Search Party (12 page)

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.

N
EAR
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.

“D
O
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.”

“But it didn't make money. Not a living for two people. And if she was sick, and knew she . . .”

“She was fine. She was never sick.”

“Well, no matter,” the man went on, in the voice quite a bit deeper and more confidently soothing than Jake's. That was why
Abby had a hard time remembering being asked any of this by Jake. That and the old woman's voice and her impossible attitude. Her bragging how she wrapped candy. “No matter. What happened to her?”

There was a long silence. “Oh . . . all right. I'll tell you. We had a reunion! Years later. Or not so long as all that. When she got out of jail . . . oh, they didn't keep her but a little while, no, they would have seen how she didn't belong there . . . It must have been after the war was over.”

“That would have been almost ten years.”

“Oh. Well then, let me see. Well . . . but my land, we went over all our memories. I do believe we sang a couple of songs.”

For a horrible moment Abby thought the old voice was going to sing again. But it just said dreamily, “We would've sat there and cried our eyes out. You know. Just thinking about . . . how poor we must have been.”

The picture changed, in one of those maneuvers of the camera lens that let you know something that looks the same is different now.

“But now tell me, why don't you, what really happened.” You could do it with a voice too. Move in closer.

After a silence the voice whispered, “I saw her that one time. The day they took me over to the jail. She must have been sick. She died in jail. It was that same year, the year I turned twelve. She died. She died.”

It was then the camera began its final sweep around the tree. Not that again, Abby thought, catching hold of the chair arms. This girl was not the one a brother had climbed a tree to wait for. She was not sister and daughter to them, or anyone. Right there you could see what was happening. Right there—she was going to look out for herself, cause some people a lot of trouble, kill the love of her own children. The guitar kept on with the one chord. The little girl stared out. She was not little, though, she was almost grown. She was ready for the life nobody could alter any more by what they did to her, because it was hers.

The Mouse