Admission (54 page)

O
ne October evening, on the precise patch of the Dartmouth College Green that John Halsey would years later compare, in its
lasting effect, to Irish hungry grass, Portia Nathan was hit by a rogue lacrosse ball and swiftly knocked out. Afterward,
she would regret that the scenario had not been a bit more elegant. All of the right elements were there: innocent girl, athletic
(presumably attractive) boy, graceful loss of consciousness segueing to graceful reestablishment of consciousness. It didn’t
happen that way. True, the night was clear and crisp, and she was wearing a floaty Indian shirt that had (until that night,
when it was more or less destroyed) been one of her favorites, and her hair that fall had never been longer, straighter, shinier.
True, she was about to gain the uninterrupted attention of the person she would spend the next several years hoping to attract,
and then retain, and then reattract. But the actual event was humiliatingly coarse.

The lacrosse ball did not, for one thing, hit her in some delicate location—the back of the head, perhaps, or the shoulder—but
square in the eye. And her unconsciousness ended not with a Sleeping Beauty–like stretch and purr, but with an upright jolt
and a hearty spasm of vomit, hitting directly the boy who leaned over her, a dark head in a halo of moonlight.

The Greek chorus of her classmates, who rushed to gather around her, produced involuntary sounds of disgust and then, like
the well-brought-up citizens they were, withdrew to a more circumspect distance. Only the boy himself and his two fellow lacrosse
players stayed with her, and the girl Portia happened to have been standing beside when the fateful ball made contact. By
the time the paramedics arrived, she was more or less upright, sticky with blood, vomit, and the fluid from her wildly painful
right eye, which she instinctively kept covered with her hand. The other eye, which mercilessly recorded her attentive audience
of fascinated classmates and her own very disagreeable physical disarray (not the least part of which was the fact that she
had come to a sitting position with her legs splayed far apart and couldn’t seem to figure out how to bring them together),
took refuge in the strangely calming vision of a monogram on the boy’s white shirt—
TSW
—etched in dignified maroon and only a little spattered with the recent contents of her stomach.

This occasion was—so ironically—the very one that had formed her initial attachment to Dartmouth: the annual building of the
class bonfire, an autumn ritual for the freshmen to bond and socialize and display their superiority to all previous classes
by making their chimney of railroad ties one tier higher than the year before. The lumber had been dropped off days earlier
near the center of the Green, and a small group of planners and worker bees had taken charge of it, mapping out the structure
and directing the labor, doing the actual work while others gathered round, chatting and socializing as the tower rose. All
week the class had filtered through, climbing the ladder of wood to hoist a tie or two or remaining earthbound to hoist a
beer. Groups sat on the grass during the day and shivered in standing groups at night, exchanging that basic information they
had been exchanging now, for weeks, and were all growing sick of but somehow still fixated upon:
What’s your name? Where are you from? What dorm are you in? Where else did you apply?
Portia herself had done her part a few days earlier, when the bonfire was only as high as her head and the freshman girls
on her floor had gone as a group. Since then, she had passed through once or twice a day, sometimes at night, amused and a
tiny bit proud to find herself within the very tableau that had brought her here in the first place.

It was not, of course, a noble business to throw up in front of an audience, but even so, the reaction was surprisingly visceral.
Hypocritical, too, given the drunken desecrations of Fraternity Row and the omnipresent odors in the bathrooms of her all-female
dormitory. Even so, Portia and her involuntary emission that night would attain the status of minor legend within their class,
and largely because just about everyone got to witness the outcome (the vomit, in other words) while few had witnessed the
mitigating fact of the lacrosse ball hitting her in the eye and knocking her out. She would, she suspected even then, adding
tears of shame to the other bodily fluids in play, forever be that girl who passed out beside the bonfire and blew chunks
over everyone, a cautionary tale, surely, of a young innocent away from home and meeting the scarlet A-for-Alcohol for the
first time. She would share her sad lot with the girl who never washed her hair through the fall term, wore shorts through
the snow all winter, and disappeared in the spring, never to be seen again, and the first boy to drink himself sick in Fayerweather
Hall during Freshman Week, who happily accepted the honorary lifetime nickname of “Boot” as a result (that scarlet A-for-Alcohol
having not quite the negative quality for men that it had for women).

Still, the news wasn’t all bleak. Portia had a couple of things going for her that night, first and foremost the darkness
(since what man-made illumination there was at the center of the college Green was focused on the rising tower of railroad
ties and not on her). Afterward, there wouldn’t be many of the hundred or so witnesses who could have picked her out of a
crowd without the helpful additions of tears and vomit. Also fortunate was the fact that Portia had not, until that moment,
made much of an impression on her classmates, and therefore few already knew who the effluent-covered freshman actually was.
Once the incident had been mined for socialization value (
Omigod, that’s so disgusting! So, what’s your name? Where are you from?
etc., etc.), the assembled did tend to move on to other topics.

The paramedics brought her to Dick’s House, the campus infirmary, and only when they left her there in the care of the nurses
did she realize that the cloth she had for some time been holding against her eye was actually the once white shirt of the
boy who had stood over her. How it had come into her hand was a mystery, but there was no doubt of what it was, not with its
monogram—
TSW
—disconcertingly pristine. She groggily refused to give it up to the nurses.

The eye was not seriously damaged, thankfully. With a patch, a single stitch in her right brow, and an astoundingly effective
analgesic, she floated away from all remaining pain and mortification and woke up many hours later to bright sunlight, still
clutching the shirt.

Over the following week, her eye healed, her bruise faded, her single stitch dissolved, and on the eve of homecoming the bonfire
went up in its usual conflagration, sealing the unity of their class for all time. She washed the shirt, intending (hoping!)
to return it to its owner, and it was only when the fabric had been finally fully liberated from its stains and then ironed
in the damp little laundry room in the basement that she realized she did not know to whom it belonged. That boy, its owner—so
real to her in his solid silhouette—had no actual name and no clear face, and as the fall progressed and the accident slipped
mercifully into the past, Portia was increasingly reluctant to bring it up.

Unfortunately, as her chances for resolution waned, her eagerness only seemed to build. She looked for the shape of him constantly
as she moved around the campus, scrutinizing boys as she brushed past them in the hallways of classroom buildings, and at
the dining room tables in Thayer, and at parties in dormitory rooms and the sticky basements of fraternities. And always as
she crossed the Green, as if she might most likely find him here, at the scene of the crime. She tried to remember the specific
backlit outlines of his shoulders and head, and strained to recall whether he had spoken, and if so, what he had said. Obviously,
he had removed his shirt—this shirt—and given it to her. How had she managed to miss this very interesting transaction and
all the information that might have come with it? Because there was little information to be had. He was tall and broad, with
hair more flat than thick and curling. There had been a shirt beneath the shirt with the monogram, but it had been too dark
to see the collar or the pattern. Mostly, she remembered the lacrosse stick, and she even went along to one of the home games
that fall (Dartmouth versus Princeton, as it happened), to try to pick him out among the hurling players. But he could have
been any of half a dozen or so, or none of them, and she went home feeling slightly sullied from the whole thing.

She was (and how Susannah would have raged at this, if she’d known) very much like a reverse Cinderella looking for her prince,
with only the clue of the monogram to fit his symbolic foot. In fact, it occurred to her more than once that the monogram
itself was taking the brunt of her fixation, that the identity of the man who had hit her—maybe—and felt bad enough about
that to remove and pass along to her his clothing, was actually no more and no less than a monogram, and so it was the monogram,
and not the man it belonged to, that truly held her.

Unfortunately, given the circumstances, Portia had had little experience with monograms. Susannah had not seen fit to monogram
a single sheet, towel, washcloth, napkin, picture frame, slipper, item of stationery, or article of clothing. Susannah’s friends
and their children also lived monogram-free lives, so Portia had no way of knowing that a monogram reading
say, T S W
—with its central
S
ever so slightly larger than the
T
and
W
that flanked it—represented a person whose initials were actually
T W S
. And so, when Portia had the bright idea to consult her freshman book, the directory of her class, she had looked long and
hard at every boy with a last name starting in
W
and a first name starting in
T
. There she discovered Teddy Washington of Columbia, South Carolina (a reedy African-American who had coincidentally been
on Portia’s freshman trip), and Theo Westerboerk of the Netherlands (stout and already balding), and Travis Wall of Hanover,
New Hampshire (son of a math professor), none of them remotely like the former owner of the monogram. To be even more thorough,
she found and searched the freshman books of the sophomore, junior, and senior classes, but the dozen or so TWs that emerged
from those were likewise wrong.

By winter, Portia had let this particular preoccupation recede. She was happy with her classes that term and attempting to
write a play for the annual student one-act competition (she never finished this), and she had taken up with the astounding
Marrow siblings, who had evidently brought with them to college the boisterous intellectual ambience of their family’s apartment
on the Upper West Side. The freshman class had three sets of twins, two of them disconcertingly identical, and Rebecca and
Daniel Marrow. The Marrows were, individually and collectively, extraordinary. Rebecca (already a novelist) and Daniel (a
Westinghouse finalist for his work on staphylococcus) had followed their brother Jonathan (chess champion) to Dartmouth. (Another
super-high-achieving brother, Benjamin, was cooling his heels elsewhere in the Ivy League.)

Rebecca was a force of nature, a flower of Ashkenazi frizz in a sea of limp WASP coiffure, a vintage double-breasted men’s
herringbone tweed in a crowd of down jackets and vests. Only a few months into their college career, Rebecca had established
herself as the nexus of creative people on campus. At her self-termed salons, salmon (shipped, from Zabar’s, by Mom) was served
on black bread and sprinkled with red onion, and wine was dispensed from bottles with French labels and actual corks. Most
of the poets and writers dropped by at least once (the more sensitive flowers among them put off by the din), as well as the
Latinists and the theater crowd, and all seemed more than relieved to have found one another, even in a charmless cinder-block
room with a view of an access road. Portia had blundered into the scene, falsely declaring (falsely believing) that she would
be doing something theatrical at some point in her Dartmouth career.

One Sunday afternoon in February, as the campus nursed a collective hangover from the exertions of fraternity and sorority
rush, Rebecca announced that she had invited Tom Standley, from her seven a.m. French drill, over for coffee, and would Portia
please come, too, because she didn’t want him thinking that she, you know, liked him, and he kind of had this thing for Jewish
girls.

What did that mean? Portia had asked, a little alarmed.

It meant that he had already taken two home to Mom, who was apparently quite the anti-Semite, which was apparently quite the
point.

Rebecca, who knew every Israelite on campus, including faculty and staff, and seemed to assume that Portia did as well, was
acquainted with both of these girls from Shabbat dinners at the student center. One, she reported, had gone to visit the Standley
family over Christmas break and returned to campus reeling, half with the hilarity of it, half in horror. The parents, she
reported, had been under the impression that her surname—Applebaum—was Appleton, and all had been well until all had been
revealed.