A moment later she appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, anger rapidly replacing relief. "I've been calling for days," said Rachel. "Portia, do you have any idea how worried I was?"

Obviously no, thought Portia, but it seemed rude to say this.

"We're starting committee," she said, suddenly realizing that this was, in fact, the case. But when? Tomorrow? Today? Had she already missed a meeting?

"Oh, bulls.h.i.t. Look at yourself. You look like f.u.c.king Howard Hughes."

Despite herself, Portia laughed. "Thanks."

"And this house."

"I've gotten a little behind in my cleaning routine."

Rachel glared at her.

"You have a key to my house," Portia observed.

"No. But I know where you hide your spare. And I was worried enough to use it. Clarence Porter called me this morning."

She was suddenly very, very alert. "Oh?"

"He wanted to know if I'd heard from you. He said you weren't responding to e-mails and calls. Are you trying to get fired?"

Was she? Portia thought. And the answer surprised her: Not yet.

"No, I just... I've been down with the flu. As you see," she said, sounding slightly accusatory. "And I went to Pennsylvania."

Rachel stared at her. She was well dressed for a rescue mission: neat black pantsuit, leather boots with a modest heel. She looked as if she were going to an office or coming from an office, if it was that day of the week and that time of the day. What time was it? What day was it?

She was about to ask what day it was when it came to her that she really could not do that and maintain the illusion of well-being.

"I've been sleeping," she said instead.

"Portia, I don't know how much of this you've heard. I know you're upset. You don't have to do this alone, you know. You have friends."

What? She frowned. There was a "this"? "I'm not sure," she said carefully.

"Of course you do. My relationship with Mark will never be the same, but I do have to deal with him. And I have to deal with Helen, which kills me, because she's a royal b.i.t.c.h. And I think they've both behaved terribly, but you know? It's done. And you couldn't possibly want him back."

"Back?" Portia stared at her. "I don't want him back."

Rachel sat on the edge of the bed. "Good. I know I'm not supposed to be glad about the wedding, but I am. I was dreading it."

This statement was so baffling that Portia found she had to replay it in her brain before responding, but to no avail.

"I thought you didn't like them," she told Rachel. "Why are you glad about the wedding?"

"Canceling the wedding," said Rachel, twisting a long lock of curling brown hair around her finger. "I thought I was going to have to put Sea-Bands on my wrists, like when I was pregnant, to keep from getting nauseous in the church."

"Rachel," said Portia, almost unkindly, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Rachel eyed her. "No?"

"No."

"Which part?" she asked.

"Which part?" said Portia, completely lost.

"You knew they were getting married, right?"

Did she? Portia thought distractedly. She supposed she did. Though she hadn't known about an actual wedding. Who would tell her?

"I guess."

"It was supposed to be last weekend. Sat.u.r.day morning," said Rachel. "In the chapel, reception at Prospect. But Gordon Sternberg died."

"He did?" said Portia.

"I guess you missed that, too. They found him on the street in Philadelphia. One of the great scholars of his generation. Author of fourteen major works of criticism on English literature. In a doorway in Kensington, holding a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey. It's incredible. I mean, how did it happen? He supervised my dissertation, you know."

"Yes, of course," said Portia. "I'm very sorry."

She waved her thin hand vaguely in the air. "No. I don't deserve condolences. None of us do. Gordon went down in flames, and we couldn't help him, but we should all have kept trying. And Mark-you know, they called him Thursday night to come down and identify the body. I guess he just felt it wasn't right to go ahead with a wedding. Gordon actually had his funeral there, when the wedding was supposed to take place. At the chapel."

Portia nodded. On Sat.u.r.day morning, when Mark, unbeknownst to her, was to have been married, and Gordon Sternberg, unbeknownst to her, had instead been eulogized, she had been driving south with her lover and her son. Isn't it crazy? she thought. That I have a lover? That I have a son? She almost asked this out loud.

"That was good of Mark," she said instead. "To cancel. It was the right thing to do."

"I know," Rachel said gruffly. "Though I'm still too angry at him to want to think well of him."

"Don't be angry," Portia heard herself say. "I don't think things were really right between us. I kept things from him. I shouldn't have. I'm responsible, too."

Rachel said nothing, and Portia was forced to look up at her. She rested on her hip, braced by one hand on the mattress. She was waiting for Portia to say more. What things had she kept from him? for example. What things weren't right? But Portia, having given so much away, felt suddenly very, very exhausted.

"They're still getting married, though," she observed. "I a.s.sume?"

"Yes. Sure. They went down to Trenton yesterday morning and did it there. Thank goodness I wasn't invited to that. n.o.body was, I think. Just as well. I get that they need to do it. Legally, for immigration and the baby. But if it's any comfort to you, I don't think he's particularly happy."

"That's not a comfort," said Portia, laughing awkwardly. She was trying to absorb the fact that Mark was married. Finally married. He had not married Marcie, the mother of Cressida, the woman who had spent the past sixteen years punishing him-perhaps for that very thing. He had not married Portia. He had married Helen.

But the clerk's office in Trenton would not have been open on a Sunday, which meant that yesterday must have been a Monday. Which meant that she had been here, in this bed, for nearly three days. No wonder the office was coming for her.

"What did Clarence say?" she asked Rachel.

"Only had I been in touch with you, because you hadn't come into the office and you weren't answering the home phone. So then I got scared because you weren't answering my calls, either. I thought maybe you were really down about the wedding. So I came rushing over here as soon as my cla.s.s was over."

Cla.s.s, thought Portia. The mystery of her friend's professional attire was laid to rest. It meant that while she had lain here, life had continued, work had continued, weddings and funerals had taken place. Only she had stood still.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed. "I have to go in to work," she said sharply.

"But you're sick," said Rachel, reaching for her shoulder.

"But I'm going to be fine," said Portia, because she was.

My biggest inspiration is my little cousin Sandra, who is afflicted with Down Syndrome. Sandra has a sunny disposition and loves to be silly. When I babysit for her, we can spend hours making cookies or playing Old Maid, and she is wonderful company. But sometimes I look at her not as a loving cousin but as a future biology major and physician. In my life as a doctor, I will work to find a cure for Down Syndrome, so that other children will not be held back the way she has been. If I can't find a way to use my talents to give back to my community, then I will feel that I have failed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

SHORT STORIES.

At some point, while she'd been away, the administrative a.s.sistants had performed their annual veiling of the downstairs conference room, a ritual that oddly involved not a curtain to cover the gla.s.s separating the room from the corridor, but a mosaic of white copy paper, each individual page affixed with a piece of tape. This act, which signaled the onset of committee meetings and the ma.s.sing wave of decisions to come, had long mystified Portia, who wondered why, if privacy was so important-and of course it was-the office had not seen fit to build an actual wall, or at least to invest in some sort of fabric sheeting that could be drawn whenever the committee got down to work. That would have to be a bit more soothing to any anxious parents, stopping in to hand-deliver a last minute CD of their child performing Bach on the cello or a testimonial from the coach. Not that anything could really buffer the stress on either side of the gla.s.s.

Statistically, she was ready for committee. She had already read more applications this year than last and had finished her entire district except for the fifty or so still missing pieces. (Though applications, from first arrivals to in-under-the-wires, were given equal weight, there was a certain undeniable quality of diminishment in the folders as they reached the far end of the punctuality bell curve. The early filers were organized, type A, staggeringly accomplished; the latecomers were a bit more relaxed, a bit less coiled to chase down their guidance counselors and teachers and make sure they'd sent in their forms, perhaps even a bit more inclined to just throw a Princeton application at the wall and see if, by some quirk of fortune, it stuck.) Portia, in spite of everything that reading season had wrought in her life, had nonetheless made her way, folder by folder, through every corner of her region, completing a symbolic pilgrimage from school to school. The backward view from West College included miles of coastline and chains of mountain ranges-Greens, Whites, Presidentials-from Vermont to Maine. She could see old towns and towns so new that the gates of their gated communities had barely been hung, the great boarding prep schools, creaking in amber tradition, and the suburban public schools around Boston (which seemed no less infused with compet.i.tive mania than the Grotons and Choates), and the great academies of Boston itself, from which Brahmin sons, born into the expectation of Harvard (and all it then represented), had once crossed the river to Cambridge en ma.s.se, and now the children of immigrants, drawn to this country by a vision of Harvard (and all it now represented), still crossed the river to Cambridge en ma.s.se.

Then, too, Portia had served as second reader to Corinne's files, revisiting the schools, teachers, and even a few families she had dwelt among for the past five years and finding again the intense, driven musicians and biologists, the offspring of new (and vast) Silicon wealth, the striving children of parents who worked in fields, construction, and even sweatshops, who were sometimes the only English speakers in their families and who wrote of mothers and fathers so dependent on them that Portia wondered how they would cope when these burdened sons and daughters flew away to meet their dizzying futures.

Over and over and over, even as she read these still forming lives as distinct, individual things, they braided themselves together into the same American story: My family came after the famine, after the Armenian Genocide, after the Shoah, after the Cambodian refugee camp. My family came last year, with nothing, and we still have nothing except for my 4.6 GPA and my National Merit semifinalist citation and my reference from the Chief of Oncology, who calls my work on cancerous skin cells "uniquely promising," and my chance to attend Princeton. We came here so my parents could take the invisible, uniformed, dangerous jobs, so the next generation could be doctors and engineers, so the generation after that could be environmentalists, poets, directors of nonprofit organizations. Almost every applicant seemed at home in this most American of equations, Portia thought. Their voices strained to merge, and she had to hold them back, pick them laboriously apart until they resumed their separate selves, some of whom would be admitted, most of whom would not. It felt wrong, given the chorus they so effortlessly made. Why should one American dream be more valid than another? Why should one family saga weigh more than the next?

Corinne's appraisals, Portia admitted grudgingly, were largely on target. She had a scrupulous fairness, a rigid bar that refused to patronize-which was a good thing, Portia instructed herself. She had, also, a discernible fondness for cla.s.sicists and a just detectable distaste for athletes who insisted the joy of competing was enough, who bravely declared that they were as proud of their hard-won last-place finish as they would have been of a victory. She could not resist noting grammatical errors ("Grm Ers") and flaws in spelling ("Spl Ers") and had, in her reader's card summaries, a penchant for the words lukewarm ("LW") and boilerplate ("BP"); but on the whole, Portia found that she rarely disagreed with her colleague.

Except, of course, about Jeremiah.

Corinne had, as promised, been fast, and his application was waiting for her on her return, shuffled in among its seventy-four fellow travelers. Each of these now bore her trademark brown felt-tip script on the flip side of the reader's card, a s.p.a.ce about half as large as that a.s.signed to the first reader-in this case, Portia-enough to agree or disagree and say why. As in: "Agree w/PN, Joseph has been a credit to his school, gifted linguist and debater, but middling writer and LW recs. Not seeing strong intellectual curiosity here, plus notably weak senior yr." Or: "Second PN's opinion of Jenny, fantastic student, v strong writer/mathematician, CW program says one of strongest fiction samples they've seen this year. Would love to see her @ PU."

Portia moved quickly through the pile, affirming and affirming. It wasn't unheard of to have disagreement, but it wasn't the norm. They were all, after all, looking for the same things, or at least the same array of different things, and while the sheer weight of the numbers meant that many of the students they loved could not be offered admission, it wouldn't be for lack of approbation. This would not be the situation with Jeremiah. And while disagreement between first and second readers made for lively discussion in committee-which was not a bad thing-the curt a.s.sessment Portia read and reread on Jeremiah's reader's card meant rough seas ahead.

"Afraid I must disagree w/PN," Corinne had written. "Clearly, Jeremiah was not well served by his public school, and his later success at the new school implies that he might have done better with good guidance. However, I don't see that we can ignore the appalling grades he seems to have been contented with grades 911, or his own lack of initiative in finding a solution for himself. This student may not be disciplined enough to thrive @ PU academically, and I see no signif non-acs to mitigate. Sorry not to be able to support this AP."

Portia returned the card to its folder and tried to calm herself. Calm was desirable. She knew what she had to do, and it wouldn't be furthered by losing control. She had made up her mind about this sometime in the lost few days she'd spent away from the office, at the end of some cul-de-sac of twisted meditation and justification and regret, and it had (somewhat surprisingly) stayed with her. After a moment, she closed the folder and got to her feet, a.s.sembled a cheery expression, and went to rap smartly on Clarence's door.

"It's me!" she said brightly, leaning in. "Back from the dead."

"Well," he said kindly, palms flat on his desktop, "I'm relieved."

"Sometimes I push myself too hard," she told him. "Then I crash. I do apologize."

"Not at all," he said. "It's only that I was worried. We couldn't reach you. And I know it had to be a difficult weekend."

It took her a moment to realize that he was talking about Mark. About Mark's wedding to someone who wasn't her. It should not have surprised her that he knew, but it did, as if her own decision not to speak about it had been somehow binding for everyone. This was ridiculously naive, of course. A move like Mark's, played out within the university community, involving infidelities and pregnancies and retroactively suspicious hirings, must have prime real estate on the local grapevine. All of her colleagues undoubtedly knew, had known for months. Even Dylan and Martha. Even Corinne. Especially Corinne.

"That's kind of you," she said carefully. "But I'm really all right. I do want a quick word, though, if you have time."

"All the time in the world," he said affably, pushing back in his chair. "Until that phone rings. I'm waiting on a conference call with Gwendolyn and Kate." Gwendolyn was the president of Princeton; Kate was the dean of students.

"Okay..." She took the chair opposite his desk. "I'll be quick. Do you remember that school in New Hampshire I visited in October? The new one."

He nodded. "Quest," he said, which was impressive. Clarence could be extraordinarily impressive. Beyond his veneer of fine suits and fine manners, past the ambient fog of cologne, lay rooms of mental cabinetry in which ma.s.ses of information were neatly filed. "You were intrigued."

"I was. By one student in particular. Different-drummer kid, very brilliant. He'd done horribly in public school. I was hoping he'd apply."

"And I suppose he did." Clarence smiled, his fingertips softly drumming the desktop in an absentminded accompaniment. "Or we would not be discussing him."

"Yes, he did. And the application is unconventional, to say the least. He was adopted, and his parents didn't attend college. I think it's possible they didn't see what he was or what he needed. He wasn't on any kind of a college track until last fall, and his transcript is a mess, but I'm very excited by this kid. I think he's amazing."

Clarence pursed his lips, already a step ahead. "Corinne disagrees, I take it?"

"Yes. Very much so. I just wanted to tell you, I know it doesn't look good, but I've talked to this kid, and I believe in him. I wondered if you'd look over the folder before we met on him."

On his desk, the phone began to purr. "Of course. Leave it with me," he said, reaching out one perfectly manicured hand.

"Thank you, Clarence," said Portia, backing out.

She closed the door as he rolled out his silken baritone: "Kate, yes, I have it here...."

He was her third boss in admissions, her second at Princeton, when he'd replaced the towering and kindly Martin Quilty. Quilty, a pa.s.sionate advocate for affirmative action, had wrested the university from its racial monochrome over twenty years of service, but more than any admissions officer Portia had ever known, he had carried the weight of the job with him and suffered from it. Over the years, his handsome face had creased and fallen, and he looked more than anything like a man of constant sorrow. He was a graduate of Princeton with a deep love for the university, but he also had a determination to make it a better place, and-most important-a fairer place than when he himself had been an undergraduate. Then, he had been a white man among white men, an undistinguished scholar among many undistinguished scholars.

Ten years earlier, in her get-acquainted lunch with Martin in the old Annex (the setting for generations of Princetonian lunches and genteel debauchery, since depressingly replaced by a very ordinary Italian restaurant), he had told her that he liked to consider each application a short story, revealing itself-revealing the applicant-at its own pace and on its own terms, and Portia had been unexpectedly charmed. (How sweetly old-fashioned, she had thought. A little bit like Martin himself.) But was it practical? Short stories aside, the university was still going to need tuba players and Pacific Islanders and a good shortstop every year, and also, what if an applicant just didn't have much of a story yet? What if he was kind of a great, normal kid who drove the family car to his lifeguard job at the lake every summer and wanted to be a doctor? What if there was no terminal illness or piano championship, no cla.s.sic immigrant saga or "Amazing Grace"like moment of awe at the power of language, or numbers, or s.p.a.ce? It seemed absolutely crazy, she had thought at the time (though nodding avidly to impress her new boss), to expect these seventeen-year-old lives to have much in the way of a narrative arc. American lives, despite what a famous Princetonian had once said, were ent.i.tled to second acts.

Martin Quilty's office now belonged to Clarence, but back then it had been dominated by framed color photos of ancestral lands in County Mayo, and endemic disarray. It had been a mess, but it had also been the kind of place she'd felt able to wander through and linger in. She missed that. At the end of the day, however, and in spite of the fact that Martin had welcomed input, advice, and debate from his staff, he still made each and every admissions decision on his own. When Clarence came from Yale to replace him, he had brought with him that office's more democratic-if surely more arduous-tradition of committee for all, or at least for most. Applicants whose first and second (and often third) readers had concluded they were not realistic admits might be stockpiled downstairs in the office, awaiting a final just-to-be-sure going-over, but the thousands of bright, accomplished applicants who remained would all have their chance in committee, each of them summarized by his or her region team leader much as a wigged and robed barrister might present a case in Chancery: My lords and ladies, Tiffany is the likely valedictorian of her cla.s.s of five hundred and fifty, captain of the softball team, a pa.s.sionate artist whose portfolio, regrettably, did not wow our Art Department. Her history teacher says she is a joy in cla.s.s who often asks for extra reading. The guidance counselor is new this year and does not know her well. The school has had twenty-three applicants to Princeton over the past five years, two admits, one attending. Her mother had some college but didn't graduate. Dad is a city sanitation employee in Portland, Maine-no college. Tiffany is the eldest of five children, two of them autistic. One of her essays concerns growing up with this challenge, feeling guilty about wanting to be away from her brothers, but loving them and being defensive of them. This is a strong candidate, though perhaps not a clear admit. Thank you, my lords and ladies.

It was at once the most satisfying and most frustrating part of the admissions cycle. By the time they left the conference room, the ma.s.s of fantastic kids-kids she had known for months through their written words and the words written about them, and whom she had sometimes met in person-would have been sorted and penned, irrevocably separated from one another. Like fish, Portia persisted in thinking, borrowing the office metaphor created years earlier by Martin Quilty and still in use. The thousands of application folders were the "pool," and a viable applicant was "swimming." Sometimes, in the dark winter months of reading period, in her office or at home, she thought of them all as muscular, frantic salmon fighting their way from ocean to river to stream, leaping and leaping upward toward their mutual goal. She still felt a wave of satisfaction when an applicant who'd moved or wowed her was affirmed and admitted by her colleagues. She still felt a pang of deep loss when she had to say good-bye to them and even today remembered more than a few of the ones that got away: good kids who'd worked hard, accomplished athletes and students, talented writers and musicians, just wonderful young people. They had, of course, gone to other great colleges and done superbly well-Portia knew they had, they must have-but she had always felt, in some indelible way, that she had failed them.

She couldn't do that now, she thought, coming back to her little office and shutting the door.

It felt very strange, at first. It was almost an unknown sensation, like a moment of miraculous understanding about something you've always only pretended to understand. For the first time in a very long time, there was a thing Portia wanted-desperately. There was an aim, a prize, and something she would gladly give anything she had to possess. Her adult life-the life she had lived since the moment she shut her eyes to not see the face of her baby-had been marked by no purpose at all, not monetary gain or career ascension, not love, not spiritual progress, not travel or variety of experience, not the alleviation of suffering, not the exploration of some pa.s.sionate interest, not other children. What motivates a person without a goal? she wondered with nearly clinical curiosity. And she thought almost immediately of how the cycle of her admissions life had always drawn her back for the next year and the next, how every summer she recovered from the loss of so many great kids and how gradually her sense of having failed them dulled and faded. Then, when autumn came, her appet.i.te would sharpen and her curiosity build. Once again, she wanted to know who waited in the folders. She wanted to meet them and find out about their lives, learn about what mattered to them, what they'd done and what they wanted from life, hear the pa.s.sion in their voices when they told her what they dreamed of achieving. That pa.s.sion was infectious, addictive, and she had spent her working life riding the slipstream of so many hopeful, determined young people, thoughtlessly hitching along on the draft of their greater energy, their extraordinary goals. It felt like a kind of addiction, or at least an unauthorized use of something that was not hers to use, and thinking about it, she was ashamed of herself in a new way.

But now there wasn't time to indulge in new shame or anything else that could distract her. She needed her wits and her energy, every force at her disposal, because she had a goal of her own. Finally. She had a thing she wanted desperately, powerfully, like the kids in the folders who wished so hard and asked so eloquently. The thing she wanted couldn't give her peace or make right the things she had done. It would not mitigate the harm. But it would be something: a gift for Jeremiah. Long overdue, perhaps, but also perhaps just in time.

"Make sure your essay stands out," my college advisor told me. "It doesn't have to be about your philosophy of life. One of the best essays I ever read was about cutting up a fish." But I've never cut up a fish. And if I did, I can't imagine how to make that interesting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.