Admission (66 page)

“Never been north of the Mason-Dixon.” Clarence smiled, looking down at the folder.

He was first in his class of over two hundred, only 22 percent of whom attended four-year colleges, and the first ever to
apply to Princeton. They voted and moved on.

Lunch was sandwiches from Cox’s, brought in precisely at noon. Portia took hers up to her office and sat at her desk, reading
Mark’s eulogy for Gordon Sternberg, which had been posted on the English Department Web site. It was dignified and diplomatic,
full of praise for the astounding reach of Gordon’s written work. It cited his humor, his forty years of devoted students,
the sometimes grudging high opinion of his colleagues around the world, not a few of whom had feuded with him very publicly
and for years. It seemed to imply that his life had ended not in a filthy Philadelphia alley, but at some undefined moment
of triumph, as if he had suddenly succumbed to a painless death while holding forth to an immense lecture hall packed with
former students, admiring members of the department, respectful rivals, adoring children, and a devoted wife. It was, thought
Portia, a masterwork of tenderness and tact. And sitting at her desk with a barely touched tuna-fish sandwich in her hands,
she was proud of Mark for writing it and an instant later terribly sad that she had not been there to hear him deliver it.

And then it was time to go back.

There were lots of Princeton families in the South. Princeton had once had the reputation of being the most southern of Ivy
League colleges, not geographically but in temperament. It was well-known, though hardly a matter of pride, that students
had once brought their own servants with them from home, housing them off campus in a neighborhood of town that was still,
a century later, predominantly black; but the Princeton of 2008 was a very different construct. Through the afternoon, tie
after tie was unceremoniously severed, with young men and women cast adrift from family tradition to find other places to
be educated. Portia, still trying to bend and not break, could not help but be sad for these, too. She shrank from imagining
the stunning impact of that slender envelope, arriving in homes where devotion to alma mater was entwined with family lore,
where alumni wrote checks and attended reunions, perhaps imagining that their sons and daughters might one day live in the
new dorm or take a class from a professor in the newly endowed chair. In a few weeks’ time, this group, more than any other,
would flood the office with letters and calls, angry and shocked and heartbroken, but that was Clarence’s cross to bear, and
he seemed to manage it well.

On and on they flew. She craved the easy ones, the slam dunks: Math Olympiad finalists, congressional interns, the winner
of Princeton’s international high school poetry prize (this year, a girl from North Carolina), the banjo player who’d taken
a year off after high school to busk his way around Europe, the amputee who’d won the grand slalom at the Turin Winter Paralympics.
It felt wonderful to gather these people together, imagine them convening at the lab bench or the cafeteria table. It felt
amazing to wonder whether the soprano from Savannah, Georgia, would meet the tenor from Baton Rouge in their freshman seminar
on Wagner and fall in love, or whether the fiery (but, she had to admit, articulate and persuasive) neocon from Charleston
would have his worldview altered, ever so slightly, by the Chilean boy whose two fathers had adopted him at birth, brought
him home to Atlanta, and raised him to reimagine the world.

There was, around the table, a calibration taking place, similar to the one Portia always felt at the very start of the reading
season, when the first and then the second and then the third applicant seemed equally impressive, equally compelling, and
then the fourth and the fifth, and so on until you came to that one who was so amazing, so extraordinary, that the landscape
suddenly snapped to clarity:
Oh yes, now I understand. These impressive, compelling kids, enormously likable kids—they’re the ones we
don’t
take. This amazing, extraordinary kid, that’s the kid we take
. A class of the amazing and the extraordinary. A class of working actors and winning athletes and protoliterary scholars
who had so impressed Mark Telford that he’d asked for their admission, and protophilosophers already capable of discussing
zombie theory with David Friedman, and the boy whose memoir was about to be published, and the girl from Richmond who had
spent the previous year in Gabon establishing a sanctuary for young women who had been expelled from their families or had
no families in the first place, as well as a charitable foundation to support its operation, and the young researchers already
attached to major studies, and the QuestBridge scholars, and the boy from Thailand who had made his way through every math
class the country’s best university could offer him, even though he wasn’t yet seventeen, and the ones who were choosing between
college and the careers they had already begun, as dancers and models and gymnasts and ice skaters—careers that might not
wait four years for them to return—and the violinists and oboists and trombonists and already accomplished composers the Music
Department requested, calling them “simply brilliant” and “rare.” They were breathtaking. And they would come here and fight
among themselves and make things and learn from one another and break one another’s hearts and push their professors to rise
to their own level of curiosity and effort and come out of the closet and get engaged and get religion and change their religion
and lose their religion and make the university better, and then make the world better. It gave her a sensation of almost
calm, almost happiness.
All things shall be well.… All manner of things shall be well.

But only if Jeremiah could be here with them.

“You have an aggressive tumor in your leg,” said my doctor. I was twelve years old and baseball was my whole life. To be completely
honest, I cared less about having the lower half of my right leg removed than I cared about whether I’d be able to play in
next Saturday’s game against Freeport.

S
he knew better than to hound him. He did not like to be hounded. He was a very organized man, very composed. Every day he
appeared in committee with a new shirt, a new bow tie, and a suit that might have been new or just identical to the one he
had worn the day before: crisp and fresh and dark blue with the faintest stripes.

The days went by and he gave no sign that he had read Jeremiah’s file: no comment, no note, no e-mail. In the committee room,
hundreds and then thousands of seventeen-year-olds were passing before them, their names one by one assigned to their final
Princeton destinations: Deny, Admit, Wait List. First the South and then the Northwest, California, the Plains, the Midwest,
foreign applications, country by country, and the Mid-Atlantic. New York and its suburbs would take nearly a week. Finally,
only her own folders remained.

Still, he said nothing to her. There was no reassurance, no “I haven’t forgotten,” and every day she had to ask herself, again,
if she ought to be doing something: reminding him, nudging him, pleading with him.

They were moving well. Last year, Clarence had hired Robin Hindery and Jordan Cobb precisely because he had expected this
jump in the numbers; the rise of the common application, the decline of Early Decision, and the peaking children-of-baby-boomers
population had made for indelible writing on the wall. The tone in the committee room was elevated, generally. Portia tried
to hold her tongue. She had not asked to be last at bat, but she didn’t want to get there with anyone mad at her. So Deepa
had argued passionately for an academically undistinguished boy whose severe stutter (he had written) had formed his character
and unlocked his love for music. Dylan had gone to bat for a girl at the Native American school who Portia was not at all
certain would be able to handle the workload. Corinne seemed to have found a number of Latinists she could not live without,
and Jordan pleaded for so many kids who’d had miserable lives that Clarence had had to take her aside and remind her that
it was not the university’s place to compensate every young person for every terrible thing that had happened to them. Kids
whose parents had died, whose siblings had died, whose friends had died, whose teachers had died. Kids who’d battled cancer
and depression and the aftereffects of car accidents. Kids who lived in communities without hope, who had somehow nonetheless
acquired hope for themselves. Kids who gave the school’s address instead of a home address, because there wasn’t really what
you might call a permanent home address, whose twenty-five-hour-a-week job at McDonald’s or ShopRite was essential to the
family income. Kids who had somehow dodged abusive fathers, schizophrenic mothers, violent neighborhoods. Kids who had kids
and were desperate to make a better life for them.

Portia wanted to give every one of her colleagues whatever it was—whoever it was—they wanted. Although technically there was
no such thing as quid pro quo in committee, no tacit understanding that she would give Robin the girl whose sisters and mother
lived in hiding (who had possibly the lowest academic profile to have reached the committee room all these weeks, who wrote
clearly and unsentimentally about the toll of violence in her family) and Robin, when the time came, would let her have Jeremiah.
She did not allow herself to appear sycophantic. She gave herself a stern expression, as if she were dubious of everyone’s
motives, everyone’s claims, but in the end she voted to admit whenever she sensed an urgency that was somehow personal, because
Jeremiah would also be one of these applicants, she knew: divisive, a little worrying. And as the folders and the names and
the accomplishments flew by, and as it looked more and more as if they would come last to her own geographic area, the Northeast,
she knew that every one of her colleagues was running short of expansiveness. It was one thing, at the outset of committee
meetings, to acquiesce against your better judgment when the class felt wide open, with places to spare and room to make,
just possibly, a bit of a mistake. But now, with thousands of such high-achieving kids already slated for denial, it was going
to be harder to get a Jeremiah past. She would need all of her passion and all of her persuasiveness and all of their goodwill.

Then, toward the end of the third week, when they had dealt with nearly everyone but the nearly two thousand students from
her own district who were, in Martin Quilty’s oddly endearing phrase, still “swimming,” she entered her office after a grueling
day to find Jeremiah’s folder in the center of her desk, an orange Post-it note stuck to the cover. “Let’s discuss in committee,”
it said.

Portia sat down heavily. It was not the response she had hoped for. She had hoped for some indication that Clarence concurred,
or at least for a chance to talk to him again before having to strut and fret her moment upon the committee stage. At Dartmouth,
there had long been an unwritten rule that each admissions officer got one free pass, one applicant they could bring to the
dean once the decisions had all been made, and have that student’s wait list designation altered to acceptance. It had been
a genteel sort of tradition, and they had not abused it, because it spread a kind of goodness through the office and the enterprise
itself. Because you might have a gut feeling about some kid, whose transcript was, say, somewhat under par, because his essay
was the one you remembered out of thousands, and you just knew he would go on to do something amazing with his life, and you
could—personally, single-handedly—make it happen for that kid. But only once a year, and only after the files had all been
closed, and only for the wait list (it didn’t work if the applicant had been denied outright), and only very quietly, strictly
between the officer and the dean.

Not at Princeton. Not under Martin Quilty, who had turned her away when she’d tried it the first year, smiling his customary
sad smile and letting her know never to attempt it again; and certainly not under Clarence, who would think she was mad.

Jeremiah was going to get one chance, and one chance only, in the last days of committee meetings, with an incoming split
opinion between his first and second readers and without a gesture of encouragement from Clarence. Portia closed her eyes.

At least, it occurred to her, she could give some thought to where in the order he might fall. First folder of the day was
not the place for Jeremiah, but neither was last. She went through them, one by one, reminding herself who each applicant
was and what they’d done, what mattered to them, what she’d had to say about them, and what Corinne had written in response.
They were all deflatingly superior, cerebral, engaged, ready to hit some college campus running and take off into their avidly
anticipated futures. Each of them had earned either a “High Priority—Admit” or a “Strong Interest” designation from her. Nearly
all of them had been just as lauded by Corinne. Against their backdrop, Jeremiah was an undisciplined smart kid, flailing
against authority, beating his own different drum with merry abandon. It was going to be a slaughter.