But only if Jeremiah could be here with them.
“You have an aggressive tumor in your leg,” said my doctor. I was twelve years old and baseball was my whole life. To be completely honest, I cared less about having the lower half of my right leg removed than I cared about whether I’d be able to play in next Saturday’s game against Freeport.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A HIGHLY UNUSUAL APPLICANT
She knew better than to hound him. He did not like to be hounded. He was a very organized man, very composed. Every day he appeared in committee with a new shirt, a new bow tie, and a suit that might have been new or just identical to the one he had worn the day before: crisp and fresh and dark blue with the faintest stripes.
The days went by and he gave no sign that he had read Jeremiah’s file: no comment, no note, no e-mail. In the committee room, hundreds and then thousands of seventeen-year-olds were passing before them, their names one by one assigned to their final Princeton destinations: Deny, Admit, Wait List. First the South and then the Northwest, California, the Plains, the Midwest, foreign applications, country by country, and the Mid-Atlantic. New York and its suburbs would take nearly a week. Finally, only her own folders remained.
Still, he said nothing to her. There was no reassurance, no “I haven’t forgotten,” and every day she had to ask herself, again, if she ought to be doing something: reminding him, nudging him, pleading with him.
They were moving well. Last year, Clarence had hired Robin Hindery and Jordan Cobb precisely because he had expected this jump in the numbers; the rise of the common application, the decline of Early Decision, and the peaking children-of-baby-boomers population had made for indelible writing on the wall. The tone in the committee room was elevated, generally. Portia tried to hold her tongue. She had not asked to be last at bat, but she didn’t want to get there with anyone mad at her. So Deepa had argued passionately for an academically undistinguished boy whose severe stutter (he had written) had formed his character and unlocked his love for music. Dylan had gone to bat for a girl at the Native American school who Portia was not at all certain would be able to handle the workload. Corinne seemed to have found a number of Latinists she could not live without, and Jordan pleaded for so many kids who’d had miserable lives that Clarence had had to take her aside and remind her that it was not the university’s place to compensate every young person for every terrible thing that had happened to them. Kids whose parents had died, whose siblings had died, whose friends had died, whose teachers had died. Kids who’d battled cancer and depression and the aftereffects of car accidents. Kids who lived in communities without hope, who had somehow nonetheless acquired hope for themselves. Kids who gave the school’s address instead of a home address, because there wasn’t really what you might call a permanent home address, whose twenty-five-hour-a-week job at McDonald’s or ShopRite was essential to the family income. Kids who had somehow dodged abusive fathers, schizophrenic mothers, violent neighborhoods. Kids who had kids and were desperate to make a better life for them.
Portia wanted to give every one of her colleagues whatever it was—whoever it was—they wanted. Although technically there was no such thing as quid pro quo in committee, no tacit understanding that she would give Robin the girl whose sisters and mother lived in hiding (who had possibly the lowest academic profile to have reached the committee room all these weeks, who wrote clearly and unsentimentally about the toll of violence in her family) and Robin, when the time came, would let her have Jeremiah. She did not allow herself to appear sycophantic. She gave herself a stern expression, as if she were dubious of everyone’s motives, everyone’s claims, but in the end she voted to admit whenever she sensed an urgency that was somehow personal, because Jeremiah would also be one of these applicants, she knew: divisive, a little worrying. And as the folders and the names and the accomplishments flew by, and as it looked more and more as if they would come last to her own geographic area, the Northeast, she knew that every one of her colleagues was running short of expansiveness. It was one thing, at the outset of committee meetings, to acquiesce against your better judgment when the class felt wide open, with places to spare and room to make, just possibly, a bit of a mistake. But now, with thousands of such high-achieving kids already slated for denial, it was going to be harder to get a Jeremiah past. She would need all of her passion and all of her persuasiveness and all of their goodwill.
Then, toward the end of the third week, when they had dealt with nearly everyone but the nearly two thousand students from her own district who were, in Martin Quilty’s oddly endearing phrase, still “swimming,” she entered her office after a grueling day to find Jeremiah’s folder in the center of her desk, an orange Post-it note stuck to the cover. “Let’s discuss in committee,” it said.
Portia sat down heavily. It was not the response she had hoped for. She had hoped for some indication that Clarence concurred, or at least for a chance to talk to him again before having to strut and fret her moment upon the committee stage. At Dartmouth, there had long been an unwritten rule that each admissions officer got one free pass, one applicant they could bring to the dean once the decisions had all been made, and have that student’s wait list designation altered to acceptance. It had been a genteel sort of tradition, and they had not abused it, because it spread a kind of goodness through the office and the enterprise itself. Because you might have a gut feeling about some kid, whose transcript was, say, somewhat under par, because his essay was the one you remembered out of thousands, and you just knew he would go on to do something amazing with his life, and you could—personally, single-handedly—make it happen for that kid. But only once a year, and only after the files had all been closed, and only for the wait list (it didn’t work if the applicant had been denied outright), and only very quietly, strictly between the officer and the dean.
Not at Princeton. Not under Martin Quilty, who had turned her away when she’d tried it the first year, smiling his customary sad smile and letting her know never to attempt it again; and certainly not under Clarence, who would think she was mad.
Jeremiah was going to get one chance, and one chance only, in the last days of committee meetings, with an incoming split opinion between his first and second readers and without a gesture of encouragement from Clarence. Portia closed her eyes.
At least, it occurred to her, she could give some thought to where in the order he might fall. First folder of the day was not the place for Jeremiah, but neither was last. She went through them, one by one, reminding herself who each applicant was and what they’d done, what mattered to them, what she’d had to say about them, and what Corinne had written in response. They were all deflatingly superior, cerebral, engaged, ready to hit some college campus running and take off into their avidly anticipated futures. Each of them had earned either a “High Priority—Admit” or a “Strong Interest” designation from her. Nearly all of them had been just as lauded by Corinne. Against their backdrop, Jeremiah was an undisciplined smart kid, flailing against authority, beating his own different drum with merry abandon. It was going to be a slaughter.
She went back to the top of the pile and began again, skimming: crew champions, choreographers, fencers, editors of the literary magazine (Expressions), kids cheered by their counselors as the soul of the school or cited by their teachers as the best they had ever taught. This time, she was not looking for weakness, but willing the best among them to make themselves known, and slowly they did. There were many of the best of them. Most of them, by any standard, were the best of them. And when those best pulled away and were placed one by one into a stack of their own, there were only about twenty left.
The ordinarily qualified.
The usually brilliant.
The expectedly talented.
Portia took a deep breath. She would begin with one of these. Then, one from the larger pile. Then, seven… no, eight of the ones everyone would see were not incredible enough. And then… Jeremiah. Her colleagues would
be ready to listen by then. They would have begun to wonder: Where were the great applicants from the Northeast? They would want to say yes to someone, or at least be willing to say it, though it would still be very hard to push Jeremiah through.
She didn’t sleep well that night and was up early, putting unprecedented thought into what she wore and how she arranged her hair. She worried especially about Corinne, who had made it through almost three weeks of twelve-hour committees without, it seemed, putting a hair out of place, while all around her the rest of them—and even, a bit, Clarence—wilted and sweated and, as the day wore on, took on a washed-out, acrid cast. Corinne brought from home clear glass bottles of water infused with some rosy liquid, and this she poured out, bit by bit, into a matching tumbler, sipping through the hours until the drink, whatever it was, was all gone. No one ever asked. When she was hungry she eschewed, of course, the Dunkin’ Donuts Abby sometimes brought and the bowls of M&M’s Deepa liked to set down in the middle of the long table but withdrew from her black leather bag a container of Greek yogurt or a package of rye thins or a perfect blushing pear. She never raised her voice but managed to communicate disapproval with a flickering glance, and Portia was never once surprised to see how she voted.
She chose, finally, a brown dress she had bought at Ann Taylor in Palmer Square, an item so plain that it was above reproach and, since it had never been worn, as unsullied as the day she’d acquired it. She wore stockings and black leather loafers because she did not have brown, but Rachel (who followed things like this) had once told her that black and brown were considered chic when mixed. Portia decided to put her faith in this, though she knew that Corinne would never go so far as to think her chic. She pulled her hair off her face and pinned it into a bun and then, after considering the finished effect in the mirror, cinched the billowing midsection of the dress with a black belt. It was meant to be belted, she remembered now. The saleswoman had said so, though perhaps she had only been trying to sell a belt.
Portia badly wanted coffee, but she resisted. She wanted a script she could memorize, but there were too many unknowns, too many factors, so she walked along Nassau Street with her hands clenched in the pockets of her overcoat, trying to think of nothing but the breath she made, visible before each step. She fell in with Jordan, crossing before Nassau Hall, and gave her a comradely grin. “End’s in sight,” she said brightly.
“Oh, my God. I had no idea anyone could get this tired.”
“Don’t worry. They bring in a team of massage therapists on the last day of committee.”
“They do?” said Jordan. She was a tiny girl with a white blond pageboy.
“Sadly, I jest,” said Portia. “I wish it were true. But we do get to go home and take a bath and order a pizza.”
“Well,” Jordan said, laughing, “I guess that’s something.”
How was her father? Portia asked as they passed the Henry Moore sculpture beside their building. (It looked like a lethal and deformed doughnut.) Her father’s heart attack had been the family emergency.
“Quitting smoking,” Jordan said wryly. “About twenty years too late, but I’m glad he’s doing it now. Of course, I’m also glad I don’t have to be within a mile of him when he does it.”
They opened the door to West College and went inside. Corinne was standing in the hall outside the conference room, towering over Deepa, who held a ceramic mug of tea. Deepa was nodding distractedly, but she was glad to focus on Portia.
“Well, you look nice,” said Corinne, but she sounded very surprised about it, which rather offset the compliment.
“Thanks,” Portia said. “Don’t want to lose any of my kids because I’ve got ring around the collar.”
“Please!” Deepa laughed. “If it were up to that, there’d be no southern students in the Class of 2012.”
“Portia,” said Corinne, “did you get the note I sent you about the Loomis Chaffee girl?”
Portia, who had seen but not read the e-mail, took a guess. “The one with the suspension sophomore year?”
Corinne nodded. Her black hair shone fiercely in the overhead fluorescent light. “I have a close friend at Loomis, so I asked about it. It was just a smoking infraction.”
Portia took a steadying breath and smiled carefully. Boarding school suspensions were tricky things, as often to do with smoking and dormitory rule breaking as with far more serious (from an admissions perspective) honor code violations or outright crimes. But looking into applicants from her area was not Corinne’s concern. Talking to anyone at Loomis, even a “close friend”—especially a “close friend”—about anything admissions related was a serious overstep, an act of aggression. She felt herself nodding like an idiot, even as a variety of caustic statements hammered at her to be spoken. But this was not the time for them. Instead, she summoned every ounce of grace she possessed and said, “Thank you. I ought to have done it myself. I’m going to make a note.”
And she walked swiftly upstairs, as if intent on doing just that.
In the office, she threw her coat over the chair in the corner and just breathed deeply for a moment. There was nothing surprising in this, Portia told herself. Corinne had never pretended not to be enraged about having been moved to California, and more than likely she had had her own eye on the New England district. But with her children now ensconced at Andover, even she must recognize at least the appearance of impropriety in that. Or did Corinne imagine she could evaluate her own children’s classmates? Was she that myopic?
Breathe, Portia told herself. Not now. You don’t have time for this now.
She gathered up the stack of folders on her desk, flipping through one final time to confirm the order, then she went back down.
This time, she helped herself to coffee. With her own geographic area on the table, they could hardly go on without her, and she took an absurd amount of pleasure in the caffeine buzz that went directly to her head.
“Howdy,” Dylan said from across the table. He looked upbeat, as if, with only the Northeast to go, he had allowed himself to believe that the hardest part of the admissions cycle was nearly done; but that was like coming to a final leg of the triathlon and realizing you still had a marathon to run. There were more applications from the Northeast than from any other part of the country. They hailed from the lousiest underfunded and overcrowded public high schools and the greatest private schools in the land and everything in between. Princeton could pretty much fill its class from this district alone and had once done precisely that. There would be thousands of them, and she felt responsible for them all. But she cared about only one.
“Good morning,” said Clarence, taking his customary seat. He appeared, as usual, as if he had just been released by his valet, and the still pleasant smell of lavender he wore settled over the room. Portia found that she was trying not to look at him.
Instead, she looked down at her pile. Last night, when she had not been sleeping, she had been imagining this, wondering if, at the last moment, she would find herself shuffling the folders into random order, denying Jeremiah even this illusion of an advantage. But she did not. And then, at last, it was time to begin.
“Leah Felder,” she read, reciting the student’s identifying number for Martha. “Darien High School. We have fourteen applications from this school, and Leah’s GPA ranks twelfth out of two-fifty. Dad a broker, mom a professional fund-raiser, younger of two siblings. Leah wrote a very moving essay about her brother, who survived cancer. She plays soccer and swims on varsity squads. Summers: part-time job, language program at Dartmouth, trips with family. She is hardworking and active in her school community. Her recs convey how very likable she is, but don’t single her out for academic promise. First reader marked ‘Only if room’ with an arrow up. Second reader agreed.” She looked around the table. “Are there questions?”
“Anything that stands out in the athletics?” asked Deepa.
Portia pretended to look, but she didn’t have to look. “No.”
“Okay.”
They voted.
“Sarah Lenaghan,” read Portia from the next folder. She had chosen Sarah very carefully. They were going to love Sarah. Sarah was going to put them all in a good mood. “Second in a class of forty-two at Winsor School, five-year count: ninety-eight applied, fifteen accepts, nine attends. Dad’s an attorney employed by MIT, mom is a homemaker. Sarah has run the Boston Marathon every year since the age of fifteen. She is a poet who edits her school literary magazine. Winner of the Bennington Young Writers Competition last fall, also an honorable mention in the Princeton competition. SATs 800 verbal, 720 math, AP fives in English, French, History and Latin. Summers, she is part of a tutoring program in Roxbury, Harvard Summer School, and her teacher there said she was one of the best young poets he’d ever taught. Raves from GC and her English teacher. I’d like to say that these were two of the best essays I read this year. And her mom’s PU Class of ’89.”
Portia looked up. She noted, with satisfaction, the effect of this. Legacy status was never a reason for admission, but it could be a tipping point. Not that Sarah was going to need a tipping point.
“Did she send in any work for evaluation?” asked Corinne.
“No,” Portia said.
“I wonder why not,” said Corinne.
“Well, the creative writing faculty judge the poetry competition. I think that’s an endorsement.”
Corinne nodded almost grudgingly.
“She also loves Princeton. She said she wishes she could have applied ED, but since she can’t, she’d like us to know that she would definitely attend if admitted.”
Portia picked up the reader’s card and read aloud from her summary. “Sarah is going to be somebody’s great roommate, fun to be around but also cerebral and involved. Recs love her, gifted poet. Would be great here.” She had checked “High Priority—Admit,” and she told them that, too. “Second reader concurred. She wrote: ‘Fantastic kid.’”
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