The Missing Person

by Doris Grumbach

  He wanted her to stay, he had begun to be used to sharing the space in Jeanette, he was over his first fears of her whiteness, and he loved making love to her. So the end of their time together, a matter of his irritation and her stubbornness, came as a blow to him. On the seventh day of her life in Jeanette, on the eve of the New Year, he got ready to go for his evening at the Y.

  “Come on, Beauty. We need a bath. You and me both. To celebrate the New Year.”

  He had been to the Y two days before but Franny had said then that she was too tired to go with him.

  “Come on. Your Y is right near the one I go to.”

  She said nothing.

  He put his jacket on and, crouching, moved toward the door.

  “Coming?”

  “No, not this time.”

  He couldn’t make her come. He left in a fury, slamming the door. He was angry because he had a passion for personal cleanliness (He’d been called a dirty nigger too many times and once had overheard two white boys in the locker room at the pool say that all niggers stank. “You can smell them come into the room,” one of them said.) and could not bear the increasingly heavy effluvium in the car. He had relished its fresh, clean, newly painted odor, compounded of gasoline fumes and the camphor flakes he used in the crevices of the bed-seat cushions. But now he was conscious that the air in the car had become fetid. He blamed it on his unwashed companion.

  When he came back at ten o’clock, exercised and scrubbed, shining with health, soap, and the natural gleam of his brown skin, she was gone. He made no effort to find her in the night. But he mourned her loss the more since all his anger had disappeared in the workout gym and the long walk back to the parking place where he had left Jeanette and Beauty. He had returned full of forgiveness. Long after her musty sour smell had left the car, and after he had discovered, from a magazine picture, who Beauty-Fanny Marker really was, he thought with longing of her occupation of Jeanette. He had loved that white girl, for all her lack of hygiene. He treasured the note she left under the lamp. It said:

  Dear Ira: I am moving on. I liked it very much in Jeanette. You were very good to me. It was kind of you to have me.

  First she had signed it FANNY MARKER. Then she scratched that out and wrote BEAUTY. The note was folded. On the outside, in a flash of memory about someone else rare to her, she wrote:

  For JACK JOHNSON

  9

  Return

  Alone, every evening like clockwork, Dolores had two whiskey sours before dinner. It took her almost as long to make the drinks as to drink them, but she enjoyed the process. It was a positive action against the inertia that inhabited her daily life. Since the extended absence of her mother she had been able to introduce a new order into her life. But systemization of things, while it satisfied something in her, intensified her loneliness. Another person’s presence, which might disrupt the strict regimen one laid down for onself, she thought, made one feel irritated, it was true, but also alive.

  Approaching thirty, Dolores Jenkins was a large-boned, intelligent, somewhat hearty, comradely kind of woman who chain-smoked, pulling hard upon the cigarette and inhaling as though she wanted to feel the smoke deep in her abdomen. Her features remained good, but became somewhat bolder; she had the kind of face that, as it took on flesh, looked overemphatic on the screen. Having surrendered all claim to a career in pictures, she became capable, efficient, pleasant, and a very good friend to those who knew her. She kept a list of their birthdays (and those of her nieces and nephews in Alabama) and anniversaries, and a reserve stack of appropriate cards to send. Composed by the poets at Hallmark, the sentiments were accurate records of her true feelings. She cared about the health, happiness, longevity, and marital bliss of everyone she knew, especially after she felt she had lost her own chances for some of these things.

  Accustomed by now to the thought that marriage and success were not a possibility in her life, this evening she discovered that the remaining gifts of fortune would soon elude her. She had spent the long, rainy New Year’s Day with Reuben, Louis Fleischer’s secretary, and two studio people reviewing the places everyone had already looked for Franny Fuller. They made plans for tomorrow, the final day of searching in the more unlikely hideouts—good hotels and resorts. The search had been hampered by the necessary secrecy that had surrounded it, broken down yesterday when Mary Maguire had become curious about the long holdup on the Fuller-Currier picture and came to visit the lot.

  “That snoop,” said Charlene when she saw her and then, in an especially embittered mood, Charlene had given her the whole story. Clearly too good and too big to confine to her column, Mary had arranged with her editor for more space and then discovered her story on the front page with a big byline. The wire services picked it up and by now FF DISAPPEARS was on the front page of every paper in the country.

  Dolores’s morning had begun at seven when she reported, unnecessarily she was sure, for work, and did nothing. She spent the afternoon in strategy conference about the whereabouts of Franny and then, tired by the long and pointless day, she had come back to her apartment, to her two whiskey sours, while hot water ran into the tub. For her this was, like smoking, one of life’s major delights. She sank into the steaming water, scented and softened by a bath oil she was fond of, with a sigh of pure pleasure.

  Lying back in the water, and exploring her own flesh the way women do when they are alone and nude, Dolores discovered the lump in her remaining breast. After the first intense shock she found she was saying to herself: Of course it is small, no bigger than a pea. I am fine otherwise. They will cut it away, a small white scar, that’s all. And then, like the second tremor of an earthquake, a lesser shock because one has already been warned by the first, she accustomed herself to the idea of the lump’s fatality. Amazed at the rapidity of this accommodation she lay without moving in the bath, still savoring its warmth, the odors that rose around her. Think about not thinking. Be the perfect stand-in if ever you were. Can I be the same now as I was before I found it? Am I on the way, this moment, to becoming a corpse? And have I already accepted it? Is my life on the thin edge when, just a few moments ago, it seemed assured, guaranteed?

  Dolores climbed out of the tub, watching her footing carefully, and then smiling at her concern. Drying and powdering herself with a kind of extraordinary compassion, she thought, she felt like a devoted mother caring for her mortally ill child. She chose a robe from her closet, the one Franny had given her. Poor lost Franny and her presents. And now her poor doomed stand-in. She put it on, feeling clean, warm, soft, and on this side of death again. How was it possible that this well-being could be threatened by a pea of a lump? Impossible.

  Then, all at once, as she lit a cigarette she was flooded, almost overcome, by the immensity of a new realization: not to be, not to be ever again, in the gulf of timeless time that stretches out, that I am allowed to conceive of, but will not be allowed to live to know. Cut off, not in the unimaginable future, but soon. Now. Dear God, I will not think of it now.

  Dolores stood in front of her window, looking down at the street, smelling the sweet, live odor of baking bread, her fist pushed into her mouth, her teeth clenched down on her knuckles, like a small boy holding back his screams. I will not be dead. I will not be quiet and wait for it. I will scream and cry, everywhere, for everyone to hear. I won’t stand still for this indignity to me. I will not allow the rest of the world to go on without me. I will be heard! Oh yes. Write a Letter to the Editor: I would like to protest, to take issue with, a lump in my …”

  The scream that came from her, in revolt against the decree she had just received was heard by no one. Traffic passing on the street drowned her out. She thinks: Perhaps I am not screaming at all, just acting a scream which will later be dubbed in, so that the real thing is lost or never existed.

  It was not a scream that sounded in her ears, but the telephone. It took a few seconds for her to realize this and to make the adjustment, to change the name of the sound from
scream to phone ringing. When she reached the phone her heart was pounding with fright, because of the noise? or has it been beating so furiously ever since the discovery of the pea?

  “Yes?”

  “This is Franny.”

  “Franny? Franny! Where are you?”

  There was a pause and then Dolores heard: “Can I come there?”

  “Of course. But where are you?” This was the natural question of a weary searching-party participant who had covered every conceivable place in the past week. “Do you want me to come and meet you?”

  “No. I’ll come there.” She hung up before Dolores could say anything more.

  Dolores dressed rapidly in slacks and a peasant blouse, thinking selectively about each article of clothing she put on, using total absorption to hold off the possibility of relapse into the abyss. Scrupulously she chose the color of the shoes she would wear, entirely involved in the act of accumulating matching articles of clothing.

  She put on the coffee pot, measuring four cups of water and four level tablespoons of coffee with the exactitude of a diabetic approaching his dinner. Then she thought she might straighten up the parlor a bit and, when this decision was made, she felt restored. In the simple acts of housekeeping she had, temporarily, lost her terror. The voice of the lost Franny Fuller had stilled the fearful pounding of blood in her ears. She found herself singing:

  I’d like to get you

  On a slow boat to China

  singing the lines over and over as if they were the only lines she knew, or as if they contained some significance that only repetition could establish.

  “Slow boat to China,” she was singing when Franny rang the doorbell. Dolores almost pulled her through the door in her delight at seeing her. Once inside she hugged her, her cheek to Franny’s, and found that her clothes were damp.

  “Where in God’s name have you been, Franny? Down a well?”

  Franny laughed, her old, familiar, frank, charming child’s laugh, instant and gay, so that the beguiling dimple shot into view, like a signal flag from a ship at sea hoisted to greet those on land.

  “It’s raining out.”

  “But before that … all this time?”

  “In a car. A huge Cadillac with a john and a kerosene lamp and copies of Literary Digest.”

  “By yourself?”

  “No.”

  This was all she would say at first. They sat on the sofa and talked in the confidential way of the dressing room, Franny still in her damp work clothes which she did not want to take off.

  Franny seemed interested in the saga of the search for her and paid attention to each detail, querying Dolores about who did what: “Did Demp really come from Florida?” She kicked off the slippers that Ira Rorie had lent her and revealed her dirty, sockless feet which she quickly drew up under her. Dolores ignored them, knowing better than to mention a bath to her. She offered her a cigarette. Franny said no thank you in her polite half-whisper. Dolores remembered too late that she did not smoke: for Franny cigarettes were too complex a pleasure, like driving a car. She could never manage the simultaneous possession of the pack, the matches, the ashtray, and all the little procedures of lighting, flicking, drawing, and blowing.

  “Where was this car, Franny?”

  “Everywhere.”

  Fantasy, thought Dolores. She’s not back yet.

  “I mean,” Franny went on, “he parked it everywhere, a different place every night.”

  “He who?”

  “A man. Very, very nice. Negro. The car was a Cadillac. Huge. Black too. And, oh yes, I forgot, named for Jeanette McDonald.” Franny was speaking very earnestly now.

  Off again. We won’t work next week if she’s like this.

  But Franny seemed well in other respects, calm, interested, open. Dolores asked her if she was hungry and she said yes she was famished. They brought a snack to eat from the coffee table, a mixture of refrigerator findings so miscellaneous and ill-matched that it suited Franny perfectly. She ate a little of each thing: chocolate icebox cookies, maraschino cherries in their syrup, hot-dog relish, herring, and pickled beets in a tangle of raw onions. Franny elaborated on her story, giving details about the meals she and the black man had cooked in the car and the things they had kept in their icebox. Dolores, convinced that each new contribution to the fantasy of the Car dangerously established its reality for Franny, tried to change the subject. She moved boldly into an idea she had been thinking about for a long time.

  “Do you know very much about psychiatrists, Franny?”

  “Sure. Arnie has one. And Reuben.”

  “I have a friend—a stand-in for Delphine Lacy—whose father-in-law is one. He’s a great fellow. If you would talk to him you might not … have these spells.”

  “Do you mean going off, Dolores? I want not to have them.”

  “And these … these dreams …”

  “What dreams do you mean?”

  “Oh, like the black car and all.”

  Franny stared at Dolores, her smile gone, her eyes almost blank with surprise. The room seemed to grow warm with her consternation.

  “Oh Dolores, was that a dream? Oh no. Was it, do you mean, like … a daze? Was it really only a dream?”

  Dolores, moved by the beautiful child’s plea, lit another cigarette and thought: And Fate’s insult to me, the mortal outrage growing in my breast, is that a dream too?

  10

  The Silent Star

  The war had ended. Servicemen, too long exiled from their familiar and comfortable American world, cleared their footlockers and sea chests, discarding, with some regret, the glossy images pasted inside, photographs that had sustained them through long empty evenings. They returned, not to Betty Grable and Franny Fuller, but to their homely, more immediately gratifying wives and girlfriends.

  Sugar, butter, and shoes reappeared in profusion in stores, minus the tag describing how many ration coupons were required for their purchase. Los Angeles was crowded with new cars, suddenly burst from the crop of Detroit factories like released prisoners. One saw their elated owners at the wheel, driving proudly into the suburbs. New things supplanted patriotism in the population. During the six years of the war, civilians had, secretly, felt unjustly deprived of the pride of purchase.

  Hollywood welcomed back the drafted heroes, rewarding them with extravagant films starring the queens of Technicolor. Three theaters in the picture capital showed glittering extravaganzas with seductive names: Cobra Woman, The Gayest Bachelor, and Diamond Horseshoe. Their leading ladies were advertised to possess flaming passions and million-dollar legs. The restraint of the war years, in which curvaceous (a word Mary Maguire made current) stars were compacted into couturier-designed service uniforms, was over. Hollywood was in its proper business; the whole country was ready once more to relax into garish foolishness, the luscious world of colored glamour, the sounds of roaring, overpopulated musical spectacles.

  Willis Lord had avoided all contact with the war. He smiled when his friend Delphine wrote to ask if he would like to celebrate the Japanese surrender together. His war had been fought, and lost, fifteen years before. This new, national victory meant little to him. But yes, certainly, he wrote to her, come at the usual time on Friday, the usual day. “We will celebrate together, whatever you wish,” he said.

  Delphine arrived with provisions for dinner, bags full of the meat and butter so long rationed to civilians. They talked in their customary vein, of their dead friends, their failed comrades from the old days, the few acquaintances who had died in airplane crashes on their way to entertain the troops, or in combat, the deterioration in the quality of movies since the coming of sound. Delphine did not mention that her recent picture had been nominated for an Academy Award and that the Studio had assured her just this morning that she was likely to be named best actress for her role in it. Exhausting her prepared list of suitably dolorous subjects, Delphine fell silent.

  It was then that she thought of one other matter, the news
of Franny Fuller’s disappearance from Hollywood and her suspension by Premium Pictures. Delphine said that, of course, she knew only what she read in the papers. But she elaborated with some details she had overheard on the set, about poor Franny Fuller’s failed marriage to a poet who had just won the Pulitzer Prize.

  “Who, exactly,” Willis asked, “is Franny Fuller?”

  “A girl with little talent and a face and figure now very much admired,” Delphine said. She filled her glass, thinking that if she drank more there would be less for Willis. “She is strange, makes a practice of disappearing so that she can’t be found by the Studio. Her last picture had to be suspended entirely because it would have cost too much to reshoot with another star.”

  Willis smiled, his small, drunken smile that she recognized at once. “Do they know where she goes? Or why she disappears?” His questions were further evidence of his state; rarely did he ask for more details of her stories of doomed persons.

  “If anyone does, I do not know about it.”

  “How old is Franny Fuller?”

  “Quite young, I should think. Or at least, very young to us. She once sent me a fan letter. It said something childlike: ‘I want to thank you for being such a wonderful actress.’ Some small, sweet sentence like that. I was very touched.”

  “I would be too,” said Lord. “My fan mail stopped some time ago.” The glass of wine slipped through his fingers, landed against his almost full plate. Amber liquid flooded the creamed chicken.

  “I am sorry. Careless of me. Perhaps I’ve had too much. I’ll lie down for a bit,” he said. “In the other room.”

  With exaggerated care Willis walked through the stuccoed arch that separated the kitchen from the living room. He sat down gingerly in the exact middle of the couch. Delphine followed him.

  “Do that, my dear. Rest a bit while I straighten up. Then we’ll talk some more. Although not too much more …”

  She almost said, “… because I have an early call,” but she stopped in time. It would not have mattered, she saw, as she pulled a mohair afghan over him. He was asleep, his hands folded on his chest in a touching gesture of drunken obedience or perhaps, she thought, of saintly resignation. She patted his bald spot and said to his sleeping head: “Goodnight, my Lord.”