Arnold Franklin spent the early part of the spring evening at McGinty’s on Second Avenue. Painted shamrocks lined the mirror over the bar and the convivial customers seemed to know each other. Arnold did not join in the joking, but listened and had a satisfying number of scotches and lemon, relishing his feeling of virtue at not eating dinner.
He walked home through the cool streets. He was not in the least sleepy. The smell of washed gutters and bus exhaust was as pleasant as McGinty’s sawdust and beery air. He enjoyed the feel of the polished knob at his front door as he opened it, went in, and then bolted and locked it behind him.
He put on a lounging robe and stood at an open window, taking deep breaths of the acrid, beloved New York air. Ready at last to work, he sat at his desk, took a pad of yellow paper from the drawer, filled his fountain pen, and settled his velvet high-backed chair closer to the flat surface of the polished desk. At ease, comfortable, alone, he began to write:
He: deluded, drowning, barely able to make his escape.…
She: beautiful, lost.…
It was eleven in the morning. Mary Maguire had cleaned her desk and was about to start work on a new book. Putting off the difficult moment of the first sentence, she picked up the last sheets of old manuscript she was about to drop into her trash basket and read:
I remember seeing those shiny ads in magazines with the whole family in them, the boy in a white shirt and a home-knitted woolly sweater ready for school with his Mickey Mouse lunchbox and the girl with a bow in her hair and a white middy blouse and the mother in a gingham robe and her face full of healthy-looking make-up and a short neat brunette haircut and the father, like God the father, shaved and smiling and full of life insurance and his hair just cut ten minutes ago and his eyes shiny from a great night’s sleep on a new firm mattress. You look at this family on shiny magazine paper sitting in their shiny yellow kitchen and out of the window in the background you can see a shiny green swing set for the little children and a plastic blue pool and they’re all inside eating breakfast things like orange juice for the teeth and cream and eggs and strawberries or some such damn thing and this family looks holy and then you know they’re the same family you see in other ads about praying in church on Sunday and you feel … out of it, like, out of the world, out of the race of people really because they must be the real ones. They’re in all the magazines and a million people must recognize themselves in them.
How do I get into those pictures? Is real life like that?
Mary Maguire had not been able to use all this in The Fabulous Franny Fuller. Crumbling the page, she sat thinking of the Golden Girl who had put those foolish questions to her, wondering where she was now, how she was. She thought about others like her whose rise to stardom she had reported on, who were now somewhere beyond the limelight. Some had resisted aging until it was too late to grow old gracefully. Some had retired rich, grateful for their privacy and their unlimited acreage in Nevada. Some had traveled down into inevitable obscurity. She tried to recall all the descending trails, but she found herself coming back to the girl on the page in her hand.
Until that moment, and throughout the years of her successful column jammed with the best recorded gossip of her time, Mary Maguire had remained unmoved by her subject matter. Now, on this hot July noon in Hollywood, on the eve of the decade of the fifties in which the Capital of the Stars declined into a provincial city, she was stopped, overwhelmed by the realization of her long, hard passivity before the spectacle of human need. Her familial duties past, she had circled her journalistic subjects like a buzzard, watching them, writing about them, waiting for more, avid for the rest of the story.…
Tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her face. Have I cried since my mother’s funeral? she wondered. Now her profound sorrow astounded her. Tears flowed faster, her throat closed as though an interior flood had started at the back of her mouth. She put her head down, her ear against the bank of keys on her typewriter. Pity overcame her, she felt drowned in it, reducing her, for once, to the troubled, fearful, uncertain, and mourning creature of her columns.
After a few minutes she raised her head, wiped her face dry, pulled her chair to the table, rolled a blank sheet of paper into her typewriter and began to write:
Honey Moon is a beautiful young starlet, returned from the obscurity that followed her brief appearance as a child star. She has a thrilling voice, and the whole world is before her. She lives in a gorgeous home in Beverly Hills, a mansion that once belonged to Delphine Lacy. But it was not always this way for Honey. Quite the opposite.
She was born in Peoria. Her mother …
A year later, realizing that at last she had lost patience with the disappearances and reappearances of Franny Fuller, and believing that her readers were bored by her unending and unexplained acts, Mary Maguire wrote her last item about FF:
This reporter gives up. Studio officials will say only that she has broken her contract. Her Ex is in New York, reportedly. At Premium no one knows anything about her whereabouts. So what else is new? Phone at the Dolores Jenkins (once her stand-in-friend) residence is no longer connected. Last night at Romanoff’s I asked Brock Currier if he knew where FF was. He laughed and said: “Not me.” Later spotted him at the bar with young and beautiful Honey Moon on his arm.…
And Franny Fuller, she of many names for no person, she of mythic, yes, epic body and face, she who obsesses the nostalgic dreams of poets, athletes, and historians, who lives in the fantasies of old actors and young Arthurians, in the imaginations of painters and photographers, in the gossipy, yellowing files of newspaper morgues: What of her? What really became of her?
Let me tell you: She lingers in the umbra between celluloid eternity and the accident of mortality, caught and hung up like an escaping prisoner on the barbed wire of his enclosure. In her, the intimations of immortality are strong. She moves toward them, and then retreats, perched precariously on the swing of the unbearable present, and destined, like everyone else, for the final take on the shores of darkness.
About the Author
Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies, and Chamber Music, has been literary editor of the New Republic, a nonfiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1981 by Doris Grumbach
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7672-5
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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The Missing Person Page 23