Search Party

by Valerie Trueblood

  With her daughters not coming he had said to invite anybody else she wanted. So they had had dinner with Darla ahead of time. By now Abby knew more about Jake; she had seen him with her own girls. She knew and she should have known all along from her own experience that the way some men looked at you was a language, spoken in ways you thought were private, but they were not private, not reserved for you. Darla had fallen under the spell of Jake’s eyes with their dark circles, and his accent that made her think of Joan Rivers, and the jokes. And certain qualities abnormal in a male—an interest in any confession, a tenderness for mistakes when they were made by women—qualities made known to Abby only gradually, in private.

  Darla had taken trouble with her face and her big auburn permanent and was wearing her long green chiffon skirt, the same lop-hemmed style of skirt that Abby’s own granddaughter had in her closet, as her daughter had pointed out to her after Darla sat by them at the Messiah. Darla had the skirt on with boots, and a new blouse of thin white material, not real silk, opened low and straining a little at the first buttonholes, and she was going to town with her impersonation of a woman a good bit younger than herself. Several times Abby had had to cut in on the storytelling and loud laughter Jake and Darla got going between them in the quiet restaurant. They were in the Hilltop Room in the old grange hall that had become the inn.

  When Darla got up to go to the ladies room Jake stopped laughing long enough to watch the green chiffon drift across the lobby. A coldness passed over Abby, coupled with a mental picture of Jake in his open overcoat hurrying back into that same lobby after he had taken her home, and Darla waving her fingers at him from a table in the corner.

  “Your friend is something,” Jake said, with a lingering and almost spiteful note in his voice, she thought, and one finger absently stroking away the grin he had been wearing through dinner. He filled his glass to the brim with the rest of the wine.

  Normally Abby could have thought of a remark that would give Darla her due as a good person to whom nothing much had ever happened, a flirt. But Abby was not as springy as usual. All evening she had been slowed by the effort of thinking what subject she might raise now that would have anything like the hypnotizing effect her words had had on Jake five years ago, when their acquaintance was new and it was all he could do to push himself back from her table after the windowpanes had gone dark and they had eaten up all of her lunchmeat and cottage cheese, and take the dishes into the kitchen the way he did and rinse them off for her, still putting questions to her over his shoulder while he emptied the ashtrays.

  “Darla wanted to come so much I called her up and said I didn’t think you’d mind,” Abby said. “She does my hair.”

  “So she said.” He was stroking his sad mouth.

  Abby did notice he was not nervous, or no more so than usual. He was always high-strung, ready to laugh or groan, or even shed tears, or go into one of his long-drawn-out explanations, looking straight into your eyes to convince you—and this too had had its effect on Darla, whom Abby could picture right now in the ladies room going round and round her mouth with the pearlized lipstick and powdering her hot cheeks—when you had forgotten what you had said in the first place to get him started.

  Half the town was in the theater. People who had not called in years but who knew Abby’s story had been calling up, assuming she’d seen the movie and cleared it. “Nope,” she said. “I told him I’d see it when it was done. And if I hate it I can stand up and say, Lord, he’s lying. I can stop it in the middle. I can do whatever I want.” “Oh, but won’t you be embarrassed?” Darla had said, and then answered herself, “No, you won’t.” For Abby was tough, and known to be. “I’d be more embarrassed if it was about me in my twenties!” Abby said. “There you’d have something to make a movie out of.”

  “If you take me to the movies, you have to hold my hand,” she told Jake. Their roped-off seats were past the middle and she was going to have to look straight up at the screen. “Oh, but who’s going to hold mine?” cried Darla, sending a smile across Abby and getting out of her best coat with a shrug of her bosom.

  A WINDOW with a blowing curtain, with clouds visible outside it. The clouds were flying and the trees were bowing. Two trees. So it was going to be in black and white. Well, why not? The time was fall, from the look of the sky. Birds on the wind. Too blustery for summer, though the big oak tree was in full leaf, in a corner yard with patchy grass that sloped to a flowerbed full of weeds.

  But that’s not right, there wasn’t a yard. No yard, the house right on the edge of the road at a crossroads, where there was a plank sidewalk. Hills behind, grown up and strong-smelling with the wild onions they called ramps. She had learned to eat them. Coal cars sliding by.

  But no. This wouldn’t be the West Virginia house at all, it would be the other one. It would have to begin in that house, the one where she was born. That house. Those two trees: a tall, straight tree and a sobbing tree.

  You could see that house today, the real one, though the town had closed around it and Wilson’s Barbecue Pit stood next door, with parking where the big trees had been. For that reason, when he was filming Jake couldn’t use the actual house; he had to find an old-fashioned place that looked right to him. When he found it, it was in a town in South Carolina, leaving him obliged to make it up to the mayor of McBride with plane tickets and studio passes, because he had promised the filming would be in McBride. So the mayor and his wife had gone around L.A. in a car with a driver, and tonight they had both strolled down the aisle of the theater with offhand smiles as if they too were guests in the town.

  The girl, Abby, was not going to be found at the window with the blowing curtain, looking out, as you expected. In fact your eye passed through the window into the yard, where you lost your balance cruising unsteadily around the huge low-branching tree. The white oak. Twice around it, dizzyingly, and there was the girl, sitting in the branches with her light hair blowing. She was a pretty little thing. That was part of it, of course, a big part. It always is. The beautiful blondes.

  The title jumped onto the screen: THE SOBBING TREE.

  She had tried to get the title out of him and he wouldn’t tell her, he said, “Wait and see.”

  The girl in the tree was eleven or twelve. The whole thing was over by then, Abby’s experience. So they would be looking back over the whole thing. You didn’t have to go to the movies to know the story was going to go backwards, the same thing was on TV.

  The girl was humming to herself. She could carry a tune but she wasn’t humming happily, you could tell that. Her small, bony fingers picked the bark. Out of the tune she was humming, music commenced, a guitar being played while the tree limbs, which arched downward of their own weight, swept and lifted and sagged in the wind.

  A piano would have been the suitable thing. Either that or an orchestra, not this slow picking, though Jake could not necessarily be blamed for not asking her what music she liked. He did know she had almost married a music professor. At sixteen she had moved away and found herself a job at a state college, landing it for the simple reason that she had written down the word music. Not only could you get work by then, but you could call attention to your hobbies and interests on the application forms.

  She had gotten a kick out of telling Jake about the music professor. By that time Jake knew she wouldn’t have been a professor’s type.

  The letters of Jake’s name materialized on the screen, grew a shadow, and sank away. Another name appeared. At that point the camera lunged as though it had to swing across miles of the world, and without any warning at all a woman filled the screen. She was putting on lipstick in a car mirror. Nervous. A nice two-piece outfit with black frog buttons up to the little flat lapels, and a tight skirt.

  She was unusually pretty, with a hairdo that gave Abby a stab of regret that time could not be reversed so that her own blonde could have lain on her shoulders in just that silken way when she bent her head getting out of a car. It had been pretty hai
r all right, but not like that, not perfect. When the girl drew her legs out of the car she had on the wartime nylon stockings with seams, and ankle-strap shoes. A man held the door for her, followed her up a flight of stairs and unlocked an apartment, carrying sheet music under his arm.

  Abby sank back in her seat. Bowen. This was not any part of the experience and it would have been the considerate thing to let her know it was going to be in the movie.

  She would not have spelled out the details to Jake, she felt sure. In fact she could remember Jake saying the later years did not concern him.

  Bowen Gray. As soon as ever they got behind a closed door they would fall kissing onto the bed and kissing get back up to pull their clothes off. And Abby was well aware that movies felt free to show that, all the way to the clear indication of just where a body sank itself in another.

  But as it turned out nothing happened, it was just a brief scene, puzzlingly there for a minute or two and then over when the last of the opening credits faded from the screen. Abby was amazed, when the scene was over, at how much could happen or seem to happen in that amount of time, with a woman doing nothing but strolling around a man’s room, wearing only his half-unbuttoned shirt and touching the things he had, with a cigarette in her fingers.

  The girl glanced over her shoulder at the man, who lay on a Murphy bed watching her with narrowed, critical eyes. Against one wall of the room was a piano. That was what appealed to me, Abby thought. I always liked somebody who could sit down and play the piano. Piles of music on the rack and the bench, and along another wall a phonograph cabinet and an entire bookcase of records. The girl went over and pulled out records, pretending they impressed her, while the ash from her cigarette dropped on them.

  She held on to her arms, the ash dusting her own skin while her thumbnail flicked the cigarette. She had on a dark nail polish and heavy lipstick, garish in black and white. But she didn’t look hard; she looked too young to be smoking and to be engaging in an affair like this one, full of accusation and disrespect. You wouldn’t have to know a thing about it to know that was what it was. A stupid girl. Of course Jake would go to some trouble to make exactly this kind of an impression on you; that was the business he was in.

  Abby looked over at Darla, who was watching the screen exactly the way she watched Another World in the mirror while she was coloring your hair, with her lips pursed and her eyebrows pulled together.

  The woman leaned on the windowsill, with an expression on her face that made it clear she was just barely keeping herself in hand. She had it in her to do something unexpected and possibly awful. Her dark lips were moving but the music drowned out her words, and the man was not listening anyway. The camera came close and the angle made her whole face slope back from the mouth opening for the cigarette.

  Again there was a tree outside the window and as the branches tossed, the girl, propped on her elbows, stared and stared at them. She had stopped talking and the cigarette burned down in her fingers, and you could follow the pretty line of her back and neck to the eyes fixed on a tree.

  What was coming? Jake couldn’t have the girl jump out the high window because she, Abby, was alive, she was here in the theater.

  Jake had been rubbing her hand all during this scene as if to warm her knuckles, until she became conscious of the thin skin pleating under his thumb, and put a stop to it by balling up her hand. He was a devilish man, under the sad, half-old mask he wore. Abby couldn’t believe she was going to have to watch this part, the trouble with Bowen Gray when she was still in her teens. And then what, her husbands?

  It had never occurred to her that anything any later than her coming back home in the police car in 1937 would show up in the movie. Not that she was ashamed of any of it. Half the women in the auditorium with them—half the women in town—were divorced, so she had been ahead of her time.

  She braced herself to head into it, but the movie didn’t do that. Jake simply went back and started at the beginning. He might get to it again, but when you came right down to it what difference did it make anyway, if Abby had a wild time and the whole town saw it? Let them, let them see exactly what went on.

  NEXT the girl who had been in the tree was down out of it and she was much younger, a little girl with scuffed knees, loose socks riding down in the shoes. Towheaded. Dress much too big for her.

  A man and woman walked into the yard where two big trees made a noontime shade, and talked to the little girl. Her plain big sister was with her at the swing and they had the baby in the wagon, just like in the picture, though everything looked completely different from the way it was supposed to.

  Abby was not ready to think about this yet. She was still turning over in her mind the picture of the man playing Bowen, on the bed, straight hair fallen across his forehead. She was surprised by this evidence that Bowen must have been a boy in his twenties. And not a professor, no. Not at that age. An instructor, sauntering by her desk every day with his remarks, a kid. When Abby had always said professor to herself.

  The big dog didn’t even bark at the couple coming into the yard. Roamer. The couple’s car was parked at the curb; you saw it from the girls’ height past the red and yellow zinnias—somewhere along the line the thing had switched to color, the way they did in commercials, and zinnias now grew thickly in rows in the weeded flowerbed—a big car with a running board and brass handles by which to pull yourself up out of the deep back seat. It was their car, but these two weren’t rich. If anything they were poorer than Abby’s family had been at that time.

  She remembered telling Jake about this car, and the Oakland that he had up there on the screen could have been the same car. A 1926 Oakland Landau, with a sunshade on the front window. This was 1931. The couple had come down from the days when they had bought this car. Jake had done a good job with that. You could sense a lot about this couple. The man squatted down to pet the big dog, which allowed him to crumple its long ears in his hands.

  Roamer. Somebody shot Roamer when he killed a chicken. But of course this dog was not Roamer. With a picture to go by, it would have been easy for Jake to get his hands on a dog like Roamer, just like he did with the car.

  He couldn’t get the people right, though. Abby was disappointed to have no personal feeling about the actors, even the little girl, beyond a vague recognition of certain things they had on, and even those things were a little off, as clothes in the movies always were, too neat or too messy, too evenly bleached, instead of faded with color still showing at the seams.

  The man was good-looking, just a bit hefty the way men were then—or the way trousers made them seem, work pants or old slacks. He was in shirtsleeves, with no job to go to. He was the kind of man who would get into a fight over the woman. He had his hand on her waist in that way, looking around at everything as if he expected a challenge.

  But the man he was playing had died just like anybody, after an accident on a tractor, one of those old contraption-tractors that got you tangled up in them, when they had the big mean metal wheels without any rubber on them. He had died not of the injury itself but of infection, due to mistakes made in the hospital. Abby did not remember that. She knew it from being told, not from memory, though she remembered voices whispering above her head, and the violent soap smell of the bathroom down the hall from his bed.

  That was the only trip to the hospital she was ever going to make. Her own girls knew not to expect her there when they had their babies and they knew not to take her into a hospital unless she was already dead and they wanted to give her body to science.

  The man didn’t know machinery because before they settled in this town in West Virginia where nobody could find them he had been a horse trainer in Florida. The woman had been a singer, and for a few years they had had a wild life. During Prohibition, that was. She had reformed; she was on the Narrow Path, she liked to say. Wild life. Those were words that ever after lifted the hair on Abby’s arms.

  And so . . . the woman knew how to sing, but nobody
paid you any money to sing any more and she had given up the kind of singing she had done for her living anyway. The man knew how to take a racehorse and get the devil out of its eye but he didn’t know how to keep a sleeve out of a PTO shaft. He had had a job selling stock powders to the farmers before he tried harvesting oats. Not the coal mines; that, he wouldn’t do.

  Oh, he was on his way out of the whole thing even if he looked, with his black hair and bright eyes, as if it was just beginning. He was not going to be the one who went through the entire experience. There was not really room for him in it. Maybe that was why Abby had as good as forgotten him. You could almost tell in the way the camera flickered past the face with the soft moustache that he was going to die.

  She wasn’t ready to look, really look, at the woman Jake had cast as the mother, other than to notice the long blonde hair. But she could tell the woman was not secretive or anxious, was not wondering whether she was doing right. Jake had the woman smiling at the little girl, the prettier of the two little girls playing on the rope swing in the straight tree, the locust, not the oak that swept the dirt. Not the sobbing tree. The woman was smiling with tenderness and joy.

  Next thing the girl was in the car with them and gone.

  “I DON’T know, I only know they had me six years. Don’t ask me how you convince a five-year-old you’re her parents. Don’t ask me. My own girls say they would have known a lot more about who had them at that age. I was different, that’s all I can tell you.”

  “I expect it took a while for you to think they were your parents. But children adapt.”

  “They do but you have to wonder,” she said, though she herself did not wonder.

  “All the better,” Jake said, speaking from under his hands.

  “Why do you want to make it into a movie?” She liked to keep after Jake. Usually this provoked a long-winded answer having to do with the Depression, and the interest he had taken in it since high school, which had brought its reward, finally, in a prize for his documentary. “A substantial prize.” He put that in every time, as if money would be the thing that would interest Abby.