He did not belong. He was a teenager from Siegsdorf with a German accent and no inherited position in anything. What he had was the ability to observe with precision and to reflect back what he observed in ways that made the people around him feel that their world was being confirmed rather than challenged.
The Connecticut host families who took him in — who invited him into their homes, gave him access to their social circles, and seem to have treated him with genuine hospitality — were not wealthy in the highest tier. They were comfortable middle-class families with a generous impulse toward a foreign student. They introduced him to people. They let him sit at their tables. They gave him, unintentionally, a study in how a particular stratum of American life presented itself.
He was a quick learner. He absorbed vocabulary — not just English words but the register-specific vocabulary of people who had gone to certain schools, belonged to certain clubs, spent summers in certain places. He absorbed the markers of identity that functioned as social passwords. He understood what kinds of questions people in these environments would and would not ask, which claims would be received with admiration rather than skepticism, and which aspects of a person’s background could be vague without generating concern.
The green card marriage in Wisconsin in 1981 was his first documented use of a personal relationship as a legal and practical instrument. He was nineteen. He married Amy Jersild Duhnke and left the next day. He had been in the country for approximately three years. He had already learned enough to stay.