Admission. Part 7

She drove home along Na.s.sau Street, the bag of new files on the seat beside her and the window down. Now only minutes from her house, she let herself feel, entirely feel, the stress and fatigue of the last couple of days-two flights, three school visits, and a night in which surfeit of emotion had met lack of sleep. And s.e.x. And, not least-though she was only, shamefully, getting to this part now-the fact of her own transgression. The weight of it all exhausted her, and there was little she craved more than a hot bath and an early night, to bed with her files, at least, if not early to sleep. She didn't know what was in the house to eat or what Mark's plans were, but she didn't want any distractions from the plan or, needless to say, any discouragement. Turning onto her street, with the towering cherry tree in her front yard already visible at the end of the block, she allowed herself the first hit of relief.

This was their second home in Princeton, the first being a nondescript ranch at the north end of town, not far from the shopping center: a sterile place, irredeemably ugly. They had moved here five years before, to this neighborhood known as the Tree Streets for its arboreal street names-Maple, Pine, Linden-but also as the Gourmet Ghetto because of its concentration of good places to buy food and dine out. In Princeton, sadly, this was saying a good deal. On their arrival, the town had been a culinary wasteland, with a single dull supermarket and only one other shop of note: an excellent fishmonger. The wonderful Princeton purveyors she had read about in Betty Fussell's gastronomic memoir, My Kitchen Wars-like the butcher who gamely ground pork and veal for clever, frustrated housewives in thrall to Julia Child-seemed to have perished, and all good restaurants, if any had existed, had evidently fled along with them. But some small transformation seemed to have taken hold, much of it in this cl.u.s.ter at the end of her own street: a natural foods market was now open and a fish restaurant, a good coffee shop, a decent Chinese. These establishments kept Princeton hours, it was true, but Princeton hours were themselves an improvement over Hanover, New Hampshire, hours. So she wasn't unhappy. At least, not about food.

The house was a product of the town's 1920s building boom, and it had a grace that had grown rarer with each pa.s.sing decade of Princeton construction. Few twenty-first-century tenants, like few twentieth-century tenants, had had the wit to leave well enough alone, but this house had somehow managed to survive with what the magazines so annoyingly referred to as "good bones." Still, and in spite of the fact that she had postponed caring about things like how nice her house looked until she actually lived in such a house, Portia could not seem to work up much enthusiasm for it. She ceded the decorations to Mark, choosing only the deep green couch and the living room rug, which even she now acknowledged clashed uncomfortably with the walls. Mainly, she kept it clean. Mark couldn't. He was a tidier, but dirt... dirt was beyond his abilities. He seemed not to understand the science of removing it. Worse, he seemed not to notice its existence, which frankly baffled her. Once-following an experiment in which she had left a pile of swept dust in the center of the living room floor for six days, ten days, two weeks, watching to see when he would, first, notice it and then, hopefully, take action to remove it-they had had a terrible quarrel. It was the night of their party, the party they usually had in the week between Christmas and New Year's, mainly for his colleagues in the English Department, but also for academics visiting from overseas ("strays and waifs," he called them), and Mark had spent the day dutifully making the house ready, ferrying gla.s.ses from the bas.e.m.e.nt, placing the chairs, setting up the bar, all the while stepping carefully around the pile of dust on the floor. He didn't see it. Or he didn't register it. Or he didn't mind it. And as the hours ticked closer to the hour of the party, her nerves frayed. Around five, she lost it and started screaming. By five twenty-five, she was thoroughly depleted and not remotely in the mood for their now imminent party, but she had at least come round to his stated view on the matter: that her resentment was displaced, excessive, not logical. After all, if she was so very troubled by the dirt on the floor, why hadn't she removed it herself? Why did she not remove it now? What was the point in being angry about it? And if it was true, as she claimed, that there were certain things, certain difficulties, he simply failed to note, then weren't there some synapses in her own domestic perceptions? That porch fixture bulb he'd asked her to replace the day he'd left for a semester's sabbatical in Oxford the previous year, only to find it encrusted by cobwebs and every bit as dark on the day of his return? The fact that she had done not one thing to implement her own aspirations for the "garden," as she rather pathetically persisted in thinking of their uncultivated front and backyards, had in fact done nothing for them at all beyond the overpriced mums she dutifully stuck in each fall and the pansies from the supermarket she dutifully stuck in each spring? Her gardening aspirations had outlasted her shelter magazine phase by a few years, but while she had gotten as far as charts and diagrams for the intended plantings, nothing had come of them. She had made nothing come of them. Nothing grew.

It was strange, she thought now, easing into the driveway. The house she had grown up in had been a control center for clubs and causes and campaigns, where the ma.s.ses were fed and plans hatched. Back then she had indulged in an idea of home, a home with frills and decoration, but even after all this time, their house had a for now feeling about it. The furniture, good enough for now. The colors, likable enough for now. As if it were not worth taking action against the generic ceiling fixture in the hallway, which a previous tenant had left in place of an original (probably gorgeous) item. As if there were some not yet articulated thing that had to happen before the living room got its truly intended blue and the right sleigh bed was even looked for, let alone found. Only every time she got close to wondering what that event might be, she found herself so thoroughly exhausted that she quickly made herself stop and think about something else.

There was a wonderful smell inside when Portia unlocked the front door, a smell that nonetheless carried with it some vague anxiety she wasn't inclined to identify. She heard the loud suck of their refrigerator unsealing and the almost immediate slap as it was shut again. Mark cooking, NPR from Philadelphia, a little on the loud side (he being a little on the deaf side). She put down her bag beside his briefcase. She put down her purse on the hall table. She didn't call out right away. The smell was rich and sweet: like fruit, but heavier. Chicken Marbella, she thought, snapping to attention. Chicken Marbella, the signature dish of an entire decade (namely, the 1980s), the dish you were more likely than not to be served at any dinner party given by any member of the bourgeoisie, or in any academic enclave from sea to shining sea, was nonetheless Mark's dish of choice when company was expected, because it was simple (after the first forty or so preparations), and because one could forgo the recipe and throw everything into the same ca.s.serole with abandon, and because most of the work could be done the day before. They never ate chicken Marbella when they were at home, alone. With dread, she stepped gingerly into the living room. All was worryingly tidy. A fire was laid. And beyond, through the open doorway, clean gla.s.sware twinkled from the dining table. Five places, but asymmetrical, as if one had been lately inserted and the others not yet adjusted to make this number seem intended, not accidental. This was more troubling than she could say.

Four places at the table... that, she realized, would have had a strangely familiar tone to it: two guests for dinner, obviously, on the night of her return, and Mark saying he would take care of everything, though she couldn't, just now, think who those two guests might be, and even if she could, what did it mean that there were five places? A stray-and-waif? A guest of their guests? The unmistakable pop of a cork from the kitchen. Red wine, opened to breathe. Clos Du Val most probably, twin of the bottle poured over the chicken an hour or earlier. Cousin to every bottle Mark had ever bought to serve with every preparation of chicken Marbella he, or she, had ever prepared, for far too many of the dinner parties they had ever given. And she was so tired. She turned and went back to the doorway and picked up her bag. She fought a brief, almost giddy urge to go back out to her car, to a motel on Route 1 with a queen-size bed and a remote control. Beside her purse there was a slip of paper she only now noticed, actually the back of a Wild Oats receipt, white with that pink stripe along the side that means: Replace the roll. It said, in his terse British print: "Your mother rang."

I would appreciate the opportunity to clarify a situation that occurred in the spring of 9th grade, when I was suspended for one week for alcohol offenses. This incident occurred at a time when my family was undergoing a difficult period, and, to put it bluntly, I had made some poor choices in the friends I was spending time with. One of these friends had an alcohol abuse problem, but I take responsibility for partic.i.p.ating in his abuse. I have regretted this incident many times since it happened, but it also helped to make me the person I am today. I certainly hope that this single youthful mistake will not adversely affect my application.

CHAPTER SIX.

ACADEMIC FOLK.

Your mother rang," Mark said. He came out of the kitchen wearing a green Whole Foods ap.r.o.n and holding out his hands, which were wet and stuck with tiny bits of mesclun.

"Hi," said Portia.

"Mwa." He kissed her on the cheek. "Was it dreadful?"

"What? No, not at all. It's the best time to be in New England."

"Oh yes."

His hair smelled of oregano. He was an enthusiastic and untidy cook, who left no utensil unturned in the kitchen. In vain had she once attempted to understand how a zester featured in a meal of shepherd's pie and green salad, but with time she had learned not to argue with the results.

"Chicken Marbella?"

"I know. It's too boring. But there was a meeting all this afternoon. I knew I wouldn't have time for anything else."

"No, it's fine. Everyone loves chicken Marbella." She looked past him at the table. "Who's our fifth?"

It was a calculated end run, this question. The third might reveal the first two, without her having to admit she'd forgotten.

"Rachel rang to ask if she could bring our new hire. It's fortunate, actually. I've been feeling bad about it. We're in November and I haven't lifted a finger. And she's my countrywoman."

"Oh." Portia frowned. "From Oxford, right? Virginia Woolf?"

"Yes." He turned and observed the table. "All of Bloomsbury, actually. Can you fix it up a bit? You're good at that."

"Yes, but..." He looked at her. "Do I have time for a bath? What time are they coming?"

"Seven. You have time. And ring your mother."

He went back to the kitchen, and she watched him: white shirt untucked, shoeless, hands aloft. He had, for all his heft, an almost irritating boyishness, no doubt to do with the soft English skin and overendowment of thick curling hair, once dark brown but now at least graying. She hung up her coat and went to the table. The table was dirty, so she removed the place settings, went to the cleaning closet, and came back with a rag. After she'd finished wiping the dust, she put everything back, straightening the place mats and placing the plates and gla.s.ses. One of the gla.s.ses was a flat tumbler, not a winegla.s.s. She took it into the kitchen.

"Are we short a winegla.s.s?"

"What?" He had the chicken Marbella on the stovetop and was stirring it with a wooden spoon.

"This is a water." She opened the cupboard and took out another winegla.s.s.

"Right. Oh, I had an e-mail from Cressida. She says she wants to go to university in the States."

"Hey, that's great," Portia said, putting the water gla.s.s back on the shelf. "What does her mother say?"

"I doubt she's told her. She won't, if she has any wit, not till she has one foot on the airplane. Can you imagine Marcie letting her come here?"

"She'll have to follow," Portia said.

He laughed. "Yes. Of course."

"And move into the dorm."

"My G.o.d."

"It smells good," she told him. "Just give me half an hour."

She went back to the table and replaced the gla.s.s, then took her bag upstairs. The fact that she now remembered what was supposed to be happening tonight, and when they had discussed it (only a couple of days earlier, at the beginning of the week), and what they had said about it (about David, Rachel's husband, who-being a philosopher-had idiosyncratic social skills), and how Mark had talked her into a dinner party on the night of her return (he would cook and clean up, he promised), was little comfort to her. She ran her bath and placed the new folders she had taken from the office on her bedside table. Had it been an ordinary trip, she might simply have made the transition: traveling saleswoman to hostess, perhaps even via the kitchen. She would have been tired, of course, but not so fundamentally worn out and... yes, actually, bereft. The bereft was new. And the guilt, of course. She was just now taking the measure of that guilt.

Drifting up the stairs, she recognized the theme music for National Public Radio's Marketplace. She ran her bath and climbed into the tub, fighting an urge to submerge herself entirely: the ritual purification for unclean women-that is to say, all women. Like most atheist Jews, Portia had never actually visited a mikvah, but she had always been curious. It just sounded so clean. Like a spa of soul-scouring proportions. Clean interested her. Did you have to believe for it to work, or did it work the way acupuncture worked, whether or not you accepted that currents of energy ran through your body? And what if it really did function as an absolution, the watery equivalent of a.s.signed penance in the confessional? Then she could wash away the residue of the fingerprints of John Halsey, along with what they had meant and how they had felt, things that were still so vivid there was nothing left to the imagination, and the unmistakable but impermissible and thoroughly troubling wish not to never see him again. Clean slate, she told herself, washing. I'm home. I'm involved. As I said, she thought, somewhat defensively.

In sixteen years, this hadn't happened. For either of them, she was certain, though there had always been another woman in their lives: Cressida, the daughter who was only twenty months old when she and Mark had met. Two other women, if you counted Marcie, Cressida's mother, though Portia had never actually met Marcie. Mark hadn't deserved the punishing stress of an enraged ex-girlfriend and the occasionally litigated afterlife of that long-ago relationship, not to mention the longing he felt for a daughter he never saw enough of. He was a good person. He was too good to deserve what she had done. She washed herself again. She wished she could not remember-so clearly, so pointedly-the heat of John Halsey's skin.

By the time she was ready, Marketplace had been supplanted by jazz and a plate of Camembert was in place on the coffee table. Portia put on the porch light when she came downstairs and lit the fire Mark had set. They were practiced hosts. They had spent the first years working out the kinks and now enjoyed a small reputation, very localized, among their friends. Dependable food: comfortable, not flashy. Dependable cast of characters: articulate, opinionated, usually affable, usually university affiliated. No fireworks. It didn't sound particularly exciting, but despite their reputation, she had found, academic folk liked peace and quiet when they went out for dinner. Princeton, like many another university town, had a certain reputation for domestic Sturm und Drang. Before moving here, in fact, she and Mark had both consumed Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem (which skewered the Philosophy Department) and Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth (booze and bad behavior among the Princeton scribes), in addition to the oft-cited My Kitchen Wars (bed hopping in the English Department); but things seemed positively sedate by the time they turned up in the mid-1990s. The bad old times, still fondly recalled by long-in-the-tooth professors, had given way to Gymboree and SAT prep, ubiquitous soccer, and benefits for the local hospital. People were too tired to sleep around, it seemed. Or so tanked up on antidepressants that they no longer felt the itch.

"You sit," Mark said, taking a gla.s.s from the table, pouring her some wine, and bringing it to her. "I said I'd do everything."

"I know. It's so nice of you. I feel like a guest in my own house."

"I can't get used to these short trips. I keep thinking you're going away for a week or two."

"Yes, I know. But this is so much better. Those West Coast trips just took it out of me. And I used to miss a lot while I was gone. I'd come back and some crisis had happened in the office. And I'd be going, 'What? What?' "

"Sounds ideal." He laughed shortly. "I wouldn't mind missing some of the crises."

Mark had taken over as interim chair the previous spring, when the august, longtime head of the English Department had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and abruptly retired. His tenure was supposed to be temporary, but there was a definite move afoot to draft him for something at least semipermanent. He was good at the sort of benevolent dictatorship required, it turned out, his light touch with the considerable egos involved matched by the sort of firm control the celebrated former chair had abdicated. The only undertow had to do with Mark's own scholarship, including a second book that was supposed to have been finished last year and now seemed even further from that goal than before the upheaval. He hadn't talked much about it in some time, since coming back from his Oxford sabbatical, actually, and Portia sometimes wondered if he had taken to this administrative work so eagerly because it buffered him from his colleagues' expectations or from-and this was, of course, far worse-their lowering expectations. Hired on the promise of his first book on Sh.e.l.ley, he'd been working on a long study of American and English Romanticism ever since. These days, consumed by the running of the department and the management of certain high-strung academics and scores of high-strung Princeton students, he didn't talk much about it.

"Here they are," Mark said. He moved past her and met them at the door. "Rachel, h.e.l.lo!"

"h.e.l.lo," Portia heard. "David's just parking. I've brought Helen."

"Yes," he said. "I'm so glad. Please come in."

Portia stood and turned, feeling-awkwardly-less like the hostess than like the first guest to arrive. She kissed Rachel and shook hands with Helen, who was small, with blond hair piled artfully on the back of her head (Like Virginia Woolf? she couldn't help thinking), and was wearing a silk scarf knotted around her throat in the way only European women seemed to master. "I'm so glad you could come," she said brightly. "We've been meaning to have you over for ages, but the term just got away from us."

"Not at all," said Helen. "I know how busy Mark is."

This was an off-script remark, Portia thought. Wasn't Helen supposed to say something about how overextended they both must be, host and hostess alike? Or all three of them-collectively busy! Or even just she herself overwhelmed, with her move to a new country, university, apartment. Portia was immediately irritated, which was unfortunate, as the evening had only begun and the woman in question, after all, already had tenure. But she felt dismissed, which was... well, an overreaction, of course. Certainly not enough to dislike Helen, Portia scolded herself. Obviously, Helen saw Mark in situ at the department. Obviously, she saw him doing fourteen things at once. And he had hired her. And plainly, she didn't know the first thing about Portia. Why should she?

"Can I get you something?" she asked. "Would you like some wine?"

"Do you have sparkling water?"

"We have Perrier," she said, hoping they did.

"Yes. What an enormous couch."

Not "pretty," Portia noted. Not "comfortable." Now she was offended on behalf of their couch, a deep, boatlike item covered in a green velvetlike fabric. It was her favorite place to read application folders when the bunker mentality of reading season set in. Admittedly, it was not very well suited to guests. At least not to very formal guests. Helen seemed to be a formal person. She perched on the edge of the couch and crossed her legs. Her dangling foot, clad in an expensive-looking T-strap leather shoe, pointed straight down. She looked up into Portia's eyes. She was waiting for her Perrier.

Portia went to get it. In the kitchen, the rice maker was percolating on the countertop, giving off a yeasty smell. A crisp salad was waiting to be dressed, and a cake box from Bon Appet.i.t, Princeton's uppity gourmet emporium, seemed to indicate Mark's plans for dessert. She took from the cupboard the same water gla.s.s she had lately put there and poured Perrier into it. She heard Rachel laugh.

When she got back to the others, David had arrived. He sat beside Helen on the deep couch, his knees apart, mauling the Camembert with a cheese knife. David was a philosopher, a term it had taken Portia some time to embrace. Not: "Taught philosophy." Not: "Was in the Philosophy Department." He philosophized; this was the term given to his work. It said something, she supposed, that she now lived among people who actually were the things they taught: poets, rocket scientists, diplomats, philosophers. And David was actually known for the work he did. There were people out there, she had learned, who avidly paid attention to what emerged from his utterly convoluted mind. She had been asked about him on recruiting trips by similarly brilliant, similarly antisocial high school students. She had even read admissions essays about his apparently world-famous abstract, "Metaphysical Reduction and the Reality of Numbers." David was a loyal and good-hearted person, though she had never once felt she had gotten past the most superficial of his layers. Maybe there wasn't anything under there, or at least anything available to her, most of him having been shunted to the work, and of course the children-he and Rachel had two, in grade school. But it had amused her to learn years earlier from Rachel that David was what pa.s.sed for socially gifted in the world of philosophers, a world populated by seriously obstructed individuals. It was a world full of men (philosophers, it turned out, were mostly men) who looked at Rachel's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, rather than her face, on being introduced. Rachel had laughed when she'd described this, but Portia had a feeling her levity on the subject was hard won. Rachel herself came from English (Bryn Mawr and Yale, before Princeton), where the men apparently looked you in the eye, at least at the c.o.c.ktail parties, and when she began to meet her boyfriend's, then fiance's, and then husband's colleagues, she had found herself alternately appalled, repelled, amused, and finally... philosophical. To motivate herself to attend David's professional events, she once told Portia, she had inst.i.tuted an add-a-pearl reward system, requiring that David purchase a pearl for this theoretical necklace every time one of his colleagues cast an untoward eye (never hand) south of her collarbone, or if he ignored her completely for a long evening as he and another philosopher lobbed theorems and formulae across her place at the table. (The formulae themselves had also taken some getting used to, Rachel explained. On sitting down together, apparently, philosophers immediately produced bits of paper and leaky pens from their jacket pockets. Then, very soon, they would begin ill.u.s.trating their conversation with formulae scribbled on the bits of paper. They could not seem to talk without these bits of paper, Rachel laughed, as Portia, who in her ignorance had not even known that there was some kind of overlap between the worlds of philosophy and math, frowned in confusion.) Rachel had attained her pearl necklace by the time she and David married. In fact, she had worn it at the wedding.

"David," Portia said. She leaned over him and kissed his cheek. "Don't get up."

He hadn't, actually, made a move to get up.

She handed the Perrier to Helen, who took it without even looking at Portia.

"Yes, it's been a bit of a problem," Mark was saying. "And there are a few in the department who just want to let it go, so that's become a difficulty in itself."

"Not me," Rachel said to Helen. "Of course, we're limited in what we can actually do. The student graduated three years ago. We can rescind the prize, of course. We can even request the monetary award, not that we could compel him to repay, but does that have any practical meaning at this point? And we don't have the other essays anymore, so even if we wanted to, we couldn't pick another winner. Not to speak of the legal issue of going into the endowment for a second awarding of the prize."

"What about criminal charges?" Helen said. "What about rescinding his degree?"

"Well, we'll be considering all of that when we meet next week," said Rachel. "But I can make all of the arguments against doing either of those things, much as I personally would like to see them done."

"What is it?" Portia said, taking one of the chairs and picking up her wine. "What's happened?"

"Absolutely, his degree should be rescinded!" Helen said sharply. "Why is it even up for discussion?"

"The student who won the Fritz Prize three years ago," Rachel explained. "It's for an original work of literary criticism. Not something done for a cla.s.s, you know. The student who won wrote about John Berryman."

"That should have been a clue!" Mark said genially.

"He cheated?" Portia asked. The conversation seemed to allow no other possibility.

"We would never have known," said Rachel. "And that, I think, is a big part of why we seem to be taking it so personally. You know, it's gone beyond our being furious at the student. Now we're humiliated, not just for not picking it up at the time, but for having to be told by another undergraduate."

"Who was the undergraduate?" asked David, still in his sprawled posture at the back of the couch.

"A senior. She came in a couple of weeks ago to look at past winners of the prize, before she started her own paper. But of course, being the very thorough Princeton student she is, she also went online and started looking at the prizewinning essays at Yale. Yale has an identical award, endowed by the same family. And there it was, the winner of the Yale prize in 1983. Different t.i.tle, but the same subject, 'Jazz in the Dream Songs.' He hadn't changed a comma. The student brought it to us last week, and we've been barely keeping the lid on until we can hold an internal meeting."

"Has the student been informed?" David wanted to know.

"That he's a cheat? I'd imagine he doesn't need to be told." Helen shook her head. The great loose bun, Portia noted, moved dangerously.

"That we know about it? No," said Rachel. "Not yet."

"I don't want to go to the dean without a departmental recommendation," Mark explained. "It's a far less straightforward thing to get than I imagined it would be. There's a certain little-to-be-gained, much-to-be-lost school of thought, you see."

"I do not see," Helen said. "You'll have to forgive me. I am a newcomer, and it all looks blindingly clear to me."

"If it gets out-" Rachel began.

"When," Mark corrected. "When it gets out."

Rachel sighed. "It becomes an irritating little item that won't go away, or at least anytime soon. A student cheats, but the high-and-mighty Princeton English Department doesn't even notice." She held up her gla.s.s to Mark, and he refilled it. "Granted, it's not an all-out disaster, like plagiarism from the faculty, but those two ideas, cheating and Princeton, would still be sitting right up next to each other. And that affects all of us, not just the department."

"Well, it's not good, of course. But why is the university afraid of showing a flaw if it's in aid of a greater principle?"

Any of the three of them could have answered, Portia thought. But no one spoke, and in the ensuing moment, which was not a comfortable moment, not a pleasant social moment, she understood that it fell to her. As the nonacademic, she supposed. The one most enmeshed in Princeton-as-financial-construct, that unfortunate nod to commerce, which too many faculty members, she knew perfectly well, did not deign to acknowledge unless they absolutely had to. She was not an artist or a scholar. She wouldn't cure cancer or even illuminate the humblest property of the humblest life form or generate a single new idea to be added to the evolving total of new ideas. There would never be a book t.i.tle beside her name, unlike the rest of them. She merely helped turn the wheel that kept them all sheltered and fed, not to mention free to do whatever it was they did to make their mark. Well, she wasn't going to apologize for that.

"Among the top American colleges, there's a constant shuffle for position," Portia said, addressing Helen. "Harvard and Yale and MIT and Stanford, all of us compete for the best students and the best faculty, not to mention funding from both private and public sources. Where we stand, in comparison with other great universities, is important to us, because that position impacts us in a lot of ways, some more obvious than others. It's kind of a contentious issue right now, actually, the whole ranking thing."

Helen seemed to perk up at the idea of a contentious issue. "Oh yes?"

"U.S. News and World Report has been ranking American colleges and universities for about twenty-five years. The rankings are very closely followed, though there's a great deal of disagreement about whether they're a good thing overall. In fact, there's a movement now to withhold data from the magazine. Not to partic.i.p.ate, in other words."

"Yeah?" David said. "Since when?"

"A couple of years." Portia shrugged.

"And how do they arrive at the rankings?" Helen wanted to know. "Is it by academic results?"

Portia shook her head. In Helen's...o...b..idge universe, the reputation of individual colleges rose and fell by the annual examination rankings. She couldn't even conceive of a comparable system here.

"That's part of the problem. There are a number of factors, like faculty-student ratio and selectivity, and what percentage of the admitted students were in the top tenth of their high school cla.s.ses. But then there are also things like the rate at which alumni give money to the school."

"You're joking," Helen said, appalled.

"And on the other hand, it doesn't measure things like public service or how many students go on to do graduate work. I mean, you would come up with entirely different rankings if you changed the formula, but U.S. News seems to have dominated the market with one set of factors, and it really does affect the numbers who apply. Students want to get into the school with the number one next to its name just a little bit more than they want to get into the number two school."