The Missing Person

by Doris Grumbach

  They danced on. Back at the table, Lou Price ate his salad alone. Franny Fuller said nothing to Arnold, and he was prevented from speaking by her silence. His own muteness began to bother him. He started to say something. Franny raised her head to look at him solemnly without seeming to see him in particular. He fell silent, stopped by the imploring blankness of her look.

  The band put its instruments on their chairs and left the stand. Arnold led Franny Fuller back to the table. She ignored the roast beef on her plate and ordered a Roof Garden Delight, an elaborate concoction of ice cream, whipped cream, nuts, chocolate syrup, and maraschino cherries. For the first time in the evening her interest appeared to be aroused as she described to the waiter exactly what she wanted on the Delight. When it came, she ate voraciously.

  She finished it all, tipping the tulip-shaped glass up to drink the last brown drops. Then she smiled at Arnold for the first time, and asked him to order another.

  “Same thing?”

  “Uh huh.”

  They sat for a while in silence. Franny played with the glass and her spoon. Then she said: “Does everyone call you Arnold?”

  “Yes. Or Arnie.”

  “Arnie,” she whispered in her famous half-voice. “The way I’m called Franny.”

  My god in heaven, he thought, I’m hooked.

  The waiter brought Franny the second Delight. Her face lit up and she ate it without once putting the spoon down. Only while she’s eating that sickening mixture, thought Arnie, does she seem to be here. The last spoonful consumed, Franny lapsed into unmoving, blank silence.

  Arnie said: “Will you be in New York long?”

  Franny looked at Lou who said: “Until the end of the week.”

  Franny nodded.

  Then, for no reason he was able to remember afterward, he breathed in deeply and said: “I’d like to show you the place I have just bought in New Hampshire, if you have the time.”

  “I’d like to see it,” she said.

  Arnie and Lou took her back to the Plaza, going through a rear door of the hotel to avoid the crowd of autograph hunters that had gathered on the front steps. They stopped at the door of her suite. Arnie said he would pick her up at eleven on Wednesday for the excursion to New Hampshire.

  That was to be the first of Franny’s escapes that Arnie was to witness. He arrived at the Plaza promptly at eleven o’clock and called upstairs on the lobby phone. The hotel operator reported there was no answer. “You must be mistaken,” he insisted.

  “No, sir,” she said. She checked her lists. It was right there, she said. Franny Fuller had left the hotel at ten thirty this morning.

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “No sir, she did not.”

  “Do you know when she plans to return?”

  “No sir, I do not. She didn’t say.”

  Three weeks later Franny called Arnie to apologize.

  “I had to go out,” she said by way of explanation.

  He was glad to hear from her. His dreams had been full of her face, he had trouble settling down to his writing routine, the platen of his typewriter seemed to have become pitted by the unexplainable presence of her blue eyes every time he tried to insert a new sheet of paper. He thought nothing of the inadequacy of her explanation.

  “That’s all right, Franny,” he said. “When can I see you again?”

  “Right now,” she said. “I’m at the Plaza.”

  It was nine o’clock at night. He had just settled down with his pipe and his pages for rewriting. He took a cab and was at the Plaza in twenty minutes. When he called up she told him to come upstairs. She was in a feathered white negligee, a script in hand.

  “I called you because I remembered you said you were a poet. Lou Price just gave me this. I don’t understand what it’s all about. What kind of part is this? What do they want of me? I don’t know how to do anything so complicated.”

  In her anxiety she said more to Arnie in that minute than he had ever heard her say before. He took the script and followed her into the bedroom. She got into bed, and he sat on a small satin dressing-table chair to read.

  It took him more than two hours to get through it. Franny said nothing, and then she listened closely as he began to explain the text to her. Tired of the uncomfortable chair, he moved over to the bed and then, still talking, he stretched out beside her. After a few minutes, he put the script on the floor, took off his clothes, got into the bed, and made love to her.

  Arnold stayed the night. He ordered breakfast sent up to the room. He went on talking to Franny about the mindless little script she had been given to study. In the afternoon she lay still while he made love to her. By early evening Arnold began to feel imprisoned.

  “I’m going to make a phone call to some friends, Franny. We need to get out of here. I think you’ll like them.”

  The Cairnses were out. He left word that he’d called, from Franny Fuller’s suite at the Plaza. A few minutes later they called back. He talked eagerly to Patrick, feeling he had at last made contact with the outside world. Franny was asleep. When she woke he told her he had spoken to the Cairnses and they were coming to have dinner with them.

  “Downstairs. All right, Franny?”

  “All right,” she said. He felt elated that she had agreed to do something more than the limited acts they had been repeating in the overstuffed hotel room.

  Two hours later Pat Cairns called from downstairs. Arnold went downstairs to meet him. Mollie was with him. They all greeted each other ostentatiously, with the excessive embraces and exclamations of persons somewhat uncertain about their real feelings for each other.

  Both genuine affection and professional suspicion characterized the long friendship between Arnold Franklin and the Cairnses. They had been the first people to do his verse play, at their Atelier. The three had never been able to decide among themselves who deserved the greatest portion of credit for it, and this made them uneasy. When they reminisced about The Lemming’s progress from the Atelier Company to the Broadhurst on Broadway, it was always with the caution of diplomats approaching a solution to a delicate international boundary question. They hedged about their own share in its success, unusual for a serious play in free verse. In their conversations they tended to assign credit too liberally to each other, while secretly convinced that it belonged solely to themselves. Arnold’s private view that the play and its poetic language were the thing, seemed untenable to the Cairnses. They had cast, directed, and produced other successful plays whose scripts had to be almost entirely rewritten during the six weeks’ rehearsals and knew how much depended on execution. Of course, this had not happened with Arnold’s meticulously composed play. But because they had all been deeply involved in an historic hit, regardless of their precise degree of responsibility for it, they had grounds for their warm professional relationship.

  “Where shall we dine?” asked Pat. He was tall, broad, and fatherly, tending to fat in his middle age, with a shock of grizzled hair, and untamed, tangled eyebrows that gave him a surprised look. In his acting days he had held his wiry hair back with heavy grease. Now his role as mentor of a highly regarded professional acting school allowed him to have it rise naturally from his head, affecting a kind of comfortable and lovable eccentricity. He was an easy man, a favorite subject for Hirschfeld’s Sunday-morning cartoons in The New York Times theater section whenever a play he directed was to open that week on Broadway. The tangle of his hair and eyebrows could always be relied upon to harbor at least three of Hirschfeld’s hidden Ninas.

  “The Persian Room. Then we don’t have to fool with taxis and all that,” said Arnie. “I’m starved. I’ll call up to Franny and tell her where we are.”

  They made their way to the dining room, Arnie walking between the Cairnses, holding Mollie’s hand in comradely fashion. He had always gotten on with Mollie, who was self-effacing and therefore, in his eyes, charming. Well into her fifties, she was still pretty, in the way that Irish women are who keep th
e precise, fine outlines of their faces despite an increase in the bulk of their bodies. Mollie was heavy—she and Pat had taken on weight at almost the same pace. They illustrated the cliche often used for married couples that they grew to resemble each other.

  Mollie’s voice was unexpectedly high and strident. She had worked hard on it with all sorts of speech teachers but had never been able to lower it much. In its tones her students could hear echoes of the shrill, happy, Irish girls she had once played in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. But her point of individuality was her clothing. She liked ethnic dresses and collected Hawaiian mumus, Indian saris, and the heavy, woven blouses and skirts of the Mayan Indians. Draped over her heavy body, below her small, pretty face, her colorful, exotic clothes distinguished her from the conservatively dressed theatergoers as Mollie Cairns, herself.

  At the door to the Persian Room they were immediately recognized by a theater-wise maître d’hôtel who gave them a table not far from the piano. They ordered drinks and waited for Franny. When she had not appeared in an hour, and they had drunk four rounds, Arnie made a lame excuse. Without bothering to call her again (Arnie sensed that if she had not come down by now she was not going to respond to his coaxing), they ordered dinner. Arnie said nothing to the Cairnses, about Franny’s other nonappearance, knowing there was nothing he could do about her.

  They ate at a leisurely pace, talking theater and literary gossip. Patrick outlined his plans for the reorganization of their school’s faculty—fewer full-time people and more visiting professionals. Economics, he said, as well as quality. He inquired if Arnie might not like to teach there for a semester or two now and then. To each of Pat’s sentences, Mollie added footnotes in her high, quick voice, like a scholar explicating a text. Arnie said he would give it some thought.

  Over coffee, having avoided the question delicately thus far, Pat asked Arnie about his “relationship” with Franny Fuller. While Arnie hesitated, Mollie overcame her natural reticence about other people’s conduct, especially creative people whose outrageous behavior she always accepted as normal, and brought herself to ask: “How did you ever get involved with … a movie star?”

  Arnie was full of scotch, wine, and after-dinner brandy. In the unaccustomed disorder of his senses, he did not say what he planned to say, that he had known her, really, only a few days. Instead, to his amazement, he heard himself telling the Cairnses that he intended to marry Franny Fuller.

  They both listened attentively, Mollie trying hard not to show her dismay at the news. They were anxious for details which would, to their doubting minds, make some sense of a union between their friend, the shy, sensitive, talented poet, and the famous motion-picture star whose turbulent life they had read about in the newspapers’ gossip columns. Arnie then provided them with a chronology of the admittedly short time he had known Franny, the depth of his love for her, omitting any account of her feelings which would have required much fictionalizing. These, he had to say to himself as he talked optimistically to the Cairnses, he knew nothing about, not even if she would consider marrying him.

  Like all couples who have stayed together despite violent temperamental differences, the Cairnses liked to hear about the marital intentions of their friends. Their intermittent clucks and mys were signs of their understanding, their superiority to the usual cautions of more conventional auditors, and their pleasure at being the recipients of such a startling piece of news.

  Arnold had almost finished his short saga of Franny and himself when the lights in the Persian Room were dimmed. A spotlight moved slowly across the heads of the patrons to the piano, where it hovered for a moment, and then stopped. Diners reached for their coffee cups and dessert plates and pulled them closer, seeming to fear that in the darkness which accompanied the entertainment they might be separated from their sustenance.

  In the bright circular light there appeared a woman of uncertain age, her harsh dyed hair glittering, the rough texture of her face unavailable to disguise. She appeared to have been pressed into youthful lines without being young. When she had taken her place in the exact center of the light her name was called, like an incantation, from all the corners of the room. The applause was loud and rhythmic: “Helena! Helena!”

  Annoyed by the interruption, Arnold stopped talking to listen to the singer. Helena went through her repertory of blues songs, all alike in their wailing lyrics. Her voice had long since disappeared under the weight of her affected delivery, her arms followed a pattern well known to her audience. Like a snake charmer evoking a cobra, she raised their enthusiasm to a pitch far beyond their first delight at her appearance. They seemed to sway toward her as she embraced herself with her familiar floury arms.

  Arnold’s attention wandered during Helena’s performance. Unlike the other listeners, he felt no nostalgia for the aging Helena. His youth had been spent in less elegant places, his ears were tutored by more natural sounds: Josh White and Leadbelly are more my style. He played with his empty water glass, making overlapping circles with its wet bottom on the table cloth. Like Arnold, the Cairnses, too, had already used up their quotient of interest and had begun to think of other things. They never noticed the singer throw her arms above her head in a vast, self-congratulatory gesture. It was her signal to her admirers of the end of her act.

  The chanteuse gone, the lights back on, Arnold and the Cairnses were freed from forced attention, able now to talk to each other. The cheers and applause gradually died down.

  “Depressing, wasn’t it?” said Mollie. “She’s getting on.”

  “That’s the nice thing about show business, though,” said Patrick. “People look at a used-up performer and see her as she once was and love her and behave as though she hadn’t changed in the least.”

  Arnold said: “I suppose.”

  Patrick could tell he was worrying about Franny upstairs. He said, “Go on up. We’ll take care of the damage.”

  “Not at all. Let me.” Arnold took the check, signed it, and wrote Franny Fuller’s suite number on it.

  “Thank you. Very nice of you,” said Mollie. “Why don’t you and Miss Fuller come down to the Atelier tomorrow?” It was her effort to equalize Arnold’s assumption of the check.

  “I’ll ask her. You never can tell with her. She might like that. I’ll suggest it to her. And thank you for your patient listening. I’m afraid I did run on.”

  “Not at all,” said Mollie. “I enjoyed it.”

  “Thanks for the feed,” said Patrick.”

  Arnold told her to wear something plain. In the taxi he looked closely at her for the first time and saw she was wearing a sheer black, sleeveless dress cut to her cleavage and clinging close to her hips and upper thighs. Over her arm was a thin, gauzy scarf.

  “Did you think the color would make you less visible?” he asked, amused at her innocence but vaguely irked at the target for all eyes she would present.

  “It’s all I have, Arnie, that’s plain like you said.”

  “Well, yes, plain, I suppose. But there just isn’t much of it.”

  She made a gesture of helplessness and threw the black shawl around her shoulders, obscuring her bosom. At the door of the Atelier, Arnie could tell by the slowness with which she climbed out of the cab that she was searching desperately for reasons not to go in. He decided to give her no chance for escape. Taking her arm, he moved her gently in front of him and opened the door to the old townhouse.

  The Cairnses were waiting for them. They came at once from a back room, full of polite, welcoming gestures and vapid talk. Arnold introduced Franny to them. “This is Franny,” he said proudly, forgetting to give her their names. Mollie said, “I’m Mollie Cairns,” and then smiled at the futility of having to be told who she was. Patrick mumbled his name, staring at Franny, trying not to look at the expanse of breasts that was visible under the scarf.

  As they walked toward the rehearsal hall Mollie caught glimpses of the famous profile. Opposed to the movies as an art form, she had never seen her in a
film but she knew her face well from newspapers and the framed still shots in front of movie theaters. Mollie felt disturbed by Franny’s beauty. She belonged to the school of the theater trained to distrust flagrant good looks, believing that a handsome actor was likely to be a poor actor. She could not accept Franny Fuller for anything more than she appeared to be, a magnificently endowed young woman whose fortune was her face and her breasts, her hips and fiddle-shaped backside, all blown up to eight times human size and moved by a machine across a giant screen, a lavish vision—but hardly an actress. Looking at Franny made her remember the skinny, odd-looking little actresses in Dublin, physically hampered by too little chin or too much nose, who had overcome those defects or hidden them completely in superb performances.

  None of that, she thought. She led Arnold and Franny Fuller into the hall where a group of students was seated around a large, bare table. Patrick brought a chair for her. Arnold found his own. The Cairnses sat with them, a little behind the students. Patrick introduced them all around. After the first curious, surreptitious glances at Franny, the students turned their attention away from her and Arnold and back to the discussion of their scripts.

  “They’re working on their version of a play of Arnie’s, Survival of the Unfit,” Patrick whispered to Franny. “During these first few days of rehearsal they talk the roles out until they begin to understand them, to get the feeling they’re moving inside the characters. Then later they will begin to incorporate action, expecting they’ll know better how to move and walk and sit after these preliminary talks. They try to work from the inside, from some kind of interior understanding of everything concerning the character, how he clenches his muscles when he’s mad, the way her body tenses when she’s afraid, his attitude, no, well, rather, his stance when he hears something he likes or doesn’t like. That sort of thing.”