Search Party (9 page)

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 hair 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.

N
EXT
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.

The fact was—as she told him herself into the tape recorder—he was nosy. Most of his questions were about
people
. People who went all out, who were desperate. Those were the ones he was after. Smart desperate or crazy desperate, he didn't care.

He laughed. He said that was close. He made her admit they were talking about a period that had lured people into doing things they would never have dreamed of before, because—and he was right, she supposed, though it was not really her time, the forties had been her time—because of the way, in the Depression, everything shifted and slid downward, important people lost their importance, ordinary people slid into being no-account. Long, hopeless fury at the president, government, law, caused the whole outfit finally to fade from the average person's mind, and out came the thin dogs, women who might have taught you in school stepping up for their box of beans and flour from the church, cars with furniture strapped on, the hopeless sharing, the sudden, reckless seizing.