Getting In: A Novel (12 page)

No one at all spoke to Lauren, because a hardened high school senior on tour knew that autonomy made a stronger impression than camaraderie.

At eleven, having visited several identical dormitory rooms and a bunch of empty classrooms, the two tour leaders herded their two dozen charges toward an auditorium in the oldest building on campus, which bore dignified witness to the amount of time that Vassar had been doing things right. A tall, slender, stern woman stepped to the podium and introduced herself. She was second-generation Vassar admissions, dressed in a first-generation uniform of silk blouse and sensible skirt; she wore pearls without irony and oversized bifocals, the ones with the earpiece attached to the bottom of the frame instead of the top, without shame. She
smiled without sincerity.

“My mother liked to say that she would’ve rejected every single girl Mary McCarthy wrote about in
The Group,
” she said, with a parched New England chuckle. “And I have inherited that high standard for Vassar’s incoming class.”

She proceeded to recite what she called the “recipe for success” at Vassar, which involved straight As, being in the top 5 to 10 percent of one’s class, community service, extracurricular activities, an application essay about an absolutely unique topic, and incomparable test scores. She frequently mentioned her own version of the holy trinity, Harvard, Yale, and Vassar, as though Princeton, Columbia, and a half dozen other impossible schools no longer existed, as though these three schools bestowed the only diplomas worth having. Her job was to change the perception of the L.L. Bean dad, to make Vassar a destination college.

“If you don’t have straight As,” she said, “then perhaps you need to ask yourself if you should be in this room. Or will you be happier at a school that doesn’t set the bar quite so high? As for the rest of you, the ones who’ve met every criterion I’ve laid out, I look forward to reading your applications in the coming months. And now, off you go to enjoy this beautiful fall day. Thanks so much for coming.”

Lauren and her parents headed for the nearest exit and walked to the main gates without saying a word. Once they were safely on the street, out of view of the other tour families, Joel wrapped his arms around Nora and Lauren.

“You cannot tell me that every kid in that room had straight As,” he said.

“That’s for sure,” said Lauren. “I don’t.”

Nora’s voice was as bright as stainless steel. “They can’t have you, is what I say. Let’s go get free tea.”

The full afternoon tea, as it turned out, involved two plastic domes, one covering striated multicolored cheese cubes and the
other red grapes, alongside a carafe of coffee and another of hot water. There was a cereal bowl full of assorted tea bags, another of slightly dehydrated lemon wedges, individual plastic tublets of cream, sugar, and artificial sweetener, and a plate of bulbous muffins. A set of white plastic tongs hung from the lid of the cheese dome.

Joel went through the motions and took his plate over to the couch in front of the fireplace. Nora studied the contents of the cheese dome as though there were a difference between one cube and another, and Lauren drifted over to the picture window to stare at the Lilliputian puddle that imagined itself a lake. Five days, and all she had succeeded in doing was make Northwestern seem even more alluring. Evanston did not feel like a small town the way Poughkeepsie and some of the other towns did, and Chicago did not feel harsh the way New York sometimes did to her. Northwestern was the best of all possible worlds, which was exactly what she had come on this trip to stop thinking. She glanced over at her dad, who could not find a thing in the local newspaper worth turning the page for, and at her mother, who seemed to have decided that late-afternoon hunger was preferable to any of the muffins. Lauren rested her cheek against the glass.

“Are we close to anything at all?” she asked.

Alexandra Kirk Bradley understood from the day Trey
slipped his great-grandmother’s engagement ring onto her finger that her job description involved administering certain of the Bradley traditions. She considered herself a highly qualified candidate, third generation in everything that mattered, from the Pasadena Junior League to the mansioned hillsides of La Cañada to the dressage finals at the annual Flintridge charity horse show, where her father and grandfather had always purchased two ringside tables apiece to accommodate any last-minute guests. She knew a small sliver of life very, very well, and she was perfectly content to leave the rest to others who were as experienced in their specialties as she was in hers. Alexandra might not be a commanding physical presence—the first time Trey met her, he had the eerie sense that he could see right through her to the other side, she was that frail, that pale, that dainty—but she knew how to do what she knew how to do. Her oldest girlfriends, who had called her Birdy in high school, insisted now that she reminded them far more of a dove than a sparrow.

Privately, she felt more like a little chicken, a
poussin
, darting this way and that, trying to get her bearings. That was what Trey had called her on their Paris honeymoon, or had tried to, except that
petit poussin
came out
petit poisson
, and he had spent several days apologizing for calling her a little fish. It was the first and last time he behaved in a deferential manner. Trey was never
harsh, but he was definitive, on everything from her family’s recipe for leg of lamb, which he summarily rejected, to the benefits of living in Hancock Park rather than near her folks in Pasadena, to the disposition of family names. Their first son, Roger, was named after Trey’s maternal grandfather, and their second son was Preston Bradley IV, always to be called Preston and nothing shorter.

Alexandra dutifully insisted that the nanny call her younger boy Preston, while other mothers and nannies, rendered inarticulate by love, referred to their toddlers as boo-boo or zee-zee, as bunny-bun or m’hija. The Bradleys donated $25,000 to Best Step Preschool, in return for which everyone on the staff was instructed to avoid affectionate diminutives. The same order accompanied a $50,000 donation to Ashland Elementary, but Alexandra had not taken into account her six-year-old son’s teary refusal to answer to any name but Brad. He became the boy with three names—Brad at school, Preston at home, and Four with and only with his father, a small reminder from husband to wife of exactly whose lineage was the dominant one.

She had fewer opportunities to call her son by any name, lately, as Brad had long since stopped talking to her about anything of significance, and everyone’s schedule was so full. October was the start of Alexandra’s charity season, with an event every weekend—a Junior League luncheon to gather supplies for homeless families, whose members would enter the coming year wearing repurposed T-shirts commemorating everything from Fashion Week to Lollapalooza; the Revlon Run/Walk for breast cancer research; a church-sponsored 5K run for adult literacy, to which she donated accumulated copies of
The New Yorker
; and a food drive that involved the aggressive gifting of frozen turkeys and boxed stuffing to families whose food heritage did not include turkeys and stuffing.

Alexandra had inherited each of her target charities from her mother, except for the breast cancer event, and she had decided
that this would be her last year for that cause unless the participants showed a bit more restraint. She wanted to raise money without drawing attention, as her mother and grandmother had done, and she was rattled by women, most of them newcomers to the charity circuit, who wanted face time with their beneficiaries, or whose passion was fueled by a personal saga they felt compelled to recount. Trey’s Jewish partner had once congratulated her for aspiring to what his religion defined as the highest form of charity, giving anonymously to an anonymous recipient. While she thought that was a bit excessive—one wanted to feel that those who received help deserved it, and a little recognition was always nice—she did like the part about never actually having a conversation with the people who benefited from her efforts.

This year, she had added to her roster a luncheon at the Peninsula Hotel, sponsored by the bank’s private investment group for families who gave away over a million dollars a year. Another of Trey’s partners handled the Bradleys’ philanthropy, but Alexandra loved the idea that she was taking on new responsibilities, one of the strategies suggested by the therapist who had come to Crestview to talk to parents about the empty nest. The bank’s scheduled speaker was an expert on ethical wills, which enabled the philanthropist to dictate from beyond the grave the good work he expected his heirs to do on his behalf or risk disinheritance, a topic of great interest to Trey and Alexandra, who were not about to let mortality alter their long-range agenda. As one of the event organizers, Alexandra had to show up early and stay late, but Trey was not going at all, some double-talk about respecting his wife’s independence being a nice cover for wanting an afternoon to himself. Saturday was the one day of the week when Trey was neither at the office nor on the golf course, and he was loath to give it up.

Brad was pacing circles in the entry hall when his mother came downstairs wearing a navy blue suit that made her skin look like skim milk.

“Hey, Mom, you look ready to take care of business.”

She adjusted her jacket and checked the contents of her handbag.

“Well, that’s a nice thing to hear from the young man of the house,” she said, uncertain about what to do next. Alexandra stepped toward her son for a kiss just as he decided that he did not need a heavy sweatshirt, and she almost took an elbow to the forehead, which must have been the reason her eyes threatened to fill with tears. She looked away as though she were checking the way her stockings descended into her pumps, blinked fast, regained her inner balance, smiled too brightly, and was gone.

Brad stood at the door and waited until he heard the whir of the electronic gate. She was gone for at least three hours. With barely a week left before the Bradleys’ self-imposed November 1 filing deadline for Harvard, Brad finally had the chance to approach his father without fear of interruption.

Trey was in his study, one of two twin rooms on either side of a back hallway that led to a large bricked patio, the only surface in all of southern California that a family in search of a New England gestalt could afford to finish in weathered brick; a patio might break up in an earthquake, but it had nowhere to fall. To the left, Trey’s study, furnished in the high testosterone of the Ralph Lauren line, wallpapered in a deep red plaid, carpeted in the color of a mighty stag’s blood after it was killed by a single perfect shot to the heart, lined with bookshelves stocked with leather-bound classics. Under the windows, an antique partner’s desk that Alexandra’s decorator had found in the little showroom with the British name that he favored for the extra 10 percent commission the owner padded into the price and split with him on top of his normal cut. In front of the bookshelves, the big black leather and cherry wood Eames lounge chair and ottoman that Trey’s father had bought for him when he passed the bar exam.

To the right of the hallway was an equally large room done up to look as though it had survived decades of salt air and Atlantic chill. Bleached wood couches covered in chemically aged cotton stood on bleached wood floors against bleached linen walls. On a long wooden table the color of driftwood, Alexandra kept a set of fabric-covered boxes, a sewing machine she never used, and a large wicker basket filled with yarn that was suspiciously color-coordinated to its surroundings. Occasionally Brad would notice a pair of knitting needles sticking out of one of the balls—today there was a globe of marigold yarn anchored by two big natural wood needles—but he never saw a finished project, never got so much as a homemade scarf at Christmas, and he had come to realize that the yarn and needles were part of the set dressing, like his dad’s books or the bottle of single-malt scotch whose level had not wavered in years.

Along the full length of the long back wall of his mother’s room, arrayed on a single shelf, were souvenirs of the one aspect of her former life that mystified Brad—a row of framed photographs of Alexandra on horseback, posed always on the same white horse, a ribbon dangling from its bridle, her parents and sometimes the trainer standing next to her holding a silver cup or a silver platter and some flowers. His mother had been brave enough to ride a horse and good enough to win some blue ribbons. It made no sense to him at all.

He had asked her about it once, and she had waved him away with an airy, “Oh, it was just something you did,” as though getting a horse to do her bidding were as easy as riding a bicycle. For all Brad knew, it was. Trey had done his best to make dismissive-ness sound affectionate.

“Let’s remember,” he said, giving his wife’s elbow a playful squeeze, “it’s not like they ever moved very fast or left the ground. Dressage. Horse dancing, isn’t that what you called it?”

“Yes,” Alexandra had said. “Horse dancing.”

Brad stood in the hallway and forced himself to focus. When he had successfully excised the image of a dancing horse from his brain, he took what he hoped was a decisive step into the doorway of Trey’s office.

Trey was watching the Stanford-Cal football game while he cleaned his golf clubs. Two simultaneous tasks was the closest he ever got to doing nothing.

“Dad.”

Trey looked up, reached for the remote control, and hit
MUTE
, but he did not turn off the set.

“Yes.”

“Can I talk to you?”

Trey gestured at the Eames with his putter. Brad hated the chair, which made him feel at a disadvantage, splayed out like a bug on a mounting board for his father’s inspection, but it was either there or the desk chair, which would make this seem too much like a meeting.

He settled in, looked at his dad, and wondered how old he would be when he woke up one morning and looked like that—like a bad watercolor of his former self, a thin, diluted, smudged version of who he used to be. In old photos, in the annual family reunion shots, in white tie on his wedding day, Trey looked unnervingly like Brad. In newer photos, he looked like he had vinegar in his veins. The handsome that got in Brad’s way burned out quickly, it seemed—the bright eyes faded, the hair lost its heavy sheen, and slender became gaunt. Or perhaps Trey’s life made him look like a ghostly version of his former self. Brad wanted to believe that being an estate lawyer took its toll on the living, even if the estates belonged to famous people with wacky codicils and questionable witnesses, because if that was true, if that was the defining variable of Trey’s life, then Brad had a
chance of not growing up to be like his dad. Over the summer, he had made a derisive joke about how his dad saw dead people, an opening salvo in his campaign to liberate himself from the Bradley legacy. In response, Trey had drawn up a list of his current clients, annotated with their Oscar and Emmy and Tony nominations, if they were any good, or their box office triumphs, if they were not.

They had stopped just short of an argument. They always did, thanks to an unspoken agreement struck six years earlier, when Brad started at Crestview and his older brother dropped out of Harvard, three weeks into the fall term, to join a dance commune in Portland. None of them had heard a word from Roger since the day he appeared on the doorstep to announce his decision, sending Trey into an impotent rage that lasted the subsequent night and half the next day and involved a bottle of Glenfiddich, a putter, and a wall clock. His only reference to his older son, once he had awakened from a sodden nap and taken a long, hot shower, was that he was glad he had not squandered the name Preston on such a loser.

Trey was ashamed that twelve-year-old Brad, now the single repository of his ambition, had seen him like that, and Brad was frankly terrified that he had. No one mentioned it again, just as no one mentioned Brad’s crying jag about his name, but from that day forward Brad had tried not to give his dad a hard time. Until now, that is.

“Application ready to go.” Trey presented it as a statement, not a question.

“Yes, sir. I thought I’d send it tomorrow. Like the good old days. Early.”

Like the good old days?
Brad winced at how dumb he sounded.

Trey shook his head. “End of an era. And nobody I’ve talked to there can give me a satisfactory explanation as to why they had to
let early decision go. Because financial aid kids need to know all their options? Great. In the meantime, don’t we lose some of the best kids?”

Brad wondered how many nobodies his dad had called, and who the “we” were who lost the best kids.

“Dad, I don’t want to go.”

Brad had to look down when he said that, so he did not notice his father’s eyes flit to the screen for the Stanford touchdown. He worried, instead, that his father had not heard him, that the knot in his throat had muffled his voice. He coughed to clear the way and repeated himself.

“I don’t want to go to Harvard, Dad.”

Trey considered the head of the putter, which was cleaner than it had been on the day he bought it, store dust being what it was. He slid the putter back into the bag, put the leather cover over the head of the club, and only then looked at his son.

“Don’t you think it’s a little late in the game to make that announcement? No, that’s not the correct first question. Are you saying you don’t want to go to protect yourself in case they turn you down, which is patent nonsense? If not—if you believe you can make a substantial case for another school—then I have to question your sense of timing. So. Is this nerves, or have you convinced yourself that there is a better school than Harvard, which will be news to Harvard?”

“Boy, good thing you didn’t become a prosecutor,” said Brad with a shift, his discomfort registered by the upholstery, which responded with a resentful squawk. He stood up. He had no chance of winning as long as he was thrashing around on that chair.