Search Party (8 page)

Because the film took a number of years to come out, Abby had a hazy memory at best of the weeks Jake Seligman spent
interviewing her, and her memories of the events themselves, as she was the first to acknowledge, were not sharp.

“I know a good bit of this is what I was told,” she said to Jake the first time they met. He was a man from Hollywood who had called her up because he had once lived in the town of McBride, her home. He had lived there for one year, “long ago,” as he put it, in the fifties, a time when their paths would never have crossed because she was a grown woman raising daughters and working nights and he was a kid in high school.

He had seen her picture, the little girls with wagon and baby and dog, in his senior year in high school, when he was looking up the Depression in the library. The Depression had remained his interest, always. Probably Abby had not run across his documentary about the WPA? His first film. It did play here and there in theaters, though not in towns the size of McBride, no. “I don't go to movies myself,” Abby said. To her surprise, when he got back to California Seligman sent it to her on video. Next time she saw him she apologized. “My daughters gave me a VCR but I don't work it unless they're over, it's not worth it. I'll just look at the ones on TV.”

That was early in their acquaintance, before Abby felt any embarrassment at his knowing the amount of time she spent in front of the TV, sometimes asleep there.

Each time Jake was in town he put a tape recorder no bigger than his hand on the table and had Abby say whatever came to her while they sat at her dining room table drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. She remembered that distinctly: days on end of having someone to smoke with, so that if her older daughter visited after Jake had been there she would step into the house waving both hands in front of her nose.

“Now don't you blame me,” Abby told her daughters. “He was pumping me. You say
something
when somebody's after you.”

Both of her daughters, however scarce they made themselves most of the year, had been planning to be in town to attend the premiere of the movie of Abby's experience. But the daughter
in Richmond went in early to have her third baby and her sister decided to go to the hospital instead. “I hate to miss your movie, but I just think at forty, when it's a C-section, you want family with you.” It was the kind of thing that daughter did, the older one, to show Abby. So Abby would think, oh, she's a sight more helpful than I am. Because as a mother Abby never did come up to the standard of her daughters, shockingly insistent and painful as her feeling about the two of them had been at one time, awake in her bed at night worrying and planning because of no one to ask. No man. Or at least no husband. The first one had cleared out; the second, who looked like Gary Cooper, was not Gary at all, not a force held in by fairness and gallantry, but a mess, so shiftless he might as well have been one of her children. She thought about her second husband with the same feeling of commiseration with her old self that she had when her best friend Darla, who was younger, described the hopeless men she had to choose from in McBride.

For Abby there had never been a shortage of men, in days past, though few of them the father type. In her years away from the town of McBride she had been one of those said to go through men.

While she was getting dressed she got the call saying the C-section had been accomplished, a boy had been delivered. “They just lifted him out, like a jar out of the canner! Your last grandchild,” her daughter added, in the way she had of catching at you before hanging up.

So Abby was going with Jake. He was picking her up in the Mercedes he rented when he flew in. He was in town to answer questions after the show and he was the mayor's guest.

“I think Mr. Mayor expects your movie to be about him,” Abby said. “He's got a girl from the Washington paper coming in.” She never could separate one mayor from another by name but she knew this one to be a grandstander.

“I heard that,” Jake said, laughing and almost winking through the phone from the mayor's house. Jake was a sad, stooped, Jewish man, handsome in a way Abby had thought, at first, that
nobody other than herself would take any notice of. He laughed at everything she said, until she really settled in to talk. Then he leaned on his elbows with his hands in a tent over his forehead, and once that happened he would get wrapped up in it and take off his glasses to clear the steam if she so much as said the dog died.

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.