The Unseen World (12 page)

On a Wednesday in September, more than a week after the school year had begun for everyone else, Ada walked for the first time into the Queen of Angels Lower School. Liston and David were with her; all three had taken the day off of work. For the weeks following the DCF's visit, there had been a debate. David had wanted to enroll her in the local public junior high, but Liston had insisted that that would not do. So, grumblingly, David and Ada and Liston had gone at the start of the month to meet with Sister Aloysius, the principal, and Mr. Hanover, the president, both of whom were in charge of welcoming new students into their fold.

In the high-ceilinged office occupied by the latter, the three of
them sat and listened to a speech about the benefits of a Catholic education, the moral enlightenment Ada would receive, the community provided by the school. David leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, looking down at the floor, the top of his bald head catching light from the window and shining. He sat up, stretched his arms and legs uncomfortably, sighed out heavily once or twice. Liston glared at him. Ada hoped that no one else noticed.

The two administrators were tactful about her history, referring to her homeschooling only vaguely, euphemistically, as if it might behoove everyone to forget about it entirely. Ada assumed that Liston, who was well known in the Queen of Angels parish and active in the school, had prepped them thoroughly.

Ada listened attentively to everything that was said, looking around with interest at the decorations and the architecture: the crucifixes on the walls, above all the doors; the ancient, ticking clocks in metal cages; the colors of the school, which had most likely been redone in the previous decade and consisted mainly of muted, modernist tones. Pea-green, goldenrod, maroon. She felt in certain ways that she had breached a castle wall; she had so often walked past Queen of Angels and scanned its exterior for signs of what it must be like inside. As outsiders, David and Ada had always been only hazily aware of the ways in which Dorchester was divided, though it interested David, and he often asked Liston to describe it. To Liston, to her children and friends, one's parish was more important than one's neighborhood or one's street. The first floor of Queen of Angels contained the local parish school, a grammar school, perhaps two hundred students in sum from kindergarten through eighth grade. But the upper floors contained a central diocesan high school that drew from seven different parochial schools, including the one beneath it, and so beginning in the ninth grade the school widened into a river of students from a broader swath of Dorchester, and some from the city beyond. Nearly everyone in Savin Hill, including all three Liston boys, attended
Queen of Angels: Matty and Gregory in the Lower School, William in the Upper. Liston herself had gone there for her entire education as a girl. This was the only fact about the school that David found at all reassuring. “Well, I suppose it did all right by Liston,” he said to Ada, but a note of skepticism still made its way into his voice. Ada would enter as an eighth-grader, based on her age and not much else, and be placed among students who had known each other for years. But Sister Aloysius assured her that by ninth grade she would blend right in.

At one point, she leaned in toward Ada kindly and put a hand on the desk. “Ada, dear,” she said, “if ever you find yourself unable to grasp something, or falling behind in a course, don't hesitate to come to me for help.”

At this David's head jerked to attention and, finally, he spoke. “There is no question that Ada will be able to
grasp
what you put before her,” he said, a sort of quiet viciousness making its way into his voice. “In fact, I'd go so far as to say she'll throttle it. The question is whether you'll be able to provide my daughter with the sort of material that will offer her even the slightest challenge. Or do you,” he said. “Or do you,” he said again, and then he lost his words.

All of them, including David, fell for a moment into silence.

“I can guarantee you, sir,” began Mr. Hanover, at the same time that Liston stood up and thanked them for their time.

“Do you have any questions?” asked Sister Aloysius, looking only at Ada, and Ada shook her head quickly in response.

Later that day, Liston called to ask whether Ada would like her boys to walk her to school in the morning. She declined, not wanting to saddle them with her, feeling sure that the request would be a burden to them. The recent turmoil in her life had momentarily supplanted her crush on William as the place her thoughts wandered when left undirected. She realized that she had not daydreamed about him for a week.

In the evening, David mustered up some energy and made them both dinner. “Whatever you like, Ada,” he said. She had chosen
pot au feu
, a special favorite of hers that David made only on occasion, and went with him to the butcher on Dot Ave to pick up the beef.

She let him amble ahead of her and concentrated on his walk, memorizing it, wondering what it would be like to be without him. For the past several weeks she had been investigating Alzheimer's disease on her own, with the help of the scholarly library at the Bit. She had discovered two things: first, that the disease typically moved at a fairly sedate pace. Life expectancy, in that decade, was thought to be about eight to ten years from diagnosis. But it had been over two years already since he was first forced by Liston to see a doctor, and—if Ada was honest with herself—she had been noticing symptoms of forgetfulness for longer than that. She had been convincing herself for years that David had always been absentminded.

The second bit of information that she learned, more troublingly, was that when the disease was diagnosed in younger people, its progression was often more rapid. David was fifty-nine: well below the age the literature listed as the cutoff point between early-onset Alzheimer's and the more typical variety. And in early-onset patients, the disease could move quite fast: two or three years until the individual's comprehension skills were entirely lost, until the individual was no longer verbal. After that, quite rapidly, the function of his muscles and all of his reflexes would shut down completely.

Ada had squeezed her eyes shut against this possibility. She told herself it would not happen: that David would be the exception.

The butcher shop was busy with customers, but the owner knew and loved her father.

“What can I get you, Professor?” he asked—his perpetual name for David, and for anyone in the neighborhood who manifested signs of formal education—and David, leaning forward, his hands behind his back, selected his cut of beef carefully, brought it home, cooked it
up for Ada while she sat in the kitchen and talked to him, her father, her best and most important ally in the world.

“I'll tell you something, Ada,” said David. He turned to look at her, pushed his glasses, steamy from the pot of water he had boiling on the stove, back up on his nose. “It's going to be a different lab without you there. Quite a different lab altogether,” he said. “I know Liston's really going to miss you.”

“I'll miss her, too,” said Ada. She was talking, of course, about her father; just as he was talking about her.

Their old and comfortable house filled up with the smell of herbs and onions and garlic. And Ada thought in that moment that it might not all be so bad.

Liston had warned her not to be late, so before she went to bed Ada had consulted the schedule she'd received, noting the start time of all the classes. Her first was at 8:00 a.m., and she planned on arriving at 7:50 just to be safe.

At breakfast, David was quiet. He did not know what to say to her: she could tell that he felt he had failed her.

Then he asked, as if it had just occurred to him, what she would use to carry her books, and she pointed to a canvas bag on the floor that she had scavenged from the basement.

“Oh, dear,” said David. “That won't do the trick. Wait here,” he said, and he went into his office and emerged, proudly, with a brown briefcase that unlocked only when a five-digit code was entered mechanically onto a rotating combination lock. David had not used it in years, but it had been an object of fascination for Ada when she was small. He had programmed the lock with a number he promised she could guess. As a smaller child she had spent hours entering guessable numbers: her birth date, then her birth date backward; his birth date, forward and backward; the address of their house with three zeroes in front of it. But she'd never guessed correctly. Every now and then, still, she walked into his office and idly tried a new idea.

“It's yours,” he said to her proudly.

She took it from him. She was pleased: she felt professional, suddenly, like her own person.

“You've never guessed the code?” he asked.

Ada shook her head.

“It's just
code
. The word
code
, using alphanumeric substitution,” he said happily. “No shifts. Stupidly simple. The sort of password that longs to be cracked.”

Ada had, long ago, memorized a table that listed each letter next to its corresponding number, 1 through 26. She turned the dials on the combination lock—3 for
C
, 15 for
O
—until they read
31545
, and then pressed two buttons to its right and left, and the latches opened with a satisfying, muted pop.

Inside, the briefcase was empty, lined with a silk material that was yellowing in places. One half of the briefcase bore little elasticized compartments meant to hold writing implements and notepads, and David now took a pen from his shirt pocket and tucked it into place inside one. He walked back into his office and came out again holding an unlined pad of white paper, stationery from the Steiner Lab that David had ordered en masse five years ago. He handed this to Ada as well.

“There,” he said. “Now you're all ready.”

“Shall I walk you to school?” he asked her.

“I'll be okay,” said Ada. In fact she would have liked him to, but she wanted to demonstrate to him that she'd be all right—to show him that she was grown up now, to lessen his guilt, which, that month, had manifested itself in ways that Ada had begun to notice. He looked at her for longer than usual; he asked her more often what she'd like to do in the evening or on weekends. A dark shadow crossed his brow now whenever he could not locate a word or phrase, which happened many times each day. The night before, in the middle of a glass of sherry, he had apologized to her.

“I should not have put you in the position in which you now find yourself,” said David. “I was trying to do what I thought was right, but I fear I've made everything worse.”

“I'll be all right,” Ada had said, reassuringly.

“Oh, my dear. I feel as if I'm throwing you to the wolves,” said David. “Genuflecting to the cross. Learning the rosary. Confessing your sins to Father So-and-So. Good heavens,” he said.

He took a pensive sip.

“Sometimes I still think I should have sent you to public school,” he said. “But Liston knows best, I suppose.”

He had packed both of them lunches the night before, as he often did, but that day, for the first time, Ada would be taking hers separately. Carrying it herself. She put the brown bag inside her briefcase, squashing it slightly when she closed it, feeling the give of the bread. They walked together over the bridge and then, at the main intersection that followed, Ada turned left and David turned right.

“What is it that I tell you here?” asked David. “Have a good day, I suppose?”

His face looked pinched, slightly red around the nose. Ada stood apart from him: she did not know how to comfort him. She needed comforting herself.

He looked at her ruefully. “Don't take them too seriously,” he said finally. “Don't take anything too much to heart, Ada. All right?”

She nodded solemnly. And then she watched her father as he walked away, carrying his own briefcase down by his side. She longed in that moment to go with him: to run after him, to sigh deeply and contentedly as she settled into her work at the lab. Instead she turned, finally, and walked in the opposite direction. Her head was down, like David's head. From above, they would have looked like mirror images of one another, one larger, one smaller: a Rorschach test; a paper snowflake, unfolded; two noblemen pacing away from one another in preparation for a duel.

It was a short walk to Queen of Angels from there. She tightened her right hand around the handle of the briefcase; it made her feel professional, secure, as if she were clasping her father's hand. When she arrived, she found she was alone. No other students were in sight; and the first-floor windows were too high to see inside from street level. Ada walked up the steps, feeling increasingly ill at ease. At the top of them, she tried the handle of a door and found that it was locked. She tried another. Locked. She stood for a moment outside, wondering about her next move; a large part of her wanted to turn and walk home.
I tried
, she imagined saying.
The door was locked
. She did not feel yet that she had any obligation to the school; she did not feel, yet, that she lacked agency, or the right of self-governance. In her life, Ada had rarely been told that she could not do something she wished to do, because all of her desires aligned so completely with the desires of those around her, because her deference to her father and all of his colleagues meant that her requests were usually very reasonable and very small. All of her life she had operated in the world of adults, and the world of adults had welcomed her.

Now she decided that it was reasonable that she turn and walk home, but as she reached the bottom of the steps, one of the dark blue doors opened behind her and a low voice issued forth.

“Where do you think you're going?” said the voice.

Ada turned around. The man in the doorway was small and stern. He had gray hair parted sharply to the side of his head, and brown pants, and a wide, short, brown tie.