The Prince by R. M. Koster

Author:R. M. Koster [Koster, R. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Political, FIC037000, FIC 019000, FIC000000
ISBN: 9781468306491
Google: j8v_aCv2et8C
Amazon: B00AMOOCGM
Barnesnoble: B00AMOOCGM
Goodreads: 17554106
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1979-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

25

At the same time they were expelling Alejo from the Tinieblan presidency, I was deposed from Yale.

This was largely Alejo’s fault, for he only partially disinherited me, giving me no money but passing me his tendency to push luck past the brink. I would never have made a scholar, but I knew the value of education and would have emerged as respectably degreed as Alfonso if I hadn’t been forced to live by my wits. First I needed money to live and pay my debt; then things were going so well I thought I’d build up a little capital for the future. In the end I was risking for the sake of risk, and besides, the influence of the gringo business-worldview had made me greedy. Like Alejo I went too far, and my luck ran out on me.

Alfonso’s bank draft arrived in New Haven a few hours after I did, but it barely sufficed to pay one term’s tuition. I had decided (in Tinieblas Airport) to support myself and repay Alfonso by gambling and calculated that I needed three thousand—a thousand for Alfonso, a thousand for spring term tuition and books, and a thousand to live on. There was that much and more at the Law School, where a pot-limit, table-stakes five-dollar-ante poker game was celebrated every night, but I needed a stake and therefore took a job as Spanish stand-in for Astor Dupont Pelf.

Pelf, who was related to a stock exchange of plutocrats and got an allowance of two thousand a month, had one obligation in life: to graduate from Yale as had every one of his male ancestors back to Isaiah Pelf, who had roomed with Nathan Hale. Upon receipt of a bona fide Yale B.A., Pelf’s daddy would provide a seat on the New York Exchange and Pelf’s mommy a bloc of chemical shares. Pelf’s problems would then be over, for while he was inept at academic subjects, he had a lively business sense. “An executive doesn’t clog his brain with details,” he would say in his Groton baa. “He hires experts.” And he applied this principle to his studies.

Pelf’s English themes were written by an assistant professor at Boston College, who received the topic by telephone and sent the finished work by special messenger. A Sperry-Rand physicist drove up from Bridgeport twice a term to take Pelf’s science examinations. Since his major was economics, he had three of the brighter graduate students on his payroll as consultants and met with them for brunch in a private room at Mory’s every Monday morning to plan his posture in class. For Spanish, where there were daily recitations and spot quizzes, he needed a full-time impersonator, someone who would show up at every class as Astor Pelf. His first appointee, a music major from Bolivia, had performed brilliantly for almost two years and had virtually fulfilled Pelf’s language requirement when he hanged himself from a shower spout during Easter vacation. Pelf was forced to drop the course and find a new stand-in to complete the last semester.

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