As for Dylan’s Chippewa student, he could certainly go to Minnesota State. He could take the time he needed to graduate, go on to medical school, and return to his reservation to become the beacon of his community, inspiring generations of other bright kids to see beyond the horizon. On the other hand, he might come to Princeton, or a place like Princeton, and buckle, leaving school altogether and never achieving what he might achieve. On the other hand, a Minnesota State might lack Princeton’s abilities to carry him, support him, bear with him. It might lack the scholarship support Princeton could provide, and the mentorship. On the other hand, Princeton’s foreignness, its diversity, its raw pressure, might prove unnecessary distractions to someone who would otherwise focus on the matter at hand: to establish a bedrock foundation for the ultimate goal of becoming a doctor. On the other hand, what if this student wasn’t really destined for medicine at all, but only awaiting the film studies or religion or art or Chinese mythology class that would set his path in a radically different direction toward an unsuspected vocation? Princeton did that for so many students. And this alive kid, this hungry kid, shouldn’t he have the broadest possible range of brilliant outcomes?
Unfortunately, there was no gain in looking to the past for guidance. Over the years, she had taken various deep breaths over various marginal students, some of whom had sailed through and some of whom had faltered and then failed. That girl from Sitka, now at Oxford studying economics on a Rhodes, had been horrendously prepared for Princeton, but once on campus (and with massive support from the writing program), she had found her footing. But there were others who had not been able to stay, and they were like little stigmata to the admissions officers who had fought for them. Portia, like every one of her colleagues, carried her own secret retinue of sorrows: the single mother from Oakland who had fought her way through high school, taking six years to do it, and who had ardently (if inarticulately) pleaded for the chance. She had had to leave after freshman year. The boy from Hawaii who had spent his life in foster care, finding a relatively stable home only in the last two years. It hadn’t been enough. Sophomore year, he had bought a history paper off the Internet and been suspended. The fact was, they didn’t know. They couldn’t know. What would happen if we said yes? What would happen if we said no? Sometimes she thought that every new admissions officer should be issued a Ouija board.
Dylan was waiting patiently, if grimly. “How bad are the scores?” Portia asked.
He seemed to consider this with a weight the question didn’t quite indicate. “Bad. Low five hundreds.”
“Science aptitude?”
“Unreflected in the transcript, but I do think so, yes.”
“Can he write?”
“Passionately. But not very well.”
Passion, Portia thought. It was what they were all about. But passion underscored by the attendant numbers and letters. This was not looking good.
“Have you considered asking them to keep him for another year? It sounds like it could make a big difference for him, wherever he ends up.”
Dylan sat back in the swivel chair and folded his arms. He looked suddenly calm and pleased. “Yes, actually. I was waiting to see if you had the same thought.”
“Do you have a good rapport with the college counselor?”
“Well, it’s new. But I liked her. I think the school would support him.” He got to his feet. “I’m going to run this by Clarence. Can I say I discussed it with you?”
“Absolutely. And you always can. These are the cases that take it out of you. Well”—she laughed—“most of them take it out of you.”
“Right. I was Mr. Universe when I graduated. Look at me now.”
She smiled at him. “You’re doing fine.”
“I’m thinking this isn’t for me, long-term.”
Portia looked at him. “I’d be surprised if it were,” she said, but in fact she was surprised. He’d been a find. Most of the young hires left after a year or two, bound for graduate school or teaching, sometimes college counseling, but she’d had hopes for Dylan. He was an orderly type who went with the gut. Indeed, he possessed that odd (and very rare) combination of opposing characteristics that the best admissions officers had: a capacity for massive detail retention and a converse ability to let go of everything but instinct. Lacking one or the other of these, you could certainly do the work, but it would always be a battle. “We’d be sorry to lose you,” she told him.
“Well, it’s something I’m thinking about. I miss Latin. I miss Latin geeks.”
Portia smiled. Dylan had been his class’s Latin orator at commencement. Thoughtfully, he had provided his classmates with a translation, letting them know precisely where in the speech to laugh and where to cheer, which impressed their parents no end.
After he had gone, she sat for a long, illicit time, watching the late afternoon darkness fill her window. She was not in a hurry. There was nothing to go home for; Mark was out, somewhere. Her only tether was to the armchair and the orange folders, traveling slowly from stack to stack across her wooden lap desk, like that T. S. Eliot poem about the life measured out in coffee spoons, except that she was measuring hers with other people’s lives, which they had measured into these life-folders. Short lives, slivers of lives, fictions of lives. She opened the next folder.
Sarah Lenaghan, Brookline, Mass. Dad an attorney, went to Cornell. Mom a homemaker. Princeton alum, class of 1991. Portia frowned. Nineteen ninety-one happened to be her own class at Dartmouth, though she hadn’t actually graduated until the following year. Sarah’s mom must have had a baby right out of college. There were other siblings, younger siblings. Sarah’s mother’s name was Jane. Portia kept looking at the dates, as if they didn’t make sense. Why should they not make sense?
So she was now old enough to have produced a Princeton applicant. So her contemporaries, in the time Portia had been reading thousands and thousands of applications, living in New Hampshire, living in Princeton, living with Mark, had produced one child, two children, four children in the case of Sarah Lenaghan’s mother, the homemaker. All those little lives, those clarinet lessons and traveling soccer teams. What had she done?
Sarah was a runner. She had run the Boston Marathon. Her writing was vivid, so vivid that Portia could feel the pain in her own lungs as Sarah hit her wall at mile nineteen. The girl was a wonderful writer. She wrote poetry. She loved Princeton. She had marched in the P-Rade since the age of five, her mother’s first reunion. If Portia met the mother, Jane Lenaghan, née Paley, what would they talk about? Their memories of the moon landing? The terrible hairstyles they had worn in middle school? Had they watched the same television shows? Listened to the same awful music? She had a strange, thankfully passing impulse to pick up the phone and call the number on the application to ask her, Jane Paley Lenaghan: “How can you have this child? How is it fair that you have this child?”
“If I still had the opportunity to apply to Princeton Early Decision,” wrote Sarah Lenaghan, “I would be doing so. For many years I have hoped to follow in my mother’s footsteps and attend this great university. Please know that, should I be fortunate enough to be accepted to Princeton, I will absolutely attend.”
She closed the folder, then, gripped by a new idea, an awful idea, she opened it again and scanned the first page, the detail page of names and addresses, e-mails, phone numbers. And dates. Sarah was born in December 1990. Portia’s fingertips felt numb. She reached down for the pile of folders she had read through the afternoon and opened the first. Sunil Chatterjee, born September 14, 1990. Beatrice McHugh, born July 24, 1990. Lucy DiMaggio, born September 9, 1990. Anna Cohen-Schwartz, born May 1, 1990. Brian Wong, graduating as a junior, born February 23, 1991.
So it’s here, she thought. As if she hadn’t been waiting, and for years, for just this moment.
Ten years ago, my mother and father left China to move here. My father had been a research scientist in China, and my mother was a civil servant. Here they run a take out restauran
t, where I also work on weekends and during the summer. I must be the translator for my parents, because they still do not speak very good English, and it is difficult for them to fill out government forms and conduct their business. We live over the restaurant, so we are never far from the business. I see every day how hard my parents work, and I am always aware of how much they gave up so that I could come to America and have a chance to go to a great American university.
CHAPTER NINE
AN ACTOR PREPARES
Four days before Christmas, Gordon Sternberg walked out of his treatment facility on the Philadelphia Main Line and disappeared into a Yuletide confection of affluent suburbia. One of Sternberg’s daughters filed a missing persons report, another spirited their mother away to her own home on the West Coast. Mark was called in, of course, though there was little he or anyone else could do. Still, on the morning of their departure for Vermont, he went into his office to make some calls, and Portia went for a walk with Rachel and the dog.
It was a cold morning, comfortingly seasonal. The dog, a Labrador retriever of uncommon stupidity (even for a Labrador retriever), was in high spirits and pulled relentlessly at the lead, especially when he sighted another dog. They walked along the lake as far as the boathouse and then turned back, making their way up through the campus and along Prospect. As they neared the Sternberg home, down past the depopulated but still magisterial eating clubs, they both slowed. In other years, these parlor windows had showcased a bigger-than-yours Christmas tree, chockablock with gold balls, and the porch pillars had been coiled with pine boughs. Now, silence and darkness in the huge house, and an air of thorough abandonment, seemed to mark the place. Portia was struck by how shabby it seemed on this street of camera-ready holiday cheer, with its drab and spotty stucco and still unraked leaves. It blared discontent and disarray, but for all its disturbances it had been a living place, a place of contact, conflict, life. That, and not the silence, was what had made them stop.
For a long moment, they both stood looking. Neither Portia nor Rachel was sentimental by nature, but both knew they were thinking the same thing: how they had met in this house ten years ago, at a large and loud gathering of English and comp lit faculty. Mark had been newly hired, and the party technically had been to welcome him, but there was no sense of occasion about it and no real order. Gordon Sternberg left Mark to fend for himself, and he seemed not to recognize Portia from the recruiting trip the previous spring, when he had taken them to Lahiere’s for dinner. So she simply wandered, looking at the knots of men and women in the hallways and rooms, noting the dusty prints of eighteenth-century London and Paris, the worn sofas and downtrodden rugs. The guests, who were veterans of many Sternberg parties, knew that there would be platters of dolmas in the dining room and spicy nuts in the living room. They knew the bottles of wine and Scotch were on a long table in Sternberg’s study, cleared for the occasion of whatever the great man was working on. They simply entered the house, filled up on food and drink, and went to their favorite spots to talk loudly with their favorite fellow partygoers. Everyone looked so comfortably ensconced that she found herself unable to pick out her hostess (Julianne Sternberg had not, naturally, been at the recruiting dinner), and in fact Portia—who couldn’t have imagined that Mrs. Sternberg would hardly leave the kitchen that night—would not meet Julianne until some months later. She discovered a pregnant Rachel Friedman in the living room with Sternberg himself, who was by then very drunk. Gordon, apparently the last human being on the planet to understand that alcohol was injurious to a fetus, was exuberantly pressing an enormous gin and tonic on his guest, and Portia, in disbelief, had reached out and taken it from him, distracting Sternberg long enough for Rachel to slip away (this was truly a selfless act, given that it then condemned her to ten long minutes of intense face time with Sternberg himself). When Rachel caught up with her later in the evening, she professed her eternal gratitude, then her astonishment to learn that her savior was the companion of the guest of honor. Then baffled surprise that there was a guest of honor in the first place.
“What will happen to it?” Portia asked, meaning the house.
“Oh, the university will buy it back, of course. Then they’ll sell it, I suppose. Probably to another faculty member.”
“That’s so final,” Portia said. “I mean, couldn’t he come back?”
“Well, Mark knows better than I, but from what I’ve heard, I don’t think so. Not after teaching drunk. And the baseball bat incident.”
“I heard it was a piece of wood.”
“Whatever.” Rachel shrugged.
“I feel bad for Julianne.”
“Julianne should have gotten out years ago,” Rachel said with a chilly voice. “I can’t fathom that kind of entropy. I mean, my God, what must it have been like to be married to him? What did she get from him?”
“Six kids?” Portia said tentatively.
“Six grown kids. Please. I hope she’ll have a wonderful new life now. I hope she’ll have a wild affair. I hope she’ll dye her hair green and go back to graduate school. Wasn’t she in graduate school when she married him? Girl interrupted! That’s quite an interruption.”
“It was a different time,” Portia said gently.
“Poppycock,” said Rachel.
They walked on, turning at Harrison in the direction of their houses.
“How’s Mark holding up?” said Rachel, pulling the dog back from an open garbage can.
“I’m not sure,” Portia said truthfully. “He doesn’t talk about it. Actually, we’re not communicating very well at the moment.” She was aware of her hands as she said this, swinging, mittened. Then of Rachel’s hand, being pulled forward with the leash. Rachel did not look at her, but she had heard.
“Rough patch?” she said after a moment.
“I suppose. Do you remember that dinner party at our house? With your friend from Oxford? He thought I was rude to her. Do you think I was rude?”
“You? She was a horrible bitch.”
Portia burst out laughing. “I thought so.”
“I was appalled. I said to David, after we dropped her off, I had no idea she was so awful. She’d been extremely pleasant when we took her out last spring. But he defended her, because she cried.”
Portia looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“She was crying. In the car. In the backseat. It was very strange.”
“You mean… wait, you mean she was bawling? Or—”
“No. Quietly. We didn’t hear her. But when she got out, we saw that she’d been crying. Honestly, it was really odd. And then the next day she phoned us and apologized. She said she was just hormonal.”
“Well, it would have been nice if she’d called me,” Portia sniffed. “I mean, I’m the one she was rude to.” After a minute, she said, “Hormonal?”
“Pregnant,” Rachel said shortly. “You knew that, right?”
Portia shook her head. She suddenly felt very numb. “No.” A block later she said, “How pregnant?”
“I don’t know,” said Rachel, hauling back the dog, who had spotted another dog across the street. “Who knows? A week? Six months? She’s so tiny, how could you tell? When I was one month pregnant I was already enormous and covered in acne. Fred!” she said to the dog, who was whining.
Portia walked, her head down. She was thinking of something, or trying to think of something. Just beyond her grasp, her ken, flittering away.
“Anyway, you mentioned that night?”
“What? Oh, we sort of quarreled that night, after you guys left. I mean, it’s fine now, I’m sure.”
“Which is why you sound so sure when you say that.”
“Don’t I?” She laughed, but the laugh was not convincing. “I don’t know. I guess it’s only noteworthy because we’ve never really been a contentious couple. We’ve always gotten along so well. We still get along,” she insisted.
“And this is what you want,” Rachel said, her gaze fixed to the dog’s meaty ba
ck.
“What?”
“To get along. I’m just pointing out the language, Portia. I have no idea what goes on in anyone else’s relationship. I barely understand my own. But I do know that some people—and they may be delusional or histrionic or shallow or any number of things—but some people want more than getting along. Or, let’s say, different. They want different. They want a deeper connection.”
They had reached Nassau Street. On the corner was the yellow brick house that contained the Michael Graves architectural firm. There were a few people here, waiting for the light.
“We have a deep connection,” Portia insisted, trying not to sound as irritated as she felt. “Rachel, we’ve been together for sixteen years. I mean, Jesus, that’s a marriage.”
“If it were a marriage,” Rachel said with in-for-a-penny abandon, “you would be married.”
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