Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  At some point, while she’d been away, the administrative assistants had performed their annual veiling of the downstairs conference room, a ritual that oddly involved not a curtain to cover the glass separating the room from the corridor, but a mosaic of white copy paper, each individual page affixed with a piece of tape. This act, which signaled the onset of committee meetings and the massing wave of decisions to come, had long mystified Portia, who wondered why, if privacy was so important—and of course it was—the office had not seen fit to build an actual wall, or at least to invest in some sort of fabric sheeting that could be drawn whenever the committee got down to work. That would have to be a bit more soothing to any anxious parents, stopping in to hand-deliver a last minute CD of their child performing Bach on the cello or a testimonial from the coach. Not that anything could really buffer the stress on either side of the glass.

  Statistically, she was ready for committee. She had already read more applications this year than last and had finished her entire district except for the fifty or so still missing pieces. (Though applications, from first arrivals to in-under-the-wires, were given equal weight, there was a certain undeniable quality of diminishment in the folders as they reached the far end of the punctuality bell curve. The early filers were organized, type A, staggeringly accomplished; the latecomers were a bit more relaxed, a bit less coiled to chase down their guidance counselors and teachers and make sure they’d sent in their forms, perhaps even a bit more inclined to just throw a Princeton application at the wall and see if, by some quirk of fortune, it stuck.) Portia, in spite of everything that reading season had wrought in her life, had nonetheless made her way, folder by folder, through every corner of her region, completing a symbolic pilgrimage from school to school. The backward view from West College included miles of coastline and chains of mountain ranges—Greens, Whites, Presidentials—from Vermont to Maine. She could see old towns and towns so new that the gates of their gated communities had barely been hung, the great boarding prep schools, creaking in amber tradition, and the suburban public schools around Boston (which seemed no less infused with competitive mania than the Grotons and Choates), and the great academies of Boston itself, from which Brahmin sons, born into the expectation of Harvard (and all it then represented), had once crossed the river to Cambridge en masse, and now the children of immigrants, drawn to this country by a vision of Harvard (and all it now represented), still crossed the river to Cambridge en masse.

  Then, too, Portia had served as second reader to Corinne’s files, revisiting the schools, teachers, and even a few families she had dwelt among for the past five years and finding again the intense, driven musicians and biologists, the offspring of new (and vast) Silicon wealth, the striving children of parents who worked in fields, construction, and even sweatshops, who were sometimes the only English speakers in their families and who wrote of mothers and fathers so dependent on them that Portia wondered how they would cope when these burdened sons and daughters flew away to meet their dizzying futures.

  Over and over and over, even as she read these still forming lives as distinct, individual things, they braided themselves together into the same American story: My family came after the famine, after the Armenian Genocide, after the Shoah, after the Cambodian refugee camp. My family came last year, with nothing, and we still have nothing except for my 4.6 GPA and my National Merit semifinalist citation and my reference from the Chief of Oncology, who calls my work on cancerous skin cells “uniquely promising,” and my chance to attend Princeton. We came here so my parents could take the invisible, uniformed, dangerous jobs, so the next generation could be doctors and engineers, so the generation after that could be environmentalists, poets, directors of nonprofit organizations. Almost every applicant seemed at home in this most American of equations, Portia thought. Their voices strained to merge, and she had to hold them back, pick them laboriously apart until they resumed their separate selves, some of whom would be admitted, most of whom would not. It felt wrong, given the chorus they so effortlessly made. Why should one American dream be more valid than another? Why should one family saga weigh more than the next?

  Corinne’s appraisals, Portia admitted grudgingly, were largely on target. She had a scrupulous fairness, a rigid bar that refused to patronize—which was a good thing, Portia instructed herself. She had, also, a discernible fondness for classicists and a just detectable distaste for athletes who insisted the joy of competing was enough, who bravely declared that they were as proud of their hard-won last-place finish as they would have been of a victory. She could not resist noting grammatical errors (“Grm Ers”) and flaws in spelling (“Spl Ers”) and had, in her reader’s card summaries, a penchant for the words lukewarm (“LW”) and boilerplate (“BP”); but on the whole, Portia found that she rarely disagreed with her colleague.

  Except, of course, about Jeremiah.

  Corinne had, as promised, been fast, and his application was waiting for her on her return, shuffled in among its seventy-four fellow travelers. Each of these now bore her trademark brown felt-tip script on the flip side of the reader’s card, a space about half as large as that assigned to the first reader—in this case, Portia—enough to agree or disagree and say why. As in: “Agree w/PN, Joseph has been a credit to his school, gifted linguist and debater, but middling writer and LW recs. Not seeing strong intellectual curiosity here, plus notably weak senior yr.” Or: “Second PN’s opinion of Jenny, fantastic student, v strong writer/mathematician, CW program says one of strongest fiction samples they’ve seen this year. Would love to see her @ PU.”

  Portia moved quickly through the pile, affirming and affirming. It wasn’t unheard of to have disagreement, but it wasn’t the norm. They were all, after all, looking for the same things, or at least the same array of different things, and while the sheer weight of the numbers meant that many of the students they loved could not be offered admission, it wouldn’t be for lack of approbation. This would not be the situation with Jeremiah. And while disagreement between first and second readers made for lively discussion in committee—which was not a bad thing—the curt assessment Portia read and reread on Jeremiah’s reader’s card meant rough seas ahead.

  “Afraid I must disagree w/PN,” Corinne had written. “Clearly, Jeremiah was not well served by his public school, and his later success at the new school implies that he might have done better with good guidance. However, I don’t see that we can ignore the appalling grades he seems to have been contented with grades 9–11, or his own lack of initiative in finding a solution for himself. This student may not be disciplined enough to thrive @ PU academically, and I see no signif non-acs to mitigate. Sorry not to be able to support this AP.”

  Portia returned the card to its folder and tried to calm herself. Calm was desirable. She knew what she had to do, and it wouldn’t be furthered by losing control. She had made up her mind about this sometime in the lost few days she’d spent away from the office, at the end of some cul-de-sac of twisted meditation and justification and regret, and it had (somewhat surprisingly) stayed with her. After a moment, she closed the folder and got to her feet, assembled a cheery expression, and went to rap smartly on Clarence’s door.

  “It’s me!” she said brightly, leaning in. “Back from the dead.”

  “Well,” he said kindly, palms flat on his desktop, “I’m relieved.”

  “Sometimes I push myself too hard,” she told him. “Then I crash. I do apologize.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “It’s only that I was worried. We couldn’t reach you. And I know it had to be a difficult weekend.”

  It took her a moment to realize that he was talking about Mark. About Mark’s wedding to someone who wasn’t her. It should not have surprised her that he knew, but it did, as if her own decision not to speak about it had been somehow binding for everyone. This was ridiculously naive, of course. A move like Mark’s, played out within the university community, involving infidelities and pregnancies and retroactively suspici
ous hirings, must have prime real estate on the local grapevine. All of her colleagues undoubtedly knew, had known for months. Even Dylan and Martha. Even Corinne. Especially Corinne.

  “That’s kind of you,” she said carefully. “But I’m really all right. I do want a quick word, though, if you have time.”

  “All the time in the world,” he said affably, pushing back in his chair. “Until that phone rings. I’m waiting on a conference call with Gwendolyn and Kate.” Gwendolyn was the president of Princeton; Kate was the dean of students.

  “Okay…” She took the chair opposite his desk. “I’ll be quick. Do you remember that school in New Hampshire I visited in October? The new one.”

  He nodded. “Quest,” he said, which was impressive. Clarence could be extraordinarily impressive. Beyond his veneer of fine suits and fine manners, past the ambient fog of cologne, lay rooms of mental cabinetry in which masses of information were neatly filed. “You were intrigued.”

  “I was. By one student in particular. Different-drummer kid, very brilliant. He’d done horribly in public school. I was hoping he’d apply.”

  “And I suppose he did.” Clarence smiled, his fingertips softly drumming the desktop in an absentminded accompaniment. “Or we would not be discussing him.”

  “Yes, he did. And the application is unconventional, to say the least. He was adopted, and his parents didn’t attend college. I think it’s possible they didn’t see what he was or what he needed. He wasn’t on any kind of a college track until last fall, and his transcript is a mess, but I’m very excited by this kid. I think he’s amazing.”

  Clarence pursed his lips, already a step ahead. “Corinne disagrees, I take it?”

  “Yes. Very much so. I just wanted to tell you, I know it doesn’t look good, but I’ve talked to this kid, and I believe in him. I wondered if you’d look over the folder before we met on him.”

  On his desk, the phone began to purr. “Of course. Leave it with me,” he said, reaching out one perfectly manicured hand.

  “Thank you, Clarence,” said Portia, backing out.

  She closed the door as he rolled out his silken baritone: “Kate, yes, I have it here.…”

  He was her third boss in admissions, her second at Princeton, when he’d replaced the towering and kindly Martin Quilty. Quilty, a passionate advocate for affirmative action, had wrested the university from its racial monochrome over twenty years of service, but more than any admissions officer Portia had ever known, he had carried the weight of the job with him and suffered from it. Over the years, his handsome face had creased and fallen, and he looked more than anything like a man of constant sorrow. He was a graduate of Princeton with a deep love for the university, but he also had a determination to make it a better place, and—most important—a fairer place than when he himself had been an undergraduate. Then, he had been a white man among white men, an undistinguished scholar among many undistinguished scholars.

  Ten years earlier, in her get-acquainted lunch with Martin in the old Annex (the setting for generations of Princetonian lunches and genteel debauchery, since depressingly replaced by a very ordinary Italian restaurant), he had told her that he liked to consider each application a short story, revealing itself—revealing the applicant—at its own pace and on its own terms, and Portia had been unexpectedly charmed. (How sweetly old-fashioned, she had thought. A little bit like Martin himself.) But was it practical? Short stories aside, the university was still going to need tuba players and Pacific Islanders and a good shortstop every year, and also, what if an applicant just didn’t have much of a story yet? What if he was kind of a great, normal kid who drove the family car to his lifeguard job at the lake every summer and wanted to be a doctor? What if there was no terminal illness or piano championship, no classic immigrant saga or “Amazing Grace”–like moment of awe at the power of language, or numbers, or space? It seemed absolutely crazy, she had thought at the time (though nodding avidly to impress her new boss), to expect these seventeen-year-old lives to have much in the way of a narrative arc. American lives, despite what a famous Princetonian had once said, were entitled to second acts.

  Martin Quilty’s office now belonged to Clarence, but back then it had been dominated by framed color photos of ancestral lands in County Mayo, and endemic disarray. It had been a mess, but it had also been the kind of place she’d felt able to wander through and linger in. She missed that. At the end of the day, however, and in spite of the fact that Martin had welcomed input, advice, and debate from his staff, he still made each and every admissions decision on his own. When Clarence came from Yale to replace him, he had brought with him that office’s more democratic—if surely more arduous—tradition of committee for all, or at least for most. Applicants whose first and second (and often third) readers had concluded they were not realistic admits might be stockpiled downstairs in the office, awaiting a final just-to-be-sure going-over, but the thousands of bright, accomplished applicants who remained would all have their chance in committee, each of them summarized by his or her region team leader much as a wigged and robed barrister might present a case in Chancery: My lords and ladies, Tiffany is the likely valedictorian of her class of five hundred and fifty, captain of the softball team, a passionate artist whose portfolio, regrettably, did not wow our Art Department. Her history teacher says she is a joy in class who often asks for extra reading. The guidance counselor is new this year and does not know her well. The school has had twenty-three applicants to Princeton over the past five years, two admits, one attending. Her mother had some college but didn’t graduate. Dad is a city sanitation employee in Portland, Maine—no college. Tiffany is the eldest of five children, two of them autistic. One of her essays concerns growing up with this challenge, feeling guilty about wanting to be away from her brothers, but loving them and being defensive of them. This is a strong candidate, though perhaps not a clear admit. Thank you, my lords and ladies.

  It was at once the most satisfying and most frustrating part of the admissions cycle. By the time they left the conference room, the mass of fantastic kids—kids she had known for months through their written words and the words written about them, and whom she had sometimes met in person—would have been sorted and penned, irrevocably separated from one another. Like fish, Portia persisted in thinking, borrowing the office metaphor created years earlier by Martin Quilty and still in use. The thousands of application folders were the “pool,” and a viable applicant was “swimming.” Sometimes, in the dark winter months of reading period, in her office or at home, she thought of them all as muscular, frantic salmon fighting their way from ocean to river to stream, leaping and leaping upward toward their mutual goal. She still felt a wave of satisfaction when an applicant who’d moved or wowed her was affirmed and admitted by her colleagues. She still felt a pang of deep loss when she had to say good-bye to them and even today remembered more than a few of the ones that got away: good kids who’d worked hard, accomplished athletes and students, talented writers and musicians, just wonderful young people. They had, of course, gone to other great colleges and done superbly well—Portia knew they had, they must have—but she had always felt, in some indelible way, that she had failed them.

  She couldn’t do that now, she thought, coming back to her little office and shutting the door.

  It felt very strange, at first. It was almost an unknown sensation, like a moment of miraculous understanding about something you’ve always only pretended to understand. For the first time in a very long time, there was a thing Portia wanted—desperately. There was an aim, a prize, and something she would gladly give anything she had to possess. Her adult life—the life she had lived since the moment she shut her eyes to not see the face of her baby—had been marked by no purpose at all, not monetary gain or career ascension, not love, not spiritual progress, not travel or variety of experience, not the alleviation of suffering, not the exploration of some passionate interest, not other children. What motivates a person without a goal? she wond
ered with nearly clinical curiosity. And she thought almost immediately of how the cycle of her admissions life had always drawn her back for the next year and the next, how every summer she recovered from the loss of so many great kids and how gradually her sense of having failed them dulled and faded. Then, when autumn came, her appetite would sharpen and her curiosity build. Once again, she wanted to know who waited in the folders. She wanted to meet them and find out about their lives, learn about what mattered to them, what they’d done and what they wanted from life, hear the passion in their voices when they told her what they dreamed of achieving. That passion was infectious, addictive, and she had spent her working life riding the slipstream of so many hopeful, determined young people, thoughtlessly hitching along on the draft of their greater energy, their extraordinary goals. It felt like a kind of addiction, or at least an unauthorized use of something that was not hers to use, and thinking about it, she was ashamed of herself in a new way.

  But now there wasn’t time to indulge in new shame or anything else that could distract her. She needed her wits and her energy, every force at her disposal, because she had a goal of her own. Finally. She had a thing she wanted desperately, powerfully, like the kids in the folders who wished so hard and asked so eloquently. The thing she wanted couldn’t give her peace or make right the things she had done. It would not mitigate the harm. But it would be something: a gift for Jeremiah. Long overdue, perhaps, but also perhaps just in time.

  “Make sure your essay stands out,” my college advisor told me. “It doesn’t have to be about your philosophy of life. One of the best essays I ever read was about cutting up a fish.” But I’ve never cut up a fish. And if I did, I can’t imagine how to make that interesting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE AMAZING AND THE EXTRAORDINARY