Early Decision (26 page)

“Naw,” William told her. He shook his head briefly. “Not at all. They love the morning light. Couldn't be happier.”

 

A
S EVER, THE
approaching end of the year brought the parents around tight as a mob at nightfall, torches aloft. Marion Pfaff rang daily to follow the progress of Hunter's other applications, this being the only way she could soothe her nerves while they waited to hear from Amherst. In particular, she wondered if it might not be worth e-mailing Admissions to point out that he'd been born four weeks early, since this represented a handicap from day one. Mr. Grant had called from Minneapolis to alert Anne to the fact that Alexis would be traveling to Chicago with her debate team the week of Thanksgiving. This lousy holiday timing required her to fly out of nearby Midway Airport, on Chicago's south side, to make it to her grandmother's house in Kansas City, where the rest of the family would be waiting. Could Anne chaperone their daughter from debate to terminal on that Wednesday afternoon? And while she was at it, might she talk some sense into the girl, who was crying her eyes red late into the night with second thoughts about Harvard? Even Dr. Kantor had rung in between procedures, to clarify that Penn would not hold it against William that he'd not applied early decision. “It really is the best fit,” he'd said. “But the boy's a stubborn one.”

When Gideon Blanchard had a request for Anne, however, these days it was Brenda Hollow, his assistant, who placed the call.

“I've been asked to contact you regarding the firm's annual Christmas lunch,” she opened tersely. Her voice made Anne think of nail clippers. “Are you familiar with the event?”

“I'm afraid I'm not,” Anne said.

“It's an annual tradition here at Blanchard, McHenry. A very lovely, formal lunch during which the firm announces its philanthropic investments for the coming year, and honors one person or organization in particular.”

“Sounds very nice.”

“This year, I'm pleased to be able to tell you, the firm's focus is education, and to mark this focus the partners have chosen to honor Cristina Castello with a full scholarship to university.”

“Um,” Anne managed. Hearing Cristina's name in this woman's mouth was like discovering the girl had been kidnapped. “To which university?”

Brenda Hollow continued: “Cristina Castello will be honored as a representative of the firm's contributions to the pursuit of higher education in the coming year. Mr. Blanchard has requested that you help Cristina to prepare a short speech, ten to fifteen minutes, to deliver on that day.”

“A speech?”

“Yes, a talk. Honorees usually share their experience leading up to this point. Not a dry eye in the house.”

“Cristina—she's seventeen.”

Brenda Hollow said nothing.

“I think that's a lot to ask of a kid in high school.”

Still Brenda Hollow said nothing.

“Look,” said Anne. She felt her frustration fraying her elocution, and she regretted giving Brenda the upper hand, but for God's sake, there was a
child
in the mix here. Two children, actually, if you counted Sadie. “Mr. Blanchard has been a little . . .
ambivalent
regarding his ability to help Cristina with college at all. So I think it's odd to ask her to speak, unless, of course, this is his way of informing us that he's going to support her application to Duke. Or maybe he intends to pay for her wherever she goes? If so, that's fabulous. I'll let her know. She can start those applications now. But we need to know which it is.”

“Shall I say she's available, then?” asked Brenda.

“You're not hearing me. I need to know: what's in it for Cristina?”

“I don't understand,” said Brenda.

Anne sighed heavily into the phone. It was meant as another flag for the woman on the other end, a semaphore from one subordinate to another, but it got her nowhere. “What, exactly, is Cristina supposed to say?” she asked finally.

Brenda began to explain, but Anne's mind wandered to the instruction she'd been given, that first, muggy day, to present herself at the service entrance of the Blanchards' five-story town home. She'd been fool enough to think it a matter of logistics. A broken doorbell, or a faulty stair.

“ . . . many powerful professionals committed to charity,” Brenda Hollow was saying. “About fifteen minutes, as I mentioned. She will be provided lunch, and is welcome to bring one guest. Mr. Blanchard suggested that you might accompany her. He also asked that I alert you that Sadie does not routinely attend.”

“Which means it's a secret?” Anne asked, rudely.

“Dress is business formal,” answered Brenda Hollow. “December eighteen, the Drake Ballroom, noon.”

Anne pulled out a pen to scribble down details, which she tended to forget when her mind went white with anger.

She tuned in again to hear Brenda actually saying, “Thank you ever so much,” before hanging up the phone.

The Blanchards were prescient in their apprehension of charity as a public game, elevated as it increasingly was from the sorry confines of clerical orders and therefore now useful as a sentiment-rich playing field for the wealthy seeking prominence among themselves. To brag about the achievements of one's own children was crass, but to brag about the achievements of children one had funded, well—that was magnificent. The annual lunch at Blanchard, McHenry, Winsett & Blair would become a landmark event, copied not only in Chicago but in New York, where the investment banks piled on, and in the glass atriums of the big studios in L.A. But Anne hadn't yet been to such a thing, so she was stuck imagining what it might look like. She saw Cristina in a Christmas dress—or should it be a suit? Where would she find Cristina a suit?—standing before a ballroom full of lawyers dressed to the nines, eating winter salads. She saw gold and silver baubles on the tables. Maybe candles. Hurricanes. She imagined the Blanchards tucking in their chairs the better to reach their wineglasses when the room fell silent and Cristina Castello began, in truth, to sing for her supper.

It was a high price for Cristina to pay. But whether it was a price too high, Anne realized, was not a decision she could make for the girl. There was a role for the skills of self-promotion in this world, after all, wasn't there? Feeling as cynical as she was just then, she thought the occasion simply the most blatant example of the elaborate marketing-and-PR exercise she completed with her kids every year: Make yourself believable. Make the big men feel moved. Make them proud of themselves for helping you on your way.

“I don't see why not,” said Michelle cheerfully, when Anne found her later that week at Cicero North. This was a surprise.

“You don't?”

“No. Can't think why not. Cristina's articulate, she's confident, she'll present beautifully. Might lead to a job. Who knows?”

Of course Michelle didn't know that Cristina's application to Duke was being held hostage to Sadie Blanchard's tender feelings, which, as of the first week in November, were unyielding. Nor did she know that Anne had lied through her teeth about why the application hadn't been made early. Not to mention that Anne hadn't even been able to discover from the executive assistant—the
secretary,
for heaven's sake—whether there really was a scholarship in the offing, or just a fancy spin on the red carpet Duke would roll out if Gideon Blanchard could be convinced to make the call.

“Why, do you have doubts?” asked Michelle.

“Sadie Blanchard isn't invited to the lunch, apparently,” Anne replied, sacrificing her last bit of dignity. “His own daughter.” Anne was shaking her head, but not for the reason Michelle understood. Apparently her need for approval was so great that she was reduced to this, plying Michelle for confidence, goosing her already-successful lies. Inexplicably to her, Martin came into Anne's thoughts: he accompanied this feeling of desperation, as though his wide shoulders were the form it took as it moved from her heart to her mind. Never had an application season felt this dire.

Her comment worked like magic, of course. Michelle loved the idea that Cristina would have access where Sadie did not. “Sounds like a very sophisticated occasion,” she said. “Cristina will have a lovely time! We'll start working on her remarks.”

The image of Michelle and Cristina sitting together, dark heads lowered, in that sad little cinder-block office gave Anne a useful edge with Sadie, who was acting like a spoiled brat. She was flat-out refusing to meet now, saying she didn't have time in her schedule. So it was a race. Sadie needed to finish her Duke application. Let go of her fantasies of Yale and so on. Submit the damn thing. Then Cristina could apply, and her speech wouldn't be just a Christmas minstrel show. And Anne could be done with all of it. She was now quite conveniently angry at Sadie for putting her in the difficult spot to begin with. Maybe it was unfair, but it worked.

“Well, you have to eat,” Anne told Sadie, when finally she caught her on her cell. “I'll find you at lunch.”

To Sadie's mannered ears, this was a kind of social assault. She chose a restaurant near school and said she'd have forty-five minutes.

Anne understood that the shift in Sadie's attitude resulted from the very common phenomenon of girls siding with their parents when a conflict arose. It had happened before, and in general Anne considered it reasonable. But she sensed that Margaret Blanchard had been disparaging her in Sadie's earshot. Just the way Sadie looked her up and down as she approached the tiny window table, as if Anne were a nerdy new girl in school—just this told her she was right in her suspicion.

“Listen,” Anne told Sadie, before she'd even removed her coat. It was chilly by the window, and Sadie was sitting there, arms folded, looking frozen and frosty both. “I know you're sick of this college stuff. Truth be told, I am, too. So let's just get this finished as quickly and easily as we can, okay?”

“Fine,” said Sadie.

Anne looked around the packed restaurant, where customers mobbed the front counter beneath a huge chalkboard listing salads and soups. “How does this place work?”

“You have to go up.”

“We only have forty-five minutes, is that right?”

“Yeah. So you'd better go now.”

Anne looked at the girl's empty place. She had a blank notebook before her, and a blue pen, and nothing else. “You've eaten?”

“Not today. Not hungry.”

“No dice,” Anne said kindly. “Come with me.”

“Really, I'm not hungry.”

Anne was still standing. “Let's go, Sadie. Just see if there's something you can eat. It's a long day at school, and it's cold.”

“No, thanks.” Sadie bit off the ends of her words, leaving her teeth exposed.

“Jesus, Sadie. You're young and growing. Have some soup. A piece of bread. It's not a big deal.”

Slowly, Sadie stood, and lightly tipped her chin up toward Anne, who was taller by several inches. “Who do you think you are, my mother?”

She was clever enough to ask the question straight, and not as mere challenge, as though Anne actually were delusional. It made anger rise up the back of Anne's shirt. The diners around them had set down their forks, so she kept her voice low. “Not in a million years,” she replied, thinking of Margaret Blanchard. “But I am about a decade older than you are, and I'm asking you to just have one bite of something while we work.”

“I don't think you're paid to monitor my diet,” said Sadie. But still she shouldered her fancy leather tote to follow Anne to the counter.

“It's not at all clear what I'm being paid to do, I agree with you,” Anne called back.

Sadie didn't respond. Anne replayed her words in her head and wondered what Sadie was making of them, and how much worse she'd just made things. Meanwhile, in front of her, something was familiar about a woman waiting: a long, shaggy, faux-shearling coat, needle-toed boots. Anne figured she needed to apologize, but she couldn't think what to say.

“Wow,” Sadie finally said.

Anne turned to face her. There were tears brimming the girl's eyes, magnifying her kohl liner and making her look animated, like a tiny, bright-eyed Disney character, something small and skittish and likely to bolt. Anne gave up what remained of her hope of boosting the girl's confidence, giving her voice newfound strength, helping her to feel she could make her own choices. Why she'd ever thought she could bestow these things, she didn't know. Sadie lived with a level of privilege that made things different for her. Why did it matter that she sent in a subpar application, got in only to Duke, and matriculated there? The broad contours of her life were assured. Anne could tip them neither up nor down.

“Sadie, I'm sorry,” she said. They shuffled forward with the line. Sadie was careful to keep her distance from Anne, who had to raise her voice to reach her. “I'm just frustrated, and that was inappropriate. This has gotten so complicated.”

“It's because of that girl,” Sadie replied. Her nose was beginning to run. She wrinkled it and sniffed. “Cristina.”

Again Anne was aware of the woman ahead of her in line, who was shifting back and forth widely, as though to make out the chalkboard menu overhead, but some part of her attention was unclaimed. Anne lowered her voice.

“Is it? Really? I'm so sorry about that, if that's true. But she doesn't change anything about our deadline. January first. And your parents are frantic that you're not going to apply to Duke at all. They have dreamed of having you there since the day you were born.”

“But what about everywhere else? If I apply to Duke, they're going to take me. Miss Hughes won't bother with my other applications. I know how it works.”

“That may well be true.”

“And if I go to Duke, it's like, ‘Oh, here comes Sadie Blanchard.' Everyone already knows me, why I'm there. My dad is giving the new practice gym, did you know that?”