Admission (62 page)

The truth was that she had long ago consigned Tom to his own life, with his family and unsurprising career path, in the very
Boston suburb from which he had sprung. Once a year, on average, she did dream of him, but the Tom in her dreams did not confront
or condemn her. He didn’t cry or wring his hands. On the contrary, he did mindless things with her, mundane things. Married
things, it occurred to Portia now, like going to a movie and walking out because it was boring, or kissing her on the cheek,
or watching children in a Christmas pageant. It was hardly passionate (even the kissing) and never emotionally fraught, except
for one time many years ago, when her dream self had stood in Tom’s (imagined) tasteful kitchen, with hands on hips, and reminded
him (reminded him?) that he had another child, and what kind of father did he think he was? She had woken from that dream
in a motel on the Oregon coast, heart pounding, the waves outside pounding, sweaty and cold and unable to calm herself. But
only that one time. And when it happened next, a year or more later, they were back in the school auditorium or at the movies.

Away downstairs, the phone was ringing again, its tinny, accompanying voice a half step behind:

“Call from… Princeton… Univ.… Call from… Princeton… Univ.…”

Surely the office. Clarence or Corinne or possibly Martha, checking to see when she would be back. That was a relief. Yesterday
there had been several, presumably from John:

“Call from… cell phone… NH.… Call from… cell phone… NH.”

Which she, of course, had not answered either. John, she could not face. She couldn’t stand to think of him waking up (in
the morning? in the middle of the night?) to wonder what had happened to her (bathroom? kitchen? insomniac nighttime jog through
the muddy Pennsylvania countryside?) or, worse, somehow intuit everything, know everything. Perhaps by now they had all gleaned
the meaning of her abrupt departure, or perhaps she had been seen, frozen in place in the upstairs hallway like Lot’s too
curious wife, punished forever for what she had done.

Once, in the application essay of a young scientist, she had read a graphic description of latent tuberculosis: deactivated
infections walled off behind a casement of immune cells in the lung. They could stay that way for years, the boy had written,
silently ticking, doing no outward harm, and then, without warning, burst open to flood the body with what he had memorably
termed an “untidy” form of death. But that’s me, Portia had thought, fighting off a wave of dread as she checked “High Priority—Admit”
at the bottom of that page, how many years ago? Her latent disease, outwardly doing no harm, inwardly building to a slaughter:
necrotic, poisonous, infectious, terminal. In August, it would be eighteen years. Eighteen years a-growing, like the child
himself. Eighteen years of searching faces on the street and in the crowds. Eighteen years of declining to hold other women’s
babies or play with their children. Years of walled-off longing. Of letting her few friends know that they should not ask
about this, of letting Mark believe that they had actually decided not to have children, of telling herself that if she were
meant to be a mother, deserved to be a mother, she would now have a one-year-old child, or a seven-year-old child, or a thirteen-year-old
child, or an eighteen-year-old child, but she didn’t deserve it because she had failed that child in the very first moment
of his life, and wouldn’t she just do the same thing to another child?

Merely adequate mothers, mothers harmed by their own terrible mothers, rotten mothers who destroyed their children in manners
too numerous to conceive—they didn’t give their children away. They held them and brought them home and took care of them—sometimes
poorly, sometimes wrongly, but as well as they could. Those lousy parents, at least, had tried. Portia hadn’t even tried.
She had done what none of them had done, refusing even to look at the baby who moments before had been inside—
inside
—her own body. She hadn’t touched him or carried him. She hadn’t named him, even to herself. There weren’t words for the terrible
thing she had done, the terrible thing she was. Her only hope had been to keep it from herself and thus from anyone else who
might have some misconceived inclination to think well of her—to love her.

She had phoned in some fraudulent malady to the office and also fraudulently claimed to be working at home, and ordinarily
this would have been true, but in fact she had not been able to face a single one of the files Martha had pressed on her.
Without them, there was no buffer, no distracting wedge to place between herself and herself, as she had—she now understood—been
doing for years. In the great annual bombardment of lives—little lives, lives unmarred by the kind of gruesome and incapacitating
flaw in her own life—there had lain the means of constant evasion, and now it occurred to her that this might be the very
reason she had thrown herself back into it, year after year, to wade among the hundreds and thousands and ultimately hundreds
of thousands of seventeen-year-olds, all fresh and new, none of whom could possibly be the one she had been looking for all
along.

Now, that was finished. Now—this year—all of the names and aspirations and batting statistics and Latin citations and FFA
honors and part-time jobs tutoring the neighbors’ children in math belonged to seventeen-year-olds who might just possibly
know her son. They might have run cross-country alongside her son or smoked cigarettes behind the maintenance shed with him.
They were the cohorts her son might have had and the girls he might have once been in love with or the kids on his language
immersion program in Barcelona. They were the classmates who might have beaten him in the student body president election
or fouled him on the basketball court. They were the possible deadweight on his biology lab team, the cheerleaders who perhaps
bounced alongside his football games, the buddies he theoretically passed time with in the inane way teenage boys passed time.
Maybe they knew him. Maybe they could tell her what he was like.

Or maybe they could, actually, be him. Her own son. Born Lawrence, Massachusetts, August 19, 1990. Name unknown. Parents unknown.
Address unknown. Interests unknown. Talents unknown. Future plans unknown. Thoughts about her, the person who had sent him
out into the world without seeming to care in the slightest, never to answer the questions he must have had or offer him the
smallest comfort, never to come after him—unknown.

And the worst of it was that none of this was new. She thought, bizarrely, of an old ghost story she had long ago loved in
a shivery, prickly way, about a woman who dreams the same dream every night: old road winding through woodland, house glimpsed
in the distance (on a cliff above the sea, of course), and how she walks up the long, long drive and knocks on the door to
ask the old man inside if the house is for sale.

“Oh, you wouldn’t want it,” he tells her with a curious expression. “It’s haunted.”

“
Haunted?
” the woman asks. “
By whom?
”

“
By you,
” says the man, closing the door in her ghostly face.

All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of these two ways:
You are dead
or
I am dead
. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves,
Who among us has died?

And then it occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.

Downstairs, the phone clicked alive in the empty rooms.

“Call from… Princeton… Univ.… Call from… Princeton… Univ.…”

Once, long ago, this would almost certainly have been Mark, phoning as he walked home to see if he needed to stop at the store,
or checking in on his way to whoever’s house they were meeting at for dinner, to ask her to bring a bottle of wine from the
cool corner of the basement, their most unscientifically maintained “cellar.” Neither of them cared overly much about wine.
When they found something that seemed good to them, they tried to remember the name, but if the wine store on Hullfish Street
didn’t have the exact bottle, they were soon once again in the morass of lyrical names and vibrant labels, as likely to vastly
overspend as they were to buy something everyone else seemed to know was dreadful. She hadn’t set foot in the cellar since
January, when she’d made one pointless visit to the chilly furnace, and took a moment to congratulate herself on at least
not having drowned their breakup in whatever Shiraz or Merlot or, she supposed, unredeemable plonk might be down there. She
wondered if Helen had been drinking wine or anything else as she slouched toward delivery. Europeans, Portia had noted, maintained
a disdainful skepticism about the proscription against alcohol in pregnancy, citing various intellectuals whose mothers had
apparently drowned themselves in Bordeaux; but Portia had once taken a class with Michael Dorris at Dartmouth and had seen,
many times, the professor with his adopted son, an addled, vacant boy destroyed by his mother’s alcoholism before he could
escape her by being born. When Dorris wrote his book about fetal alcohol syndrome the following year, she hadn’t even needed
to read it to know the connection was true.

When it happened to her, she drank nothing. She had done that much for him.

And he was brilliant. Eccentric, of course, but brilliant. Where had that come from? Not Tom, surely, who was smart in a plodding,
capable way. Not from her. Susannah was bright but scattered, Tom’s parents had been so closed off to her that she had no
sense of what they thought, let alone how. The person she had always thought of as
I’m OK—You’re OK
couldn’t have had that much to contribute to Jeremiah, could he? Unless… what if he had been some sociologist or critic, preparing
a blistering lecture on pop psychology for the idiot masses? For the first time in days, Portia felt her face contract in
a strained approximation of a smile. Was it not the height of narcissism to suggest that of the hundreds of thousands of vapid
Americans who read that very book that very year, her biological father was the only one to read it for the purposes of scholarly
vivisection?

Perhaps she was getting a little better.

To test this theory, Portia sat up in bed, clutching her own knees, which, she observed, were still clad in the jeans she
had worn to Pennsylvania. They were slack with wear, undeniably grimy, and it occurred to her that it must be strange that
she was wearing them at all, and also strange that she hadn’t noticed the strangeness before. This is how depressed people
behave, she suddenly thought, taking a mental step back to scrutinize the cross-legged person in the center of her slovenly
nest. But the thought of being depressed made her smile again. She had never thought of herself as a depressive person. Depressive
people rent their garments and howled in grief and took to their beds… well, like this. But had she ever felt, actually, depressed?
She was a contained person, that was all. Even-keeled. Perhaps a little judgmental, but who could fault her for that? She
judged for a living, didn’t she, and it was ingrained, and she was a responsible representative of whatever it was she represented.
She wasn’t like Mark, who had had low periods, usually related to Cressida and the spiteful whims of his ex. Or her mother—Portia
could see now that those last years in Northampton, Susannah had not been her habitual steamroller self, that something had
left her household and her life when Portia departed for college, a slowly deflating balloon where the familiar person had
once been. Susannah had indeed been depressed, Portia supposed. Maybe for a long time. Maybe until that phone call only a
few months earlier and her crazy idea about taking in this mother and baby and just possibly starting the whole thing over
again. I’m not like that, Portia thought fiercely, even as a fresh reminder of grief came rolling through her. She meant,
she wasn’t like that in life—her real, actual life. She wasn’t a whiner or a self-flagellant or given to dramatic plunges
like… well, again, like this one. The tearful thing she might be now, the thing made up of useless limbs and a brain that refused
to make thoughts—it wasn’t really her. It wasn’t going to be her—please, please—for much longer, let alone forever.

She decided, in a very clinical way—as you might prescribe a course of supplements for some detected deficiency—to think of
the last time she had felt happy, and she found, to ever growing distress, that she was feeling her way further and further
back. Past the years with Mark and the various contentments therein, and the walks with Rachel, and the visits home to Susannah,
always careful not to show her hand, holding back, always holding back, and the pleasure of doing her job well, and how she
liked her house, or would surely like her house when it transmogrified, at some unknowable point in the future, into a home.
She thought of endorphin highs, the heady combinations of good talk and good food at the tables of their friends—tables, she
could not help but notice, that she had not seen since Mark’s departure. She thought of how good it felt when they—when the
admissions officers from the Ivy League and the other most selective colleges—had their meetings, nominally to build the fences
that kept things neighborly, but somehow also to fan their mutual flame: find the great kids, the ones who dreamed and toiled
and took nothing for granted, and bring them here, and give them what they need, and watch them change the world. Mark, when
she had brought him along to one of these conferences (only once, and many years before), had shaken his head as they drove
back to Hanover and said, “You’re all such do-gooders.”

And she had laughed, unsure of whether to take offense or be flattered. This was not news to her, of course. The newest admissions
officers spoke only of what they dreamed of unearthing in some inner-city school or depressed, abandoned town. The older guard
grew filmy eyed recounting the young doctors and engineers and novelists whose Cornell or Yale education had changed—no,
made
—their lives. That this rosy-hued altruism existed in direct contrast with the public face of the Ivy League admissions officer—which
was something akin to the Witch in
Snow White
or the pompous and dismissive Professor Charles Kingsfield of
The Paper Chase
—only added to the perverse satisfaction of the matter. Portia actually knew several colleagues who had indeed chosen college
admissions instead of the Peace Corps or VISTA or, more recently, Teach for America (itself a product of Princeton, or at
least one Princeton student’s senior thesis). Make the world better: her mother’s never actually articulated life philosophy.
And Portia had done that, she had, though Susannah herself had never gleaned or at least never acknowledged the connection.
She had been stuck, eternally stuck, on the notion that Portia toiled in service to elitism and exclusivity, that her work
was to preserve some antiquated ideal of American success as the exclusive property of already privileged white men. Susannah
had been addled by the undeniable wealth of first Dartmouth and then Princeton, as if it were shameful for an educational
institution to have too much money. She had convinced herself that her daughter, raised so carefully to make everything right
with the world, was in thrall to some imagined power trip of saying no and no and no and no, over and over again, all the
while unclipping the velvet rope to motion inside the sons and daughters of suburban stockbrokers and generous alumni. At
first, Portia had done her best to persuade her mother that admissions work was part of the solution, not a shoring up of
the system itself. She’d explained to Susannah that elite universities were hot spots of social mobility, that admission to
a Dartmouth or a Princeton could provide in four years what might have required generations a century before, and that the
beneficiaries of these shining opportunities had every intention of aiding their communities, using their intellectual abilities
to fix the problems that affected everyone, and serving as role models for others who followed. Where, exactly, was the problem
in all this? But Susannah had clung to her own barricades, and after the first few years, Portia had surrendered:
Fine, fine. I’m a maidservant to the patriarchy, a hapless flunky for the myopic American aristocracy, fanning the flames
of its elitist institutions so that future slacker generations can raise their kids in a gated community or play a round at
the Maidstone Club, just as they’ve been doing since the first Pilgrim bottom landed smack on Plymouth Rock.