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