Living Witness(61)

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Alice thought. Then she thought of Judy Cornish’s smug little face—Judy Cornish and that other woman, Niederman. God, Alice hated all those people, all the people from the development, making fistfuls of cash for doing what? Not for working, that was for sure. Not for getting their hands dirty and their legs tired. Most of them had never done a day’s work in their lives. They went to offices, or they were like Judy Cornish and didn’t go anywhere at all. They just drove SUVs no decent person could afford the gas for and stuck their noses in the air because they were educated people.

“Educated people,” Judy Cornish had said, sitting in Miss Marbledale’s big outer office, “haven’t taken Creationism seriously for eighty years. You may not care whether or not your daughter can get into a good college, but I do care about mine.”

Good college. Oh, that was something. Of course, as far as Judy Cornish was concerned, the University of Pittsburgh was not a “good college.” Nothing was a “good college” except those fancy Ivy League places. Alice wasn’t sure which schools were in the Ivy League, although she knew about Yale and Harvard, because everybody had heard of them. She thought they were all in New England or someplace. She wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter. God, these people were all so, they were all—they had been just like that even back in high school, the one or two who were going to go away to “good colleges,” but it hadn’t mattered then, because nobody had to take them seriously then. They didn’t play sports, those people, or if they did they played fag sports like tennis, and nobody liked them.

“I think a club devoted to expanding investigations into serious academic topics would be a good thing for a school like this,” Judy Cornish had said. “There isn’t enough civic education in our schools, not even at the best of times. That’s why we end up with silly lawsuits like the one we have.”

God, Alice thought again, and then. Who would join a club like that? They’d be laughed at, and rightly. It wasn’t natural. Sitting in that room, she had been so angry she had had a hard time getting herself to speak, and it hadn’t helped that Miss Marbledale had been off somewhere when she got there. Nobody had any idea where Miss Marbledale had gone, and by the time she got back Judy Cornish was in full swing, with that Niederman woman standing right behind her, outlining the whole “agenda” for the vice principal.

“Agenda.” Alice hated big words. Alice hated people who used big words.

“I’m fairly sure that if enough parents chip in, we could bring some fairly important speakers to town to address the club,” Judy Cornish was saying. “We could get somebody from the National Center for Science Education, for instance, to clear up some of these misunderstandings about evolution. We could get somebody from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and maybe at least someone from one of the local chapters of the ACLU. The club could sponsor the talks and we could hold them in the evening and open them up to the entire town—”

That was when Alice had first noticed that Miss Marbledale was back. She must have come in while Judy Cornish was talking. Judy Cornish went on talking. She was talking and talking.

“Nobody would go to see those people,” Alice had said. “Nobody would. We don’t want Communists here. Communists and, you know, liberals. Secular humanists. I don’t care what you call them. We don’t want them here, and we don’t need them to confuse the Hell out of everybody when any fool knows what’s true and it isn’t what they say.”

“I want them here,” Judy Cornish had said. “Shelley wants them here. I’ll make some phone calls this afternoon. I’d bet anything I could get a good dozen parents who want them here.”

“Shelley” must be the Niederman woman, Alice thought. They all looked alike, these people. They all carried around the same big pocketbooks. Alice looked at Dick Henderson. He looked uncomfortable as Hell. He ought to look uncomfortable as Hell.

“You can’t start any club like that,” Alice said. “It’s against the rules.”

“It’s not against any rule,” Judy Cornish said.

“It will be against the rules,” Alice said. “We’ll pass a rule. Wait and see. You’re not in charge here. I’m on the school board. I’m the boss. We’ll make sure you can’t bring that kind of thing in here to contaminate our kids—”

“You can’t pass a rule,” Judy Cornish said triumphantly. “There’s a law called the Equal Access Act. It says that any school that gets federal funds has to allow any school club that any student wants to form without engaging in viewpoint discrimination. It says—”