Search Party

by Valerie Trueblood

  The fact was—as she told him herself into the tape recorder—he was nosy. Most of his questions were about people. People who went all out, who were desperate. Those were the ones he was after. Smart desperate or crazy desperate, he didn’t care.

  He laughed. He said that was close. He made her admit they were talking about a period that had lured people into doing things they would never have dreamed of before, because—and he was right, she supposed, though it was not really her time, the forties had been her time—because of the way, in the Depression, everything shifted and slid downward, important people lost their importance, ordinary people slid into being no-account. Long, hopeless fury at the president, government, law, caused the whole outfit finally to fade from the average person’s mind, and out came the thin dogs, women who might have taught you in school stepping up for their box of beans and flour from the church, cars with furniture strapped on, the hopeless sharing, the sudden, reckless seizing.

  It was, Jake said, an atmosphere of suspended regularity. It was the nearest thing to a home front that you could have, without a war.

  He said, “How old do you think I am?”

  “Oh, forty,” Abby said to flatter him.

  “Ha. I was born in nineteen forty-two. Where do you think I was born?”

  Of course she said, “New York.”

  “I was born in Poland. So tell me, nobody has any pictures of you from that period. Six years. They were afraid to take any?” This was a couple of years into their acquaintance, when the filming was under way and he was in town double-checking everything.

  “Might be,” she told him, “and might be it was just their way, not to take a picture of everything.” Jake liked to have several explanations to choose from, she knew that.

  “But those two . . . I can’t help thinking somewhere there might be one. Because if they really believed they should have you, and you belonged with them . . . Jesus, what did they believe?” Abby didn’t have to answer. Jake had states in which his features sagged and he splayed his fingers on his chest and stopped taking notes or lecturing her, stopped everything and just sat, dissatisfied, even disgusted with her, it seemed, and with himself. Now he said bleakly, “But of course to have pictures they would have had to own a camera.”

  SO far not a word had been spoken on the screen. Just as she was going to ask him if he had made a silent movie, someone, a woman, began to talk.

  “In nineteen thirty-one, when I was five years old, I was taken from my front yard by a man and woman I had never seen before. I went to live with them. He had different jobs he would get and on one of them he died. A farm accident. I don’t know just when that was but I had turned seven by then, I’d say. I remember the funeral. It was in our church.”

  This was put together from her own words, because Jake had them on the tape, but the voice was a surprise and an unpleasant one. It was not her voice at all. He had an actress doing it. It was much older, it was the voice of an old woman. And the accent was the wrong part of Virginia—more like Tidewater, with that throaty ladylike sound. A quavery, pretty, old-teacherish voice, soft, so that Abby could hardly catch it with the hearing aid turned down the way it had to be in crowds. Although she was not yet seventy she was hard of hearing, and Darla told her her voice was loud.

  She was sensitive about her voice because although she could sing, it was fair to say her speaking voice had always been higher than average, with what the daughter who went to college called a twang. A man had said her voice surprised him. Because, he had said without any apology, her beauty had led him to expect a different sort of voice. Bowen. He had had a fund of such remarks. It didn’t matter. She had survived it. He ought to see her now, at this premiere—skinny and her hair still blonde, and young-looking, so that people thought she wasn’t all that much older than Darla, who was forty-six, or they thought at least that she was in her fifties and were shocked to find out her real age, to find out that what had happened to make her famous had happened in the Depression.

  The movie was all cut up, with some scenes taking place twice, the second time a little different from the first, and the music was cut up in the same way. Now a banjo took over with a song they used to hear on the radio every day, “This World Is Not My Home.”

  The couple and the little girl came out of a little broken-down house, more like a sharecropper’s place than a house in town. Way worse off than the house Abby remembered, even though on the inside that one had had missing floorboards and doors blocked with towels at the bottom. But she was not criticizing. No, she could go along with how everything had to be exaggerated. The house had had one nice feature and Jake had remembered to put it in, a front door with a big oval glass pane in it, a door that looked as if it had been taken off another house.

  They got in the car. Sitting between the talking man and woman as they rode along, the girl began to smile. Out the window was a long coal-train they were outdistancing. She leaned her head back on the high seat. You could see now how pretty she was, how the mother had put her hair up in pins just long enough to give it waves.

  The girl had a Bible in her lap, and gloves on, so they were going to church.

  Abby thought, I did have gloves like that. If they got a hole in the finger, she sewed it. She did mine and then hers. She washed them in an enamel basin in the kitchen. She did everything for me. You wanted to do everything for your daughter if you had one.

  When we stood and looked at ourselves in the glass door with our church outfits on we looked alike. The beautiful blondes, he said.

  “They were churchgoers, you see. But not the pious type. She played the piano at church. Oh, she could play! Play and sing! They had an old upright in the sanctuary with a good tone. She always said one night we were going to go and steal it,” the woman went on with a ladylike chuckle. “And the two of us would push that thing on its casters down the aisle and out the door, and down the street without making any noise, under the moon. Well, now, we didn’t, of course, because of course they would have caught us, in a place that size.” Nevertheless the scene was taking place on the screen, the piano rolling and jolting and the moon huge, with the icy look it had in movies.

  “Now, what did she sing. She sang ‘Balm in Gilead’ and all the Methodist hymns. She sang ‘Bury Me Not.’ ‘Just a Song at Twilight.’ And ‘In the Gloaming’! That was her favorite. We could harmonize.” And just as Abby recalled her own effort, with Jake joining in, on the first afternoon they had brought out the gin, the ladylike old voice began to sing,

  In the gloaming, oh my darling!

  Think not bitterly of me!

  Though I passed away in silence

  Left you lonely, set you free.

  The woman doing the voice kept to the tune, that was about all you could say. She took a deep shaky breath and finished up:

  For my heart was crushed with longing.

  What had been could never be.

  It was best to leave you thus, dear,

  Best for you and best for me.

  It was best to leave you thus, dear.

  Best for you and best for me.

  Then the guitar—this time with some backup music—took it up and went on for some time.

  The part in the tree, when the girl was back where she had started, at the first house, was black and white; the other part was color. That was it.

  The real parents did not appear. A little boy in short pants could be seen slipping through the door onto the unlighted porch while the girl was up in the tree, and down into the yard in the near dark with bats in the air, and turning tail and running inside, letting the screen door slam. And then creeping back out to be with her. Jerry. Her real brother, the one boy in the family, poor kid. Always crying his eyes out about something. Cheeks permanently chapped. Begging every night to have the lamp left on. And she, at the top of her voice, “Why don’t you leave it on for him?” Having a fit. She didn’t care if it cost money to burn a light in a bedroom. No, she couldn’t get along for
a minute with this family they had dropped her back into. Except for Jerry none of them knew how to treat her. And if they had wanted her so bad all the time she was gone, it must have been for the work she could do.

  Jerry. Weak-kneed as he was, he got out of there, he joined up and got himself killed in Korea before he turned twenty. Abby was long gone by then, but his letters, when they finally came, were all to her, nobody else.

  The boy was the one calling her when she was in the tree, calling her by the name Amelia.

  He brought her hard candy he had stolen out of the bin at the mercantile and she reached down for it. This ran several times, with her arm hanging down and Jerry on tiptoe closing her fingers around the candy.

  All right, Abby thought. Get down from there.

  Color bloomed on the screen again but now the girl was much older; she was the same age as she was in the black-and-white part when she was back home. She was walking very slowly along a corridor, with a fat-rumped woman in a uniform who reached back for her hand so that she would speed up, but she wasn’t going to. She sat down at a table and pretended to play the piano on it until a woman was brought into the room. It was the blonde woman who had been her mother, long hair cut short. At the sight of her the girl jumped up sobbing and threw herself on her, grabbing her loose dress savagely and knocking her off balance.

  Wait. She sat in her chair and let the woman come slowly into the room in an awful dress with no belt. She let the woman come up to her where she was sitting and kiss her cheek. The woman sat down on a chair after kissing her and they talked in very low voices, or the woman talked and the girl sulked and swung her feet. Abby couldn’t hear this part. The girl would not even look at the woman. The woman actually—speaking, taking hold of the girl’s hand with both of hers—actually knelt beside the chair. The girl looked down on the clipped head and made no sign she heard.

  It wasn’t right. No, no. It was the first way.

  But then they back up and do the whole thing again, the second way, only this time the warden gives an order at the end and the woman gives the warden a slap—the slap the girl deserves for being so cold and cruel to her. The woman just slaps the warden’s face, because although it is a jail and not the asylum, the woman is, after all, in a certain way, crazy.

  The woman is in a small pen, like a dog run. She is yelling, at such a high pitch it affects Abby’s hearing aid unpleasantly. This is a dream, because while the woman is hollering, her hair is growing back very fast, just pouring out of her head.

  Then the girl is in bed. She has been having a dream. She shouts, sits up with her face pinched and wild, holding her pillow with her chin hooked over it. She is in a room with another girl, her sister Martha. She looks with the wild face at her sister for so long that you can’t tell if she is going to get up and smother her just to get the wildness of the dream out of herself. The hair growing like that, pouring out of the woman’s head.

  No one comes into the bedroom to check on the girl after she shouts. She is back where she belongs, in her own home. Where are the real parents?

  When the dream scene was over with, Darla on the other side of her said, “Whooee.”

  Abby pressed Jake’s hand. He was watching with a frozen squint. “Oh, now,” she whispered to him, “did I ever say it was that bad?”

  He pressed back and smiled at the screen. The girl was in the tree, with the same circuit of the camera allowing only glimpses of her while the watery old voice said, “Six years after I left, I was returned to my home.” We already know that, Abby thought. We just saw you in your bed.

  The picture steadied itself and the girl’s face filled the screen, a face pointy and sour, and at the same time, with its big gloomy mouth, even prettier than the face of the woman in the first scene, in the apartment. It was a beautiful face, really, that the young actress had. Looking at it Abby thought she could see why people made such a fuss about pretty versus beautiful, and she knew suddenly that no matter what she had been told, in reality she had only been pretty. What if she really had looked like this girl?

  “Everyone was there to greet me when I got out of the car, only the baby was in the first grade and there was a different baby, a girl. The man and woman who said they were my parents were very nice to me. For that first little while they were especially nice. People came out to celebrate. The house was a ways out of town then. They grew their potatoes and corn and beans. They say things were in short supply there too . . . but I had been over in West Virginia in a little coal town in the middle of nowhere, where you noticed it more. Not even a town, really. A crossroads. That was it . . . that was all it was. We had chickens at first, there. Tramps would come up on the porch and ask a setting of eggs. But by the time I left, the chickens had all been put on the table.”

  Suddenly, out of nowhere and more or less under the music, which had left off its picking on the guitar and become regular movie music, a male voice spoke. It was not Jake’s voice, it was deeper and smoother. “Did you think about your parents, your real parents.” Not a question really.

  “Can’t say I did or didn’t. Oh, I must have . . .” The camera stuck on the beautiful face of the girl, as she hummed to herself in the tree. The eyes went back and forth, back and forth. They lit on what must have been the front porch down below. An older girl had come out holding a baby. Dark braids, plain. Square jaw and small gentle mouth. “Amelia,” this girl called out timidly. In the tree Amelia drew back under the leaves and clamped her full lips tight. Made a mean, savage face. Oh, Abby thought. A nasty thing.

  The older girl jogged the baby on her hip. She did not have the breasts you could see on her younger sister in the tree.

  “Oh, the trouble I caused,” the old voice said. “Took away every boyfriend my sister had. Wasn’t a week before Harry who was her little shadow was eating out of my hand. He was eight and they’re little men by then, you know.” Harry. Amelia and Harry, instead of Abby and Jerry. It made a difference, the names being wrong. And her plain sister Martha—but no one called Martha by name at all.

  “No,” said the man’s voice. “If he was the baby in the wagon, Harry must have been six when you came back.”

  “Well, he liked to play doctor, I know that much.”

  “What about the new baby?”

  “She and I never hit it off. A crier. I never did let my own daughters get away with whining. That sister doesn’t live here in town, nor the older one either. They got away.”

  All the while the voices were going back and forth, the story was proceeding. The talk among them was so faint you couldn’t make it out. There was music swelling over it. The two girls were pulling wash off the line, and standing on chairs to lift dripping quart jars out of the canner, and spreading squash seeds out to dry, and when you saw the boy he was drilling holes in a cigar box so he could string it to make an instrument. Jerry wouldn’t have thought to do that, though. Jake had it wrong there, so she must not have said much about Jerry, poor kid. He wouldn’t have been making himself anything to play with, he would have been right there in the way for everybody to trip over, helpless. And then the older girl, not so plain as the real Martha, buttoning dresses onto the baby.

  Martha put her nose down and smelled deeply against the baby’s neck, and came up smiling. The baby girl was dark-haired, closer to Martha’s looks than to Abby’s, though everybody pretended it was a pretty baby. The baby Jake had put in the movie looked about right, it was stout and had a spoiled, milk-fed look and one of those squashed-in, satisfied baby faces.

  The baby didn’t even know Abby had been gone. It didn’t know she had ever been born.

  You could tell everything had gone back to normal in the house by the time this baby was born, to make it fat and satisfied and getting the fuss made over it that Jerry missed out on, being the baby at the time Abby was stolen.

  Everything was too clean, but Jake had the general idea.

  Where were the real parents?

  THIS time the girl was st
raddling the branch with her cheek against it and her legs and arms hanging down on either side as if she had been dropped from a height. Nothing happened at all on the screen, they just kept on showing her lying there like a dead thing all during the dialogue that was taking place offscreen. It was easier to hear because the music had come to a stop for the time being. The music was bothering Abby anyway. No piano, in the whole movie, when it was the piano she loved, the sound of a woman at the piano playing songs.

  “Your real mother. Did you ask her about those six years with you gone?”

  “Well sir, I remember her telling about one thing: somebody shot the dog. Dogs were in for it, then, if they got after the chickens. Shot. Spine-shot and crippled, so they had to get rid of him. Happened a while before I got back. After they kept him fed one way or another all that time. She told me about it. The only time I knew her to cry. Cried like she lost . . . lost everything. She kept saying, ‘You remember him, don’t you? Roamer?’ as if I would have been thinking about a dog for six years.”

  Abby turned up her hearing aid, dissatisfied with the manner in which the woman made her replies.

  “But if you had forgotten everything . . . I expect she wanted you to know what had happened to everybody. I expect she kept trying to tell you about it.”

  The “research” they were all talking about, that was it. Jake could have gone and seen anybody. Got them talking. Given them that look that said he could see exactly what they meant, exactly what their point of view would have been, the ones who would say, “That child when she came back didn’t have a kind word to say to her own mother.”

  And where was the woman who was supposed to be her mother, anyway, in the movie, if Jake cared about her so much? Where was either one of them?