Admission. Part 31

Yet in the seven months she'd spent in Lawrence, it hadn't been at all difficult to a.s.semble the trappings of adulthood, the acc.u.mulation of objects, the rituals, the paper trail of bills and checks. Not every twenty-year-old woman was a junior in college, it seemed; some were living on their own in places like Lawrence, paying their rent, making small talk with the bored teenager in the checkout line, taking care that there was enough toilet paper. It was, she would think perversely, a thing to be sort of proud of, perhaps not on the scale of bringing a human being into the world, but unlike the human being in question, a thing she would certainly be taking away with her. And when she went back to Dartmouth, and when she saw Tom again, she would not be the same childish person she had been, but a placid, seasoned woman, moving forward, unenc.u.mbered and unafraid, and above all else, contained. No one would ever know what had happened here. Portia would barely know, herself.

She clung stubbornly to this idea.

Through the summer, which was very hot, she grew ponderous and breathless. The sisters next door moved on, complaining of the construction dust, and a man Portia didn't like the look of took the apartment. The counselor she'd been coerced into seeing tried to get her to talk about the adoption. She did not want to talk about the adoption. Portia did not even want to approve the family. She didn't want to know anything about where the baby was, only that it would be safe, as if they could promise that. She let them tell her only that the couple were from Watertown, in their thirties, and married for a decade. They were, according to Lisa, "ecstatic."

All right.

And so she went home and tried to settle into The Mystery of Edwin Drood and waited for it to begin.

On the ponderously hot morning of Sunday, August 19, her water broke as she was walking home along the Merrimack River with a bag of the few things she could still stand to eat: Triscuit crackers, peanut b.u.t.ter, carrots, and cranberry juice. At first, she thought she had somehow broken the juice and irrationally looked for the red liquid on the ground. When it wasn't there, it took her a long, addled moment to realize what was happening. She stood where she was, deliberately considering her options, stunned by how quickly her world had just contracted to a few mundane decisions.

Get home, put the food in the kitchen, call the taxi?

Set down the bag, ask a pa.s.serby to phone the doctor?

Stand very still until someone noticed that she was having a baby and took care of her?

She went on home, stopping twice to fully appreciate the earliest (and, sadly, mildest) contractions, and when she arrived, she carefully placed the plastic bag on the kitchen table. Of course, she would not be eating this food now, but wouldn't she want it when she came home? After? Or would these always be the foods of her pregnancy, things she would never want to see again, like the vast dresses she'd been wearing for the past two months and the dirty Keds her swollen feet had come to rely on, and the 1960s television shows that seemed to dominate the local channels? She was trying to think past the elephant, which was not just in the room but squarely in her path. She did not want to go to the hospital too soon and be sent home, multiplying what she imagined would be, at the very least, an uncomfortable journey, but after only another ninety minutes she decided to move while she was still competent to manage the trip. She called the taxi company, and while she waited for it to arrive, she called Lisa and told her what was happening. The social worker at the hospital would be informed, Lisa said, and she would call the parents now and tell them what was happening. "Good luck," she told Portia, who was momentarily stymied by the use of the word parents.

She had not attended Lamaze cla.s.ses, not because she objected to the idea of it, but because she couldn't face not having a partner. She had, however, dutifully read a book about the method, which-sadly-she had to jettison entirely once the contractions. .h.i.t their stride. Within minutes of changing into a gown she was gasping for relief, which they seemed happy enough to give her, and with the lower half of her body mercifully numb, she fell almost peacefully asleep and awoke four hours later, nearly fully dilated. The room's other bed had acquired an occupant, a sleeping woman with straw yellow hair and a ruddy complexion. She was immense, her midsection so large but so ill defined that Portia couldn't tell whether she had had her baby yet or not, and she never found out, because as soon as her lower abdomen came jolting back to life, they moved her down the corridor to an antiseptic little chamber.

The grandmotherly OB-GYN was away on the Cape with her actual grandchildren for the weekend. Her replacement was called "Dr. B." He came in clapping his hands but never actually looked up from the end of the table, and he never asked her name. She tried not to take this personally, as he wasn't much of a conversationalist in general and made use of a single abbreviated word, one size fits all, to conduct the labor. " 'Kay," he said at the end of each contraction. " 'Kay," he said when the next one began. " 'Kay" meant whatever it had to mean: Good job. Try harder. Stop pushing. Push harder. It was extraordinary how quickly she deciphered all this. She wanted to laugh at him, but by the time she caught her breath, it didn't seem funny anymore. " 'Kay," he said, "next one."

It occurred to her that she didn't know what the B stood for or if it represented his first name or his last, and then it occurred to her that that was something to add to the blessedly long list of things she did not know and would not know, like her baby's name, and what he-or she-would turn out to be, and who would love him. She did not believe that she could love him. Susannah, whatever else was wrong with her, had thrown herself into maternal love, and Portia felt, again, that she must be very unnatural, and it did pain her that she did not already love her baby, did not believe she would eventually love her baby, would wish her baby away in a breath if she could catch her breath, especially if the pain went, too. But she couldn't do anything if she couldn't breathe. She couldn't be expected to produce the baby, or whatever raging thing had gotten itself trapped deep inside her, not if every time she tried to gather her strength, the deep pain of it came soaring through her body, leaving no appendage unturned, making every part of her crackle horribly. She remembered now that she had asked for the version of labor without pain, but when she tried to bring this up, it came out sounding sort of vague, as if she were still in Europe and attempting to accomplish the task at hand in some unfamiliar language, managing only to state the obvious: "Hurts, hurts, stop."

" 'Kay," said Dr. B. "Third time's the charm."

Was he trying to be funny? Portia thought.

Then, in her acrid fog, she thought: I have to do this three times?

"You got anyone here, sweetheart?" said the nurse at her ear.

Portia turned vaguely in her direction. "What?"

"Your mama? Boyfriend?"

"No," she panted.

"Well," the woman said comfortingly, "that's okay. One good parent's one more than a lotta kids get."

"No," said Portia. "It'll have two. It's being adopted."

Her hand, on Portia's shoulder, seemed to turn instantly cool and even slightly clammy.

"You giving your baby away?" she said in a whisper.

Portia, in the grip of a contraction, with no breath to spare, only nodded.

"Why you wanna do that?" said the nurse. "It's your baby."

Astoundingly, no one in the room seemed to react to this. Perhaps they couldn't hear it. Perhaps, thought Portia, it had not actually been said aloud.

"I have to," she said, or possibly said.

" 'Kay," said Dr. B. "This is it."

A hand-that same hand?-patted her shoulder.

"I have to," she possibly said again, but louder this time. She had to say it louder, over the din of the pain.

"You gonna see your baby now," the nurse said matter-of-factly, and Portia waved her hand to say no, she didn't want to see the baby. n.o.body had said anything about having to see the baby. Wasn't that optional? They couldn't make her, she thought, and shut her eyes, idiotically, like a five-year-old.

But she could hear it, crying even louder than she was crying, bitter wailing that ricocheted against the bones and the walls and the tiles. Portia pressed her hands against her ears. "Little boy," said the most deafening voice in the world. The physical pain was suddenly gone, lifted from her like a sodden tablecloth, and now there was only the other thing: the tearing, searing agony that had irreversibly replaced it.

I don't want to, thought Portia. She shook her head, eyes squeezed shut, hands over ears. "Please," she told the nurse, whose hand had left her shoulder, giving way to a blast of frigid air.

They had taken him to the far corner of the room, where three nurses who had come from nowhere attended him, rubbing, cutting, wrapping, lifting. The soreness was her legs, coming together. I don't want to, she thought again.

"Would you like to hold your baby?" said a man, and it took Portia too long to realize that this was Dr. B., who could say other things aside from " 'kay" after all, and that he was standing close, just past the hands covering her ears, and already holding the baby, who was also, as a result, close. Very close. She shook her head, bereft and also enraged, because hadn't she already said no? Hadn't she said no? Had she said no?

"I don't want to," Portia said to the insides of her eyelids and the insides of her hands, because if they took him now, before she truly looked and truly heard him, then she could still retain this delicate skein of not knowing. It was possible. People did it. They did it for things even worse than this, far worse than this: affairs and diseases and men who fell out of love. She remembered, quite suddenly, the man her mother had married, who had died a long and terrifying death from a disease no one understood. The Chilean musician who might have been her father but wasn't, she thought, curling up tight on the hospital bed, kicking away the nurse at the foot of the bed who was trying to clean her and dry her. He had died childless in a hospital bed like this one, surrounded by his friends and lovers, half of whom would die soon after of the same baffling thing. His name had been Renaldo. Portia and Susannah had visited during his illness, Portia just old enough to recoil from the sores in his mouth, the furious dark patches on his arms, legs, and chest. He was a very sick man, but not a mournful man. He had swung her hand from his hospital bed. He had told her: "I wake up every morning and pretend I'm not dying."

He could do it, and he was covered with stigmata-the world knew what he refused to acknowledge. Perhaps there was a life in that, she thought. Perhaps it will be possible to wake up every morning and pretend there was never a baby. I've never been here. I'm not here now. I never even opened my eyes.

" 'Kay," the man said softly. He took a step back and turned to carry the baby away. She took her hands away from her ears, and white noise came pouring in. She opened her eyes and saw white light. Of course she did not intend to look after him as he left the room. She was so close to escaping, sight unseen, but some rigid claw turned her head and held her there, insisting that she witness this tiny shock of the new: protruding from the striped hospital blanket, a head of darkest hair and a nose momentarily flattened by birth. That hair took hold of something inside her and wrung it wildly. Portia tried to sit up and made a sound she couldn't really decipher. They had all finished with her. There was no one left in the room, even to vaguely pat her shoulder, even to disapprove.

It was just-she would later think-that she had not been expecting what she saw. Tom's hair was blond, like his parents' and brother's hair. Her own hair was the same as Susannah's: dark brown, stubbornly wavy. The meaning of this would not be immediately clear, but in the years that followed-years and months and weeks and days-she would come to understand, and with devastating impact, just what it signified. The black-haired child they took away was not only a child, but one of the very few people in the world she knew for a fact was related to her. And the only chance she would ever have to see her father's face.

PART.

IV.

DECISIONS.

For as long as I can remember, my most important goal has been to make my way to a great university, where I could spread my academic wings and engage in intellectual exchanges with my peers. I have been thinking about this, dreaming about this and, yes, also worrying about this since I first discovered what the acronym SAT stood for. Now, all these years later, I look at what I've accomplished and discover, to my great concern, that I am only one of thousands just like me, ambitious and well-prepared for college, but not particularly outstanding in the context of your applicant pool. Of course, I wish that I had written a novel or won a Grammy or modeled for Vogue, but to be totally honest, I just don't understand the necessity of completing or even beginning my life's work by the age of seventeen. And the fact is, I was really busy with Honors Calculus.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

WHO AMONG US HAS DIED?.

For the first time in weeks (and thanks to John), there was heat in the house, but Portia still could not seem to get warm. She lay beneath all available blankets, quilts, the duvet from her own bed and the one from the guest bed, clenched like a fist and wild for relief. She was discovering, first, that she had somehow known this would happen, that the baby she had once refused to see would one day materialize before her and force her to look at him. And also that the act of excising those nine months from her memory, and the life she had after all saved by carrying to life, and the phantom child growing without her in some unknown place with some unknown woman pretending to be her and some unknown man pretending to be Tom, was a fearful, constant presence. It was the rasping monster resurrected by the monkey's paw, drawing closer and closer to home. It was the silent corpse of Eurydice, always a half step behind every step she had taken since Lawrence, Ma.s.sachusetts. She did not remember ever actually deciding to tell no one, but she had never told, never even considered telling. Instead, she had filled the place her son might have occupied with shame. Shame: like poured cement, a.s.suming exactly the dimensions of the missing child.

But shame about what, exactly? Portia refused, then as now, to feel disgrace at having become pregnant at the age of twenty. She declined to apologize for not choosing to terminate, bizarrely old-fashioned as that was. Even now, she wasn't completely sure why she had done it. She hadn't, after all, been shunned by her family, thrown out of school, church, community, dumped in one of those terrible places for bad girls to be warehoused until she could produce an infant for some superior woman to raise. Her mother would have embraced her, certainly would have enabled her to continue school. And Dartmouth, despite its macho bl.u.s.ter, would not have blinked an eye-or not much of an eye-at a single mom finishing up her degree, commuting to campus from Hartland.

But she had never thought of keeping him, and the shame of that had become the body within her body. She was suffused with shame, drenched with it, riddled with it like something metastasized. Her bones kept it erect and her muscles made it move and her skin contained it, and everything she had ever felt or thought or done since that morning seventeen years before, when the baby had left her body and the room and-she believed-her life, had been felt in shame, thought in shame, and done in shame.

Now it felt as if that shame were leaking from every pore of her, leaking and leaking as the first day pa.s.sed, and then the next, and then the next. The bed was soaked with it, and the blankets and duvets made a damp tent to huddle beneath. It was, she would later think, a kind of an afterbirth, seventeen years in the making, and she wondered how long this was going to take, how long until, finally, she was dry and done. Her body claimed not to understand the logic of this. There was, it seemed to her, no end to the backlog of weeping.

It had never occurred to her to tell Tom. Not senior year, when she'd had to turn away her face at the sight of him. Not when she read about his marriage to the very Winky or Stinky (all right, all right, in fact Binty, nee Elizabeth) Caldwell Hemming, who had waltzed away with him that day in Paris, or the births of his other children in the alumni magazine. She knew this was wrong. She knew that he had the right to know there was a child, to be a father if he chose it, not that she believed for a minute that he would actually have chosen it. But it was still wrong, even increasingly wrong, she supposed, after he'd had other children and perhaps understood the enormity of what had been kept from him. He didn't deserve that baby, was what she told herself, not after the way he had left her, not after failing to know-magically, she supposed-that they had conceived a child. Coming and leaving, impervious and nonchalant, where she, at least, had endured the variant pains of carrying the baby and giving birth to the baby and hardening herself against the baby, an effort that had now lasted for many years and blasted every other part of her life out of its way, while he had married and made a family and gone on to lead the life he was always going to lead. How must he remember her? The exotic Jewish girl who had his mother so riled up, who seemed to understand that it couldn't be a lasting thing, a real thing, they were too differently wired, and who had become, of all things, a Dartmouth admissions officer-I mean, who could have seen that one coming?

The truth was that she had long ago consigned Tom to his own life, with his family and unsurprising career path, in the very Boston suburb from which he had sprung. Once a year, on average, she did dream of him, but the Tom in her dreams did not confront or condemn her. He didn't cry or wring his hands. On the contrary, he did mindless things with her, mundane things. Married things, it occurred to Portia now, like going to a movie and walking out because it was boring, or kissing her on the cheek, or watching children in a Christmas pageant. It was hardly pa.s.sionate (even the kissing) and never emotionally fraught, except for one time many years ago, when her dream self had stood in Tom's (imagined) tasteful kitchen, with hands on hips, and reminded him (reminded him?) that he had another child, and what kind of father did he think he was? She had woken from that dream in a motel on the Oregon coast, heart pounding, the waves outside pounding, sweaty and cold and unable to calm herself. But only that one time. And when it happened next, a year or more later, they were back in the school auditorium or at the movies.

Away downstairs, the phone was ringing again, its tinny, accompanying voice a half step behind: "Call from... Princeton... Univ.... Call from... Princeton... Univ...."

Surely the office. Clarence or Corinne or possibly Martha, checking to see when she would be back. That was a relief. Yesterday there had been several, presumably from John: "Call from... cell phone... NH.... Call from... cell phone... NH."

Which she, of course, had not answered either. John, she could not face. She couldn't stand to think of him waking up (in the morning? in the middle of the night?) to wonder what had happened to her (bathroom? kitchen? insomniac nighttime jog through the muddy Pennsylvania countryside?) or, worse, somehow intuit everything, know everything. Perhaps by now they had all gleaned the meaning of her abrupt departure, or perhaps she had been seen, frozen in place in the upstairs hallway like Lot's too curious wife, punished forever for what she had done.

Once, in the application essay of a young scientist, she had read a graphic description of latent tuberculosis: deactivated infections walled off behind a cas.e.m.e.nt of immune cells in the lung. They could stay that way for years, the boy had written, silently ticking, doing no outward harm, and then, without warning, burst open to flood the body with what he had memorably termed an "untidy" form of death. But that's me, Portia had thought, fighting off a wave of dread as she checked "High Priority-Admit" at the bottom of that page, how many years ago? Her latent disease, outwardly doing no harm, inwardly building to a slaughter: necrotic, poisonous, infectious, terminal. In August, it would be eighteen years. Eighteen years a-growing, like the child himself. Eighteen years of searching faces on the street and in the crowds. Eighteen years of declining to hold other women's babies or play with their children. Years of walled-off longing. Of letting her few friends know that they should not ask about this, of letting Mark believe that they had actually decided not to have children, of telling herself that if she were meant to be a mother, deserved to be a mother, she would now have a one-year-old child, or a seven-year-old child, or a thirteen-year-old child, or an eighteen-year-old child, but she didn't deserve it because she had failed that child in the very first moment of his life, and wouldn't she just do the same thing to another child?

Merely adequate mothers, mothers harmed by their own terrible mothers, rotten mothers who destroyed their children in manners too numerous to conceive-they didn't give their children away. They held them and brought them home and took care of them-sometimes poorly, sometimes wrongly, but as well as they could. Those lousy parents, at least, had tried. Portia hadn't even tried. She had done what none of them had done, refusing even to look at the baby who moments before had been inside-inside-her own body. She hadn't touched him or carried him. She hadn't named him, even to herself. There weren't words for the terrible thing she had done, the terrible thing she was. Her only hope had been to keep it from herself and thus from anyone else who might have some misconceived inclination to think well of her-to love her.

She had phoned in some fraudulent malady to the office and also fraudulently claimed to be working at home, and ordinarily this would have been true, but in fact she had not been able to face a single one of the files Martha had pressed on her. Without them, there was no buffer, no distracting wedge to place between herself and herself, as she had-she now understood-been doing for years. In the great annual bombardment of lives-little lives, lives unmarred by the kind of gruesome and incapacitating flaw in her own life-there had lain the means of constant evasion, and now it occurred to her that this might be the very reason she had thrown herself back into it, year after year, to wade among the hundreds and thousands and ultimately hundreds of thousands of seventeen-year-olds, all fresh and new, none of whom could possibly be the one she had been looking for all along.

Now, that was finished. Now-this year-all of the names and aspirations and batting statistics and Latin citations and FFA honors and part-time jobs tutoring the neighbors' children in math belonged to seventeen-year-olds who might just possibly know her son. They might have run cross-country alongside her son or smoked cigarettes behind the maintenance shed with him. They were the cohorts her son might have had and the girls he might have once been in love with or the kids on his language immersion program in Barcelona. They were the cla.s.smates who might have beaten him in the student body president election or fouled him on the basketball court. They were the possible deadweight on his biology lab team, the cheerleaders who perhaps bounced alongside his football games, the buddies he theoretically pa.s.sed time with in the inane way teenage boys pa.s.sed time. Maybe they knew him. Maybe they could tell her what he was like.

Or maybe they could, actually, be him. Her own son. Born Lawrence, Ma.s.sachusetts, August 19, 1990. Name unknown. Parents unknown. Address unknown. Interests unknown. Talents unknown. Future plans unknown. Thoughts about her, the person who had sent him out into the world without seeming to care in the slightest, never to answer the questions he must have had or offer him the smallest comfort, never to come after him-unknown.

And the worst of it was that none of this was new. She thought, bizarrely, of an old ghost story she had long ago loved in a shivery, p.r.i.c.kly way, about a woman who dreams the same dream every night: old road winding through woodland, house glimpsed in the distance (on a cliff above the sea, of course), and how she walks up the long, long drive and knocks on the door to ask the old man inside if the house is for sale.

"Oh, you wouldn't want it," he tells her with a curious expression. "It's haunted."

"Haunted?" the woman asks. "By whom?"

"By you," says the man, closing the door in her ghostly face.

All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of these two ways: You are dead or I am dead. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died?

And then it occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.

Downstairs, the phone clicked alive in the empty rooms.

"Call from... Princeton... Univ.... Call from... Princeton... Univ...."

Once, long ago, this would almost certainly have been Mark, phoning as he walked home to see if he needed to stop at the store, or checking in on his way to whoever's house they were meeting at for dinner, to ask her to bring a bottle of wine from the cool corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt, their most unscientifically maintained "cellar." Neither of them cared overly much about wine. When they found something that seemed good to them, they tried to remember the name, but if the wine store on Hullfish Street didn't have the exact bottle, they were soon once again in the mora.s.s of lyrical names and vibrant labels, as likely to vastly overspend as they were to buy something everyone else seemed to know was dreadful. She hadn't set foot in the cellar since January, when she'd made one pointless visit to the chilly furnace, and took a moment to congratulate herself on at least not having drowned their breakup in whatever Shiraz or Merlot or, she supposed, unredeemable plonk might be down there. She wondered if Helen had been drinking wine or anything else as she slouched toward delivery. Europeans, Portia had noted, maintained a disdainful skepticism about the proscription against alcohol in pregnancy, citing various intellectuals whose mothers had apparently drowned themselves in Bordeaux; but Portia had once taken a cla.s.s with Michael Dorris at Dartmouth and had seen, many times, the professor with his adopted son, an addled, vacant boy destroyed by his mother's alcoholism before he could escape her by being born. When Dorris wrote his book about fetal alcohol syndrome the following year, she hadn't even needed to read it to know the connection was true.

When it happened to her, she drank nothing. She had done that much for him.

And he was brilliant. Eccentric, of course, but brilliant. Where had that come from? Not Tom, surely, who was smart in a plodding, capable way. Not from her. Susannah was bright but scattered, Tom's parents had been so closed off to her that she had no sense of what they thought, let alone how. The person she had always thought of as I'm OK-You're OK couldn't have had that much to contribute to Jeremiah, could he? Unless... what if he had been some sociologist or critic, preparing a blistering lecture on pop psychology for the idiot ma.s.ses? For the first time in days, Portia felt her face contract in a strained approximation of a smile. Was it not the height of narcissism to suggest that of the hundreds of thousands of vapid Americans who read that very book that very year, her biological father was the only one to read it for the purposes of scholarly vivisection?

Perhaps she was getting a little better.

To test this theory, Portia sat up in bed, clutching her own knees, which, she observed, were still clad in the jeans she had worn to Pennsylvania. They were slack with wear, undeniably grimy, and it occurred to her that it must be strange that she was wearing them at all, and also strange that she hadn't noticed the strangeness before. This is how depressed people behave, she suddenly thought, taking a mental step back to scrutinize the cross-legged person in the center of her slovenly nest. But the thought of being depressed made her smile again. She had never thought of herself as a depressive person. Depressive people rent their garments and howled in grief and took to their beds... well, like this. But had she ever felt, actually, depressed? She was a contained person, that was all. Even-keeled. Perhaps a little judgmental, but who could fault her for that? She judged for a living, didn't she, and it was ingrained, and she was a responsible representative of whatever it was she represented. She wasn't like Mark, who had had low periods, usually related to Cressida and the spiteful whims of his ex. Or her mother-Portia could see now that those last years in Northampton, Susannah had not been her habitual steamroller self, that something had left her household and her life when Portia departed for college, a slowly deflating balloon where the familiar person had once been. Susannah had indeed been depressed, Portia supposed. Maybe for a long time. Maybe until that phone call only a few months earlier and her crazy idea about taking in this mother and baby and just possibly starting the whole thing over again. I'm not like that, Portia thought fiercely, even as a fresh reminder of grief came rolling through her. She meant, she wasn't like that in life-her real, actual life. She wasn't a whiner or a self-flagellant or given to dramatic plunges like... well, again, like this one. The tearful thing she might be now, the thing made up of useless limbs and a brain that refused to make thoughts-it wasn't really her. It wasn't going to be her-please, please-for much longer, let alone forever.

She decided, in a very clinical way-as you might prescribe a course of supplements for some detected deficiency-to think of the last time she had felt happy, and she found, to ever growing distress, that she was feeling her way further and further back. Past the years with Mark and the various contentments therein, and the walks with Rachel, and the visits home to Susannah, always careful not to show her hand, holding back, always holding back, and the pleasure of doing her job well, and how she liked her house, or would surely like her house when it transmogrified, at some unknowable point in the future, into a home. She thought of endorphin highs, the heady combinations of good talk and good food at the tables of their friends-tables, she could not help but notice, that she had not seen since Mark's departure. She thought of how good it felt when they-when the admissions officers from the Ivy League and the other most selective colleges-had their meetings, nominally to build the fences that kept things neighborly, but somehow also to fan their mutual flame: find the great kids, the ones who dreamed and toiled and took nothing for granted, and bring them here, and give them what they need, and watch them change the world. Mark, when she had brought him along to one of these conferences (only once, and many years before), had shaken his head as they drove back to Hanover and said, "You're all such do-gooders."

And she had laughed, unsure of whether to take offense or be flattered. This was not news to her, of course. The newest admissions officers spoke only of what they dreamed of unearthing in some inner-city school or depressed, abandoned town. The older guard grew filmy eyed recounting the young doctors and engineers and novelists whose Cornell or Yale education had changed-no, made-their lives. That this rosy-hued altruism existed in direct contrast with the public face of the Ivy League admissions officer-which was something akin to the Witch in Snow White or the pompous and dismissive Professor Charles Kingsfield of The Paper Chase-only added to the perverse satisfaction of the matter. Portia actually knew several colleagues who had indeed chosen college admissions instead of the Peace Corps or VISTA or, more recently, Teach for America (itself a product of Princeton, or at least one Princeton student's senior thesis). Make the world better: her mother's never actually articulated life philosophy. And Portia had done that, she had, though Susannah herself had never gleaned or at least never acknowledged the connection. She had been stuck, eternally stuck, on the notion that Portia toiled in service to elitism and exclusivity, that her work was to preserve some antiquated ideal of American success as the exclusive property of already privileged white men. Susannah had been addled by the undeniable wealth of first Dartmouth and then Princeton, as if it were shameful for an educational inst.i.tution to have too much money. She had convinced herself that her daughter, raised so carefully to make everything right with the world, was in thrall to some imagined power trip of saying no and no and no and no, over and over again, all the while unclipping the velvet rope to motion inside the sons and daughters of suburban stockbrokers and generous alumni. At first, Portia had done her best to persuade her mother that admissions work was part of the solution, not a shoring up of the system itself. She'd explained to Susannah that elite universities were hot spots of social mobility, that admission to a Dartmouth or a Princeton could provide in four years what might have required generations a century before, and that the beneficiaries of these shining opportunities had every intention of aiding their communities, using their intellectual abilities to fix the problems that affected everyone, and serving as role models for others who followed. Where, exactly, was the problem in all this? But Susannah had clung to her own barricades, and after the first few years, Portia had surrendered: Fine, fine. I'm a maidservant to the patriarchy, a hapless flunky for the myopic American aristocracy, fanning the flames of its elitist inst.i.tutions so that future slacker generations can raise their kids in a gated community or play a round at the Maidstone Club, just as they've been doing since the first Pilgrim bottom landed smack on Plymouth Rock.

And yet. And yet. It might just possibly be time to cede the moral high ground, Portia thought dimly, observing the white knuckles of her oddly bony hands, which were indeed offputtingly spectral. I have been as stubborn as she was. And besides, there wasn't much to be proud of in the scene she currently set: woman alone, in the middle of her bed, in the middle of the day, in the middle of her life. Or perhaps not quite alone, as someone was apparently downstairs, alternately knocking at the front door and pushing the doorbell, which had long emitted a weakened chime.

Portia looked resentfully in this general direction.

Alone, moreover, had not been thrust upon her, but chosen-she saw this now so clearly, she wondered that it had never occurred to her before-within her relationship with Mark and beyond, in the people she had firmly pushed away, beginning with her own child and following on with friends, colleagues, and now with the man who had miraculously emerged, long past the time she deserved love, offering what felt astoundingly like love. All of that energy, she shook her head, spent keeping people out, just so that she could maintain this enviable solitude.

The person downstairs seemed disinclined to leave. The doorbell rang again, and the knocking continued. They must be thick, she thought irritably. She had half a mind to leave her bed and go downstairs and tell them, whoever they were, how thick they were, or if not thick, then rude, because wasn't this a clarion-clear no? And did they not understand the meaning of no?

Then, to her great surprise, she heard a key roll in the lock and the door swing open.

"Portia?... Portia?" The voice was shrill and laced with fear.

It was Rachel.

"I'm upstairs," said Portia, but the sound barely emerged.

"Portia?"

"Here!" she managed, like child answering attendance.

"I'm coming up."