He seemed doubtful of her story. But it was true, and in Dellarobia’s opinion no more far-fetched than the tales he’d told her. Of newborn butterflies, for instance, somehow flying thousands of miles to a place they’d never seen, the land where their forefathers died. Life was just one big fat swarm of kids left to fend for themselves.
Dr. Byron uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, pressing his hands together between his knees and looking at her. For the first time in this interview he seemed totally present. “Is this typical of high schools in this area, what you are describing?”
“Well, I only went to the one.” She hesitated, reconsidering how much she ought to disclose. She thought of Dovey mocking her ratty T-shirt: Be sure to wear that to your interview. “I had some good teachers,” she began again, unconvincingly. “Well, okay, I had one, Mrs. Lake for English. She was about a hundred years old. It’s weird, it was like she came from some earlier time when people actually cared. I heard she had a stroke, though. Bless her heart. Probably one too many times hearing some kid conjugate ‘bring, brang, brung.’ ”
Ovid seemed unamused. “What about math?”
“Our high school had Math One and Math Two,” she said. “Coach Otis, baseball. Math Two was for the kids who were already solid with multiplication.”
His brow wrinkled formidably. “Is this true?”
“Is that, like, massively insufficient?”
“Two years of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus, and stats.” He rattled this off like a ritual prayer in an alien religion. “Nothing there sounds familiar?”
“You ought to try that out on Coach Otis. If you want to see a grown man cry.”
Dr. Byron actually seemed agitated. “What are these administrators thinking?” he asked. As if he had a dog in this race, Dellarobia thought. His children, if any, would get started on higher math in some upmarket kindergarten.
“They’re not thinking anything much,” she told him. “Sports. That’s huge, a kid can shine if he’s good at football or baseball. Probably get a job later on in the bank or something like that.”
“Well, but it’s criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make?”
“I’d say you’re looking at it.” She crossed her arms, awaiting Dr. Byron’s verdict. Former Feathertown athletes had this town in their hands: the mayor, Jack Stell; Bobby Ogle; Ed Cameron at the bank, with whom she’d pleaded grace on her house loan. In his office that day they’d joked about their semester together in Mrs. Lake’s class, which Ed barely passed, and the football squad he led to state semifinals. People liked and trusted such men.
“Look, Dellarobia, I don’t want you to take this personally. But I’ve been wondering about this. I went to that school. Things were not what I expected.”
“Feathertown High?” She was startled, unable to picture any intersection between Dr. Ovid Byron and local culture. “When?”
“In December. I wanted to speak with the faculty about getting volunteers in the new semester. It’s a great chance for these kids. Exposure to field biology, data analysis, scientific method. If for no other reason, the college résumé. But I got nothing. The counselor asked if we were paying minimum wage.”
“Oh, kids in Feathertown wouldn’t know college-bound from a hole in the ground. They don’t need it for life around here. College is kind of irrelevant.”
His eyes went wide, as if she’d mentioned they boiled local children alive. His shock gave her a strange satisfaction she could not have explained. Insider status, maybe. She thought of Billy Ray Hatch, turned into a freak show on TV. Dovey said he was all over the Internet now too, with his reckon and this winter been too mild to suit my coon dogs. The world’s next big laugh of the moment. She’d like to hug that old man around his neck, and punch some cameraman in the kisser.
“Footballers teaching sports in place of science class,” Dr. Byron declared, “should not be legal. Are there no state standards or testing?”
“Oh, yes. We flunk those. We are dependable in that regard.”
“How can that persist?” He was studying her carefully, for irony she supposed, or some kind of storybook scrappiness. She’d already taken this interview to be a lost cause, but now she resisted. She didn’t want to lose on his rules.
“I’ll tell you how,” she said. “This state has cities on one end of it, and farms on the other. If they ever decided to send somebody out from the money end of things to check on us, they might slap down a fine or something.”
“And why do you suppose they don’t?”
She laughed. “They’re scared they’ll get kidnapped by the hillbillies like in that Deliverance movie.”
“I haven’t seen that one.”
She leaned forward. “May I ask a personal question? What country did you grow up in?”
He matched her posture, both hands on his knees. “The United States of America. Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands.”
“Whoa. America has islands? Besides Hawaii, I mean.”
“America has quite a few in fact, in several oceans. Saint Thomas is a protectorate, which is really a glorified colony. We pay taxes, but nobody comes out from the money end of things, as you say, to keep our schools up to date.”
She nodded, checking him for irony or scrappiness, she supposed. It made sense of this man, to picture him stalking butterflies on a golden shore and wowing the teachers in some little one-room school. “And here you are anyway,” she said, “doctor of all the sciences, Harvard and everything. But see, there’s not room at the top for everybody. Most of us have to walk around in our sleep, accepting our underprivileged condition.”
“You may be overstating the case,” he said, and left it at that. As if she were a child. She had taken things too far, of course. But she felt anger rising, some things still left unsaid. Dr. Byron flipped through what looked like a lot of pages on his clipboard. He had asked to borrow a clock for the lab, and she’d brought out the only one she had, a big wind-up alarm thing shaped like a chicken that Preston had used for learning to tell time. The ridiculous object sat ticking off seconds on a table nearby, measuring out the remainder of her tenure here among the well educated. A machine next to the clock was labeled SARTORIUS, which made her think of sartorial, a vocabulary word from long, long ago. Of or pertaining to the tailor’s trade. What was getting sewn up here?