She knew her way around the Main Line, more or less, and had an impression of Wayne, where John had grown up, as a region straddling the border between horse country and suburbia, with serious affluence on either side. She knew that she was going to the house John had lived in from the age of four, and where his parents—following the departure of his younger sister and himself—had continued to live, with a succession of chocolate Labs. He insisted they would be happy to see her, unannounced though she might be. Not that they were easygoing people, he noted, go-with-the-flow types with extra beds at the ready and the makings to feed a crowd always on hand.
“My mom is very hospitable, but she’s a planner,” he explained. “You don’t surprise her and expect to be welcomed. But she already knows she’s getting two adults and three teenagers. Another body won’t throw her. We’re going to bill you as my old friend from Dartmouth who was kind enough to pull a few strings for Jeremiah.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” she said, her voice dropping. It startled her, how instantly she was on edge. “I can’t be associated with the phrase pull a few strings. I mean, I know I get a little paranoid about this stuff. But it’s important.”
“I meant because you arranged for him to go to a class, that’s all.”
“I know, I know,” she said, feeling pretty stupid by now.
Silence ensued. It was weighted, but just this side of unpleasant.
“I wonder how Simone’s liking Bryn Mawr,” John said finally.
“Simone,” said Portia, relieved by the segue, “is a piece of work.”
“A work in progress,” he chided. “She’s only sixteen.”
“I thought she was a senior, when I visited the school. She really took me on.”
“Yes. She can’t help it, you know. I mean, she has this oppositional temperament, which is innate, and if that weren’t enough, she’s a little bit like you were in the nurture department. Also brought up to be a warrior. But you know what? I feel like she’s one of those kids who needs to crash into something before she figures out how not to do it. She’s going to be great, when the smoke clears. But she’ll bang herself up a lot first.”
Portia sighed. “I forgot, you really know kids. All these years of teaching. You’ve seen everything.”
“Well,” he said affably, “so have you.”
“No. I just see what they show me. I see the part of the iceberg that’s above the waterline. Which isn’t the scary part.”
He turned in his seat and looked at her, his eyes boring through her peripheral vision. She pretended not to notice this, focusing instead on the road, which now twisted through tended meadows and cultivated yards, overgrown contemporary homes interspersed with older but just as expensive properties. She drove past a paddock with two roan horses grazing at the split rail fence. They were in serious tally-ho country, the horse farms and gated estates interspersed with new developments all too happy to take up the theme: Hunter’s Chase, the Copse at Wyndmoor, Fox Run Estates. “You grew up here,” she observed.
“Yes. Awful, isn’t it? These all used to be farms. There was a farm next door to us. Now it has forty horrible homes on it, every one of them with a media center and a three-car garage.” He shook his head. “But I’m just confirming all of your suspicions about the snobbery of Main Line WASPs.”
“Not at all,” she said, though she had been thinking exactly that. “What about your house?”
“Well, my house reflects the snobbery of an earlier time. I know that. It has every luxury on offer in the 1920s, and a bunch added on later. But maybe without this compulsion to use up every square inch of the land, just because you can. And please don’t get my mother started on this. Preserving open land is one of her big things. She’s gone for these long walks, for years, with the dogs. A few years ago she got hit by a golf ball off one of the courses. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so angry. Well, apart from the time I told her I was going to Uganda.” He laughed shortly.
“Was she hurt?” Portia asked.
“Not really. Not physically. But she hasn’t missed a zoning board meeting since then. We’re getting close now,” he said, pointing at the upcoming gap in a stone wall. The mailbox, in faded, hand-painted blue, read “Halsey.”
Portia pulled off the road and drove down a long gravel track, through maple trees. The house, when it appeared, was modestly small from the front, but when John directed her past it to the detached garage, she saw that it had expanded, probably over time, in nearly a straight line, so that it resembled a classic but plainly modern version of the old New England chant: “Big house, little house, back house, barn.” The long tail of the building ended before a pond, ringed by carefully placed flat stones and abutted by a garden in its winter netting.
“Oh,” said John as she parked beside a blue Subaru with New Hampshire plates. Deborah’s car, Portia recognized. “I thought they’d spend the afternoon at Bryn Mawr,” he said, climbing out. Two great brown dogs came bounding up to him.
“Hey, guys. Samson and Delilah,” he said, introducing them to Portia.
They went wild at the sound of their names.
“I love the smell of wet dog in the morning.” He laughed, petting them and fending them off at the same time. And they were indeed wet, Portia noted, stepping back. And very muddy.
“Well, hi!” A woman emerged from the garage.
John pushed away the dogs and hugged her. She was short and thick through the middle, but very hale. She was dressed in the kind of clothes people wore to appear as if they relished outdoor life, but her khakis and quilted olive green jacket were the real article: streaked with brown mud, frayed at the edges. On her feet, old Wellington boots were encrusted with dirt. She looked, thought Portia, very little like John, except—she decided, eyeing the wrist protruding from that olive jacket as she hugged her son—this peculiar, embedded grace in the shoulders, arms, and hands. When they broke apart, when the wrist retreated into her coat sleeve and the hands made briefly for her coat pockets, even that small resemblance evaporated.
“This is my old friend Portia Nathan,” John said, and his mother turned to her. She had a great correctness about this transition, giving him his long maternal embrace and only afterward seeming to notice Portia, and then Jeremiah, in the proper order. She extended her hand graciously, also in that order.
“Hello,” said Portia, “Mrs. Halsey.”
“And this is Jeremiah Balakian.”
“I’m very happy to see you, Jeremiah. Portia?” she asked, though she had just heard the name.
“Yes.”
“Old friend? From school?”
“Yes,” said Portia.
“No,” said John. “I mean, not from Lawrenceville. From Dartmouth. Portia very kindly gave us a ride down. We stayed in Princeton last night.”
“I live in Princeton,” she added, probably unnecessarily.
“I thought you were all coming together,” his mother said. “Deborah came separately with the kids.”
The kids, noted Portia, her antennae prickling. To John’s mother, the former partners and their children plainly represented some flavor of family unit.
“I wasn’t expecting them to show up till later,” he told her. “They were supposed to go see Bryn Mawr this afternoon.”
“Oh, they did,” his mother said, rolling her eyes. “Only apparently Simone took one look and refused to get out of the car.”
Portia laughed. “In the trade, we call that a drive-by. The kid says, ‘No way am I going here.’ The best option for parents is to move along.”
John’s mother looked keenly at Portia. She had straight hair, still somewhat blond but liberally interspersed with steely gray. “What trade is that?” she asked Portia.
“Portia is an admissions officer,” John said. “At Princeton.”
Those eyes, like so many eyes before them, reacted to this news.
“Well, welcome,” she told them, her ingrained good manners reasserting themselves. “Come in
side. I’m ready for some coffee. The dogs and I are just back from our walk. We walked all the way to Chanticleer,” she told her son, who scowled.
“Mom, it’s too far. Why don’t you just stick with Willow Park? Isn’t that enough?”
“Well, it was for me, but the dogs objected,” she told her son.
“Please tell me you took a phone with you.”
“Okay. I can tell you that.” She held open the door for them and shut it once Jeremiah had passed inside.
Portia found herself in a warm central hall with a staircase that climbed upward to a formal landing, a round wooden table in the center of the floor, and a worn brass chandelier overhead. On the table: neatly stacked letters, the kind no one was supposed to be writing anymore, a muddle of keys in a china dish, and a photo of smiling John and his smiling female counterpart (long necked, dimpled, brandishing diploma) in a silver frame.
“I promised you hunting prints,” John said puckishly, at her elbow.
“I’m sorry?” his mother asked.
Portia looked up. The prints climbed the stairs, framed in uniform cherry. She smiled.
“What about the prints?” said his mother.
“I was telling Portia about them.” He set down the bags, his own and Jeremiah’s.
“Do you ride?” his mother asked, looking at Portia in surprise.
“No, no. Well, once, when I was a child.”
“But you’re interested in hunting?” She seemed appropriately perplexed.
“No, not really.”
She glanced resentfully at John, who was pretending not to enjoy himself.
Just off the staircase, a formal archway led to a living room that was itself classically formal, with long chintz sofas from which a teenager’s blue-jeaned legs were just visible and a mantelpiece festooned with more silver frames. There was motion from the landing above as Deborah materialized. Simone emerged from another doorway off the entrance hall, holding her place in a thick paperback, looking characteristically put upon. Behind her, Portia saw a dark, wood-paneled room lined with bookshelves.
“Hi,” Simone managed.
“Hey, Simone,” said John. “I heard you didn’t see eye to eye with Bryn Mawr.”
“No way,” she said tersely. “Forget it.”
“Some of my dearest friends went to Bryn Mawr,” said John’s mother. “It was always a place for smart, ambitious women.”
Simone made a face. She was about to say something acerbic—even Portia could tell—but her mother cut her off.
“Just not a good fit. We decided to come visit with Eve and Robert. Save ourselves for Penn in the morning.”
“How was Princeton?” Simone asked Jeremiah.
“Oh, my God.” He shook his head. “Amazing.”
“Portia arranged…” John glanced at her. “Portia has a friend who teaches philosophy. She asked him if Jeremiah could attend his class this morning. It was such a great opportunity for him, I thought the two of us should stay over.”
“You stayed in a hotel?” his mother asked.
“I was going to,” he said with what seemed like real nonchalance. “But Portia had a guest room. Jeremiah stayed with an undergraduate.”
Eve Halsey looked first at Deborah, plainly trying to get a grasp on the interpersonal situation. Beneath her placid demeanor, she seemed to be genuinely puzzled: Which, if either of these women, was her son “with”? And what, to an unmarried man in his late thirties with a tall black son from the other side of the planet, did “with,” after all, mean? Deborah, with admirable indifference, merely smiled and slung her arm over her daughter’s thin shoulders.
“Well,” John’s mother finally said to Portia, “that was extremely nice of you.”
“No, not at all,” Portia told her. “It was nice to catch up with John. And I think it’s great that Jeremiah was able to sit in on a class.”
“Hey, Nelson,” John said loudly. “Are you in the house?”
“Hey,” came the voice from the general vicinity of those blue-jeaned legs on the living room couch.
“Could you come out and show yourself?”
“I’m on level five,” he called in apparent explanation.
“Well, that is exciting,” John said dryly. “But there are actual human beings here, who would like to see you. One of them is your father.”
There was a grudging sigh from beyond the wall and a rustle of silk. Nelson appeared, holding an open laptop.
“You loaned him your laptop?” John asked his mother, looking as if she had let him play with her Uzi.
“Hey,” Nelson said to Portia. He gave his father a brief embrace.
“Why not?” Eve Halsey said. “He promised me it wasn’t one of those awful ones, with blood flying everywhere.”
“Level five,” Nelson reiterated.
“I saw the best minds of his generation gummed up with video game dreck, lost forever on level five,” John lamented.
Deborah laughed. “Come on, John. If Allen Ginsberg were alive today, he’d probably have a huge video game collection.”
“Yeah,” Jeremiah said brightly. “Pong for disembodied poetics! Like, instead of the ball, it would be Corso versus Kerouac, hurling metaphors through cyberspace.”
“That would be terrible, you know,” Deborah said brightly. “You’d have to think while you played it.”
“Pong?” said Nelson, looking at Jeremiah in clear disgust. “What are you, like, forty?”
John then leapt into the fray, elicited a grudging apology from Nelson, and instructed him to lead Jeremiah upstairs, to the room they would be sharing—his own childhood room, he informed Portia, unreconstructed for twenty years, still ornamented with the usual embarrassing teenage ephemera. Deborah and Simone were to sleep next door, in the pink princess beds that once belonged to John’s sister, Diana. Portia watched the four of them climb the stairs.
“I hope you’ll be able to stay for dinner, Portia,” said John’s mother. “I just put a roast in. John’s sister is coming later, with her daughter. I know they’d love to meet you. My granddaughter, Kelsey, is in eleventh grade at Baldwin. Do you know Baldwin?”
“Of course,” Portia said brightly, even as she shriveled inside. “Wonderful school.”
“Then you’ll stay?” John’s mother said, as if the prospect of an eleventh grader from a highly competitive prep school were actually an inducement.
“Well, thank you. I’m not sure of my plans, actually. I’m kind of on the lam from work. It’s our busy season.…”
She glanced helplessly at John, who managed to communicate sincere embarrassment while seeming fascinated by the carved banister of the staircase. Then again, if the lingering inappropriateness of her contact with Jeremiah was not enough to chase her away, she was hardly going to assign that power to a Main Line private school mom and her undoubtedly Ivy-aspiring daughter. And the truth, which was only now occurring to her, was that she wasn’t ready to leave yet.
“But certainly, I’d love to stay for dinner.”
“Wonderful. Well, I have to go wash the great outdoors off. John? You’re downstairs.” She whistled, and with a magisterial sweep of her hands, the two muddy dogs roused themselves and trotted into the kitchen, where they stayed. Then she shed her muddy boots and walked upstairs, looking purposeful. Portia could almost hear the update she was about to deliver to her daughter on the phone and the strict instructions to the surely terrific Kelsey.
John took her hand. “Come with me,” he said.
He took her downstairs, past a storeroom and a wine cellar and a Ping-Pong table slightly too large for the room it was in. At the end of the corridor, the door to a small guest room had been left open. He tossed his bag on the bed beside a crisply folded towel, hand towel, and washcloth, left in a precisely stacked pile. Then he kissed her, pulling her against him. For a long moment, Portia forgot where she was.
“This is a very erotic scenario for me,” he said affably, coming up for air. “You know, be
autiful girl, in the basement of my own house, with my parents upstairs.”
“As well as your ex,” she reminded him. “And your adolescent son. And your ex’s teenaged daughter. And your student.”
“Killjoy,” he commented, kissing her again. “Wanna sleep over?”
“Not if I have to provide free college counseling for your niece.”
“Ow.” He grimaced. “I’m sorry. My mom isn’t really sensitive that way. You don’t have to. I’m sure you’re good at repelling the advances of high school juniors and their fond parents.”
“Well…” She sighed. “You sort of have to be.”
He smiled. “In the trade.”
“In the trade.”
“So, you’ll sleep over?”
“I really should call my office,” said Portia. “While we’ve been amusing ourselves, there’s a stack of files with my name on it, getting taller and taller.”
“Portia,” he reminded her, “it’s Saturday night. You’re expected to work Saturday night?”
“In February? Saturday night. Friday night. All day Sunday. We get to hibernate in the summertime.”
“Dad!” Nelson howled from the top of the basement stairs.
“Yes?”
“Everyone’s reading, and Grandma took her laptop back. I’m bored.”
“Oh no!” said John, grinning. “He’s bored. Let’s call the National Guard.”
“Dad!” Nelson called. “Did you hear me?”
“The whole neighborhood heard you, Nel.” His father laughed. “Hang on.” He squeezed Portia’s wrist. “If you have to leave, I do understand. But stay if you can. I’ll never let my sister get you alone. I won’t let any of them get you alone,” he told her. “Except for me.”
Princeton has been a part of my family since I can remember. I grew up hearing my grandfather’s stories about rowing on Lake Carnegie, and my parents’ (much less dignified!) accounts of Saturday nights on Prospect. Certainly, all three of them have enormous affection for the institution, but they have not spared me the difficulties of being African-American at a place like Princeton in the 1950s, and even, for my parents, in the 1980s. In spite of this, I grew up understanding that Princeton was a place where amazing things could be experienced, and it has always been my passionate wish to follow my parents and grandfather.
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