The Missing Person

by Doris Grumbach

  Delphine had sold her famous old mansion and now lived elegantly in a vast apartment at the top of the Laurel Grove Hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard, not far from the ocean. Her housekeeper was a discreet, elderly Finnish lady who also served as her masseuse. In her frugal French way, Delphine worked hard and saved rigorously, wasting little time or money on Hollywood’s frenetic social life, taking vacations abroad between pictures abroad. She answered none of her fan mail herself, turning over all but her lightweight foreign letters to studio secretaries who sent out typed replies over her forged signature. Sometimes, to the more caloric correspondents, they enclosed a glossy photograph with her signature in a white replica on the black edge of her gown. She made no public appearances, posed for no advertisements, and would not be interviewed by magazine editors or presidents of her fan clubs.

  She thought of her work, and the place in which she lived, as a long but temporary apprenticeship to the life she planned to live, when, in one stroke, she would put motion pictures behind her, leave the apartment, the lot, and the city, and go to Paris. In Hollywood she felt in hiding, not only from fans who were both men and women, but from the people who worked with her in pictures and from those executives who wanted to extend their authority into friendships with their women stars.

  Paris was her spiritual home. The day after retakes on a picture were finished, she would pack and be gone on the City of Los Angeles to New York where she would sail aboard the Ile de France. On the high seas, she spent her time alone in her stateroom, reading, and eating lightly from the elegant and elaborate display of dishes the infatuated chef sent to her. It was a time of purification, a conscious shedding of artifice, publicity, hyperpyrexia, and the flagrant, exaggerated sexuality of the American screen, all of which she thoroughly despised.

  By the time the ship had landed in Le Havre, Delphine Lacy, beloved of vast audiences in America and abroad, symbol to them of barely suppressed sexual passion and intelligent, radiant beauty, felt renewed, refreshed. She retrieved her luggage, had it stowed in the trunk of a limousine she had ordered in advance in New York, and settled back in its darkened interior for the drive to Sèvres, and her reunion with the enduring love of her mature life, the French aristocrat and couturier, Alicia Desroches.

  Delphine had been abroad two months. Willis Lord’s loneliness, even after the softening effects of gin, began to trouble him. He played out unending games of solitaire, setting up an elaborate three-personed population for his card table. The man at his left bought the pack for fifty-two dollars from him. The man across from him bet against the player. Then he proceeded into the game, hoping always that he would not be able to win, disheartened if success seemed imminent. To work it out inhibited his playing further games that morning, or afternoon, interfering with his assigned day’s work which was striving to win at solitaire, betting, competing against “the house” or the ghostly occupants of his table. All the time he was turning up cards, peering down nearsightedly to see them, matching red to black, and shifting piles from one declining number to another, he hoped for failure. Almost always, he lost.

  On one of his infrequent walks to the grocery store (the liquor store delivered what he required three times a week) he saw on the rack a magazine with a highly colored photograph of Franny Fuller on the cover. He stood staring at the smiling face. Then, in a rare gesture of extravagance, he paid twenty-five cents for the magazine, called Silver Screen, and took it home with him.

  Most of that day he sat in his easy chair, staring alternately at an unfinished game of solitaire and at the face of Franny Fuller, at her white chiffon evening gown falling from her beautiful shoulders, at her incredibly narrow waist and luxuriant hips, all photographed in primary colors.

  Toward evening he felt himself moving, out of the chair and toward the opposite wall where there was a movie camera on a tripod set up and directed at him, in his easy chair.

  “Other profile,” he said to himself, cranking the handle of the camera and peering into the eyepiece. He turned his face to the left, entering easily into his old habit of watching himself as he performed every small act of his days and nights, a saving voyeurism that gave him distance from his urge toward self-destruction. It kept him company. When he woke in the morning he turned in bed and smiled at the camera now moved to a corner of his bedroom, its tripartite legs spread out over his wicker hassock, behind it a knickered, capped cameraman who looked very much like him as a young man. In the silence of his first motions: getting out of bed, putting on his slippers, raising the shade at the window, moving into the bathroom, he could hear a director instructing him on the next step. The wonderful sound of direction over silent motion—the way in the old days the director would guide the actors without disturbing the progress of the quiet scene—spurred Willis into living through his day.

  “Go to the kitchen now, slowly, don’t rush it. Now over to the icebox, take out the eggs. With your right hand, so you don’t interfere with the camera. The butter, then the eggs. Now turn to the left, smile a little at the prospect, walk, not so fast, not too fast, to the range.”

  Willis would act as he was instructed to, knowing that the camera was recording the grace and precision of his every move. This day, and every other day in his life, was being filmed, edited, the film spliced, pieced, canned, and shelved, for his eternity.

  Silence had not come upon him gradually. So great was his anger at sound that he lost the desire to speak to anyone for a period after his retirement, as though to do so would betray the validity of his hatred of talkies. He had his telephone removed, and when the tubes in his Stromberg-Carlson burned out he never replaced them.

  Once his voice was silenced he decided on further withdrawals. He found his nearsightedness increasing. Through a blur he saw the familiar objects on his nightstand, his kitchen table, his reading stands and desk. But he decided, perhaps because he felt the eye of the camera upon him, not to have glasses made. In his retreat, using the invested returns of his once-lavish salary (he had won the battle with MGM over his canceled contract), the cameras grinding away and following him from room to room, Willis Lord resigned himself to living in the satisfying past, the edges of the distant landscape softened by gin, his circle of friends narrowed to Delphine.

  But she was in Europe. He felt his loneliness even more keenly when he knew she was not in the city. The camera zoomed in upon him, too close, too constant. He heard the director’s commanding voice, urging him out of his chair, but he had not drunk enough, or perhaps it was that he had drunk too much? to obey him It was dusk. He told the cameraman he was going to take a walk, he scooped some change from the top of his bureau, put on his wide-brimmed felt hat and the brown officer’s coat he had worn in Their Marvelous Night, and went to look for a street corner that contained a telephone booth. At the door to his house he turned and instructed the cameraman that he would be back shortly. “That’s all for now,” he said. The director raised his megaphone and shouted through it, “Cut!” The camera fell silent, and he was free to make his telephone call unobserved.

  The four glass sides of the telephone booth opened him to the silent street. Yet, without the camera on him he felt quite safe. He lifted the directory to within a few inches of his face and found the name of an old acquaintance who, Delphine had informed him, had risen from assistant director on one of Willis’s pictures to producer.

  “Tony,” Willis said when the ringing stopped and he could hear the receiver raised. “This is Willis Lord. Do you remember me?”

  “One moment, sir,” a voice said. “I will call Mr. Partridge.”

  Then he heard, “Willis! How wonderful! How are you? Where are you? What can I do for you?”

  There was a silence. Willis could not remember, for a moment, why he had made the call.

  “Are you still there, Willis?”

  “Yes, I’m here. Do you by any chance … do you know of a new actress in Hollywood named Franny Fuller. Or perhaps it is Frances Fuller …?”


  “Sure thing. Who doesn’t. Not so new, though. She’s with Premium, or was, last I knew. She’s had some trouble, I’ve heard.”

  “I’d like to have her telephone number.”

  “Yes. Sure thing. Wait up, I’ll see if I have it here.”

  He heard her say she would come. She was indefinite about the time on Thursday, but she would be there. She would ask someone to drive her over. Of course she remembered him. She had seen and loved all his pictures.

  Thursday he waited from nine thirty in the morning on. He fixed a little salad lunch. When she had not appeared by dinnertime, and after he had played out twenty-four games of solitaire without, happily, winning once, he converted the lunch into hors d’oeuvres for a dinner he had in mind to serve. By nine in the evening he was very drunk because he had eaten none of the food he had prepared, clinging to his superstition that she would come if only he left the spaghetti and garlic bread untouched.

  At midnight he was still on the couch, groggy with gin, the camera recording the fact that he was seated erect and therefore in readiness to go to the door when the bell rang. Just after midnight he thought he heard someone at the door. He rose abruptly, upsetting his glass over the failed card game on the coffee table. But Franny Fuller was already in the room.

  He stared at her, unable to say anything. She looked magnificent, dressed as she was in a long white chiffon dress, pleated about her bosom and falling off her magnificent shoulders, a wide, abandoned expanse of flesh and material. After he had greeted her: “How do you do, Miss Fuller,” he went on staring at her. She seemed so familiar, as though he had seen her before, many times: that dress, that glowing yellow hair, that seductive, uplifted face. For the first time, since the day he had seen Delphine Lacy on the set of Passion Flowers, he felt a surge of warmth in his chest. He dug his hands into the pockets of his smoking jacket, realizing that the heat came from his groin, and hoping the swelling was well covered by the folds of his robe.

  “Sit down, sit down, won’t you? I’m so glad you could come.” His tongue, tied to the top of his mouth for so long, had suddenly, like the member in his crotch, become freed. He could not stop babbling. “Over here, right here. This is a better chair.”

  He swept a jacket from the recliner to the floor and ushered her, holding her elbow as though it was in danger of breaking, onto it. He watched, fascinated, as she sank down, her body undulating to accommodate the tightness of her long draped dress. Every move of this beautiful girl was sumptuous. He was enchanted.

  Franny Fuller looked at him, he thought, with pleasure. She said nothing, and he admired her silence, her way of suggesting interest without uttering a stream of stupidities to match his own. He offered her a drink. She shook her head. “Some food? I could heat it up in no time,” he said. She waved her hand as though to indicate that she was fine, she wanted nothing.

  He sat beside her on the hassock, almost at her chiffon-swathed knees and then, for no reason he was ever after able to understand, he began to pour out to her, for hours it seemed to him, all the frustrations and resentments of his life since his fame had deserted him. She listened gravely, shaking her head often, as if to let him know she understood the agony of his present existence as well as the glories of his past. Now and then she smiled, telling him, he thought, that she recognized the tragic truth of his statements but making no attempts at interpretation. He moved back to the couch and went on talking:

  “You thought I was dead, did you say, when I called? That’s what I thought you said.” With a sideward motion of her head she seemed to be denying it. “Yes, I know I heard you: ‘Willis Lord? I thought he was dead.’

  “Well, he, that is, I, am not dead, although sometimes it seems so, even to me. I have been at it a long time, dying that is. I have a long jump on the embalming process, my doctor tells me.” He laughed as he told her about the hardening of his liver the doctor had referred to, waving his empty glass at Franny Fuller to show her what he meant. She smiled at him.

  He could not stop. “You may think I am talkative but I am not usually. I swallow words or else I bury them. Dampen and put out sounds. I live in a soundless well most of the time. No, not a well, because I hear no echoes. My residence is a hollow set, all front, no rooms or closets or plumbing, just doors that open onto space. There is no content to my words, to myself, for that matter.

  “Would you care to play a game of gin? Double solitaire, perhaps?” When she said nothing but continued to smile gently at him, he swept the damp cards from the coffee table onto the floor, and went on:

  “Have you seen those coloring books in the drugstores, those paint books for children? Sonja Henie, Queen of the Ice, Coloring Book, and the Betty Grable Coloring Book? On every page is a new costume with the figure of the silent Star hovering behind it in black and white, waiting for the thick wax color of the crayon to be applied. I am the coloring-book hero of the twenties, in hard-and-fast black-and-white lines. I wait for some child-God to bestow Technicolor sound on me. But realize this, Miss Fuller, I did not fade to this state. I never lost color in my rage at Fate: I was always, like the Star in the book, in black-and-white. The way you see me now.

  “The only difference is that ordinarily I am silent. I can’t think what has come over me. It must be your beauty that has untied my tongue.…” She smiled as though to acknowledge his compliment, but he waved her smile aside:

  “Have you thought what the next step is, away from color, turned into black-and-white? Disappearance. Not being there at all. I am waiting patiently for that to happen. But my friend Delphine Lacy—you must know of her—tells me you have practiced this art. I have asked you here because I think we may be very much alike. Lost in the ruins of Hollywood lots, and needing …”

  He did not finish. Overcome by his unaccustomed talkativeness and the gin, his eyes closed and his head fell to his shoulder. He was in a deep, unhearing sleep, enveloped in the familiar blackness of his drunken nightly despair, and did not know whether she left at once or stayed on watching him as he slept. He never heard the door, and when he awoke the next morning, cold, stiff and very thirsty, she was not there. The room smelled of spilled wine and garlic. Beside the recliner was a full glass of red wine he remembered pouring for her and his own empty one. Had she answered him, and did he not remember?

  All day he tried to remember what she had said to him. He sat on the couch, sipping slowly at his glass of gin, looking at the seat he was sure she had occupied, seeing her there almost as clearly in the growing dusk of the living room as he had the night before. By midnight his eyes had closed, his head had fallen back against the couch. But his vision of her was still strong. Just before he slid into his nightly oblivion he thought: She will come back, she will.… Now she has a place to escape to.…

  Willis Lord was to live two years longer. Even without the weekly visits of Delphine Lacy, who was killed in an automobile accident in France just before she was due to return to the United States from her three months’ holiday, he was never again to be lonely. He had Franny Fuller often, on the chair opposite him. They talked at length or, more accurately, he talked and she listened to him, with her charming, soft smile directed at him. Knowing her aversion to being seen by strangers, he had ordered the camera in the corner to be still in her presence.

  Edna-Mae, Dempsey Butts’s second wife, said: “Did you know an actor named Willis Lord when you were in Hollywood?” She moved the Des Moines Register away from her face and looked at her husband.

  Dempsey looked up from Newsweek. He was reading a piece about the Green Bay Packers. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Nothing. Only I see in Walter Winchell that he died.”

  “I got to know very few people there in those days.”

  Edna-Mae smiled coyly. “Just the beautiful ones, huh?” She was a sturdy blond woman from Ames whom he had known briefly in his college days and met again when he went back to coach for Iowa State.

  Dempsey looked at her a moment. “Yes
,” he said. “Just one beautiful one.”

  The funeral director, a slender, white-haired man in a black suit and shined black shoes, shook hands with Billie-Jo Jenkins.

  “Everything will be very nice, don’t worry about anything, Mrs. Jenkins. We do our best for our customers.”

  Billie-Jo mumbled: “For the price, you should.”

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing. Thank you.” Her eyes filled with tears at the prospect of a pinched and lonely old age: the money these people took from you in your sorrow. She pulled on her white cotton gloves against the heat of the noonday street, set her lips firmly together, and left the funeral parlor. As she walked toward her apartment she said aloud to herself, her voice low and angry: “Robbers.”

  Mrs. Fanny Marker tried many times, without success, to contact her daughter after she realized who Franny Fuller was. Franny would not talk to her or respond to letters sent to the studio. Mrs. Fanny Marker settled for fame by association.

  She took a copy of Silver Screen to her customer whose head was encased in a large metal bubble. Knowing she could not be heard over the electric din within it, she opened the magazine at an article headlined in bold black letters, IS FF IN LOVE AGAIN? and pointed to it. The customer under the dryer blinked her thanks.

  Fanny had already read the story and was prepared to call it to the attention of captive readers in her shop. She had not seen or heard from her daughter in twenty-five years, but that was okay with her. She got much mileage out of the kid during manicures and while fastening white pin curls to the pink scalps of elderly women. In the stories to her customers her daughter was pure, beautiful, and devoted to her. “My dear husband died very young,” she told them, “and I had to be both parents to her.” The ladies loved the stories.