Admission (50 page)

“Oh, I’m sure your job is very hard.” Diana shrugged, looking as if she were sure of no such thing. She was also looking peevishly
at her daughter, as if the looming social diminishment she anticipated were all the girl’s fault. “But let me ask you something.
Why do you even ask, on the applications, where the parents have gone to college? I mean, if you’re just going to penalize
the kids for having parents who read the newspaper and take them to Europe. Isn’t it better not to ask at all? I mean,” she
said, utterly missing the point, “the less you know, the more level the playing field. That’s what I think.”

Portia looked sadly at the now empty wineglass in her hand. She could not remember, really, drinking it, let alone how it
had tasted, but she saw that it had been red, and she very much wanted more of it. “We ask,” she said, “because it helps us
create a more meaningful picture of where the kid is coming from.
And
because it matters to us if their parent went to Princeton.
And
because it matters to us if they’re the first in their families to go to college. Everything matters,” she finished lamely.

“Right,” Diana said, looking truly indignant now. “So if my child isn’t a legacy and isn’t a minority either, the fat lady’s
basically already singing.”

“No. No…” Portia looked desperately across the room, but John was now deep in conversation with his father. She was stranded
on this fatal shore with no rescue in sight.

“Well, that’s what I’m hearing. You’re sitting pretty if your parents sneaked over the border, lack basic hygiene, pick crops
for a living, are constantly threatened with eviction, and never read a newspaper. All you have to do is get the bright idea
that you should go to college and the Ivy League sends you a first-class ticket. But if you have parents who truly value education
and work their butts off to pay for the best schools they can afford, you’re a dime a dozen.”

“Diana, that’s
not
—”

“But you know,” she rolled on, “I don’t think you people have any idea about the impact this is having. All those loyal alumni
whose children aren’t getting in, if you think they’re going to keep on blithely writing checks to their alma mater, you’re
going to be very surprised. That’s going to cut down on the first-class tickets, I would think.”

The conversation, thought Portia, was now officially a lost cause. She looked sadly into her wineglass.

Diversion would come only with the contretemps between Deborah and Simone, audible even from upstairs, where the two had withdrawn
to quarrel at full volume. The sounds were nonspecific but clearly outraged, and only Nelson and Jeremiah, playing a game
of chess on the window seat, seemed genuinely unruffled. Diana, in plain discomfort, announced that she could never have gotten
away with screaming at her own mother, a comment that was unheard by Mrs. Halsey (now in the kitchen) and could thus not be
contradicted. Kelsey, Portia noticed, received this statement with a roll of her eyes, which made Portia smile. John got up
from the opposite couch, where he had been speaking with his father, and came to get her.

“Thank you,” she said when he had led her out of the room, announcing that they had volunteered to set the table.

“I wouldn’t have left you, but there wasn’t room on the couch. And you know, my sister wasn’t going to rest until she got
you to talk. Can you blame her? In her world, information is power. You’ve got the information.”

“Everyone’s got the information,” Portia said, annoyed. “Every person who’s ever left a job in admissions has written a book
about it. Every one of them has spilled the deep, dark secrets about how to get in or shoot yourself in the foot. Anyone with
twenty bucks can buy the entire codebook on Amazon. I can’t tell your sister a single thing at least a dozen other people
haven’t published in hardcover, paperback, and assorted digital formats. Come on!”

He shrugged. “I guess she thinks there’s more. Maybe you all swear a blood oath never to reveal the one crucial thing. You
know, anyone who hikes the Appalachian Trail on a pogo stick automatically gets admitted. Nobody named Fred or Poindexter
will ever get a place.”

Despite herself, she laughed. “How did you find that out?” she said. “It had to be torture.”

“Close,” he said affably. “It was sex.”

Simone, red in the face, came tearing down the stairs and out the front door.

“Let her go,” Deborah said, following wearily. “She needs to calm down.”

Portia looked after her. In a gesture that even she recognized as typical, Simone had pointedly left the door ajar, and wet
snow was floating onto the foyer floor. “It’s kind of cold,” she noted.

“She’ll come back when she’s ready,” said Deborah, closing the door. “I’m assuming I don’t have to worry about her getting
mugged in Wayne, Pennsylvania?”

This seemed not to require a response.

“What was it about?” said John.

“Oh…” Deborah shrugged. “Penn. College. Life. Me. The grand themes.” She shoved her hands deep into her jeans pockets. “You
know what’s weird? When you’re a single mom, and everybody talks about how hard it must be, what they mean is the little-kid
stuff. Getting up in the middle of the night all the time because there’s no one else to do it, or having to take on all the
doctors’ appointments and parent-teacher conferences yourself. But I’m telling you, that was nothing. This teenager stuff
is hard. This is, like, crazy hard.”

“It looks it,” Portia said, and was quickly ashamed of having said it, as she sometimes was when called to comment on matters
of parents or children. But nobody seemed to react.

John’s mother called them to dinner, and the table was hurriedly set. They sat to reassuringly myriad conversations, blessedly
unconnected to anything of colleges, essays, standardized tests, or the wider implications of “the application process.” Portia
drank more wine and ate happily, reveling in the old-fashioned staunchness of the meal: roast, salad, potatoes. She was sitting,
quite deliberately, beside John, whose thigh rested against her own in a reassuring, not overtly sexual gesture. His attention,
though, was dominated by the far corner of the table, where his father sat beside Nelson.

Beside, thought Portia, following his gaze. But not, somehow, interacting. Mr. Halsey, still a man of physical presence and
not a little innate beauty, looked almost pained as he sat, skewed in his chair, turned definitively away from his grandson.
He spoke, instead, across the granddaughter to his right, who shared his coloring and chin, to his daughter, who gestured
with the long fingers of her left hand as she cut, speared, and lifted cubes of roasted potatoes with her right. They were
talking about redress, a contractor who had walked off the job, something related to marble, which had arrived too veined
or not veined enough. Kelsey, the field hockey captain, sat stiffly, eating in silence, and Nelson, who seemed not to have
noticed that he was being ignored, watched the exchange, frowning occasionally at the indecipherable parts.

“I’m telling you,” said Diana, “it’s a good thing I didn’t listen to Kevin and give him the rest of the money up front. He
wanted it, you know.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Mrs. Halsey. “You put one glass or one plate down a tiny bit too hard and it smashes
to little pieces. I think you’re much better off with Corian. Ours looks exactly the way it looked when it went in.”

Her husband nodded. “Can’t destroy it.”

“Mom,” John said suddenly, “did I tell you that Nelson wrote an essay for a state competition?”

“Black History Month,” Nelson said affably.

“He’s a finalist,” John went on. “We’re going to Manchester next week for a ceremony with the governor.”

“Well,” said his mother. “Nelson, congratulations.”

“What’s your essay about?” Portia asked.

“Buck Jordan,” said Nelson. “And the Negro Leagues.”

“Baseball,” John said helpfully.

“Yes, of course,” his father said. “Eve, is there any more of the wine?”

“I can open another bottle,” she said, rising.

Portia felt an unmistakable chill settle over the table, or at least their end of it.

After a moment, John’s father turned to Deborah. “Sure you shouldn’t go after her?” he said.

“I’m thinking about it,” she said uncomfortably. But even as she said it, they all heard the front door click heavily open.
There was a conspiracy of silence as Simone stalked in, surveyed the table and its open setting, and sat down heavily. Without
a word, Jeremiah passed her the roasted potatoes. John’s mother returned and handed the open bottle to her husband.

“Portia,” she said with a deliberate brightness, “can I ask you, how did you get into admissions work? Is it something you
go to school for?”

“Oh… no. Well, some people get degrees in education. I haven’t done that. I just fell into it, actually.”

Portia felt Diana’s disapproval all the way across the table. “Fell into it,” she repeated.

“I worked at the Admissions Office at Dartmouth when I was an undergraduate. I gave tours, and then I worked the desk in the
office. They offered me a job just before graduation. I really had no idea what I was going to do after graduation. I wish
I’d been like John,” she said, happy to imply that she and John were in fact old friends, old comrades, that her being here
was not the bizarrely sudden event that it actually was. “I’d say most of us had figured things out by senior year. But I
wasn’t one of them. I thought I’d stay on and work for the college, and maybe lightning would strike. So I said yes.”

“Well, that was good luck,” Diana observed.

“Yes,” said Portia, willfully ignoring the implications.

“And lightning never struck?”

“It turned out I liked the work,” she said evenly. “I had an aptitude for it. I liked the mix of solid guidelines and creativity.
And I loved the kids.”

“That’s funny,” said Simone, the first time she had spoken since her return. “I mean, you don’t have any kids of your own,
right?”

Deborah looked at her daughter in horror. Then, to Portia’s great dismay, she apologized on her behalf.

“What?” said Simone, all innocence. “She doesn’t, right?”

“That’s right,” Portia said, sounding unnaturally bright. “Maybe that’s the reason I can enjoy keeping company with thousands
of teenagers a year. Because none of them are mine.”

“Touché,” Deborah said under her breath and with the faintest of smiles.

“You must get bombarded wherever you go,” said John’s father. “Everybody wants to know the magic formula.”

“If only there were one.” She laughed with forced mirth. “We’d just set the computer to make all the decisions, then we’d
go off to Bora-Bora with a nice beach book.”

“Where’s Bora-Bora?” said Nelson.

“French Polynesia,” said Jeremiah.

“But I’m sure you get tired of answering questions,” John said pointedly.

“The same questions,” Portia said. “Over and over. Yes. Sometimes I think I should have cards printed up, with my answers,
and just hand them out.”

“Like what?” said Diana.

“Like… ‘What’s the SAT cutoff for Princeton?’ Answer: There isn’t one. Which nobody believes. No cutoffs. No limits. No quotas.
Or, ‘How many hours of community service does Princeton require?’ Answer: None. Not one hour. Not that we don’t think it’s
great to serve the community. But when you make it a requirement, and that’s just what’s happened in so many schools, it does
undercut the impact. How could it not?”

“Baldwin has a community service requirement,” Diana said defensively. “We feel it’s important for our students to give back.”

“It
is
important,” Portia assured her. “But it’s not a requirement. For admission. We don’t penalize kids if they don’t do it. We’re
mainly interested in what they’ve done in the classroom.”

“But I imagine the lion’s share of your applicants have done just great in the classroom,” said John’s father. “Then what
do you do? Do you have some kind of points formula to compare an A from Andover to an A from… I don’t know, a public high school
in Mississippi?”

“You don’t have to answer that,” said John, glaring at his father.

“No, it’s okay. We have a big staff, Mr. Halsey. And we’re each assigned to a different part of the country. My colleague
in charge of the South has been able to get to know the schools in her region very well. She knows exactly what an A from
a public high school in Mississippi means. She also knows how many applicants we have from schools in Mississippi, how many
have come to Princeton in the past, and how they’ve done at Princeton. A student from Mississippi has a lot to offer a northern
school.”

“As opposed to those Andover students,” Diana said tersely. “Who are a dime a dozen.”

“And fantastically prepared,” said John. “I’m sure.”

“Yes. And wonderful kids. From all over the world, you know. The prep schools have changed, too. They’re hardly the all-white,
all-Christian, even all-American bastions they were. Today, a prep school student could be from any kind of background at
all. For that matter, so could a legacy. We’ve had coeducation and diversity long enough to produce legacy applicants of all
different ethnicities. It always surprises me when people assume legacies are always white. Do they think our black and Asian
and Hispanic graduates aren’t having children? And the kids themselves are great applicants, because they come from families
that value education very highly.”

“But,” said Mr. Halsey, “you have to forgive me, I still don’t understand how this works. If you’re not going to use the SAT
and if you don’t set some kind of standard that ranks an Andover A against an A from an underserved school, then it’s hard
for an outsider to figure out what goes on behind the curtain. There must be a formula.”

“There isn’t,” she said, beyond joking.

“But—”

“My dad,” said John, “is an engineer. Can you tell?”

“Oh.” He looked chagrined. “Am I being rude?”

“Only slightly,” said John.

“No, not at all,” Portia said quickly. “I know it looks mysterious from the outside, and it’s definitely more art than science.
But that’s the way it should be, because if we made it just about one standard—any standard, like a GPA or a test—we’d have
a very different campus environment. From our perspective, what we’re doing works beautifully. What we’re doing produces spectacular
undergraduate classes, and a very vibrant campus environment. For us, that’s the most important thing—and the academics, of
course. Which is not to say that we’re complacent about it. The whole thing is like an animal that’s constantly evolving.
I mean, we just got rid of Early Decision—that was a course correction. In a few years, it might have changed again.”