Search Party

by Valerie Trueblood

  “What do you remember about her?”

  “Well . . . let’s see . . .”

  She must have said something about her that Jake could put in, about the two of them, her original parents. Even though she got away in her teens and didn’t look back for quite some time. She wouldn’t have just left them out of the whole experience.

  That’s the tree your mama called the sobbing tree out there, see it?

  That was something said to her while she sat uncomfortably on somebody’s lap. Of course that would have lodged in her memory, because it was awkward to be taken onto someone’s lap when you were eleven years old. Somebody from town, some visitor come by to celebrate? A man. Men liked to get her close to them. She always listened more to men.

  Perhaps it was her father. How was it she had no memory at all of her father?

  It didn’t matter who it was. The words were being said by the old woman, with a troubling pulsation as if the mute pedal was being pushed and released on a piano.

  He said, That’s the tree your mama called the sobbing tree out there, see it?

  My sister said, That’s the tree I used to climb up and look for you.

  My little brother Harry said, Roamer looked for you. We went down by the grange every day because they seen a stranger there. Roamer snuffed all over.

  It was mama went down there every day, and how do you know that, you were a baby, my sister said. But not meanly, she was good to him. Good to everybody. Not like me. How do you know he snuffed all over? my sister said to him.

  I know it, my brother said.

  He said it to me not her.

  I know it.

  Jerry, Abby thought. Nothing went right for that boy, did it. Nor for Martha either, nor any of them, never mind that they weren’t the ones that had the experience.

  She had left out a lot with Jake that she couldn’t put in now. All that trouble. But it wasn’t her fault. It isn’t your fault if people want you. And it was not looks that did it, as people would say to her when she had her looks. It couldn’t have been. No, it must have been . . . what? Fate? But how did one person’s fate get separated out from another’s? How could anything happen to any one person that didn’t pull in everybody else and their fate, and the world, for that matter, and the universe, how could it all be sorted out, if any one of them had a fate? And if they didn’t, what made you go through what you went through? If your life was just any old thing, what made you keep at it?

  There was a long silence and then the old woman resumed answering the question in her flat, maddening way. “I guess—oh, of course she did, she missed me—I guess after all that time we couldn’t, we just couldn’t get used to each other. Oh, she always said we were poor and there were so many mouths to feed, and I knew we weren’t poor, for one thing, compared to what poor was in the other place. Oh, not that she didn’t want me back. Both of them. They got the money together to hire a detective from Winchester. But you may know this, a good many detective agencies then were just men who had lost their farm or their store. It was just a fluke I was ever found. Somebody traveling, like they did in those days, selling galvanized buckets. Drove across the line, into West Virginia. Somebody from the town of McBride.”

  WHEN the screen finally went blank Abby sat back out of breath, as if she had climbed the stairs to the Hilltop Room for a second time. She looked around in the hazy light that had flooded the theater like an unwished-for morning. The whole thing had been like crossing a floor in the dark not knowing which boards were going to sink in. She was not quite steady, and sat with her knees apart feeling the slant of the floor under her feet. Her upper arms ached.

  The mayor stood up clapping forcefully, and then everybody stood and clapped while Jake was letting go of Abby’s cramped hand so he could get up. He jumped up onto the platform, rubbing his eyes in the light. He got his tie loosened and with his hands on his hips he shifted from foot to foot, pleased with himself and shyly sociable, grinning as if he had done every one of them a good turn, like changing a tire or moving something heavy, that had left him flushed and out of breath.

  So there was more to come, and Abby could not go home, she had to stay in her seat.

  It was going to be a big surprise to her if he got a question out of this audience.

  But she had reckoned without teenagers, girls as well as boys, who wanted to know how you got the camera up into the tree, and how you got it into the car, and whether the women really had no clothes on underneath if you showed them in a bedroom in a man’s shirt, or in other movies where they showed them with nothing on, who all was there on the set? One of them in this group that raised their hands had a mother in the audience who covered her face, but Jake let her know it didn’t bother him. “That’s exactly what I used to wonder,” he said, taking the microphone off the stand and swirling the cord, and he told them what they wanted to know.

  The kids liked him because of his messy hair, which Abby happened to know he struggled over with the comb, and his New York accent that caused them to snicker with delight as if he were putting it on, and because of the strong charm important people gave off, when they answered questions as if they would be just as happy to know you as all the rich people they did know. Darla had shown at dinner that she did not recognize this, but Abby knew it from way back, from the faculty dining room, after Bowen finished improving her manners.

  Then an older woman asked Jake how he did his research. He said he had done it over years, in this town and towns like it, and mentioned his documentary, but she flapped her hand right back up to know how he got the little girl’s story.

  “I copied it out by hand from an old newspaper, and many years later I found she had been here all along—or rather come back with her children—and was a lady gracious enough to give me many hours of her time. I didn’t want to keep strictly to the experience she had, but I wanted to preserve it as the core of a film about a period of American history. As it happened I became interested in the individual. But of course I departed from the facts she gave me. Something else happens, or you hope it will, when you work in film.” He bowed to Abby, who was paying attention to her pulse, which had given over to heavy and uncomfortable rocking while he was speaking of her, as it had not throughout the movie. At some point Darla had placed her arm around Abby’s shoulders and now she snuggled her a little as if she were an old grandma, and glanced around possessively.

  The audience would have let the subject rest, but the next question came from the same persistent woman. Abby decided she was the new librarian, intent on showing off some information she must have up her sleeve. Turning around to see, she had a side view of a woman with long gray hair held off her face with a barrette, wearing a fringed blanket with a hole cut in the middle for her head to come through. It was not any librarian from McBride and not the well-dressed girl from Washington, the reporter; that one was writing in her notebook but not asking any questions.

  The woman stayed on her feet, egging Jake on with the mention of other directors and their movies, repeating “film” and “your film” until you could slap her. She knew something about the movies, it was clear—she knew about Jake and she had made the trip from somewhere—but now she had changed the subject. She had him talking about the war. Talking about himself, as any man would sooner or later, while Darla yawned and signaled disgust with her darkened eyebrows, and the mayor, who had a speech in his pocket he was going to pretend he made up on the spot, started fidgeting for it to be his turn.

  But Jake had dropped his guard now, along with the casual act, and was pacing with his hands clasped to his chest with the microphone between them, and talking the way he liked to, as if everything that happened had three or four explanations. All about how he had come to this country from Poland. Somebody had unearthed distant relatives for him, an older man and wife who had no children and who, when he was finally at home there and had almost finished high school and had perfected the accent—that brought the house down—moved away from
New Jersey. His foster parents moved. He struck himself in the forehead. First to McBride, when he was in high school, where there were no Jews in school except him—and to this day he did not know why they had conceived the idea of retiring here, he said apologetically, passing his hands through his wayward hair in a way that made Abby think of several women of her acquaintance in the room, in addition to Darla, who would be trying hard to remember a Jewish family that ever had lived in town, in order to have an opening to introduce themselves afterwards. But despite the beauty and hospitality of the town, his guardians soon picked up and moved on once more, to Florida.

  Abby snapped open her change purse to see if she had any of her relaxant pills in there. She had been made almost ill at the start by having to crane her neck to see the screen, and by the dizzying shots of the girl in the tree, and then put through the Depression in some infernal way—after being made to look like a hussy at the outset, if you thought about it, although the audience, thank God, never saw anything but the one scene.

  “I think my parents stayed with a couple who agreed to hide them if they would—in the event their capture became inevitable—if they would leave, and leave me behind. Now, this is what I never could put together. There are two theories. One, that my parents agreed to this and the couple saved me although they could not save my parents. The other, that they turned my parents in so that they could keep me.” He looked up at the ceiling. “So they could keep me!” he repeated, or really wailed, like a woman, in a kind of shrill comical disbelief.

  Abby thought for a minute Jake was going to fall into one of his old-man states. He had stopped his energetic pacing, and stood with the microphone dangling from his hand. She thought he might be going to lose his hold on the audience. To her dismay he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. He unfolded it carefully but did not use it.

  “And so how did you end up in this country?”

  “Someone got out. Got away. He made it his business to find me. Someone very tenacious. He had known my mother. I believe her grief—even there, in the camp—had made an impression on him.”

  Abby had lost all patience with the woman who had changed the subject and with Jake himself, who in his excitability had forgotten, apparently, after his first success with the kids’ questions, that the only thing people in the room really wanted to hear about was Hollywood.

  Without trying to hide what she was doing Abby reached up and pried out her hearing aid. She wanted to get home and Jake had to come with her. He owed it to her not to go back to the inn and meet Darla but to come in, sit down on the couch and let her pour him, and herself, some gin out of the refrigerator.

  She had a grandson born today and at the very least she deserved a toast. Furthermore she deserved a chance to have her say about her own life.

  He might think she had told everybody here what she had told him but she had done no such thing. She never talked about her experience. Even though everybody professed interest in it, the interest had really died away long ago. He ought to hear her own daughters if she ever brought it up.

  Something had come between her and her daughters, the way mold can get between the layers of an onion that looks fine on the outside, and she could not identify it to this day, something that made it so that once they had their own children, her daughters started in telling them things that were not true.

  “Nobody thought to tell me this at your age,” the older one in particular would say to her own daughter, in Abby’s hearing, “nobody taught me, but I want to make sure you know . . .” With that one, who had gone to college, the problem was clearer: college had changed her. She had come home the first two or three times with a lot of mean energy in her and the makeup scrubbed off, and a way of retelling events to make them unpleasant. “So you were such a big deal that you got stolen, and then stolen back. And why was that, in your opinion?” Though there had been a time when she and her sister could never hear the story enough, and crowded against Abby, their little-girl scalps sending up a sweat of suspense through the fair hair. Stolen from your mother. Unthinkable.

  It was too late to go into it and clear everything up with her own daughters. But with Jake it wasn’t. Sitting across from him in her own house with a shot of gin warming her—the thought joined the sensation the movie had left in her sinuses, the hot-cold you would get smelling ammonia. But at the same time pleasant. Of course it was neither thing; it was her imagination, not an actual sharp breath, as it seemed, of tree bark and ramps and coal, or of the washed blonde hair of the one she loved best.

  The only one she loved, ever.

  To whom she had done that terrible thing. Not spoken to her, not said a word, when she came into the room of the jail in the jail dress.

  Abby almost moaned. Her whole body had gone sore and stiff. If and when she was given the chance, she was not at all sure she was going to be able to get up. With difficulty she uncrossed her legs and crossed them again. She must have done it a time or two, because Darla got a sympathetic look and patted her knee and whispered something to her that she couldn’t catch without the hearing aid.

  “What do you know about it?” she said to Darla, more viciously than she meant to.

  Darla sat back and Abby tried to soften what she had said by picking something off Darla’s chiffon skirt and buffing the cloth with her fingers. But Darla’s lip had begun to tremble. She laid her palm on her see-through blouse where the bra was visible, and pressed her heart.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Darla,” Abby began.

  “It’s not you,” Darla said, the first tears dropping out and sticking the blouse to the skin of her breasts. “Everything’s not you. Aren’t you listening to what he had happen to him?”

  Abby looked straight at Jake, and that was when she saw, in the smile that came to his bitter mouth at the sight of Darla crying, a smile with a little down-turned corner of pleasure craving and determination, that this tear-stained cheek of Darla’s would most certainly be laid, tonight, on his bare skin. It couldn’t be stopped. It was like a film that was going to run until it was over. It was too late. Abby could not start to cry herself, she was beyond such an outlet. She could not make clear all that Darla needed to know about the matter of being chosen, and what it got you, and what it got anybody who had to be left out of it.

  The girl in the tree certainly did not know what was coming, did she? She thought all the trouble that could come to her would come from too many people wanting her, and she welcomed it, the cruel, stupid girl.

  If those people, if a single one of those people wanted anything the way Abby had wanted the wrong mother, every day of her life since the day at the jail, she hadn’t met them. And Jake hadn’t met them, either. But he had met Abby and he knew.

  Jake went looking for the people who wanted a thing they were not going to get. He knew them when he met them and that was what interested him and he would put it into any movie he made.

  She felt a shiver. She remembered something. She remembered thinking, when Jake first told her about the movie, that he meant she was going to be in it. That he wanted her—impossible as that was when you thought about it—to be in the movie of her experience. To play herself. Of course she realized. She never said anything.

  She turned herself in the seat and found a smile for Darla.

  NEAR the end of the movie a point had come when she shook herself back to attention and it seemed to her that she had been in the theater, trapped in the low seat, for days. She wished she could go to the bathroom but she thought about crawling over everybody in the dark and gave up the idea.

  She had decided sometime earlier in the evening that by “docudrama” Jake had meant that he was not going to make a movie at all but something more on the order of a slide show, if slides could move, and having once decided that this was what his movie was, she had found it easy, as she always did when anybody showed slides, to close her eyes.

  A long time elapsed and when she took notice of the progress of things again the
girl had her hair in a ponytail and the mother had a bandeau around hers and they were washing windows. They were on the porch, dipping rags into a brand-new, shiny bucket. You could tell the water had vinegar and ammonia in it because when they wrung the rags out they made faces. They were washing the front window and the big oval pane in the door. It was spring.

  Then there was a scene she almost couldn’t look at.

  The camera circled the mother as if to trip her. The girl, tall and developed as she was by then, was lifted like a child and placed in the back seat of a car, and when she unlocked the door a man leaned on it to keep it shut, so she rolled across to the other side, seeing the mother trip on the plank sidewalk and totter on the arm of a uniformed woman to the other car, the one that belonged to the two men who were now holding both doors shut on Abby. These men would not have had the strength between them to force her mother if she had been herself and fended them off. But she went; she didn’t even make the two men leave off holding the car doors to put handcuffs on her, when you would have thought she’d have been ready to die for Abby, and might have on another day, with time to plan—though why was the plan not made and agreed on between them, why not agreed on a hundred times?

  But she didn’t fight or die; she got into the car without looking back at the unpainted house where they had been washing windows because spring had come and she and Abby were alike in their love of clean windowpanes and swept floors, as in everything. She got in without even looking to see where Abby was, and put her head back on the high seat, and shut her eyes.

  “DO you think she told him?”

  “Told who?”

  “The man from McBride, when he came through. The bucket salesman.”

  “Told him?”

  “Did she have any way to make a living when her husband got killed?”

  “Nobody did, did they? Nobody did.”

  “Yet they had to. Didn’t they?”

  “She worked at every kind of thing. For instance she made candy at home and I wrapped it up in papers I cut out of a catalog and she sold it. She sewed aprons and dishtowels for different places . . . the school, I think, the church.”