“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.