Mislaid

by Nell Zink

  He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet. Then, pretending to hesitate to break the bad news, he pointed out that the hereditary fortune was a bit of a question mark. Lee was, he said, broke. His salary was a drop in the bucket. He didn’t own the house he lived in. His parents were spending his inheritance right and left on increasingly expensive vacations, tootling around Norwegian fjords on first-class ferryboats and dabbling in the Himalayas. Exclusive inside knowledge of the world financial system, acquired from Lyndon LaRouche for $5,000 a year, had not stopped them from buying a town house in Georgetown right before the stock market crash. He was starting to wonder whether they hadn’t mortgaged everything they owned. Byrdie might be well advised to pursue a career that involved such niceties as an employer.

  The irony was not lost on Byrdie. He listened to Lee’s complaints and said he would take them under advisement.

  Dee had feared the best she could afford for Temple was community college, but when he began getting letters from historically white colleges all over the South, soliciting his application and offering scholarships on the basis of his PSATs, her mind was made up. She said, “Temple is going to The University. If it was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, it’s good enough for my son.”

  Self-confident Temple dashed off his essay in an afternoon. Karen’s application caused her weeks of grief. After abandoning several memoir-like drafts about various aspects of her life, which seemed more incoherent the deeper she got into it, she wrote about her ambitions. When the past is hard to explain, it’s best to concentrate on the future. She wrote that she wanted to work hard and get good grades and pick an interesting major.

  Charlottesville being far away, the admissions office had a local alumnus interview the applicants. He wasn’t a professional, just a public-spirited businessman prepared to meet the children of country-club acquaintances and recommend their admission. He volunteered a Saturday afternoon and borrowed the librarian’s office adjoining the high school media center.

  Karen felt insecure, but it had little to do with her qualifications to attend college. It was puberty. Just turned fifteen, she had attained maximum unfamiliarity with her own body. She always expected to grow up boyish like Meg, but she took after Lee’s mother instead: an eye-popping hourglass in miniature, but nervous about it, with skinny legs and bitten nails.

  For the interview, she wore a blue double-knit suit, bought at a thrift shop in an ancient gas station, that had been hand-sewn before her birth for an even smaller woman. She mumbled, feeling shy, and left with tears in her eyes. The interviewer looked down at his form and tried to formulate a way of calling her childlike, yet trashy. He regarded the box checked “black” as evidence of functional illiteracy. Her grades did not impress him. This, he said to himself, is a corn-fed heifer who lets teachers feel her up.

  Through the glass window of the librarian’s office he watched her shuffle away in her short, tight suit and strappy sandals with three-inch heels (hand-me-downs from Janice), unwittingly waggling her ass—the only black thing about her, in his opinion. He would have compared her to the one secretary in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but given her size, mood, and clothing, he kept thinking of Taxi Driver. He watched her collapse sobbing into the arms of a gangly black boy in a blindingly white old-fashioned tennis sweater. He said something that made her smile. She responded with something that made him nod. Their brief conversation gave the strange but distinct appearance, to someone who couldn’t hear it, of being charming, witty, and enticingly mysterious. The girl uttered a long sentence, tears on her eyelashes, and the boy looked at the ceiling for a moment before replying with another long sentence that made the girl cock her head quizzically, and so on. The two seemed oblivious to the prep school boys and girls slumped nervously in upholstered chairs. Then the boy looked at his watch. The next interview slot was his.

  The interviewer forgot to make any notes about Karen at all. Because Temple blew him away. After he met Temple, he called the dean of admissions and gave him a heads-up. Modest, handsome, well-spoken, sharp as a tack. Temple in his essay had done his best to be funny, sprinkling it with quotations from Montaigne since French was the subject he enjoyed most. As a Joyce and Beckett maniac, he didn’t see himself as having a choice. The interviewer spoke a bit of French to see what would happen and Temple replied, his grammar convoluted and his accent proving beyond a doubt that he could also spell, that whether his ultimate posting was in Francophone Africa, which of course fascinated him, or the Soviet Union, as he dared to hope, a command of the French language would be indispensable to his activities as a diplomat, a career he felt The University could help him work toward. The interviewer felt a pang of envy.

  The admissions office made Dee drive him to Charlottesville to interview for a merit scholarship. Temple left them bewildered and excited. What egg did he hatch from? Since when do things like that crawl out of the woods? They called the high school to make the principal nominate him, and handed him a four-year free ride. And not because he was underprivileged, but because they considered him one of their best applicants that year. The chief admissions officer described him to the committee as a high-potential whom they could not afford to lose. Financial aid, he could get anywhere. They would lose a bidding war with the Ivies. They needed a prestigious scholarship as bait.

  As for his classmate, well, they’d be fools to admit a kid black as the ace of spades without admitting his girlfriend. There were maybe two hundred black girls enrolled at The University. One was absurdly fat and in a wheelchair, and another was a hair-trigger feminist with a habit of standing up in lectures and yelling, not to mention the two girls from prominent families in DC, both majoring in prelaw—whatever that was—who were so extremely attractive that it hurt the dean of admissions to look at them. These were the black girls one noticed. It was safe to assume they would be of no assistance to Temple. The dean recalled the one Black Student Alliance party he had attended as a bleak affair. It was hard to say what had depressed him more: the studied footwork of the couples on the dance floor, or the heartrending petty bourgeois piteousness of cucumber sandwiches passed around by accounting majors whose overly colorful bow ties had been expressly chosen to keep them from looking like waiters. Lonely, Temple might become a danger to himself and white women. The light-skinned girlfriend was a ready-made shock absorber and, after all, a legitimate applicant in her own right.

  They let her in and gave her a grant. As the dean said, she could have qualified for food aid in Biafra. She was about the poorest applicant they’d ever seen.

  To say Temple was ecstatic would be an understatement. He was lit from within. He had always suspected he had potential. Now he had official confirmation. The State Department beckoned. All he had to do was ace a triple major in international relations, Slavic languages, and government while slaking his thirst for math, science, literature, history, various upscale PE offerings such as rock climbing and squash, etc.

  Meg, too, was overjoyed. Karen was fifteen and three-quarters, awfully young to go to college, but she had a commonsensical, matter-of-fact way of approaching things. You couldn’t call it maturity. It was passivity, that was all. Who knew what she really wanted from life. She seemed to regard Temple as her hereditary betrothed, which somehow got her off the hook for getting sexually involved with him. Meg and Dee agreed on that score: Temple and Karen were like Hansel and Gretel. They worried that Karen, surrounded by college boys who thought she was white, would ditch Temple and break his heart.

  With UVA in the bag, Temple felt he had time to catch up on his black studies. He enjoyed Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Then Meg bought him Coming of Age in Missis-sippi. It was like giving a Jewish kid a coffee-table book about Auschwitz. Before then nothing had occurred to shake Temple’s belief in universal ethical values. Black men overcame (an intransitive verb), and that was that. Now
he wondered if black people might not be owed a hearty collective thank-you, perhaps in the form of trillions of dollars.

  His cogitations culminated, late in his senior year, in an ill-advised one-man show adapted from Ellison’s Invisible Man, to be performed onstage at the shuttered black high school where he had attended first through seventh grades. (The new high school’s auditorium was also the gym, so it was a bit cavernous for the arts.) The set was not ready until dress rehearsal. The many lightbulbs onstage in the final scene blew an irreplaceable antique fuse, necessitating the postponement and ultimately the cancellation of a one-act festival that had cost the senior English teacher an awful lot of work.

  Ike Moody grumbled silently that if Temple were a little smarter he would notice not only that his people were victims of prejudice, but that his family had been run off their property and was living in a housing project. But of course a future diplomat thinks in world-historical terms, unfamiliar with basic post-Marxian concepts . . . debt peonage, land reform, grumble, novels that leave him innocent as a newborn baby, grumble, grumble . . . Not being a big reader or a particularly determined steward of pieces of paper, Ike didn’t know his creek bank had its origins in Reconstruction land grants that totaled nearly four hundred acres. Nor did he know he had held on for an unusually long time.

  After World War II—in the years of the “Great Migration,” when black people came out en masse as cold-loving proletarians—many Virginia counties had become dotted with vast and beautiful army, navy, air force, and CIA bases. That is, certain people’s land was taken in great swathes by eminent domain for national security, and where black people once hunted, fished, and farmed, servicemen now dwelt in high-ceilinged brick mansions on the water, watching pleasure boats come and go. Whenever the US Congress leaned on the services to stop being dogs in the manger about such valuable real estate, they would—just an example here!—sell part to developers for a golf resort and the rest to retired officers. If you have to be bad, be so bad sympathetic hearers just shake their heads and give up.

  Nobody suggested to Temple that his family had been cheated. Nobody wanted him growing up thinking people are bad or that the world is a bad place. That would have been Christianity or the Gnostic heresy, though they didn’t put it in those terms. They portrayed the world as in need of repair, not as populated by people you’d be insane not to hate. Resentment of collective ill-treatment of the race was fine, if it helped him fine-tune his sense of justice.

  High school graduation was a triumph. Temple gave an earnest valedictory speech on independence cribbed from Thoreau. Whenever he raised his voice, he reminded the white parents of black activists they’d seen on TV, and they shrank back in their seats. It wasn’t what he was saying, which involved hopes for a more just world if people would sit down and do the math like Thoreau, but his wearing a suit and not being a preacher, yet speaking in public.

  Karen as salutatorian reminisced about the years their class had spent together in a scholarly way. The parents were used to hearing more comprehensible things at commencement speeches such as “We sold out of Brunswick stew and our class spirit was psyched,” but many were pleased to find their children had been exposed to learning. They regarded Karen as an honorary white person and applauded extra loud.

  Hearing the term “Jefferson scholar” as he took the scroll and shook the principal’s hand, Temple was hard put not to jump up and down and squeak. He looked out and saw his mother gazing up with her hands pressed against her chest. His grandparents appeared transfigured by joy, blissful, liberated, expansive. His siblings were standing and whooping. His father’s place was empty, since he’d gone to the back of the gym to face the wall and dab at his eyes with a hankie. After Temple came the quarterback of the football team, with an athletic scholarship to George Mason, who got a lot more applause. But it was still the proudest moment of all their lives up until then. Dee was out of control all summer, high-fiving everyone. Trotskyite or not, Ike seemed to float around on invisible roller skates.

  Given residency requirements that put them far apart—Temple was in a special dorm for Jefferson scholars—and their differing class schedules and busy orientation programs, Karen and Temple weren’t able to spend a lot of time together in their first few weeks at school. Karen had been warned by her mother not to spy on him and by Dee not to follow him around like a puppy, so she figured it might be a good thing.

  He was busy anyway, disoriented and discombobulated, having typical adolescent experiences without knowing they were typical. Making long speeches to distracted eighteen-year-olds who were thoroughly occupied washing down fish sticks with Pepsi, feeling that they, despite their inattention, were understanding every word. Watching them stand up and wander off as though he did not exist. The invisible man. He was not used to seeing the faintest trace of comprehension dawn on the face of anyone other than his mother, Karen, Meg, the occasional teacher, and others predisposed to be nice to him—mostly Meg—so he had naturally assumed that anyone smart enough to understand him would find him fascinating. It was a shock to discover that suburban kids could follow his argumentation and find it hopelessly dull. “Pale Fire is so overwritten,” they would say, yawning. He began to talk less, shortening his speeches to make them more efficient and effective.

  It never crossed his mind to be tender, charming, or witty. Those were his ways of interacting with Dee and Karen. He didn’t know you could fake affection and manipulate people into loving you that way. Temple never pretended. He merely watched himself with eagle eyes. He saw that he was a nerd, possibly even a geek or a pedant if not a boor, definitely a name-dropper, and certainly not as well informed on certain topics as he would have liked to think.

  Lectures, where he could be anonymous, were what he enjoyed most. At tutorials he felt he was wobbling over thin ice, keeping in motion to avoid plummeting into the sucking hole of his own ignorance, reliant on generous teaching assistants to bridge gaps in his knowledge, hyperaware that his problem was not stupidity but a basic approach that was all wrong in every way. Because he wanted to work hard, concentrate on things, dig in, move more slowly. But that was too slow. If you did all the reading, you wouldn’t have time to eat, sleep, go to class, or anything else. He needed to pick and choose, but he was not the type to question the potential relevance of material prescribed by professors. If they said read Thucydides, he read Thucydides. Maybe not every statesman had read him, but they ought to. He assumed no one would knowingly place obstacles in his way.

  He threw himself into learning Russian with intense fervor, hanging around the Russian House at all hours. There he got into a game of Risk—a game at which he had thought he was the ruling expert master, since he always beat Karen and the neighbor kids—and got slaughtered by a pimply fat girl whose laugh was like the rhythmic call of a monkey. Heenh, heenh, heenh, alternating with a pseudo-Mayfair screech of “Boring, Sidney!” borrowed from a movie about the Sex Pistols. She seemed thick as a brick in every way, horribly repellent, yet successful. The next time he saw her, she took him apart at chess and informed him that they made first-semester Russian easy as falling off a log to attract more majors. They don’t spring the six noun cases on you until the spring. It was even easier than introductory ancient Greek. Then she recited a poem in Greek, and Temple, who had been proud of getting an eighty-eight on the first pop quiz in Russian class, began to feel that as a Jefferson scholar his goose was cooked. Or maybe not cooked, but getting warm on the bottom and in need of a change of location.

  He kept moving. He took up drinking coffee. He did his reading in the library, staying there until late at night. He realized with a shock that he might have to withdraw from Physics 101. He had neglected to sign up for a lab because he didn’t know you were supposed to. Now he was weeks behind. They had entire particles that hadn’t been in the textbooks in Centerville. When he saw Karen, he would shake his head and smile wanly.

  What he didn’t know: He was tall and broad-shouldered like
a boy on an athletic scholarship. He wore white V-neck undershirts instead of dark crew-neck pocket tees. He didn’t wear glasses. No one could place him. Generally, faculty members were in favor of giving him a chance, or a tutor—it’s not like you could put a star scholar in a remedial course. What would you have been trying to remedy, anyway? His grammar and spelling, his diction and syntax, his study skills, it was all fine. It was his dated frame of reference that needed hoeing to let some sun through to the post-1960s vegetation. Temple needed someone to sit by him in lectures and say “Ignore this. Ignore this. Ignore this. This matters, because it’s new. Ignore this.” To him, everything was new and mattered.

  Karen took a more pragmatic approach and was having more fun. She planned, tentatively, to major in English. As she explained to her mother in a letter, she knew English already, so she could probably get okay grades. There was no point majoring in something she didn’t know already, as she would just get into trouble or, more likely, major in the wrong thing. Whereas with English you can’t go wrong. Employers always need English. Besides, she had to take all sorts of electives to graduate anyway. She took cosmology, architecture, and economics, saving philosophy, chemistry, and military science (a special subject for ROTC members, but Karen had heard it was an easy A) for her second semester. They all sounded entertaining to her. Kicking back and listening to a lecture in a survey course was her idea of a good time. It was so much more interesting than high school or TV or anything else she’d done up to then. She loved college.

  Reading statements like that made Meg get all choked up inside. After all, she had gone to Stillwater to meet women, and rather than a program of high-quality infotainment, it had turned out to be the low-budget, audience-participation version of college where professors leave content generation up to the students. She regretted that part of her life in its entirety, with the exception of its having produced Karen. Now she envied Karen so much it hurt. She wanted to be young again.