“It’s been years since I changed a diaper! But I’m telling you, I can’t wait.”
Portia, who knew only that none of the words she had been expecting were part of this, found herself tuning out the manic buzz from the other end of the line. She looked at the file in her lap. “Terry Wang,” it said. She had no memory at all of Terry Wang, despite the fact that she had nearly reached the essays when the phone rang. In theory, many numbers and letters and words of great importance to Terry Wang had already wafted from these pages, coiling up into the great cauldron of her own presumably adequate intellect and capacity for judgment. Something about a mother? She had a deceased mother. Mandarin spoken in the home. She was in a choir, yes? Or a… chorale of some kind. Likely major: molecular biology. Or… Latin? Was she, in fact, a she at all? Portia had many times been pulled up short by a pronoun at the very end of an application. Sometimes with a name like Chris or Terry. More often with names foreign to her, Debdan or Meihui. She would nearly have a fixed idea of this girl who played speed chess to relax, or this boy who had broken every freestyle record his high school could throw at him, only to have some teacher remark, “He is such a pleasure to teach.” Or, “She is the only girl presently in my advanced calculus seminar, and refuses to be intimidated.”
“Portia,” her mother said shortly. “Can you believe this?” Clearly, she was relishing some kind of moment.
“He didn’t say anything,” Portia said apologetically. “Are you okay about all this?”
Her mother laughed. She laughed, Portia thought, without context, for the sheer, inappropriate pleasure of it. Portia sat on her bed, her finger inserted between the pages of Terry Wang’s short, focused life, listening to her mother laugh, far away up north. She saw Susannah in her warm, messy kitchen, an ancient cat under the table, four days’ worth of Boston Globes on the counter, dangerously near the stove. Where was Frieda? Portia wondered. Frieda was her mother’s remaining housemate. Why didn’t Frieda stop her laughing?
“Tell me,” said Portia, reaching for the safest thing, “how did this happen?”
“You remember Barbara? Teaches anthropology at Cornell? We stayed with them when you were looking at the school.”
“Sure I remember,” Portia said, though it had been two decades ago. “Them” had been a houseful of women, very messy women, some affiliated with the university, in the College Town section of Ithaca. She and her mother had slept on a miserable twin mattress on the floor, in a room off the kitchen. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to go to Cornell.
“Barb’s been working in Wyoming,” said Susannah, as if this were some sort of explanation.
“Mom?”
“She’s doing a book about feedlot culture.”
“For cows?” Portia asked, baffled.
“No, Portia. For people. It’s a new economic model. No one’s looked at the social impact yet.”
“But…” Her head was meandering. She was actually fighting an urge to reopen Terry Wang’s file, to solve the now thorny issues of major and gender. “Mom, Barb from Cornell is writing a book about feedlots in Wyoming. What does that have to do with… did you say you were getting a baby?”
“So she’s been mentoring at Planned Parenthood, like she used to do in Ithaca. One abortion provider for a thousand miles, and surrounded by the crazies, you know? And this girl came in a few weeks ago, but she seemed ambivalent about terminating. This girl wanted to finish school and go to college, but she couldn’t continue the pregnancy at home.”
“Why not?” Portia asked.
“Various disapproving family members, I assume,” Susannah said shortly. “Anyway, Barb called me. This is two weeks ago. And I said send her here. So Barb put her on a plane.”
“Wait…” Portia was shaking her head in disbelief. “When you say ‘girl,’ how girl do you mean? You didn’t kidnap a middle schooler, did you?”
“No, no. Caitlin’s seventeen. She wants to go to college next fall. Her parents think she’s on a high school exchange program. Which she is, more or less. I enrolled her at Hartland Regional. It’s like Harvard compared to the lousy school she went to in Wyoming, you know?”
Portia was briefly distracted by her own internal review of Hartland Regional, which was unlike Harvard in every way she could think of. “Well… ,” she faltered. “Good for you. You took in an unwed mother. That’s great. And what happens when the baby’s born?”
“Oh,” said her mother with maddening nonchalance. “She thinks I’m adopting it. But it won’t come to that. Not that I’m opposed to taking care of the baby. I’d love having a baby around again. Frieda’s giving me a hard time about it, but she’ll come around.”
Now Portia was reeling. Somewhere between “she thinks I’m adopting” and “won’t come to that” and Frieda needing to “come around,” there was a crisis afoot. But what specific breed of crisis?
“Mom,” she managed, “you’re”—she frantically did the math—“sixty-eight.”
“I know how old I am,” her mother said tersely. “And very healthy, I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear.”
“Of course I’m happy to hear it,” Portia said, in shock. “Why would you want to do this, at this time of your life?”
“Because I can, right? And I happen to think it’s important. And it needs doing. There you go, three excellent reasons. And you only asked for one.”
“But you can’t adopt a baby!” she said, baffled that she had to be saying this at all.
“I’m not adopting. Didn’t you listen to what I said? Caitlin isn’t going to let that baby go. She doesn’t know it yet, but when the baby is born, she’ll see. And I’m happy for her to live here. She can finish high school here. She can even start college in Vermont if she likes. She has no idea how she’s going to feel once the baby is actually here and she can see it and hold it. And even if she doesn’t feel that right away, she’ll come home and stay with us, and she’ll bond with the baby.”
Portia felt ill—physically ill. She was now sitting bent forward, hands wrapped tight around her knees, as if bracing for an unsurvivable plane crash. She wanted to slap her mother, or scream at her, at least, but what would she say? How dared Susannah assume to know how a seventeen-year-old would feel about a baby she wanted to give up? How dared she lie to a pregnant girl about something as critically important as this? Once, she might have been able to say these things to her mother. Now just the idea of them filled her with horror.
“Mom, don’t.” This was all she could manage.
“Don’t? Don’t what?” Susannah said tersely. “Don’t open my home to a young woman who needs help? Don’t give her the opportunity to change her mind about something this profound? You know, Portia, you may have decided not to have children, but that does not diminish the mother and child bond for the rest of us. I happen to feel it’s quite powerful.”
Portia was shaking. Bent over, the phone mashed to her ear with a clammy hand.
“She thinks she can just give birth to a baby and get on a plane and leave it behind. Back to her life and her family, whatever. And that’s understandable. She’s a baby herself. She has no idea how it’s going to feel, but I do. And any mother does. I know, when she sees her child, it’s going to change. And when it does, the door will be open for her, to take back her child. All I’m doing is making it possible for Caitlin to change her mind.”
“And what if she doesn’t?” Portia heard herself say. “What if she has her baby and gets on that plane and doesn’t change her mind? What if you’re left with a baby to raise?” At your age! she almost added, but fortunately caught hold of herself.
“You must think of me as very frail,” Susannah said icily. “I had no idea.”
“No, no,” she objected, but feebly. Susannah had never been frail. Susannah was the opposite of frail. “Obviously, you can do this.”
“Well, thanks for that,” her mother said with abundant sarcasm. “Look, there’s no point going on about it now. I get that I’m c
atching you off guard, and you’re finding it difficult to pretend you’re happy about this.”
She was certainly right about that, Portia thought.
“Why don’t you just call me back when you’re ready to have a real conversation. In the meantime, we’re not going to do Thanksgiving, in case you were thinking of coming up. We’re just getting Caitlin settled in. I don’t want to overwhelm her. I’d rather you and Mark waited till next month. Then you’ll get a chance to meet her. She’s very intelligent, by the way. I mean, maybe not Princeton material, but still intelligent.” This last was said with a definite sneer—identifiable even across the miles and the less than state-of-the-art telephone connection.
“That’s not fair.”
“Well, life isn’t fair,” her mother said, and hung up smartly.
As an ninth grader, I was fortunate to win a scholarship to Andover through a program that prepares minority students for college. The first year here was very difficult for me. I felt alone. I was one of very few Latina students on campus. The other students tended to be from very privileged backgrounds, and though they weren’t unkind to us, it was clear to me that they didn’t really have an ability to communicate with us in any meaningful way. In my sophomore year, however, I joined the crew team, and gradually crew became a common language. Some of my crew teammates became my friends, and while none of them have ever come to visit me in my hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, I have spent a lot of time in their homes. The father of one of my teammates is a Princeton alum, and he first talked to me about the school. I want you to know that I am aware my SAT scores are significantly lower than what is typical for a Princeton student, but I am used to working very hard, and I am determined to thrive in college.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FICTIONS OF LIVES
Mark seemed to take the news of their Thanksgiving banishment with equanimity, if the shrug he offered in response might be termed equanimity. In fact, there was a certain reserve of emotion in the days that followed the dinner party, days in which they woke and spoke and made plans and shifted them without ever having what might be termed an important conversation. Certainly they never returned to the crucial moment, the moment she would later know to be a definitive kind of rift, but only seemed instead to lay a walkway over it and get on with things. Portia considered this, if not precisely satisfying, then oddly mature, as if they had somehow arrived at a place in their life together where not every moment of conflict required a deconstruction and then a reconstruction of souls, individual or entwined. Like silence in a long conversation, what had happened felt, in its immediate aftermath, like a sigh, a shake of the head, or perhaps even the shrug Mark himself had offered when she’d told him—not, perhaps, in these particular words—that Susannah did not want them after all, that they were off the hook. Surely he was glad not to face that grueling drive, eight hours at the mercy of their fellow travelers on the wintry roads, the odd American ritual at this even odder American table in this oddest of all American households. It meant even less to him than it did to her, surely. Why he had even tolerated it all these years… well, it testified to his general forbearance, she supposed.
But then again, he didn’t seem relieved. He carried this dismissal like a very small but accrued burden, part of an ongoing increase in small burdens. He made no suggestion for an alternative plan for the holiday, nor did he ask whether she cared to make a plan. She had just begun to feel real concern for the situation when, three days before the holiday itself, Mark came home in a state of some agitation and reported an unfolding crisis within his department, one that had been consuming him—as it turned out—for the better part of a week, and which, reassuringly, had nothing whatsoever to do with him, with her, or—most important of all—with them.
Gordon Sternberg, for decades the most celebrated member of the English Department (as likely to turn up on Charlie Rose as he was to grace Princeton’s Web page with the news of some new book or honor), was undergoing a breakdown of spectacular proportions, encompassing—so Mark explained to Portia—every aspect of his life. Sternberg, the author of classic works of scholarship on a staggering array of literary subjects (he was a nineteenth-century man on the whole, but so brilliant that a brief, aberrant fascination with Spenser had resulted in an instantly classic work of criticism on The Faerie Queene), was a former chair of the department and current power behind the throne—Mark’s throne—simply too important not to consult on matters minuscule or major. He lived a few minutes’ walk from campus, at the end of a long street of stately homes, with his wife and whichever of his six children might be drifting through, writing up their PhD theses or taking time off between stints of fieldwork. Famously raucous faculty parties took place in the classically proportioned rooms, with legendary bad behavior and marriages rent asunder. (Portia had herself attended many of these parties, often finding herself in the kitchen with Julianne Sternberg, who—hailing from the Betty Fussell years of competitive Princeton entertaining—refused to hire a caterer or even allow the university to assemble the buffet.)
Now, with a clamorous jolt, it was all over—the marriage, the family, the career.
Sternberg, always a drinker, had imploded in a series of crises, domestic disturbances, a weaving car down Prospect Avenue, an outburst from his seat at a visiting scholar’s lecture on Tennyson. Campus security had found him under his own office desk at four in the morning. One of his children had gone to the dean of faculty, pleading for help. Julianne Sternberg was not talking to that child, who was not talking to two of her siblings. The house, it turned out, was quite literally falling down, with the ceiling of the large living room—scene of so many famous bacchanals—actually scattered over the carpeting and the walls puckering from damp and carpenter ants.
The first midnight call came the week before the Thanksgiving holiday, and when Mark returned home just before dawn, it was to deliver the news of Gordon Sternberg’s hospitalization at Princeton House, the addiction treatment facility of the local medical center. “I knew this was coming,” he said wearily, pulling off his shoes again and lying on top of the covers. “Gordon has been in terrible shape for a couple of years. I’m glad he’s had the crisis, in a way. Now he’ll get the attention he needs, and they can help him.”
But three nights later another call came, this time from the police. Gordon had made some sort of escape from the facility and next appeared at his family home, armed with a long piece of wood he had evidently lifted from a neighbor’s garbage pile. His turncoat daughter had called for help as her mother sobbed upstairs. Now there were criminal charges to contend with. This time, Mark didn’t come home till nearly ten the next morning.
Meanwhile, there was Sternberg’s advanced seminar on the Romantics, which had to be reassigned (Rachel, taking one for the team, volunteered to step in), and the weighty matter of the great man’s junior paper students, and the half-dozen thesis advisees, not to mention the graduate students and Rhodes and Marshall applicants to whom he’d promised life-altering recommendations. There was Julianne Sternberg, who was herself becoming unhinged by the rapid implosion of her entire life, the sudden, brutal divisions among her children, the financial body blow of what promised to be intensive and chronic care for her husband, coupled with his abrupt lack of employment in circumstances that didn’t at all guarantee the seamless continuation of his salary, not to mention the growing laundry list of legal expenses. And there was the small difficulty of one Ezme Johanna Castillo, the unwitting catalyst for all this heartbreak. Castillo was a doctoral candidate from NYU who had been invited by Sternberg to co-teach an advanced seminar on demonic preoccupations in nineteenth-century American poetry and to whom Sternberg had apparently been declaring extreme devotion since the beginning of the fall term (to, she was insisting, her intense chagrin). The English, comparative literature, and even, in a couple of cases, creative writing faculty had leapt into this sordid human mess and begun thrashing about, milling gossip and schadenfreude out of the
muck, calling Mark to register long buried grievances against Sternberg, or little warning signs they’d noted, or confidences he’d entrusted to them, which they—being loyal, honorable people—had kept silent about, despite their better judgments (which—seeing the clear price of their silence—they certainly regretted now!). Everyone, naturally, wanted to talk about Ezme Johanna Castillo. Was she? Were they? Was it a case of an unwitting pawn, lodged in the tractor beam of the great man’s stature and brilliance? Sorting out the complicity or innocence of this person, which was technically not even relevant to the nuts and bolts of the Sternberg situation, and figuring out what to do with her from the university’s official standpoint, began to consume more and more of Mark’s energy, as far as Portia was concerned. As if, she thought, all would hinge on whether it was an actual affair, and if so, a consensual affair or a coercive affair, or instead something confined to the now unbounded imagination of the rapidly deteriorating Gordon Sternberg. So Mark interviewed her, and because he couldn’t in good conscience ask anyone else for an opinion on Sternberg’s and Castillo’s private lives, he interviewed her again. And again. Then, apparently distraught, she disappeared, with nothing settled. And who could blame her?
Sternberg himself at this point was ensconced at a treatment facility outside of Philadelphia and in some legal limbo. Officially he was on medical leave, and the university was maintaining an attitude of prim silence on the whole business, but the entire Modern Language Association seemed nonetheless to be on intimate terms with what was happening. At Thanksgiving dinner, which Portia and Mark ultimately attended at Rachel and David’s house, at a table populated by no fewer than four other department-affiliated couples (plus the ever disagreeable Helen of Oxford), no one spoke of anything else, and in the days following the holiday, the scandal only waxed. Mark’s phone seemed to ring all the time—at home, too, as if the situation called for a suspension of that civilized separation between time on and time off. Portia, who was attempting to get through thirty application folders a day in her armchair in the corner of the bedroom, began to anticipate the interruptions and found herself becoming syncopated, disjointed in her reading, which forced her to go back and reread, which slowed her down and confused her. She tried turning off the bedside phone but then only heard the downstairs phone and the disembodied voice coiling up the stairwell.
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