Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  Alexandra dutifully insisted that the nanny call her younger boy Preston, while other mothers and nannies, rendered inarticulate by love, referred to their toddlers as boo-boo or zee-zee, as bunny-bun or m’hija. The Bradleys donated $25,000 to Best Step Preschool, in return for which everyone on the staff was instructed to avoid affectionate diminutives. The same order accompanied a $50,000 donation to Ashland Elementary, but Alexandra had not taken into account her six-year-old son’s teary refusal to answer to any name but Brad. He became the boy with three names—Brad at school, Preston at home, and Four with and only with his father, a small reminder from husband to wife of exactly whose lineage was the dominant one.

  She had fewer opportunities to call her son by any name, lately, as Brad had long since stopped talking to her about anything of significance, and everyone’s schedule was so full. October was the start of Alexandra’s charity season, with an event every weekend—a Junior League luncheon to gather supplies for homeless families, whose members would enter the coming year wearing repurposed T-shirts commemorating everything from Fashion Week to Lollapalooza; the Revlon Run/Walk for breast cancer research; a church-sponsored 5K run for adult literacy, to which she donated accumulated copies of The New Yorker; and a food drive that involved the aggressive gifting of frozen turkeys and boxed stuffing to families whose food heritage did not include turkeys and stuffing.

  Alexandra had inherited each of her target charities from her mother, except for the breast cancer event, and she had decided that this would be her last year for that cause unless the participants showed a bit more restraint. She wanted to raise money without drawing attention, as her mother and grandmother had done, and she was rattled by women, most of them newcomers to the charity circuit, who wanted face time with their beneficiaries, or whose passion was fueled by a personal saga they felt compelled to recount. Trey’s Jewish partner had once congratulated her for aspiring to what his religion defined as the highest form of charity, giving anonymously to an anonymous recipient. While she thought that was a bit excessive—one wanted to feel that those who received help deserved it, and a little recognition was always nice—she did like the part about never actually having a conversation with the people who benefited from her efforts.

  This year, she had added to her roster a luncheon at the Peninsula Hotel, sponsored by the bank’s private investment group for families who gave away over a million dollars a year. Another of Trey’s partners handled the Bradleys’ philanthropy, but Alexandra loved the idea that she was taking on new responsibilities, one of the strategies suggested by the therapist who had come to Crestview to talk to parents about the empty nest. The bank’s scheduled speaker was an expert on ethical wills, which enabled the philanthropist to dictate from beyond the grave the good work he expected his heirs to do on his behalf or risk disinheritance, a topic of great interest to Trey and Alexandra, who were not about to let mortality alter their long-range agenda. As one of the event organizers, Alexandra had to show up early and stay late, but Trey was not going at all, some double-talk about respecting his wife’s independence being a nice cover for wanting an afternoon to himself. Saturday was the one day of the week when Trey was neither at the office nor on the golf course, and he was loath to give it up.

  Brad was pacing circles in the entry hall when his mother came downstairs wearing a navy blue suit that made her skin look like skim milk.

  “Hey, Mom, you look ready to take care of business.”

  She adjusted her jacket and checked the contents of her handbag.

  “Well, that’s a nice thing to hear from the young man of the house,” she said, uncertain about what to do next. Alexandra stepped toward her son for a kiss just as he decided that he did not need a heavy sweatshirt, and she almost took an elbow to the forehead, which must have been the reason her eyes threatened to fill with tears. She looked away as though she were checking the way her stockings descended into her pumps, blinked fast, regained her inner balance, smiled too brightly, and was gone.

  Brad stood at the door and waited until he heard the whir of the electronic gate. She was gone for at least three hours. With barely a week left before the Bradleys’ self-imposed November 1 filing deadline for Harvard, Brad finally had the chance to approach his father without fear of interruption.

  Trey was in his study, one of two twin rooms on either side of a back hallway that led to a large bricked patio, the only surface in all of southern California that a family in search of a New England gestalt could afford to finish in weathered brick; a patio might break up in an earthquake, but it had nowhere to fall. To the left, Trey’s study, furnished in the high testosterone of the Ralph Lauren line, wallpapered in a deep red plaid, carpeted in the color of a mighty stag’s blood after it was killed by a single perfect shot to the heart, lined with bookshelves stocked with leather-bound classics. Under the windows, an antique partner’s desk that Alexandra’s decorator had found in the little showroom with the British name that he favored for the extra 10 percent commission the owner padded into the price and split with him on top of his normal cut. In front of the bookshelves, the big black leather and cherry wood Eames lounge chair and ottoman that Trey’s father had bought for him when he passed the bar exam.

  To the right of the hallway was an equally large room done up to look as though it had survived decades of salt air and Atlantic chill. Bleached wood couches covered in chemically aged cotton stood on bleached wood floors against bleached linen walls. On a long wooden table the color of driftwood, Alexandra kept a set of fabric-covered boxes, a sewing machine she never used, and a large wicker basket filled with yarn that was suspiciously color-coordinated to its surroundings. Occasionally Brad would notice a pair of knitting needles sticking out of one of the balls—today there was a globe of marigold yarn anchored by two big natural wood needles—but he never saw a finished project, never got so much as a homemade scarf at Christmas, and he had come to realize that the yarn and needles were part of the set dressing, like his dad’s books or the bottle of single-malt scotch whose level had not wavered in years.

  Along the full length of the long back wall of his mother’s room, arrayed on a single shelf, were souvenirs of the one aspect of her former life that mystified Brad—a row of framed photographs of Alexandra on horseback, posed always on the same white horse, a ribbon dangling from its bridle, her parents and sometimes the trainer standing next to her holding a silver cup or a silver platter and some flowers. His mother had been brave enough to ride a horse and good enough to win some blue ribbons. It made no sense to him at all.

  He had asked her about it once, and she had waved him away with an airy, “Oh, it was just something you did,” as though getting a horse to do her bidding were as easy as riding a bicycle. For all Brad knew, it was. Trey had done his best to make dismissive-ness sound affectionate.

  “Let’s remember,” he said, giving his wife’s elbow a playful squeeze, “it’s not like they ever moved very fast or left the ground. Dressage. Horse dancing, isn’t that what you called it?”

  “Yes,” Alexandra had said. “Horse dancing.”

  Brad stood in the hallway and forced himself to focus. When he had successfully excised the image of a dancing horse from his brain, he took what he hoped was a decisive step into the doorway of Trey’s office.

  Trey was watching the Stanford-Cal football game while he cleaned his golf clubs. Two simultaneous tasks was the closest he ever got to doing nothing.

  “Dad.”

  Trey looked up, reached for the remote control, and hit MUTE, but he did not turn off the set.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I talk to you?”

  Trey gestured at the Eames with his putter. Brad hated the chair, which made him feel at a disadvantage, splayed out like a bug on a mounting board for his father’s inspection, but it was either there or the desk chair, which would make this seem too much like a meeting.

  He settled in, looked at his dad, and wondered how old he would be when he
woke up one morning and looked like that—like a bad watercolor of his former self, a thin, diluted, smudged version of who he used to be. In old photos, in the annual family reunion shots, in white tie on his wedding day, Trey looked unnervingly like Brad. In newer photos, he looked like he had vinegar in his veins. The handsome that got in Brad’s way burned out quickly, it seemed—the bright eyes faded, the hair lost its heavy sheen, and slender became gaunt. Or perhaps Trey’s life made him look like a ghostly version of his former self. Brad wanted to believe that being an estate lawyer took its toll on the living, even if the estates belonged to famous people with wacky codicils and questionable witnesses, because if that was true, if that was the defining variable of Trey’s life, then Brad had a chance of not growing up to be like his dad. Over the summer, he had made a derisive joke about how his dad saw dead people, an opening salvo in his campaign to liberate himself from the Bradley legacy. In response, Trey had drawn up a list of his current clients, annotated with their Oscar and Emmy and Tony nominations, if they were any good, or their box office triumphs, if they were not.

  They had stopped just short of an argument. They always did, thanks to an unspoken agreement struck six years earlier, when Brad started at Crestview and his older brother dropped out of Harvard, three weeks into the fall term, to join a dance commune in Portland. None of them had heard a word from Roger since the day he appeared on the doorstep to announce his decision, sending Trey into an impotent rage that lasted the subsequent night and half the next day and involved a bottle of Glenfiddich, a putter, and a wall clock. His only reference to his older son, once he had awakened from a sodden nap and taken a long, hot shower, was that he was glad he had not squandered the name Preston on such a loser.

  Trey was ashamed that twelve-year-old Brad, now the single repository of his ambition, had seen him like that, and Brad was frankly terrified that he had. No one mentioned it again, just as no one mentioned Brad’s crying jag about his name, but from that day forward Brad had tried not to give his dad a hard time. Until now, that is.

  “Application ready to go.” Trey presented it as a statement, not a question.

  “Yes, sir. I thought I’d send it tomorrow. Like the good old days. Early.”

  Like the good old days? Brad winced at how dumb he sounded.

  Trey shook his head. “End of an era. And nobody I’ve talked to there can give me a satisfactory explanation as to why they had to let early decision go. Because financial aid kids need to know all their options? Great. In the meantime, don’t we lose some of the best kids?”

  Brad wondered how many nobodies his dad had called, and who the “we” were who lost the best kids.

  “Dad, I don’t want to go.”

  Brad had to look down when he said that, so he did not notice his father’s eyes flit to the screen for the Stanford touchdown. He worried, instead, that his father had not heard him, that the knot in his throat had muffled his voice. He coughed to clear the way and repeated himself.

  “I don’t want to go to Harvard, Dad.”

  Trey considered the head of the putter, which was cleaner than it had been on the day he bought it, store dust being what it was. He slid the putter back into the bag, put the leather cover over the head of the club, and only then looked at his son.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little late in the game to make that announcement? No, that’s not the correct first question. Are you saying you don’t want to go to protect yourself in case they turn you down, which is patent nonsense? If not—if you believe you can make a substantial case for another school—then I have to question your sense of timing. So. Is this nerves, or have you convinced yourself that there is a better school than Harvard, which will be news to Harvard?”

  “Boy, good thing you didn’t become a prosecutor,” said Brad with a shift, his discomfort registered by the upholstery, which responded with a resentful squawk. He stood up. He had no chance of winning as long as he was thrashing around on that chair.

  “I am not confusing nerves with lack of desire, though there is no such thing as a sure bet,” he began. Trey started to protest, but Brad held up a hand and his father, surprisingly, went back to his clubs. “There is no such thing as a sure bet, but I’m probably the valedictorian and everybody acts like I’m Crestview’s best chance at Harvard, so sure, if anybody’s going to get in it’ll probably be me, especially with the legacy thing, unless…”

  “Thank you for including the family in your list of assets,” said Trey, dryly, cutting him off before he could raise the specter of Roger’s behavior.

  “Dad. I just don’t think I’ll be happy there.”

  His father polished his three wood and waited, wondering what chromosomal ding on Alexandra’s side produced boys who perceived an imaginary link between rebellion and happiness. He cautioned himself to remain calm at all costs. His first, unguarded response to Roger’s news, a loud “You’ve got to be kidding me,” had not put the boy in the mood for reasoned deliberation. Self-control was essential to a positive outcome.

  “I just don’t think I’ll be happy there,” Brad said again, stuffing his hands into his jeans pockets and starting to pace. “I just don’t see myself being a lawyer. I don’t know, maybe I should be a sculptor, or maybe an architect if that sounds more responsible….”

  “Brad, please.” The imperative in Trey’s voice worked as it always had. Silently, Brad watched as his father walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind his desk, knowing exactly what was coming next. Trey retrieved a small, slightly battered rectangular black case, placed it on the desk between them as though it contained an heirloom jewel, and flipped the two metal clasps that held it shut. Brad smelled the musty smell that he associated with every unpleasant lecture he had ever sat through and waited to see how the clarinet pertained this time.

  Over the years, Trey had used his childhood clarinet to illustrate a variety of life lessons. When Brad was a toddler, his father showed him the clarinet but did not let him touch it, because we respect other people’s possessions unless they give us permission to use them. At nine, bored and frustrated by soccer, Brad found out that his father had practiced the clarinet diligently, even though he disliked the daily hour’s drill, because you get out of life what you put into it, and nobody has anything coming to them without hard work. In middle school, the clarinet represented dedication—and if that lecture backfired when Brad started paying what Trey considered to be too much attention to woodworking, a reprise came in handy a few years later, when it was time to decide how many APs to take. For a time, Brad had lived in terror of the day when he would find out how the clarinet fit into his father’s lecture about responsible sex, but happily, Trey seemed perfectly willing to leave that conversation to his wife, who never broached the subject but told her husband that she had.

  Brad watched with a new horror as his father lifted the segments out of their worn velvet nest and started to fit them together. Until today, his father had settled for using the clarinet as a visual aid, but now it looked as though he might actually play it. Brad could not decide what would be worse, a show of surprising talent or a pathetic musical misfire. He felt a tiny thrum of panic. He would have preferred a know-it-all little sister to the damned clarinet.

  “Hey, the famous clarinet,” he said, with a weak smile.

  Trey held up the clarinet and peered down its shaft as though he were a marksman sighting his prey. He had no intention of playing a note, but he needed something to do with his hands.

  “My prep school orchestra needed a clarinet, so I began lessons in third grade. In high school I played with both the orchestra and the marching band. When it was time to apply to college I considered applying to Oberlin to major in music.”

  Brad squirmed and waited. The bit about Oberlin was new information, but he could tell that this was a pause for effect, not an invitation to respond. His father sat up a bit straighter and locked his gaze on his son.

  “And then my father asked me a ve
ry simple question: what would happen if I did?”

  “Were you good enough?”

  Trey waved away the question. “There are things we have to set aside as we grow up,” he said. “The question of whether I was any good is beside the point, and my father helped me to realize that. Imagine what our life would be like if I had pursued music. How would I support your mother and you? How would I provide not just financial support but the kind of emotional support, the constancy, the stability that a family needs?”

  “But Grandpa was rich. You could have done anything and we wouldn’t have been broke.” And you would have been a musician, Brad thought, so Roger might have hung around. With almost ten years and a wing of the house between them, Brad barely knew his departed older brother, so there was not much to miss. Still, he had to wonder how things might have turned out if Trey had done what he wanted to do.

  “And my father’s wealth buys me what? What kind of a son would I be if I exploited his wealth so that I could sit around and play the clarinet? A parasite. An opportunist.”

  Trey left the clarinet on his desk and walked back over to his golf bag, where he began to polish his three wood for the second time. “Children always think that they’re the first generation to want to do something interesting,” he said, glancing up as the silent Cal quarterback got knocked to the ground by a silent Stanford linebacker. “They think their parents were born this boring. This limited. That’s how they see adult responsibility. My father thought it about my grandfather, I thought it about my father, and now you think it about me. But here is the truth: Every dull parent was once an interesting person with ideas his parents did not want to hear. No, not every dull parent. Some of them were dull from the moment they were born. But not your father or your grandfather or your great-grandfather. We were adolescents”—and here his pacing slowed, as though each word were a complete thought—“and then we came to understand the obligations and challenges of adulthood. You have that same great opportunity. To continue a tradition of excellence and accomplishment. That is not dull.”