Getting In: A Novel (9 page)

Ted only wished that he came across more kids who were named after their parents, because that business about being the first you was one of the best lines he had ever come up with on the fly. He would have loved the chance to use it again.

“Makes all the sense in the world, I guess,” said Brad.

“Besides, you think they give you a sign to hang around your neck that says ‘legacy’? For that matter, do the math: They don’t take every legacy that applies. They don’t have the room.”

“Okay, but what if I’m right? What if I’d be better off someplace else? I don’t think it’s a good strategy to send in a great app and hope I’ll be one of the legacies who doesn’t get in, I mean, that’s kind of leaving my future to chance, don’t you think? And besides, if I want to be an architect…”

“I see,” said Ted, “and somehow a school that spit out your guy, Gehry, and Philip Johnson, that’s too old-school for you, okay, Thom Mayne, a school that has what’s-his-name Koolhaas on the faculty, somehow this is not up to your standards?”

“How do you know all that?”

“It’s my job to know all that.” Ted moved in for the kill. “So tell me what could possibly be wrong with going to Harvard if architecture is your—”

“
You don’t get it.
” The tone of Brad’s voice rattled them both. “I’m sorry, Mr. Marshall. Really. But listen. I can’t go to Harvard and be an architect, don’t you see? If I go to Harvard I’m going to
be a lawyer. Everybody in my family who goes to Harvard ends up a lawyer. You have no idea, I’m sorry to say that, but you don’t. I mean, I go there, my life is set for the rest of my life.”

He took a deep breath.

“I am not going to be a lawyer,” he said.

Ted reeled it in. “I believe you. Look, this is a stressful time. Let’s get you in and then you can stand up for yourself, which I know you will. What do you think your father’s going to do—show up in Cambridge to help you register? Pull the plug on tuition if you’re not prelaw? Come on. Let’s get some perspective here. Have you looked at their fine arts curriculum?”

Brad reached for a smaller handful of paper clips and lined them up left to right.

“Not really. No, not at all,” he said, without taking his eyes off the paper clips. “Y’know, I’m not really working on the double helix so much anymore. Not so much. Not at all, really. There’s not a whole lot of time for…”

“Clean up the first essay you showed me and send it in, okay?”

“Okay,” Brad lied.

Ted came around the desk and clapped Brad on the shoulder. “I’ve got to tell you, Harvard’s always seemed like the right match for you.”

“You’d say if you didn’t think so.”

“I would,” Ted lied, in return.

Dan Dodson was one senior partner’s retirement away from a corner office with a view of the Hollywood sign, but until the guy came to terms with reality, Dan had to settle for the standard Century City consolation prize, an office with an endless bank of windows that opened onto a vista of other endless banks of windows.
He did not care about the view, because at his level there was no time for staring out the window. He did mind the positioning, and if he had a business lunch near Decorator’s Row he occasionally stopped in at one of the showrooms to consider the latest styles in desks and credenzas, so that he would be ready when the inevitable happened.

He always planned ahead in that way, envisioning the future as he wanted it to be, in great and specific detail, as though a definitive dream would be likelier to materialize than a vague one. He did not even see these internal dramas as dreams, really, but as documentaries. Anticipatory documentaries. He occasionally rehearsed lines of dialogue to determine in advance how best to tell the story of his life.

“I have two kids at Williams.”

“Both of our children are at Williams.”

“My son and my daughter attend Williams.”

He took stock twice a day—once right before he left his office, and again right before he went to sleep, even on Sundays, when he had to fight the soporific effects of what Joy called sex night. The office session enabled him to compartmentalize and make the transition from attorney to family man. The bedroom tally, which involved a nightstand notepad, ensured that he would wake up with his priorities intact.

When Ron had applied to college, all the Dodsons cared about was finding a school that appreciated an extraordinarily smart boy who on a good day aspired to nothing more than flatlined social skills. Anyone who accepted Ron was going to do so in spite of his personality, not because of it, so the Dodsons had endorsed Ted’s strategy of focusing on small, prestigious schools outside but equivalent to the Ivy League—Williams, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Amherst. Once Ron got in and Dan could relax, he embraced Williams with all the fervor of a man intent on building the family brand.

He defined success in terms of status and status in terms of
money, a nicely quantifiable formula for happiness. Dan had grown up on the second floor of a Chicago three-flat near his father’s liquor store, and when he was in junior high, old enough to stock the snack shelves, he got his first good look at people who had it better than he did. Every weekend a parade of snooty kids from Northwestern University and Evanston High, sentenced to spend their adolescence in a dry town, would drive down to Howard Street to make a buy. They pulled up in front of his dad’s store and handed a ten-dollar bill to the nearest drunk, who reeled into the store for them and got a pint for himself with the change. Sometimes the kids waved at Dan and hollered that they were going to call the cops because he was too young to be inside a liquor store. He spent a lot of time inventing replies that he never had the nerve to deliver. He met Joy at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and by the time they reached senior year, their combined ambition had jelled into a plan. He would go to law school, she would be a doctor, they would marry and pursue lucrative specialties, and together they would buy their way into exclusivity, one component at a time.

He used reverse volume as his leading criterion of value: the best things were those that the fewest people could acquire, which was why an AMG Mercedes was better than a standard model, a custom piece of jewelry was better than anything of which there was more than one, no matter how expensive it was, and a small school, preferably one that was hard to get to, was better than even the most prestigious university in a major airline’s hub city. By his standards, Williams was collegiate paradise, a bucolic campus nestled at the base of the Berkshire mountains—Yale did not have mountains—with a cute little neighboring town—Yale did not have that, either—and intimate classes taught by the professors themselves. The life of the mind—the Fiske had used that very phrase—taught in an idyllic, East Coast setting.

He tried again.

“You can’t do better than Williams. Unless you care more about brand names than education, right?”

Having both his children at Williams would be like having a wine locker full of bottles with nothing less than a Parker score of 92. It was knowing what lardo was—and knowing that no one else at his table would stoop to making jokes about eating pig fat. It was proof of his success, essential when what he considered failure, what he called the Howard Street era, was only years, not generations, in the past. After some debate, he decided not to argue relative merits with Katie, not unless she got headstrong about Yale. He had rehearsed his dinnertime presentation in the car on the way to work, as he was about to in the car on the way home. It was unassailably simple: on an objective level, Yale was no better than Williams, so he saw no compelling reason to endure the logistical inconvenience of having two children at two separate schools.

Tuesday and Thursday nights were the Dodsons’ workweek family dinner nights, and Dan and Joy remained firm about that schedule, as well as a traditional Sunday night meal, despite ever more imaginative excuses from Katie. They had read articles that credited the family dinner with everything from improved SAT scores to higher lifetime income, they had read critics who with equal fervor debunked the claims, and they had decided to split the difference, just in case. Joy amused her friends by claiming that she and Dan did not have a kitchy-koo gene between them. They preferred an evidence-based approach.

Dan always started the conversation while Joy dished up one of a revolving set of takeout meals from the Italian restaurant in the lobby of her building. The latest management team had divined that authenticity mattered not as much as political correctness to their clientele, so tonight’s entrée was what the menu called “chicken osso buco,” even though chickens lacked shank bones, to say nothing of edible marrow. Real osso buco was veal, and veal was beef, adorable baby beef with its hooves nailed to the floor. A smart res
taurateur responded creatively to customers averse both to the cholesterol level of veal and the torture of baby cows, but accepting of chickens bleeding out through the neck. Joy served the chicken with broccoli and a small scoop of generic pasta salad, chosen for color accent rather than flavor and measured out with a doctor’s precision, grateful for the mindless task. She had spent her afternoon doing full-body skin cancer checks, and the dainty prodding of the skin behind people’s ears, on their balding pates, at an obsolete bikini line, always left her worn out. Bad news could lurk on the skin between one’s toes. Joy had to start referring these patients to someone else.

Dan started to speak as soon as she put down the serving spoon.

“So, Katie. You met with Ted today.”

“Did you call him? You promised you wouldn’t…”

Joy sat down and reached a conciliatory hand toward her daughter. “Katie, please. It’s on the college calendar. Your father did not call anyone, and I think you owe him an apology.”

“Sorry,” Katie grunted.

“Accepted,” said Dan, who in fact had confirmed the date and time of the meeting with Ted days before, when he dropped off the bottle of wine. “And he’s happy with your essay.”

“Sure.” Katie shrugged. She would have replied in exactly the same way if Ted had fed her essay to his shredding machine. She had written him off when her parents pushed for Williams instead of Yale and he failed to push back hard enough. The absolutism that made her such a successful student, the belief that there were right answers in lit and history as well as in math and science, informed her attitudes about people as well, and once she assigned them a category she was unlikely to reconsider. Ted had proven himself her parents’ ally when he was supposed to be hers. Every one of his suggestions about her essay was clearly suspect and stemmed somehow from his desire to see her at Williams.

Dan attempted a supportive smile. “So the only thing left is to resolve…”

“Katie, what your father’s trying to say…”

“I’m saying what I’m trying to say, Joy. We need to resolve this Yale business once and for all and talk dispassionately about what approach is going to yield the best results.”

“The best results?” Katie slammed down her fork and a globule of chicken osso buco sauce catapulted onto her T-shirt. Reflexively, Joy dipped her napkin in her water glass and reached over to wipe it off.

“Mom, stop it.” Katie knocked her mother’s hand away and started to push her chair back.

“Excuse me,” said Dan. “People who storm out of rooms have a great deal of trouble figuring out how to walk back in, so we do not storm out in the first place, and you know that. We are going to talk this through.”

“No, we’re not,” said Katie, inching her chair back into place. “Talking would mean I get to say what I want, which is not to go to Williams, but I can tell already I’m not going to get to say that. Or I can say it but neither one of you is going to listen to me. This isn’t a conversation. Maybe my idea”—and here she mimicked her father’s measured tone—“of
yielding the best results
is to figure out how to get me into Yale.”

“Sarcasm does not help, Katie,” said her mother.

Katie speared a chunk of broccoli so that she would have an excuse not to talk. She had always liked her parents better than anyone else’s. Lauren’s parents were nice enough, but they never seemed to know what to do, not like Katie’s folks, who were always a good six months ahead of the curve. Chloe’s parents were too busy fighting and Brad’s parents were too smug to think about what was really best for their kids. Katie’s parents had always told her she could do anything she set her mind to—and yet they refused to yield on Yale. They acted as though she could not possibly
know what was best for her, having raised her to believe the opposite, which made her dig in simply for the sake of being obstinate. There was no good reason for Katie to insist on Yale—surely she could navigate Williams without running into her brother, she knew that—but the more her parents insisted, the harder she pressed. It was exhausting, and she had begun secretly to wish that she could figure out how to give it up without hating herself.

She swallowed and looked at her plate. “I am just trying to say that I don’t think you ever really considered whether Yale might be better for me. Never really considered changing your mind.”

“Or you might give us the benefit of the doubt and consider that we’ve weighed everything very carefully,” said Dan. “We have been extremely satisfied with your brother’s experience, and we see no reason for you not to go to Williams. We see only benefits, in terms of the school being a proven commodity, in terms of not having to split our time between the two of you when we visit. In terms of what’s best for you and for this family.”

Dan took a sip of wine to see if Katie was going to object, but she was concentrating on arranging her remaining fusilli in the shape of the letter
K
, so he continued.

“And I have to say, Katie, that since your mother and I are the ones paying for this excellent education, we do expect you to take our opinions seriously, in the same way you expect us to take yours. So how about it?”

Joy chimed in. “Honey, can you just tell us what it is about Yale that makes you want to go there so much?”