Search Party (32 page)

It was not like that at all. It was ordinary. Mrs. Dominick's breathing problem made little oases in the conversation, during which you did not have to do or say anything. For a while they stood together looking out at the balcony. Against the thick, brightly lighted leaves of trees in tubs, rain was coming down in big drops, separate and greenish, like something shredded, celery or fish. Susannah began to be hungry. Far down, headlights were being pulled along Lake Shore Drive, and beyond that was the dark rainy lake. On the other side of her the husband, the surgeon, was saying that he was at sea with art people.

It wasn't clear who the art people were. There were a few young men with earrings and one or two bodies in very short dresses fitted like socks, but most of the guests were older people dressed just the way people would be in Virginia, and the talk seemed to be about their children's problems.

Everyone was talking in a more emotional way than she imagined they normally did. The children were in drug programs or
going through divorces. Susannah thought of her own children, anxious all of them that she no longer guard them. “No one told you what to do,” they would point out to her. “I guess not,” she would say. They would not be able to resist saying, “Look what you did when you were our age. You got
married
.” Then they would be sorry. In their minds she had gotten married because of their crazy grandmother. Simple. Escape.

Of course they could not know the thing so irresistible it parted her from everything leading up to it, from all worry, from her bedroom with Jo, from Jo. The tiny supply room at school, the sheet faintly stenciled
CLINIC
, the window. The high-up radiant window pumping heat across the cot at noon, when Larry Kephart woke up and she pulled him up to her by his hot arms and said to him, “Don't cry.”

Standing by the window she drank more of the wine they handed her, and found she could speak comfortably with the husband, the surgeon, who did not seem to have known Jo. Or perhaps he had been one of them, too, Jo's lovers, she thought suddenly, angrily, looking at the clean gray hair behind his big earlobes and the shirt collar digging into his shaven neck. He looked considerably younger than his little elderly wife. But it did not matter, did it? Nothing at all, certainly nothing that could be said or discovered in this room, mattered where Jo was concerned. “Sad, sad,” Dr. Dominick kept saying when there was a pause.

She thought of Mrs. Dominick calling her husband at work to tell him about Jo. It must seem unfair, perhaps even infuriating, after operating on people all day to be told that someone else has used this time to force the life out of herself. Has gulped all her lithium and dropped herself down, a week after the decision to get married and have children, and a day after the exuberant passing of this news to her sister and father—but the surgeon getting this call from his wife wouldn't know that, or want, in all likelihood, to know it—into the brown commercial river right in the middle of the city, in the sight of people not so far above on the bridge, where, as one couple was to tell the police, although
she had been walking slowly she had done nothing to draw attention to herself, so that no one thought to grab her before she got up and over and dropped herself into a river full, as Susannah pictured it, of barges and floating trash. She could not swim. She sank. No one jumped in to save her until it was too late. No one saved her.

Some of the Dominicks' art was too large for a room with furnishings in it and occupied a wide hall. One wall held huge paintings of trees—“Prints, actually. They're colored etchings,” said Mrs. Dominick—tall as trees themselves. Susannah was going to comment on their beauty but she thought better of it, after calling them paintings. On the other hand Mrs. Dominick seemed not to notice little things but to be governed, in her regard for each work, by a maternal care that it not be passed over and a confidence that the artist still inhabited it, out of sight like a shy tenant.

At the end of the hall were Jo's photographs, on a wall to themselves, on either side of an old carved door. Susannah knew that some of them were recent because there were things other than machines in them. Two even had people.

In one there was a large-bodied young woman with her arms spread out, a hand on each of two big, bomb-like old-fashioned hairdryers. Stevia. But of course it was not Stevia. It was hard to know just what Stevia would look like now, but she would be much older than this. This mischievously straight-faced fat woman was under thirty.

Stevia's son would be that age now, and more. “Ah,” Susannah said. She knew why she had put on her glasses and looked so long at the little print in the corner of the living room. The title had been written in pencil at the bottom with the print number: “Man with Antlers.” The man's face wore a look neither alarmed nor proud, the look of a calm beast. She thought of herself at nine, hoping all summer that Stevia's baby would have something wrong with it, something unforgivably and incurably wrong, would be
an animal
. Everybody had the same ideas, really. The artists just didn't feel ashamed of their ideas and disgusted by them.

That could be good or it could be bad.

The wine was making her mildly unsteady. She was tired from being on the plane and trying to talk to Garland in the car, and from the speeches and the loud music, and from being given no food and introduced to people who said they were glad to meet Jo's sister. Glad. Susannah felt certain she was the only one here—except maybe Mrs. Dominick, with her wall of photographs—who had found happiness in knowing Jo. She shook off dizziness and stepped firmly away from the pictures. How strange it was to think now that things done so many years ago by Jo and herself had been happiness.

She leaned against the wall to fit her fingers down the side of her shoe, and almost fell. Mrs. Dominick said, “My dear, you need a minute or two to simply lie down. You can get right back up. Come with me.”

Garland met them in the living room, flushed and carrying a bottle of wine. He said her whole name, “Susannah Floyd,” the way people sometimes would back home when they first ran into you on the street. He seemed to forget she had a married name. “Here you are. I never have asked how your father is.”

She held up her glass. “I couldn't tell you how many I've had. Thank you. My father couldn't come. He's old, he's upset, he can't leave his cows.” Words poured out of her. “He's very tired, after my mother. Anyway we had Jo's service at our church and we buried her in the cemetery.” “We buried her.” What strange words. Like a secret crime. We buried Jo. She would have taken a picture of the hole. Not near our mother, there wasn't a space there, and that's just as well. And for days everyone brought us food, for days—you know how they do. You're from the South. And everyone talked about Jo's birth and the search party.

“And you have children, don't you?”

Surely he knew this. “Four. Two of them are taking exams right now. They were all just home for their grandmother's funeral. My daughter—she's the one who was so close to Jo—left the next day for Indonesia. She's going to study batik.” She
could not stop herself from saying all this so that he could see not only why her children had not come to this memorial but that they were out in the world, like Jo, not stuck in the amber of home as Jo might have described it to him. That no matter what Jo might have said or not said, Susannah's children were people who ventured out, who were involved in art, in going to school. “Of course the younger ones were at the funeral.”

Garland said, clearing his throat, “Forgive me, I didn't mean why aren't they here.”

The woman he had been talking to, who had come up behind him, said, “Well, what did you mean, Garland?” She said this rather drunkenly, taking his arm, and he bent to let her down onto the couch the same way he had helped Susannah into the car. He was the bereaved, like Susannah. His hands shook. Yet he was attending to everybody. Susannah turned to speak to Mrs. Dominick so he would not think he had to attend to her.

“I don't need to lie down,” she said stubbornly. “I came so I could be here.”

“Just come with me. Come along.” Mrs. Dominick took her arm.

There was no way to refuse. This must be what had appealed to Jo.

“T
HAT
'
S
Garland's wife,” Mrs. Dominick said in the little bedroom. It was a shut-up room, with a chair, a low carved chest and a single bed in it, cool with a camphory air they had stirred to life in the dark. “His ex-wife.” She meant the drunken woman with the eyebrows. She turned on a little lamp by the bed and pulled back the comforter. “This was Jo's room when she lived here, from time to time.” She hoisted her shoulders and her large bust and let them down with a rasping sigh. “You know, my dear, about your sister's decision to marry Garland.”

“Yes.” Susannah gulped from her glass. “What happened?” She had sworn she would not ask anybody this.

“Well, my dear, your poor mother died, for one thing.”

Your poor mother. It gave Susannah a little start. No one had said this, even at her mother's funeral. She said, “Actually I think Jo was more or less waiting for our mother to die.”

“Well, now.” Mrs. Dominick eyed her pityingly. “But these things are mysterious, aren't they? And then Garland is a man of . . . emotion. I believe the French have a word for it, ah,
l'homme
. . .” She sat down in the chair with her hand on her heart. “Oh I can't think what. Jo was not used to that, I don't think, do you?”

“I don't know.” But Susannah knew everything about Jo. “Did she say much about our life?”

“Not very much at all. Oh, I don't mean . . . my dear, not the family. With
men
she wasn't used to it.”

“I mean did she tell you the stories?”

“What stories are those?”

“Well, about her birth? About the search party?”

“My dear, she didn't seem to look upon the past in that way.”

“What way?”

“Oh, the way we do, most of us, looking back. Oh, we regret things but we have a soft spot for ourselves and what happened to us. I do anyway.”

“But she told you about our mother.”

“Oh yes. But only a little.”

Garland had followed them. He leaned heavily against the doorframe and rubbed his jowly face with both hands. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned his damp collar. Mrs. Dominick settled, puffing, in the little armchair. Garland said, “May I join you?” He sat down on the bed beside Susannah and stared distractedly at her. She thought ahead, past whatever these two intended to tell her, to being able to go to sleep.

“You do look like her in certain ways,” Garland said. “Doesn't she, Eugenia?”

“Well, that's a compliment,” Susannah said. One of Mrs. Dominick's tears finally ran out onto the cheek, leaving a trail in the thick old-woman's powder she had on.

“Though Jo was so thin,” Garland said with a bewildered sigh, and then as if Jo's thinness had been an illusion in which he
had been tangled, he made a gesture toward Susannah and Mrs. Dominick, as if their proportions were reality itself. A gallant gesture. It would have blocked any reference Susannah might have made—but she was not going to do this—to differences between herself and Jo in weight, in beauty.

“A
WINCH
! It's a machine! Isn't it? Jo would have liked the winch,” the woman with the thick eyebrows, Garland's ex-wife, called out in the middle of the story. Her name was Anne. She too was popular and important here, though Susannah did not think she was imagining that some distaste and pity attached to Anne, too. Or perhaps not. Garland seemed to rely on her in some way. Art people. But Anne was sitting on the arm of the chair stroking the hand of a thin young man sprawled there, whereas Garland sat on the bed with Susannah, in his socks, with his knees wrapped in his arms. There were seven or eight people in the room, and as many bottles on the night table. Anne's head had dropped but kept butting in Garland's direction. “Gar knows that fascination she had with machines.”

“I don't remember if she liked the winch,” Susannah said seriously. She felt the beginning of a pain in her chest. Heartburn. That meant nausea was on the way. She had known this and gone ahead and drunk seven or eight glasses of wine. Maybe more. “Was this after Stevia?” said Garland.

“Stevia was gone by then. Stevia,” she said to the people in the bedroom, “was the girl, the woman, who took care of us. We had a—we had a disabled mother.” She should have found a simple word, such as Mrs. Dominick would have found. But Mrs. Dominick had leaned back a while ago with her mouth open and her little blue eyes closed. Hours before that her husband had appeared in the light of the doorway, shaken hands all around and gone to bed.

“The things Jo said about Stevia,” Garland said dreamily. His accent had deepened as the wine went lower in the bottles. It was not a Virginia accent but it was similar, she thought. Maybe North Carolina. “Now you're gonna tell me she wasn't a witch.”

“Stevia?” Susannah said. “She was fat . . . maybe she teased . . . but she was . . .”

“And all those other witches and gorgons, the ones who molested her in stores and strapped her down in emergency rooms . . .”