“That’s too bad,” she heard herself say, and it really was. Too bad that they had blown an admit on a kid they’d never had a chance at. Too bad there was a Princeton dad out there who wanted his kid here more than he wanted his kid happy. Of course, there were students who had done far worse, like received an early admit and then trophy-hunted the rest of the Ivy League, only to accept the original offer. It was poor form, but it wasn’t illegal when Yale’s offer wasn’t binding. And it did sound as if Jesse had wanted to do the right thing.
“I know. What a waste.” And she could hear Elisa Rosen’s thoughts, as clearly as if they’d been spoken aloud: Since Jesse’s out of the picture, would you take another of our kids? “Anyway,” said Elisa, “as I said, I really thought about whether you ought to know this. And I decided… I just couldn’t see a downside, you know? To keeping the communication going.”
And Portia, very suddenly, wanted very much not to keep the communication going, not with Elisa Rosen or any of the others at any of the other handsome, moneyed schools populated by Seans and Jesses and their thoroughly entitled parents. She felt her empathy for the college counselor leave her in a rush. She pictured Elisa Rosen walking a plank over snapping, hungry, angry parents, each one brandishing their broken contract: You said if I paid the tuition, you said if he got a rave from his biology teacher, you said if he got 750 or above on the math SAT, dug a ditch in Costa Rica, lettered in swimming, wrote about the brace he wore for scoliosis in the eighth grade, the most gruesome, painful, crushing personal experience of his life, he would get in. You said. And I wrote those checks. And he did those things. And they turned him down. And I will never forgive you for lying to me.
With whatever strength she could muster, she thanked Elisa Rosen for her time and said good-bye. Then she got up out of her chair and went to the window.
That morning, for the first time since fall, she had opened the window, and now the remarkably mild air was moving through her little office, smelling rich and damp. There was only the briefest season of ugliness in this town, and it was over now for another year, with the mud sinking back into the earth and the black squirrels starting to wake up. Outside, the mostly buried armament poked its end out of Cannon Green, and a couple walked behind it, their winter coats unzipped and lifting behind them in the breeze. These two, like every one of them, every one of the thousands in their rooms, or eating dinner, or going to rehearsal or practice right now, all over campus, had been weighed and measured and talked through and voted on, then they had disappeared into the maw of anonymous data in the registrar’s computer. And unless something happened—unless one of them plagiarized or got a Rhodes or picked up a bullhorn and led a rally out on Cannon Green—neither Portia nor her colleagues ever thought of them again. They were simply gone from the collective ken of admissions, their files unceremoniously transferred to the registrar’s suite of offices in a caravan of file boxes, their names replaced by thousands of other names, with their thousands of other needs and wishes and difficulties, when the fall rolled around again. As for the other folders, the deny folders, they were shredded.
That was probably the moment when she understood what she was going to do.
Already, the office felt empty. It was a rare lull in the admissions year. It was the perfect time to do this one small thing. Many of her colleagues, in fact, had dispersed. Deepa was in Georgia, visiting schools and speaking to parents’ groups in Atlanta and Athens. Dylan had gone to see the University of Texas, where he’d been admitted to a graduate program in Latin. Jordan had gone back to Virginia for the weekend, to be with her mother while her father had bypass surgery. Corinne had decamped for Andover to watch her daughter in a cross-country meet. Clarence was around, of course, but he had left for the day, brandishing tickets to the Met.
Portia returned to her chair and sat, very still, listening to the quiet, trying to think it through. Of course she would be found out. That was not in question. But if she could do it well enough, she would not be found out right away. Four days, five days… that was all it would take, long enough for the letters to go out, because once they were out, Clarence would have to stand by the offer. If she could do it well enough, she might have that long, and although she could not bring herself to believe in fate, which was no better than religion, which was itself a kind of religion, she knew a gift when she saw one. Jesse Bolton, bound for Yale, was a gift.
Hours went by. She didn’t move or make noise. She wasn’t here. Occasionally, the entrance door downstairs gave a faint creak as the few others, and Martha and her staff, departed for the day.
Still, Portia could not seem to get herself out of the chair. She had never, to her knowledge, cheated or stolen. In fact, she possessed, like far better Jews than herself, a surfeit of guilt, and it took very little to set that off. Once, in the seventh grade, she had pretended to be ill in order to get out of an algebra test, then was so overwhelmed by remorse that she had confessed and forced her mother to take her in anyway, even though Susannah had been happy enough to let her have the day off. Among her high school friends, swiping candy bars from Cumberland Farms was so common as to be unremarkable, but Portia could never bring herself to do it. She had never bought a copy of CliffsNotes or even allowed herself to ask a classmate for help when she was stuck, not that she condemned those things. But she’d had to do everything alone for it to be real: mediocre and real versus superlative and false. Good for you, she thought sourly. And look where it’s got you.
What time it was when she finally got to her feet she didn’t know, and that was strangely encouraging. Some black hour in the shifting middle of the night, silence in the building, silence even on the campus: It must be very late or very early. She put on her coat, opened her office door, and shut it quietly behind her.
Admissions officers had access to the data files, of course, but they were not empowered to register decisions in the system. Only one person could register an admit, and that wasn’t Martha, who had perhaps the farthest-reaching overview of what was happening. It wasn’t even Clarence. It was Abby, the assistant who sat in the antechamber outside his office.
As it happened, Portia knew Abby’s password for access to the system, but even if she hadn’t, it wouldn’t have been difficult to guess. Abby’s daughter, Louisa, had gone to Russia as a Bear Stearns analyst ten years before, met a Muscovite doctor named Grisha, and moved there permanently. Two years later, she had given birth to a wide-eyed boy named Aleksei, whose image (dipping his toes into the Baltic Sea, grinning before St. Basil’s) papered the cubicle of his adoring grandmother. One day the previous year, when Abby was home sick with flu, she had asked Portia to help Clarence extract some bit of data he needed, and Portia had not been at all surprised to learn that her password was Aleksei.
When she got to the desk, she sat quietly in Abby’s seat and turned on the monitor. The screen flickered alarmingly to life, banishing its vaguely psychedelic screen saver and replacing it with yet another photograph of the blissfully smiling boy, this time on the first day of school, holding the traditional bouquet for his teacher. With a fingernail, she carefully entered the letters, and the system welcomed her.
It was not difficult. She went first to Jesse Bolton’s entry, overwriting the A beside his name with a D and hitting Return.
D, she thought, for Don’t even think about it.
Then she found Jeremiah and did the same thing, in reverse. A for Admission. Also: Amoral. Also: Absolutely against the rules.
She exited Abby’s account and put the terminal back to sleep, watching little Aleksei’s face disappear behind coiling, swirling comets of purple.
Breathing, Portia got to her feet.
She walked softly, rubber soles on carpeting, down the hall and then the staircase, closing the doors carefully behind her so they didn’t click, as if there were anyone there to hear it. Then she made her way to the ground-floor office and, solely by the glow of the emergency light, entered the office security code a
nd went inside.
The deny files were stacked in a room off the office, awaiting shredding. It was a room without windows, but when Portia switched on the light the blare of it unnerved her even so. She started to look around quickly. There were thousands here, of course, about seventeen thousand, and the folders nearly filled the space, covering two long tables and lining a bookcase against one wall; but they turned out to be neatly sorted, state by state and school by school where there were multiple applicants. New Hampshire—St. Paul’s and Exeter aside—was not exactly a breeding ground for Princeton applicants. Portia had little difficulty locating the file. She extracted it and nudged the pile it had come from into place. Then she went back into the main room.
The admit files were arranged alphabetically in file boxes on the same table where those appalling vegan “health bars” had once resided, waiting for someone brave enough to eat them. There were, naturally, far fewer of these, and she had no difficulty finding Jesse Bolton: Princeton legacy, future journalist, future Yalie. Portia went to the supply cupboard past Martha’s desk and took out two unused orange folders. Then she carefully peeled back the color-coded stickers from Jeremiah’s and Jesse’s and affixed them to the new folders. She slid the contents of each—reader’s card, application, transcript, school report, and recs—into the new folders and clumsily folded and stuffed the old folders into her coat pocket. Then she took a red pen from Martha’s desk, checked “Admit” on the front of Jeremiah’s refashioned folder, and slid it into place, snug between Babbitt, Christopher, and Balthazar, Henri-Paul. Babbitt, Balakian, Balthazar. Portia shook her head. Then, quickly, she checked “Deny” on Jesse Bolton’s new file, slipped back into the adjacent room, and placed it with the files of his rejected schoolmates, just behind the appropriately declined application of Sam Aronson. I’m sorry, she told it, and she found that she truly was, because Jesse Bolton had deserved to know that the admissions officers at Princeton thought he was wonderful and hoped that he would choose them, bring his undeniable gifts to the Prince, carry on his father’s valued tradition. One application among these thousands, multiplied by seventeen years. Could it really be as wrong as it felt?
When she let herself outside, the air felt clammy and unexpectedly cold. She turned up her collar and walked through the campus, past the art museum and the mansion that had once been home to the university president, then out through the arches to Prospect Avenue, where the eating clubs faced off in a row. They were larger than the fraternities at Dartmouth and looked considerably more solid—less Animal House, in other words, than Animal Mansion—but Portia often wondered how Princeton managed to retain its reputation of gentility when Saturday nights on Prospect rivaled any debauchery she had ever seen in Hanover. Tonight, however, no one stirred, and she walked quickly down the moonlit street, leaving the clubs behind and beginning to pass the neat, pleasant homes of faculty members and university administrators. One bore the after-effects of an Easter egg hunt the previous weekend, with discarded plastic eggs and hastily removed bits of foil soggily embedded in the lawn; another was lined with little plastic flags bearing the logo of an electric-dog-containment company and the words Puppy in Training. Finally, at the end of the avenue, she came to Gordon Sternberg’s home and stopped for a moment to look. Perhaps it was not as abandoned as it appeared, she thought. Perhaps some of those dark windows had sleeping Sternbergs in them, Gordon’s wife or kids returned to sort through his things or start the wrenching process of moving out. She had met the kids, she was fairly sure, at some of the parties, but she doubted she would know them now, nor would they know her. Gordon himself had barely registered her. She had only been Mark’s not-even-wife, not pretty enough to be noticed, not clever enough to talk to about his work, which was the only thing he truly liked to talk about. Whenever she reminded him, as she often did, that she worked at the Office of Admission, he lurched into cruel discourses on the doltish students who had dared to attend his classes, charity cases, he supposed, or the opposite: children of too much wealth and too little brain, who had obviously bought their way in.
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.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
99 PERCENT PURE
It 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 teacher
s 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.
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