The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  They brought Ada to the living room to deliver the news. Later, she recalled wondering, perversely, if this was what it was like to have both a father and a mother. They sat together across from her. She was on a little chair that David said had come from his grandmother. They were on a leather sofa that David attended to from time to time with an oil that smelled like lemons.

  David looked at Liston for help, but she shook her head.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Two years ago,” he began, “at Liston’s insistence, I visited a doctor for the first time in quite a while. There I was instructed to return for further testing. Upon doing so, I was informed that it was likely that I might be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. I disagreed with that assessment. I still do.”

  He paused.

  “How familiar are you with Alzheimer’s disease?” he asked.

  Ada considered, and then said she knew what it was. She had read about it in some book or other, or perhaps more than one book. It was part of her vocabulary. She pictured it as a slow gray fog that rolled in over one’s memory. She pictured it seeping in through the doors and windows as they spoke, invading the room. She felt cold.

  “Have you been back to the doctor since then?” Ada asked.

  Liston glared at David.

  “No,” he said, hesitantly.

  “What?” he said to Liston. “There’s nothing they can do for me. Even if their diagnosis is correct.”

  “You seem fine,” Ada said to him, and to Liston, and to herself.

  “I am,” he said. “Don’t worry too much about this, Ada,” he said. “I’m quite all right.”

  Ada could feel the tension between David and Liston. She knew, though she was young, what was causing it: it was Liston’s wish to protect her with honesty, and David’s to protect her—and himself—with optimism, wishfulness, some willful ignorance of his impending fate.

  “I think David might have told me he’d be going out of town, actually,” said Ada. “I can’t remember now.”

  It was a lie. Of course it was a lie. Liston looked at her sadly.

  “You see?” said David, but Liston didn’t respond.

  Finally, in the midst of their silence, Ada stood up. She turned to Liston.

  “I guess I can stay here now,” she said, and she excused herself, and walked slowly up the stairs to her bedroom, which was as unfrilled and austere as a man’s, wallpapered in a brown plaid that the previous owners had chosen. She’d been reading The Way of a Pilgrim, like Franny Glass, and although she was not religious, she said the Jesus Prayer aloud, quietly, five times. She told herself that everything would be fine, because she could imagine no alternative. Because no life existed for her outside of David.

  In a week, the Boston Department of Children & Families came to visit them. Liston had called Officer Gagnon to let him know that David had been found, but they were concerned enough about his disappearance to investigate.

  David was appalled. He sulked his way through the home visit, with a woman named Regina O’Brien, a gray lady with gray hair. To her questions he gave single-word answers, sometimes unsubtly rolling his eyes. In order to offer an explanation for an absence that had brought the police to their home, David was forced to reveal his diagnosis to the DCF. His first proposal that he had simply forgotten to tell Ada that he’d been going out of town had seemed to alarm them more than it assured them of his competence.

  Then came a question that David and Ada had not prepared for in advance. Miss O’Brien looked at Ada and asked how she was doing in school.

  Ada paused. She looked at David, who looked at Miss O’Brien and told her that Ada was doing very well in school.

  It was not, perhaps, a lie, if one counted David’s method of educating her at his laboratory as school. He had always been hazy about homeschooling Ada; in that decade, everyone thought it was odd and eccentric, but not out of line with the rest of David’s odd, eccentric behavior. Everyone, including Ada, seemed to accept that he had worked something out with the state. In that moment, for the first time, it occurred to Ada that perhaps he never had.

  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.

  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 fro
m 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.