“You sit,” Mark said, taking a glass from the table, pouring her some wine, and bringing it to her. “I said I’d do everything.”
“I know. It’s so nice of you. I feel like a guest in my own house.”
“I can’t get used to these short trips. I keep thinking you’re going away for a week or two.”
“Yes, I know. But this is so much better. Those West Coast trips just took it out of me. And I used to miss a lot while I was gone. I’d come back and some crisis had happened in the office. And I’d be going, ‘What? What?’”
“Sounds ideal.” He laughed shortly. “I wouldn’t mind missing some of the crises.”
Mark had taken over as interim chair the previous spring, when the august, longtime head of the English Department had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and abruptly retired. His tenure was supposed to be temporary, but there was a definite move afoot to draft him for something at least semipermanent. He was good at the sort of benevolent dictatorship required, it turned out, his light touch with the considerable egos involved matched by the sort of firm control the celebrated former chair had abdicated. The only undertow had to do with Mark’s own scholarship, including a second book that was supposed to have been finished last year and now seemed even further from that goal than before the upheaval. He hadn’t talked much about it in some time, since coming back from his Oxford sabbatical, actually, and Portia sometimes wondered if he had taken to this administrative work so eagerly because it buffered him from his colleagues’ expectations or from—and this was, of course, far worse—their lowering expectations. Hired on the promise of his first book on Shelley, he’d been working on a long study of American and English Romanticism ever since. These days, consumed by the running of the department and the management of certain high-strung academics and scores of high-strung Princeton students, he didn’t talk much about it.
“Here they are,” Mark said. He moved past her and met them at the door. “Rachel, hello!”
“Hello,” Portia heard. “David’s just parking. I’ve brought Helen.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m so glad. Please come in.”
Portia stood and turned, feeling—awkwardly—less like the hostess than like the first guest to arrive. She kissed Rachel and shook hands with Helen, who was small, with blond hair piled artfully on the back of her head (Like Virginia Woolf? she couldn’t help thinking), and was wearing a silk scarf knotted around her throat in the way only European women seemed to master. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said brightly. “We’ve been meaning to have you over for ages, but the term just got away from us.”
“Not at all,” said Helen. “I know how busy Mark is.”
This was an off-script remark, Portia thought. Wasn’t Helen supposed to say something about how overextended they both must be, host and hostess alike? Or all three of them—collectively busy! Or even just she herself overwhelmed, with her move to a new country, university, apartment. Portia was immediately irritated, which was unfortunate, as the evening had only begun and the woman in question, after all, already had tenure. But she felt dismissed, which was… well, an overreaction, of course. Certainly not enough to dislike Helen, Portia scolded herself. Obviously, Helen saw Mark in situ at the department. Obviously, she saw him doing fourteen things at once. And he had hired her. And plainly, she didn’t know the first thing about Portia. Why should she?
“Can I get you something?” she asked. “Would you like some wine?”
“Do you have sparkling water?”
“We have Perrier,” she said, hoping they did.
“Yes. What an enormous couch.”
Not “pretty,” Portia noted. Not “comfortable.” Now she was offended on behalf of their couch, a deep, boatlike item covered in a green velvetlike fabric. It was her favorite place to read application folders when the bunker mentality of reading season set in. Admittedly, it was not very well suited to guests. At least not to very formal guests. Helen seemed to be a formal person. She perched on the edge of the couch and crossed her legs. Her dangling foot, clad in an expensive-looking T-strap leather shoe, pointed straight down. She looked up into Portia’s eyes. She was waiting for her Perrier.
Portia went to get it. In the kitchen, the rice maker was percolating on the countertop, giving off a yeasty smell. A crisp salad was waiting to be dressed, and a cake box from Bon Appetit, Princeton’s uppity gourmet emporium, seemed to indicate Mark’s plans for dessert. She took from the cupboard the same water glass she had lately put there and poured Perrier into it. She heard Rachel laugh.
When she got back to the others, David had arrived. He sat beside Helen on the deep couch, his knees apart, mauling the Camembert with a cheese knife. David was a philosopher, a term it had taken Portia some time to embrace. Not: “Taught philosophy.” Not: “Was in the Philosophy Department.” He philosophized; this was the term given to his work. It said something, she supposed, that she now lived among people who actually were the things they taught: poets, rocket scientists, diplomats, philosophers. And David was actually known for the work he did. There were people out there, she had learned, who avidly paid attention to what emerged from his utterly convoluted mind. She had been asked about him on recruiting trips by similarly brilliant, similarly antisocial high school students. She had even read admissions essays about his apparently world-famous abstract, “Metaphysical Reduction and the Reality of Numbers.” David was a loyal and good-hearted person, though she had never once felt she had gotten past the most superficial of his layers. Maybe there wasn’t anything under there, or at least anything available to her, most of him having been shunted to the work, and of course the children—he and Rachel had two, in grade school. But it had amused her to learn years earlier from Rachel that David was what passed for socially gifted in the world of philosophers, a world populated by seriously obstructed individuals. It was a world full of men (philosophers, it turned out, were mostly men) who looked at Rachel’s breasts, rather than her face, on being introduced. Rachel had laughed when she’d described this, but Portia had a feeling her levity on the subject was hard won. Rachel herself came from English (Bryn Mawr and Yale, before Princeton), where the men apparently looked you in the eye, at least at the cocktail parties, and when she began to meet her boyfriend’s, then fiancé’s, and then husband’s colleagues, she had found herself alternately appalled, repelled, amused, and finally… philosophical. To motivate herself to attend David’s professional events, she once told Portia, she had instituted an add-a-pearl reward system, requiring that David purchase a pearl for this theoretical necklace every time one of his colleagues cast an untoward eye (never hand) south of her collarbone, or if he ignored her completely for a long evening as he and another philosopher lobbed theorems and formulae across her place at the table. (The formulae themselves had also taken some getting used to, Rachel explained. On sitting down together, apparently, philosophers immediately produced bits of paper and leaky pens from their jacket pockets. Then, very soon, they would begin illustrating their conversation with formulae scribbled on the bits of paper. They could not seem to talk without these bits of paper, Rachel laughed, as Portia, who in her ignorance had not even known that there was some kind of overlap between the worlds of philosophy and math, frowned in confusion.)
Rachel had attained her pearl necklace by the time she and David married. In fact, she had worn it at the wedding.
“David,” Portia said. She leaned over him and kissed his cheek. “Don’t get up.”
He hadn’t, actually, made a move to get up.
She handed the Perrier to Helen, who took it without even looking at Portia.
“Yes, it’s been a bit of a problem,” Mark was saying. “And there are a few in the department who just want to let it go, so that’s become a difficulty in itself.”
“Not me,” Rachel said to Helen. “Of course, we’re limited in what we can actually do. The student graduated three years ago. We can rescind the prize, of course. We can even re
quest the monetary award, not that we could compel him to repay, but does that have any practical meaning at this point? And we don’t have the other essays anymore, so even if we wanted to, we couldn’t pick another winner. Not to speak of the legal issue of going into the endowment for a second awarding of the prize.”
“What about criminal charges?” Helen said. “What about rescinding his degree?”
“Well, we’ll be considering all of that when we meet next week,” said Rachel. “But I can make all of the arguments against doing either of those things, much as I personally would like to see them done.”
“What is it?” Portia said, taking one of the chairs and picking up her wine. “What’s happened?”
“Absolutely, his degree should be rescinded!” Helen said sharply. “Why is it even up for discussion?”
“The student who won the Fritz Prize three years ago,” Rachel explained. “It’s for an original work of literary criticism. Not something done for a class, you know. The student who won wrote about John Berryman.”
“That should have been a clue!” Mark said genially.
“He cheated?” Portia asked. The conversation seemed to allow no other possibility.
“We would never have known,” said Rachel. “And that, I think, is a big part of why we seem to be taking it so personally. You know, it’s gone beyond our being furious at the student. Now we’re humiliated, not just for not picking it up at the time, but for having to be told by another undergraduate.”
“Who was the undergraduate?” asked David, still in his sprawled posture at the back of the couch.
“A senior. She came in a couple of weeks ago to look at past winners of the prize, before she started her own paper. But of course, being the very thorough Princeton student she is, she also went online and started looking at the prizewinning essays at Yale. Yale has an identical award, endowed by the same family. And there it was, the winner of the Yale prize in 1983. Different title, but the same subject, ‘Jazz in the Dream Songs.’ He hadn’t changed a comma. The student brought it to us last week, and we’ve been barely keeping the lid on until we can hold an internal meeting.”
“Has the student been informed?” David wanted to know.
“That he’s a cheat? I’d imagine he doesn’t need to be told.” Helen shook her head. The great loose bun, Portia noted, moved dangerously.
“That we know about it? No,” said Rachel. “Not yet.”
“I don’t want to go to the dean without a departmental recommendation,” Mark explained. “It’s a far less straightforward thing to get than I imagined it would be. There’s a certain little-to-be-gained, much-to-be-lost school of thought, you see.”
“I do not see,” Helen said. “You’ll have to forgive me. I am a newcomer, and it all looks blindingly clear to me.”
“If it gets out—” Rachel began.
“When,” Mark corrected. “When it gets out.”
Rachel sighed. “It becomes an irritating little item that won’t go away, or at least anytime soon. A student cheats, but the high-and-mighty Princeton English Department doesn’t even notice.” She held up her glass to Mark, and he refilled it. “Granted, it’s not an all-out disaster, like plagiarism from the faculty, but those two ideas, cheating and Princeton, would still be sitting right up next to each other. And that affects all of us, not just the department.”
“Well, it’s not good, of course. But why is the university afraid of showing a flaw if it’s in aid of a greater principle?”
Any of the three of them could have answered, Portia thought. But no one spoke, and in the ensuing moment, which was not a comfortable moment, not a pleasant social moment, she understood that it fell to her. As the nonacademic, she supposed. The one most enmeshed in Princeton-as-financial-construct, that unfortunate nod to commerce, which too many faculty members, she knew perfectly well, did not deign to acknowledge unless they absolutely had to. She was not an artist or a scholar. She wouldn’t cure cancer or even illuminate the humblest property of the humblest life form or generate a single new idea to be added to the evolving total of new ideas. There would never be a book title beside her name, unlike the rest of them. She merely helped turn the wheel that kept them all sheltered and fed, not to mention free to do whatever it was they did to make their mark. Well, she wasn’t going to apologize for that.
“Among the top American colleges, there’s a constant shuffle for position,” Portia said, addressing Helen. “Harvard and Yale and MIT and Stanford, all of us compete for the best students and the best faculty, not to mention funding from both private and public sources. Where we stand, in comparison with other great universities, is important to us, because that position impacts us in a lot of ways, some more obvious than others. It’s kind of a contentious issue right now, actually, the whole ranking thing.”
Helen seemed to perk up at the idea of a contentious issue. “Oh yes?”
“U.S. News and World Report has been ranking American colleges and universities for about twenty-five years. The rankings are very closely followed, though there’s a great deal of disagreement about whether they’re a good thing overall. In fact, there’s a movement now to withhold data from the magazine. Not to participate, in other words.”
“Yeah?” David said. “Since when?”
“A couple of years.” Portia shrugged.
“And how do they arrive at the rankings?” Helen wanted to know. “Is it by academic results?”
Portia shook her head. In Helen’s Oxbridge universe, the reputation of individual colleges rose and fell by the annual examination rankings. She couldn’t even conceive of a comparable system here.
“That’s part of the problem. There are a number of factors, like faculty-student ratio and selectivity, and what percentage of the admitted students were in the top tenth of their high school classes. But then there are also things like the rate at which alumni give money to the school.”
“You’re joking,” Helen said, appalled.
“And on the other hand, it doesn’t measure things like public service or how many students go on to do graduate work. I mean, you would come up with entirely different rankings if you changed the formula, but U.S. News seems to have dominated the market with one set of factors, and it really does affect the numbers who apply. Students want to get into the school with the number one next to its name just a little bit more than they want to get into the number two school.”
“And Princeton is… ?” Helen asked archly. She plainly expected its ranking to be neither of these.
“Number one. This year. But that’s not the point.”
Helen looked satisfyingly surprised.
“A situation like this, in the English Department, is not going to affect the U.S. News rankings. And rationally, we could look at it and think, Well, it’s not an institutional problem. It has nothing to do with ‘Princeton,’ you know? It’s a small, localized situation. Just… one bad apple. But unfortunately, people love a story about a great university with mud on its face. So then… well, let’s say someone is trying to decide between two universities he’s been admitted to. Those tiny little things can become tipping points for the applicant. Or his parents.”
“Applicant?” Helen said, actually turning to face her for the first time. “Parents?” She gave Portia a frankly curious look.
“The fact is,” Portia went on, “we encourage a large applicant pool so that we can select the students we want. And then, once we’ve selected those students, we often have to work to get them. The same Intel winner or National Spelling Bee champion or… I don’t know, Academy Award–winning actress who applies to Princeton has almost certainly applied to other Ivy League colleges, or Stanford, or MIT and Caltech. Those colleges will make an offer of admission as well, or some of them will. So now, suddenly, instead of students competing to get into Princeton, Princeton is competing to get the student. And that’s when our tipping point comes into play.”
“Oh, I think this is a little parano
id,” Helen said.
If only it were, thought Portia. This scramble at the tail end of the admissions calendar seldom got much scrutiny from the public, but it was critically important to the universities involved. The fact was that once an offer of admission had been made, the entire game changed and the roles reversed: now the school was the one on bended knee. Having gone to the trouble of winnowing the stupendously remarkable from a vast field of the only normally remarkable, Princeton did not want to lose that stupendously remarkable student to Stanford. Or Harvard. Or—gnashing of teeth—Yale. There had been more than a few of these students over the years. She had agonized over their applications and been moved by their stories, impressed by their essays and achievements. She had stood up for them in committee and felt immense satisfaction as she persuaded her colleagues to admit them. Then she had watched them blithely go elsewhere, and while the choices were often understandable (some students were always going to choose Harvard, weren’t they?), sometimes they were baffling. She remembered in particular one boy from Arkansas who had won Princeton’s international poetry competition for high school students—a very useful thing to have done if you cared to be admitted to Princeton. This kid had grown up in extreme poverty and was a loner in school, but also a student his teachers were enraptured by, and his essays were beautifully realized evocations of the life he had lived and the one he hoped to live. (He was, Martin Quilty had noted at the time, one of those kids who had somehow picked up Princeton on their radar—you were never sure how. A poster outside his English teacher’s office? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Brooke Shields?) In committee, there had been so much enthusiasm for his application, Portia remembered. The admit vote had been accompanied by actual applause. But the applicant had chosen to go to a state college down south. Years later, Portia still thought of him, baffled and disappointed at his escape, or failure of nerve, or their own failure to bring him in.
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