The sachems at the Education Department didn’t know what to do with Mr. Cartwright. He was much too young to retire. They couldn’t reward him with a disability pension. He wasn’t disabled. He met with lawyers and administrators at the department’s new headquarters in lower Manhattan. It was, they said, Milo’s last chance. He was sent to a barrio in the South Bronx where no teacher or student had ever prospered. He would finish out his days in “Siberia” or wouldn’t finish at all. It was a special high school for the hardest cases, housed in an abandoned fire station near Boston Road. He was a misfit in a school for misfits. But he felt comfortable around a bunch of kids who had already been condemned to a life of non-learning—the Bronx’s own prodigal daughters and sons from housing projects that were little better than high-rise caves. Milo himself was a prodigal son. He’d graduated from Columbia at fifteen, had been awarded a fellowship to study English literature at Oxford.
