Admission (24 page)

“Do you have a good rapport with the college counselor?”

“Well, it’s new. But I liked her. I think the school would support him.” He got to his feet. “I’m going to run this by Clarence.
Can I say I discussed it with you?”

“Absolutely. And you always can. These are the cases that take it out of you. Well”—she laughed—“most of them take it out
of you.”

“Right. I was Mr. Universe when I graduated. Look at me now.”

She smiled at him. “You’re doing fine.”

“I’m thinking this isn’t for me, long-term.”

Portia looked at him. “I’d be surprised if it were,” she said, but in fact she was surprised. He’d been a find. Most of the
young hires left after a year or two, bound for graduate school or teaching, sometimes college counseling, but she’d had hopes
for Dylan. He was an orderly type who went with the gut. Indeed, he possessed that odd (and very rare) combination of opposing
characteristics that the best admissions officers had: a capacity for massive detail retention and a converse ability to let
go of everything but instinct. Lacking one or the other of these, you could certainly do the work, but it would always be
a battle. “We’d be sorry to lose you,” she told him.

“Well, it’s something I’m thinking about. I miss Latin. I miss Latin geeks.”

Portia smiled. Dylan had been his class’s Latin orator at commencement. Thoughtfully, he had provided his classmates with
a translation, letting them know precisely where in the speech to laugh and where to cheer, which impressed their parents
no end.

After he had gone, she sat for a long, illicit time, watching the late afternoon darkness fill her window. She was not in
a hurry. There was nothing to go home for; Mark was out, somewhere. Her only tether was to the armchair and the orange folders,
traveling slowly from stack to stack across her wooden lap desk, like that T. S. Eliot poem about the life measured out in
coffee spoons, except that she was measuring hers with other people’s lives, which they had measured into these life-folders.
Short lives, slivers of lives, fictions of lives. She opened the next folder.

Sarah Lenaghan, Brookline, Mass. Dad an attorney, went to Cornell. Mom a homemaker. Princeton alum, class of 1991. Portia
frowned. Nineteen ninety-one happened to be her own class at Dartmouth, though she hadn’t actually graduated until the following
year. Sarah’s mom must have had a baby right out of college. There were other siblings, younger siblings. Sarah’s mother’s
name was Jane. Portia kept looking at the dates, as if they didn’t make sense. Why should they not make sense?

So she was now old enough to have produced a Princeton applicant. So her contemporaries, in the time Portia had been reading
thousands and thousands of applications, living in New Hampshire, living in Princeton, living with Mark, had produced one
child, two children, four children in the case of Sarah Lenaghan’s mother, the homemaker. All those little lives, those clarinet
lessons and traveling soccer teams. What had she done?

Sarah was a runner. She had run the Boston Marathon. Her writing was vivid, so vivid that Portia could feel the pain in her
own lungs as Sarah hit her wall at mile nineteen. The girl was a wonderful writer. She wrote poetry. She loved Princeton.
She had marched in the P-Rade since the age of five, her mother’s first reunion. If Portia met the mother, Jane Lenaghan,
née Paley, what would they talk about? Their memories of the moon landing? The terrible hairstyles they had worn in middle
school? Had they watched the same television shows? Listened to the same awful music? She had a strange, thankfully passing
impulse to pick up the phone and call the number on the application to ask her, Jane Paley Lenaghan: “How can you have this
child? How is it fair that you have this child?”

“If I still had the opportunity to apply to Princeton Early Decision,” wrote Sarah Lenaghan, “I would be doing so. For many
years I have hoped to follow in my mother’s footsteps and attend this great university. Please know that, should I be fortunate
enough to be accepted to Princeton, I will absolutely attend.”

She closed the folder, then, gripped by a new idea, an awful idea, she opened it again and scanned the first page, the detail
page of names and addresses, e-mails, phone numbers. And dates. Sarah was born in December 1990. Portia’s fingertips felt
numb. She reached down for the pile of folders she had read through the afternoon and opened the first. Sunil Chatterjee,
born September 14, 1990. Beatrice McHugh, born July 24, 1990. Lucy DiMaggio, born September 9, 1990. Anna Cohen-Schwartz,
born May 1, 1990. Brian Wong, graduating as a junior, born February 23, 1991.

So it’s here, she thought. As if she hadn’t been waiting, and for years, for just this moment.

Ten years ago, my mother and father left China to move here. My father had been a research scientist in China, and my mother
was a civil servant. Here they run a take out restaurant, where I also work on weekends and during the summer. I must be the
translator for my parents, because they still do not speak very good English, and it is difficult for them to fill out government
forms and conduct their business. We live over the restaurant, so we are never far from the business. I see every day how
hard my parents work, and I am always aware of how much they gave up so that I could come to America and have a chance to
go to a great American university.

F
our days before Christmas, Gordon Sternberg walked out of his treatment facility on the Philadelphia Main Line and disappeared
into a Yuletide confection of affluent suburbia. One of Sternberg’s daughters filed a missing persons report, another spirited
their mother away to her own home on the West Coast. Mark was called in, of course, though there was little he or anyone else
could do. Still, on the morning of their departure for Vermont, he went into his office to make some calls, and Portia went
for a walk with Rachel and the dog.

It was a cold morning, comfortingly seasonal. The dog, a Labrador retriever of uncommon stupidity (even for a Labrador retriever),
was in high spirits and pulled relentlessly at the lead, especially when he sighted another dog. They walked along the lake
as far as the boathouse and then turned back, making their way up through the campus and along Prospect. As they neared the
Sternberg home, down past the depopulated but still magisterial eating clubs, they both slowed. In other years, these parlor
windows had showcased a bigger-than-yours Christmas tree, chockablock with gold balls, and the porch pillars had been coiled
with pine boughs. Now, silence and darkness in the huge house, and an air of thorough abandonment, seemed to mark the place.
Portia was struck by how shabby it seemed on this street of camera-ready holiday cheer, with its drab and spotty stucco and
still unraked leaves. It blared discontent and disarray, but for all its disturbances it had been a living place, a place
of contact, conflict, life. That, and not the silence, was what had made them stop.

For a long moment, they both stood looking. Neither Portia nor Rachel was sentimental by nature, but both knew they were thinking
the same thing: how they had met in this house ten years ago, at a large and loud gathering of English and comp lit faculty.
Mark had been newly hired, and the party technically had been to welcome him, but there was no sense of occasion about it
and no real order. Gordon Sternberg left Mark to fend for himself, and he seemed not to recognize Portia from the recruiting
trip the previous spring, when he had taken them to Lahiere’s for dinner. So she simply wandered, looking at the knots of
men and women in the hallways and rooms, noting the dusty prints of eighteenth-century London and Paris, the worn sofas and
downtrodden rugs. The guests, who were veterans of many Sternberg parties, knew that there would be platters of dolmas in
the dining room and spicy nuts in the living room. They knew the bottles of wine and Scotch were on a long table in Sternberg’s
study, cleared for the occasion of whatever the great man was working on. They simply entered the house, filled up on food
and drink, and went to their favorite spots to talk loudly with their favorite fellow partygoers. Everyone looked so comfortably
ensconced that she found herself unable to pick out her hostess (Julianne Sternberg had not, naturally, been at the recruiting
dinner), and in fact Portia—who couldn’t have imagined that Mrs. Sternberg would hardly leave the kitchen that night—would
not meet Julianne until some months later. She discovered a pregnant Rachel Friedman in the living room with Sternberg himself,
who was by then very drunk. Gordon, apparently the last human being on the planet to understand that alcohol was injurious
to a fetus, was exuberantly pressing an enormous gin and tonic on his guest, and Portia, in disbelief, had reached out and
taken it from him, distracting Sternberg long enough for Rachel to slip away (this was truly a selfless act, given that it
then condemned her to ten long minutes of intense face time with Sternberg himself). When Rachel caught up with her later
in the evening, she professed her eternal gratitude, then her astonishment to learn that her savior was the companion of the
guest of honor. Then baffled surprise that there was a guest of honor in the first place.

“What will happen to it?” Portia asked, meaning the house.

“Oh, the university will buy it back, of course. Then they’ll sell it, I suppose. Probably to another faculty member.”

“That’s so final,” Portia said. “I mean, couldn’t he come back?”

“Well, Mark knows better than I, but from what I’ve heard, I don’t think so. Not after teaching drunk. And the baseball bat
incident.”

“I heard it was a piece of wood.”

“Whatever.” Rachel shrugged.

“I feel bad for Julianne.”

“Julianne should have gotten out years ago,” Rachel said with a chilly voice. “I can’t fathom that kind of entropy. I mean,
my God, what must it have been like to be married to him? What did she get from him?”

“Six kids?” Portia said tentatively.

“Six grown kids.
Please.
I hope she’ll have a wonderful new life now. I hope she’ll have a wild affair. I hope she’ll dye her hair green and go back
to graduate school. Wasn’t she in graduate school when she married him? Girl interrupted! That’s quite an interruption.”

“It was a different time,” Portia said gently.

“Poppycock,” said Rachel.

They walked on, turning at Harrison in the direction of their houses.

“How’s Mark holding up?” said Rachel, pulling the dog back from an open garbage can.

“I’m not sure,” Portia said truthfully. “He doesn’t talk about it. Actually, we’re not communicating very well at the moment.”
She was aware of her hands as she said this, swinging, mittened. Then of Rachel’s hand, being pulled forward with the leash.
Rachel did not look at her, but she had heard.

“Rough patch?” she said after a moment.

“I suppose. Do you remember that dinner party at our house? With your friend from Oxford? He thought I was rude to her. Do
you think I was rude?”

“You? She was a horrible bitch.”

Portia burst out laughing. “I thought so.”

“I was appalled. I said to David, after we dropped her off, I had no idea she was so awful. She’d been extremely pleasant
when we took her out last spring. But he defended her, because she cried.”

Portia looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“She was crying. In the car. In the backseat. It was
very
strange.”

“You mean… wait, you mean she was bawling? Or—”

“No. Quietly. We didn’t hear her. But when she got out, we saw that she’d been crying. Honestly, it was really odd. And then
the next day she phoned us and apologized. She said she was just hormonal.”

“Well, it would have been nice if she’d called me,” Portia sniffed. “I mean, I’m the one she was rude to.” After a minute,
she said, “Hormonal?”

“Pregnant,” Rachel said shortly. “You knew that, right?”

Portia shook her head. She suddenly felt very numb. “No.” A block later she said, “How pregnant?”

“I don’t know,” said Rachel, hauling back the dog, who had spotted another dog across the street. “Who knows? A week? Six
months? She’s so tiny, how could you tell? When I was one month pregnant I was already enormous and covered in acne. Fred!”
she said to the dog, who was whining.

Portia walked, her head down. She was thinking of something, or trying to think of something. Just beyond her grasp, her ken,
flittering away.

“Anyway, you mentioned that night?”

“What? Oh, we sort of quarreled that night, after you guys left. I mean, it’s fine now, I’m sure.”

“Which is why you sound so sure when you say that.”

“Don’t I?” She laughed, but the laugh was not convincing. “I don’t know. I guess it’s only noteworthy because we’ve never
really been a contentious couple. We’ve always gotten along so well. We still get along,” she insisted.