“Yeah?” Todd’s father said, over the din of a baseball game playing on the television.
“It’s Todd.”
There was a pause as he turned down the game. The pauses: Todd had forgotten about them. They took forever, were like that peculiar feeling of being on a family car trip and never knowing when you would arrive.
“Hey, kiddo. What can I do for you?” his father finally said.
“I wanted to talk to you about my college applications.”
Todd heard his father sigh. “Todd, you know I can’t contribute to that. Your mom’s got plenty of money set aside for you and your brother.”
“It’s not about paying, Dad.”
“What’s it about then?”
“There’s a statement that’s supposed to be written by your parents—you can do it separately, if they’re divorced—but it’s supposed to be about what your parents think of you, why they think you should go to that college, stuff like that.” Todd nervously scratched away at a Harvard sticker that had been plastered on the wall next to the phone.
“Todd, your mother is the writer in the family. I think she would be much better handling that sort of thing.”
“Okay,” Todd said. “I just thought I’d ask.”
“No problem, kid. Let me know if you need anything else.”
Todd hung up without saying good-bye. His hands were shaking. Was it too much to ask his father to write a five-hundred-word recollection of his younger son? Todd thought he had written a statement for Brian. Or had his mother simply mailed in one on both their behalf? It would be like Jackie not to want to admit to an admissions officer that Don Eldon played no role in his sons’ lives.
It didn’t matter anyway. What Todd needed to focus on were his grades; his college adviser had assured him of that. He wanted to get into a good school (Brown was his top choice), not simply for himself, but to show his parents he could do it without them. He feared that they saw him as a failure; he had never had the marks or gotten the recognition Brian had when he was at the school. His brother had been the model Berkley Boy: photo editor of the yearbook, head proctor, starting player on the lacrosse team, winner of the school spirit award in his Fifth and Sixth Form years. Not that his father would have noticed; he hadn’t even shown up for Brian’s graduation, only sending a card and fifty dollars in his absence.
As a replacement, Jackie had pathetically brought along as a date her best friend and literary agent, Nick. He was nice enough—Todd had known him since childhood—but he was the most effeminate man Todd had ever met, and he knew that wouldn’t fly on the Berkley campus.
When he recalled Nick’s visit, the cream suit he had worn, complete with lavender pocket square (he sent out a silent prayer: please, don’t let her bring him again), Todd was reminded of a story from the 1940s that was often told to the younger students. Theodore Bainbridge had been a fey Fifth Former who liked to read poetry; Whitman was his favorite. He would recite it in the halls, carry it with him to the dining hall, quote from it in class. His dorm mates, who were more excited by athletics and females, decided they would teach him a lesson one afternoon; poetry, after all, was far too precious an affectation for a Berkley Boy (it was fine, perhaps, to attract the opposite sex, but that was the extent of its usefulness). A trio of hockey players hanged Theodore by his silk necktie one afternoon as a prank before heading out to practice, suspending him in front of his doorway. He screamed and shouted for them to let him down, but they ignored his cries, laughing all the way to the rink. Theodore, they assumed, would get himself down easily. Someone would see him; the point would have been made. When they returned three hours later, his body was limp, his face the violent purple of an eggplant, the door scratched and battered where he had tried to kick his way free with his hard-soled lace-up shoes. The boys were never apprehended, as it wasn’t discovered until fifty years later that what had been ruled a suicide was in fact not so.
CHAPTER 2
Why boarding school? Why now? Ethan had prepared numerous answers to these questions, expecting that he would be asked to explain himself the moment he arrived at Berkley as a transfer student to the senior class, known as the Sixth Form. The hubris, he now realized, of assuming anyone would care! His fellow classmates were burdened with the minutiae of high school life: athletic uniforms that were unflattering (everything was always too baggy, or too tight), unusual growth spurts (Evan Douglas had gained four inches over the summer), absurd rumors (a Fourth Form girl had become a kleptomaniac and was said to have hundreds of tins of lip gloss in her bedroom—if she liked you, she would share), haircuts (Robbie de Sola had clipped off his beautiful dark locks), students who hadn’t returned after summer break (where were they?), summer flings (Tina Palmer had done it in her parents’ Southampton bedroom with a townie).
Ethan knew people arrived at the school at various junctures for different reasons: They needed an extra year of credits before college and would help beef up the hockey or football team (or occasionally, the music or drama program). They had been kicked out of another, equally prestigious institution (there weren’t really any better schools than Berkley—it had always been ranked in the top five, according to those who knew about such things), and had been admitted as a last-minute favor, usually with the help of a letter from a member of the board of trustees. They had been dissatisfied at home.
Though Berkley was generally not the type of school where young people in trouble enrolled—those institutions were further down the ladder, more akin to military academies and the like—a fair number of young people in trouble still ended up there. Or perhaps, Ethan would wonder, as he heard stories of his fellow classmates sharing cigarettes in the shower at 2:00 a.m., or stumbling drunk down the hallway in the middle of the afternoon, still in school uniform (coats and ties, always, for the boys), the trouble found them after they arrived.
But nothing so thrilling as having been expelled had happened to Ethan. He wasn’t a rebel, or a slacker, or a drug addict—he could only faintly recall the last time he had broken a school rule. (It would have been in the sixth grade when, unable to catch, he had been so afraid of playing touch football that he hid in the school library during PE for an entire semester. It had garnered him an F on his report card, the only one he had ever received. An F! His parents laughed it off: he, a professor of engineering and she of literature, were not the type to care about such quotidian matters as grade point averages. They were of the rare breed who only cared if their child was learning.)
His parents’ house in Palo Alto was ten minutes away from campus and it had been too easy to fall into the same patterns he had followed since grade school: walking home directly after classes, not socializing with his peers, spending hours in his bedroom reading, finding himself alone on a Saturday night. His social life had improved, certainly, in his first three years of high school; he shuddered to think about what he had been like as a freshman (geeky glasses, pimples, faint mustache—why hadn’t his father noticed it was time to teach him to shave?). He had been on a few dates with girls; he had friends whom he would see occasionally, though he suspected they felt the same sort of ambivalence toward him that he felt for them. He could have managed his last year of high school at home, but he and his parents knew he needed to move on.
The other element was his mother’s illness that had enveloped their little house. The official word was that she was in remission, though there was always the danger of the cancer metastasizing. Ethan suspected that she and his father hadn’t been telling him everything in recent months. He wanted to be there for her, but he also longed to escape the reality of it. It had been discovered seven years ago, the epithelial carcinoma on the outer surface of one of her ovaries. He knew these details by heart, from his mother reciting her condition, early on, at the dinner table after each appointment with her oncologist. At first, Judith treated it distantly, as if it were a work of literature they were discussing,