The Missing Person

by Doris Grumbach

  She went to the door, unbolted and unlocked it, and opened it to a short woman all in black except for a white fringe around her face, a cross hanging on her chest, and steel-rimmed glasses so thick Franny couldn’t make out her eyes through them. A nun, for god’s sake. Is she following me from the school?

  “Are you sure you have the right place?” she asked.

  “Yes, miss. I’m Sister Inez, a Parish Visitor. I’m taking the Catholic census of this neighborhood. Are you a Catholic?”

  “God, no,” Franny said. “Why?”

  The Sister wrote something down on a paper she had stuck on a clipboard, and started to walk away. Franny (later she never knew why) suddenly said: “Will you, uh, would you like to come in?”

  The Sister stopped, turned around, looked at Franny through glasses like the ends of binoculars, and hesitated. Then she said: “All right. If you want me to.”

  Franny led her into the parlor.

  The Sister’s black, floor-length clothing looked odd against all the white in the parlor. She took off a large, black shawl and folded it carefully over her arm.

  Franny said: “Please sit down.”

  She did, on one of the hard white chairs under the window. She perched on the edge of it and watched warily as Franny stretched out on the couch. The silence grew heavy.

  Then the Parish Visitor said: “Is there something I can do for you, miss?”

  Franny couldn’t think of anything to say, but she wanted to say something so that the Parish Visitor would stay, sitting there on the edge of the chair in the white parlor, like a blackbird in snow.

  “Are you the one from the school downtown?” she asked politely, like a little girl making conversation to a grownup.

  The Sister looked confused. “No. I don’t think so. But the Motherhouse for Parish Visitors is not too far from here.”

  Franny began to feel the effect of the two Seconals. She said apologetically to the Sister: “I’m a little tired. I hate to go to sleep when I’m alone.”

  The Sister nodded, as though to indicate that she understood this phenomenon. “Do you want me to stay with you until you fall asleep, miss?”

  “Oh yes, I do. Thank you very much.” Franny went to the bar at the far end of the room and poured herself a glass of grape juice with gin in it. She took another Seconal from a bottle she kept under the lip of the white bartop, and then stretched out again on the couch. She closed her eyes, waiting for the dark-red film to come over her eyes, like grape juice, like blood, after I have enough gin and pills, the slow coming on of sleep, not black, not yet, only red and then purple.…

  But the black did not come. Franny opened her eyes. The Parish Visitor was sitting there, still bolt upright, her eyes closed, a string of black beads in her hands. She seemed to be talking to herself.

  Franny’s voice trembled. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m praying.”

  “For me?” Franny asked in a shocked voice.

  “What?”

  “Are you saying prayers for me?”

  “For the whole world, miss. In saeculi saeculorum. For us all. For you too.”

  Franny shut her eyes. Sleep was just beyond her, across a blood-red chasm she could see with her eyes closed. She thought: one more pill and some grape-juice gin will do the trick, take me across. One more pill and it wouldn’t matter that Arnie was in New York talking to people who would know how to answer him. She remembered that when that happened his eyes didn’t look empty, the way they looked behind his glasses when he looked at her, seeing nothing in her, judging her the way her mother used to do when she looked at her.

  Franny went to the bar, and then lay down on the couch. She woke to find the Parish Visitor standing over her, holding her wrist. Franny saw she was wearing a thick plain silver wedding ring. A nun? she wondered and then she felt herself falling asleep again. Dark-red blood filled the pits around her eyeballs, and leaked out of the holes of her ears.…

  The Sister was shaking Franny, pushing at her face, slapping her. Franny muttered in her sleep: “What’s a Parish Visitor?” and the Sister said, “Your eyes look strange, miss.”

  Franny said, “I’m fine. I need to sleep.” The Sister pinched Franny’s cheeks gently, trying to keep her awake.

  “The wedding ring,” said Franny flatly, although she had meant to ask a question. She lay still, her eyes shut.

  The Sister said: “Bride of Christ, miss. Please sit up and stay awake. Have you taken something?”

  “Not a thing,” mumbled Franny. “Tired.”

  “At six o’clock in the evening? You look strange.”

  “Say the prayers. I’ll just sleep a little.”

  The Parish Visitor turned the beads around in her hand, praying in a low voice.

  “Pay for us now and Indy whirl to comb,” Franny thought the Parish Visitor said. She felt herself being covered with something, and before she could ask what the words meant she was asleep.

  For the rest of the evening, the Parish Visitor sat on the edge of the couch, letting Franny sleep a little and then slapping her awake. She said the rosary twice and then read from a small black book she had taken from her pocket.

  At ten, she stood up, putting the rosary and the prayer book into her pocket and throwing the shawl around her shoulders. She said: “I must go, miss. They’ll worry about me at the convent where I stay.”

  Franny heard her, dimly, but could not summon up enough energy to respond, and then fell back into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  At midnight she woke to find Olivia there, her brown face having faded into place over the Parish Visitor’s white-bread face. Franny said nothing to her about the nun, never told anyone (except Mary Maguire much later) about her coming that night, and was not sure, sometimes, that she had been there at all. But she believed that the Sister, sitting there and praying for her and for all the world with those blind eyes and black beads and the silver Bride-of-Christ wedding ring, had pulled her from the red-running stream of death and nothingness into some saving place. She thought her rescue may have depended on the incantation the Parish Visitor kept saying. She was always to remember her as a person who had words, like Arnie, and she believed that the magic of the words had saved her. Her regret was that the Parish Visitor had gone off to the Motherhouse without telling her what they were, what they meant. She had lost her chance for salvation.

  7

  The Missing Person

  Two weeks later Franny did not appear on the set for an early-morning call. Reuben waited a day, and then called her house. Olivia said she had not seen Miss Franny in two days. Did she go to New York? She didn’t think so. She didn’t take any clothes from the house. She hadn’t even seen her leave. But Mr. Franklin was due home tomorrow from New York and when he got in she’d have him call.…

  Arnold Franklin sat in the living room of his wife’s house and stared out through the French doors at the banjo-shaped swimming pool. The former owner was a Western cowboy-star who had died of lung cancer in this house. Fanny had bought the house from his estate, and had left everything, furnishings and curiosities, exactly as they were. The swimming pool filled itself from a mound of rocks over which the water cascaded. Now the falls were not running, having ceased when the pool was half full. In the moonlight the whole structure looked to Arnold like an unfinished construction site, black rain water standing in its muddy pit, like the ones he used to see in Brooklyn when he peered through the boards that surrounded an excavation.

  The whole house was like this, full of the evidence of elaborate plans which had fallen slowly into shabbiness. A bar with concealed panels opening electrically had suffered a short circuit and now stood, invalided, frozen into a half-shut position. The bar’s surface was covered with glasses, bottles, cocktail shakers, and grape juice bottles, mute witness to electrical failure and the triumph of necessity over order.

  Most of the upholstered furniture, originally of some delicate white material, was spotted and worn. Marks of t
he backsides of two generations of motion-picture people were pressed into every chair and sofa cushion. During a party celebrated later in the gossip columns, a glass door of the living room had been struck with a BB shell at eye level: rays of infinitesimal lines, like an imprisoned spider, radiated from the point of contact. Beyond it was the hole of entry, intact: that bullet had proceeded through the door and struck a well-known cowboy star in the left buttock. He had sued the owner of the house, charging his career on horseback had been threatened, and suggesting professional jealousy.

  Arnold hoisted himself out of his chair, put his glass down amid the graveyard of drinking paraphernalia on the bar, and went to the bathroom. The plumbing in the larger bathrooms of the house was almost useless. Arnold’s own bathroom had a marble tub that filled from a miniature waterfall spurting out of an eroding fake-stone wall, allowing only a trickle of water into the tub and requiring two hours to fill, and a toilet that did not flush. So he had fallen into the habit of using a bathroom in the maids’ quarters, the only one in the house that straightforwardly represented its intended function. It had a white-tiled floor, an uncabineted sink, a white tub on clawed, unclean feet, and a working toilet minus the gold-plated flush-handle designed to look like a banjo which adorned the other sluggish (or entirely ineffectual) toilets in the house.

  Seated on the toilet in the maid’s room, staring at the little octagonal white tiles on the floor, like the ones they used to have in the family bathroom in Brooklyn, Arnold thinks grimly that for the first time all day he knows exactly where he is, maybe for the only time during all his recent Mardi Grasian, grandiose Hollywood nights and days. After a year and a half of life in this mansion he knows he has been defeated by the place. He had come because of Fanny, and because of Hollywood’s extravagant promises of ego- and purse-enriching rewards. He now has arrived at the point where he knows what Hollywood and Fanny want of him: his presence, his approval, his appreciation. True, it has paid him well. But he has a disturbing sense of having failed it with his ingratitude. He feels less a beneficiary of this beautiful woman and this city than its captive, a prisoner of too much undigested money and excess possessions, and of the legend that is Franny Fuller, no, Fanny Marker.

  So it is now and so it always will be, if I stay here, thought Arnold, walking back to the living room, sinking into his chair and looking out again at the vestigial waterfall. I’m here, easily located. Fanny’s great talent, he thought, despite that famous face and body, is for disappearance. I couldn’t find her now if I tried. I am furious with her because I know her profound simplicity and still cannot fathom her intentions, her motives, her retreats and tentative, precarious, inexplicable advances. O my frightened shining undernourished symbolic beauty, come back. I have exhausted my energies running you down time and time again, you with your surface magnificence and your unplumbable, subterranean sickness.

  Reaching with his left arm over the top of the couch, he picked up the telephone which was on the end of a long, knotted cord. Inert, too weary to stand up, he put the phone on his knees and, putting his head back to gain some distance from the receiver, he asked the operator for Dempsey Butts’s number in Prairie City, Iowa.

  Arnold heard the operator give his name and place to someone in Prairie City. There was a long silence at the other end and then the operator broke in to report that Mr. Dempsey Butts was not at this number. Would Mr. Franklin speak to anyone else?

  He asked to speak to the Reverend, who sounded polite but uninterested in his problem. “I don’t know exactly where my son is tonight,” said the Reverend Butts. “If you wait I can look up his last letter.”

  Arnold waited. The Reverend came back. “He is probably in Florida. He says he was going there for a few weeks. I’ll give you the name of the hotel.”

  Arnold swallowed his pride. “You haven’t had any word from … Miss Fuller, uh, asking for Mr. Butts or anything, have you?” He hesitated before Fanny’s name because he could not think of one that he and the Reverend had in common.

  “No, Mr. Franklin, I haven’t. Why on earth would she call me?”

  Arnold thanked him for his trouble and hung up without explaining about her disappearance. He had called Prairie City because, in other bad times, close to the end of her control, Fanny would talk of her time with Dempsey Butts. Her words were just those: “When I was with Demp,” the way a child speaks of being with a governess, or with a grandmother on a vacation. Arnold felt no jealousy of Demp after hearing Fanny tell about their time together. As she spoke he had visions of a vast rural innocence, a bare, windswept prairie on which a boy and a girl, stick figures cartwheeling, somersaulting, wrestling, tumbling like puppies about each other, played on through sunlit days into moon-drenched nights. Dempsey Butts must have been Jack to her Jill, acolyte to her priestess. They had lost themselves, like fairy-tale characters, the athlete and the movie star, in the world’s forest, protected only by their glowing faith, their handfuls of bread pellets, and their innocence of the evils of humanity.

  Arnold thought of Dempsey as a well-coordinated Kaspar Hauser. Once his plan had been to supersede Dempsey’s adolescent place with Fanny, to represent maturity to her, to serve her as guide and mentor, to evoke from her responses beyond the powers of her boyish first husband. He had never met Butts but his view of him, he felt sure, was accurate. Only in recent months had Arnold begun to lose faith in the feasibility of his plan.

  The line to Florida was busy. It was half an hour before he could get through, and then he could tell by the blurred sound of Demp’s voice that he had awakened him. As he asked his questions he prepared himself for the weight of Dempsey’s concern, so that when the inevitable answer came—no, he had heard nothing at all from her—he knew what was going on in young Hansel’s mind. He flooded Arnold with questions, Arnold turned them away, professing his complete ignorance of Fanny’s motives. On the muffled edge of Dempsey’s voice he could hear his doubts. He sounded like a man who had sold the family concern and cannot help questioning the capacity of the new owner to handle all the details of so complex a business.

  “If I hear from her I’ll call you, Mr. Franklin,” said Dempsey, sounding deeply respectful but full of unnamable doubts. “I don’t think I will, though. She wouldn’t know where I was.”

  Arnold remembered that once before, the first month after their return to California, Fanny had thought of something she wanted and couldn’t find. “Demp will know where it is,” she said and insisted on tracking him on the telephone from one possible stop to another. He didn’t have the energy to remind the quarterback of this occasion. The weariness in Dempsey’s voice seemed to have traveled the long-distance line to him. He thanked him, told him he was sorry to have awakened him, and hung up. Only afterward did he become aware of Dempsey’s last sentence, like a mechanical playback comprehended some time after it is spoken: “She’ll be back, Mr. Franklin. Don’t worry. And … take care.”

  Take care. Of whom? Fanny Marker? It’s too late. She’s beyond my care, friend quarterback, and beyond yours. Anyone’s. I’ve got to take care of me, to get out or I will go down with her. In this mad airless space in which she lives, no one can find his way. Now she is off again to some uncharted hermitage. None of us can find her, and who knows if she wants to be found?

  For Demp, the night was shot. He shared a room with two vacationing teammates who were awakened by the sound of the telephone. Grumbling, and while he was still talking to Arnold Franklin, they went back to sleep. He decided his bed light would disturb them, so he crept out of the room, pulled on his slacks and sweatshirt in the bathroom, and, gently manipulating the door and the lock behind him, went down to the lobby.

  It was deserted except for a night clerk behind the counter under the RESERVATIONS sign who was reading True Stories. Demp sat in a cube-shaped chair at the far end of the room, put his bare feet on a hassock, fixed his eyes on a distant chandelier shaped like a wagon wheel, and gave himself up to a daydream about Franny. Ther
e would be a long search by all the others, and then he would be the one to find her. Like the youngest son in the fairy tale, he would once again be granted her hand.…

  The next morning, from the desk of the airline office in the hotel, he called Arnold Franklin to say he’d be in Los Angeles by noon.

  Reuben went to the airport to meet Dempsey Butts at Arnold Franklin’s request. The well-built, lithe football player was not hard to spot as he came down the steps from the plane. Walking toward him across the hot airfield, Reuben thought of Dempsey Butts in one role only, the former husband of the woman he loved hopelessly. He saw his own love for Franny Fuller as chivalric, nobly silent, adoring. In his mind Dempsey Butts and Franny, Arnold Franklin and Franny, assumed the postures of frozen statues, like those in circus tableaus. Franny stands, white and shining. Around her, the men kneel in the classic attitudes of religious art.

  In his fantasy Reuben was never one of the kneeling men. Instead he was ordering costumes or arranging lights to enhance her beauty or, oddly, holding her in his arms in the posture of a male pietà, a compassionate, grieving, solacing father to a suffering child, a faithful parent, after the surrogates had departed the scene, succoring her in her extremities of suspicion, self-distrust, and despair. His fantasy was never disturbed by the absurdity of its concept, or by her ignorance of his secret passion. She hardly knew he was there. In his daydream, a mode of extrasensory communication existed between them. When she needed him, she would know where to direct her summons, and he, mystically, would unerringly find her.