have been sitting, was Susan her face riveted on the nearest students. She drew out a cigarette. She smokes, Hart thought: Jesus Christ, she smokes. Twenty lighters clicked. Twenty hands reached down to the cigarette. She lowered her face to the nearest flame and, as she exhaled, looked back over the crowd and saw Hart.

  It was a blind disorderly retreat. He stepped back into the crowd, placed his drink on a table and went through the front door without his coat.

  “Excuse me,” he heard as he stood in the yard. He saw the maid holding his coat. Behind her, coming out of the door, was Susan.

  She tried to look serious, but the attempt failed. “Going home?” she asked. “Why, you haven’t introduced yourself to my father. Why don’t I take you in to meet him?”

  He tried to stare with his most piercing, most I-have- great-internal-rage look.

  She came down from the steps and took his arm: “I’ve spent the required hour. Let’s walk.”

  “It’s all different now,” Hart said. “The way you’re dressed.” He cursed himself for wearing his new tie.

  They were walking in the quietness of the old houses and the trees in the small front yards. The air was heavy, warm, Florida like air.

  “I can’t believe that you’re mad. On the other hand, I don’t know why I’m humoring you.” She let go and moved slightly away from him. “Do you think I’ve fooled you? Or could you be jealous? No, not that. Confused. You must be confused. Tell me about your confusion.”

  He knew that the relationship between them had shifted. Not only that she was his daughter, but also because she had controlled the situation inside the house.

  “I don’t know.” He tried to say it casually. “It was very mysterious, going for car rides late at night, your apartment. I liked taking you as you were, not putting you against any background. Why didn’t you tell me you were Kingsfield’s daughter?”

  “I didn’t want to be put against any background. Anyway, I’m not his daughter very much. I do things like this because he wants me to, but that’s all.” She took his arm again and she felt it had relaxed.

  “Where was your mother?” Hart asked.

  “Do you want to know everything about me? Shit, we don’t even know each other.” He had never heard a girl say shit before.

  “Is she dead?” he asked.

  “As a matter of fact, she’s blown her mind. She’s in a mental hospital, crazy as hell.” Hart tensed.

  “I’m not,” she added.

  11

  SUSAN SAT ALONE on the bed. The green light from the painted bulb kept the room dark and allowed her to see the tops of the houses across the street. She knew the room was a mess, but she didn’t have the energy to clean it, not now, so late at night. She would clean it the next afternoon. The long cord on her telephone played like a snake across the room and led under a pillow where the receiver was concealed off the hook.

  Perhaps it was the living by herself that made her feel so angry lately, she thought. Maybe it was just part of her character, an echo of her father. Hart would come over for a visit later. She vowed not to give him any shit.

  On the table by the bed were letters, thirty or more, carefully piled, in chronological order. The leftovers from last year’s love affair. She rolled over and picked them up. Letters written to her when Peter was only a quarter of a mile away. Why did they have to write letters when they saw each other daily in classes? Letters written to her from Europe.

  She didn’t feel anything for Peter now, except that thinking about him made her laugh. But the summer before she had started college, and through the fall and winter, she had really loved him. She had planned it all out. Marry Peter, wait until he finished law school, move to New York, live there while he worked his way up through clerkship, up to being a partner. Live with him through vacations in the Caribbean, through children. Peter smiling with a tanned face.

  Hart, hearing the sound of the record player, knocked loudly. The door was unlocked and the knock pushed it open. He walked in, closed the door and went into Susan’s bedroom.

  He was tired. He stumbled across the small bedroom and sat down on the floor under the window. The contract law he had been studying was fixed in his mind like a map and he couldn’t shake it.

  “I’ve been looking at Peter’s letters,” she said, pointing at the pile. “I was in love with him last year.”

  The thought of contracts vanished. “Oh,” he said.

  “No, I didn’t really love him.” She propped her head up on her hands.

  “Oh,” he said, trying to seem indifferent.

  “Don’t you want to hear about this?” she asked. “Don’t you have an interest in the wild exciting life I lead?”

  “Look, you’re going to tell me anything you want to, and not tell me what you don’t want to, so go ahead.” He thought this was a pretty forceful statement.

  “Well, he was this friend I fell in love with. We were down at Dad’s place in the Bahamas and we fell in love. But that’s not the part I want to tell you. The point is that he became completely dependent on me. He tried to monopolize me when we got back to school. He kept it up with letters, waiting for me at classes, making sure that he knew where I was all the time. His problem was that he wasn’t very smart, do you know what I mean?”

  Hart thought he did know. He said yes.

  “Anyway, I saw other people and it drove Peter wild. He decided he had to tame me. But as I told you, Peter was stupid. He had an affair to make me jealous. Of course, it freed me. I didn’t degenerate completely, sleep with everyone, but I stopped sleeping with Peter, not because of the moral implications, but because he just didn’t turn me on anymore. ”

  Hart began to get a tingly feeling.

  “Of course, it all made Peter go wild. He quit school and went to Europe. I had completed his transformation. He left in blue jeans, with the beginnings of a beard and a knapsack. On some odyssey to catch some of the things he’d missed out on. It was pathetic watching him go.

  “I went to the airport with him, I guess to acknowledge the fact that he was
taking a bold step, and to make sure he got on the plane.”

  She had rolled over on her back, looking up at the ceiling. She had her arms at her sides like a mummy, pressing them into the bed, lifting herself up slightly, doing a casual exercise.

  “The letters are funny” … ‘my dearest … what is life without you.’… Terrible. Peter had a hard time communicating the depth of his feeling. It all started out very seriously and ended as a comedy. I think you can only take your first love affair seriously and then, only if it happens to you when you’re young enough to take it to heart. The difference between Peter and me was that I was smart and Peter was stupid. If I hadn’t helped him, he’d still be going to law school and raising stupid kids in the suburbs. I banished him to the colonies because I was tougher.”

  12

  “WHAT ARE WE going to do about practice exams?” Kevin asked.

  Exams. The word made the study group look up from their notes. Except Hart. He was gazing out the window, in better shape now because he was getting some sleep, but thinking about other things.

  “Nothing,” Ford said. “Practice exams don’t count. We aren’t going to do a thing. Just keep pointing toward the end of the year, Kevin. You’d just have to relearn it all then anyway. ”

  “But we can find out how we stand. You know, whether one of us needs special help,” Kevin said.

  “You need special help,” Bell said. “And you too, O’Connor. You both need shrinks.” Bell chuckled to himself.

  The beginnings of Bell’s property outline were nestled strategically between his arms. Two hundred tattered yellow sheets, wrapped in clear plastic. His eyes kept moving from side to side, and when Hart, sitting next to him, looked over, Bell shielded the papers with a palm as if Hart were cheating.

  “I agree with Ford,” Anderson said. “I’ve given the problem considerable thought and in terms of maximum grade point, the most sensible thing is not to study. Use the exam as a check on your studying habits. See how much you retain as a result of normal studying procedure. Then you will be able to measure accurately how much extra studying you will need for the real test at the end of the year.”

  Hart saw a sparrow fly down and land on the grassy yard between the dorms. He watched it pecking among some leaves.

  “I thought we might all study together for practice exams,” Kevin said, looking down at the table. “It would give us a chance to see how we’ll work together at the end of the year.”

  “Listen, Kevin,” Ford said, “we don’t have time to get up for this exam. It doesn’t count.”

  “What I’d really like to do is talk about the way to take the exam,” Kevin said.

  “It’s not so bad an idea,” O’Connor said, pulling himself up so he seemed taller and glaring at Bell. “I’d like a session on examsmanship.”

  “You need someone to hold your hand?” Bell muttered. The words grated on Hart’s ears. His eyes lost their focus on the sparrow.

  “Kevin, there isn’t enough time,” Ford said. “Listen, they don’t count. Listen to Anderson, he knows what he’s talking about.”

  Ford shuffled his notes together and looked away from Kevin. “All right,” Ford said, clearing his throat, “I want to get into the statute of frauds today.”

  Kevin cut him off. “I’m not ready yet.” He spat out the words and then was surprised and unsure.

  Ford swung his head over to Kevin slowly, looked him up and down. He tapped his pencil down on the table.

  “The whole statute is given on page fifteen hundred,” Ford said. “We’d better go over it together, before we review what was said in class.”

  Kevin’s face went red and then drained of color. He half rose from the table.

  “Who do you think you are? King shit? You don’t run things. You don’t run me,” Kevin yelled.

  Hart put his hands up to his head, covering his ears with his fingers and his eyes with his palms. But he could still hear Ford’s answer, coming in a quiet monotone.

  “You talk too much, Kevin, and you give everyone around here a pain in the ass. If you don’t like things, leave. But figure on this. We can get along without your outline. Can you get along without ours?”

  Hart stood up. He felt sick. He put his hands down on the table and bent over so his head was only a foot from Ford’s.

  “Shut up, will you,” Hart hissed. “Just shut up.”

  When I was an undergraduate we cornered McNamara in the street. About two thousand of us surrounded him and lay down in the road, not letting him leave. Finally, he agreed to answer three questions and climbed on top of a car. A skinny boy with glasses was standing near the car. He screamed in McNamara’s face: “How many children have been killed in Vietnam?” McNamara said the question was unfair: no one had any idea how many. The boy tensed into a steel rod, his face turned red, his body bent forward. With all the power he had he screamed back: “Why don’t you know, don’t you CARE?”

  13

  HART WAS STANDING in Kingsfield’s study. He hadn’t been able to sleep and, leaving Susan in the large bed upstairs, had come down and wandered through the house until he found the small study, perched behind the living room.

  He had turned on only the desk lamp. He wasn’t quite sure that the neighbors, knowing that Professor Kingsfield was gone for the weekend, would assume that it was Susan in the house.

  The desk was surprisingly small. The same clutter of objects that filled the other rooms but more personal-an engraved ashtray and pen set. The pictures on the wall fascinated him most. A picture of Susan, about five years old, standing on the beach smiling. She looked different in short curly hair. A picture of the three of them together; Kingsfield, Susan, and her mother, a pretty woman, smiling, holding the hands of the other two.

  “Are you interested in the study?” Susan had crept up on him in the dark, following the study light. It startled him, having her there without warning. Sleeping in her father’s bed was one thing but he felt like an intruder in the study. She picked up an oblong inscribed silver box, opened it and produced a cigar. Brushing by Hart, she sat behind the desk and struck a match on the big leather chair.

  “I played in this study when I was a little girl. I used to run the Dictaphone.” She leaned back in the chair, striking the pose of the Columbia student who had been photographed in Grayson Kirk’s office. The allusion was lost on Hart. But the sight of her naked, smoking her father’s cigar and leaning back in the chair made him nervous. She could do it-it was her father-but he was an intruder.

  “Sit down, boy,” she said, in mock seriousness. “They tell me you have special problems. Maybe you ought to get involved with a nice girl and settle down.”

  She opened the cabinet behind the desk, took out a bottle of bourbon and poured Hart a glass. “Have a drink of this, son, it will give you strength for the battle ahead.”

  He sat down with the drink.

  Behind Susan’s head was a graduation picture of thirty or so serious, suited young men. Kingsfield was in the middle of the group. Susan could tell Hart was looking past her.

  “That’s the Law Review of 1929: two chief justices, and Dad. He put the picture where you have to look at it.”

  “I feel funny,” Hart said. “This is his special room.” He picked up the silver ashtray. It had an inscription on it, a squash prize, 1926. “Do you think he’d like us drinking in his room?”

  “Hell,” Susan said. “He’s in New York. He’ll never know you or I were here. There is absolutely nothing, nothing, not one thing in the entire world, to worry you. You just lean back and talk to me. Besides, don’t you think he’d want you to see it all? You’re behaving just the way he’d want you to behave. Picking up his little silver mementos, looking at his Law Review picture. You act like a student in a seminary. It’s just what he’d want. To have you fondle his things.”

  She blew the smoke out of her mouth in a hard push and looked at Hart as though she was tired. He smiled, trying to break her new mood. He put
his feet up on the desk, touching her toes with his.

  “You know, Susan, when I’m in class with your father I feel like he knows me, as though when he calls on me he had it all planned out, like he’s watching my progress. I feel like we’re talking about things. You know, when he asks me a question, like he cares about how I do.”

  She turned in her chair, looked past him, took a sip of her drink and laid the cigar on the table. Then she looked directly at his eyes, hard. She took a deep breath.

  “You’re going to get screwed. You’re a nice guy but you’re going to get screwed. There isn’t any middle ground. If you start thinking like that you’ll never be able to survive. Hell, it’s all got to roll off your back. Do you think my father even knows who you are? Do you think he’d care, even if he did know? What do you think law school is all about? You have to ignore it, or you have to be able to take it. You have to float with it or you have to wade through not thinking it’s there.”

  Hart was surprised she’d taken it so seriously. He put the little ashtray back on the table. “Listen,” he said, “you’re a beautiful naked girl sitting right across from me and if you start getting serious, you’ll blow my mind.”

  He got up and came around the desk, put a hand around her head and pulled it into his chest. He stood that way, waiting for her to move.

  14

  HART GOT BACK to the dorm late Sunday night. He dropped his books on the bed and then turned on the light. Standing by the window, dressed in his vest and suit pants with a striped tie fluffed neatly away from his white shirt, was Toombs.

  “Oh, hello,” Toombs said.

  “Can I do something for you?” Hart said, angry to be back in the dorm and angry that someone had come in without asking.

  “Can I do something for you?” Toombs said. “I finished working and I thought you might like to talk about your dorm problems.”