Search Party by Valerie Trueblood Page B

clasped to his chest with the microphone between them, and talking the way he liked to, as if everything that happened had three or four explanations. All about how he had come to this country from Poland. Somebody had unearthed distant relatives for him, an older man and wife who had no children and who, when he was finally at home there and had almost finished high school and had perfected the accent—that brought the house down—moved away from New Jersey. His foster parents moved. He struck himself in the forehead. First to McBride, when he was in high school, where there were no Jews in school except him—and to this day he did not know why they had conceived the idea of retiring here, he said apologetically, passing his hands through his wayward hair in a way that made Abby think of several women of her acquaintance in the room, in addition to Darla, who would be trying hard to remember a Jewish family that ever had lived in town, in order to have an opening to introduce themselves afterwards. But despite the beauty and hospitality of the town, his guardians soon picked up and moved on once more, to Florida.
    Abby snapped open her change purse to see if she had any of her relaxant pills in there. She had been made almost ill at the startby having to crane her neck to see the screen, and by the dizzying shots of the girl in the tree, and then put through the Depression in some infernal way—after being made to look like a hussy at the outset, if you thought about it, although the audience, thank God, never saw anything but the one scene.
    â€œI think my parents stayed with a couple who agreed to hide them if they would—in the event their capture became inevitable—if they would leave, and leave me behind. Now, this is what I never could put together. There are two theories. One, that my parents agreed to this and the couple saved me although they could not save my parents. The other, that they turned my parents in so that they could keep me.” He looked up at the ceiling. “So they could keep me!” he repeated, or really wailed, like a woman, in a kind of shrill comical disbelief.
    Abby thought for a minute Jake was going to fall into one of his old-man states. He had stopped his energetic pacing, and stood with the microphone dangling from his hand. She thought he might be going to lose his hold on the audience. To her dismay he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. He unfolded it carefully but did not use it.
    â€œAnd so how did you end up in this country?”
    â€œSomeone got out. Got away. He made it his business to find me. Someone very tenacious. He had known my mother. I believe her grief—even there, in the camp—had made an impression on him.”
    Abby had lost all patience with the woman who had changed the subject and with Jake himself, who in his excitability had forgotten, apparently, after his first success with the kids’ questions, that the only thing people in the room really wanted to hear about was Hollywood.
    Without trying to hide what she was doing Abby reached up and pried out her hearing aid. She wanted to get home and Jake had to come with her. He owed it to her not to go back to the inn and meet Darla but to come in, sit down on the couch and let her pour him, and herself, some gin out of the refrigerator.
    She had a grandson born today and at the very least shedeserved a toast. Furthermore she deserved a chance to have her say about her own life.
    He might think she had told everybody here what she had told him but she had done no such thing. She never talked about her experience. Even though everybody professed interest in it, the interest had really died away long ago. He ought to hear her own daughters if she ever brought it up.
    Something had come between her and her daughters, the way mold can get between the layers of an onion that looks fine on the outside, and she could not identify it to this day, something that made it so