Admission (26 page)

She and Mark had never moved to Georgia, of course. They never considered following Marcie to England. What was the point?
Keeping their daughter away from him had become Marcie’s occupation. (The teaching job, nominally her excuse for leaving the
country, never materialized; instead, she became a volunteer at Cressida’s school.) Mark, for a time, was deeply depressed.
He took a year’s sabbatical and managed to bang out his Shelley book, but his life coalesced around the summer trip to see
his daughter in England and the occasional visits to Atlanta, where his time with Cressida was closely controlled by Marcie
and her parents. Over the years, he had managed to get his daughter to Princeton only twice, and only with Marcie ensconced
in the city, an hour away and in near constant telephone contact; and though Portia had been with Mark for most of his daughter’s
life, she had actually met the girl only a handful of times and had never reached anything resembling intimacy with her. Cressida
had been a complex child, suspicious (naturally) of her father and anyone around him, slow to show pleasure of any kind. Later,
as an adolescent, she had begun to explore the forbidden fruits of her relationship with her father, taking obvious delight
in the torment it caused Marcie, but with Portia she was still distant and mildly dismissive. In the last several years, and
thanks to e-mail, father and daughter had forged a definite (if virtual) relationship, liberated from Marcie’s control, and
Mark often spoke of Cressida now, not only to Portia but to his colleagues and friends, some of whom hadn’t known he had a
daughter in the first place: Cressida’s fondness for Wertmuller, her large and growing denim collection, the Coldplay concert
at Wembley, her choice of A-level subjects.

He was, in the most essential sense, a bereaved father, a man defined by what had been taken from him, which was why it had
always surprised Portia that Mark had not asked her for another child. There was no other child, she had decided. There was
only the stolen one, the rightful one whom he had failed in her first, fragile moment, then spent every moment since apologizing
to. And that, she certainly understood. Though she had never told him how much, or why.

Near New Haven, they stopped at a Starbucks drive-through for coffee, then turned north. She was beginning to think herself
ahead, to do the necessary self-adjustment for what lay at the end of the road. Mark would find the visit difficult enough,
but Portia had a special burden: to salve his dislike of Susannah even as she mustered her own affection from its hiding places.
And the girl, the pregnant girl. How she would meet this absurdity, this gruesome challenge, she had no idea. They were due
to spend six days, returning Sunday. An actor prepares, she thought grimly.

“I need to stop,” Mark said quietly. Hartford loomed ahead, rearing up suddenly like the Emerald City. She looked at him.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m not,” he confirmed. He took an exit for the city center. She turned in her seat, watching him.

“Do we need to go to a hospital?” she said, afraid. He had the look of someone barely contained: one nudge, one word, away
from some terrible release. He guided the car around a one-way system of downtown streets. There was a park, a chain hotel,
a pizza restaurant. He turned a corner and pulled over. “Mark,” said Portia, “what can I do for you? Are you going to be sick?”

He shook his head.

“Mark?”

He was hunched forward, as far as the steering wheel would allow. She saw fingertips with bitten nails emerge from his thick,
graying hair. He was making a sound she could not immediately identify, a fascination in itself. Not pain, but pain, emitted
from a location so deep and so impacted that it seemed to emerge in wisps of labored breath. She put her hand on his shoulder,
but he shook it away. “Don’t,” he said simply.

“Are you in pain? Do you need a doctor?”

“No, no,” he said, but she felt for her cell phone anyway and opened it. “I said no,” he said bitterly, and she stared at
him.

“All right,” she told him. She was amazed at how calm she sounded. She was amazed at how she knew, suddenly, what was about
to happen, what was already happening and couldn’t be turned back. And how drab the setting, after all: this dull little street
in Hartford, a place, she realized abruptly, she had driven through hundreds of times but never actually seen. And never would
again, she told herself. After this.

“I can’t go any farther,” said Mark. “I just can’t.”

“Do you want me to drive?” she asked. But she was only humoring him. She knew it had nothing at all to do with who drove.

“No.” He still had his hands over his face, as if he could hide from her. “I can’t go any farther. I can’t go to Vermont.
I can’t go back to the house. I just can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

“Why,” she said dryly, “are you sorry? If you can’t, you can’t.”

Absurdly, she wanted to laugh. She was having a bizarre memory, of another Christmas trip, this time to Birmingham, where
his parents lived. Mark’s mother, a round woman with soft white hair and the bluest eyes, who taught at a local teacher-training
college. Mark’s father, tall like Mark and a bit stooped, in old corduroy pants and an ancient sweater. He was a university
professor, an economist who taught in Sheffield. He had another flat in Sheffield and, it seemed, another family there. They
all knew it, but nobody bothered to tell Portia, who made some gaffe about Christmas morning. The other family included little
children, and Christmas morning was theirs. Here, sitting in the still running car on this ridiculous Hartford Street—within
sight, it now occurred to her, of the train station—she was thinking of the blue bowl of satsumas on his parents’ dining room
table as they all looked at one another, alarmed and aggrieved, and how bright those orange fruits were, and how sharp they
smelled. She hated that house in Birmingham.

“Portia,” said Mark, “I need to tell you… she’s pregnant.”

Portia gaped at him. “Cressida?”

“What? Oh, my God, no. Helen. Helen is pregnant.”

“I know that,” said Portia, oddly proud of herself: an outsider with insider information. Then, in a violent, sickening moment,
she understood what he was telling her. There was no whiff of smugness, no pride at all. There was no vestige of protection.
He had tolerated their childlessness not only because he was not, in fact, childless himself, but because he had always held
open that door—not widely enough for the both of them, but only as far as he could pass through, alone. And the car was…
still
… running.

Now she was the one who was sick. Her folded arms were pressed tightly against her abdomen, holding herself intact, and her
head… it felt as if someone had taken it and shaken and shaken to empty out the blood, like a bottle with some sluggish, stubborn
condiment still lurking at the bottom. What was left? She didn’t know whom she was sitting beside. She didn’t even know where
she was.

“I can’t tell you,” he said, “how sorry I am. I didn’t plan this. I’m not sure I even wanted it.”

“But you want it now.” She was amazed to hear another voice. It sounded nothing like her own.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

She began to cry. This was a lousy development. It improved nothing. It set her back. For the longest time, she kept crying.
To her amazement, he offered only a hand, vaguely patting her thigh, as comfort. After a while, she took hold of it and flung
it away.

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” he told her. “I won’t make any trouble for you.”

“Trouble?” she screamed at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You can stay in the house as long as you need to. I mean, we’ll need to talk about everything, of course.”

She stared at him, blurry through her running eyes. She liked him this way, she found: indistinct, nullified. He was nearly
handsome, melting into colors. Now, he wasn’t Mark, only this melting thing in the driver’s seat, and anyway, he was about
to leave.

“I’ll go now,” he told her with infuriating kindness. “I don’t think I should go with you. I’m sure you agree.”

She didn’t agree to anything. On principle. But she said nothing.

“I just… ,” he faltered. “I can’t miss this, Portia. The first time, I made such a mistake. I can’t do it. I’m sorry I…”

What?
she thought wildly. “Misled me? Lied to me? Cheated on me?”

Soberly, maddeningly, he nodded.

But I,
she wanted to say,
have cheated on you
. Not that it was the same thing. Not that it was, remotely, the same thing. The same thing—that was the thing she had
actually
done and hidden away. If you only knew, she thought cruelly. But she wouldn’t squander it now. She wouldn’t cheapen it by
telling him here, in this
fetid
running car. That was for another time or, more probably, never.

“We’ll talk,” he said. “But now, I think I should go back. I’ll move some things out. We’ll both take some time.”

“Speak for yourself,” Portia said unkindly. “I won’t need much time.”

He let her have this. He was being noble, apparently.

He unfastened his seat belt and opened the car. Chilly air slipped in.

Mark unfolded his long legs and stood on the pavement. He went to the trunk and opened it, removing a small bag, and slammed
the trunk shut. An instant later, he opened her door.

“I know you can’t forgive me yet,” he said. “One day, I hope you will. But I have to do the right thing. I have to, Portia.”

“Like you had to fuck her,” she said caustically. “Nothing noble about that.”

He shrugged. He seemed to have tired of the conversation. “We’ll talk when you get back. We’ll be good to each other, I promise.
I promise for myself, anyway. What you do is up to you.”

He straightened up. He was so high above her. He blocked the light.

“Tell Susannah I’m sorry,” he said. And he left her there.

When we approached the gate of Dachau, my grandfather stopped suddenly and broke down. He refused to go any farther, even
though he and my father, sister and I had come all the way from Seattle to see the concentration camp. We stood looking at
him, not sure of how to react. We understood what he was thinking and feeling, but we couldn’t really understand. He had been
here before, when he was exactly the age I am now. There were no Princeton applications for him, though he was (and is) a
brilliant mathematician, winner of a national award for mathematics (at least, until the Nazis rescinded his prize and gave
it to the competition’s fourth highest scorer, and top scoring Aryan). There was no dreaming about his future, and what he
might accomplish at university and beyond. There was only the terror of watching his family try and try and fail to get out
of the country, first with their property intact, then with just their lives.

D
on’t wake Caitlin,” Susannah said with some urgency. She was holding the door frame with one hand and pinching shut her heavy
bathrobe with the other. She leaned out into the winter night, anxious and fretting, as Portia opened the car door. “Caitlin’s
asleep upstairs,” Susannah said.

Portia was not processing very well. Coming down the long drive to the house, she had seen her mother through the living room
window, her head with its long gray ponytail tipped forward as she read. She had seen the moment of awareness, the jerking
of her mother’s torso, the snapping turn of her neck. Susannah had leapt from the couch at the sound of the car, scurrying
into the kitchen and opening the door, frantic not to embrace, it seemed, but to quiet. Now, extracting herself from the car,
Portia found herself unable to look at her mother directly but saw instead the house itself, moonlit in the clear, starry
night, and the field behind it, and also moonlight on the field, blue and electric bright. Out in the field, prickles of cornstalks
and brush came up, spiky through the crust of old snow, and slashes of ice reflected black in that blue light, a landscape
from the moon itself, or Jack London. In that same instant, she felt the vastness of the night and her own smallness and inconsequentiality,
which was oddly—in the circumstances—comforting. She felt, too, an abrupt, not readily fathomable urge to walk directly into
that wild and limitless place, though the wedge of dull light from the kitchen nearly reached the spot where her car had come
to rest, and framed her own mother, that ultimate symbol of attachment, implying every comfort there wasn’t in the snowy field.
Without warning, a nimble cat darted for freedom past her mother’s legs, and Portia watched it as it took flight around the
side of the house and off in the direction of the field. The cat was not known to her. Her mother always seemed to have a
new cat, Portia thought.

“Go in,” she heard herself tell Susannah. “You’ll get cold. I’m coming.”

“Sh,” her mother said. “She’s sleeping.” Then, obligingly, she stepped back into the kitchen and closed the door, waiting
on the other side and peering through the window.