Admission (49 page)

“Well…” She sighed. “You sort of have to be.”

He smiled. “In the trade.”

“In the trade.”

“So, you’ll sleep over?”

“I really should call my office,” said Portia. “While we’ve been amusing ourselves, there’s a stack of files with my name
on it, getting taller and taller.”

“Portia,” he reminded her, “it’s Saturday night. You’re expected to work Saturday night?”

“In February? Saturday night. Friday night. All day Sunday. We get to hibernate in the summertime.”

“Dad!” Nelson howled from the top of the basement stairs.

“Yes?”

“Everyone’s reading, and Grandma took her laptop back. I’m bored.”

“Oh no!” said John, grinning. “He’s bored. Let’s call the National Guard.”

“Dad!” Nelson called. “Did you hear me?”

“The whole neighborhood heard you, Nel.” His father laughed. “Hang on.” He squeezed Portia’s wrist. “If you have to leave,
I do understand. But stay if you can. I’ll never let my sister get you alone. I won’t let any of them get you alone,” he told
her. “Except for me.”

Princeton has been a part of my family since I can remember. I grew up hearing my grandfather’s stories about rowing on Lake
Carnegie, and my parents’ (much less dignified!) accounts of Saturday nights on Prospect. Certainly, all three of them have
enormous affection for the institution, but they have not spared me the difficulties of being African-American at a place
like Princeton in the 1950s, and even, for my parents, in the 1980s. In spite of this, I grew up understanding that Princeton
was a place where amazing things could be experienced, and it has always been my passionate wish to follow my parents and
grandfather.

T
he family chin that John had once briefly mentioned, months earlier in a dark hotel room in New Hampshire, materialized that
evening on the various faces of his father, sister, and niece. It was a broad chin and quite masculine, which was somewhat
less successful on the women, but it lent John’s sister, Diana, in particular, an air of command. This was matched by a personality
at once insistent and impatient, though just on the near side of rude. Obviously tipped off, she made for Portia immediately,
taking the other half of a too small sofa in the living room and leaning right in. Within moments, Portia was the possessor
of Diana Halsey Bennet’s entire résumé, and John’s sister was already moving on to the unnaturally engorged résumé of her
daughter, Kelsey (field hockey captain, class secretary, treasurer of the literary magazine), who sat on the other side of
the living room, looking—to her credit—horribly embarrassed.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for Princeton,” Diana said, sipping a glass of white wine. “My husband went to Cornell.”

Portia thought she’d better not comment on this apparent non sequitur. “Cornell’s a fantastic school,” she said. “I think
it’s the best place in the country for some things.”

“It was his safety,” Diana said shortly. “He was supposed to go to Yale.”

Portia wondered bleakly what “supposed to” was supposed to mean in this context. She certainly wasn’t going to ask.

“Well, it’s nobody’s safety anymore,” she responded. “Your mother is so great. I can’t get over how she just handles all these
people for dinner, including an unexpected guest.” She hoped, perhaps not very realistically, that this would lead them to
another topic or at least constitute an unignorable hint.

But Diana did not disappoint her. “That’s the truth,” she said with palpable distaste. “My friend Margery’s daughter, Whitney,
graduated last year from Baldwin. I couldn’t believe it. This girl had 750s on her SATs and was in the top ten percent of
her class. At Baldwin! I mean, it’s not like the top ten percent at Baldwin is like the top ten percent at a public school.
And Cornell turned her down. Even Tufts and Wesleyan turned her down.”

“Tufts and Wesleyan are highly selective. They always have been, but now, statistically, they’re as selective as the Ivies
were when you and I applied to college.”

Deflecting the appeal to camaraderie, Diana set her formidable jaw. For her, as for so many members of their generation, time
had stood still. Obviously, the Ivies were tough, at least some of them. But other New England private colleges were supposed
to catch the overflow. Wasn’t that their job?

“You know,” Portia said wearily, “it’s just brutal for these kids. Every day I feel lucky that I’m not applying to colleges
now. The field is so much bigger and so much better prepared. Which is a wonderful thing, of course. But for the kids, especially
if they’ve gotten the idea that there are only a few places they can go and feel good about themselves, it’s very difficult.”

“Sure,” Diana said dismissively, “but how are they supposed to feel if they can’t get into their parents’ colleges? I mean,
what kind of message does that send, when they work hard and are so accomplished? And I can tell you, in a lot of cases I
know, the kid’s a much better student than the dad ever was. Some of Kevin’s friends—Kevin is my husband—you know, they just
trotted off to Yale and Dartmouth, and they weren’t exactly intellectuals. Then along come their kids, thirty years later.
And they’ve got straight A’s, and they’ve dug, I don’t know, sewage pits in Ecuador, and their teachers are raving about them,
and they all have toll-free scores.”

She stopped. She eyed Portia. “You know that expression?”

Grimly, Portia nodded. It was the highly tacky code for straight 800s.

“Right. And these kids not only are not getting into Dad’s alma mater. They’re not getting into Dad’s safety school. They’re
not getting into some school Dad’s never even heard of, that the guidance counselor swears is the so-called new Ivy or the
Harvard of the upper plains. I think it’s just a catastrophe.”

Portia, by this time, was actually appalled, but she had not
quite
given up hope. “I’m sorry, I don’t see that,” she said carefully, “I mean, catastrophe? Maybe if the few schools you’re talking
about were the only places to get an education in this country. They’re not. I think the landscape of higher education is
pretty fantastic right now. All kinds of places are attracting great faculty and developing infrastructure. And the students
are of such a high caliber that they’re challenging the institutions to meet their needs. It’s a great time to go to college,
even at the state schools and those Harvards of the upper plains, and the little colleges that we never used to hear much
about. We’ve got a real ‘lift all boats’ situation,” she finished heartily. “I think, anyway.”

There was more, of course. With the right audience, she would have lobbed in the old chestnut about Bill Gates dropping out
of Harvard, or the recent statistic about how more CEOs had attended state universities than Ivy League schools, or even that
some of the most impressive entrepreneurs these days seemed to be marching out the gates of quirky Hampshire, where the students
a generation ago had been best known for on-campus farming and pharmaceuticals. But this was not the right audience, and it
was frankly getting harder and harder for Portia to suppress her irritation. She shifted on the couch, letting John, seated
across the room between Nelson and his niece, Kelsey, catch her eye long enough to convey his apologies. She was exhausted:
the night, the drive, the bombardment of faces and surprising emotions, not to mention random desire, so inappropriate in
the immediate circumstances. On another occasion, she would have been more than content to lay it all out for John’s sister,
and (in absentia) her bewildered friend Margery, and all the other aghast moms at the Baldwin School and every school of its
ilk from wealthy suburb to wealthy suburb, from here to far Tortuga. She would have smugly, sharply, explained to Diana that
the system—the much maligned system that so perplexed and offended the woman beside her—did not exist to validate her child’s
life, let alone her child’s parents’ lives. It did not exist to crown the best and the brightest, reward the hardest workers,
or cast judgment on those who had not fulfilled their potential by the ripe age of eighteen. It certainly did not exist to
congratulate those parents who had done the best parenting, pureed the most organic baby foods, wielded the most flash cards,
hired the most tutors, or driven the greatest distances to the greatest number of field hockey games.

The system, as far as she was concerned, was not about the applicant at all. It was about the institution.

It was about delivering to the trustees, and to a lesser extent the faculty, a United Nations of scholars, an Olympiad of
athletes, a conservatory of artists and musicians, a Great Society of strivers, and a treasury of riches so idiosyncratic
and ill defined that the Office of Admission would not know how to go about looking for them and could not hope to find them
if they suddenly stopped turning up of their own accord. So get over yourself, Portia thought through her tight, achingly
tight, smile, because Diana had now moved on to last year’s scholarship girl, the daughter of the school janitor, who had
gone off to Harvard and was a lovely,
lovely
girl, of course, and certainly a wonderful little flute player, but had scored over one hundred points lower on the math
SAT than the class salutatorian, who had been rejected not only by Harvard, but by Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Williams,
Amherst, and—
can you believe this?
—NYU. And come on, everyone knew what that meant. And how—
how?
—could it be fair?

“Well… fair… ,” Portia said weakly. “Fair is kind of an imprecise concept.”

“I don’t think so,” said Diana.

She appeared shocked. With a sinking heart, Portia could just imagine how this was going to play at Monday-morning drop-off.

“How,” said Diana with great precision, “can you participate in a system you know to be unfair?”

Somewhere in the vicinity of her right ocular orbit, a whisper of pain flickered to life and persisted. How can I buy a cheap
shirt at Wal-Mart knowing it’s made by an illiterate ten-year-old? she wondered crossly. How can I employ an undocumented
worker to mow my lawn and pretend he doesn’t exist the rest of the time? What kind of life did this woman think she was living?

“Oh no,” she said, in order to keep from saying any of these things. “What we do, it’s very complex, but scrupulously fair.
I didn’t mean that. I meant… I suppose it’s like building a better fruit basket.” There was, she noted, a slightly absurd brightness
in her voice. “You know, the apples might outshine everything else, but if you wanted a basket of apples, you’d only be considering
the apples. You know?”

John’s sister was looking at her intently. She wasn’t giving an inch.

“You want everything in there. You want bananas and oranges and… I don’t know, kiwis and mangoes. You want some exotic stuff
that you’ve never even heard of. All kinds of fruit,” she finished idiotically, “make a fruit basket.”

Diana observed her coolly.

Her mother came by with a plate of Brie and crackers. “What are you two talking about?” she said, looking confident of the
response.

“Fruit,” Diana said dryly.

Mrs. Halsey frowned and moved on.

“Everything is read so, so carefully,” Portia said, her voice low, as if this were secret, privileged information. “You can’t
imagine how much thought goes into these decisions. We know they’re important. We know these are teenagers who’ve worked incredibly
hard. We know that behind every one of those kids is a family and teachers and guidance counselors. We get that, don’t worry.”

“But I just don’t see,” said Diana, right back to where she had apparently departed the conversation, “how it’s fair to ask
kids to do great in school and score well on all these tests and then just ignore all that because they’re up against…” She
considered. “A more exotic fruit.”

“The tests…” Portia shrugged. “You know, they’re not a really good predictor of success at the college level. Only success—gradewise—for
the first year of college. After that it seems to even out. And they’re certainly no predictor of other things we value, like
creativity and perseverance. And the grades, of course it’s true that it’s harder to get an A at Baldwin than in some other
schools. But our mantra, really, is success within the applicant’s setting. Wherever they’ve grown up, however they’ve grown
up, we want them to have done everything they could with what they’ve had. So okay, maybe that Baldwin student had to be very
bright and work very hard to do as well as she’s done, but maybe she’s also grown up in a household where people read books,
or even just the newspaper. Lots of them don’t have that, you know. How can you truly compare a kid who’s been taken to the
theater and art museums, or out of the country, to someone whose family couldn’t afford basic nutrition and medical care,
or who had to waste half his energy worrying about getting evicted? Or even just a kid who had to come up with the idea of
going to college on his own, because that’s far from a foregone conclusion where he comes from? We see all kinds of unfair.
Morally,” she concluded, but without much hope of the outcome, “the whole thing’s an obstacle course.”