Search Party (31 page)

Instead Susannah said, “You were prettier. She didn't want you to get uppity.” She turned over the notion that either of the baffled children they had been could have been uppity.

Though she did remember, around the time of the Mrs. Grayson episode, being called downstairs from her own classroom to take Jo into the hallway outside third grade and reason with her. She could remember Jo's stare, magnified by the unfallen tears, her fury, mistaken by the teacher for shame. She could remember having her head pulled down sideways in Jo's thin rough fingers, her ear cupped and filled with the hot breath of Jo's curse on the school.

Their mother lived to be seventy-four, and her age resembled her youth, except that it allowed her to grow less tremulous and more remote as it shifted the whole cargo of the world gradually out of her sight and mind. But at the same time she lost control of some of her functions, she let go of pieces of self she had kept
back. She lost her stillness, her vigilance, her thinness. She ate. She spread out, she lumbered restlessly through the house in her slippers, new every Christmas. She fiddled with things. She worked holes in the old couch arms and picked out the seams in her sleeves.

She grew harder to take care of, but their father did it, along with some hired help and Susannah. She had shoes left, in the closet in their father's room, but—this was what surprised Susannah, packing a bag for her, into a trance of woe such as she had not experienced in years and years—no pocketbook to take when she went into the hospital to have her gallbladder operated on and never came out.

Their father did not die either, when the burden of her had fallen away, as Susannah had secretly feared he would. It was Jo who died.

S
USANNAH
got off the plane and looked for Garland. She knew very little about him but she supposed him to be an artist of one kind or another, possibly foreign. Garland was probably his last name. Jo liked to call people by their last names. Somewhere in his fifties, the age Jo liked. Probably wearing something Susannah would be able to recognize as setting him apart, something odd or foreign, like a beret.

Her feet had swollen on the plane. She took a deep breath. They had circled for an hour, and then come down a lead-colored sky in thunder and skidding sways.

“Susannah,” said a Southern voice. Garland. Of course, a Southern name, she thought as she turned. A portly man in a suit, not very tall, with jowls. He grasped her hand when she put her suitcase down. “Garland Smith.”

“Garland!” she said. Immediately she felt helpful. His hand was trembling. Jo had done this to the man. “I'm sorry it took so long.”

“They stacked you up out there. That's my nightmare,” he said. “You don't mind flying?” He picked up her suitcase. She was not used to men who said anything was their nightmare, and
cast about for a reply. He walked soundlessly and she felt she was stumping along in her tight shoes.

“You'll be staying at the same place where the memorial is being held, the Dominicks'.” Susannah knew she was not to stay in Jo's apartment. Tomorrow she was going there with Garland to go through things. She felt a physical resistance, a twisting in her body away from this idea.

“It's so nice of you to come get me.”

“Not at all,” he said with a little sideways scoop of his head. “I wanted to meet you.” She didn't know whether he meant meet her plane or finally meet her. Maybe he had been thinking, before, that if he got to know her he would have another avenue to Jo. He had graying brown hair resembling her own, but thin. She wanted to say soothingly, I don't know what got her going, with you, but it wouldn't have lasted. It might have been almost, almost as bad as this anyway. Though she knew of course that nothing could match up to this.

Out in the vast parking lot of the airport it was cold, getting ready to rain. At a distance across the flat land you could see rain: a section of sky had let down a brown ramp of water that was rolling toward them. The spring wind whipped their coats. Garland didn't just open the door, he handed her into the car, the way dressed-up boys would have, years ago. Though not her. Not her: she was not to have dates, but to stand by her locker and talk to a boy who leaned against the wall because he was tired, and she was to be weak in every limb over this tiredness—the rubbed neck, the deep yawn—in one so persistent, so dogged and strong. But certainly Jo had been lowered into cars this way by her boyfriends, who were the dressers, the dancers. Jo had sunk back into a gush of skirts chosen by some Mrs. Grayson, and smiled her planning smile.

Susannah put her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. The upholstery was cracked and stiff. Garland occupied himself with the gears of the little growling car.

Jo's interest in school dances did not last. The time came when
she told Susannah, “We say we're going but we don't.” It was after Susannah was married and Jo was running around, racing boys in the pickup, with rolls of barbed wire gashing the salt blocks in the truck bed, doing whatever she could think up to make Susannah sorry she had left. It made Jo sick to drink, herself, but she ran with the boys who did. Every year in the spring Jo knew the boy who wound his car around a telephone pole or flipped it into the river and died. In their bedroom in Larry's mother's house Susannah would tremble to hear a siren out across the fields at night.

“It was so warm I took my dress off. In a field way up near Bluemont, know whose land? Ray said that old woman lived out there and she does. The place is a mess. He wanted me to see. He thought I'd like it.”

“Why? Why would you like it?” But Susannah could see from Jo's face that she did like it.

“It was dark, and she came out with a shotgun.”

“Jo! The woman with the dogs? She shoots that thing!”

“Not at us. She had it cracked over her arm just like nothing. We weren't right on her land. She came over to the fence. There I was with my dress off. I held it over me. I mean I had everything off. I don't know if she even noticed. She talked to us.”

“What did she say?”

“I told her who I was. She recognized the name. She thought I was you, the search party one. She said, ‘Well, you grew up, didn't you.' She said her land is posted but people hunt on it all the time. She sort of wanted us to know she was a good enough shot not to kill 'em when she shot at 'em. Ray said, ‘You don't approve of hunting?' God is he stupid. She said they shot one of her dogs. She has eight left. She's not crazy,” Jo said suddenly. They looked at each other. That left their mother the craziest one around.

A
YOUNGISH
man read a poem. Susannah realized it was a poem when it was too late to go back and recall the beginning. When he
sat down a man with a long head and tinted glasses rose and spoke about Jo's work, her beauty, her openness to life, her refusal to shut out the terrible—even her welcoming of it.

What exactly was the terrible and how did he know Jo welcomed it? Had anybody said how Jo could screech in her sleep, how she could shiver in a booth in a department store? The crowd was small, Susannah thought. Well, Jo had shut out more than he thought, or tried to, and not only the terrible. But the man spoke with authority. Look at her pictures, he repeated, as if the people in the room might not have seen them. Susannah thought he might be a critic. Maybe they were all critics, not friends. She had never been sure the people around Jo in Chicago were friends. Certainly Jo did not like them. There is nothing morbid, the man said reassuringly. There is no irony, nothing we would say is ugly. Susannah let herself be soothed as he went on in this vein.

Another man stood up to speak. She knew Garland was not going to. And she had declined when he asked in the car if she wanted to. Never. Not about Jo, who was not even a grown woman, to her, let alone an artist about whom other people, who did not know her, might have opinions. An artist was what she had been when she drew pictures, when they were girls. She had been a girl.

What was Jo? She was like Larry, part of the world as it had to be, as it could not be if she were not part of it. Under her skin Susannah felt the spread of a slow, confused wrath. She had almost forgotten something: how people wanted you to lay grief aside in a year—or two or three years, the generous ones. Lay all of it aside, all the previous world. They wanted it over with. They wanted . . . And if she had forgotten that, then she must have done it, laid it aside. She must have. But it was new again as she sat there; it was always there, she thought almost with relief, ready to begin again. A woman with an alto voice was singing a song in German. The sound of the song had brought tears to Susannah's eyes, but the tears just pooled there, she did not have to fend off the quakes of crying that had overtaken her on the
plane. Beside her the plump, hospitable hostess, Mrs. Dominick, whispered, “When will you come?”

“Excuse me?” Susannah said.

“It means more or less ‘when will you come,' this song,” Mrs. Dominick said with short puffing breaths. Asthma, Susannah decided. The woman had small old blue eyes under a layer of bright tears. Then they stood up in the big room and rock music was put on that was said to be Jo's favorite. It was turned down and then turned up again. Susannah knew from having had teenagers that it should be loud. She recognized it. No comfort in it, loud or soft, though Jo would argue that comfort was not what music was for.

Openness to life. Susannah knew what the words were meant to convey, approximately: an innocent questing, a girlish trust, along with a certain inoffensive greediness. “Openness to life!” She could hear Jo's scornful voice. You asked for it, she answered Jo. They can say whatever they want. You fixed it so people could talk any old way about you. She went on coldly in her mind in this voice. She knew that if you spoke to the dead in this way, you made a sort of puppet. A little condensed person of self-pity and shame whom you could berate and console.

Garland Smith went through the small crowd one by one, on a steady course. Almost everybody hugged him. While this was going on Susannah saw that the memorial was less for Jo than for Garland himself, that it was he, whoever he was, who had importance to the people here, and was surrounded by them in his grief because of this importance.

At home Susannah would have thought he was gay. Something about his phrases, his smooth walk. Winning the heart of a gay man would have given Jo one of her angry pleasures. It would have been worthy of some exertion, to her. But as she watched the man Susannah no longer thought so. His attention was focused on the women in the room, and theirs on him. It was the women he was talking to. If you watched for a while you saw the rueful, sweet smile, the smile of a man used to women, to having them make much of him, and make exceptions for him, a
man who came to them, who accepted their help. “He's not much to look at,” women she knew at work would say of a man like this. “I don't know what it is . . .” When Garland Smith bowed his head, the loose skin of his face drooped forward. He lifted his graying eyebrows helplessly so that deep wrinkles formed on the sides of his forehead.

Yet she did not doubt the sincerity of whatever he was saying. He had a handkerchief in his fist, for sweat. You can't fake sweat. He was sweating and shaking in his loose suit. Maybe he had been losing weight for his wedding. She noticed he talked for a long time to a gesturing woman with thick gray eyebrows rather like his own, and then to Mrs. Dominick, who actually reached out and with her plump thumb wiped his eyes for him.

Mrs. Dominick was an art collector. Her husband was a surgeon. Once the rows of chairs were out of the way their apartment was not much different from the houses of doctors or horse people at home, with worn Persian rugs and dusty jade plants in Chinese pots. A maid was passing out glasses of wine from a tray. If there was food Susannah couldn't see it. Glassed-in boxes with objects and scenes in them were stuck into the bookshelves. Paintings covered every wall. Susannah stopped before a small print in a corner. Mrs. Dominick came to join her as she was putting on her reading glasses and leaning to read what was written on it.

They began to walk along together, past a row of portraits in heavy frames. Susannah imagined that the subjects of these paintings would have thought twice about hanging them in their own houses. Nude and holding cats, or standing in messy bedrooms, or sitting in cars with the windows rolled up, they stared out unkindly. Walking seemed to cost Mrs. Dominick most of her breath. She had taken Susannah's arm. She looked at each painting at the same time Susannah was looking at it, and then at Susannah as if she had introduced them. “She's a hero of mine,” she said.

“Which one?” said Susannah.

“The painter,” said Mrs. Dominick. Despite her breathless-ness
she said everything easily, with no instruction in her voice. She offered the facts about her collection. It was the way you talk to children, Susannah thought, when their questions don't bother you at all. When you are happy. Mrs. Dominick was one of those here, apparently, who really did mourn Jo. For some reason she was one of them. But she lost sight of her grief in giving the name of the lengths of pipe assembled on a dais in the entrance hall—machine parts Jo must have liked—and the stroller full of rope in the study: they were installations. They were as they should be. Everything had a rightness if one paused for a long enough look.

On the plane Susannah had imagined this gathering. The women would be wearing the kind of clothes that halfway frighten you and have hair dyed red-black like Jo's. Savage gossip would be whispered. Susannah would be pointed out to men who had been Jo's lovers. Grief might or might not excuse her grown-out permanent, her feet swollen over the sides of her pumps. No one would believe Jo had been only three years younger than Susannah.