Читать книгу Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection - Nell Zink - Страница 13

Meg’s financial situation was delicate. Her expenses were low. She had a thousand dollars of capital left in her emergency fund. If something worse than that came up, she’d cross that bridge when she got to it. She had no rent, no utility bills, and a daughter who could survive on a noodle a day. Karen ate dutifully, not with feeling. But sooner or later she was going to get her growth spurt and start liking food. And there was the little matter of clothing. The county had a thrift shop. Like thrift shops everywhere, it specialized in the leavings of the elderly dead. People always had acquaintances who needed children’s things and seldom donated them. Well-off children wore late-model hand-me-downs, but to get in on the action, Meg would have had to join a church. And although she was prepared to accept that the world was adopting stodginess as a fashion trend—that girls were putting away their mules and feather earrings and donning prim sweater sets like Lee’s mother—she could not face praising Jesus in song to put Karen in Pendleton kilts. You have to respect your boundaries.

Still, they needed clothes. Even polo shirts are born and die, in delicate pastels that show every stain. She needed an income.

Waitressing was out of the question. Waitresses are high-profile public figures. It doesn’t get any more visible than that. She might as well put her byline in the paper.

Cashier likewise, along with receptionist. Too public.

All jobs in the public eye: inadmissible.

As for invisible jobs, Meg pondered what they might be. Her mother, never a women’s libber, had steered her away from vocational education toward more disinterested studies in the liberal arts. Meg had met several working women in her years with Lee. She suspected that provost and sculptor, like latter-day Brontë, were not roles she could aspire to right off the bat.

Even the discreet and anonymous position of housemaid was a hard racket to break into. You need references. Someone has to tell everybody how discreet and anonymous you are. It was a conundrum. Plus, she was known around the county as black. She suspected herself of presenting a fatal attraction qua negress. Light-skinned, slim, unattached. If the men didn’t come to hate her, their wives would. The men would hate her for saying no, and their wives would never believe she hadn’t said yes.

She realized with some regret she had joined a race with which she’d had just about no contact at all. She had seen black people every day of her life. She wasn’t afraid of them. More like the reverse. But they might as well have been those Indonesian shadow puppets made of parchment. Her parents hadn’t had the option of sending her to an integrated school. If you integrated your school back then, the Commonwealth would shut it down. And although Stillwater had started admitting black girls a few years before she left, none had applied for admission—at least not that anybody knew of. Of course an applicant could be black and not know it. Possibly Stillwater had been integrated from the start. That was the standard defense of whites-only institutions: We’re not the DAR. We don’t check pedigrees.

Once Meg even caught herself saying “nigger.” Some kid had shown up at school in a rabbit fur coat (her father was an auto mechanic notorious for payday splurges). Karen admired the coat and had been allowed to pet it. Meg shook her head. She said, “Typical nigger—rich, buying your daughter a fur coat when you can’t afford to take her to the dentist!—Oh, gosh, Karen, I didn’t mean to say that. I’m really sorry. Here, hit me on the arm. Make a fist.”

She went on to explain at length that she had merely meant the father was not good with numbers, and that this quality had once been called shiftlessness. Such a man works hard, but he never gets ahead, because whenever he gets some money, he puts a down payment on something he can’t afford, and it is soon repossessed. This unfortunate custom had given rise to the concept, etc.

“I think a fur coat is rich,” Karen objected.

“Rabbit is not rich, and fur is tacky anywhere south of Vermont. Rabbit is poor tacky. Rich tacky would be fox. A girl your age could wear dyed sheared beaver, maybe, if she lived on the shores of Lake Baikal.”

Karen frowned.

Meg felt more strongly than usual that many thoughts life had taught her to articulate were not her own, while many of her thoughts went unexpressed for lack of a suitable audience.

For this and other reasons, she concluded that although she desperately needed someone to talk to, she also needed a career where you work alone and don’t get roped into chatting with people on any subject whatsoever.

She looked glumly at the typewriter and poured herself a drink.

Her writing was going well enough. She told herself she was honing her craft and would soon be making money. But it was like honing a primitive stone tool, not a forged blade. Life with Lee had taught her to be laconic. She could quip. So her plays all ended on page two.

Typically they were murder mysteries with no mystery. A woman sneaks across the stage and plunges a knife into the neck of a sleeping man. He says a few choice last words and dies. She expresses her ambivalence as the police come to haul her away.

Meg’s first paycheck materialized as she drove to the grocery store early one morning. She saw a cardboard box on the shoulder. She stopped, because a box like that nearly always contains kittens. Not worth money, but tell that to Karen. Karen worshipped kittens as gods.

Except this box was full of pornographic magazines from England. Dry, clean, and in excellent condition. What mysterious denizen of the county had felt called upon to make an obviously cherished collection vanish anonymously? Frightened of being observed at the wayside Dumpsters, hitting the brakes for a second or two to unload years of costly, intimate personal history … or had his wife done it? The girls were chunky, posing in what appeared to be their own backyards, private parts concealed by fluffy fur and sometimes adorned with ribbons. They were lavish, glossy mags on heavy paper. No amateurs, no swingers, no contact information, just girls next door, apparently the first to return after the neutron bomb was dropped on Folkestone, because how else could they romp naked in middle-class gardens with low hedges and sea views?

Meg felt on some level it was the strangest thing she had ever seen: innocent porn. No wonder it had to go. A wife who discovered it could no longer feel superior to the whores in her husband’s freak books. She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug’s ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac. The false dichotomies promulgated by Tammy Wynette et al. would vanish like morning fog, leaving her alone with her self-doubt.

Or were they the possessions of an old man, trying to manipulate how he would be remembered? His heirs, trying the same thing? Was he rich, poor, addicted to Masterpiece Theatre, raised in the Church of England, in love with flowers, an Englishman?

There was no way of knowing. The cover price was high, suggesting a wealthy man, but pornography is a classic payday splurge for the shiftless.

The magazines didn’t turn her on. One woman standing over another with a whip, absentmindedly fingering its thick, braided handle: that image, seen for a fraction of a second while leafing through a coffee-table book in the Lambda Rising Bookstore in Georgetown before she fled blushing, was burned into her memory, and she seldom had an orgasm in which it was not implicated. These girls, with their apple cheeks and dahlias, were by contrast disquietingly perverse. But they had to be worth money to someone.

She weighed her options. The county did in fact have a junk shop. It lay in the crook of an unfinished half-moon road, just off the new four-lane highway. She got twenty dollars for thirty-eight magazines, but the shop owner leered in such a way that it was clear to her she would never again sell pornography to a filthy-minded good old boy. Since that demographic sort of dominates most aspects of the pornography market, her days in the secondhand sex industry were over almost before they began.

But the scavenging bug had bitten her. Her next find was a dead raccoon. She took it straight to the bait shop and sold it to the bearded white guy behind the counter for six dollars. He said in good repair they could go as high as ten.

Roadkill in good repair: not an easy assignment, even at first light. She started swinging by the county dump several times a week.

Like Dante’s Inferno, the dump had circles. The outer circle was where people unloaded discrete and possibly salvageable objects such as planks and furniture. In the next circle, plastic sacks hit the ground and were pushed into piles with a front loader, and somewhere back of that were the looming brown mountains of decay and the overweight turkey buzzards that couldn’t fly.

It was to these mountains that items were taken directly when no one was supposed to know they were in the dump, for instance human bits and parts from funeral homes. It was also said that a certain white man who had treated people badly had driven his pickup deep into the dump to unload construction trash, and while he was still in his cab a black man at the controls of a lordly Caterpillar had unceremoniously covered him with dirt and shoved his truck, still running, into the mountains of the dump, burying him alive. Whether he was crushed or asphyxiated or fell unconscious from the fumes or rotted from the inside out due to the radioactivity of his load depended on whom you asked. The truck had never been found, nor looked for, because people were scared of the radiation.

Or so the story went. There was no question of his having vanished in the usual way. He would never run out on his family like that.

Meg first heard the story on her return visit to the junk shop with a chair from the first circle of the dump. The shop owner said he leaned toward the carbon monoxide theory as being more “mercified.” Meg said she didn’t believe anything about it, because the police would surely investigate the death of a white man and arrest eight or ten black people just to get started.

“Not if the sheriff wants reelection they don’t,” the shop owner said. “This is the New South. Niggers have impunity.” Nodding sagely, he drained the day’s eleventh can of Georgia Iced Tea (Busch).

Trash picking did not bring Meg much money. But enough for peanut butter and store-brand Cheerios with a brittle crunch like powdered glass, plus Karen’s favorite nondessert food in the world, BLT. Mayonnaise is an irresponsible splurge when you don’t have a fridge, but there are small sizes available, especially in places where people live hand to mouth and “large economy size” is regarded as a long-term investment that would tie up needed capital. The bait shop sold mayonnaise in jars barely bigger than a film canister. Polishing off a package of bacon at one sitting was no problem for Karen.

“If you are what you eat, I’m bacon,” she announced blissfully one day. Meg imagined her mother hearing this, and felt grateful they were not in touch.

Someone driving by saw a man get out of a van in front of Meg’s house and mentioned it at Mrs. Sutton’s Restaurant. Soon it was common knowledge that she had a white boyfriend.

White in Virginia in those days was a fairly narrow category. It didn’t include anyone with dark hair, such as … such as … such as people with dark hair, who on good days were called “Spanish.” But it made room for the red cheeks, green eyes, and thinning rat-tail braid of Lomax Hunter, a Mattaponi Indian.

They met not long after Meg started collecting night crawlers. Leaving Karen asleep on the backseat of the car, she would wander around with a miner’s headlamp, staring at the ground. There weren’t many places with good lawns, just a few churches and cemeteries, but when it worked it was a license to print money. A dozen night crawlers was worth fifty cents at the bait shop, and on a dark night after a rain you could pick up a dozen in three minutes, which makes ten dollars an hour. You have to be sneaky, because other people will horn in on your night crawler grounds. Meg was not up for turf battles, especially not nocturnal single combat with strange men. When she scented competition, she drove away. Gradually Karen was getting too old to pass out automatically if you laid her down, and too big to hide under a towel. Big enough to be conspicuous, so you wouldn’t want to leave her alone unconscious in the places frequented by the drifters who gather night crawlers. So that ultimately night crawlers were a glorious, lucrative interlude, nothing more—the first of many fitful, sporadic, hand-to-mouth seasons of wealth, adequate to cement in Karen’s mind an indestructible association between worms and Pepperidge Farm cakes.

Put off by the competition for worms, Meg thought it over and decided to hunt for ginseng instead. Ginseng grows in the woods in daylight, where a child can help you look for it. Even sassafras will bring in money, they say. There’s all kinds of valuable stuff growing in the woods.

The bearded man who ran the bait shop said he would miss her gentle touch with the worms, as many of his suppliers grasped the worms too tightly and injured them. He put Meg in touch with a hippie who dealt in herbal medicines.

As it turned out, this hippie was not in the ginseng and sassafras business. But he said he could give her fifty cents per psilocybin mushroom.

“We got more cow patties than lawns,” Meg said. “Fifty cents a shroom beats four cents a worm any day of the week.”

“You got that right,” Lomax replied. “Drugs is where the money’s at.”

Lomax was a middle-class Indian. Rather than on the Mattaponi reservation, he grew up in a tract house in Spotsylvania County. Both his college-educated parents had office jobs pushing paper in the highway department. A social outcast at work, Lomax’s father had become an avid chipmunk watcher. The house’s large, flat backyard was the scene of unceasing warfare among the solitary ground squirrels, except in mating season, when they pursued momentary alliances that provided for nonstop action and inaction. He had founded a chipmunk conservation group and authored its bylaws.

Stoned, even at age ten, Lomax found the chipmunks easier to take. His mother sympathized. Of her three children, Lomax was her favorite. He never caused her any trouble. No sports, no extracurricular activities, always willing to talk to her husband about his hobby.

Lomax’s home life taught him to value harmony, but school told him that Indians were wild, nonconformist rebels. The Chanco story in fourth-grade Virginia history laid the groundwork, and Billy Jack and Wounded Knee put the icing on the cake. He dropped out and bought a Dodge van with his drug-dealing proceeds, informing his parents he was heading west to join the Ghost Dance. He got as far as Bristol, Tennessee. At seventeen he declared his financial emancipation and moved into the van in the yard with the chipmunks. He applied for SSDI (Social Security Disability Income) with a letter from a psychologist at a National Guard recruiting center.

At twenty-one, certified unemployable, Lomax could pass for a middle-aged man. He was starting to lose hair up top, and his pot belly put a strain on his shirts. His meetings with Meg always started with the same ritual greeting: “Yo, Chief!” To which he replied, “What up, Poodlehead?” She would send Karen outside to play and spread her haul of psychedelics on the table. He would sort the mushrooms into fat and soft (fifty cents apiece) and scraggly and moldy (fifty cents a dozen, a folk aphrodisiac for livestock). She would pour him a glass of Seagram’s gin and they would talk.

Lomax was a talented raconteur. At their first business meeting he described visiting the Mattaponi reservation with the Order of the Arrow and what a drag that was—the chief dressed up like a Sioux in a hawk-feather wig and moose-hide bedroom slippers—until he talked a boy into eating jimson berries. The kid went out-of-body and couldn’t find the piss button. They ended up at the hospital getting him catheterized. The twists and turns in Lomax’s story made Meg laugh. By their sixth meeting he regarded her as an intimate friend. He made her listen to his heart, which was beating about a hundred times a minute.

“And I’m just sitting here!” he said proudly.

“And you get SSDI for being insane? Man, if my heart was fucked up, that’s what I would get disability for.”

“No, man, that’s stupid. Because if your body’s fucked up you can still work, like keypunch or a switchboard operator. But if your mind is wasted, you’re certified unemployable. They won’t even draft your ass.”

Meg said that she had never applied for public assistance in any form, not even the free school lunch, and Lomax nodded.

“I can appreciate that. In my line of work, you like people minding their own business. One girl, she pulled a disappearing act last year, I had to hand it to her. I went down to see her and her place was trashed. Floorboards pried up. Electric sockets hanging out the wall. But I know she’s all right, because she had two Chesapeake Bay retrievers. The one of them had a head on it like a bear. It could bite through your tires. The other one was the most nervous animal I ever saw. They was both laying dead in the mudroom. She could only have shot them herself.”

“Wait a second.” Meg looked at him questioningly. “She shoot her own dogs?”

“Nobody else could get close enough to those dogs to shoot them,” he assured her. “She couldn’t take them down to Dominica. There’s a quarantine.”

“She’s in Dominica?”

“I don’t know! She might be in Cuba or Antigua.” He shrugged. “No human soul ever put the time she did into dog food. Every day she made them a pot of stew. If she had to go, it was a mercy she killed them. Sometimes you have to think about the best interests of the animal.”

After Lomax drove away, Meg considered his remarks on the dogs and decided an alarm system might be in order, as well as a way of storing cash and drugs that didn’t involve the bed where she slept.

She took Karen down to the shelter and let her pick. And thus it was that they acquired a six-year-old spayed cockapoo bitch named Cha Cha and eventually several sets of nesting Tupperware suitable for burial in the yard.

It was their eighth meeting before Meg knew there was a girl sitting outside in Lomax’s van the entire time, and only because Karen brought it up. Karen asked whether the girl in the van could come out to play, and he promptly responded, “She’s a little old for that. She’s my girlfriend.”

Karen objected. “I’m not old, and I have a boyfriend!”

“What’s his name?”

“Temple Moody.”

Lomax looked at Meg with one eyebrow raised. “He Canadian?”

“He’s black like us,” Karen said.

“Y’all black?”

“So black it’ll blow your mind,” Meg said. “Blackhearted as coal. Versed in the black arts.”

“So you’re a witch, and your boyfriend is a warlock?”

Karen snickered. “Yeah. We got a real voodoo doll made of wax and hair. That’s how Temple could hypnotize ants to join his ant farm.”

“Well, I’ll be doggoned,” Lomax said. “You’re joking, right?”

Meg managed to keep a straight face, and Lomax suddenly felt insecure. He suspected that as an Indian he was supposed to know something about magic and spirits, but his grasp of the world was congruent with the grasp of his two hands. Now at least he had an explanation for Meg’s interest in herbal medicines.

He went back to the van and told his intermittently dozing girlfriend about it as he drove her home to their trailer 120 miles away in the woods near Danville.

“I wish I were a witch, but I’m the wrong generation,” Flea (short for Felicia) said. “Witches are born every seventh generation, and my grandmother was already a witch.”

“You’re saying Poodlehead and her daughter can’t both be witches. But if her boyfriend was a sixth-generation warlock?”

Flea paused to think and said, “You’re so smart.”

“We could both be witches and not know it. Hell, I don’t know what my ancestors were doing seven generations ago.”

“Can you cast a magic spell?”

He sucked on the roach clip smoldering in the ashtray, cleared his throat, and sang, “Hey-a ho-yah ho-yah, hey-a ho-yah ho-yah, ohm anautcha sheila, ohm anautcha rama.”

“Isn’t it Shiva, not Sheila?” Flea asked.

Flea was a dropout, like Meg, with intellectual ambitions that outstripped her resources. But on a smaller scale. Like Lee, she was a sexual outlaw who had left home young. But not to go to boarding school. She had ditched sixth grade to move in with Lomax.

It was no fault of his. She had long legs. Her girlfriends were older, and she pitched her voice low. She wore makeup and tight pants and styled her hair. In a dry county, there are no bartenders to turn away jailbait for a man’s protection. There was only a low stone retaining wall by a river, where everybody went to party. When they met, it was dark. The morning after, he got a surprise.

He saw himself as her protector. As long as she was with him, she wasn’t hanging out at the wall, waiting for whomever. He could make an honest woman of her. He proposed marriage.

Her father said Lomax was a rat. Flea puffed on a cigarette and said he was just jealous. Her parents drank. She could repeat many things that made her seem worldly and mature. There was no privacy in her childhood home. Every conflict was open for all to see, so she knew love was wrapping paper and a battle for supremacy. Her clique of eighth graders taught her feminist pride, as they understood it: it meant knowing how to wait for a better offer. Lomax brought order and stability to her life and allowed her to be a child again. With every day she spent riding around in his van, she became more innocent and ladylike. She never had to beg or flirt. She just asked for what she wanted—a Darvon, say, or Mountain Dew and pork rinds—and he would figure out a fast way to get it. No effort was needed to catch his eye. He was always watching her, more often than he looked in the rearview mirror.

Sometimes he needed her to do difficult things, but here her experiences compared favorably to those of her friends who were thirteen and unattached and still going to the wall. Among her friends his social status was in a class by itself. They called him “the Candy Man” and envied her openly.

Even after she turned twelve, her father refused to consent to her preengagement, so they could not be married. Still she lived as an adult, her lover’s all-round helpmeet. She was older than Byrdie by about six weeks. To look at, she was a leggy, wispy, lovely girl. But almost nobody ever saw her. She was under orders to stay in the van, where she killed time listening to the radio.

Sometimes watching Karen fall asleep at night, Meg suspected her of weaving romantic fairy tales to herself about her father and brother. She might well remember them, or the lake, or her paternal grandparents’ house at Christmas. Every time one of Meg’s stories featured a lost royal child, fairy changeling, or disenfranchised heiress (she especially liked retailing what she remembered of Mistress Masham’s Repose), she watched Karen’s face closely. There was no glimmer of recognition. But during ugly-duckling-style stories—the kind where someone underappreciated turns out to be a princess, if only by marriage after the story is basically over—Karen would sit up straighter and appear dissatisfied, setting her mouth in a horizontal line. Confronted for the first time with Cinderella, she protested her working conditions and said the midnight rule was unfair.

It disheartened Meg to think that Karen might regard her minimal roster of chores and homework as equivalent to the labors of Cinderella. In reality, it was much stranger than that. The mind of a child! Children have no hearts (cf. Peter Pan, another story Meg could reproduce fairly accurately), and their minds are rickety towers of surreal detritus. Of course Karen remembered Lee and Byrdie. Once there was a house, a boat; once there was a big, mean boy. There were men, wading pools in sunlight, termites, stamp hinges, and coffee-table books of illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. There was a push-button gear shift, high up on a dashboard. There were little white buttons on Lee’s pink shirt where she lay in a haze of Pernod fumes while he slept it off. It was all there. But as memories. Not photographs. Not stories. There were no anecdotes, no mentions of “your brother.” She had no way of connecting the dots.

Her memories were far less vivid than her dreams. Once in a dream she met her father. He lived in a red-and-gold castle on a miniature golf course. He was the monarch King Vitaman. It would have shocked Meg to know how seldom Karen thought about him. Deep down, she didn’t think she needed a father. Maybe at one time she had one, past tense. But she didn’t have one, present tense, and that was plain as day.

The virgin birth had suggested manifold alternatives to her. Karen received no religious instruction from Meg, but as an outcast she spoke frequently with Amber Schmidt. Schmidt told her about the Blessed Virgin Mary and said it could happen to anybody. As a girl you could never be the Second Coming, but you might be His mother.

Garbage in being garbage out, Karen had a vivid nightmare. God came to her in the form of a leatherback sea turtle like one she had seen at a beach house in Duck, North Carolina, when some poets put it in Lee’s bathtub. God’s penis looked like elbow macaroni. She ran across the room to her mother’s bed and yowled, “Mom!” Meg seemed nonplussed, so she improvised: “I had a bad dream mean boys were chasing me on bikes!”

“Come here, darling baby,” Meg said gently. She pulled Karen under the blanket. She stroked her sweaty face and tangled hair and said, “Sleep, my love. I will never let anybody hurt you.” Holding her child in her arms, clueless Meg pondered the opportunity costs of childhood in a world without sidewalks. Having grown up at a school with athletic facilities, she knew how to swim, hit a tennis ball, ride a bicycle, and even—unusual for a rural Virginian—roller-skate. Her poor daughter, always having to choose between the road and the woods.

And the black box in her arms whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered. To be the kind of duck who gets included by wild swans because she’s unobtrusive.

Possibly she felt special enough already as a blond black midget and did not wish additional attention. A recent visit to Schmidt’s house had gone poorly. She had ridden the pariah’s all-white school bus to a little subdivision of mobile homes in a wheat field. They barely had time to put on a record and open up Tiger Beat when Schmidt’s father entered with a razor strop to whip his daughter for letting a nigger in the house. When Meg picked Karen up, they were playing two-square in the road. Every car that passed had to slow down, and if the driver was a man under about twenty-four, Schmidt would make eye contact and hold her hair up off her neck. Karen was glad to leave, but she got a scolding from Meg for playing in traffic.

Lee applied himself to being a caring father by acquainting Byrdie with the finer things in life. His grandfather had a hunt near Berryville and often invited him to take part. There Lee rode a fit yet docile stallion named Idle Vice (a pun on “edelweiss”). This was, to Lee, an animal in whom no feeling person could help but take delight. Lee set Byrdie on him at the first opportunity, expecting euphoria.

Byrdie said the horse was stupid. He said the dogs were slobbery and too numerous. Fuchsia coats with cordovan boots embarrassed him. The bloody stump of the fox’s tail made him sick. He refused riding lessons. He would not go cubbing. He would not go hilltopping. He would not go basseting, or even aim his .22 at a squirrel. He spent hunt days reading a book under a tree. Horses in Byrdie’s mind were free to bound over obstacles, on their backs effeminate slaves to equine virility or aging little girls, but only at races where a person might bet on them.

Lee and Cary took him to a steeplechase near Warrenton. They tailgated at the finish line and waited. The day was mostly halftime shows of various kinds. Lee waxed enthusiastic about a fellow who rode an Arabian in flowing multicolored robes. He invoked Pegasus and Helicon. Cary mentioned Lawrence of Arabia.

The show rider appeared to Byrdie much like a belly dancer on a goat. He walked purposefully to the concession stand and ordered three beers. He figured if you order one beer they might think it was for you, but if you order three, they think your dad sent you so he wouldn’t have to interrupt an important conversation. He sat down behind a horse trailer with his three flimsy Solo cups and sipped, struggling at first against the awful taste. Soon the tide turned. He chugged the rest and began staggering around feeling better than he’d ever felt in his short life.

He leaned against a paddock fence and stared at horses resting. Lee came up behind him and said, “I see you found the Peloponnesians.”

It was an excruciatingly bad pun on “polo ponies.” A demonstration game of polo was scheduled for later on, and sure enough, grooms in magenta and cyan began to come out and wrap the horses’ legs and ask them to step into little rubber bell-bottoms. Byrdie turned away in disgust and lisped—being drunk and not entirely in control of his tongue—“Horses are for Bruces.”

“Hortheth are for Brutheth” was very quotable, in Lee’s opinion. He and Cary quoted it at every opportunity. It took on a life of its own and was heard at parties all across the state. Every time anybody said it, it was a maul driven into the space between Lee and his son, who soon expressed strong interests in other sports. Lee said he personally didn’t see how letting a horse run away with you over fences was any less cool than regattas, Pebble Beach, or downhill skiing with helicopters. The festive colors and the drunkenness were the same, and hunting was more dangerous and expensive. Byrdie had nowhere to run but school. He had read enough Billy Bunter books and Stalky & Co. to live for the day when he could go away and be with real boys.

Lee’s finances did not admit of boarding school. But his parents loved Byrdie and so did Meg’s. There was general agreement that he couldn’t go to the local day school, where the lacrosse coach taught math and physics as sidelines and the girls would be coached by their mothers to seduce him.

The first day of ninth grade, Lee drove Byrdie and his things to school in Orange. The campus was the way Lee remembered it—the back road in over the Rapidan, the main building perched on the bluff, the nine-hole golf course. Other things had changed. Byrdie had a black roommate, a stolid middle-class kid from northern Virginia who had no accent of any kind, as though he had been worked over by Professor Higgins. His other roommate was the son of a fashion photographer and an iconic model. The upwardly mobile kid was obviously going to be a bore, but the neglected child of artists seemed promising. His mother helped carry in his meager belongings and hung around the door to the triple room sneaking a cigarette, reaching down to tousle her son’s hair and flirting with Lee as though her life depended on it. Lee would have been happy to tousle the kid’s hair himself, but he stopped himself and said, “Byrdie. Let’s take a walk.”

Byrdie flipped his suitcase shut and shoved it under the bed. Knowing he had landed in a triple, he had insisted on coming early to avoid the bunks. He was almost done unpacking before the black kid (bottom bunk) even showed up.

They walked over the lawn toward the chapel. “You got any tips for me? Last-minute advice?” Byrdie asked.

“Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall open. That means don’t be afraid to say what you want.”

“I want to talk to Mom.”

Lee was silent for a moment and said, “She knows I was planning to send you here. Maybe she’ll come see you. You’ll let me know if she does.”

“Is she really okay by herself?”

Lee looked down at Byrdie, wondering whether Mireille was a taboo topic. He decided she was. “Your mother is fine. She’s hard as nails.”

“I’m afraid she’ll come by and embarrass me.”

“Here,” Lee said with a sense of relief. He took out his black book, a tiny leather binder, and wrote neatly, “Can’t talk now. Send letter.” He tore the page out and gave it to Byrdie. “Carry this in your pocket, and if she shows up out of the blue, just give it to her.”

Byrdie put it in the inside pocket of his blazer and said, “I thought you knew where she was. I thought you were waiting for me to be old enough, and maybe today’s the day you were going to tell me.”

“Oh, Byrdie,” Lee said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t hide that from you. I wish I had something left to hide.”

“Remember Antietam?”

“Sure,” Lee said hesitantly. “A lot of good men died—”

“No, I mean when I drove the car.” Byrdie had been allowed to guide Cary’s Maserati through the narrow right-angle curves of the battlefield memorial during an otherwise forgettable excursion to the Inn at Little Washington because it had an automatic transmission. “That was the best day of my life. What I mean is, I know you’re weird and everything, but the real problem is you don’t care about normal stuff and you don’t have any money. Dad, I’m in school now. I need decent golf clubs.”

Lee sighed. “Byrdie, you’re not thinking straight. Who do you know who has decent golf clubs?”

“Grandpa.”

“So tell me, is he going to invest in duplicates of things he already owns?”

“No.”

“But would he buy himself something better and give you his castoffs?” Lee shifted to the Tidewater-plantation-owner accent, a lilting drawl carefully cultivated in certain circles and said to be unaltered in its abject Anglophilia since 1609: “Grandfather, I was wondering, have you seen those new golf clubs, made of rare Siamese elephant parts? Coach claims they’re unsportsmanlike, for the other teams, if we’re the ones to have them.”

Byrdie interrupted, “Yeah, yeah, I get it. But it’s not going to work. It’s not like he ever gave you anything!”

“I want stuff he’s only giving away over his dead body. I’m Sherman and the Grand Army, and you’re the little match girl. Golf clubs, what a fucking joke.” Byrdie laughed, not sure why. Lee stooped down and enfolded him in his arms. “Byrdie, I love you desperately. I want you to have more than I have. Meaning more than the shit nobody else wants.”

“I love you, too. But don’t touch me. There’s people watching.”

Meg all but knew for sure that Byrdie was at Woodberry. She thought of driving there to see him, then imagined the look on his face. Would he be happy to see her? Probably not. More likely enraged. Or just distant. It had been a long time, especially for a kid.

She drafted long letters and tore them up. You don’t burden a teenage boy with your guilt. Especially not when you really are at fault. She had abandoned him. He had been nine—long past the cuddly stage—but it was entirely possible that he missed her. Maybe he cried for her at night when he was sad. She suspected he was much too cool for that, and that Lee would be giving her bad press.

The same ambivalence about consequences kept her from coming clean to Karen. Hiding Karen from her father: It might not solve any problems she currently had. But once upon a time it had solved a problem, and now it prevailed by force of habit.

Hiding Lee from his daughter was different. It solved a future problem: the problem she would have if she stopped hiding him. Karen was not going to be happy. She might be happy to hear that her father was alive and well. But she would not be happy with Meg.

Here a person might ask: Was Meg self-centered or what?

Meg was self-centered.

Early life spent fighting for chances to be herself, planning the cockeyed social suicide of manhood in the army; weeks of unrequited lesbianism; willing submission to a teacher who ran circles around her socially, intellectually, emotionally; marriage to him. For comic relief, visiting poets and two introverted kids. Would any sane person expect a life like that to result in a warm, affectionate personality? Meg was a shallow smartass brimming with fierce, self-sacrificing maternal feelings, saddled with a passion to be loved that no one had seen but Lee. She knew she was ridiculous. That’s why she expressed her love for Karen through irony.

And that irony of ironies, her lifelong poverty. From the poverty of a rich kid with an allowance designed to teach the virtue of thrift, to the poverty of a poet’s wife feeding houseguests on a budget, to genuine poverty, to faking poverty for the DEA. Too late she noticed that bringing Karen up poor wasn’t ironic. It was poverty.

Once you’ve lied to your child for years, it gets hard to find reasons to tell the truth. Karen’s reaction to the truth would be to throw herself into Lee’s arms. When he found out Meg had raised Karen black, he was likely to revisit his plan of commending her to psychiatric care.

Because people never grow accustomed to lies. They either believe them or they don’t. And a big lie is never forgiven. The person who told the lie stops existing, and in his place stands a paradox: the truthful liar. The person you know for sure would lie to you, because he’s done it before and confessed. You never, ever believe that person again.

The lie Meg repeated to Karen every single day was a very big lie.

Little children don’t remember the past, and they believe anything you tell them. So Karen didn’t know she had been done to. But Byrdie hadn’t been so little when Meg left. He had been nine. Old enough to have a worldview and draw his own conclusions.

Meg was fenced in: On the one side, her lies to Karen. On the other, her crime against Byrdie.

There was only one way she could hope to be loved by any child, ever: carry on. Byrdie would never trust her. But Karen might, if she was kept from the truth.

Meg’s feelings for Byrdie were fierce and self-sacrificing. Feeling that he was at Woodberry made her unbearably nervous. September 1980 was a month spent on edge.

The fierce desire to see him, the self-sacrificing willingness to avoid disrupting his life. In October she capitulated and did what any normal mother would have done: She bought a watch cap and sunglasses and stalked him on a weekday afternoon.

And she found him. He was alone on the tennis courts, practicing a two-handed backhand against a ball machine.

She sat down inside a boxwood shrubbery—it was old, with a capacious interior—to watch. Feeling the smooth curvature of something artificial under her ass, she noticed that this particular hedge was a repository of many empty liquor bottles. It was dark in the shade of the bushes with sunglasses on. She stroked the dirt to check for broken glass and sat down again. She watched Byrdie practice.

He stopped, startling her. But he didn’t leave the court, or even look her way. He gathered the balls in a basket and dumped them back in the machine.

He was only fourteen, but almost as tall as Lee. He looked a lot like Lee, but with Meg’s suntan and brown hair. He could not have looked any healthier. He didn’t look happy, exactly, but he was working on nailing a two-handed backhand.

Meg felt her heart constrict. There was so much she wanted to say to him. Things any normal mother would say, like that a one-handed backhand is more versatile. She was flooded by overwhelming emotions, which she immediately repressed, and the upshot was small, narrow emotions, tightly squeezed.

She realized she had better get out of there before anybody saw her. She wasn’t crying, but her movements were awkward, like a blind baby kitten pawing at nothing. She backed out of the bush crab-style, clinking bottles as she went, right into a groundskeeper with a rake. “Hey, you,” he said.

She panicked and ran. Like the wind, like a thief caught in the act, like the prowler the groundskeeper said she was when Byrdie came up the hill to look at the bottles.

With Byrdie away at school, Lee’s parents gave him money to hire a detective again. Their main motive was concern for Byrdie’s peace of mind. They wanted to find Peggy before she had a chance to reenter his happy life and turn everything upside down.

The detective went to see the Vaillaincourts and poked around thoughtfully. He toured the school, trying to get a general sense of what resources Peggy had to fall back on. He walked through the churchyard and saw Karen Brown’s grave. With very little legwork indeed, he found the registrar who remembered Peggy’s acquiring a birth certificate for a dead black child.

He told Lee he had good news and bad news. The good news: His wife definitely had balls, and his daughter might be enrolled in school under the name Karen Brown. The bad news: Being named Brown in America is like being named Lee in China. Finding them was going to be expensive and time-consuming.

He asked how Lee wanted him to proceed, repeating that they might both be passing as black.

“Peggy’s not that stupid,” Lee said. “White, she’s a dime a dozen. A black lady who looks like her would be the talk of the town. More likely it’s the other way around. They’re up north somewhere, passing for white. Peggy always wanted to move up to New York.”

The detective said, “I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t think I have a chance in hell of finding them, and I don’t want to spend any money you don’t have.”

The detective went to the powder room. Lee retreated to the back porch to consider his alternatives.

They were unappetizing. His daughter was not legally his property. There’s no sole custody without a divorce, and divorce was not an option. He would have had to settle something on Peggy, possibly even pay her alimony. You can keep a wife on a very short leash. Divorce is like handing it over to her as a whip.

He could use Byrdie as bait. Publish an appeal by the lonely boy desperate to see his mother. Say Byrdie was gravely ill. Run a newspaper ad offering a generous reward for any and all information leading to a dour lesbian with a blond limpet of a daughter. Hire a bounty hunter.

But Mireille might be growing up black in Farmville, or as an ethnic Pole in Baltimore. The shock of seeing her again might do him in.

It occurred to him that if he let it be known he was in the market for a wife, he could get a compliant young cook and housekeeper within weeks and a replacement child by this time next year.

On his own back porch he was always the same. Self-stalemated, dangling in the wind, exhausted. Besieged by emotions, none stronger than the self-respect he gained by doing nothing. It was a good reason to get up and offer his guest another drink.

They agreed that it was hopeless, but the detective promised to keep an eye out for her anyway. He performed a farewell service for the Fleming clan: He had a forensic artist create an updated image of the missing child. This was an expert with training in physical and cultural anthropology who worked scientifically. He knew that the lissome Mireille, entrusted to a mother like Peggy, would turn into a freckled, husky tank. Her hair would darken to a shade between dishwater and mousy.

Even Meg couldn’t have seen Karen in it. And the description gave her race as white. So even if it had been a good likeness, people who knew her would have said, “Funny how that missing white girl Karen Brown almost looks like our Karen Brown!” But almost no one saw it. Snatched children on milk cartons were still years away. Eventually it appeared in a pamphlet aimed at school administrators and teachers. Distribution was hit or miss, and it missed.

If Lee had known how Mickey was living, how would he have reacted? If he had known his daughter had but one toy, a rabbit-skin mouse Lomax bought her at Horne’s?

She carried it in her hand. She would balance it on a fallen log and lie down to squint at it with one eye closed so that it loomed like a buffalo. Her spiritual kinship with Lee would have been obvious to any impartial observer, were there such a thing as an impartial observer. What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world?

Lee was not that observer. His thoughts on his back porch surrounded him like a carpet of mice, immobilizing him via his unwillingness to cause them pain. The mice of introspection were as effective as any buffalo herd. He was strong, and the energy that kept him motionless was his own. Expending it on self-defeat exhausted him every day.