Getting In: A Novel (13 page)

“I am not confusing nerves with lack of desire, though there is no such thing as a sure bet,” he began. Trey started to protest, but Brad held up a hand and his father, surprisingly, went back to his clubs. “There is no such thing as a sure bet, but I’m probably the valedictorian and everybody acts like I’m Crestview’s best
chance at Harvard, so sure, if anybody’s going to get in it’ll probably be me, especially with the legacy thing, unless…”

“Thank you for including the family in your list of assets,” said Trey, dryly, cutting him off before he could raise the specter of Roger’s behavior.

“
Dad.
I just don’t think I’ll be happy there.”

His father polished his three wood and waited, wondering what chromosomal ding on Alexandra’s side produced boys who perceived an imaginary link between rebellion and happiness. He cautioned himself to remain calm at all costs. His first, unguarded response to Roger’s news, a loud “You’ve got to be kidding me,” had not put the boy in the mood for reasoned deliberation. Self-control was essential to a positive outcome.

“I just don’t think I’ll be happy there,” Brad said again, stuffing his hands into his jeans pockets and starting to pace. “I just don’t see myself being a lawyer. I don’t know, maybe I should be a sculptor, or maybe an architect if that sounds more responsible….”

“Brad, please.” The imperative in Trey’s voice worked as it always had. Silently, Brad watched as his father walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind his desk, knowing exactly what was coming next. Trey retrieved a small, slightly battered rectangular black case, placed it on the desk between them as though it contained an heirloom jewel, and flipped the two metal clasps that held it shut. Brad smelled the musty smell that he associated with every unpleasant lecture he had ever sat through and waited to see how the clarinet pertained this time.

Over the years, Trey had used his childhood clarinet to illustrate a variety of life lessons. When Brad was a toddler, his father showed him the clarinet but did not let him touch it, because we respect other people’s possessions unless they give us permission to use them. At nine, bored and frustrated by soccer, Brad found out that his father had practiced the clarinet diligently, even though he disliked the daily hour’s drill, because you get out of life what you
put into it, and nobody has anything coming to them without hard work. In middle school, the clarinet represented dedication—and if that lecture backfired when Brad started paying what Trey considered to be too much attention to woodworking, a reprise came in handy a few years later, when it was time to decide how many APs to take. For a time, Brad had lived in terror of the day when he would find out how the clarinet fit into his father’s lecture about responsible sex, but happily, Trey seemed perfectly willing to leave that conversation to his wife, who never broached the subject but told her husband that she had.

Brad watched with a new horror as his father lifted the segments out of their worn velvet nest and started to fit them together. Until today, his father had settled for using the clarinet as a visual aid, but now it looked as though he might actually play it. Brad could not decide what would be worse, a show of surprising talent or a pathetic musical misfire. He felt a tiny thrum of panic. He would have preferred a know-it-all little sister to the damned clarinet.

“Hey, the famous clarinet,” he said, with a weak smile.

Trey held up the clarinet and peered down its shaft as though he were a marksman sighting his prey. He had no intention of playing a note, but he needed something to do with his hands.

“My prep school orchestra needed a clarinet, so I began lessons in third grade. In high school I played with both the orchestra and the marching band. When it was time to apply to college I considered applying to Oberlin to major in music.”

Brad squirmed and waited. The bit about Oberlin was new information, but he could tell that this was a pause for effect, not an invitation to respond. His father sat up a bit straighter and locked his gaze on his son.

“And then my father asked me a very simple question: what would happen if I did?”

“Were you good enough?”

Trey waved away the question. “There are things we have to set aside as we grow up,” he said. “The question of whether I was any good is beside the point, and my father helped me to realize that. Imagine what our life would be like if I had pursued music. How would I support your mother and you? How would I provide not just financial support but the kind of emotional support, the constancy, the stability that a family needs?”

“But Grandpa was rich. You could have done anything and we wouldn’t have been broke.” And you would have been a musician, Brad thought, so Roger might have hung around. With almost ten years and a wing of the house between them, Brad barely knew his departed older brother, so there was not much to miss. Still, he had to wonder how things might have turned out if Trey had done what he wanted to do.

“And my father’s wealth buys me what? What kind of a son would I be if I exploited his wealth so that I could sit around and play the clarinet? A parasite. An opportunist.”

Trey left the clarinet on his desk and walked back over to his golf bag, where he began to polish his three wood for the second time. “Children always think that they’re the first generation to want to do something interesting,” he said, glancing up as the silent Cal quarterback got knocked to the ground by a silent Stanford linebacker. “They think their parents were born this boring. This limited. That’s how they see adult responsibility. My father thought it about my grandfather, I thought it about my father, and now you think it about me. But here is the truth: Every dull parent was once an interesting person with ideas his parents did not want to hear. No, not every dull parent. Some of them were dull from the moment they were born. But not your father or your grandfather or your great-grandfather. We were adolescents”—and here his pacing slowed, as though each word were a complete thought—“and then we came to understand the obligations and challenges of adulthood. You have that same great opportunity.
To continue a tradition of excellence and accomplishment. That is not dull.”

There it was. In this season’s lecture, his dad’s clarinet symbolized a discarded and irresponsible passion, the musical equivalent of an adolescent fling, or Brad’s interest in architecture, or anything else on the list of things the Bradley men did not do once they became men. Trey considered even a fleeting infatuation with the arts to be a condition one grew out of.

Trey raised his arm in a sweeping gesture, encompassing not just the study but everything it stood for.

“Someday you’ll own this house, and your mother and I will be out in Palm Springs playing golf. This is a good room for a hobby. Tear out the bookshelves. I’ll take the desk with me. Make it a wood shop. Make it the place you go to catch your breath and build things.” He put the three wood back in the bag and looked at his son.

“So. Are we all set?”

“Yes, sir,” said Brad.

“Good,” said his father. He hit the
MUTE
button to bring the sound back up, and the room filled with the Stanford marching band’s rendition of “California Dreamin’.”

Brad slogged upstairs, opened his laptop, and cut and pasted the Brewster McCloud essay into the last vacant space in Harvard’s online application. Without hesitating, he clicked
SUBMIT
. There. He had done his dad a big favor and not used the legacy essay.

He fell back onto his bed. This was what four generations of ambition had bought him, five if he counted those anonymous Welsh ancestors who decided that Tregaron was not the place to start an empire. Brad was heir to enough money to make his grandchildren rich, even if Trey reconsidered and wrote Roger back into the will. The day after he graduated from law school, he could start work at his father’s firm, incurring the resentment of every em
ployee who was not the boss’s son. He could have this house or a bigger one, a weekend place and a philanthropic presence. That was what his mom liked to call it, a philanthropic presence.

He could inhabit his father’s life. Brad groaned, rolled over, and buried his face in the pillow. The future that Preston Bradley III had in mind for Preston Bradley IV was essentially a maintenance job.

Maintenance.

That was Brad’s presumptive fate. Somebody had to manage the family empire, and Brad was the obvious, in fact the only, candidate. Roger was not even in the running. Roger got to dance and Brad got to be responsible. Some reward system: the prize for not driving his parents nuts, it seemed, was the opportunity to continue to do what they thought he ought to do. Brad’s life was to be the epilogue to generations of cumulative success. He was the family’s fiscal tree trimmer. He was the fiduciary pool guy.

Liz awoke to a silent house on Saturdays. If her room had been darker, or the neighbor’s Chihuahua quieter, she might have slept until noon. But her bedroom curtains were no match for the eastern sun, and the nervous little dog felt a compelling need to chronicle the slightest motion outside the apartment building on the corner, so Liz never got the chance to feel guilty about sleeping through half of her parents’ workday. The greatest indulgence of her weekend morning was to lie in bed, stare at the ceiling, and imagine what might happen next.

She had to be a little careful when she talked to her parents about the future. They might say they wanted nothing more than for her to go to Harvard, but there had to be a bit of envy tucked into the folds of that dream. How could there not be? Her father had been an engineer who worked on roadway overpasses and hoped someday to build a bridge over water instead of over pavement,
and now he drove a cab six days a week. Her mother had all but run a children’s clinic for three doctors, and now she squandered her compassion on patients whose biggest challenge was to look the age they lied about being, and spent her Saturday mornings driving the mother of one of those patients to the beauty salon, because the woman was embarrassed to be seen in Beverly Hills in the van from the assisted-living center. If their lives had unfurled in a logical and just fashion, with the kind of fantastic momentum Los Angeles advertised, they would have had more today than when they started. It did not work that way when passports and job recertification were involved. Liz’s parents had traded personal accomplishment for Liz’s future, which made their ambitions for her complicated. She had to go to Harvard to pay them back, but if she did, the gap between them would be enormous.

At eight o’clock on an unfettered morning, she wanted nothing more than to fulfill their expectations, not because she wanted to be away from them but because she wanted an education that made her immune to circumstance. She wanted to prepare herself for a career so safe, so essential, that fate would never show up at her door to inform her that her native land had hit the skids and starting tomorrow she would be a cocktail waitress or a dog groomer in a booming oil-rich nation in the Middle East. She wanted always to be in demand, doing something substantial enough to compensate for what had happened to her folks. With a cool pragmatism, she had begun to clip articles about autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s. Nobody was going to figure those out in her lifetime.

For that matter, she wanted to be at a school where everyone was as smart as or smarter than she was. She wanted never again to walk by a sniggling gaggle of girls who called out to her, “Hey, Ivy, you know, like in League?” Liz had pretty much given up on finding friends at Ocean Heights. She settled instead for working nonstop and told herself it was an investment in a happier future.

Valedictorian heaven. That was where she would be in the fall.

She got out of bed, smoothed the sheets and blanket and plumped her pillow, and put on the hoodie and sweatpants Yoonie had brought home on Friday, the store tags still on them, one of the occasional bequests from Dr. Joy, who sometimes bought the wrong color for Katie, or a sweater she did not need. Dr. Joy insisted that it was easier to give the clothes to Yoonie than to take the time to drive back to the Grove or the Promenade to return them, so in a way Liz was doing her a favor by accepting them. Dr. Joy was glad that the girls were the same size, and that was that. She refused to listen to a single word of protest from her nurse.

Liz was particularly pleased with this latest inheritance, which was incredibly soft, and much more to her liking than the last offering, a wraparound cardigan whose long tails flopped like octopus tentacles unless she bound herself once, twice, three times and tucked up the ends. Liz did not really have taste, which would have required wasting time paying attention to clothes, but she had severe criteria, and she rejected most of what passed for fashion because it was nonsense. There was no structural reason for those ridiculous tails, but the sweats were soft, and loose without being baggy, and a comforting shade that the tag identified as sea foam. She was happy to have them.

Liz was taller than either of her parents, slender like both of them, and the planes of her face could look harsh when she was tired. The sweats smoothed the edges a bit, and the color made her think of the ocean, which as far as she was concerned was the best thing about Los Angeles. In these clothes, on a solitary morning, Liz almost felt at ease.

The final copy of her Harvard application was stacked on the kitchen table next to a wax-paper-wrapped bagel with cream cheese and a room temperature chai latte, clearly an early-morning purchase by her father, who equated excessive amounts of dairy
products with prosperity. Next to the plate, a coffee cup filled with the pink alyssum that overran everything else Yoonie tried to plant on the parkway. Liz carried the bagel over to the sink, squeezed both halves together until she reached what she considered the proper proportion of bagel to filling, and scraped the extruded cheese into the garbage. She poured the latte into a little saucepan, skimmed off half the foam, and reheated it. Satisfied with breakfast on her own terms, she sat down at the table.