University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania stands at the origin of Sam Bowden's professional life and, indirectly, at the origin of his family's ordeal. It was at Penn that Sam earned his law degree, the credential that launched his career as a partner in the law firm Dorrity, Stetch and Bowden and that placed him firmly within the respectable professional class of New Essex. Yet the same institution that conferred upon him his status also handed his enemy the key to his front door. When Max Cady's defense officer questioned Sam during the trial that sent Cady to prison, the fact of Sam's Penn law degree emerged in the testimony, and Cady, with the patience of a man who had thirteen years to plan, filed the detail away. After his release, he traveled to Philadelphia, consulted the university's alumni records, and extracted from them Sam's home and business addresses. The University of Pennsylvania, in this sense, is the hinge between Sam's public achievement and his private vulnerability: the very institution that made him a lawyer also made him findable.

A Meeting at the Horn and Hardart Cafeteria

The university is also the setting for the beginning of Sam's marriage. On a Friday noon in late April of 1942, Sam met Carol at the Horn and Hardart Cafeteria near the Penn campus. He was in his final year of law school; she was in her senior year of the undergraduate school. The ground floor was full, so he carried his tray up the stairs, found the upstairs almost as crowded, and spotted an exceptionally pretty girl alone at a wall table for two, reading a textbook. Had it happened a year earlier, he would never have gone over and balanced his tray on the corner of her table and asked, "Do you mind?" He was not particularly shy, but he had always been awkward about approaching a girl he did not know. But it was 1942, and there was, as the narrative puts it, a new and reckless flavor in the world. The war was reshaping everything, including the courage of shy law students. When he spoke to her, she responded with a teasing recovery of her own: she happened to be doing very well in the course that had given him a rough time, and she told him she thought she liked him. The encounter, born of a crowded cafeteria and a world at war, became the foundation of a fifteen-year marriage that Sam would later describe as "of the very best variety."

The Address That Cady Found

Years later, the university's records became a weapon. Cady, having learned during the trial that Sam held a Penn law degree, went to Philadelphia and had someone check the alumni records for him. From those records he obtained Sam's home address and business address, and with them the means to find his way to New Essex and to the Bowden farmhouse just outside the village of Harper. The detail is chilling precisely because of its bureaucratic ordinariness: no surveillance, no detective work, no violence was required. A public institution's alumni files, maintained for the benefit of graduates, served as the intelligence that allowed a convicted rapist to locate the man who had testified against him. Cady was proud of the way he had found Sam, and he wanted Sam to know it. When he confronted Sam in the parking lot, he explained the whole method, savoring the revelation as he savored every piece of his campaign. The university, which had given Sam his profession and his wife, had also given Cady his address.

The Contrast of Worlds

The university also marks the boundary between the world Sam inhabits and the world Cady comes from. Sam's law degree from Penn is part of the constellation of achievements that define his life: his partnership in the law firm since 1948, his house on ten acres of land, his boat and his summer trips to the island, his healthy family. Cady, by contrast, is described by the private investigator Sievers as coming from "old stock. Hill people." The Cady family history, as Sievers recounts it, is a catalog of violence and deprivation: the father a moonshiner with a violent temper who was in and out of prison his whole life and married the boys' mother when she was fifteen and he was nearly thirty; the mother feebleminded her whole life; the oldest brother shot to death in a running gun battle with federal agents; the next oldest killed in a prison riot in Georgia while serving a life sentence for felony murder. Max Cady himself had no record prior to his Army sentence, but he was not an angel: he got into the Army after cutting a man badly with a broken bottle in a fuss over a woman, given the choice of enlisting or going to prison. Sievers' verdict is blunt: "He's one of the wild ones. They don't think the way people do." The University of Pennsylvania, with its alumni records and its crowded cafeteria, belongs to a different America entirely from the one that produced Cady. The novel draws the contrast implicitly but insistently: the institution that educated Sam Bowden is the same institution that, through its records, let a man from the hills of Appalachia find him.

The Fragile World the University Represents

The world that Penn represents for Sam is one of order, achievement, and security. His marriage, his career, his home, his children, his boat, his summer trips to the island: all of it, he tells himself at the novel's opening, is under control. "Everything was fine," he thinks. "The marriage was of the very best variety. Everybody was healthy." He has no savings to speak of, only a few shares of pale blue-chip stocks, but his hefty insurance program gives him a feeling of security. The farmhouse he and Carol found in 1950, after looking for a long time and hesitating over the price, sits on ten acres of farm land with elms and oaks and a line of poplars, all the front windows overlooking a far vista of gentle hills. It is, in short, the American Dream as lived in postwar suburbia, and the University of Pennsylvania is its educational foundation. When Cady's intrusion shatters this idyll, Carol gives voice to the loss: "The untouchables. And now something has come in out of the darkness and struck one of us down. The charm isn't working any more." She later reflects on her "enormous and infantile trust that this world was made for me to be happy in," a trust that the university, with its promise of merit and reward, had helped to build. The novel's arc, from the Horn and Hardart Cafeteria in 1942 to the siege of the Bowden house, traces the destruction of that trust, and the University of Pennsylvania stands at both ends of the story: the place where the dream began and the place where the nightmare found its address.