Admission (22 page)

Gordon Sternberg, for decades the most celebrated member of the English Department (as likely to turn up on Charlie Rose as
he was to grace Princeton’s Web page with the news of some new book or honor), was undergoing a breakdown of spectacular proportions,
encompassing—so Mark explained to Portia—every aspect of his life. Sternberg, the author of classic works of scholarship on
a staggering array of literary subjects (he was a nineteenth-century man on the whole, but so brilliant that a brief, aberrant
fascination with Spenser had resulted in an instantly classic work of criticism on
The Faerie Queene
), was a former chair of the department and current power behind the throne—Mark’s throne—simply too important not to consult
on matters minuscule or major. He lived a few minutes’ walk from campus, at the end of a long street of stately homes, with
his wife and whichever of his six children might be drifting through, writing up their PhD theses or taking time off between
stints of fieldwork. Famously raucous faculty parties took place in the classically proportioned rooms, with legendary bad
behavior and marriages rent asunder. (Portia had herself attended many of these parties, often finding herself in the kitchen
with Julianne Sternberg, who—hailing from the Betty Fussell years of competitive Princeton entertaining—refused to hire a
caterer or even allow the university to assemble the buffet.)

Now, with a clamorous jolt, it was all over—the marriage, the family, the career.

Sternberg, always a drinker, had imploded in a series of crises, domestic disturbances, a weaving car down Prospect Avenue,
an outburst from his seat at a visiting scholar’s lecture on Tennyson. Campus security had found him under his own office
desk at four in the morning. One of his children had gone to the dean of faculty, pleading for help. Julianne Sternberg was
not talking to that child, who was not talking to two of her siblings. The house, it turned out, was quite literally falling
down, with the ceiling of the large living room—scene of so many famous bacchanals—actually scattered over the carpeting and
the walls puckering from damp and carpenter ants.

The first midnight call came the week before the Thanksgiving holiday, and when Mark returned home just before dawn, it was
to deliver the news of Gordon Sternberg’s hospitalization at Princeton House, the addiction treatment facility of the local
medical center. “I knew this was coming,” he said wearily, pulling off his shoes again and lying on top of the covers. “Gordon
has been in terrible shape for a couple of years. I’m glad he’s had the crisis, in a way. Now he’ll get the attention he needs,
and they can help him.”

But three nights later another call came, this time from the police. Gordon had made some sort of escape from the facility
and next appeared at his family home, armed with a long piece of wood he had evidently lifted from a neighbor’s garbage pile.
His turncoat daughter had called for help as her mother sobbed upstairs. Now there were criminal charges to contend with.
This time, Mark didn’t come home till nearly ten the next morning.

Meanwhile, there was Sternberg’s advanced seminar on the Romantics, which had to be reassigned (Rachel, taking one for the
team, volunteered to step in), and the weighty matter of the great man’s junior paper students, and the half-dozen thesis
advisees, not to mention the graduate students and Rhodes and Marshall applicants to whom he’d promised life-altering recommendations.
There was Julianne Sternberg, who was herself becoming unhinged by the rapid implosion of her entire life, the sudden, brutal
divisions among her children, the financial body blow of what promised to be intensive and chronic care for her husband, coupled
with his abrupt lack of employment in circumstances that didn’t at all guarantee the seamless continuation of his salary,
not to mention the growing laundry list of legal expenses. And there was the small difficulty of one Ezme Johanna Castillo,
the unwitting catalyst for all this heartbreak. Castillo was a doctoral candidate from NYU who had been invited by Sternberg
to co-teach an advanced seminar on demonic preoccupations in nineteenth-century American poetry and to whom Sternberg had
apparently been declaring extreme devotion since the beginning of the fall term (to, she was insisting, her intense chagrin).
The English, comparative literature, and even, in a couple of cases, creative writing faculty had leapt into this sordid human
mess and begun thrashing about, milling gossip and schadenfreude out of the muck, calling Mark to register long buried grievances
against Sternberg, or little warning signs they’d noted, or confidences he’d entrusted to them, which they—being loyal, honorable
people—had kept silent about, despite their better judgments (which—seeing the clear price of their silence—they certainly
regretted now!). Everyone, naturally, wanted to talk about Ezme Johanna Castillo. Was she? Were they? Was it a case of an
unwitting pawn, lodged in the tractor beam of the great man’s stature and brilliance? Sorting out the complicity or innocence
of this person, which was technically not even relevant to the nuts and bolts of the Sternberg situation, and figuring out
what to do with her from the university’s official standpoint, began to consume more and more of Mark’s energy, as far as
Portia was concerned. As if, she thought, all would hinge on whether it was an actual affair, and if so, a consensual affair
or a coercive affair, or instead something confined to the now unbounded imagination of the rapidly deteriorating Gordon Sternberg.
So Mark interviewed her, and because he couldn’t in good conscience ask anyone else for an opinion on Sternberg’s and Castillo’s
private lives, he interviewed her again. And again. Then, apparently distraught, she disappeared, with nothing settled. And
who could blame her?

Sternberg himself at this point was ensconced at a treatment facility outside of Philadelphia and in some legal limbo. Officially
he was on medical leave, and the university was maintaining an attitude of prim silence on the whole business, but the entire
Modern Language Association seemed nonetheless to be on intimate terms with what was happening. At Thanksgiving dinner, which
Portia and Mark ultimately attended at Rachel and David’s house, at a table populated by no fewer than four other department-affiliated
couples (plus the ever disagreeable Helen of Oxford), no one spoke of anything else, and in the days following the holiday,
the scandal only waxed. Mark’s phone seemed to ring all the time—at home, too, as if the situation called for a suspension
of that civilized separation between time on and time off. Portia, who was attempting to get through thirty application folders
a day in her armchair in the corner of the bedroom, began to anticipate the interruptions and found herself becoming syncopated,
disjointed in her reading, which forced her to go back and reread, which slowed her down and confused her. She tried turning
off the bedside phone but then only heard the downstairs phone and the disembodied voice coiling up the stairwell.

By the following week, the wave of alarm among Sternberg’s colleagues, critics, children, nominal friends, acolytes, students
past and present, editors, and now, ominously, creditors seemed to be cresting, so on Tuesday morning Portia relocated her
operation to West College, with a box of Constant Comment teabags and the back pillow from her sadly abandoned armchair, a
move that might have signaled—to her colleagues, at least—an unusual situation at home. There, however, she was scarcely less
distracted.

Corinne stopped by early, to rhapsodize about her children (Bennett, the elder, had won some wrestling prize, and Diandra
had been invited to join the Andover debate team, even as a freshman!) and, with a martyred blush, announce that she had
single-handedly
fed twenty-five for Thanksgiving. Clarence, too, stopped by to sympathize, barely concealing his own interest in the English
Department morass.

“Mark must be stuck in the middle of this Sternberg mess,” he said without preamble.

“Right in the middle,” she told him. “The phone rings off the hook. Which is why I came in,” she said, answering his implicit
question.

“Ah.” He nodded. “Sad for the wife.”

“Yes. And the kids.”

But he was already distracted and moving on. “How’s your region looking?”

“Well, it’s early, of course. But the numbers are pretty much in line with last year.”

“Good, good,” Clarence said absently. “Do me a favor and look out for a Milton Academy student named Carter Ralston. Development
has already called twice about him.”

Portia wrote down the name on a Post-it note and stuck it on the end of her lap desk. “You want me to look for it?”

“No, no. It’s either here or it’s coming. Just make sure we talk about it. Anyone else?”

“We have a fourteen-year-old from Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Homeschooled. He has eight hundreds just about everywhere, and
six AP fives. His mother sent a letter saying she wants to come with him and have him live with her off campus.”

Clarence sighed. There were a few of these every year, brilliant kids twiddling their thumbs in high school or even middle
school, screaming to be let out. Emotionally, of course, they were unprepared for college life, and in general they were noncontributors
to the extracurricular life of the community. But even so, there was sometimes a place for them.

“Leave it on my desk,” he said. He turned to leave, then stopped. “How was that school you visited? That new school.”

“In New Hampshire?” She frowned. “Quest?”

“Yeah. I had a letter from someone on their board, a Class of ’60-something. He said they were doing amazing things.”

“Well… ,” she said skeptically, “
amazing
. I don’t know.”

“How’d it seem to you?”

“Like a work in progress.” She shrugged. “I mean, they’ve got the students milking the cows, but they’ve also got Harkness
tables. The kids are kind of different. Very secure and opinionated. I had one girl arguing with me about whether college
was necessary and whether Princeton was only branded prestige. I don’t know if the school is going to wind up looking like
Putney or Choate, but I can tell you they’re very serious about what they’re doing.”

He nodded. “We shouldn’t see applications for a couple of years, then.”

“Actually,” she told him, “I’m pretty sure we’ll get at least a couple this year. There’s one kid I met, I hope he applies.”

“Oh?” Clarence said, looking at her.

“Very gifted, and a little bit odd.”

He gave a tired sigh. “One for the faculty, then.”

“Whatever works.” She laughed.

“All right, I’ll let you get back to it. Remember to look out for the Milton kid.”

“Carter Ralston,” she read off the Post-it note. “I will.”

He moved off in the direction of his office, trailing cologne.

Portia read on. It was early in the pool, still before the official deadline, but the applicants and the high schools were
still adjusting to the post–Early Decision era, and it seemed as if a lot of these kids (and their advisers) were just programmed
to get their stuff in early. Maybe they wanted it done so they could get on with the out-of-my-hands portion of their senior
year. Maybe they wanted to convey that they were so together, so on top of the task at hand, that the deadline was incidental.
She had read a number of notes from applicants assuring her that while Early Decision might be a thing of the past, Princeton
was their first choice, and if admitted, they would certainly attend; but she put aside this information—if it was information.
Without the binding contract of Early Decision, they might be making the same vow of commitment to every college on their
list.

The art of admitting students to selective colleges had never really stood still, but the shifts and reversals seemed to be
coming thicker and faster, and the end of Princeton’s Early Decision option was only the most recent course correction. The
previous century had been a continual shuttle between academic excellence and “our kind of fellow,” and no move had been made
without a corresponding chorus of disapproval. Placate the faculty by tightening academic standards, and certain objectionable
immigrant groups became a bit too well represented on campus. Introduce the notion of “character” into the process to salve
the wounded alumni (and keep the Jews out, or at least down), and the faculty let you know how disgusted they were. Let in
women: Piss off the traditionalists. Beef up the football team: Watch the academics slide. Show diversity: Insult the traditional
applicant pool. Open the door to impoverished students from all over the world: Turn your back on children of the American
middle class. A Princeton class of one hundred years ago looked very different from the way it did today, which was of course
no bad thing, but Portia sometimes had to remind herself that they would probably always be tinkering with the idea of what
a superior applicant looked like. In her brief tenure alone, for example, a new focus on scholarship had seemed to take hold,
and a disregard for dabbling in any form was now entrenched. Gone—or going fast—was the reign of the all-around kid, the tennis-playing,
camp-counseling, math-tutoring, part-time-job-holding A student who was pretty sure he wanted to be a doctor or an investment
banker but was also considering law school. These kids had to know, from the cradle, it seemed, that virology or avant-garde
music was their destiny. Portia was sorry to note this change, not because it made her job harder to see the thoroughly specialized,
committed, and wildly accomplished applicants she saw now (it didn’t, actually), but because she herself had been the epitome
of an all-around kid: soccer team member, Amnesty volunteer, stage manager for the musical, book reviewer for the school paper,
honor roll perennial. Her own era as a desirable college applicant was now, clearly, past.

Officially, of course, colleges did not comment on such things. There was hardly an Ivy League press office declaring the
current fashion to potential applicants with
Vogue
magazine authority, and it took time for the new reality to permeate the culture. These kids were at the mercy of their parents
and advisers, too many of whom were still rooted in outdated thinking about what Princeton was sifting the applicant pool
to find, and it pained her to pass on these students who had clearly done, and done well, the precise things they’d been told
to do, who had become the very seventeen-year-olds they’d been encouraged to become, a project that sometimes reached back
to their infancy, with Music Together and toddler gymnastics. What it did to the kids—she saw that every day. But what it
did to the parents! One day a few years earlier, she had been stripping off her sweaty clothing in the locker room of her
gym when she overheard two Princeton Day School mothers lamenting the state of their children’s seventh-grade science fair
projects. One was distressed because a research partner would share the credit for her son’s experiment design. The other
lamented the fact that her daughter’s project did not constitute an original contribution to science. Portia, who was struggling
to pull a wet Lycra top over her head at the time, looked intently at the two women to reassure herself that they were joking.