Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection. Nell Zink

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       Five

      At school Byrd Fleming was accounted slightly weird but popular, neatly straddling two pigeonholes without fitting in either. He could hang around with rich kids, slinging derogatory remarks about the middle classes with blasé aplomb, without being regarded as a wannabe. When it came to food, beverages, and drugs, he was unsurpassed, awing even the teachers with his disdain for clove cigarettes and Tokay. All the boys copied his way of making gin and tonics. The rich kids liked him because he never claimed to have done anything he hadn’t done. Deep powder skiing: Sounds cool. Twelve-meter yacht: Sounds cool. Orgy in a model apartment: Sounds cool. In exchange he offered them solidly grounded, reliable secondhand knowledge of nightclubs, high culture, and sex for hire.

      He finagled a single room his junior year and stayed in it senior year, because it was on the ground floor and he could get in and out without using the door. In warm weather he could often be seen and heard sitting in the window, picking out Jerry Garcia guitar solos on a Gibson Hummingbird somebody left at his dad’s house. He dressed perfectly in boat mocs, oversized khakis, threadbare button-downs, and a navy blazer with omnia pro deo on the breast pocket. He shrugged when people asked what school. Said somebody left it at his dad’s house. His black cashmere overcoat soft as chambray: Don’t know, some faggot forgot it at my dad’s house. Fleming’s dad’s house was widely regarded as something akin to the Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome.

      And compared with the other kids’ homes, it was. But no one had seen it. Lee and Byrdie had had a minor disagreement after Lee’s first parents’ weekend, freshman year. “You should tell your little friends to stop coming on to me,” Lee had said.

      “Dad, are you bonkers? What are you talking about?”

      “The tall kid, what’s-his-name. Chad. Thad?”

      “Thad’s a senior. He has two girlfriends, one at Madeira and one at Chatham Hall!”

      “And they use him and don’t put out, and he thinks he can work that magic on me. If I fucked every high school senior who wanted his poetry in the Stillwater Review, my dick would be worn down to a nub and it would still be useless juvenilia. You tell him that.”

      Byrdie drew back as though a cream puff had exploded in his hand. He closed his eyes and resolved to avoid boys who wanted to meet his father.

      The first couple of times he was invited to friends’ houses for the weekend, he went. He sat waiting for their moms to serve roast that was getting cold while their dads carved it, and played Monopoly with their little brothers until bedtime. Then it occurred to him that the school administration wasn’t in the habit of calling parents to check whether visitors СКАЧАТЬ