Early Decision (22 page)

The thing was, Mrs. Pfaff explained, once, before Hunter was even in high school, she had received a haunting piece of advice: “Every kid has gotta have a hook.” And this was particularly true, everyone knew, for white boys; even more so for privileged white boys. The wisdom had come from a Chicago matron whose two girls had come out at the Passavant Cotillion and whose sons had rowed at Yale, and all of them, Marion Pfaff noted, had returned home to Chicago to live. One Thanksgiving at The Racquet Club, she'd taken advantage of a corner table to study the eldest, Barnett, a right-angled, gold-hued creature with a boarding school ring, and determined that this was within her reach. Her own son was dynasty trust-funded and a forehead over six feet, with an excellent first serve. He was a prize fish in a big, strong net of alumni and family connections that would lead him through every gate he approached.

And yet, when it came to college in these modern, “multicultural” days—she said the word as though it had bitten her—he was doomed. White suburban boys were everywhere. Rich white suburban boys were everywhere. One read the newspapers, of course, so one wondered: was it worse for California-born Asian boys? Mrs. Pfaff figured that unless you were shooting for Stanford, no, it was not. At least we don't live in Greenwich! she said. Maybe the Midwest counted for something. And one night when Hunter was nine, she sat up late on the Common Application Web site and scrolled through the questions. If only she could fill it out for him, she realized, she might have a shot at making them see how wonderful he really was. But there were more drop-down menus than text boxes, and the whole thing was user-unfriendly: private equity wasn't even an option under
Occupation
for Gerry. She supposed
banking-finance
came closest. He'd shudder to hear himself called a banker. And what should she choose for herself?
Homemaker?
Were they kidding?

Year after year she monitored the evolution of the Common Application, but they never seemed to learn. And more and more colleges capitulated to the form. Then interviews became optional, and then they weren't even offered by admissions officers anymore, only by alumni, and who knew who you'd draw? Some kid, some nobody with a chip on his shoulder, when a former trustee lived just next door and had watched your child grow up, but could you choose
him
? Oh, no. Not without seeming to be grasping at straws, not without looking desperate. But the truth was that colleges weren't interested in the whole child, clearly. She counted exactly two places on the form—three, with an “optional” space for God knows what—where a student could even write a full sentence. In her mind she saw—had always seen—her son, honest and eager, in a wood-paneled office talking with men who would decide admissions; this was the meeting she'd been raising her child for. When had it happened that meeting the child, knowing the child, no longer mattered? Whatever became of the gentleman scholar? Nowhere in the application's crotchety boxes could she explain what made Hunter special. The form seemed designed to strip him of his dignity.

So she determined, all those years ago, that Christopher Hunter Pfaff would have a hook. As a nine-year-old, he seemed to choose tennis. She called up the head pro and worked out an arrangement. Before long he was attending Nick Bollettieri's camps, and with Mrs. Pfaff doing the paperwork, he was steadily earning a north suburban ranking for Illinois boys twelve and under. But Hunter had gotten only as good as he needed to be to play number one on his high school team; like a carp, his father said.

“It's true,” Gerald declared now.

So Marian Pfaff had decided Hunter should travel. And indeed, he had surprised them one morning at breakfast with a question about South America, so that summer she had arranged for him go hiking in Chile and then crew on a Caribbean yacht. The trip came at some expense to his tennis, but that was acceptable because of the language skills he stood to gain. But halfway through the trek, he'd come down with terrible diarrhea, and spent the time holed up with a trip manager who'd flown in from Santiago to look after him. The fiasco darkened when his passport was misplaced—Hunter was sure it had slipped from his pocket as he paid for some bottled water—and it had required Gerry flying down there to sort it out and bring him home.

But the trip was a wonderful thing in that while Hunter was so ill, he'd lain in bed and taken photographs out the window of his room, and Mrs. Pfaff could have slapped herself for not thinking of his photography: he'd been taking pictures forever, as long as he could hold a camera in both little hands, and some of them were even pretty good. His high school had only a one-semester photography course, which he took as a freshman. But sophomore year there was a brilliant photographer in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago, Richard Mandalay, and while he hadn't taught in years, she'd been able, with a little wrangling from a friend in the development office, to talk him into giving Hunter a few lessons. Twice a month she'd driven her son downtown to the man's River North loft and waited in a coffee shop downstairs while Hunter studied his craft. Once, on the way home, she offered an idea she'd had: “It must be wonderful to work on your gift without having to worry about grades.”

But Hunter had only shrugged. “I guess so,” he said. In truth, he'd have preferred receiving a grade to the surly brows of the old man Mandalay, who didn't care for Hunter's pictures of the girls' field-hockey games, even the cool black-and-white one from the knees down that showed motion and captured the speed of the athletes. He and the photographer mostly sat in silence in the overheated loft and turned the pages of coffee-table books. Occasionally the old man would point to one and say, “That's what I mean by balance.”

Mandalay's residency ended and he returned to Vermont or New Hampshire or wherever, and Hunter slid his camera under his bed and left it there. At which point his mother overheard him picking at a guitar, which he'd bought secondhand from a kid who took a year off before college and wanted to pack light. He had a certain feel for the strings. So guitar lessons were arranged, and Mrs. Pfaff found front-row tickets to see James Taylor at Ravinia, now that Hunter could appreciate his talent. And so on.

All of which was set out now in Hunter's Significant Activities list, and detailed in his résumé. “Why didn't you keep up with your photography?” Anne had asked him. “Your guitar?” This falling off in his commitments was a bad thing; one wanted to show increasing dedication to singular pursuits, even though that seemed precisely contrary to the natural inclinations of a confident, curious adolescent. “And your Spanish?”

Hunter's résumé reminded Anne of the chalked outline of a homicide victim: perfectly correct, but without anyone inside. Mrs. Pfaff had managed to kill every interest he revealed. Her Midas-by-proxy was among the most devastating examples of crap parenting Anne had ever seen. No wonder the mustangs.

Mrs. Pfaff's voice was as slender as a whisper now. “So that's what I mean,” she said. “I tried everything. I give up.” Her sorrow was genuine. Anne hated her, and she hated her husband, and she hated the colleges; and somewhere upstairs, Anne knew, Hunter was hating her—Anne—too, maybe just as fiercely, for witnessing this, and for acting as his parents' tool.

“Well, to hell with it,” said Gerald Pfaff. He shook his head. “Who the hell cares about these places if to give our kid the world is to put him at a disadvantage? Sorry. In my book, you open every door you can. That's the right way. If they want to fault our son for being who he is and not black or brown or what have you, well, that's about as blatant racism as I can figure, but nothing I can say about it anyway.”

“So that's it?” asked his wife. “We just let go?”

“Um, of Amherst, maybe,” dared Anne. She sensed an opening here. It could all turn, it could all be so good. Hunter could study environmental science in Billings! Or Denver! Or Tacoma or Boulder! He could spend every summer working for the Park Service! He could take those guns from the front hall and set out west . . .

“Not a chance,” said Mr. Pfaff. “Christopher will apply early to Amherst. Let them prove me wrong. If it's as good a place as they say it is, they'll let him in. He's a good kid. And I'm no slouch. We know folks.”

“Fine,” said Anne. “The application's due in two weeks. So maybe have Hunter call me when he's feeling up to meeting.”

“Will do,” said his father, like it was nothing at all. He ambled toward the French doors and peered out.

“What a mess,” said his mother. She smoothed her hair over her temples and those oddly shiny cheeks, and turned to Anne. “Now probably isn't the best time to work on essays,” she said. “Dinner and all. May we give you something for the road? A piece of fruit?”

“Don't worry, she'll bill us,” muttered Mr. Pfaff. He was studying his grounds, his back to them, his bottom embarrassingly feminine in its bulges. Mrs. Pfaff switched on the kitchen lights against the evening, which had now fallen, and immediately Anne made out his face reflected in the glass. His eyes, unlike his wife's, were brimming with tears. He still thought himself unseen.

“Lord, it's dark early,” he said.

 

“O
KAY, WELL, SO,
I get it now,” Anne told Hunter, in opening.

“Get what?”

“That's a lot of stuff you have to deal with there.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

They had his latest draft before them on the table at Starbucks. She never wanted to set foot in the Pfaff house again, so she'd suggested an alternative for a few days later. Late afternoon. The Winnetka Starbucks was full of anxious mothers in cashmere coats, zooming in for enormous lattes prior to suppertime. Anne kept her voice down, and Hunter his hat low. But it was better than the gabled manse. The carp. Christ.

They were working line by line. “ ‘It was just one of her latest ideas for my college application, I thought,' ” Anne read out loud, pointing with a pen nib. “About your mom. It's funny. But are we comfortable with what that might suggest about your mom's involvement in your activities?”

“It's the truth,” said Hunter.

“Of course it is. But you don't owe them a confession, you're telling them a story. It's up to you.”

He was mute.

“Is there a fear that someone reading this might think your mom has helped things a little too much, do you think?”

“Oh,” he said, scraping his finger along the outside of his iced drink. It was a frigid, iron-gray day, and he wore only jeans and a T-shirt and his big, scribbled-black sneakers. “I see what you mean. Like I've been packaged.”

“Yes.”

“Well, but it's true—that's what I thought. She was signing me up because it's totally the sort of thing she falls for. And it's important, like, to say why I didn't want to go on that trip.”

“Okay, then leave it. But can we find a way to pick up that thread later? So we don't let them wonder on their own?”

He took the page from her and bent his head.

“What if here,” he said, pointing to a sentence toward the end, “I changed ‘When my parents ask me about this stuff . . . I don't want to share it with them' to something about, like, being grateful for the idea but wanting to make it my own now? Or, like, how I already have made it my own?”

“Great,” said Anne. “That's the right turn to make, I think.”

“That's nicer than I feel.”

“It's the right thing to do. Not because it's nice, but because we don't want the admissions people thinking you hate your parents.”

“I don't hate them.”

“I applaud that.”

“But calling Winnetka a prison is maybe not that cool?”

“Could sound a bit spoiled, I think, maybe.”

“Right,” he said, and leaned back again. He stretched his length under the table, and with one hand idly twisted a rope bracelet on the other wrist. Anne knew, as though it were her own memory, that Hunter's girlfriend had given it to him.

“Hey, nice man-jewelry,” she teased.

He smiled, but didn't look up. “It's kind of starting to smell.”

“No worries. You can just rub a little Tide on it, on the inside there, before you shower.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Works a charm.”

He spun the bracelet a few more times. “I'm not gonna get in, am I,” he said.

“What?”

“Amherst. Not happening.”

“Oh. Well, I'm not making the decisions. But I think it's probably not going to be that easy. No.”

“You know what?” He raised his shaggy head on his long neck, a teenage lion. “I don't even want to. My cousin, she's the junior there? She's sweet and all, but she's, like, so uptight. I mean, have you ever been to Darien? Craaaazy. She's basically, like, applying to law school after she finishes her homework and everything. Like, no time to think. Or chill. Or just, whatever.”

“Mmm. Those East Coasters,” Anne said.

“They're all like that?” he asked. She was spooked to realize he was serious. Sometimes she forgot how young these kids were.

“Oh, it's just a stereotype. You know, of suburbs like Darien, or New Canaan. But your cousin sounds like a great student.”

“Humph.”

“So anyway, what do
you
want?” Anne asked.

“To go back out there,” he said. “To Montana. Idaho. I don't know. Can you go to college there?”

“You can, in fact, yes.”

“So, like, where?”

Anne flipped over his essay and started writing names. “These are schools I want you to go home and look up. Read about them, see what you think.”

“Cool.”

“And this one, in particular”—she starred Colorado College—“pay close attention. They have this thing, a block schedule, that lets you really focus on one area at a time. I think you might really love that. Then let's talk.”