Search Party (11 page)

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?

T
HIS
time the girl was straddling 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?

“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.”

W
HEN
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.