That these kids, individually and collectively, had refused to meet her expectations was, after all, not their fault, but she actually felt a little annoyed with them for confounding her. She had weathered nearly sixteen years of teenagers, always at just this moment in their lives, always coming up to the same fork in the road. They variously charged ahead or hung behind or else stumbled along because they couldn’t care less what happened to them, but in essence they had never changed. Not in hundreds of school visits, and hundreds of thousands of applications, and an untold number of unscripted, unscheduled encounters, when people found out what her job was and dragged over their astonishing niece or godchild or prodigy offspring to talk to her. She knew how to recognize the good girls and the diligent boys, the rebels and fuck-ups, the artsy kids who knew nothing about art and the ones who had art burning inside them. She could spot the blinkered athletes and the pillars of some future community, the strivers of every stripe and shade, the despairing and despaired of. Almost every single one of them occupied a place that had been previously occupied by someone else, and someone else before that—someone elses who looked like them and sounded like them and thought like them. Sixteen years of drummers and different drummers, poets and players. But these students… they were not taking their seats. She was having trouble putting them in their places.
When the film ended, most of them—apparently taking Portia at her word—got up and left, but a few walked straight over to her and began talking. There seemed to be no medium, happy or otherwise, between “I care” and “I don’t care.” The ones who approached her wanted to know how to apply to Princeton. They wanted to know the essence of what the admissions committee looked for in an applicant and what made them admit the one out of ten and reject the other nine. (She had to repress her natural response; it was so artlessly asked.) They asked what was meant by the idea of diversity and what the political mood of the campus was. The Asian girl asked if she could study fashion at Princeton. (“No,” Portia told her. “But you can study art and culture, which are necessary to understanding fashion. And you can create a senior thesis that incorporates fashion design.”) The girl in the gas station jumpsuit was writing a novel and wanted to know if she could submit that instead of a traditional application. “You can submit it as part of your application,” Portia said. Would it matter, someone asked her in a quiet, urgent voice, if both parents worked in a supermarket?
It was the reader. He stood with his finger wedged into his book, its bright yellow-and-blue dust jacket frayed at the edges.
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“My parents aren’t educated. They both work in a supermarket in Keene.”
He looked at her with a disarming directness. He was an inch or so taller than her but still somehow gave the impression of looking up. He had very dark eyes, with very dark circles beneath them. His black hair was so imprecisely cut it looked as if he had hacked it himself, perhaps when it had fallen in his eyes one too many times. He wore jeans an unfashionably pristine shade of blue and a red sweatshirt with the single word quest printed in white letters. Noun or verb? she found herself thinking. He continued to stare at her, motionless but not exactly tense. He was merely waiting. There were no social niceties, no verbal lubrications: Thank you for speaking to us. I’m really interested. I think it would be an amazing opportunity. It was as if, having finally broken off from his book, he had now found something equally interesting to focus on.
“Oh no, of course not,” Portia said, stumbling. “It doesn’t matter what your parents do for a living. It’s your application.”
“Don’t you care, though?” he asked, again with that unthinking directness.
“No. We don’t care. There are kids from very intellectual, academic backgrounds at Princeton, but there are also plenty of kids who are the first in their families to graduate high school.”
“I’m going to apply,” the boy said bluntly. “I need to get out of here.”
She looked at him curiously. “This seems like a good place to be a student,” she said carefully.
“It’s good. I don’t mean the school. They just let me read. I know it doesn’t sound that great, but it’s so much better than my old high school in Keene.”
“Why?” she couldn’t help asking. “What was that like?”
He shrugged and pushed a black curl out of his eyes. It immediately escaped confinement behind his ear and flopped back.
“I just couldn’t get with the program, you know? I just wanted to kind of go off on my own, ’cause my brain sort of… it goes a little walkabout, you know?”
Portia, who didn’t, nodded anyway, just to keep him talking.
“I mean, I was all for learning, I just did it differently.”
She took a moment to absorb this, then converted it to the most likely euphemism and asked, “Oh, I see. You’re dyslexic? Or… ADHD?”
“What?” he said. “You mean… reading? Can I read?”
“Of course you can read,” she said, thoroughly embarrassed, as if she were the one to be telling him this.
“Yeah. No, there’s nothing wrong with my reading. Except they couldn’t stop me doing it. If I was in the middle of something good, I didn’t want to go to class. Or if I was in class, I wanted to talk about whatever I was thinking about then, not what the test was going to be about. And sometimes I tanked on the tests and sometimes I pulled it out, but on the whole they couldn’t figure out what to do with me. You know, do they skip me ahead a couple of years or make me repeat all the classes I failed?”
Portia nodded. “That’s a very unusual problem.”
“It’s much better here,” he said affably. “John and the others, they’ve been talking to me about going to college.” He stuck the same lock of hair behind the same ear, where it remained only a fraction of a moment longer. “Princeton sounds like a cool place.”
“It’s very cool,” she agreed.
“They teach philosophy there? I like philosophy. What about art?”
“Great Philosophy Department. Great Art Department.” She nodded to his book, still held open where he had left off, as if he had no wish to waste time finding his place again. “Tell me about Edie,” she said.
He lit up. “You know this book? It’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s the first biography I’ve ever read where the narrative form reflects the content.”
She frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”
“I mean that in this depiction of the sixties, the fragmentation of the experience is mirrored in the use of oral history. You feel as if you’re there, because so many impressions are competing for your attention. No single witness can claim to understand the subject of the biography, but cumulatively you do come to see who she was. I’m fascinated by the entire Factory thing, actually. Warhol—I can’t quite decide if he was utterly talentless or utterly talented. And his passivity. You know, how does someone so resoundingly passive wind up with all of these forceful personalities deferring to him? Can anyone do that? I mean, can people be trained to be a Rasputin or a Warhol or a Charles Manson? Or is it a sort of chemical thing? Or do certain cultural factors have to be lined up just right?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed uneasily. “I’m afraid you lost me back at the Factory.”
“I know who Bob Moses was,” said the boy.
This was a moment of cognitive whiplash. It took her a moment herself to remember who Bob Moses was. “Oh?”
“He lives in Cambridge now. He’s trying to teach math in a new way. About a year ago, I had this phase where I was reading books about mathematicians. He was in one of the books I read.”
Portia could only nod.
“You know what’s strange, though? Really good mathematicians talk like poets. They run out of language, so they twist words together to explain their ideas. Like poets do. But anyway, the book about Moses made some reference to his civil rights work. So then I read something else about what he did in Mississippi.”
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Portia,” said John, materializing beside her, “thank you for doing that. And I apologize—you must have thought the initial reaction very odd. I ought to have prepared you—we tend to encourage that kind of participation. Spirited participation.”
Rude participation, she thought. “I sort of got that. The culture of the school, yes?”
“Yes. And that particular student is Deborah’s daughter.”
“The elusive Deborah Rosengarten?”
“Yes. Simone’s her only child. She’s been raised to make her opinions known.”
Portia smiled. Simone Rosengarten. As in de Beauvoir, no doubt. She would write it down tonight.
“Not your typical information session, I suppose,” he said, watching her.
“No.” She smiled. “I do feel as if I earned my salary today.”
“I would have stepped in if I were ever in doubt. You were really remarkable.”
“Oh, I enjoyed it,” she said, not entirely truthfully. And—” She turned to the boy, the Warhol boy, but he was already halfway to the door. “Hey,” she said after him. “Wait a minute.”
John turned to look after him. “Hey, Jeremiah?”
The kid stopped, but halfheartedly. “Yes?”
“I—” But she wasn’t entirely sure. Wanted to ask him something, but what? His last name? Or whether he would really apply? Or maybe what it was that kept her here a long moment past the point where it made sense to be looking after him.
“Jeremiah,” said John, “are you thinking of applying to Princeton?”
“Yeah, maybe.” He looked utterly nonplussed.
“Well, I hope you do,” Portia told him. “And if you do, please let me know. Here’s my card,” she said, taking one from her wallet. “Let me know if you have any questions. If you want to come visit the campus, we can match you up with an undergraduate and you can stay with him in his room.”
“Okay,” he said, looking at the card. “Portia,” he read as if she weren’t there. “Like The Merchant of Venice.”
“Yes. My mother had the idea that if she named me that, I would grow up to be very wise. I’m lucky she didn’t name me Athena.”
“Or Minerva,” Jeremiah said. “Or Sophie. But a lot of people are named Sophie. They probably have no idea that’s what their name means.”
Portia frowned.
“Or Metis. That would be really strange. Or Saraswati. Yeah, I think you probably got lucky. If you’ve got to be called something that stands for wisdom, you probably couldn’t have done any better.”
She just looked at him. He stood by the door, his book resting against his thigh. He had delivered this disjointed speech in profile, his rather aquiline nose directed at the great picture windows at the end of the room. Now he lingered for a final minute, utterly without self-consciousness, and finally turned and left.
“Interesting kid,” Portia said, removing the DVD from her laptop and placing both into her brown leather satchel.
“I guess. We’re so used to him. We let him alone, mainly, but we do make him produce scholarship, otherwise he’d keep going the way he was before. He told you about his old school?”
She nodded. “So… he doesn’t take classes here?”
“Oh sure. Well, he attends, but his mind is usually otherwise engaged. We decided not to fight it. That’s what they did at Keene Central, to ill effect.”
“They threw him out?” she asked, shouldering her bag.
“Well, they were headed in that direction. I met him at a yard sale last spring. He was sitting on the ground reading a 1952 Encyclopedia Britannica. Letter S.” John grinned. “He said he was looking into the source material for King Lear. He told me he was on academic probation. We started getting together at Brewbakers on Sunday afternoons.”
“Brewbakers?”
“Only cappuccino in town.” He shrugged. “Anyway, he started here this fall, and it’s working, as far as I can tell. He’s preparing a lecture for the entire school about pop art right now.” He shook his head. “On the day we assigned it, it happened to be pop art. If we had assigned the lecture a few days earlier, it might have been the Beats. A few days later, it could have been the Armenian genocide. He’s like that game show where they let you loose in the supermarket for five minutes and you have to grab everything you can, except we can’t seem to convince him he has more than five minutes. He can take his time.”
“He mentioned that his parents hadn’t gone to college.”
“No. They seem like nice people, but they don’t connect with him very well. You know, he was supposed to be playing football at Keene Central by now and racing motocross on the weekends. Jeremiah was never going to be like that.”
She nodded. There had often been Jeremiahs in the applicant pool. They were attractive to the faculty, who some years earlier had flatly asked for more of them: fewer golden kids who did everything well, please, and more awkward kids who were brilliant but couldn’t tie their shoes. The faculty themselves, she suspected, had once been awkward, brilliant kids who couldn’t tie their shoes.
“Are you going back now?”
“Oh no. I’m staying over in Keene tonight. I’m going to Northfield Mount Hermon in the morning, then I’ll fly back from Hartford.”
“Northfield’s a great school.”
“Yes. We’ve had wonderful applicants from Northfield.”
She stopped. She was aware, for the first time, of something awkward between them, something she had to call upon herself to ignore, or resist. She didn’t particularly want to look at it directly.
“Let me walk you out,” said John.
Outside the sunlight was in its last, brilliant blare of the day. The hay in the fields was richly yellow and came glowing, vibrating, out of the dirt in unkempt piles of bales. She could see kids in the cow pasture, walking the herd back after milking, with three or four dogs running around them. Closer, where the volleyball game had been played, the stout woman she had seen in the commons seemed to be setting up for some kind of game, with goals and boundaries. This enterprise, it seemed to her, was not entirely logical, but it was, in some baffling way, cohesive. Even beautiful. This was, Portia felt suddenly, a beautiful place—an astoundingly beautiful place to spend a life, or a work life, at any rate. Whatever their oddities, the project here seemed tangible. Take kids, make them participate in the community, and make them think. It was Princeton’s own mission, more or less. Minus the ivy. And the money.
She opened the passenger door, and the car emitted hot air. She closed her eyes, momentarily dizzy. John stood behind her, and there was again that awkwardness between them. She was wondering how to leave, precisely, but in the next moment a boy of about fourteen came rushing up to them and stopped abruptly at John’s elbow.
“Dad,” he said.
The boy was young but tall—gangly, teetering on long legs. He was a handsome boy with coiling black hair and deeply black skin and a long, sinewy neck too elongated for his wheat-colored turtleneck sweater, which hit rather lower than it was meant to. He glanced at Portia without expression, then focused again on John.
“Portia,” he said, “this is my son. Nelson, can you say hello to Portia?”
Obediently, he turned and held out his hand. It was warm and dry and rough, and she shook it.
“Dad,” the boy said, his task dispatched, “okay if I go home with Karl? We want to do math.”
“Math?” John said wryly. “Or computer games?”
“First math. Then, and only if there’s time, educational computer games.”
“All right,” he said. “Be responsible. I’ll come and get you on the way home.”
“Thanks,” said Nelson. “Bye,” he said to Portia, and took off.
John looked after him. “Of course he makes friends with the only kid at our school who has a full library of computer games. I’m only hoping they’re not of the blood-spattered genre, but the truth is, I’m a
fraid to ask.”
“Denial is a parent’s best friend.” Portia smiled.
“Yes. Do you have kids?”
She shook her head quickly. “No. No kids.”
“Well, it’s an adventure.”
She nodded, watching his long boy climb into the backseat of a battered Volvo. “He seems like a great kid.”
“Oh, he is. He’s happy and smart. A little lazy, but why not be lazy when you’re young? When else are you going to do it?”
“Good point. Well, listen, thanks for having me. It was very interesting. You’ve got some very strong personalities here. I hope we’ll get some of them to apply.”
“I think you might.” He smiled. “I’ll work on Jeremiah. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you got Simone, eventually. I think she’d do fantastically well at a place like Princeton. Despite her bluster.”
“Maybe because of her bluster,” Portia said. “Look, if you have questions about the process, please call me. College guidance is such a well-oiled machine at most private schools. I don’t want your kids to miss out because this is the first year for you.”
“That’s really kind of you,” he said. He looked as if he meant it. “We should have had you sooner,” he said. “And I’m so sorry about Deborah. I will scold her when I see her.”
“Oh, not on my account,” Portia said, thinking that a scolding was certainly in order. “Hey, can you tell me how to get to the lovely Keene Best Western?”
He could, and did. She wrote down what he said and tossed the piece of paper onto her passenger seat. Then she closed the car door. “Well, good-bye,” she told him, forcibly ignoring, once again, that clear discomfort.
“Portia,” said John, who wasn’t taking her outstretched hand, “before, when I said I remembered you, I didn’t mean that I remembered the appointment. I meant that I remembered you. I remember you,” he said. “I went to college with you.”
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