Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “So you’re the Spielberg we’ve all been hearing about,” said Harry, clapping a hand against Buddy’s back.

  “I hope not, sir,” said Buddy, suddenly self-effacing, with a kind of orphanage politeness.

  “Not in it for the money, then?” asked Harry.

  “You have good instincts,” commented a woman from across the room. “I always said there was a movie or two in Naples.”

  “Film I hope, not videotape,” someone drawled.

  “Is there a lot of sex in it?”

  “Are you going Art or Hollywood?”

  Buddy, now the center of attention, blushed.

  “Um,” he said. “It’s sort of a documentary.”

  “Erroll Morris-type stuff?” asked Harry. “Well, you can’t be wanting for material. This town is crammed with colorful characters.”

  “What exactly is it about?” inquired Midge Plum, the diminutive movie actress who had been staying with the Bruckners for two weeks, hiding from the tabloids after her divorce.

  “I’m not sure,” said Buddy, honestly. “I mean, I thought it was going to be about one thing, but now—”

  “You finding the locals hard to talk to?” asked Sweeney Phillips. His wife gouged him with her elbow, nodding toward Jack.

  “Have you talked to Diana Busby?” asked Polly, coming out of the kitchen, having caught the last sentence, smoothly covering it over. Joan was following closely; her face went pale when she saw Buddy, but she hid her agitation well, setting down the tray of hors d’oeuvres she was carrying and fussing a while with the napkins.

  “Um, no,” said Buddy.

  “You’ve read her, of course,” said the Bruckner cousin, not waiting for an answer. “Watusi was so raw and primitive, and just riddled with imagery.”

  “Sounds painful,” said Jack.

  La Bruckner summed him up in a glance as having no true interruptive power.

  “She’s simply marvelous. You must talk to her,” she told Buddy.

  “She’s as eccentric as they come,” said Polly. “A whole movie in herself.”

  They all pitched in to elaborate on the many attractive yet odd features of Diana Busby.

  “But she never gives interviews,” said Marcus Stone.

  “Reclusive,” agreed the Bruckner cousin. “Naples’s own Salinger.”

  “I can give you a letter of introduction, if you like,” said Harry, carelessly.

  While they talked, I moved over to Joan.

  “I’ve checked the seating for dinner,” I said. “He’s very far away from you.”

  “Thanks,” she muttered, picking up the tray again.

  “Let me take that,” I said.

  “I can handle it,” she said, a stubborn crease between her eyebrows. “You just handle him.” She moved away, and I watched her go, helplessly. Her anger tonight was no doubt a product of her surprise; she would get over it. At any rate, I would see to it that Buddy would not get near her.

  By the fall, we had stopped looking for Amanda, although the tattered posters were still everywhere, nailed onto telephone poles, pleading in hand-printed letters: MISSING. Each with a plastic-protected snapshot of the girl, blurred so that all you could really recognize was her big light eyes. The photo had been taken at her sixth birthday party; Joan was in the foreground, but cropping had reduced her to an unidentifiable lighter blob of forearm. The posters had been the work of an afternoon, Joan’s idea for something useful the women could do while they waited. Meanwhile, the men of the town had searched the town and surrounding area, wandering over farms and through building sites long after dark, swinging flashlights and calling out her name.

  Joan was privy to all the facts of the tragedy since that windy May Monday when Amanda didn’t come home. She’d vanished right out of the school yard, Joan told me, though I’d already heard that part on the radio. She was wearing a red sweater, and should have been easy to spot in Naples, where after the first news bulletin everyone was on the lookout for a fair-haired child in a scarlet cardigan, and would have been quick to pounce on the strange man holding her by the hand. For it was certain to be a stranger; no one from the town would have done that, no one was that deranged, and even those citizens who were a little off wouldn’t have done it to Beth, not so soon after the divorce. It just wasn’t that kind of town.

  But we didn’t find her, not a trace, not after three months, despite the community vigilance and the early publicity, Beth pleading tearfully on television, Joan holding her hand and looking grimly into the camera. Bring my baby back, said Beth, just bring her back, and I won’t ask any questions or press charges. When she returned from the Crawford house that night, Joan reported that the police had been unhappy with Beth; they had told her she shouldn’t have said that part about not pressing charges. I thought, privately, that any kidnapper seeing that television spot wouldn’t have believed it anyway, not with the way Joan looked, sitting rigidly beside Beth on the sofa, her face frozen and grey against the white collar of her blouse. While Beth spoke of amnesty, Joan embodied retribution. Her expression promised murder, disembowelment, hot pokers. My wife could be a severe woman, when the situation warranted it.

  After a month or so, the initial horror and dismay subsided a little, and a new feeling crept into the town. It was confusion of a sort, sympathy and the clean love of gossip pulling people two different ways.

  The scandal of the Crawford divorce had sustained the townsfolk for months. It was common knowledge that Beth had asked for the divorce, although Billy was a good fellow, an occasional churchgoer, hardly drank at all anymore. He sobbed out the story in bars all over town; the citizens absorbed the details, and carefully weighed the evidence. Everyone had always gotten along with the Crawfords; they’d been pillars of the town since its settlement. Beth, on the other hand, was Miller stock, always stirring up trouble. Most people still remembered the story about her great-grandfather; and of course, Lucy Miller was pointed to, with great effect. In this rational, evenhanded way the town reached its verdict: Beth Crawford was a shrew. Some even called her a gold digger, although Bill had never gotten his hands on much of the family money, and she was asking only modest child-support. There was the shocking red Mustang, which Beth drove around town shamelessly, the top down, the wind pushing back her hair. Tongues clucked at that. Some of the women believed that Beth might be a feminist, though she’d never given any previous indications of such leanings. And the real root of the mess was the adultery at the bottom of it. No one had forgotten the elopement; the matter was brought out again, and reexamined, and hindsight put a whole new light on things. It was clear to just about everyone now that Beth and Jack had never fallen out of love. The romance-novel readers put it best: evidently the two of them had been longing for one another the whole time, and were engaged right now in a torrid affair. There was proof: she’d been seen getting out of a foreign-looking car late at night, and walking unsteadily up the flagstone path to her house; she was hanging around with the fast crowd again, no way for a mother to behave, and who knew about their morals? He’d been taking days off work, and of course Paula had up and left him less than a year ago. Count was kept of the number of times she went out of town “to the movies,” leaving Amanda in the charge of that half-witted girl. Movies, indeed! The whispers went ahead of Beth as she walked down Beverley; they rippled through Purdy’s of a crowded Saturday morning; after a while, Beth stopped going to PTA meetings, and she quit the bridge club. It was too uncomfortable, she told us, to have those mean eyes all over her.

  A few months after the divorce was final, Bill moved away. He had run up debts all over town; and right before he left he started flashing money around, talking big about some job he’d found out west. After he was gone, it was rumored that Joe Crawford had offered his son a deal, in effect that he had paid him to go away. A few sensationalist types murmured Mafia, wiggling their eyebrows suggestively, but nobody believed them. The town knew why Billy had gone. Driven, they said, by his gras
ping wife. Long after he left, the talk continued, no less harsh than before.

  Then Amanda disappeared, and Beth Crawford, who had been so satisfactory a villainess, was now perceived as a victim. Mothers and fathers regarded their own children playing, healthy and safe, and repented some of their remarks of the past. No one could blame them for having indulged themselves in a little speculation; but maybe they needn’t have been so thorough. The damage had been too extensive for easy reparation; besides, stubbornness makes repentance difficult. The matter was debated, in the social groups and in the bars. It took up a whole meeting of the PTA. The solution was formulated simultaneously by several different groups, who met in the middle and fought about whose idea it was. Apart from that small dispute, there was general agreement: they needed a go-between.

  Joan was the natural choice. As Beth’s best friend, she had stood by her through the ordeal of the divorce. It might have been expected that a portion of the criticism would shift onto Joan in the process, but it didn’t; it seemed her reputation was tarnish-proof. It was said of her that she was a good friend, couldn’t have a better one; and she’ll stick by you, thick and thin. It was only proper, then, that a few months later she should be the one to carry the town’s apology to Beth. She was hinted to, in Purdy’s and at church teas. She was bemused at first, and then furious.

  “Those old biddies,” she said. “After all the things they said.”

  “They feel bad,” I said.

  “Now they feel bad,” she said. “What about before? Now they’re feeling all guilty, and they want me to get in the middle.”

  “I wouldn’t think you’d mind,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Joan, stiffly.

  “You’ve done a lot of good works, is all,” I said. “Isn’t that your job, getting in the middle?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly,” she said, but she was softening.

  “People naturally turn to you,” I said.

  “They turned against me at first,” she said. “Just like they did to her.”

  “Took them a while to get to know you,” I said.

  “They don’t know me,” said Joan.

  “They trust you,” I said.

  “Huh,” she said. “I wish someone had stood up for me then,” she added, following her own train of thought.

  “I stood up for you,” I said, hurt.

  “I guess you did,” she said, absently. “In your own way.” With a little shake of her head, she brought herself back to the matter at hand. “I just despise their cowardice,” she said. But her anger was gone; she’d seen a way in which she could be useful, and she was bound to take it.

  Cautiously, then, through Joan, the women of the town extended their hands to Beth. Joan passed on invitations to lunch, and to wedding (never baby) showers.

  “Hey ho,” said Beth, as we helped her sort through her mail. (She had been getting some nasty letters, evidence of a horrid spirit still lingering in the town.) “Here’s another one about that club membership. All of a sudden, I’m the most popular gal in town.”

  “You always were,” I said warmly. She looked at me, but said nothing.

  “They’re trying to comfort you,” said Joan. “In the only way they know how.” She had found an unsavory note and slipped it adroitly into her purse as she talked, to pass on later to the police.

  “Screw em,” said Beth. “I liked being a pariah better. It’s sure as hell quieter,” she said, wincing as the phone rang.

  Beth’s refusals were met with understanding.

  “Of course,” they said. “Poor thing. Under the circumstances.”

  “It’s a good thing she’s got Joan,” people said.

  “Can’t have a better friend than Joan,” it was agreed.

  The matter was settled, and the town’s conscience salved. It went about its business: the investigation was left to the police, and the comforting was left to Joan.

  Amanda’s abduction had been a shock, but a quick one. By four-thirty that afternoon, the situation, although horrifying, was clear. Now followed the much more painful, longer process of waiting.

  “We can’t leave Beth there alone,” I said to Joan.

  “She has that nanny person,” said Joan.

  “Elsie,” I said. “That’s no help.”

  “She hasn’t even cried all that much,” said Joan. “It’s strange.”

  “She’s in shock,” I said. “She should come stay with us.”

  But though we urged her, Beth refused. Amanda knew her own address and phone number, but although she’d done much of her growing up there, it was never imagined that she might need to know the particulars about the house on Worth Street.

  “What if she tries to call,” said Beth, “and I’m not here?”

  We couldn’t argue with that. So Joan and I took turns sitting with her; we arranged our schedule around her, and one weekend evening Lucy Miller, smaller and less brassy now, sat by Beth’s telephone while the three of us made a stiff, sad procession to the movie theater. It was a horrible parody of our jolly trips of the past, and I am sure not one of us paid any attention to the screen. Beth cried silently all through. I could feel her shuddering in the seat next to me, but when I put my hand out to her she didn’t respond. The lights came up to reveal her damp but collected; something in her expression warned us off, and we accompanied her wordlessly home.

  Meanwhile, the investigation proceeded, slowly. It had started with a dozen of us beating the bushes and shouting ourselves hoarse. Now it went to the next level: paperwork. Because Amanda might have been taken across state lines, the FBI got involved. They considered Billy a prime suspect, and threw some telephone calls west after him. He had quit his job and moved a couple of times, but they located him pretty quickly, living in Texas with a sixteen-year-old girl. He was booked for that, but close questioning indicated his innocence in the disappearance of his daughter.

  “I hoped,” said Beth, when they told her. “Better Billy, you know …” and her voice trailed away.

  There were other false leads, and the disappointment after they had been tracked to their vaporous ends; and there was the ghastly occasion when the police from two counties over summoned Beth to identify a body.

  “All the way there, she was talking,” Joan reported later. “Babbling. First one way, then the other. She seemed unhappy that it wasn’t Amanda.”

  “You can’t blame her,” I remarked. “Maybe at this point she just needs to know.”

  “Sure,” said Joan, looking at me strangely. “But there’s no point in giving up.”

  Amanda’s disappearance was taking its toll on Joan. All day, she ministered to the needs of her students, and at night she tended to Beth. The stress was beginning to tell on her. She fell prey to attacks of self-doubt, the dispassion in which she usually reveled now making her occasionally fragile. She would need comforting, and would curl her legs beneath her on the sofa, clutching a brandy snifter, whispering into its wide mouth.

  “They listen to me, Gil,” she said, while I stroked her hair. “It scares me sometimes. What if I say the wrong thing? Why do they listen to me?”

  They listened because Joan seemed to know. The students listened, and the school board listened, and all of the sisters and cousins and parents of the town. They listened because they had never seen her like this, with her feet tucked under her thighs for warmth, terrified by her own power, shaky. They saw only seamless Joan, confident and certain, and they begged for her directives, and they carried her wisdom away. Words from the mountain. I yearned to snatch her from her guru perch and hide her away.

  “You can’t take everyone else’s sorrows onto yourself,” I said. “It doesn’t help them, in the end. People have to learn to be strong by themselves.”

  “I’m a fraud,” said Joan. She added in a very small voice, “I’m a liar.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. I had never heard her speak this way before.

  She flicked her
glance toward me, then away.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  We looked at one another for a long moment, miserably uncertain. She opened her mouth to speak.

  The phone rang.

  “Don’t answer it,” I said.

  “But—it might be Chlorinda,” she said, slowly uncoiling herself. “She took her driver’s test today.” And she took the call, while I watched her transformation. Her arm thin and helpless, going toward the receiver, and her hand wrapping around it, cold and unsure. Her movements steadier, as she lifted it to her ear, her limbs thickening where she stood next to the telephone table, until she was solid again, and strong.

  “Slow down,” she said into the mouthpiece. “Take a deep breath. In and out. Now tell me again.”

  Murmuring, she carried the phone away, into her downstairs study, pulling the cord behind her, shutting the door with her foot. Calm again, definite, Joan.

  The first time I spoke to Jordan Devlin was at an office party in the middle of April. I had come home that day to the usual situation of late: an empty house and a note from Joan saying that she was staying the evening with Beth. Office parties did not normally attract me, but it promised a buffet-style meal, and I was tiring of my own dispirited efforts at feeding myself. Moreover, I was wishing for some lightness of heart. I brushed the dust off of my good suit jacket, shaved carefully and reknotted my tie, and attended alone.

  I was surprised to see Devlin there; I had thought he stayed away from the swell of underlings. Apart from his weekly tromps through the basement room where I worked, I had never seen him up close. A few minutes after I arrived at the party, I turned to see Devlin walking toward me, a crowd of admirers travelling with him. Standing, I was absorbed into the moving knot, and found myself face-to-face with him.

  He cut an impressive figure, standing two inches taller than I, with hard-looking features and a full head of greying hair. He surprised me, stopping in mid-stride to grasp my hand, switching on a brief but dazzling smile.