Admission (63 page)

And yet. And yet. It might just possibly be time to cede the moral high ground, Portia thought dimly, observing the white
knuckles of her oddly bony hands, which were indeed offputtingly spectral. I have been as stubborn as she was. And besides,
there wasn’t much to be proud of in the scene she currently set: woman alone, in the middle of her bed, in the middle of the
day, in the middle of her life. Or perhaps not quite alone, as someone was apparently downstairs, alternately knocking at
the front door and pushing the doorbell, which had long emitted a weakened chime.

Portia looked resentfully in this general direction.

Alone, moreover, had not been thrust upon her, but chosen—she saw this now so clearly, she wondered that it had never occurred
to her before—within her relationship with Mark and beyond, in the people she had firmly pushed away, beginning with her own
child and following on with friends, colleagues, and now with the man who had miraculously emerged, long past the time she
deserved love, offering what felt astoundingly like love. All of that energy, she shook her head, spent keeping people out,
just so that she could maintain this enviable solitude.

The person downstairs seemed disinclined to leave. The doorbell rang again, and the knocking continued. They must be thick,
she thought irritably. She had half a mind to leave her bed and go downstairs and tell them, whoever they were, how thick
they were, or if not thick, then rude, because wasn’t this a clarion-clear
no
? And did they not understand the meaning of
no
?

Then, to her great surprise, she heard a key roll in the lock and the door swing open.

“Portia?… Portia?” The voice was shrill and laced with fear.

It was Rachel.

“I’m upstairs,” said Portia, but the sound barely emerged.

“Portia?”

“Here!” she managed, like child answering attendance.

“I’m coming up.”

A moment later she appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, anger rapidly replacing relief. “I’ve been calling for days,”
said Rachel. “Portia, do you have any idea how worried I was?”

Obviously no, thought Portia, but it seemed rude to say this.

“We’re starting committee,” she said, suddenly realizing that this was, in fact, the case. But when? Tomorrow? Today? Had
she already missed a meeting?

“Oh, bullshit. Look at yourself. You look like fucking Howard Hughes.”

Despite herself, Portia laughed. “Thanks.”

“And this house.”

“I’ve gotten a little behind in my cleaning routine.”

Rachel glared at her.

“You have a key to my house,” Portia observed.

“No. But I know where you hide your spare. And I was worried enough to use it. Clarence Porter called me this morning.”

She was suddenly very, very alert. “Oh?”

“He wanted to know if I’d heard from you. He said you weren’t responding to e-mails and calls. Are you trying to get fired?”

Was she? Portia thought. And the answer surprised her:
Not yet.

“No, I just… I’ve been down with the flu. As you see,” she said, sounding slightly accusatory. “And I went to Pennsylvania.”

Rachel stared at her. She was well dressed for a rescue mission: neat black pantsuit, leather boots with a modest heel. She
looked as if she were going to an office or coming from an office, if it was that day of the week and that time of the day.
What time was it? What day was it?

She was about to ask what day it was when it came to her that she really could not do that and maintain the illusion of well-being.

“I’ve been sleeping,” she said instead.

“Portia, I don’t know how much of this you’ve heard. I know you’re upset. You don’t have to do this alone, you know. You have
friends.”

What? She frowned. There was a “this”? “I’m not sure,” she said carefully.

“Of course you do. My relationship with Mark will never be the same, but I do have to deal with him. And I have to deal with
Helen, which kills me, because she’s a royal bitch. And I think they’ve both behaved terribly, but you know? It’s done. And
you couldn’t possibly want him back.”

“Back?” Portia stared at her. “I don’t want him back.”

Rachel sat on the edge of the bed. “Good. I know I’m not supposed to be glad about the wedding, but I am. I was dreading it.”

This statement was so baffling that Portia found she had to replay it in her brain before responding, but to no avail.

“I thought you didn’t like them,” she told Rachel. “Why are you glad about the wedding?”

“Canceling the wedding,” said Rachel, twisting a long lock of curling brown hair around her finger. “I thought I was going
to have to put Sea-Bands on my wrists, like when I was pregnant, to keep from getting nauseous in the church.”

“Rachel,” said Portia, almost unkindly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Rachel eyed her. “No?”

“No.”

“Which part?” she asked.

“Which
part
?” said Portia, completely lost.

“You knew they were getting married, right?”

Did she? Portia thought distractedly. She supposed she did. Though she hadn’t known about an actual wedding. Who would tell
her?

“I guess.”

“It was supposed to be last weekend. Saturday morning,” said Rachel. “In the chapel, reception at Prospect. But Gordon Sternberg
died.”

“He did?” said Portia.

“I guess you missed that, too. They found him on the street in Philadelphia. One of the great scholars of his generation.
Author of fourteen major works of criticism on English literature. In a doorway in Kensington, holding a bottle of Canadian
Club whiskey. It’s incredible. I mean, how did it happen? He supervised my dissertation, you know.”

“Yes, of course,” said Portia. “I’m very sorry.”

She waved her thin hand vaguely in the air. “No. I don’t deserve condolences. None of us do. Gordon went down in flames, and
we couldn’t help him, but we should all have kept trying. And Mark—you know, they called him Thursday night to come down and
identify the body. I guess he just felt it wasn’t right to go ahead with a wedding. Gordon actually had his funeral there,
when the wedding was supposed to take place. At the chapel.”

Portia nodded. On Saturday morning, when Mark, unbeknownst to her, was to have been married, and Gordon Sternberg, unbeknownst
to her, had instead been eulogized, she had been driving south with her lover and her son. Isn’t it crazy? she thought. That
I have a lover? That I have a son? She almost asked this out loud.

“That was good of Mark,” she said instead. “To cancel. It was the right thing to do.”

“I know,” Rachel said gruffly. “Though I’m still too angry at him to want to think well of him.”

“Don’t be angry,” Portia heard herself say. “I don’t think things were really right between us. I kept things from him. I
shouldn’t have. I’m responsible, too.”

Rachel said nothing, and Portia was forced to look up at her. She rested on her hip, braced by one hand on the mattress. She
was waiting for Portia to say more.
What things had she kept from him?
for example.
What things weren’t right?
But Portia, having given so much away, felt suddenly very, very exhausted.

“They’re still getting married, though,” she observed. “I assume?”

“Yes. Sure. They went down to Trenton yesterday morning and did it there. Thank goodness I wasn’t invited to that. Nobody
was, I think. Just as well. I get that they need to do it. Legally, for immigration and the baby. But if it’s any comfort
to you, I don’t think he’s particularly happy.”

“That’s not a comfort,” said Portia, laughing awkwardly. She was trying to absorb the fact that Mark was married. Finally
married. He had not married Marcie, the mother of Cressida, the woman who had spent the past sixteen years punishing him—perhaps
for that very thing. He had not married Portia. He had married Helen.

But the clerk’s office in Trenton would not have been open on a Sunday, which meant that yesterday must have been a Monday.
Which meant that she had been here, in this bed, for nearly three days. No wonder the office was coming for her.

“What did Clarence say?” she asked Rachel.

“Only had I been in touch with you, because you hadn’t come into the office and you weren’t answering the home phone. So then
I got scared because you weren’t answering my calls, either. I thought maybe you were really down about the wedding. So I
came rushing over here as soon as my class was over.”

Class, thought Portia. The mystery of her friend’s professional attire was laid to rest. It meant that while she had lain
here, life had continued, work had continued, weddings and funerals had taken place. Only she had stood still.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I have to go in to work,” she said sharply.

“But you’re sick,” said Rachel, reaching for her shoulder.

“But I’m going to be fine,” said Portia, because she was.

My biggest inspiration is my little cousin Sandra, who is afflicted with Down Syndrome. Sandra has a sunny disposition and
loves to be silly. When I babysit for her, we can spend hours making cookies or playing Old Maid, and she is wonderful company.
But sometimes I look at her not as a loving cousin but as a future biology major and physician. In my life as a doctor, I
will work to find a cure for Down Syndrome, so that other children will not be held back the way she has been. If I can’t
find a way to use my talents to give back to my community, then I will feel that I have failed.

A
t some point, while she’d been away, the administrative assistants had performed their annual veiling of the downstairs conference
room, a ritual that oddly involved not a curtain to cover the glass separating the room from the corridor, but a mosaic of
white copy paper, each individual page affixed with a piece of tape. This act, which signaled the onset of committee meetings
and the massing wave of decisions to come, had long mystified Portia, who wondered why, if privacy was so important—and of
course it was—the office had not seen fit to build an actual wall, or at least to invest in some sort of fabric sheeting that
could be drawn whenever the committee got down to work. That would have to be a bit more soothing to any anxious parents,
stopping in to hand-deliver a last minute CD of their child performing Bach on the cello or a testimonial from the coach.
Not that anything could really buffer the stress on either side of the glass.

Statistically, she was ready for committee. She had already read more applications this year than last and had finished her
entire district except for the fifty or so still missing pieces. (Though applications, from first arrivals to in-under-the-wires,
were given equal weight, there was a certain undeniable quality of diminishment in the folders as they reached the far end
of the punctuality bell curve. The early filers were organized, type A, staggeringly accomplished; the latecomers were a bit
more relaxed, a bit less coiled to chase down their guidance counselors and teachers and make sure they’d sent in their forms,
perhaps even a bit more inclined to just throw a Princeton application at the wall and see if, by some quirk of fortune, it
stuck.) Portia, in spite of everything that reading season had wrought in her life, had nonetheless made her way, folder by
folder, through every corner of her region, completing a symbolic pilgrimage from school to school. The backward view from
West College included miles of coastline and chains of mountain ranges—Greens, Whites, Presidentials—from Vermont to Maine.
She could see old towns and towns so new that the gates of their gated communities had barely been hung, the great boarding
prep schools, creaking in amber tradition, and the suburban public schools around Boston (which seemed no less infused with
competitive mania than the Grotons and Choates), and the great academies of Boston itself, from which Brahmin sons, born into
the expectation of Harvard (and all it then represented), had once crossed the river to Cambridge en masse, and now the children
of immigrants, drawn to this country by a vision of Harvard (and all it now represented), still crossed the river to Cambridge
en masse.

Then, too, Portia had served as second reader to Corinne’s files, revisiting the schools, teachers, and even a few families
she had dwelt among for the past five years and finding again the intense, driven musicians and biologists, the offspring
of new (and vast) Silicon wealth, the striving children of parents who worked in fields, construction, and even sweatshops,
who were sometimes the only English speakers in their families and who wrote of mothers and fathers so dependent on them that
Portia wondered how they would cope when these burdened sons and daughters flew away to meet their dizzying futures.

Over and over and over, even as she read these still forming lives as distinct, individual things, they braided themselves
together into the same American story:
My family came after the famine, after the Armenian Genocide, after the Shoah, after the Cambodian refugee camp. My family
came last year, with nothing, and we still have nothing except for my 4.6 GPA and my National Merit semifinalist citation
and my reference from the Chief of Oncology, who calls my work on cancerous skin cells “uniquely promising,” and my chance
to attend Princeton. We came here so my parents could take the invisible, uniformed, dangerous jobs, so the next generation
could be doctors and engineers, so the generation after that could be environmentalists, poets, directors of nonprofit organizations.
Almost every applicant seemed at home in this most American of equations, Portia thought. Their voices strained to merge,
and she had to hold them back, pick them laboriously apart until they resumed their separate selves, some of whom would be
admitted, most of whom would not. It felt wrong, given the chorus they so effortlessly made. Why should one American dream
be more valid than another? Why should one family saga weigh more than the next?