Liz Moore - The Unseen World

It must have occurred to Regina O’Brien, too, for she looked at Ada levelly and asked her what school she attended.

She panicked. She looked at David, who said nothing. She thought she should lie. “Woodrow Wilson,” she said, naming a nearby middle school, uncertain whether it was even the one she’d be sent to.

“And what grade are you in?” asked Miss O’Brien.

“Eighth,” said Ada.

Miss O’Brien paused.

“And who’s your favorite teacher there?” she asked.

At last, David interjected. “She doesn’t go anyplace. I teach her,” he said. “I provide an education for her at home and at my place of work.”

And from the look on Miss O’Brien’s face, Ada knew that they were deeply in trouble.

Later in the 1980s, a series of cases worked their way through the Massachusetts courts that would define the laws that now govern the idea of homeschooling. In Care and Protection of Charles & Others , one will find an overview of what is now required of homeschoolers in the state of Massachusetts: Prior approval from the superintendent and school board, for one. Access to textbooks and resources that public school children use, for another. David and Ada had neither. In 1984, David’s failure to enroll his daughter in any school was only further evidence of his neglect, in the eyes of the DCF.

He seemed not to recognize the severity of the allegations against him. He felt it was impossible that they could take his child from him. Absurd. He told Liston it would not happen.

But after that first visit, their lives began to change. The DCF commanded David to enroll Ada in an accredited school. Miss O’Brien recommended to her supervisor that home visits be continued, and social services required David to see a doctor regularly to monitor the progress of his disease. To see whether, and how fast, he was progressing toward parental incompetence. Incompetence: the word that Liston had once used in reference to him. Incompetence: the opposite, to Ada, of her father’s name.

The Queen of Angels School was a brown brick building, four stories high, set close to the sidewalk. One wide short flight of stairs led to six unpretty industrial doors, painted a dull dark blue. Its roof, surrounded by high chain-link fences on all sides, was used for gym class in warm weather. Its lower windows had metal bars running from top to bottom — added several decades after the school was first built, an attempt to calm paranoid parents who increasingly saw Dorchester as a place to be feared — and its upper windows were narrower and more numerous than what would have been standard for the building, which gave it the look of a medieval fortress or a city wall.

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.