Taking Off (8 page)

“I'm afraid it's too late to apply,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Matthew told me, but I just want to see what I'm missing. Something in me won't be able to rest until I know what might have been.”

She gave me the brochure, and then she added to it a useless application form. I stared at her, searching her face for any evidence of a smile.

“Mrs. Kippwagen,” I said slowly, not quite sure whether I would actually ask her what I wanted to ask her.

“Yes?” she said, a bit warily.

“Why didn't you let me know about this in time to apply? I would have liked to go. I probably could have gotten in, if Matthew got in. My grades are better than his, especially in math and science, and I—”

“The feeling here,” she said, tapping the eraser of her pencil on the blotter that covered most of the surface of her desk, “within the administration of the Babbington Public School System, was that only one student was likely to be chosen from any one town, and we wanted that student to be the best representative of the system we could put forth.”

“That's Matthew?” I asked.

“We decided that it was Matthew,” she said. The rhythm of the tapping pencil never altered.

I asked the classic question: “What's he got that I haven't got?”

“The right attitude,” she said without half a moment's hesitation. “Matthew is a boy who exudes seriousness of purpose. People look at him and say to themselves, ‘This is a sober boy, a boy who has put aside childish things, a boy who probably reads the world news every day and clucks his tongue over that chronicle of human misery—'”

“Mrs. Kippwagen,” I asked, “are there any other summer institutes like this—maybe some that I could still apply for?”

“I've never heard of anything like this before,” she said. “This is a new idea. It's a response to a national crisis. It's no laughing matter.”

*   *   *

THE BROCHURE led off with these words:

Y
OUTH OF
A
MERICA
! U
NCLE
S
AM
N
EEDS
Y
OU
!

This is what followed:

Enemy Powers are training their youth to build rockets, satellites, and fearsome weapons.

Our intelligence tells us that their youth are far ahead of our youth. This means you!

We need a new generation of whiz kids who can build rockets, satellites, and fearsome weapons for us!

That's why Your Government, working through the privately funded Preparedness Foundation, is sponsoring the Summer Institute in Math, Physics, and Weaponry (SIMPaW) for promising high school students.

The Summer Institute is a six-week residential program for bright, serious high school students. (NOTE: For purposes of security and secrecy, the Institute is held on the campus of the New Mexico College of Agriculture, Technology, and Pharmacy, and accepted students should refer to themselves as “future pharmacologists of America.”)

As a student at the Summer Institute, you will pursue a challenging curriculum that will prepare you for the struggle that lies ahead.

Don't think that you'll be sitting in dusty classrooms studying empty theory! Oh, no! You'll get useful, practical experience in calculating missile trajectories and weapons yields.

S
HOULD
Y
OU
A
PPLY
?

The Summer Institute is not for everyone. We're not looking for sluggards, laggards, or dullards. If that's you, pass us by. No comedians, either, thank you. We're looking for boys (and girls) with
promise,
the ones who stand at, or near, the top of their class, do their homework, and take out the garbage. If that's you, Uncle Sam says, “I want you to fill out the application form.”

You must submit the application, school transcript, signed loyalty oath, and letters of recommendation in triplicate by April 15. No application received after that date will be considered for any reason under any circumstances. (And don't try to blame a late application on the U. S. Mail. Nothing stays those loyal couriers from their appointed rounds, and we will look with double disfavor on the application of anyone who claims that something does.)

Despite the clear statement that no applications would be entertained after the deadline, I decided to make the effort anyway, in the never-say-die spirit of Dædalus. I completed the application. I arranged to have my transcript sent to the institute. I noticed that the application did not include the loyalty oath that was mentioned in the list of required documents; I considered this the application's equivalent of an exam's trick question and devised a loyalty oath of my own. I lined up letters of recommendation, and I wrote a heartfelt cover letter explaining why my application was late and all but begging to be considered after the deadline.

Dear Admissions Committee:

I am submitting an application for admission to the Summer Institute. I realize that this application will reach you after the official deadline for submission of applications, through no fault of the U. S. Mail. I trust that you will consider my application, despite its lateness, on the grounds that I have a good excuse for being late. Here it is: until now, no one had ever told me that there was such a thing as the Summer Institute.

I am convinced that attending the Institute is the very thing I need to advance me in my goal of becoming a pharmacologist, if you know what I mean. I have been serious about this goal since I was a young boy, and I have always done my homework on time. (Well, almost always. Nearly on time.) I have enclosed a signed loyalty oath. (None was supplied, so I wrote my own, which I sincerely hope will be acceptable.)

You should receive, under separate cover, my school transcript and letters of recommendation from my math and physics teachers and from a pharmacist in my home town of Babbington, New York.

I implore and beseech you to give my application full consideration despite its lateness. If, on a winter's night, a traveler arrived at your door late, when dinner was done and the lights were out, seeking shelter and the warmth of human companionship, would you turn him away? Of course not. Though he arrived late, you would throw your door open wide and welcome the weary applicant with hot soup, a warm fire, and a soft bed, wouldn't you? Isn't that the American way?

Sincerely yours,

Peter Leroy

Loyalty Oath

I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Peter Leroy

It didn't work. The admissions committee was not amused, and my application was not entertained. I received a small slip of paper printed with the following rejection notice:

Thank you for your interest in the Summer Institute. Your application was received after the Institute's deadline for receipt of applications had passed. Therefore, it cannot be considered. The Institute wishes you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

Chapter 15

On Rejection's Gray Gloom

ALBERTINE CROSSED THE ROOM, rumpled my hair, sat beside me, and gave me a hug, responding as much to the sigh that I appended to my reading of the preceding chapter as to its text, I think.

“Were you horribly disappointed, my darling?” she asked.

“Yes, I was,” I admitted. “I had forgotten this sad section of the tale, or perhaps I had chosen not to remember it. When that letter arrived, I fell into rejection's gray gloom.”

“But you hadn't actually been rejected. Your application was late. It was never considered, not rejected.”

“Try to tell an adolescent boy that there is a difference. Do you suppose that if he calls a girl and asks her to go with him to the first dance of the school year and hears her tell him that she already has a date, he allows himself to feel that he hasn't actually been rejected because his application was late and therefore could not be considered?”

“I see what you mean.”

“Of course you do.”

“He sinks into that gray gloom you mentioned just a moment ago.”

“His estimation of his own self-worth slips lower and lower—”

“He asks himself why she couldn't invent some excuse to rid herself of the earlier bird and put him, the late applicant, in the place held by the earlier applicant and, ultimately, in the arms of the girl herself.”

“Yes, I guess he does—”

“He tells himself that if she cared for him, she certainly would do that.”

“Right—”

“He tells himself that if she
really
cared for him, she would never have accepted the invitation of any other applicant no matter how early the application was made.”

“Yes, that too.”

“He begins to wonder whether he shouldn't have done something to distinguish himself, to move himself to the head of the line of suitors, so that the timing of his invitation would not have been a factor in the girl's decision.”

“I don't know about that—”

“He curses himself for not having offered to fly her to the dance in an airplane of his own construction.”

“What?”

“That would have made her change the rules and accept him in place of the earlier applicant.”

“Hey—”

“But no, no. Such thoughts would bring the fault too near himself, and the gray gloom of rejection is better than the bitter tea of inadequacy or incompetence or ineptitude, so he allows himself to slip a little lower, and a little lower, until he is sure that the girl wouldn't go to a dance with him if he were the last young aviator on earth, covered in glory, and he suspects that she would stay at home on the night of the dance, watching her parents play mah-jongg rather than be seen in public on his arm.”

“I think I'll move on to the next chapter.”

“Oh, goody.”

Chapter 16

Mr. MacPherson Raises a Question

MY FRENCH TEACHER, Angus MacPherson, must have noticed the downcast look that I wore throughout his class—a particularly knotty one on the uses of the subjunctive—because he stopped me on my way out the door and said, with a look of concern, “Peter, you seem a bit—how do you put it—down in the dump.”

“Dumps,” I said.

“Yes, that's it, the dumps, ‘down in the dumps.' But why should it be so? Here in Babbington there is but one dump, unless they are hiding another from me. Are they? Is there a dump known only to initiates in a secret society of refuse and rubbish?”

“Um, no,” I said. “I don't think so.”

“Then one must be down in the dump, not the dumps, and that is where you seem to be. Why is that, Peter?”

“I've been rejected,” I said.

“Ah! An affair of the heart! Of such sweet pain the teenage years are full to overflowing, I am afraid. Doubtless you will experience rejection many times. ‘Learn young, learn fair; learn auld, learn mair.' In my own case—”

“It was more like being rejected by a college.”

“How time flies! ‘There's nae birds this year in last year's nest.' Are you after leaving us for college already?”

“No. Not yet. But I was hoping to spend the summer in New Mexico at a summer institute for promising high school students.”

“Ah. That's a lot to parse all at once. An institute, you say?”

“Yes.”

“What would that be? Not an institution, certainly? Not a house for the mad, I hope?”

“No, no. It's just—I guess it's—well—I don't exactly know what it is. A kind of summer school.”

“Glorified by the name of Institute. I see. For promising high school students, you said?”

“Yes.”

“I'm fully familiar with high school students, after trying to teach them to conjugate irregular verbs these past eight and twenty years, but I'm a bit less certain about what
promising
might mean.”

“I think it means students who show promise.”

“Students who show promise? What do they promise, pray?”

So far as I know, the Socratic dialogue had not yet become a Method of Instruction in the pedagogical armamentarium of American education, as it was to become not many years later, but Mr. MacPherson was already a practitioner of it, a pioneer in his way.

“I guess they promise to get better—improve—do remarkable things.”

“Do you consider yourself a promising student?”

“Yeah. I think I've got promise.”

“You think that you are likely to do remarkable things?”

“Well—I hope so.”

“‘Him that lives on hope has a slim diet.' What do you hope to do that's in the remarkable class?”

“I—um—I don't know—I—”

“Not a promising beginning,” he said.

“I'm going to build an airplane out of parts of old motorcycles,” I asserted suddenly.

“Now that is a promise! I see that you are a promising lad after all. So, with your being such a promising lad, why did the Institute for Promising Lads not accept ye?”

“Oh—my application was late—and I didn't mention anything about building the airplane.”

“Hmmm. I see. Well, ‘nae great loss but there's some smaa 'vantage.' With the loss their having passed you over, the advantage is that you are, I suppose, available if other institutes come looking for recruits?”

“Sure—but—”