Loon - Jack McLean [30]
There was only one way to find out.
Hulburd thought it would be good practice for me to have a warm-up interview before visiting Harvard the following week. Although I was not particularly interested in attending college in New York, Columbia and Harvard were similar enough that Hulburd felt an interview at Columbia would be beneficial for me. The day of my practice interview at Columbia, I pulled out the gray suit—still new, still pressed—that I had last worn that miserably rainy graduation day at Andover a year before. I found a crisp starched white shirt and black socks in my father’s dresser, and a presentable tie in his closet. I removed my spit-shined Marine Corps dress shoes from their flannel sleeves and put them on to complete the outfit. The shoes felt awkward and out of place without my uniform, but they were all that I had. The suit and shirt didn’t quite fit, but I did feel well put together, considering the circumstances.
I walked out the front door, down High Street, and across Route 9 to the Brookline Village trolley stop and took the Green and the Blue lines to Logan airport. I made the nine o’clock shuttle to New York with time to spare and was sitting in the waiting room of the Columbia University admissions office in Hamilton Hall at ten-twenty. I was forty minutes early for my eleven o’clock appointment. As I looked around the room at the other candidates gathered for their interviews that morning, there was no question that I had the shiniest pair of shoes.
At the stroke of eleven, I was introduced to the interviewer. He was a short weaselly-looking young man in a black suit who, after leading me into his tiny office, directed me to sit on a cracked plastic guest chair. He positioned himself safely behind a large desk. My suit pants were strangling my thighs, which had bulked up during the past year. The early-morning excitement and my anticipation from the plane trip down from Boston evaporated in an instant.
He did not appear to be happy to see me.
“Good morning, Mr.… ah, McLean,” he began as he fumbled to find my name on his appointment sheet.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Let’s see.… You’re the person we got a call about from Andover the other day?” He was still searching.
“Yes.”
“They wanted us to see you right away. I don’t have any information on you. Is that your transcript that you are holding?”
“Yes,” I replied, and silently turned over the envelope Hulburd had given me.
No small talk. No “So tell me what you’ve been up to for the past year.” No “So how was your flight down?” He just wanted what was in the envelope. It contained my five-year Andover transcript and College Board scores. I should have spared myself the humiliation and just left.
“This is it? These are your grades?” He was mystified and made no attempt to hide it.
“Yes, sir.”
I knew that he wanted to ask me if there was some critical piece of paper that was missing, if there was some obvious fact that he had overlooked that was key to my coming all the way down from Boston for this moment.
“Why are you here?”
I scrambled. “Well, I think that they thought you might be interested in my experience—you know, what I’ve been doing for the past year.”
“The army?” He said the two words with the same drawn-out inflection that he might have used had I told him that there was an elephant in the room, which, I might add, there was.
“Well, yes. That is, the Marine Corps, actually, but yes.” I decided to kill Hulburd as soon as I got back to Boston.
“Tell me, how old will you be at the start of your freshman year?”
“Twenty-one.”
“That’s going to be a problem. We prefer that our incoming freshmen be eighteen or nineteen years old. We think it adds