Admission. Part 21

"It's all of our jobs," she said with pa.s.sion. "Places like this need agitation. They need students who refuse to consider themselves superior to other people. I mean, what do you think is going to happen when you bring privileged people to an elitist inst.i.tution? You just validate their elitism."

"Appearances to the contrary," Portia said wearily, "this is not an elitist inst.i.tution. At least, not in the way you imply."

"Oh, come on."

Portia shrugged. She was not in the mood to fight with a teenage girl.

"Well," said her mother, "I'd say that about wraps up your application to Princeton, Simone."

"That's for sure," said Nelson, grinning.

"No, not at all," Portia told them. "You should absolutely apply. I'd maybe omit the word bulls.h.i.t from your application. Just a tip."

"Simone," Deborah said, shaking her head.

"I'm not expecting to get into Princeton," Simone said defensively, looking squarely at Portia. "I don't even know that I'd want to come here. I might be happier at an inst.i.tution that's a bit more forward thinking. Hampshire, maybe. Or Wesleyan. Oberlin."

"Right," said Portia, losing it. "A congregation of the enlightened, where everyone in the choir gets to preach to everyone else."

John, beside her, burst out laughing.

"I think," Deborah said carefully, "there might be a middle way. Where we don't seek out people who are just like ourselves but we also refrain from attacking people who are different from ourselves."

Brava, thought Portia, again momentarily perturbed to note how much she liked Deborah.

"We like iconoclasts here," she told them. "We like young people who have a sense of mission. And we absolutely love to bring them together and watch them mess with one another's preconceptions. Inside every admissions officer is a mad scientist." She laughed.

"Well," Simone said, still petulant, "I'll think about it. I'm still looking around. I don't apply until the fall."

John said quickly, "We're going to Penn tomorrow. And Swarthmore. I think Swarthmore would be a fantastic place for Simone."

"And Bryn Mawr," said Deborah. "This summer I'm taking her out to Kenyon and Oberlin."

"Those are all great schools," said Portia. "What about you?" she asked Jeremiah.

"I want to be here," he said plainly. "This is for me."

"Jeremiah," John said uncomfortably, "you've applied to a bunch of places. We haven't seen any of the others."

"I know. But I know."

"It's a wonderful place," Portia said carefully. "But it's not the only wonderful place. A student who wants a great education can get one at almost any American college. It's a terrific time to go to college."

"Sure," he said affably. "But this. I love this. I wanted to go into every cla.s.sroom we pa.s.sed."

"He kept trying to sneak off the tour," John said with forced humor. "I had to restrain him."

"I wanted to disappear into that library," said Jeremiah with a motion of his head. He meant Firestone, she supposed. "I kept thinking I could run up to people and ask them what they were studying. Everything on the kiosks..." He looked at her. "You know? The kiosks?"

"Sure."

"Everything I saw, I wanted to do. Not the singing groups. I can't sing. Not... you know, I run around, but I'm not an athlete, like a team athlete. But everything else. I wish we could stay here. I don't need to see the other schools."

"Jeremiah," Deborah said tersely, "we haven't driven all this way to see one college."

"Would you like to stay?" Portia heard herself say. "I could probably arrange an overnight with an undergraduate. You could go to cla.s.ses in the morning."

They all looked at her, except for Nelson, who was digging for the marshmallow in his cup.

"Really?" said Jeremiah.

"But... we're staying at Tara's tonight," Deborah said quietly to John.

"Deborah has a friend in Bucks County," he explained to Portia. "We were going to stop there and go on to my parents' tomorrow."

"Well, it was just a thought," Portia said. She was suddenly feeling awfully uncomfortable. She had not thought before she spoke of how it might appear to them, or what it signified for her.

"He could," said John, looking at Deborah. "The three of us could. And meet you tomorrow at my parents'."

"I don't want to stay here," Nelson said bluntly.

Silence ensued.

"Shall I just make a phone call?" Portia said, getting up. "I can see if it's even possible."

"Yes!" Jeremiah said, oblivious to the tension around the table.

"That's very kind of you," said Deborah after a moment. She looked at Simone. Portia, too, was looking at Simone, belatedly taken aback by her own rudeness. Was this offer, so suddenly formed, open to her as well? It had to be, obviously.

"Simone...," she began carefully.

"Oh, no thanks. I want to go see Tara."

"And Bryn Mawr in the morning," added Deborah.

"Right. But thanks."

"Let me call," said Portia, taking out her phone. "Give me a minute."

She went outside, where the cold was now welcome, clarifying, and somewhat punitive. Her thoughts were racing. What it meant, what she had done, they must all have some grasp of it. Who first? Deborah? Or John? Simone, with her tractor-beam expression? What were they saying back there? She thought fleetingly of skin and heat. She thought of his mouth. She felt as if she had declared herself in some irreversibly public way. She felt at once excited and deeply humiliated.

Her intention was to phone Rachel, but at the last moment she reconsidered and dialed David's office. No, he a.s.sured her. She was not interrupting.

"I have a prospective student," she told him. "I was hoping you might know an undergraduate who can put him up tonight. Preferably someone with a philosophy cla.s.s in the morning. He'd like to attend a cla.s.s."

"Is it the zombie kid?" David said excitedly.

"What? Oh no. But interested in philosophy. Very unusual kid. Not very polished, you know? But brilliant."

"Brilliant and not very polished." David laughed. "The philosopher's coat of arms. Hang on."

She heard him speak, indecipherable. A knocking sound as he put the phone down, she supposed, and then a sc.r.a.pe as he took it back up.

"I've got a freshman in my office now," said David. "He has my metaphysics and epistemology seminar tomorrow at nine. Will that do?"

"Only perfectly." She smiled. "And he has room?"

"Hang on."

More indistinct sounds. She heard laughter-unmistakably David's.

"There's a bed," David said, returning. "One of his suite mates has a girlfriend in Forbes. Apparently he hasn't appeared all term."

"Fantastic." She wrote down the kid's name and arranged to bring Jeremiah to his dorm room in Mathey. Unless she called back in the next five minutes. Then she thanked David profusely and hung up.

Back at the table they were waiting for her in alert silence, like a nineteenth-century family portrait: father, mother, children, attentively seated with all hands visible. Between the two adults there was no discernible tension, which was at once perplexing and rea.s.suring. "He can do it," she said, addressing Deborah for some reason. "If it's all right with you."

"It's fine," she said with surprising warmth. "I think it's a tremendous idea."

"This is so great," Jeremiah said, half out of his seat already.

"Shall I put him on the train to Philadelphia in the morning?" Portia asked, amazed to hear herself speak these words. She paused to admire her own ingenuous cool.

"Oh," John said, frowning. "I'm going to spend the night. I'll find a hotel in town and take him on the train tomorrow. It's all set."

She looked at Deborah. Deborah was not returning her gaze.

"And you're sure you don't want to stay yourself?" she asked Simone.

"No. Thank you. I think I should try to see as many places as possible." She said it so primly, Portia thought. This Simone was very nearly a Bryn Mawr girl of the old school: brittle, clever, imperturbable.

"Can we go?" said Jeremiah, and Nelson, who had evidently been ready to go for some time, careened to his feet, tipping the table. They put on their coats and went outside into the new dark of the afternoon, and walked back to their car in the munic.i.p.al lot by the town library. John slung Jeremiah's bag over his shoulder, and his own. Portia gave directions to the highway as Nelson and Simone strapped in, and Deborah, she thought, drove off rather abruptly. She looked at John.

"Lead on," he said amiably.

Back up Witherspoon Street, back onto campus, through the arches, and across the courtyards to Mathey, its faux Gothic courtyard belying the newness of its actual construction. They climbed a staircase perfumed with stale beer to the beat of ambient rap music and found the appointed suite on the second floor, door flung open to display the universal decor of the newly emanc.i.p.ated Princeton male: alcoholia (on a shelf, the empty bottles of beers of many nations, all in a row), technology (an oversize television screen and snarls of wires), and Princetoniana (tigers, tigers everywhere, and in the prime position on the sitting room wall, an orange-and-black cla.s.s of 2011 banner).

"Luke?" she called, knocking on the open door.

"Yes! Hey!" came a yelp from one of the bedrooms, loud over the music, which actually seemed to come from elsewhere in the building. "I'm Luke."

He was tall and reed thin, with ginger hair. He was from Albuquerque and had never been east, he informed them, until the previous fall. Winter had taken him somewhat by surprise, he admitted. He reached for Jeremiah's bag, opened the bedroom door of the absent suite mate, and tossed it on the pristine bed within. A bunch of them were planning to check out This Is Princeton after dinner, he told Jeremiah. Was he cool with that?

Jeremiah agreed instantly, though he couldn't have known what it was. Portia, who did know, was delighted. Someone would be back to collect him in the morning, she said. After metaphysics and epistemology. Then they left.

Now it was fully dark. Portia held her jacket at the throat and did not look at him. They took a few steps along the pathway and stopped on the same dime.

"I think," said Portia, "we did that rather well."

He took her hand.

My grandmother rolls out the dough, using a long wooden rolling pin, so faded from the imprint of her hands that the paint on the handles is barely visible. She pauses to dip her hands in the flour bowl by her elbow, then gently sprinkles flour over the perfectly flat dough as she prepares to cut out her special Italian Christmas Cookies, favorites of our family since I can recall. She checks to make sure that I am paying close attention. After all, she chides me, long after she is gone, I will one day need to recreate this exact combination of flour and water, egg and sugar, for my own child or grandchild, keeping alive this link between a girl who had barely attended school, who shared a bed with two sisters in a house without running water in a remote village in southern Italy, and her violin playing, robotics obsessed, college-bound granddaughter in Los Angeles, and on to descendents she will never know. This may be our private family tradition, but it is comes from an American story.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

CONTENT TO BE LED.

Oh dear," he said. He was still standing behind her on the porch, though she had unlocked the door and opened it and even stepped inside. It had not occurred to her to worry about the house, and now she looked around, wary and bewildered, to see what she must have forgotten: trash? shed underwear? palpable signs of extreme loneliness and abandonment?

There was a floor lamp in the living room that she had left on all day, apparently, so the electricity was working. Light made a house look homey, didn't it? Perhaps it had been longer than all day, Portia thought, trying to remember the last time she had sat in the living room and what she might have been doing there.

"Portia," said John, who had stepped, unheard, into the room, "I think your heat might be out."

She raised her head, as if she were some animal testing the air.

"You're absolutely right," she agreed with him. She was trying for growing realization but hit outrage instead, as if she were ready to murder whichever vile spirit had stolen in and shut off the furnace. "You know, I thought it was a little cold this morning, but I was running out to work. It must have happened in the night."

"Can I look at your furnace? Would you mind?"

He was almost comically gracious, and she nearly smiled. "Would you?" she asked. "I could call the oil company."

"Well, it might be necessary. In the bas.e.m.e.nt?"

She showed him the door and turned on the light for him. She had not thought to look at the furnace herself.

Thirty seconds later, there was a deep rumble from below her feet and a whirring sound, and the slight vibration of the floorboards came rushing back to her, so thoroughly familiar that she wondered how she had not noticed it was gone all these weeks. The vibration meant warm air and hot water, which meant comfort. Suddenly, what she wanted most in the world was a bath.

"There's enough oil," said John, emerging from the dark corner where the furnace was ensconced. "I don't know why it went out, but it just needed to be restarted. Has it happened before?" he asked.

"No, not that I know of."

"And you think it went out in the night?"

She shifted uncomfortably, unsure of how a.s.sailable that claim might be. Would he be able to tell? From its condition? The temperature of the house? She thought of brutal parents in the emergency room, insisting the baby had only fallen from his playpen, plagiarists who swore they'd written the essay themselves. Would he know? Could he prove it?

"I really... I'm not sure. I've been at the office so much. It might have happened yesterday. Or before."