"Dad!" Nelson howled from the top of the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 Sat.u.r.day nights on Prospect. Certainly, all three of them have enormous affection for the inst.i.tution, 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 pa.s.sionate wish to follow my parents and grandfather.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

FAIR IS KIND OF AN IMPRECISE CONCEPT.

The 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 resume, and John's sister was already moving on to the unnaturally engorged resume of her daughter, Kelsey (field hockey captain, cla.s.s secretary, treasurer of the literary magazine), who sat on the other side of the living room, looking-to her credit-horribly embarra.s.sed.

"I've always had a soft spot for Princeton," Diana said, sipping a gla.s.s 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 n.o.body'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 const.i.tute 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 cla.s.s. 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 inst.i.tutions 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 inst.i.tution.

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 cla.s.s 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 undoc.u.mented 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."

"Oh, I'm sure your job is very hard." Diana shrugged, looking as if she were sure of no such thing. She was also looking peevishly at her daughter, as if the looming social diminishment she antic.i.p.ated were all the girl's fault. "But let me ask you something. Why do you even ask, on the applications, where the parents have gone to college? I mean, if you're just going to penalize the kids for having parents who read the newspaper and take them to Europe. Isn't it better not to ask at all? I mean," she said, utterly missing the point, "the less you know, the more level the playing field. That's what I think."

Portia looked sadly at the now empty winegla.s.s in her hand. She could not remember, really, drinking it, let alone how it had tasted, but she saw that it had been red, and she very much wanted more of it. "We ask," she said, "because it helps us create a more meaningful picture of where the kid is coming from. And because it matters to us if their parent went to Princeton. And because it matters to us if they're the first in their families to go to college. Everything matters," she finished lamely.

"Right," Diana said, looking truly indignant now. "So if my child isn't a legacy and isn't a minority either, the fat lady's basically already singing."

"No. No..." Portia looked desperately across the room, but John was now deep in conversation with his father. She was stranded on this fatal sh.o.r.e with no rescue in sight.

"Well, that's what I'm hearing. You're sitting pretty if your parents sneaked over the border, lack basic hygiene, pick crops for a living, are constantly threatened with eviction, and never read a newspaper. All you have to do is get the bright idea that you should go to college and the Ivy League sends you a first-cla.s.s ticket. But if you have parents who truly value education and work their b.u.t.ts off to pay for the best schools they can afford, you're a dime a dozen."

"Diana, that's not-"

"But you know," she rolled on, "I don't think you people have any idea about the impact this is having. All those loyal alumni whose children aren't getting in, if you think they're going to keep on blithely writing checks to their alma mater, you're going to be very surprised. That's going to cut down on the first-cla.s.s tickets, I would think."

The conversation, thought Portia, was now officially a lost cause. She looked sadly into her winegla.s.s.

Diversion would come only with the contretemps between Deborah and Simone, audible even from upstairs, where the two had withdrawn to quarrel at full volume. The sounds were nonspecific but clearly outraged, and only Nelson and Jeremiah, playing a game of chess on the window seat, seemed genuinely unruffled. Diana, in plain discomfort, announced that she could never have gotten away with screaming at her own mother, a comment that was unheard by Mrs. Halsey (now in the kitchen) and could thus not be contradicted. Kelsey, Portia noticed, received this statement with a roll of her eyes, which made Portia smile. John got up from the opposite couch, where he had been speaking with his father, and came to get her.

"Thank you," she said when he had led her out of the room, announcing that they had volunteered to set the table.

"I wouldn't have left you, but there wasn't room on the couch. And you know, my sister wasn't going to rest until she got you to talk. Can you blame her? In her world, information is power. You've got the information."

"Everyone's got the information," Portia said, annoyed. "Every person who's ever left a job in admissions has written a book about it. Every one of them has spilled the deep, dark secrets about how to get in or shoot yourself in the foot. Anyone with twenty bucks can buy the entire codebook on Amazon. I can't tell your sister a single thing at least a dozen other people haven't published in hardcover, paperback, and a.s.sorted digital formats. Come on!"

He shrugged. "I guess she thinks there's more. Maybe you all swear a blood oath never to reveal the one crucial thing. You know, anyone who hikes the Appalachian Trail on a pogo stick automatically gets admitted. n.o.body named Fred or Poindexter will ever get a place."

Despite herself, she laughed. "How did you find that out?" she said. "It had to be torture."

"Close," he said affably. "It was s.e.x."

Simone, red in the face, came tearing down the stairs and out the front door.

"Let her go," Deborah said, following wearily. "She needs to calm down."

Portia looked after her. In a gesture that even she recognized as typical, Simone had pointedly left the door ajar, and wet snow was floating onto the foyer floor. "It's kind of cold," she noted.

"She'll come back when she's ready," said Deborah, closing the door. "I'm a.s.suming I don't have to worry about her getting mugged in Wayne, Pennsylvania?"

This seemed not to require a response.

"What was it about?" said John.

"Oh..." Deborah shrugged. "Penn. College. Life. Me. The grand themes." She shoved her hands deep into her jeans pockets. "You know what's weird? When you're a single mom, and everybody talks about how hard it must be, what they mean is the little-kid stuff. Getting up in the middle of the night all the time because there's no one else to do it, or having to take on all the doctors' appointments and parent-teacher conferences yourself. But I'm telling you, that was nothing. This teenager stuff is hard. This is, like, crazy hard."

"It looks it," Portia said, and was quickly ashamed of having said it, as she sometimes was when called to comment on matters of parents or children. But n.o.body seemed to react.

John's mother called them to dinner, and the table was hurriedly set. They sat to rea.s.suringly myriad conversations, blessedly unconnected to anything of colleges, essays, standardized tests, or the wider implications of "the application process." Portia drank more wine and ate happily, reveling in the old-fashioned staunchness of the meal: roast, salad, potatoes. She was sitting, quite deliberately, beside John, whose thigh rested against her own in a rea.s.suring, not overtly s.e.xual gesture. His attention, though, was dominated by the far corner of the table, where his father sat beside Nelson.

Beside, thought Portia, following his gaze. But not, somehow, interacting. Mr. Halsey, still a man of physical presence and not a little innate beauty, looked almost pained as he sat, skewed in his chair, turned definitively away from his grandson. He spoke, instead, across the granddaughter to his right, who shared his coloring and chin, to his daughter, who gestured with the long fingers of her left hand as she cut, speared, and lifted cubes of roasted potatoes with her right. They were talking about redress, a contractor who had walked off the job, something related to marble, which had arrived too veined or not veined enough. Kelsey, the field hockey captain, sat stiffly, eating in silence, and Nelson, who seemed not to have noticed that he was being ignored, watched the exchange, frowning occasionally at the indecipherable parts.

"I'm telling you," said Diana, "it's a good thing I didn't listen to Kevin and give him the rest of the money up front. He wanted it, you know."

"I hope you know what you're doing," said Mrs. Halsey. "You put one gla.s.s or one plate down a tiny bit too hard and it smashes to little pieces. I think you're much better off with Corian. Ours looks exactly the way it looked when it went in."

Her husband nodded. "Can't destroy it."

"Mom," John said suddenly, "did I tell you that Nelson wrote an essay for a state compet.i.tion?"

"Black History Month," Nelson said affably.

"He's a finalist," John went on. "We're going to Manchester next week for a ceremony with the governor."

"Well," said his mother. "Nelson, congratulations."

"What's your essay about?" Portia asked.

"Buck Jordan," said Nelson. "And the Negro Leagues."

"Baseball," John said helpfully.

"Yes, of course," his father said. "Eve, is there any more of the wine?"

"I can open another bottle," she said, rising.

Portia felt an unmistakable chill settle over the table, or at least their end of it.

After a moment, John's father turned to Deborah. "Sure you shouldn't go after her?" he said.

"I'm thinking about it," she said uncomfortably. But even as she said it, they all heard the front door click heavily open. There was a conspiracy of silence as Simone stalked in, surveyed the table and its open setting, and sat down heavily. Without a word, Jeremiah pa.s.sed her the roasted potatoes. John's mother returned and handed the open bottle to her husband.

"Portia," she said with a deliberate brightness, "can I ask you, how did you get into admissions work? Is it something you go to school for?"

"Oh... no. Well, some people get degrees in education. I haven't done that. I just fell into it, actually."

Portia felt Diana's disapproval all the way across the table. "Fell into it," she repeated.

"I worked at the Admissions Office at Dartmouth when I was an undergraduate. I gave tours, and then I worked the desk in the office. They offered me a job just before graduation. I really had no idea what I was going to do after graduation. I wish I'd been like John," she said, happy to imply that she and John were in fact old friends, old comrades, that her being here was not the bizarrely sudden event that it actually was. "I'd say most of us had figured things out by senior year. But I wasn't one of them. I thought I'd stay on and work for the college, and maybe lightning would strike. So I said yes."

"Well, that was good luck," Diana observed.

"Yes," said Portia, willfully ignoring the implications.

"And lightning never struck?"

"It turned out I liked the work," she said evenly. "I had an apt.i.tude for it. I liked the mix of solid guidelines and creativity. And I loved the kids."

"That's funny," said Simone, the first time she had spoken since her return. "I mean, you don't have any kids of your own, right?"

Deborah looked at her daughter in horror. Then, to Portia's great dismay, she apologized on her behalf.

"What?" said Simone, all innocence. "She doesn't, right?"

"That's right," Portia said, sounding unnaturally bright. "Maybe that's the reason I can enjoy keeping company with thousands of teenagers a year. Because none of them are mine."