The Missing Person

by Doris Grumbach

  On the trolley she fell into a dream. Enormous figures lived on the screen, breathing down at her in the dark. To her the actors and the characters were one; their screen love had united them in her mind. She imagined lovely rooms in which they must live, with windows to the floor and gauze curtains blowing in from a wind from the Sound or the sea. Or maybe they had an apartment on the top floor of a building in New York overlooking the Park, with a penthouse terrace full of potted trees and wicker chaise longues. From it they could see the river when they weren’t in each other’s arms gazing at the Park. The two actors loved each other gently, tenderly, exclusively, although there was another man who loved Catherine, hopelessly; they were all friends. All of them ate wonderful roasts but you never saw them chew their food. They made a great ceremony of mixing drinks in silver cocktail shakers, but they only sipped them and then put them down and forgot them. They never did things like wash their hair or pick food out of their back teeth. They never had colds or went to the john or cut their toenails, or puked, thought Fanny gratefully.

  Riding past the drab, red-brick houses of Utica, Fanny conjured up again that real world and its people. She never gave much thought to the process of getting into this world because, in her daze, she was already there, even when she was at home eating at the card table with her mother and Jerryboy and listening to them argue about all the food he ate and the water he wasted in the bathroom. Fanny was a continent away from them and from the flat in Utica. She was Vilma Banky’s houseguest in a duplex apartment. From a white boudoir she talked on a white telephone to Conrad Nagel.

  That afternoon Fanny came home to an empty flat. She stretched out on the double bed in her mother’s room and began to shape her eyebrows. She was trying to elevate the arch of the right one to look like Norma Shearer’s. Supporting the magnifying mirror between her legs she bent her head toward it, holding the tweezers carefully so as not to pinch her skin.

  Then she heard the key in the door and Jerryboy’s heavy boots. He closed the door behind him, and she heard him turn the lock. She called out, “Mom’ll be home pretty soon,” but by then he was at the bedroom door, smiling at her. She began to feel queer.

  He sat down on the stool in front of her mother’s chest of drawers which was draped with an organdy skirt so it would look like a dressing table, and began to unlace his thick boots with his dirty hands, not looking down at all but smiling steadily at her as he did it.

  “Bubbles,” he said, “whatcha doin’ home?”

  “Nothing,” she said, “nothing. Why are you?”

  “Nothing special. Laid off for a coupla weeks. Goddamn plant shut down. Whatcha expect after the banks conked out last month? Everything’s gone straight to hell.”

  Fanny had not heard about the banks or the layoffs. Her dream world did not allow for the realities of a crashing stock market or unemployment. But she could tell by the way Jerryboy’s voice sounded that he wasn’t paying much attention to the words he said. He was just talking to fill in until something else happened.

  He stared at her, smiling that crazy smile she recognized. She’d seen him look at her mother that way. After dinner he’d fall asleep on the chesterfield for an hour. He’d wake up suddenly, sit up and grin at her mother, and finish the flat beer in his glass. Then they’d go into the bedroom. Fanny could hear the sounds, and then the name-calling, the terrible ones Jerryboy would call her mother and her mother’s mumbled answers. There always seemed to be that time after the door closed when they hated each other and would shout the worst words they could think of. Then came the sounds of pain, and then something like Indian wrestling, Fanny thought.

  When it was over she would hear Jerryboy slap her mother hard on the buttocks, she thought it sounded like. Her mother would cry out and then laugh. It was like a signal: THE END, like the fade when the movie was over. The next morning, when Fanny went into the bedroom for her clothes which hung in her mother’s closet, she smelled sex, the thick, sour-blanket smell. That was all she really knew about it then, the sounds, the smell, the closed door, the names and slaps, and the ugly grin on Jerryboy’s face beforehand.

  He sat down on the bed, on the side away from her. Then he swung his filthy webbed feet up and crooked his arm under his head. He watched her as she started to pluck at her widow’s peak. She had a small one to start with, but she was intent on making it deeper as she read you could do in a beauty-hints column.

  He watched her without moving. Then he seemed to get annoyed at what she was doing. He reached over, grabbed her arm, and pulled her into the middle of the bed. Opening his fly he took out his thick red penis and then fastened her other, flaying arm firmly to the bed. He nudged her legs apart with his knee and fell on top of her, so hard that it knocked her breath away. He pushed. There was tearing, like a seam somewhere in her had ripped, and then she felt a hot splash on her thighs. Her eyes seemed to her to be filling with the same blood she was feeling between her legs. She blacked out.

  When Fanny next knew anything she looked down and saw she was still bleeding a lot. She felt pain in a place she had not known the exact location of before. She had wondered about it, especially in connection with her mother. But always before she had an idea that the place had been made in her mother by a lot of different men pushing themselves into her until they had worn a way through, like a path beaten in the woods.

  So. Violent things like this happened to her mother, and now to her. But it could not possibly be true in the movie world, the real world. She wondered: After Willis Lord turned off the light and you no longer saw his profile and Delphine Lacy’s and there was only the black screen—did the screen turn red with blood, not black? Was the silence pain? Did the cameraman look away in horror?

  Fanny lay there, bleeding. Jerryboy had gone into the bathroom. She could hear water running. She saw she was getting blood all over her mother’s sheets, but made no move to get up. She pulled the blanket over her bloody thighs and went to sleep, as she always did when she was frightened. Just before she fell asleep she thought about how long it always took Jerryboy in the bathroom and how her mother hated that about him. She wondered how anyone could stay so long in the bathroom and come out dirty.

  Fanny woke to the cracking feel of her mother slapping her face. She saw that judging look. Her mother had the blanket in her hand. Jerryboy was not there. There was no sign of him, no shoes near the door. Just Fanny, lying there in her bloody mess, her mother standing over her, slapping furiously at her face, first one side of it, then the other, like a funny man attacking the straight man in a vaudeville act.

  She knew she had to get out of the flat. Her mother’s appraising face had turned to stone. When she left for work the next morning without speaking to her daughter, Fanny got dressed, put on a pair of high-heeled shoes from her mother’s closet, and took a trolley downtown.

  The lobby of the Hotel Mohawk was crowded with salesmen and town girls who usually worked in the glove factory, but it was now closed indefinitely. The girls were all gussied up and looked at the men who were registering, or those reading the papers in square leather chairs around the lobby. Fanny stood near a paper palm tree taller than she was, hoping she looked as though she were waiting for someone she knew. She read the signs that said TODAY LUNCH ROTARY INTERNATIONAL and ELKS GREEN ROOM 12:45 PM. She thought if she stood there reading long enough some guy would say: “Hey, Blondie, can I buy you a drink?” because boys at school always called her that, and it was a common opener she had read about in Screen Romances. She would answer: “Why not?” It was illegal to serve drinks to fourteen-year-old girls, but everyone in school said she looked older. After that she would say: “My name’s not Blondie. It’s Laverne Lucienne.”

  All the men who came into the Hotel Mohawk, salesmen for hardware or men’s pajamas or farm equipment to the town stores, looked at her. Their shirts were stuck to their backs, their trousers hung low on their hips from sitting in their cars so long. Their luggage bulged with samples, dirty laund
ry, hair tonic, and bottles of Four Roses.

  She waited, into the middle of that long afternoon. The stiff-mouthed, superior-looking cigarette counter woman watched her, and the bellboys looked at her sideways as they passed and repassed her, laughing. Her ankles ached from standing so long in her mother’s shoes. But she was afraid to sit down in a leather chair where she felt she had no right to be. The woman at the cigarette counter had a high, teachery voice. She was talking to a salesman who asked for three of those.…

  “You, Blondie,” a man said, pulling his wet shirt away from his large stomach, “come on up and have a drink with me.”

  She looked at him and swallowed. She said, “Okay,” and then she said, because by that time she knew what she was going to say after that, “Don’t call me Blondie. My name is Melinda Courtney.”

  Once she had gone to live in the golden light of Hollywood, Franny remembered the East as dark and cold. The skies were always gray. The air felt as if it were about to snow. Everything back there was, to her, the color of fog and sidewalks. At night the skies were like school-boards, black and hard. There was no bright color back East that she could remember.

  On such a gray morning she had left home for good. She could no longer stand her mother’s stone silences or the pressure of the two of them alone in the flat. Jerryboy had been put out by her mother a few days after It happened. Fanny pocketed some bills from her mother’s drawer, took a bus to Schenectady, and found a job waiting tables. She was given a room in the rear quarters of the hotel. For some time after she left Utica her life was serving blue-plate specials, and men.

  She learned about eastern men. All the ones she met were going someplace. They were always planning for the future and making lists of places they had to get to at certain times. For a meal she had to listen to where they were planning to go this summer “with the kids,” and the best way to get there: “You take Route Five until you hit Oriskany and then you …” Or they told her about where they planned to go when they graduated from someplace or to take courses at some other place. Plans. They were all full of them, and they loved to describe every detail.

  Men looked at her and suddenly, it seemed, the plans they’d been telling her about opened up or held off for a minute, as though they were deciding whether or not to include her in them. But most of them were ambitious traveling men. They moved on fast, even faster now that the Depression had reduced their business. They went home to their wives, who were named Betty-Anne or Emmy-Jo, always two first names, one weekend in the month. They were up early in the morning to be first with their goods when the stores opened downtown. They liked to be there when the bank or the post office opened, sat close up for sporting events, and boasted they had the best seats in the the-ay-ter in Albany when it showed plays from New York. It seemed to Fanny that none of these men enjoyed anything very much, but they all had to be the first at it, and in the best location. Everybody was out of breath. Everybody planned, and then ran.

  She spent three years working her way down through New York State from one hotel and restaurant and bar to another. Often she spent her nights with hotel customers in their rooms, listening to them talk about themselves before they laid her. They were always full of preliminary talk, mostly about their futures, like the futures in the grain market they told her they sometimes took chances on.

  “Wait a sec, Blondie, while I leave a call. Operator, wouldya call me early, say six thirty. I’ve got to make Buffalo by three.” Turning his confidences from the operator to Fanny, he would say: “Always try to get there early in the spring. Opened there and did pretty good. Expect I’ll do even better this year. Before you come back, Blondie, could you fill this with a little water in the bathroom?”

  She got to know what seemed to her hundreds of such men who ran around one upstate gray city after another, from one appointment to the next, stopping only long enough to invite her to share their dinner, or a drink so she would share their bed later. They were called at six thirty, and then she heard them splashing around the bathroom using all the water in the world like Jerryboy used to do when her mother would scream through the door to turn it off. They came out with a towel around their hips and stuffed their pajamas into their suitcases. “I’m off to Syracuse, Blondie. See you next time through. Be good now, ixnay on the heavy stuff, it’ll ruin your looks, and don’t take any wooden nickels, ha ha.”

  Fanny was almost seventeen when Judd Sampson drove her in his convertible down to New York City. It was his Christmas vacation from his last year in college. He, too, was originally from Utica, he told her, when they met in a hotel lobby in Kingston during a heavy snowstorm. They were both waiting, she for someone to ask her upstairs and he to be able to move his car back onto 9W for the trip to New York.

  Judd said he was on his way to the City, she said she’d always wanted to see it, he asked if she’d like to drive with him if he ever made it out of Kingston in this snow. She went to her room at the back of the hotel dining room, packed her suitcase, told the man at the desk she was leaving, and, without bothering to collect the twelve dollars the hotel owed her for three days’ work, got into Judd’s Plymouth. It was the final lap from the city of her birth to the city of her dreams. She never saw Utica again.

  After almost six hours on icy roads they arrived in the City. Judd had money. He drove to a hotel near Columbia University. They registered as husband and wife and were given a room so small there was nowhere to sit but on the bed. When the bellboy left their two suitcases on the bottom of the bed, Judd immediately began to unpack, putting his toothbrush in a drinking glass and settling his comb and brush squarely in the middle of the one dresser the room held. Then he lined up all his shirts in the top drawer, hung his ties on the rod of a hanger, and folded his trousers neatly over another. All of this took some time. Fanny lay on the bed, her feet propped on her suitcase, and watched him. She wondered if it was some new kind of fancy delaying action. He seemed frightened of her. Was he putting off turning around and looking at her by doing his housekeeping?

  For some reason Fanny felt less exultant than she had expected at finally making it to the City. Then she realized it was because she had already been here so many times in her dreams. There was very little difference now except that it was not quite so fancy and it was very cold.

  She felt sorry for Judd Sampson. He was still moving his things from place to place. She said: “Judd, are you cherry?” He turned to look at her, his face red, and said, “Yes, ma’am. Yes, I am.”

  Ma’am, she thought, Jesus, I’m seventeen. But she supposed he could not tell. They went out to supper in a delicatessen on Broadway and then, holding hands, they walked back slowly to the hotel through the snow. Upstairs they warmed up by leaning against the high radiator.

  They undressed and got into bed. Judd lay on his side of the bed, very still. Then he started to talk. He told her how afraid he was of women and the black blood they had every month and of getting a dose from them. He said he believed fervently in God and was going to enter the Theological Seminary at Columbia the next fall to study to be a minister, if they would accept him.

  They lay far apart. Fanny listened to him describe his sacred plans, his desire to serve God and His people, and to keep clean. He talked on and on: Fanny fell asleep listening to him. She was wakened at one in the morning by the sound of water running into the bathtub. She decided it must be because he had been lying close to her. When he came back to the bed she pretended to be asleep, and then she fell asleep and slept, without dreaming for once, through the night.

  Next morning Judd said he had to go for his interview at the seminary. Fanny stayed in bed and watched him as he put on his black suit and white shirt and black tie, as though he were already a seminarian. After he was dressed he packed his suitcase.

  “How old are you, Judd?” she asked.

  He flushed. “Twenty-two.”

  Holding his black felt fedora and suitcase in one hand, he put the room key on top of the dresse
r.

  “Stay as long as you like, Laverne. You’re a beautiful girl, like … like the Venus de Milo or Gloria Swanson or someone colossal like that. I wouldn’t do anything to you, even if I could. Even if I knew what to do.”

  Fanny stayed in bed all that day feeling good. She got up late in the afternoon because she was hungry. Under the key on the dresser she found two ten-dollar bills. The sight of them made her smile. It was the first time anyone had given her money for doing nothing, and she found that very funny, and very nice.

  Fanny took the money and went upstairs to the roof restaurant to have dinner. She was given a table for two. Almost immediately a man came over and asked if she minded if he shared her table. She smiled and said no, although it was pretty silly: it was early in the evening, the restaurant was almost empty, and there were plenty of other tables. He said his name was Eddie Puritan and he was a talent scout for a movie company.

  “Why do you laugh?” he asked.

  “Mr. Eddie Puritan, you must be about the fifteenth or sixteenth talent scout I’ve ever met in my life. The hotels in Utica, Amsterdam, Albany, and Saugerties, New York, are full of them, wall to wall, all the rooms except those filled with hosiery salesmen.”

  “I am one, though.…”

  “And they all have ‘very tempting offers,’ they always say, to make to me. Except nothing ever comes of them, only a few quick lays and a whole collection of fake cards I still keep, like a dope, in my suitcase.”

  Eddie Puritan went on insisting he was a talent scout. He told Fanny she was a beautiful girl and that he could arrange a screen test for her. He tried to take her check but she insisted on paying her own. She said, “So long, chum,” and he said, unsmiling, “See you in the movies.” She went back to her room.