Early Decision (32 page)

“She has applied to several places,” answered Anne, when in fact the truth was Cristina had applied only to the U of I, and the Duke application was waiting, stamped and sealed, for the high sign. Anything else was out of the question in terms of financial support. “She's looking into a bunch of schools.”

“Probably the very same schools as young Hunter, eh?” said Mr. Blanchard, addressing the Pfaffs. “Such a bright kid. So much potential.”

“Some of them, I think,” said Gerald Pfaff.

“Don't I remember that he has cousins at Amherst? Isn't that so?” This was Margaret Blanchard. “I think we met them last Christmas, didn't we?”

“One, yes,” said Mrs. Pfaff.

“So Hunter must have applied,” concluded Mrs. Blanchard. “How wonderful.”

“No. ”

“No? Oh.”

Mrs. Pfaff recovered. “No, no. So small! No, he's looking to play tennis, so we're working with coaches, you know. It requires waiting to see how things shake out, the team ladders, it's a process on all fronts that way.”

“Of course,” said Gideon Blanchard. “I will never forget that kid's forehand. Comes at you like the Concorde, I swear.”

“That's nice, thank you.”

“And what about Sadie?” asked Mr. Pfaff.

“Well, she's quite fond of Duke, so we're pleased,” answered Margaret Blanchard. It was another sign of the difference between her and Marion Pfaff: she felt no shame, saw no need to trim her sails.

All four parents smiled, but only one of them was genuine. Gideon Blanchard hadn't a doubt in the world. So for the benefit of them all, he said, “Well, Anne, this must be so boring for you! You can't have much to do with this side of things, seeing as you serve the population you do at Cicero North.”

By now Anne was game. “Not at all. It's a challenging time for every student, no matter her background,” she replied.

All four adults nodded gravely.

“Well said,” pronounced Gideon Blanchard.

Marion Pfaff nodded lightly to Anne. “Well, nice to meet you.”

“Yes, very,” said Margaret Blanchard. “Gid, we must—”

“Yes, Gerry we should—”

They moved off.

Anne was left at the empty table. Cristina and her mother had gone. On their plates remained chocolate mousse terrines, drizzled with raspberry glaze and dotted with berries. Their name tags lay neatly alongside their untouched spoons.

 

B
UT IN THE
foyer of the Pfaff residence, late in the evening of December 23, Anne was greeted not only by name but with an embrace. Mrs. Pfaff reached round her twig arms and pressed awkwardly, as though measuring Anne for a dress. Her eyes beneath her plucked brows were hollow. You'd have thought the family had received a diagnosis rather than a denial. Anne stood by the gun case, uncertain.

“Rommel's been boarded,” said Mrs. Pfaff, barely above a whisper. “You can come in.”

The dog wasn't the one Anne was worried about.

“Gerry has—well, he's done some work,” explained Mrs. Pfaff. “On the essays. He's very upset. I thought you should just come see where things stand. I know how hard you and Hunter have been working.” She dropped her head and led Anne through the dark halls to a third-floor study where Hunter and his father were waiting.

Following up the stairs, Anne inhaled the carpets and paint and wondered at how casually Mrs. Pfaff overlooked the fact that just a few days ago she'd pretended not to know Anne at all. Maybe crisis trumped manners. Or maybe it was just understood that Anne should be ignored, like a therapist, say, or one's gynecologist at the grocery store. Maybe it wasn't that Anne was unimportant, but that she was very far on the inside indeed.

Noting that Mrs. Pfaff was wearing house slippers, Anne concluded the latter.

The study was low-shouldered at its gabled eaves and lit by a single floor lamp, under which Gerald Pfaff had parked himself in a wide leather chair. Scattered across the carpet were essay drafts and printed copies of the Common Application—the disorganization made Anne start to sweat—and across from Mr. Pfaff, seated with his knees folded up and his back to the wall, was Hunter. Gerald held pen and paper in his burgeoning lap.

“I'll be downstairs,” said Mrs. Pfaff, like a nurse. “If you need anything.” She descended silently.

Mr. Pfaff said, “Anne.”

Hunter flapped one hand in greeting.

“What's up?” she asked, as lightly as she could.

“We've made some changes,” replied Mr. Pfaff. “To the application, here. Some things more fitting for our current situation. Wanted you to sort out the last bits now.”

Hunter said nothing.

Mr. Pfaff held out the page in his hand. He wasn't about to hoist himself from the chair, so Anne crossed the room, stepping around essays as best she could, to take it from him. She cleared a spot, knelt, and began to read. Only a few words in, Mr. Pfaff spoke again.

“So is that your day job, then?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Working with the poor kids. That's your day job, and this is just on the side?”

She might have said “just the opposite,” except that both college-counseling roles were sort of on the side, and since she'd left her doctoral program, there really wasn't anything to speak of in the middle. But Hunter seemed fragile as blown glass, and couldn't be made to feel anymore that he was an also-ran.

“I volunteer at Cicero North,” she said simply, “every Saturday. For years.”

Mr. Pfaff said only, “Humph.”

It was an uncertain verdict, but she had been warned: he doubted her motivation now. Her sincerity. She felt him watching her read the page in her hands. It was Hunter's personal statement, the primary essay, which had been polished to a sincere gleam. Now the last two-thirds were crossed out, with swift arrows tracing down and all around, like a winter weather map, to a new paragraph scribbled in Mr. Pfaff's hand:

Like so many young men in American history, I went West and found the way I want to live. I loved the mustangs because they represented the pursuit of my own independence and my own interests. But I realized that they are not useful icons for a young man, because they are not responsible to anyone or anything. The idea of running free is fun to think about but no way to live.

I've spent my time in high school working on activities that I liked. I'm very lucky to have been given the chance to develop these skills and gain an education. Colleges, like all communities, benefit from the participation of all different sorts of individuals. Not everyone can be exceptional, and in fact the foundation of any community is the group of average, hard-working people. Mediocrity has just as much place as anything else, and in fact it is important for a community to boast diversity of achievement. My grades and test scores may not be in the 99th percentile, but this offers value to the institution. Instead I will bring to college my many interests and well-rounded experience.

Thereafter a long, sinuous line traced back up the page to the original, though the concluding sentence about the mustangs had been vigorously inked out.

Anne took a deep breath and let her eyes travel up. Mr. Pfaff's words swam in her brain like little piranhas, toothed and quick.
Offers value to the institution,
writes the private equity chief.
Useful icons for a young man,
writes the one just fifty. And cruelest of all, yes, there it was—the word “mediocrity.” A word Hunter would never use, perhaps didn't even know, applied to himself in his father's hand. Anne blinked several times. The study was overheated and the lamp's shadows made it hard to see. Her body seemed to be failing to get things right. She was hot, tearful, panicky.

“So this is the new version we've got, then,” said Mr. Pfaff. “We're just wanting your spell-check before we send it in. Marion thought you should come by rather than do it on the phone.”

What Anne was feeling, of course, was rage. But she was not familiar with that emotion, which she habitually twisted like hanger wire into prodding self-doubt, and she was certainly no good at using it. So she stalled.

“Okay. It's really late—could we take a day or two? I always think it's best to do that after a major revision.”

“Nope,” he replied. “We leave for Jackson in the morning, and I want this done.”

“Right,” she said. “It's just that if—if the mustangs are useless as a symbol, then they don't really belong in the essay, is all. Logically speaking. So we should take those out, which really leaves us with not much to ground the setting in the first place. It doesn't need to be about Montana, or anywhere else.”

Mr. Pfaff narrowed his eyes at her. The lamp highlighted the deep pouches of his face and neck and shone off his protruding belly, where his shirt was stretched tight.

“Good point,” he said.

From deep in his throat Hunter let out a smack of sarcasm. He was out of words.

Hoping to establish camaraderie, Anne looked at him, but he kept his gaze level at the far wall.

Anne might have hated them both, the rich boy with his long legs coiled, his bags packed for the ski slopes. His father, who was an ass. But what was Gerald Pfaff searching for that hadn't been handed to him, and to his father before him? Hadn't the sons of privilege always been expected to inherit their fathers' kingdoms? And hadn't the sons always chafed at the narrow chute opening before them as adulthood dawned? Anne wondered if college madness in contemporary America wasn't, after all, the problem, but rather a poor solution to the problem: it was intended to give a young person the opportunity to pursue any professional life he could imagine for himself. These boys weren't facing recession or depression or war. College was four years to spend looking for something that was just right. It was a great idea, and a fine time to live it. But such an opportunity presupposed imagination, and fathers had always been the gatekeepers of their sons' dreams. You could turn that opportunity into just another chance to fail, if you were entitled enough and careless enough and far enough from your own boyhood self. Anne felt, in that stuffy, crow's-nest room, that she was in the presence of a crisis much older than college admissions.

Mr. Pfaff was making further decisions. “So I'll just cut that part, too, then,” he said. “All the horse stuff.” He held out a square paw for the page in her hand.

“Then we'll have not much left at all.”

“How many words it have to be?”

“I'm not really thinking of word count.”

“How many?”

“Five hundred limit.”

“We're well under that. Is there a minimum?”

“Not technically, no, but it should be—something—”

“We've got plenty.” Mr. Pfaff licked his lips, propped the page on one thigh, and drew lines through additional text.

“We really had that in pretty fine shape, I think,” Anne said. She let him hear her sigh, let him see her check her watch. Ten more schools. Ten more schools that needed this application, and it was—what—ten at night now, and the family was leaving in the morning. And the essay had been months in the making, and Hunter, exhausted, seemed hung from his shoulders like a whipped dog. She thought of the elaborate display of Christmas lights across the boxwood hedge all along the front of the house—thousands of white fairy lights, and larger bulbs in the dogwood trees lining the lot. Of course they'd paid to have this done, not mounted ladders themselves, but why? The lights would shine all night long in front of an empty house while the family skied and didn't talk to each other out in Wyoming. You couldn't see any of it from the road. No one would even know. What role frivolity in the face of revisions like this?

“The essay was a strong one,” she added, feeling braver.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Well, obviously not.”

“The essay did not keep him out.”

“Sure as hell didn't get him in.”

“Neither will this one. Trust me.”

“Should I?”

“Up to you. But the word ‘mediocrity'? Really, do you think that's the best way to approach this?”

Half Mr. Pfaff's face raised in a disbelieving smile. Had he used the word “chutzpah,” he'd have been thinking it now. But his background supplied him with different terms, more like “floozy” and “gall.” He turned to his son. “What think you, Christopher?”

Hunter raised his eyes, met his father's, and then looked away. They had broken him at last.

“Right,” said his father. Gerald Pfaff turned back to Anne, triumphant. “So just give this the once-over, for the small stuff, and then you and Christopher here can type it up and be done with it.” In a series of pulls and shoves, he raised himself from the chair and moved to the door. Before descending the stairs, he said one last thing: “And you'll see we're no longer applying to those mountain schools, the U Boulder whatever. We ski on vacation. He'll go east.”

They listened to him lumber down a few stairs, waiting for something more.

“ 'Night, Dad,” called Hunter. There was no reply.

 

D
ID
“
MEDIOCRITY
”
STAY?
The word settled over Anne like a sort of moral, a key to her days that was as predictive as it was gloomy. She wore it while sitting in the chair by the fire at her parents' house Christmas Eve, beside her mother with a crossword puzzle and her father with his laptop. She hauled it back down to the city first thing the twenty-sixth, glad the holiday was behind her, watching her sparkleless fingers on the steering wheel as she drove the salted highways home. She'd left Martin's ring with her parents. She didn't yet have the heart to mail it back, but she didn't want it in her apartment either. Fondling the bright diamond over the kitchen sink, her mother had sighed and said, “Do you mind if I wear it out every now and then?”