The Missing Person

by Doris Grumbach

  Even this peripheral activity had exhausted him. He did no writing. There was little need to do anything on the film he was involved with: shooting had stopped for some retakes. Besides, there were those Two Competent Young Men.… He felt he had to leave.

  What purpose does all this shoring up, he thought, this sustaining of Fanny Marker of Utica, serve? Is there any chance that this angst she produces in all of us will enrich me, or will I end like a spendthrift wasting his capital? Will I wake some morning and find all my blood has been transfused into her? I believe I am worth saving. I am no longer sure she is, and if she is, that I can save her.

  Franklin’s leaving California, if only for a few weeks, as he claimed, was taken by the other searchers as desertion. But he no longer cared. Suddenly he needed an injection of New York. He took the City of Los Angeles east to Chicago and, in the comfort of its lush parlor-car seats, worked on a draft of a new, long poem.

  8

  The Car

  Ira Rorie worked for the State of California. A 4-F because of a childhood bout of rheumatic fever that left his heart uncertain, and because most of the whites with his education had been drafted and then commissioned, he settled into the kind of job Negroes rarely got: He was director of the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health, with “thirty people under me,” as he described it. He had his own office, glassed in and square-shaped like a giant ice cube. All around him secretaries and clerks typed, filed, interviewed clients.

  At five o’clock when he finished work, he took his brown straw hat down from the coat tree in the corner of his cube, locked the confidential right-hand drawer, and walked through the room full of white assistants, saying goodnight right and left as he went.

  Employees made it a point to smile at him because they disliked him, the Negro director of them all, separated from them in his glass cubicle. He was the boss, and this was offensive to them. Ira Rorie was well aware of their dislike so, when the chance arose at the end of a day, he would pat one of them on the head as she bent to shove papers away in a lower drawer or reach for her purse from under her chair. He knew he shouldn’t do this; but it was the only concession he made to the feeling about him he sensed in the outer office. This breach of office decorum and racial separation informed them that he knew. Because of their dislike he would outrage their sense of his place in the scheme of things.

  Rorie was always the first to leave the office, another prerogative he assumed to himself. This night was Christmas Eve, but he ignored the holiday. It was five exactly when he went through the revolving doors of the building. He walked across the parking lot full of Fords and Chevys until he came to the gas station at the end of the street. In the office of the station he nodded to Alex, who pumped gas on the day shift, and picked up his car keys from a hook over the cash register.

  Alex said: “Merry Christmas, sir,” and Ira smiled pleasantly at the dark-skinned, elderly attendant.

  Ira said: “And to you.”

  At the back of the service alley was a shack where he kept his car. Walking toward it from the station he always felt the same intense rush of pleasure. He was leaving the office, the daytime source of his strength as a man, and going to the other, his home.

  His car, a black 1940 Cadillac, of the kind that is rented for a funeral to bear the principal mourners to the cemetery, jutted so far out of its garage that the door could not be closed over its mammoth bumper. He stood looking at its shining rear end and then, as he always did, gave it a tender pat on its left fender, walked slowly along the sleek flank and opened the driver’s door. Settled into the seat he murmured, as he did every evening, “Hiya, Jeanette.”

  Ira Rorie had named the Cadillac for the movie soprano whom he greatly admired. On the screen she seemed to him slim and aristocratic, with a high, narrow nose and a grand, aloof look, a long, curving, horsy neck and the suggestion of inner warmth, like his car.

  “Good ol’ Jeanette,” he said, sitting low in her on a wicker seat close to the pedals because his legs were short. Delaying to push the starter and pull out the choke, he reviewed all the appurtenances of the mahogany-paneled dashboard, some of them standard, others wired into place by himself. The additions were distinguished by their knobs, which were gold-plated and elegant; the anonymity of their function made them look like the gold trimmings on a bandsman’s uniform, bright and gaudy.

  “Ol’ girl,” he murmured, and pulled the ignition knob. Jeanette started with a low, even purr, making no protest, seeming to follow his instruction with pleasure, like a pliant girl being led in a waltz. My girl, he thought. He backed her out carefully, turned her in the narrow alley, and started out of Los Angeles through the flat, commonplace lower-middle-class houses. At a traffic light, as he approached the edge of the city and inched his way in the heavy traffic toward Beverly Hills, he took off his brown straw hat and pressed a button on the dashboard. From under it a small drawer moved out, almost at his hand. He took out a black cap and placed it on his head. With its visor of shiny plastic material, it made him look as he might well have been expected to look all the time, like a clean, well-appointed chauffeur on his way back from an errand for his employer. He put the brown straw hat into the drawer, pressed the button again, and watched with pleasure as it slid noiselessly back into its slot.

  The long, smooth, black Cadillac, shining in the declining evening sun, left the city and moved into the suburbs, through flat, straight streets on which the houses, behind great front lawns, seemed to have retreated out of sight. Only the cultivated vegetation remained, as if it had taken possession of the area. In its victory all human life and its habitations had disappeared.

  Just ahead the road divided. A lush green strip appeared in the wide lane, and the high hedges shielding the invisible homes (“Palatial Homes of the Hollywood Greats” was the way Mary Maguire described the section) moved even farther back from the two roads. Ira Rorie drove his Cadillac so slowly along the right-hand lane that it was almost silent, allowing it only a humming sound, like a soprano pitching her voice low under the high notes of a tenor.

  The wheel was specially set into the floor at an angle that did not interfere with the series of small drawers he had built into the space under the dashboard. With a slight motion of his left hand he turned it. The car pulled to the curb, coming to rest comfortably against the green strip. Its motor seemed to settle down into a warm, easy silence. Ira Rorie took off his cap, put it back in the drawer on top of the straw one, and pushed the button to close the drawer.

  It was now a little after six o’clock. He got out, unlocked the left rear door, and climbed into the back which no longer contained the conventional seat but instead, two heavy, plush-covered cushions facing each other. Seated on one, he pulled a lever. A table, thin and black, on two aluminum legs, rose from the floor. Ira set a sterno burner on the table, lit it, and then opened his icebox, a square container that fitted neatly beside one cushion. He brought out a covered pan of sliced chicken and boiled potatoes and put it on one burner, filled his coffee pot from a jug of water in the icebox, and put the pot on the other burner. He sliced and buttered two pieces of French bread which he took from a box at the side of the icebox. Reclining somewhat, he placed a small cushion behind his back. He drew the dark shades at the window behind his head and then at all the windows in his car, including the long one at the back. For this he used a metal bar that reached and hooked on to the holes at the bottom of the shades. In his intimate, secluded corner he ate his dinner and read the Los Angeles Times by the light of a battery-operated lantern. Hooked to the car’s left wall, it sent its small, directed beam upon his paper.

  Ira Rorie was home for the night. After dinner he disposed of his paper plate and cup in a chemical system he had installed in the capacious trunk of the car which he could approach from inside the car. He stored away his pot and utensils to be washed at the garage the next day, used the chemical toilet that retracted under one of the seats when not in use, washed his hands and face in
a portable basin filled from a water container he stored under the front seat. Then he made his bed by pulling the two cushions together and spreading sheets and blankets over them, even taking the time to cover his back cushion with a pillow case. Fed, washed, toileted, curtained, and locked into Jeanette, he settled down to read in bed. Tonight he planned to study the text for a course in economics he took two nights a week at the Y, the evenings he wasn’t studying or working out in the gym and then having a swim and a shower.

  He had come upon this home very simply. Settled into his job in Los Angeles, prosperous and alone, he could still find no place to live except in the city’s meager and squalid Negro areas. For a while he lived in a room there. But he hated the filth, the smell of defeat and transient hopelessness that emanated from the broken, disfigured floors and walls and the defective plumbing. He had noticed that, although the Negroes he knew lived in this way because they were not permitted entry into better neighborhoods, they often had elaborate, expensive cars—the only feasible way to enjoy what money they had for the short time they were in possession of it.

  His problem was somewhat different; he could buy a car outright with the cash he had saved while living in his miserable room. So he walked about the city exploring the used-car lots until he found just what he wanted—a four-year-old Cadillac in good condition. He bought it on the spot, drove it to his rooming house in East Los Angeles, and spent three months outfitting it. When he was finished he paid his rent, thanked his landlady, packed his clothes, his cooking utensils, and bedding, and moved into the Cadillac.

  He had solved his housing problem. The Cadillac—“ol’ Jeanette, my pretty”—was unchallengeable, parked as she was each night on a different street in some fine suburb of Los Angeles, wonderfully adapted to her environment, raising no constabulary doubts. Sometimes, in good weather, he would drive thirty miles beyond the city, always being careful not to duplicate his resting place more than once or twice in six months, always choosing a secluded, quiet, aristocratic street, with a good tree for shade from the late-evening or early-morning sun. Shrouded by his dark shades, he would sleep serenely in the pure air and regulated quiet of Beverly Hills or Cold Water Canyon, wake in the morning in time to wash, shave, dress, make his bed, have breakfast, and then join the stream of prosperous-looking traffic making its way from the outlying bedroom areas to city offices.

  He always remembered to wear his cap and, as he pulled into the shack behind the garage, he stowed it away in its drawer, locked the car, and left the keys on the hook for Alex, his “housekeeper,” as he called him. Alex emptied the trash and the water, put ten pounds of ice into the box, refilled the water containers, dusted, vacuumed, did his dishes, and cleaned his toilet. Each week he took Ira’s laundry to the nearby Chink, and picked it up and put it into the car. Ira knew Alex thought he was a nut but admired him and, for the regular stipend he was paid each week for his services, agreed not to discuss Ira Rorie’s living arrangements with anyone.

  For some time these arrangements served him well. True, he was lonely. At times the Y provided him with some companionship. But, despite their high-minded avowals, he distrusted the blank-faced, white, thin-lipped people that he played volleyball with or discussed The Racial Question or Economic Opportunities for the Underprivileged with. These topics were listed on the bulletin board as Youth Fellowship Activities. He liked the word Fellowship but profoundly distrusted the youth. At twenty-seven, frugal, ingenious and content, for the time being, with his lot as he had devised it, Ira Rorie, in his well-furnished, one-room Cadillac named Jeanette, saved his money, and waited for the time when he could drive her down one of the long aisles of cedars that lined the approaches to invisible mansions, park her in one of the three or four garages he was certain those places came equipped with, and spend the night in a ten-foot round bed in the master bedroom. Until then …

  His comfortable, solitary existence was interrupted in the winter of 1944. In the fall he had, with the true home-owner’s passion, added a number of refinements to Jeanette. He had installed a radio, and a place in the dashboard into which he could plug it. This meant using his battery more than he liked, but since the winter had a number of cold nights, he consoled himself by using his heater at the same time. That cold Christmas Eve, warm and deep into an article on improvements in the design of typewriters in Science and Mechanics, he did not, at first, hear the thump against Jeanette’s right front fender.

  He thought he must have imagined it. Often at first, outside sounds, someone walking by or a passing car, would cause him to look out under the shade, but he soon learned the danger of such a practice. Once a car had slowed down, he thought, at the sight of a light in his car. Now he ignored the sound. A dog maybe—or a drunk servant stumbling home late. But then he heard it again, this time accompanied by a gasp. He could not resist the temptation to move over to the other side of his “living room,” put out his reading light, and raise the shade.

  Even then he would not have gone out (his caution was born of his knowledge that in the last year or so the local police had taken to patrolling these sections rather frequently) if he had not caught a gleam of yellow, a look, a tilt to the bulky figure, that for some reason made him think it was a woman.

  He took his flashlight from its wall shelf and put on his lumberjacket. The nights were chilly and black in December. Outside he could see no one. Only when he walked around to the rear of Jeanette did he see her sitting on the curb behind the car.

  Sick? he thought, then immediately, drunk?

  No. She was sitting too still.

  “Can I be of some assistance to you, miss?” he said in a whisper. His long nights of being alone had made him unaccustomed to the sound of his own voice. He always whispered to Jeanette, so he whispered to the girl on the curb.

  “Oh yes. You can be of some assistance. I’m awfully tired—I’m not sure where this is.” She, too, was whispering, he supposed in response to him.

  “You mean you’re lost?”

  “No. Yes. Mostly tired.”

  Ira Rorie stood looking down at her for a few moments. She had yellow hair and a white face (Christ!) and heavy, bulky clothes that looked waterlogged in the dark.

  “You look wet. Are you wet?”

  “I fell in somebody’s pool back there.”

  “How did you get through there? I thought everything was fenced off and padlocked and full of guards.”

  “I guess it is. I live back there.”

  “There?”

  She waved her arm vaguely to her right and behind her. “Somewhere there.”

  White, he thought, and, from her voice and what he could make out from her pure profile, beautiful. Blond, like the soprano, Jeanette.

  “What’s your name, miss?” he asked, bending over a little and still whispering.

  She did not look up to answer but went on staring at the gutter where two Juicy Fruit wrappers, side by side, nestled in a small pool of brown water.

  “That depends,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On who is talking to me. I’ve got all sorts of names. And addresses. And clothes. And,” she added, glancing at the Cadillac beside her, “three cars. But you can call me anything you like. It’s bound to be all right.”

  “Would you care to come inside and dry off? It’s cold out here.” His whisper became even more tentative. White. Wet. Beautiful, and young. Jail bait, he thought. San Quentin quail.

  She tried to get up and stumbled. One hand under each arm, he pulled her to her feet.

  “Where are your shoes?”

  She looked down and seemed to have noticed for the first time that she was barefoot.

  “No idea. Maybe I lost them in the pool. It was a long walk. Where’s your house?”

  “Right beside you, miss. Just bend down and step in. Be my guest,” he said, grinning. “What’s mine is yours.”

  “This car?”

  “This, miss, is not a car. This is an estate, a mansion,
a noble edifice name of Jeanette, conceived in Dearborn, Michigan, it is true, but nurtured and cultivated and matured by the hand of her master, her lover, me. Within this great lady resides all that a man of my color needs to be warm, nourished, refreshed, and elevated into the pure air of the white upper classes.”

  The girl stared at him as he rolled this introduction off his tongue, his eyes shining in the light from the car as he opened the back door. Then she climbed in and sat down on the cushion nearest the door. He had to climb past her to reach the cushion opposite, but he was skilled at this, and managed to pull off his jacket as he did so. She started to struggle with hers.

  “Hey, wait. Be careful you don’t upset the lamp. Let me help.”

  Crouching, he moved to her side and helped her take off the soaking wet jacket and pants. Underneath she wore a nightgown. He held up the wet clothes.

  “Where’d you get stuff like this? Are you married to a plumber?” Now he could see her face clearly, and it seemed to illuminate her corner of his “living room.” In the kerosene lamp’s weak, flickering light, her eyes glowed as if she had a high fever, her cheeks seemed on fire, her hair appeared to flame above her face. A real beauty, he thought, wondering who she was and where she belonged: surely not back “there” as she had said, dressed in these filthy clothes.

  “No. I buy them. In a workman’s supply store in Hollywood.” She looked about at Jeanette’s interior, touching the surfaces, smiling a little at all the evidences of Ira Rorie’s ingenuity as he pointed out his arrangements for living: “This is where I …”

  “And where do you pee?” she interrupted, as if she had waited for this point in his catalogue of riches, and could wait no longer. “I haven’t peed since noon, I think.”