"Fine," he said, clearly looking as if it weren't.

"You getting slammed?"

"No. Not yet. I was traveling last week. You have a moment?"

She put her lap desk on the floor. He took the swivel chair and swiveled in her direction.

Dylan was a slight man with a hairline already under a.s.sault, sweet and extremely kind. He had come to Princeton from a Houston prep school and had never been north before his college tour, but he had fallen so in love with seasons that Portia doubted he could go home now. Close enough in age to the applicants that he seemed still to bear the marks of his own admissions pa.s.sage, he was full of empathy with them. That would change, Portia suspected, over time. In a few years, he would grow less patient with them, less able to dismiss self-indulgences and cultural myopia. But not yet. For now, he was their advocate and apologist, a famously soft touch in the department. He had just been a.s.signed to the Southwest.

"Where were you?" Portia asked him.

"New Mexico. And Arizona. I went to the Native American boarding school near Taos."

"Oh. Good," she said, wondering where this was going.

"It's a very inspiring place." She nodded, waiting. "I've been meaning to ask you, you were at Dartmouth, right?"

Portia frowned. "As a student? Or an admissions officer? Well, yes to both."

"Right. I thought so. I just wanted to ask what your experience was there, with recruiting Native American students."

"Well, we had a designated admissions officer for Native American students. It wasn't my area. If you have a specific question, I mean, I did observe while I was there, obviously. But you know, Dartmouth has a historical relationship to Native Americans."

Dylan frowned, demonstrating a forehead creased beyond its years.

"The college was founded to educate them. Well, the point was to convert Indians in New England, and then ordain them so they could go out and convert more Indians. Vox clamantis in deserto is the college motto. You know, 'voice crying out in the wilderness'? But they were matriculated students at the beginning, alongside the others. All training to be clergy. Like here," she said, alluding to Princeton's own Presbyterian roots. "But then they disappeared from the student demographic for a hundred and fifty years, give or take. We had to get a liberal president in before we got them back on our radar. He came from Princeton, actually."

"I didn't know that," said Dylan.

"Yes. Anyway, in his inaugural speech he rededicated the college to its original purpose, and that meant getting out to the reservations and the Native American schools, and recruiting. So I guess we had a little head start on the other Ivies. Or else we were really late fulfilling our own obligations."

"But," said Dylan, "how did they know which kids were going to make it through?"

"They didn't. And a lot didn't. Of course, there were kids with Native American heritage coming through the general pool, and they did fine. You know, a parent or grandparent had a tribal affiliation, but they were mainstream. The ones we had to go out to find, it was rough for them. On the other hand, the college is very proud of how well some of them have done. And they're committed to continuing. Was there someone in particular you wanted to discuss?"

He nodded, his eyes downcast. The light caught his scalp, already visible. She tried to age progress him a couple of years and found, to her regret, that he would not be an attractive man.

"I met this great kid in New Mexico. At the boarding school. He's a Chippewa from Minnesota. He did horrendously in public school, and they took a big chance on him and let him transfer in last year."

Portia nodded and waited.

"He wants to be a doctor, but if he came here, he wouldn't be as prepared as a typical freshman pre-med. Actually, he's behind across the board: English, languages. He'd need a lot of support with writing...." Dylan trailed off.

"There's a 'but' here," she said helpfully.

"Yeah. But. He's this amazing kid. He's so alive. He's eating everything up there. It's like he's been waiting for some growth hormone, and they've got him on IV. He asked me all these questions about Princeton, and the culture here, and whether they'd let him catch up and keep going. He has a pretty clear grasp of what he needs to do. It's just that I have this awful sense of him getting here and being overwhelmed by the workload, and just falling apart. I don't know if we can support him enough, you know? And I wonder if it's doing him a disservice, in the long run. Maybe if he went somewhere less challenging, he'd be successful, and he'd get there sooner. If he comes here, he might not get there at all."

Portia considered. This was a discussion she had had many times, with many colleagues, and it was an even more frequent internal preoccupation. It wasn't a question of who deserved. They all deserved. But the very delicate balance between ambition and accomplishment, daring and security, made more volatile still by the essential adolescence of the average college applicant, made these decisions of ma.s.sive-but unknowable-personal impact. When her geographic area included (and was dominated by) California, she'd been able to enjoy a considerable buffer for her anxieties, because the excellent students she rejected for Princeton had an enormous safety net in the form of Berkeley, the jewel in the crown of California's public university system and the likely destination for any high-achieving students who fell short of the Ivy League. The chess master valedictorian from Los Angeles, the brilliant mathematician from San Diego, the meticulous girl from Santa Cruz who had worked so hard, only to be the tenth or fifty-eighth or ninety-first hardworking girl from Santa Cruz to come before the Princeton committee: All of them would be offered admission to Berkeley, and once there, a superb faculty could get them where they needed to go. Now, with Portia's focus on the other end of the country, she felt the lack of such a secure fallback. Not that there weren't state universities for these accomplished applicants, but the University of Maine wasn't Berkeley. Applicants from New England had more to lose, and she-as a result-had even more sleep to lose over them.

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 cla.s.s 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 ma.s.sive 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. Soph.o.m.ore 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 apt.i.tude?"

"Unreflected in the transcript, but I do think so, yes."

"Can he write?"

"Pa.s.sionately. But not very well."

Pa.s.sion, Portia thought. It was what they were all about. But pa.s.sion 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 ma.s.sive 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 cla.s.s's Latin orator at commencement. Thoughtfully, he had provided his cla.s.smates 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, Ma.s.s. Dad an attorney, went to Cornell. Mom a homemaker. Princeton alum, cla.s.s of 1991. Portia frowned. Nineteen ninety-one happened to be her own cla.s.s 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, nee 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 pa.s.sing 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 restaurant, 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 grat.i.tude, 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 G.o.d, 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.

"Poppyc.o.c.k," 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 b.i.t.c.h."

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 back.

"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."