Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Thank you,” she told Portia, who had really not done so much, only reviewed Caitlin’s application and advised against an early essay about singing in her high school choir.

  “Don’t be silly. You were a great applicant. You’re going to have a fantastic experience.”

  “Oh, my God, I know,” said Caitlin. She sounded a little out of it, actually. A little blissed out, a little drugged. Portia let her go, promising to call the next day, then she hung up with a smile.

  Then it started slowly. A happy call from a coach in Maine. A tearful call from the principal of the charter school in Roxbury, where a remarkable young man named DeShahn Mellings, trumpet virtuoso and gifted debater, had just received the best news of his life. And then the pace began to pick up. It was like kernels of corn beginning to pop, first slowly, with lacunae, and then in a solid mass. And some of them were brutal, but they were not the one Portia was waiting for.

  She accepted the bittersweet thanks of Sarah Lenaghan’s college counselor, who was consoling eight of Sarah’s classmates, and the assurances of Milton Academy’s head of counseling that Carter Ralston, in whom the development office had expressed such interest, was very fired up to attend Princeton. (Ralston had been a strong applicant, it turned out, with an 800 verbal, a beautiful essay about traveling in South America, and a New England Prep School Athletic Conference record for the high jump.) She had spent a scant fifteen minutes (not a single moment more than she could bear) talking to her old colleague Rand Cumming, who seemed astounded that some number less than twenty-seven of his twenty-seven applicants had been admitted, and an hour on the phone with William Roden at Deerfield, moving at his insistence through the list of more than forty applicants, about a quarter of whom had been either admitted or wait-listed. Sadly, Matt Boyce, once wrapped in an orange swaddling cloth, was not one of them. But Deerfield had sent them wonderful applicants, as always, Portia reminded him. Kids from Europe and Asia as well, all of them wonderfully prepared and immensely likable.

  “I hope you’ll encourage them to come to our hosting weekend,” she told them. “And let me know if you want me to set up any meetings for them while they’re here. I can get the rowers out on the water, if they’d like. And the Music Department is very eager to meet Sandra Lu.”

  He promised he would.

  On the fourth day, she began to be surprised that nothing had happened to her. The fifth day passed. The ecstatic calls waned; she and all of her colleagues were now soothing and placating, getting yelled at or wept at, begged and cursed, in the annual ritual of response: usually parental, occasionally from the guidance counselors and coaches, often enough from the applicants themselves. This year, one of the worst calls would be from Matt Boyce’s mother, who’d struggled to maintain her composure through the conversation. “Can’t you put him on the waiting list?” she’d asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “It’s so heartbreaking for him. It’s all he’s ever wanted.”

  And when Portia had said, with genuine regret, that this would not be possible, the woman had turned on a dime and announced that her next call was to the president’s office, then the development office, and then to alumni affairs, where it was to be firmly understood that no one in her family of Princetonians would ever give another penny to the school.

  “It’s so difficult,” said Portia, illogically hoping that Matt Boyce’s mother would suddenly understand the reality of the numbers, the complexity of the problem. But the woman told her to go fuck herself and hung up.

  Portia hung up, too, then stared at the phone, wondering who’d be next. The boy whose eighteenth-century antecedent had “helped set up the place”? The guidance counselor from the private school in Connecticut who seemed to feel, each year, that the decisions contained in his advisees’ letters were just a preliminary suggestion, like the first step in a drawn-out negotiation? Some devastated kid insisting that her future had been destroyed? She did not doubt their disappointment and frustration. These applicants had done nothing wrong. They had not “deserved” the slender envelopes any more than the others had “deserved” the thick packets of welcome, glossy look books and invitations to hosting weekend. Still, it was fair. Scrupulously fair, if not entirely fair. It was, as Martin Quilty had once memorably put it, making his case to an alumni group, “like Ivory Snow. Ninety-nine percent pure.”

  Clarence emerged occasionally to knock on someone’s door and go over some point before he phoned back an irate alum, but it was all routine. It was like last year and the year before. It was incredible. It was passing. Already, she wondered if the calls weren’t tapering off.

  And then the weekend came. There were no phone calls over the weekend.

  By Monday, she had begun to test the idea that nothing was going to happen to her. This was a riveting thought and came with a retinue of attendant thoughts, which were also riveting: that she might spend the next four years being close to Jeremiah, perhaps getting to know him. She could offer him a place to stay over the school breaks—surely he would rather stay in Princeton than go home to his parents, his vacation job at the market. Over time, they would grow close, like great friends who sense some deeper bond they can’t articulate. She would make sure he received every single thing the university was able to give him, not just the education and financial support, but the travel, work experience, the cultural smorgasbord undreamed of by a boy from working-class New Hampshire, and the guidance of mentors who understood his complexity and promise and truly wanted him to succeed. It was a soaring feeling. It was a feeling of sweetness and deep resolve. It was, for her, for probably the first time—peace.

  And then it happened: without real warning and brutishly quick.

  First, Abby came, knocking on her door and leaning in. “Oh, good. I thought you might have left,” she said. “Clarence wants to see you.”

  Portia went numb. She nodded. “What about, do you know?”

  “No idea,” said Abby. “Hey, did you decide if you’re going to the NACAC this year? I’m booking travel.”

  Irrationally, Portia decided the question was a good omen. “I think so. I love Seattle.”

  She got to her feet and followed Abby, who returned to her desk. Portia went in alone.

  “Hello,” she said tentatively.

  He said nothing but nodded at the seat opposite his own. Then he sat, fingertips touching, two lonely files on the desk before him. For a long moment, she pretended that she knew nothing and asked herself what could this mean—this strange, charged silence? This rigid expression and bald stare? She told herself that she did not recognize this assemblage of features, which were not charming Clarence or proper Clarence or Clarence-the-leader-of-the-team or Clarence off guard, laughing at the joke, or the Clarence who might disarm the most conservative of alumni men, those Class of ’40-somethings and ’50-somethings and even ’60-somethings, not a few of whom were actually, secretly, appalled that the gates to Princeton were now being guarded by a black man, a gay man, a man from Yale (which was possibly the worst of the three). This, Portia realized with a start, was a Clarence she had never once seen before. This was Clarence enraged. And her career, which had so very recently felt uncurtailed, a string of unknown length stretched vaguely forward to retirement, now had precious minutes to run.

  “I had a call,” he said. His voice was quiet but packed with bitterness.

  Portia looked past him, to the Asher Durand behind his desk. Did he ever look at it? she wondered. She always did whenever she was here in the office. This would almost certainly be the last time.

  “Oh yes?”

  “From Richard Bolton, class of ’81. Father of Jesse Bolton. Are you familiar with Jesse Bolton?”

  Portia, glumly, nodded.

  “I was not. So I asked Martha to pull the file before I called him back.” He flipped open the cover. “Budding journalist. Writes for The Boston Globe. National award from Scripps. Is this coming back?”

  She was tempted to tell him that he didn’t have
to be a jerk about it.

  “I remember this kid. We loved this kid.” Portia looked at her hands. “We admitted this kid,” he said through gritted teeth. “And yet…” He held up the file, pointing out, with one of his long, elegant fingers, the “Deny” box checked in red pen. “Are you ready to explain this to me?”

  What good would that do? she wanted to say.

  After a very uncomfortable pause, he went on.

  “And so I asked for the admit list. I looked for Bolton, Jesse. No Bolton, Jesse. But I did find Balakian, Jeremiah.”

  He held up the other file. “Mr. Balakian has accepted our offer of admission,” he said with barely contained vitriol. “I don’t remember making him an offer of admission, Portia. Now, I’d like to ask you again. Why did you do this? Why would you throw away your career and your reputation? And, what’s far more important to me, our reputation? On this?”

  “He isn’t a ‘this,’” Portia said lamely.

  Clarence leaned forward. He was halfway across the desk. For a man of such refined tastes, he had a very muscular build, she observed. His neck, within the collar of his elegant pink shirt, was defined by muscles and sinews. She took an almost clinical interest in this and wondered how he had achieved so much definition in such an odd area.

  “You,” he rasped at her, “have exposed this office and the university to a completely undeserved scandal. What you have done is unconscionable. How dare you be so cavalier with this institution? If word were to get out about this, the damage would be irreparable.”

  Portia sat up, newly alert. “Well, I won’t tell anyone,” she said brightly.

  “No,” Clarence said tightly. “You won’t. And I won’t either. What you will do is submit your resignation. I don’t care what excuse you use, but I never want to see you in this building again. I will keep this matter between ourselves. Not for your sake, I can assure you. But if I ever hear that you’ve gone to work for another admissions department, I will be on the phone to your dean before they nail your name to the door. Is that understood?”

  “Well,” she said, “let me take a moment to think it over.”

  Clarence actually banged his fist on the desk. The ink blotter muffled the blow.

  “You have no choice. This career is over. I can’t tell you how thoroughly disappointed I am.”

  Portia shrugged. She was finding a distinct lack of outrage in all this. And it wasn’t just because none of it was a surprise. She was ready to go. She was ready for something else. On the spot, she decided she also wanted to live somewhere else.

  She got to her feet. “He’s going to Yale,” she said. “Jesse Bolton. The guidance counselor told me. We never had a chance at him.”

  Clarence reacted to this, but then he remembered himself. “That’s not the point,” he said fiercely. “As you know. I only wish you’d tell me why.”

  And she actually considered doing that. It might have surprised him to know how far such an uncomplicated request finally traveled: ahead to an idea of her own future, behind to the college student she had once been, running a ring about herself in the names of men he barely knew or had never even heard of: Tom and John and Mark and Jeremiah. How strange that she had come to be defined by so many men. What would Susannah have to say about that? She could imagine what Susannah would have to say about that. And no one had ever asked her why before, because no one had ever known there was a why. And she found, very much to her own surprise, that she did want to talk about it. She did want to tell somebody why she had done this strange and unchangeable and thoroughly uncharacteristic thing. And there were people who ought to be told, because what she had done—not just now, but then—had actually hurt those people, and they deserved to know why. But Clarence wasn’t one of them.

  “Would it make any difference?” she asked him, looking up. “About the job, I mean.”

  “It would not,” Clarence huffed.

  “Then I won’t, if you don’t mind. I assume you’ll be standing by the offer.”

  “To Balakian? I don’t see how we can rescind it without the whole thing blowing up in our faces.”

  Out of common courtesy, Portia tried to banish any outward sign of smugness. “Well, I’ll be going, then,” she said. “I’ve learned so much working with you, Clarence.”

  He glared at her. Apparently, he considered her praise offensive.

  “I’m sorry to have disappointed you,” she told him. “I’m going to write you a fantastic letter of resignation.”

  He gathered up the two folders on his desk and slapped one—which one?—briskly on top of the other. Then he pointedly looked away from her.

  Portia left the room. She stood for a stunned moment outside his door.

  “You heading home?” said Abby. She didn’t look up from her computer screen. There was a new grinning Aleksei on the desktop.

  “Yes,” said Portia. “Good-bye.”

  “Bye, then.”

  Portia turned and walked off down the corridor. Everyone seemed to have gone for the day, infected by the warm spring weather, taking cover from the vitriol on the phones and in the computer in-boxes. She walked slowly to her office and went inside, wondering what belonged to her and what did not: yearbooks, manuals, sheaves of printer paper, her sizable collection of what she’d always called “admissions lit,” books touting surefire strategies to get into college, ways to “package” yourself and be your own college consultant. Books that hurled ridiculous solutions at a problem they never actually stated: that there were simply too many qualified applicants for each available spot, and there always would be, and no amount of strategizing, “brag sheet” construction, or SAT prep was ever going to circumvent that bald little fact. She was fairly sure she owned those books, but not at all sure she wanted to take them with her into whatever her new life was going to be.

  In the end, she could find only a single thing she wanted: the Plath poem Rachel had given her, the one that began, “First, are you our sort of a person?” She reached across her desk and plucked it from the bulletin board and folded it carefully and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. Travel light, Portia told herself. She left the building by the front door.

  Of course, I was disappointed not to be able to accept an unpaid summer internship at a marketing firm, but after a few weeks in my not terribly exciting retail job in an outlet mall, I started to realize that I was learning a lot about the very subject I’d hoped to learn about at my internship. After ten weeks of watching people purchase items they didn’t need and, in some cases, didn’t even like, I believe I know far more now about human psychology and behavior than I did before I first pinned on my Land’s End name tag.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

  Mark turned up at seven that evening, right on time, and Portia let him in with a smile that felt surprisingly genuine. It was a comfort that she had decided not to hate Mark. If Portia could have hated him and still done what she was about to do, then she might have indulged herself, but that wasn’t going to be possible. And in fact, the more she probed her own current distress, the more she discovered that it was mainly illusory. On the contrary, she felt not terrible. She felt bizarrely settled, in spite of how precarious her situation actually was. And when this was over, she told herself, she might be permitted to feel better than she had in many years.

  Mark was thin. He looked drawn, and he wore a wedding ring, and Portia found that she had to avert her eyes from it, if only to retain focus. He gave her an awkward hug, looking fairly surprised to find himself making the gesture. “You look very well,” he told her.

  Portia laughed. “I doubt that. But thanks.”

  “You finished for the year?”

  “All over but the shouting.”

  He looked perplexed.

  “You know, the letters go out, the calls come in. ‘How could you reject my son? You took the kid who got a B plus in chemistry and he got an A minus.’”

  “Oh, right.” He shrugged
. “I forgot.”

  “Most people are fine, but the unhappy people take up most of your time.” She looked directly at him. “Let’s not talk about work. I talk about work too much. I’ve made some tea.”

  He seemed relieved. “I’m really glad you called, Portia.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, I should have done it months ago. I just wasn’t ready.”

  The teapot was already on the kitchen table. Portia led the way and poured for them both. She had always shared his taste in tea: the more English and staid, the better. The day PG Tips had appeared in the tea aisle at McCaffrey’s had been a good day for their household.

  “Thanks,” he said when she passed him the milk.

  “I had a baby,” said Portia. Then, amazed at herself, she burst out laughing. It was not happy laughter, particularly.

  “You… what?” He stared at her.

  “I never said those words out loud. Never once. ‘I had a baby.’ You know, it’s easier the second time.”

  “When?” Mark looked stricken. “Before you met me, I’m assuming.”

  “Yes. A year before. He was adopted.” Her face was streaming with tears, she was surprised to note. That seemed to have happened very quickly.

  “Portia,” said Mark, “I’m so sorry.” He actually reached for her hand, and she let him take it.

  “You know why I never went into therapy?” she said brightly. “Because someone once told me that what happens in therapy is, they help you figure out who to blame, and then they get you to blame them, and then you feel better. So I thought, Well, I don’t need that. I already know who to blame.”

  “You must have been very confused,” Mark told her.

  “Oh, I should have been more confused. If I’d been more confused, I might have made another decision. I might have let someone actually talk to me about it. I don’t know why I thought I had to do it all by myself.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I’m quite the chatterbox tonight.”