The office was on the right side of the corridor as they stood looking into the school. Gregor went in through the office door and found, again, what he would have expected to find. There was a counter separating the public—or, in this case, the students—from the secretaries at the desks in the open area beyond, and then a small row of doors to the private offices. The offices were labeled generically: principal; vice principal; guidance counselor. Miss Marbledale lifted the movable part of the counter and waved him through.
“Didn’t somebody tell me you have been here for many years?” Gregor asked.
“I’ve been here my entire career,” Miss Marbledale said. “It’s been decades. Four, at least, and then some. I could work it out if I tried.”
“Have you been principal long?”
“For the last fifteen.”
Miss Marbledale had her office open. Gregor could see through the door and across the desk through the windows, to the big oval front lawn ringed by the asphalt driveway that would let busses come in and out without getting in each other’s way.
“You can’t see the construction from here,” Gregor said.
“Ah, the construction,” Miss Marbledale said. “You have no idea how long I waited for this town to approve this project, and I’ve been waiting ever since. I don’t understand people sometimes. There’s work to be done here, real work, not arguing about whether teaching evolution gets students thinking that there is no God. I’ll admit I wasn’t happy when Franklin and the new board were elected, but I had some hopes for Annie-Vic. She’s got her priorities straight. And then, of course, now this.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “This. Did Annie-Vic have her priorities straight, as you put it? I thought she was involved in this lawsuit.”
“Only pro forma,” Miss Marbledale said. “Henry Wackford went to the ACLU, and to the local chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The ACLU, I think, found him a lawyer, and the lawyer gave him some advice on how to put together a set of plaintiffs.”
“Henry Wackford is the old chairman of the school board?” Gregor said. “I thought he was a lawyer himself.”
“Oh, he is,” Miss Marbledale said. “And for all I know, he may be a good one. But this is a federal case, literally. A federal court and a Constitutional question. And the stakes are high. Nobody wants to take any chances.”
Gregor looked around the office. Miss Marbledale’s degrees hung on the wall, including a doctorate. There was a picture in a frame on the desk, of Miss Marbledale with a woman who could have been her clone. Gregor supposed that was a sister.
“Try to help me understand something,” he said. “From Gary Albright, I’ve gotten the impression that no matter what I’ve heard on the news, this is not a case where the school board wants teachers to teach Creationism, or Intelligent Design, I suppose I should say, anyway, they don’t actually want teachers to teach it in school.”
“That’s right,” Miss Marbledale said. “The courts have been fairly clear about that. There would be no point in trying that here or anywhere else, given the relevant case law.”
“What they want,” Gregor said, “is for there to be some kind of notice in the biology textbooks, saying something about how evolution is one way some people try to explain the great variety of living things on earth, and Intelligent Design is another way, and if students are interested in Intelligent Design, there’s a book in the library they can go to see.”
“Yes,” Miss Marbledale said. “To be specific, the book is called Of Pandas and People. It’s a famous book in its way. It started out as a straightforwardly Creationist text, and then with the outcome of the case in Arkansas, when it was clear the courts wouldn’t allow it in the schools, the book was retooled for Intelligent Design. There’s a woman named Barbara Forrest who’s done excellent work tracking the history of that book.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “what occurs to me, and what I think would occur to a lot of other people, is that this lawsuit seems a little like overkill. It’s a disclaimer, and a book in the library. It’s not teaching Genesis in science class, or even mentioning Intelligent Design in science class. So why file a suit against the school board over something that innocuous.”
Catherine Marbledale looked Gregor Demarkian up and down and back and forth. Then she took her seat behind her desk.
“Are you a supporter of Intelligent Design?” she asked.
“To tell you the truth, I know nothing at all about it, except what I’ve heard since I came here,” Gregor said.