Admission (2 page)

Rand was, in fact, one of those boulders around which the waters of Ivy League admissions had parted, leaving him in a wake
of soaring academic standards and dizzying diversity. He had bristled through every clank of progress, every painful adjustment
in policy that aimed to transform the university from its dunderheaded Jazz Age uniformity to its rightful place as the best
of all possible universities for the best of all possible students. The new Princeton, so wondrous and varied, so… multicolored,
was not his Princeton, and his suffering was evident. He was an angry man, a furious man, beneath his veneer of irreproachable
manners.

He had been waiting himself, Portia supposed, for the retirement of Martin Quilty, his chief antagonist in the struggle of
tradition versus merit and the dean who had brought coeducation and surging minority enrollment, so that he could begin the
slow but necessary work of turning back the clock; but when that blessed event finally arrived, Rand had found himself passed
over in the most offensive way possible. He soldiered on for a year or two, making his opinion on just about everything known
to the new dean whenever possible, and then, quite suddenly, the previous May, he had left—completing the circle of his unadventurous
journey by taking the post of college counselor at his very own prep school.

And there, Portia knew, he was destined to prove as irritating a voice in her ear as when he’d occupied the office just down
the hall from her.

But it was worth it to have New England. She had wanted New England for years, coveting the post as she’d watched Rand Cumming
glad-hand his cronies at Groton and Concord and Taft. She had considered asking for it whenever there was a district reshuffle
(Rand had seemed oddly immune to these.) And she had made sure she was the first one in Clarence Porter’s office to ask for
it—Clarence being the new dean in question—when the opportunity finally arose. Not
only
(she explained) because she herself was a product of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont—in roughly that order—and
not
only
because her mother, now a Vermonter, was getting on in years (hint, hint) and she would be personally grateful for the opportunity
to drop in on her more often, but also because the New England district featured the kind of boarding school interaction she
hadn’t much experienced in the California-Oregon-Hawaii-Washington-Alaska applicant pool. That in particular was a deficit
in her experience, a deficit unbecoming an admissions officer, and that embarrassed her. Serving Princeton to her utmost ability
called for fluency with its traditional feeder schools: the Grotons and Choates and Andovers, whose top students the university
had been cherry-picking for centuries. She had reminded Clarence of the miles she had logged for Princeton, not only along
the coasts and valleys of California, but, before that, along the empty highways of the Midwest, plucking genius 4-H’ers and
ambitious dreamers from the Great Plains. She had personally recruited the Inuit girl from Sitka, Alaska, who’d won Princeton’s
sole Rhodes scholarship last year. She had found Brian Jack, homeschooled (self-schooled) in some barely existent Oregon town,
and made sure he chose them over Yale. (His senior thesis, a novel, had just been published by Knopf, showering Princeton
with the fairy dust of reflected literary glory.) She’d been about to start in on the fact that her West Coast region had
boasted the highest percentage of female engineer admits for all five years she’d had it when he stopped her and offered her
the job. And a good thing, too. She couldn’t have supported any claim of credit for those last admits, not really. There were
simply more female engineers in the heavily immigrant population she’d overseen.

“I was going to give it to you anyway,” Clarence had said, barely looking up from the call log on his desk. “I thought you
needed a little shaking up.”

A little shaking up.
She hadn’t quite engaged with that at the time—it had seemed more advisable not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
A hearty thank-you, a formally written letter of delighted acceptance later that day, and some unsolicited advice with regard
to her replacement—she had done what was expected without ever returning to this nagging, vaguely shameful moment. The exchange
had not been very satisfying, in any case. There was a kind of detachment to it, given that Clarence’s mind had been more
consumed by the call sheet on his desktop than by the very sincere and well-phrased request of his very present employee.
His very competent employee, who had never asked for anything before or indicated in any way that she was in need of anything,
required any concession or support, and was generally not in the habit of calling attention to herself. Portia had never,
not ever, thought of herself as someone who needed shaking up, and it appalled her to realize that he, apparently, had.

Clarence had come from the Yale Admissions Office, a fact more than a few Princeton alumni were still—rather comically—grumbling
about. Before he had been an admissions officer he had been a professor of African-American history at Yale, in fact the head
of that fractious department, where he had taught the music, culture, literature, and lore of the Delta, an immaculate gentleman
in full Savile Row regalia holding forth on Howlin’ Wolf, Leadbelly, and Blind Willie McTell. He had an ever present silken
handkerchief in the breast pocket of his beautifully cut jackets and a silken voice that rumbled an accent north of the islands
and west of the United Kingdom. Before an audience he was magic, his beautiful voice equally calming to the jittery freshmen
at orientation and the alternately fawning and preemptively furious parent groups he addressed. He could, better than any
admissions officer Portia had ever worked with, soothe an irate alumni parent whose child Princeton had turned down, and unlike
every other admissions officer Portia had ever known, he was never seen hauling around great sacks of folders but seemed to
be able to retrieve an astounding range of data from memory. His office, too, was always serenely uncluttered, with a perennial
vase of calla lilies on the corner of his desk and a rather nice Asher Durand on loan from the Princeton University Art Museum
on the wall behind him. It was a far cry from the mixed-up-files cacophony the room had been when it belonged to Martin Quilty.
(Back then, only Martin’s assistant could guess in which pile or holding bin something might be stashed.) Portia, who was
nothing if not supremely well organized herself, could only aspire to the minimalist mastery of her new boss. Theirs was not
a warm relationship, obviously. But she did appreciate the calm. And she did appreciate that Asher Durand.

After they landed, Portia made her way into the terminal, pulling her small suitcase behind her. There was a real chill in
the building, and she held the lapels of her tweed coat together at the throat. She wore one of the outfits she now rotated
for these visits: a synchronicity of tweed and cashmere and brown leather boots, überschoolgirl, Sylvia Plath minus the pearls
and plus the sunglasses, but comfortably of the world she was about to enter. The previous May, on her first visits to New
England prep schools, she’d learned that they had rituals of their own, with more graces and ceremony than she’d been used
to in, for example, a Bay Area public school. Typically, some sort of tea-and-cookies affair followed her presentation, which
took place in a slightly shabby, generations-old salon, under the watchful portraits of (white, male) alumni. The first time
she’d been ushered into one of these receptions—at Andover, as it happened—she’d experienced a discomforting moment, a kind
of self-detected fraudulence—clad as she was in her basic black jeans and careless sweater. No one had ever discussed wardrobe
with her or suggested she might be letting down the institution with her evident sartorial imperviousness, but the plain surprise
in the eyes of the college adviser, the teachers, and even a couple of the students had sent the message home effectively
enough. Later that day she’d dropped nearly a thousand dollars at an Ann Taylor outlet on the way to Milton Academy.

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).