Portia picked up her car in the rental lot and took off directly, heading north on 91 to familiar lands. When she had learned to drive as a teenager, Bradley Airport had been at the outer edge of her home range, which extended this far south and as far as the Vermont border in the other direction. The highway was a spine supporting the breadth of New England. It was a part of the world that held firmly to its past, and how could it do otherwise? Indian attacks and iconic American furniture. Austere family portraits and most of the earliest groves of academe, Shakers and Quakers and colonial unrest, the place where the essential idea of American-ness was forged, its very filaments dug deep into the rocky earth. Growing up here, she had sometimes had the sense of walking over bones.
Portia pulled into the school parking lot and left her car. She reported first to the well-marked Admissions Office and was directed to college counseling in a brick building on the quadrangle. She had known many Deerfield students as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, where they had seemed to flow seamlessly into the culture of the college, retaining their friends, their rustic athleticism, even their prep school sweats (which were, handily, identical in color to Dartmouth’s). Looking around at the fit and good-looking kids on the walkways, she was struck by the stasis of this vision, a self-replenishing gene pool bubbling up to fill these grand and lovely buildings. These kids were interchangeable with her own college classmates of two decades earlier: the same hale complexions and down jackets and laden backpacks, the same voices of greeting. They were sons of Deerfield, identical to the smooth-faced footballers in the sepia photographs she passed in the entryway of the administration building. Oddly, even the Asian or African-American faces did not overly thwart the general vision of blondness and fair skin.
At the college-counseling office, Portia introduced herself. The secretary, a pale woman with a noticeable blink, jolted to her feet. “Princeton! Mr. Roden’s expecting you.”
She had spoken with William Roden on the phone earlier in the week, mainly to assure him that she had directions, needed no overnight accommodation, had no special requirements—museum tickets? a room at the Deerfield Inn?—that might make her visit to Deerfield complete. He seemed surprised to learn that she had grown up not terribly far away, and almost distressed—as if her local status, her presumed education outside the prep school bubble, might predispose her, and by extension Princeton, against his kids; but he didn’t quite articulate this. Now, bounding from his office, he looked entirely as she’d imagined him: a decade her senior, with a growing middle and fleeing hair, cheeks disarmingly pink.
“Ms. Nathan,” he crowed, hand outstretched. “So glad to see you.”
“It’s so nice to be back,” she told him, shaking his hand. “It all looks exactly the same.”
“Yes,” he said. “You grew up nearby.”
“Northampton High School,” she told him, anticipating his next question. “I used to play soccer here. I’m afraid we didn’t stand a chance against Deerfield,” she said indulgently, though her team—she remembered perfectly well—had in fact more than held its own.
“Yes, we’re very proud of our athletics. Our students train very hard. And I don’t know if we still used the old gym at that time.” He was too polite to ask her age. “The new gym opened in ’95. You should have a look while you’re here.”
She didn’t need much, she told him as he took her back outside. They were going to a meeting room in the library, a modern building designed to harmonize with the older structures around the quadrangle. Inside, he led her into the librarians’ lounge and brought her some coffee in a Styrofoam cup. “Starbucks hasn’t come to Deerfield yet,” he told her apologetically. “We do our best to carry on.”
“I totally understand,” she said, smiling. “I’d like to show a DVD, if I may. And I’ve brought some applications. If they’re on the fence about applying, sometimes it makes a difference if we get the application into their hands.”
“I don’t think you’ll have very many on the fence,” Roden said. “You had, what, twenty-five? twenty-six? from us last year. I expect you’ll get about the same this year.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Portia. “We love Deerfield students.”
“They are remarkable,” he agreed. “Now, let’s see about the DVD.”
The DVD, in fact, was identical to the version on the Web site, but Portia had found that showing it to a group had an interesting effect. It made some students dreamy, others morose and uncomfortable, as if all those iron tigers and grand neo-Gothic buildings fringed by rippling ivy were a taunting Shangri-la. Kids got withdrawn or determined, she found, and while it nearly always came down to what was actually contained in the applications, there had also been times when a student had made such an impression, in just this kind of setting, that she had followed up and pushed things along. Just as Portia retained that little trill of excitement every time she opened a folder, so she still relished taking the temperature of a group like this. Undoubtedly, there were going to be future admits here. It was always intriguing to try to pick them out.
He took her DVD to the meeting room and left her with her terrible coffee, and Portia used the moment to review the numbers: in five years, 124 applications, 15 admits, 11 attends. Without doubt, Deerfield was a serious player in the construction of any Princeton class, and at a great school like this she wouldn’t need to muster much of a sales pitch. On the contrary, she could walk into a room full of Deerfield seniors and tell them the university was a hole, the entire state of New Jersey sucked, and a Princeton degree was a poor return for the roughly $128,000 in tuition they’d have to come up with, and she probably wouldn’t lose a single applicant (though she would undoubtedly lose her job).
“Is this a class period?” asked Portia when Roden came back for her.
“Yes, but we let seniors out. It’s important.”
Portia suppressed a smile and followed him into the meeting room: midcentury portraits of steely masters overlooking Williamsburg sofas and wing chairs. She didn’t doubt that Princeton’s admissions office was of vital importance to Deerfield. In spite of the laudable philosophy of the institution—the education of young minds or something of that nature—college placement was the raison d’être of every prep school, and the annual dispersal of students to the Ivy League and other selective colleges functioned like a stock market within their world; a prep school that found itself unable to place its students well would find itself unable to attract students in the first place. Indeed, these economically symbiotic relationships were so long-standing that they had attained the filmy gleam of tradition, Portia thought, allowing Roden to take her leather bag. But it was far, far more complicated now. And though there would undoubtedly always be Princeton students who hailed from Deerfield and Andover and Harvard-Westlake and Lawrenceville, it had also become harder and harder for those applicants to get in, a fact known to every single student waiting for her to begin her presentation.
The kids sat on the couches and on the floor, some perched on the window seats or leaning against the walls. They seemed to avoid the wing chairs, as if these were consecrated to adults. They smiled nervously at her or did not smile (in case it was a bad thing to smile, in case it made them seem too eager or insecure); then, thinking better of that, thinking that it might make more sense to seem friendly and affable, the ones who had resolutely not smiled began to grin. One bold boy in a green Deerfield Crew sweatshirt stepped into her path and introduced himself.
“I’m almost finished with my application,” he said, squeezing her hand a little too tightly. “Just waiting on my physics teacher. I wish you still had Early Decision. I’m totally committed.”
“This is Matt Boyce,” Roden said helpfully. “Both his parents went to Princeton.”
“Yeah, we’re total Princeton,” Matt Boyce said eagerly. “I was, like, wrapped in an orange blanket.”
“I’ll look forward to reading your application,” said Portia with practiced warmth, noting the
scowls of displeasure around the room as this exchange was observed.
Roden was deflecting other students who’d been emboldened by their classmate and held up his hand as they stood to catch her eye. “Later,” she heard him say quietly. “Wait till later.”
Later meant the inevitable reception, she thought. More bad coffee, but this time with Oreos. And full-throttle adolescent anxiety.
“Okay, settle down,” Roden said. “Everyone…” He trailed off, eyeing a too-cool-to-care-about-college-admissions trio on one of the sofas. “Hunter, is there someplace else you need to be?”
“Absolutely no, Mr. Roden,” the boy said, not giving an inch.
“Then let’s please quiet down and give Ms. Nathan our attention. She’s come a long way to be here with us today, so let’s give her a warm Deerfield welcome.”
Energetic applause. Portia stepped to the front of the room and gave her audience a swift appraisal. At least sixty of them. It was going to be a tough year for these kids.
“Hello,” she told them. “I’m really pleased to be here, because I grew up nearby and I love coming back. Especially this time of year. Actually, any time of year except for mud season.” This got a laugh. The tension slipped in the room, just slightly. “I’m a great believer in visual aids,” she said, “so I’m going to show you a little film about Princeton. Takes about sixteen minutes. Some of you might already have seen it on our Web site, so you can just amuse yourselves. Work on your college essays or something.”
Nervous laughter in the room, but they settled in. No one worked on their college essays. They watched, instead, the parade of bright kids through the bright courtyards and leafy glens of the campus and listened to the newly minted Princetonians on the screen speak about their freshman seminars, their adventures of the mind and spirit. “Each of you,” intoned Clarence in an address to the freshman class, filmed a couple of years ago in Richardson Auditorium, “is the kind of person your classmates came here to meet.” The students were admonished to play with their fancies, to step beyond their comfort zones and take the chance of learning something truly unsuspected about themselves. They were fantastic, articulate, adorable. And when it was over, Portia was not really surprised to see two girls wiping away tears.
“Okay,” she said as the lights flicked on. “Lots of great schools out there. Lots of places to get a first-rate education. So why Princeton? What’s so great about us?”
“You’ve got Toni Morrison,” said a girl with a long red braid, seated on the floor in front of the foremost couch.
“Okay. And twelve other Nobel laureates. Thirteen, if you count Woodrow Wilson.” She smiled. “But who’s counting? We’re not the only university with an outstanding faculty.”
“What about Albert Einstein?”
“Alas,” she said, “we no longer have Einstein.”
“No,” the boy said, chagrined, “I mean… he was there.”
“Well, more or less. He was at the institute, not the university proper.” Due to the small matter of endemic academic anti-Semitism at the time. But why rain on her own parade? “Here’s my point,” said Portia. “At Princeton, we’re all about the undergraduate. Yes, we have graduate programs. Graduate students are an important part of our community. But our professors are dedicated to the undergraduate. Now, you can go to a university with marquee-name faculty, and you can park yourself in a very large lecture theater and have your mind blown by an hourlong talk on Milton or Buñuel or fractals, or whatever it is you’re into, but you may never get closer to that lecturer than the first row of the lecture hall. And for many students, that’s just fine. But the ones we’re looking for want more than that. If you’re the kind of student who wants more than that, we hope you’ll apply.”
They laughed uncomfortably.
“Look, there is no mystery about this,” she said bluntly. “There is no secret formula or hidden agenda. I’m going to tell you right now what we’re looking for. We’re looking for intellectual passion. What it’s for—that’s secondary. We are looking for the student who is so jazzed about… whatever… that he or she can’t wait to get to Princeton and find out everything there is to know about it. And that’s, by and large, not going to be the student who’s content to sit in the lecture theater and take her notes, and take her exams, and collect her grade, and move on. We’re looking for the students who are looking for our faculty.”
Now there were expressions of real dismay as well. She wondered if she’d been too strong.
“Does this mean,” she said, “that every Princeton undergraduate is a genius? A prodigy? Absolutely not. But what makes Princeton such an exciting place is that it’s an environment where people care about ideas. We have a faculty who are doing work they’re passionate about, and every fall, about twelve hundred bright and excited new students turn up to meet them and argue with them and learn from them. And that makes them happy.” Portia shrugged. “Intellectuals… can be strange.” She laughed. “But sometimes that’s what I think admissions really is: the care and feeding of the Princeton faculty. We procure fresh young minds to keep them busy, and I have to tell you, we’re very good at it.”
She told them a story—true story—related to her some years before at a History Department party. The man who’d told her this was a post-colonialist in a limp suit, who’d had a student he was quite fond of, a sophomore from Pittsburgh. The student had a twin brother at another Ivy league school, which she naturally refrained from naming, who was also majoring in history. One day, the professor had been in his office at around ten in the morning when this student arrived, his identical brother in tow.
“This is Peter,” said the student.
The Princeton student, whose name was Patrick, and Peter both took seats in the historian’s office, and they talked. They talked about being twins and having twins (the professor had fraternal girls, so physically different that they barely looked like siblings). They talked about Peter’s growing interest in cold war Europe and his recent class on the economic history of the Baltic states. They considered a couple of evolving ideas for Patrick’s junior paper, compared and contrasted the schools’ football teams, and discussed the relative merits of Bent Spoon and Thomas Sweet ice creams (the brothers had already embarked on a highly scientific study). They took a run at Pennsylvania Democratic politics and the failure of the Clinton health plan and the various repellent aspects of Karl Rove and the Blair scandal at The New York Times. They talked about the professor’s daughters’ obsession with Harry Potter and the twins’ remembered literary obsessions from their own childhood, and they spent a good long while going over the paper the professor was readying for the AHA in two weeks, about the amateur photographs taken by British troops in the Boer War. And then finally, finally, the professor had looked at his watch, seen that it was nearly three o’clock, and announced that he had to go and pick up his children at school. Whereupon the twins burst into hysterical laughter, and Patrick turned to his brother and said, “See? I told you. I told you.”
They had had a bet, the Princeton brother reported, when the two had at last stopped high-fiving each other. “Peter said I was always jerking him around when I talked about conversations I’d had with my professors. He said he never got past the TA in any of his classes, and he’d never be able to just knock on a professor’s door and sit down and have a conversation. I said I did it all the time, so he bet me. Five hours! I have to say, you surpassed even my expectations. But don’t worry.” Patrick laughed. “I’ll donate my winnings to charity.”
“You ought to donate your winnings to me,” said the history professor, but he wasn’t really angry. In fact, there was definite pride in his face as he told this story, and Portia had happily purloined the tale.
“I’m telling you this,” she said, “because I want you to think carefully about what you really want out of the next four years. Ivy League institutions may be wrapped up in one big ribbon, but these are very different institutions, offering very diffe
rent experiences. Don’t just apply to these eight schools because they created an athletic conference in 1954. You might be happiest in a huge university, or in a little college. You might want to see an entirely different part of the country when you go to university, or even a different part of the world. And let’s not forget, some people just don’t want to work that hard in college. They want to go, learn a little bit, play a little Frisbee, and get a halfway decent job when it’s over. Not everyone is looking for the kind of intellectual environment Princeton is offering, and if you’re not, I urge you to save yourself the effort involved in applying, not to mention the application fee. And I urge you to spare us the very distressing task of having to reject your application. Please be honest with yourselves, because this is about your well-being, and your goals, and your life.”
She stopped there. They were all somber, of course. A few of them seemed actively engaged in some sort of internal catechism: Because Mom wants me to? Because Dad wants me to? Because it never occurred to any of us that I wouldn’t? Because I just want to get in, and I’ll worry about all this Deep Thoughts crap in my own damn time.
“Okay,” said Portia. “I’m sure you have questions. I’m here to help. Is there something you’d like to know about the university? Or about admissions?”
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