Admission. Part 16

The door to the Admissions Office opened as she reached the Mc.n.u.tt steps, and Portia found herself looking up into the florid face of Gale Eberhoff. Eberhoff, a former Dartmouth football player, oversaw recruitment for football and baseball and had done so since before Portia had set foot on campus. Winning seasons were his joy in life and losing an athlete to Yale his particular horror. He looked, for a moment, thoroughly perplexed by the sight of his former colleague. Then the synapses snapped into place.

"Well! Prodigal daughter!"

"Where's my fatted calf?" she said, giving him a hug. She had always worked well with Gale.

"Visiting your mom?"

"Yes. I had to come in on an errand. I thought I'd take a self-consciously nostalgic walk through my old haunts."

"I'm surprised you can find any," he said. "This town is turning into the Mall of America."

"We'll always have Lou's, Gale."

"And thank G.o.d for it! So tell me, how are our orange friends in the great state of New Jersey? I'm still smarting over that pitcher you stole from me last year."

She shrugged. This had been a lanky, prematurely bald boy from Rhode Island. The previous January, with applications in to Brown, Dartmouth, and Princeton, Notre Dame had offered him a full scholarship, which he'd had to accept or decline right away. Telling the three Ivies about this offer had set a flurry of events in motion, sending Portia, Gale, and presumably their Brown counterpart scrambling to process the application and make an offer of admission and financial aid-or decline him. Brown had declined. Princeton's baseball coach had wanted this boy very badly, and he was burning up the phone line to Portia's office, pleading and badgering by turns. The pitcher had come to Princeton.

"You'll get us back," she said. "You know, Jerry really wanted him. I thought he was a strong writer, too. I still remember his essay."

Gale shook his head. In the afternoon light, his cheeks seemed redder than ever. "You were always good that way. Every year in April, I feel like I'm clearing the whole cache out of my brain to make room for the next batch."

"I know what you mean," said Portia, but it wasn't true. Not that she remembered them as individuals-no one could ever do that-but she couldn't excise them, either. Instead, she sometimes felt as if she were throwing them behind her, into a great sack that grew heavier and heavier every year, and then she dragged them forward with her, all those lives.

"You ever think of coming back? Harrold is leaving, you know. And a couple of the kids, going to graduate school."

"Harrold? Really?" This was news. Harrold, Dean of Admissions for a generation, had both admitted her to Dartmouth and then hired her. "Is he going somewhere else?"

"No. He says he's done."

"College counselor?" She frowned.

"Not even that. No, he's really done. I have no idea what he's going to do. I don't think he does. Well, he does seem to mention Hawaii a lot."

"Can you blame him?" Portia smiled. "I mean, twenty-five years of Hanover winters?"

"He did say if he runs through his generous Dartmouth pension, he'll write a college admissions guidebook."

She sighed. "Well, why not? Everyone else seems to."

"I'm counting on it myself." Gale smiled, showing stained teeth. She'd forgotten he was a smoker. "Well, my wife is counting on it. That's our retirement home, she informs me."

"How is your wife?" asked Portia, and they talked about her for a bit. Gale and his wife lived in a vast colonial on Webster Terrace, down at the end of Fraternity Row. It made for a depressing walk home, she had always thought. Their daughters, Dartmouth graduates, were now lawyers in Boston. Their son (to his father's vast regret, an aesthete) was in his final year at Bard.

After she had hugged him good-bye and sent love to his wife, she went inside. The Mc.n.u.tt waiting room was not much changed: Windsor chairs with the college crest, coffee tables laden with yearbooks and copies of the Dartmouth, framed photographs of the campus on all the walls. A young woman sat at the reception desk. She looked young enough to be a student, if not an applicant.

"Can I help you?" she said brightly. The waiting room was empty.

"Oh. No," said Portia. "I'll just take an application." She took it from a pile on one of the faux Chippendale hunt cupboards.

"We have one more tour, at three-thirty."

"No thanks. I'm just pa.s.sing through."

She looked around, wondering if any of her other former colleagues might show themselves. When they did not, she left.

As she stepped back outside, she saw that the light had become suddenly elusive, an early dusk settling over the snow. It was a familiar dusk, with a known glow, lavender in color, and she stood for a moment, appreciating it. There was without question an intense beauty to this place, a specific juxtaposition of white clapboard, brick, and open s.p.a.ce ringed by winter trees. It made her think of that song they had all been taught as freshmen. Not the raucous, silly alma mater with its awful line about "the granite of New Hampshire / In their muscles and their brains" and its shifting p.r.o.nouns to accommodate coeducation. But the pretty one, the one that-despite her best efforts to sing it stoically-always ended with her choking up: By the light of many thousand sunsets, Dartmouth Undying, like a vision starts: Dartmouth, the gleaming, dreaming walls of Dartmouth, Miraculously builded in our hearts...

It was, as someone far cleverer had once said, only a small college. And yet there were those who loved it.

Caitlin was waiting for her in the cafe, at a table by the window, stirring sugar into her tea.

"I'm so sorry," said Portia. "I completely lost track of the time. Is that normal tea?"

"What?" Caitlin looked up at her. She looked, suddenly, terribly young to Portia. She moved a white plastic bag from the tabletop onto one of the chairs. There was a clanking sound inside, of gla.s.s knocking together, as she set it down.

"Sneaking soda back to the house?" Portia teased.

"No. It's this stuff they gave me. I have to drink it before my next appointment. It's for a test."

"Gestational diabetes?"

"Yes." Caitlin frowned. "How did you know that?"

"There was an article in one of those magazines."

"Oh."

She went to the counter, ordered herself a coffee, and stood waiting for it, not exactly avoiding conversation with the girl, but perhaps minimizing it.

"Last time I was here it was jam-packed," Caitlin said when she returned. "There weren't any seats at all."

"Well..." Portia sipped her coffee, then blew on it. "That was probably in term. All the students are gone for the holidays."

"Yeah," Caitlin said, and awkward silence hung between them. "You know," she said after a minute, "sometimes I can't believe we're the same age."

"We?" Portia looked at her in alarm.

"The Dartmouth students and me. I mean, what are they, eighteen? Nineteen? I'm eighteen in June."

She nodded, waiting.

"It's just, I mean, I look at them and they're, like, having a good time, worrying about... I don't know, a French test or something. And I'm having a baby. It's so... wild. You know?"

Portia was pretty sure she did know, but she didn't say anything.

"Not... I don't want to sound like I'm not grateful. To your mom. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't met her friend. Barbara?"

"Yes. Barb. She used to live near us when we lived in Ma.s.sachusetts."

"And she had this crazy idea, to come here. But I needed a crazy idea. I needed any idea."

Portia sipped her coffee. "I think...," she said, remembering, "my mother said you wanted to go to college yourself."

To her surprise, Caitlin responded to this by laughing. She shook her head over the mug of tea, which she held between her palms. Portia looked around the room. They were indeed alone, except for the dull-looking girl who had made her coffee and a man in one of the armchairs, reading The New Yorker.

"Here's what's funny," Caitlin said. "Well, I think this is pretty funny. Yeah, I do want to go to college."

"There's nothing funny about that," said Portia.

"No, that's not what I mean. I realized I wanted to go to college the same day I figured out I was pregnant. It was a pretty intense day. Well," she said, eyeing Portia, "I don't know if you want to hear this."

"Of course," said Portia, surprised to discover that she did.

"I took the test in the morning. It was Labor Day weekend. I went to the drugstore and got it, then I went to the library and took the test there. I didn't want to take it home and have my mom find it."

"Okay," said Portia.

"So I'm not... I mean, it was awful. I didn't believe it at first. I couldn't believe I was pregnant."

"Were you using anything?" Portia asked, trying not to sound preemptively judgmental. Obviously she hadn't used anything.

"Anything? Like birth control?"

Portia nodded.

"My boyfriend... my boyfriend," she said with refreshing hostility, "told me we didn't need it. He said he wouldn't"-she took her own furtive glance around the room-"go in all the way. He said I could only get pregnant if he went in all the way. And he didn't," she finished unnecessarily.

Portia sighed. She was glad her mother wasn't here. The inevitable diatribe would not have been helpful. "If it's any comfort," she said, "you're not the first woman to get misinformation on this subject. You won't be the last, I'm sorry to say."

"Not much comfort. But thanks." She rolled her eyes.

"But what about at school? Didn't they teach you about birth control in school?"

"Oh, you're kidding." She summoned a smile. "My school? Maybe here, but not where I'm from. My school is, like, one-third LDS, one-third born again, one-third meth addicts. They taught us what your period is, and all those other fun changes that mean you're a woman now. But birth control, no way. Why would we need birth control? We're not supposed to be, you know, having s.e.x. We were supposed to stay pure till we got married. That part of it was really clear. But, I mean, they never told us what that meant, exactly. I know girls who thought if they ever kissed someone, they weren't pure anymore. I used to think that, actually. I thought s.e.x was kissing." She smiled and actually blushed. She looked, oddly, thoroughly innocent, circ.u.mstances notwithstanding.

"In other words, you were supposed to be the first teenagers in history not to have s.e.x. Is that it?"

Caitlin looked suddenly delighted. "That's about it."

"Did you tell your boyfriend?"

She shook her head. "By the time I found out, he wasn't my boyfriend anymore. If I told anyone, it should have been the girl he was going out with after me. I mean, isn't he going to tell her exactly the same thing?"

"Oh, probably," Portia said. "So back to taking the test."

"Yeah. I'm in the bathroom at the library, trying not to lose it. And it was Labor Day weekend. Did I say that?"

"Yes," said Portia, sipping.

"On Labor Day weekend we always have lunch at my aunt Jane's house. All the sisters. My mom is one of six sisters and two brothers. All the sisters are married, and one of the brothers. Almost all of them have kids, so it's a ton of people. Plus my grandmother. My grandfather died a long time ago."

"Okay," Portia said, trying to follow.

"And usually I'm running around with the kids, but this time I don't feel like running around, so I'm sitting at the table with my mom and all my aunts, just, you know, trying to follow the conversation and pretend the bottom hasn't just fallen out of my life. And my aunt Susie was talking about the school her kids went to, or something about the parents at the school, and I just started looking around the table at all of them, you know?"

Of course Portia didn't know. But she nodded anyway.

"And I just... suddenly, I just looked at them, and I realized. Every one of them, my mom and all her sisters, they went to junior college for one or two years, and then they got married. And that was it. And then it just dawned on me, you know? That I never thought about my future, and they never thought about my future. They never asked me, you know, what do you want to do when you grow up? Or if I wanted to go to college. And I never asked myself. Because that part of my life was just kind of supposed to end after a year or two, and then I was supposed to get married and do what they'd done, which was have babies. And it was totally bizarre, because here I'd come to find out I was going to have a baby, and suddenly the one thing I knew was that wasn't what I wanted. Do you understand?"

Portia, dumbfounded, nodded. "That must have been very hard."

"But I love them, you know? I love all of them. I love my mom and my aunt Jane. They only want the best for me."

"Of course."

"But I couldn't tell them this. There wasn't any part of it they'd understand. My mom would have just been, you know, destroyed. And I think my dad and my brothers... I don't know. And that part about wanting to go to college. I mean, real college."

"Four-year college."

"Yeah. They just wouldn't have had any idea what to do with that. You know, four-year college, that means away, somewhere else. Not at home."

"Most parents," said Portia, carefully, "like to send their kids to college. Of course, they miss them, but it's an important part of their growing up and becoming independent."

Caitlin shook her head so vigorously, the thin locks of hair came out from behind her ears. "No. Not my parents. You know, all these aunts? The farthest any of them lives from each other is, like, ten miles. And it isn't just my family. It's every single person I know. n.o.body ever goes away, except the boys, of course."

"Why the boys?" Portia asked suspiciously.

"Oh, they go to Brigham Young if they go to college. And they go on mission, of course. But then they come back after. But to get back to Labor Day, I was sitting there thinking about all this and I was just, like, paralyzed, you know? And then that went on for a couple of weeks, and it was awful because I couldn't tell anybody what was happening. But finally I made myself make some kind of decision, because I wanted to be the one deciding what was going to happen. So I went to the nearest clinic, which was all the way in Casper. I mean, four hours in the car to get there. I thought I was going for an abortion, but I didn't know you couldn't just walk in and get one. They need to talk to you first and make sure you know what you're doing. I didn't expect that."

Portia nodded, waiting.

"The thing is, I wasn't really in favor of abortion. I'm pro-life. I've always been pro-life. I mean, everyone I know is pro-life. I guess I was expecting the people in the clinic would be, like, 'Step this way, lie down on the table,' you know, 'we'll get rid of it for you.' But they wanted to talk to me about how I really felt and what I really wanted to do with my life, and how I thought about the baby. Barbara was my counselor. And I kept saying, yes, I want to end it, yes, I want the abortion, but you know, she knew I couldn't do it. She made the appointment to come back and do it the next week, but when I came back I was just a wreck. I couldn't make myself do it. It just felt really wrong."

Portia drank the end of her coffee, lukewarm and grainy going down her throat. "It sounds like you were really struggling."

"Well, Barbara asked me if I'd thought about giving the baby away for adoption, and of course I thought that was a fantastic idea. I mean, right away I thought: That's it. That's my way out. But I still couldn't go home to my family and have a baby. I already looked different. I couldn't wear most of my clothes. I don't think anybody noticed yet, but I noticed."

"Then Barb mentioned my mom?"

She nodded. "Not her in particular, but she said she had some friends back east who might be able to let me live with them and I could go to school. The adoption part I could work out later, but the main thing was to get me out of the house as soon as possible. I still can't believe how fast she did it. I mean, less than a week later I was getting off the plane in Burlington." She gave a ragged sigh that spoke of barely averted tears. "I know how this sounds. I know you think I'm an idiot for getting pregnant in the first place, and then not going through with the abortion."

"I don't think that at all," Portia said, surprised.

"It's just," Caitlin continued, ignoring this, "when something like this happens, it's like, you're just knocked off your feet. I couldn't think about anything. I couldn't make any decisions, like even what to put on in the morning or which way to drive to school, let alone what to do about my life and going to college and having a baby. I think I must have gone crazy or something. I'm sure you can't imagine what I'm talking about."

"I can imagine," Portia said quietly. "I got pregnant once, a long time ago."

Caitlin snapped to attention. She looked sharply at Portia, as if Portia had just become the most fascinating thing in the universe. Portia, on the other hand, went numb. She found herself taking inventory of the palms of her hands. She had not planned to say this. She was a little bit stunned herself.