Getting In: A Novel Read online

  He reached over to the stack of essays for Brad’s second effort, hoping that it was a new version of the architecture essay, knowing before he read the first line that it was not.

  A college’s policy of giving preference to legacy applicants might not seem fair to a deserving candidate who happens to be the first in his or her family even to go to college, but those of us who stand to benefit from it appreciate the powerful lure of being, in my case, the fourth generation to attend Harvard.

  It makes me part of the narrative that has defined our family. My great-grandfather went to Harvard as an undergraduate and then to Harvard Law, and he worked for many years at a large Manhattan law firm before moving his family to San Francisco to open his own firm there. My grandfather went to Stanford because he wanted to be near his family, but then continued tradition by attending Harvard Law. My father, who grew up in San Francisco, was eager to experience the East Coast, so he went to both Harvard and Harvard Law before returning to California, where he is an estate lawyer.

  The extent of my adolescent rebellion, I guess, is that I may be the first man in my family in years (MR. MAR SHALL, I still have to figure out how many, sorry) not to go to law school. But if I subtract that from the equation, I see that my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather are all hardworking, intelligent, well-educated men whose Harvard education gave them a tremendous foundation for what came next.

  Maybe I’m going to start the next chapter in the family legacy: three generations lured to Harvard and the law, and now a new set of legacies who might be drawn to Harvard and then to the arts. I’m very interested in architecture and sculpture. Who knows? Someday my great-grandson might decide to become the seventh generation of my family to attend Harvard because he feels it’s the best possible place for a performance artist to get a great education.

  Certainly that’s not a connection that many people make at this moment, but a great university, like the best students, has to be flexible over time. Thirty years ago, no one would have imagined that someday Harvard might have a woman president, and yet here we are, in the midst of an unexpected but very exciting transition. Thirty years ago, no one would have imagined that a single comment from the former president, about women and their skills at math and science, would have erupted into such a public furor, pretty much demanding his eventual resignation. Harvard has come through a difficult moment in its history and been strengthened by it. The idea of this prestigious university as a home to avant-garde artists might seem as unlikely as a woman president—but by the time my great-grandson sends in his application, who’s to say?

  That’s what excites me about being the fourth generation at Harvard. Whatever I end up wanting to do, I know I’ll get the best possible education there. I might even surprise everyone and end up a lawyer, after all.

  Ted poured himself a second glass of wine and flipped on his brand-new, fifty-inch flat-screen plasma TV, purchased right before school began with last year’s accumulated Best Buy gift cards from grateful graduates’ parents and a portion of the bonus check he had received from an equally indebted head of school. He and Brad were going to have to have a talk, and fast, for whatever he was doing with these essays, he was not trying to get into Harvard. The first essay was too flaky, and the fact that Ted liked it was Ted’s personal and rather unprofessional shortcoming; when he put his Harvard hat on, it felt light and more than a little goofy. The second essay definitely did not work, and on this one he had to agree with what he anticipated the neofeminist and the lumberjack would say. She would pull on the gold ankh charm she wore on a leather cord around her neck, he would pull on the untrimmed beard that always carried a remnant of his most recent meal, and they would mutter about subtext, about what Brad seemed to be saying underneath what Brad was saying—which was that he did not want to go to Harvard at all.

  Ted reached for the binder where he recorded his notes about the essays, having abandoned margin notes a few years earlier after a run-in with a famously bestselling author dad who had taken issue with Ted’s comments. The man had sent his daughter’s essay to his equally famous editor, who was on the board of trustees of the very college the girl in question wanted to attend, and the editor had replied with a two-page, single-spaced critique of Ted’s critique, which boiled down to the conclusion that Ted was an idiot. In truth, the editor found Ted’s comments to be more than reasonable, but the editor had heard rumors of the dad’s possible defection to another publishing house, so he did what was necessary to make his author feel beholden. In self-defense, Ted ordered a Levenger leather portfolio with a lock on it and never again shared written notes with a student.

  He wrote Brad’s name at the top of a page, printed WHAT’S THE AGENDA? right under it in big block letters, and turned his attention to CNN just long enough to read the tail end of a crawl about the possibility of an Ebola outbreak in some country whose name had already slid by. If it had been E. coli he would have waited for the item to lap and reappear, to make sure it had nothing to do with the burgers at In-N-Out, but Ebola was out of his zip code, a distraction unless it got on a plane and landed in a dorm in Boston or Palo Alto.

  In the fall, television was little more than white noise. Ted had no time for anything but admissions. He got his hair cut shorter first semester than he did during the rest of the year, so that he could cancel his standing monthly appointment if a crisis arose without the head of school making nervous jokes about Ted’s Afro. He rarely ventured past the prepared-foods counter at Whole Foods, except to buy precut and prewashed produce and bottled dressing, and he paid extra to have his dry cleaning and laundry delivered. He burned up his Netflix queue and barely remembered what he had seen. Every morning he donned a crisp pair of Ralph Lauren khakis and a starched, striped broadcloth dress shirt, unless one of the Ivies was visiting, in which case he hauled out one of the two equally dark gray Zegna suits that a grateful couple who owned a boutique had purchased for him on one of their buying trips to Florence.

  During college application season, Ted was distilled to an efficient essence: He was not black, not male, not forty-five, not short, not slim, not a lapsed Baptist, not a Democrat, though all these things were true. Ted was his results.

  The big lesson of Ted’s childhood boiled down to “Don’t,” a command uttered and obeyed long past the point of humiliation, though he never once complained. Ted Marshall grew up at the intersection of urban unrest and geographical misfortune; ten years or ten blocks in either direction and everything would have been different. He paraded in front of the television set, as proud as any baby who had figured out how to get the appendages to do something more than wriggle, while his parents and both sets of grandparents watched the Watts riots that kept them indoors for a week. He enjoyed a few seasons of dusk basketball after they fled to a tiny apartment in nearby Compton, only to be hustled indoors by his parents once the Bloods and the Crips designated his block as one worth fighting for. His father started walking Ted to and from middle school before and after his postal route, while his grandfathers split the responsibility of escorting his younger sisters. The girls loved the attention, but twelve-year-old Ted was ready to unfasten the latch that held him to his childhood, which mattered not at all to his terrified parents.

  They moved again at the end of his sophomore year at Compton High, this time to the barely affordable fringe of Baldwin Hills, a middle-class black suburb where no one, as far as they could tell, cowered in fear. For the first time in his postponed life, Ted was allowed to walk to school alone. It was too late to matter. The students at his new school did not want to make friends with a boy who undoubtedly had a gang past, or at least knew gang members who might come looking for him some night; their parents told them to keep their distance, just as Ted’s parents had instructed him to stay away from two previous neighborhoods’ worth of trouble. His father might as well have continued to walk him to school and back for all the good his new autonomy did him. The only thing Ted could control was homewo
rk, which he went at with a vengeance. When he got a scholarship to UCLA, he took a perverse pride in knowing that some of the families that had snubbed him were probably having second thoughts.

  His background gave him a certain cachet in college, as long as he was careful about discussing it. Ted could claim to have witnessed crucial moments in Los Angeles’s black history only if he was among people who knew nothing about it, as his first-hand experience involved being marched away, quickly, from whatever was going to make the next day’s headlines. He was smart enough to let people mistake his solemn silence for depth of feeling, though, and he managed to get more than one date with girls who assumed that there must be a great deal of emotion right underneath the surface. In fact, Ted had seen enough of what happened to people who got caught up in the thick of things—who found themselves the target of a cop or a rival gang, trouble either way—even if his vantage point was the sidelines. He wanted no part of it. He dreamed circumspect and solitary dreams, because any other instincts had long since atrophied.

  He graduated with a BA in English and an agenda that involved a first novel and a first love, the former about to be written, the latter, he was sure, about to be met. A year later, he had ninety pages of unfinished manuscript, and a year after that, he had barely broken a hundred. Ted could no more step out of his head than his younger self could step off the curb without his father’s permission, so he accepted his parents’ offer to stake him to a teaching credential and got a job at a big public school, where he saw some of his students for the first time on the day he gave the midterm. Three years of that and he answered Crestview’s ad for an English teacher. He told himself it was a temporary move, an advantage, really, in terms of raw material for his novel. Thanks to his parents’ watchfulness, Ted had no serious misfortune to peddle. A detoured life as an English teacher might lack the exploitable depth of genuine bad luck, but it would have to do.

  Inevitably, one of the seniors asked him to read a draft of her college application essay, and when she got into Stanford early, she and her parents let everyone know that Ted had made all the difference. He got so many requests for help that the head of school cut his teaching load in half and made him the junior member of what was then Crestview’s two-person college counseling team.

  He never wrote another page of his novel. The true love part of his fantasy eroded as well, when his most promising girlfriend broke up with him midway through his first early-decision season as department chair, as though her biological clock could not have kept ticking for a few more weeks, until he saw how the applicants shook out. He dared to suggest that she was not being reasonable, as his deadline was absolute and hers was not. She stomped out of his place, and he never heard from her again. His acceptance rate that year was 10 percent higher than his predecessor’s had been.

  He had a gift for other people’s success, if not his own, so he let the job take up more and more of his time, until it eclipsed his old ideas of who he would turn out to be. Crestview parents generously assumed that he had secrets and occasionally speculated as to what they might be, but in fact he was a lower case enigma. Ted let them wonder, for whatever they imagined had to be more interesting than the truth.

  Ted read Brad’s flying essay one more time, wrote, “Nice writing, but let’s get on course” in his notes, and moved it to the bottom of the stack, more irritated than made sense. He read an essay about solving the health crisis in Africa, “One of thousands,” he wrote on his notepad, though when the boy came in Ted would make a flattering plea for something that better reflected the boy’s dynamic range of interests. He read one about a personal epiphany inspired by the discovery, in the garage, of the applicant’s parents’ Pete Seeger albums. “Reed or Hampshire,” wrote Ted, “and change epiphany.” Lots of people rewrote their kids’ essays, even if they swore their children had asked for input and all they had offered were copious notes, but subtlety was key, and “epiphany” was not a subtle word. He read a long essay by a girl who thought that buying only local produce, even if it meant forgoing apples in the middle of summer, qualified as profound self-sacrifice.

  Katie’s essay could not possibly be any worse than those. The last draft had been fine, and at this point he was reading only to buy her parents another week to persuade her to switch to Williams. He riffled through the rest of the stack and plucked hers out. It was always easy to spot Katie’s drafts, because she had scrolled through the font list until she found a sans serif typestyle that she felt better reflected her straightforward personality than the standard Times Roman font.

  I am the fortunate daughter of two people who have taught me so much about hard work, and good work. My father is an attorney-at-law and my mother is a physician, and I have learned from them the value of self-discipline and needing always to do my best.

  Ted started to write “parallel construction” on his notepad, and then he stopped, certain that the teacher who gave Katie As in her AP class, despite syntax like this, would somehow manage to catch the error.

  I have also learned that success is not enough in and of itself, but that I need to use my future success to make a contribution to making the world a better place. This is analogous to what I have already done in high school, where I have been very successful academically (NOTE TO MR. MARSHALL: How soon can I say I’m valedictorian? Grades come out after the early-decision deadline, but I’m pretty sure) and also have made numerous contributions that have nothing to do with my personal life. In the summer before my junior year I went to Guatemala for two weeks to help build houses….

  At a cost, thought Ted, that would have paid for an entire village of houses.

  In the summer before my senior year I went to China to do the same. I will end my high school career with a skill-set that makes me an excellent candidate for a rigorous college program. In addition to my superior academic profile, I have made myself something of a Renaissance woman involved in many different kinds of activities.

  He circled “Renaissance woman,” which must have come from Katie’s mom.

  My mother says that magazines used to talk about “jugglers,” because women had to try to figure out how to raise a family and have a career, and be an attentive wife and an interesting woman all at the same time. Somebody should have asked her how to do it, because she really has it all figured out, and I don’t say that just because she’s my mom. I don’t feel like I need more of her time than I get. She has taught me to look at it a different way. The time I’m alone is when I learn to be independent, to get along by myself, which is going to help me in college and after.

  And my dad has taught me the benefits of what he calls compartmentalizing, which means 100 percent attention to whatever you’re doing at the moment, and then you switch channels and give all your attention to the next project. We joke about channel surfing and our invisible remote controls, but his example has shown me that I can do more because I’m more organized.

  I’m honest enough to say that I’m not sure where the next four years will take me—or maybe, like my dad says, I’m self-confident enough not to need a major to tell me who I am. I could be an attorney or a physician, although my parents have set the bar high. I could combine my parents’ interests and become both an attorney and a physician. In fact, I remind myself not to think just about working for a law firm or a company that already exists. What’s the next step from what my parents did? Perhaps I’ll run my own company or succeed in a universe that won’t exist until I create it. I might even run for public office.

  Whatever I end up doing, I have to be all I can be.

  The last line was new. Ted sang the jingle the Army had used for as long as he could remember—“Be. All that you can be. Da da duh duh, in the Army.”—and wondered whether Katie had come up with the line without knowing its source, in which case she was a natural for a career in advertising, or, worse, if she knew where it came from, in which case she could be the first Crestview student to apply to West Point. For a wicked instant, he
was tempted to let her use it, but he wrote on his pad, “Admissions officers probably won’t get the last line.” If she balked, he might call her dad, to make sure he was on record about his reservations. In Ted’s experience, the more enthusiastic and effusive parents were at the beginning of the process, the angrier they got if things did not go as planned. He had to protect himself from accusations down the line.

  The remaining essays were from early applicants Ted happened to like, even though he knew that their chances were not as good. The boy with too many Bs from the semester when his dad had the stroke, the girl with a B minus in physics because the teacher was too embarrassed to confess that he had misfiled her supposedly nonexistent homework assignments in another student’s folder, the girl who pulled off straight As but only took APs in courses she actually liked, and the twins who between them were a perfect candidate, one with 2370 on his SATs and the other a basketball star. And Lauren, neither an angel nor an ambulance case, the kind of kid who in any other generation would have had her happy pick of schools. Lauren, who ought to get into Northwestern and probably would not. All these breeding, over-achieving baby boomers; wasn’t anyone with bad SAT scores having children?