Admission (70 page)

Another expert with an opinion about admissions.

Another authority who was sure he could do it better.

Now she saw that it was no longer entirely dark, that the first intimation of morning had crept overhead, casting the Sternbergs’
stucco house, which was actually white, with a faintly rosy tint. And she was suddenly exhausted—all the adrenaline of subterfuge
bled out of her in a rush, and she thought she could sleep now, if only she could get herself home.

Portia turned the corner and headed west on Harrison, thinking of sheets and the weight of her quilt, the bed where she could
stop, if not actually rest, the place where she might be comfortable, if not actually safe, while she waited for the ax to
fall.

Since my mother’s death, I have watched my father make a valiant effort to do the things she would have done for my sister
and me. This has been amusing at times, like when he tried to explain menstruation to my very embarrassed sister, but for
the most part he has risen to every occasion. My mother used to attend every one of my diving meets, and now it is my father
I can see from the uppermost board, looking up at me with a big grin on his face. I miss my mother every day, but I know how
fortunate I am to have my father. Without him, I don’t think I would have come through the last couple of years.

I
t didn’t fall, or not at first. The next day, she stayed fretfully at home, not trusting herself to go back. She made coffee
and drank it and paced, waiting for the phone to ring, the police to arrive, something irrevocable, but no one even asked
after her. By midday, she decided to start cleaning the house, just to take her mind off of what might be happening at the
office; but in fact, not much was happening at the office, at least upstairs. Downstairs, in Martha’s domain, eighteen hundred
letters of acceptance began to emerge from a wall of printers, and the seventeen thousand folders in the small adjacent room
waited to be fed to the shredders.

By late afternoon, Portia had bundled months’ worth of recyclable papers and stacked them by the curb. She had done half a
dozen loads of laundry and folded Mark’s clothes into a cardboard box, flipped the mattress, and remade the bed. She had sorted
the mail to glean an amount of actual correspondence that was at once depressing and illuminating. This handful of significant
stuff included several recent letters from Mark’s attorney, some personal notes from university friends she’d assumed had
abandoned her, and the letter to which John had alluded several weeks back. She put these aside to deal with later and tackled
her fridge, throwing away various putrid items with satisfying abandon, after which she drove to McCaffrey’s and stocked up,
filling her cart with all kinds of things she had forgotten she liked to eat. Back at the house, she opened up some of the
windows and let the spring air inside.

Then, with no reasonable excuses to keep her away from her office, Portia went back and began to do her waiting there.

She set about, as if everything were normal, to lay some groundwork for the next admissions cycle, thinking about which schools
she wanted to visit and putting them together in theoretical trips. Maine and northern New Hampshire. Hotchkiss and Taft.
Boston Latin and the magnet school in New Bedford. She found excuses—not too many, not too obvious—to go downstairs so she
could check on the notification letters, which were still being prepped, still clearly in residence, and then climbed the
stairs back to her office, heart thudding, head racing.

Then, quite suddenly a few days later, those thousands of letters were gone: dozens of plastic bins of them loaded onto a
line of U.S. mail trucks that backed up to the front door of West College. Portia watched from her window as the trucks wound
around the campus drive and disappeared from sight. Now, she thought, sinking into her chair and laying her head down on the
desktop, she was safe, or Jeremiah, at least, was safe. Five months from now, he would come with his strange ideas and meandering
imagination, and he would meet other teachers like John Halsey and other oddball kids like himself, who had blundered through
high school like bats in the light, addled by the unfathomable rules of social conduct and the indelible judgments of teenagers.
She actually fell asleep that way, waking only when one of the financial aid officers knocked on her door to check a detail.
And then she went home and slept again.

A couple of days were allowed to pass. All over the world, the blows were absorbed. Portia and the others prepared to woo
the admitted students, if necessary. There was a meeting to plan the hosting weekend. She sat in her office, watching the
in-box on her computer, listening for the deceptive purr of the phone, heralding vitriol at the other end of the line. Those
calls were coming, she knew.

But the first one had nothing to do with Princeton.

Caitlin had given birth to her baby on the day she received her own notification from Dartmouth. These two events, it transpired,
were not unrelated.

“I was jumping up and down,” she told Portia, phoning from her hospital room at Mary Hitchcock. “In the hallway? Just inside
the front door, you know? And all of a sudden I went, ‘Wow, I think I peed my pants.’ So we both started screaming and Susannah
drove me over. I’m so happy!” she crowed, though she didn’t really specify about what. Caitlin claimed that she had seriously
considered naming the baby Eleazar if it had turned out to be a boy, but thankfully it was not a boy. The baby was to be named
Alice, after both an ancestor who had emigrated from Germany to Utah in the 1850s and one of Caitlin’s aunts, who had assumed
Caitlin would attend a two-year college and then marry.

“Thank you,” she told Portia, who had really not done so much, only reviewed Caitlin’s application and advised against an
early essay about singing in her high school choir.

“Don’t be silly. You were a great applicant. You’re going to have a fantastic experience.”

“Oh, my God, I know,” said Caitlin. She sounded a little out of it, actually. A little blissed out, a little drugged. Portia
let her go, promising to call the next day, then she hung up with a smile.

Then it started slowly. A happy call from a coach in Maine. A tearful call from the principal of the charter school in Roxbury,
where a remarkable young man named DeShahn Mellings, trumpet virtuoso and gifted debater, had just received the best news
of his life. And then the pace began to pick up. It was like kernels of corn beginning to pop, first slowly, with lacunae,
and then in a solid mass. And some of them were brutal, but they were not the one Portia was waiting for.

She accepted the bittersweet thanks of Sarah Lenaghan’s college counselor, who was consoling eight of Sarah’s classmates,
and the assurances of Milton Academy’s head of counseling that Carter Ralston, in whom the development office had expressed
such interest, was very fired up to attend Princeton. (Ralston had been a strong applicant, it turned out, with an 800 verbal,
a beautiful essay about traveling in South America, and a New England Prep School Athletic Conference record for the high
jump.) She had spent a scant fifteen minutes (not a single moment more than she could bear) talking to her old colleague Rand
Cumming, who seemed astounded that some number less than twenty-seven of his twenty-seven applicants had been admitted, and
an hour on the phone with William Roden at Deerfield, moving at his insistence through the list of more than forty applicants,
about a quarter of whom had been either admitted or wait-listed. Sadly, Matt Boyce, once wrapped in an orange swaddling cloth,
was not one of them. But Deerfield had sent them wonderful applicants, as always, Portia reminded him. Kids from Europe and
Asia as well, all of them wonderfully prepared and immensely likable.

“I hope you’ll encourage them to come to our hosting weekend,” she told them. “And let me know if you want me to set up any
meetings for them while they’re here. I can get the rowers out on the water, if they’d like. And the Music Department is very
eager to meet Sandra Lu.”

He promised he would.

On the fourth day, she began to be surprised that nothing had happened to her. The fifth day passed. The ecstatic calls waned;
she and all of her colleagues were now soothing and placating, getting yelled at or wept at, begged and cursed, in the annual
ritual of response: usually parental, occasionally from the guidance counselors and coaches, often enough from the applicants
themselves. This year, one of the worst calls would be from Matt Boyce’s mother, who’d struggled to maintain her composure
through the conversation. “Can’t you put him on the waiting list?” she’d asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “It’s so
heartbreaking for him. It’s all he’s ever wanted.”

And when Portia had said, with genuine regret, that this would not be possible, the woman had turned on a dime and announced
that her next call was to the president’s office, then the development office, and then to alumni affairs, where it was to
be firmly understood that no one in her family of Princetonians would ever give another penny to the school.

“It’s so difficult,” said Portia, illogically hoping that Matt Boyce’s mother would suddenly understand the reality of the
numbers, the complexity of the problem. But the woman told her to go fuck herself and hung up.

Portia hung up, too, then stared at the phone, wondering who’d be next. The boy whose eighteenth-century antecedent had “helped
set up the place”? The guidance counselor from the private school in Connecticut who seemed to feel, each year, that the decisions
contained in his advisees’ letters were just a preliminary suggestion, like the first step in a drawn-out negotiation? Some
devastated kid insisting that her future had been destroyed? She did not doubt their disappointment and frustration. These
applicants had done nothing wrong. They had not “deserved” the slender envelopes any more than the others had “deserved” the
thick packets of welcome, glossy look books and invitations to hosting weekend. Still, it was fair. Scrupulously fair, if
not entirely fair. It was, as Martin Quilty had once memorably put it, making his case to an alumni group, “like Ivory Snow.
Ninety-nine percent pure.”

Clarence emerged occasionally to knock on someone’s door and go over some point before he phoned back an irate alum, but it
was all routine. It was like last year and the year before. It was incredible. It was passing. Already, she wondered if the
calls weren’t tapering off.

And then the weekend came. There were no phone calls over the weekend.

By Monday, she had begun to test the idea that nothing was going to happen to her. This was a riveting thought and came with
a retinue of attendant thoughts, which were also riveting: that she might spend the next four years being close to Jeremiah,
perhaps getting to know him. She could offer him a place to stay over the school breaks—surely he would rather stay in Princeton
than go home to his parents, his vacation job at the market. Over time, they would grow close, like great friends who sense
some deeper bond they can’t articulate. She would make sure he received every single thing the university was able to give
him, not just the education and financial support, but the travel, work experience, the cultural smorgasbord undreamed of
by a boy from working-class New Hampshire, and the guidance of mentors who understood his complexity and promise and truly
wanted him to succeed. It was a soaring feeling. It was a feeling of sweetness and deep resolve. It was, for her, for probably
the first time—peace.

And then it happened: without real warning and brutishly quick.

First, Abby came, knocking on her door and leaning in. “Oh, good. I thought you might have left,” she said. “Clarence wants
to see you.”

Portia went numb. She nodded. “What about, do you know?”

“No idea,” said Abby. “Hey, did you decide if you’re going to the NACAC this year? I’m booking travel.”

Irrationally, Portia decided the question was a good omen. “I think so. I love Seattle.”

She got to her feet and followed Abby, who returned to her desk. Portia went in alone.

“Hello,” she said tentatively.

He said nothing but nodded at the seat opposite his own. Then he sat, fingertips touching, two lonely files on the desk before
him. For a long moment, she pretended that she knew nothing and asked herself what could this mean—this strange, charged silence?
This rigid expression and bald stare? She told herself that she did not recognize this assemblage of features, which were
not charming Clarence or proper Clarence or Clarence-the-leader-of-the-team or Clarence off guard, laughing at the joke, or
the Clarence who might disarm the most conservative of alumni men, those Class of ’40-somethings and ’50-somethings and even
’60-somethings, not a few of whom were actually, secretly,
appalled
that the gates to Princeton were now being guarded by a black man, a gay man, a man from Yale (which was possibly the worst
of the three). This, Portia realized with a start, was a Clarence she had never once seen before. This was Clarence enraged.
And her career, which had so very recently felt uncurtailed, a string of unknown length stretched vaguely forward to retirement,
now had precious minutes to run.