The Missing Person Page 10

  Soon after his graduation from college, Franklin married Naomi Kaplan, a woman of his own age. Naomi was a well-fleshed, passionless woman whose single concern since her girlhood had been to be married like her mother and her friends, and then to play in some game or other every afternoon of her life. She had no desire for children. But these things she disguised successfully from her “intended,” Arnold Franklin, who was dazzled by her pose that she was devoted to poetry, to the higher life of the mind, and to the underlying passions of the body that sustained it.

  After their marriage she cooked elaborate meals for herself and Arnold, not so much for his gastronomical pleasure as for her wish to report to her women friends the routines she employed and the menus she devised.

  Naomi possessed a certain measure of loving kindness which she reserved for her friends. Her husband bored her, indeed, almost immediately after the excitement of the wedding was over. Their wedding night ended the promises her body seemed to hold out for Arnold. She suffered his ministrations to her in bed as if she were enduring with heroic fortitude some kind of painful and undeserved trial. When a friend came by one evening to talk about the formation of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to go to Spain she found herself hoping that Arnold’s radical zeal would take him there, thus providing her with some relief from what she considered unusually heavy sexual demands. But it did not happen. Arnold’s poor eyesight would never have allowed him to take his place among American antifascists.

  Except for her progress reports to the “girls” at the bridge table, she had little sympathy for Arnold’s agony over his writing. She was impatient with his presence in the apartment all day long. She longed for private, feminine hours such as her friends had, time to do things to her body and her face without fear of his walking in upon her. Except for the luster of his name which was beginning to be well known in New York, giving her a certain amount of standing with the girls, and his income, sporadic but adequate when it did come, Naomi had no need whatever for him.

  She was astonished when he finally told her he knew this. It had never occurred to her that theirs was not a complete and ideal marriage. What was missing? she asked. What else was there?

  Arnold moved out of their apartment and took two rooms in the Ansonia, a Broadway hotel full of retired, elderly Jews living on their interest and coupons, and theatrical young girls involved in obscure productions in the Village from which they hoped for a break. In this hotel Arnold was a personage, treated with respect by the staff, stared at in the restaurant and in the aged elevators by the inhabitants who rented their rooms by the year.

  After a time Naomi reluctantly agreed to a divorce. Arnold submitted to the unsavory pantomime that the State of New York required as evidence of infidelity although he insisted that “it” be done in a midtown hotel where he wasn’t known.

  In two years he was free. Naomi returned to blessed singleness. She kept her married name, the apartment, generous support, and gave herself over wholly and with pleasure to her wide circle of women friends. She was an Amazon warrior who had won a costly victory over a male army, not one whit diminished by her losses. Now that she was free of him, Naomi displayed a compassionate affection for her former husband, like a proud owner recalling a prize horse from his stable that had gone lame after some major victories.

  She ate a great deal, grew fat, and began to play bridge for a penny a point.

  Arnold Franklin’s concept of life, formed from his parents and prolonged into his marriage to Naomi, was bourgeois. After his divorce he became more conventionally settled than ever. He insisted on being left alone amid all the orderly impedimenta of his literary life. He required a well-arranged, dusted set of rooms to live in, a neat periphery to the methodical and productive-looking confusion of his desk. He had abandoned the Ansonia and taken a house, which he sublet from a friend, on Washington Square.

  He told himself that his appetite was delicate and capricious and at the mercy of his creative urge. This was a fiction. The truth was, he got hungry three times a day at the same hour every day. He went without eating only when he had some strong, self-punishing point to make by staying away from the table.

  All his habits were equally compulsive and meticulous. He liked drawers full of rolled socks, starched shirts, and pressed undershorts. He told the woman who came in to wash and iron that he liked his handkerchiefs pressed into a folded triangular shape that slipped effortlessly into his breast pocket. He drank two cocktails before dinner, never more, and nothing, ever, afterward. He wrote during the same hours every day, and for this activity he required good light. His eyes were weakening and he wore bifocal glasses.

  He wrote always in the same manner, on legal-size, lined yellow paper with a carefully chosen English Parker fountain pen and blue-black ink. He did his best work seated in a particular chair, his pipe and tobacco at his right side and a hassock near his feet for those moments when he felt the need to stretch his legs.

  At four in the afternoon, after a short nap, in good or bad weather, he took a walk. He liked to leave the house and walk through the streets and mews of the Village at the exact time he knew the maid was in the process of preparing dinner. His excursions were timed to bring him back at six, when the evening meal would be waiting for him. Sunk in upon his poetic problems, he preferred dinner to be solitary and silent. Occasionally he broke this rule and invited a female friend to dinner. He was patient with what he considered her pointless chatter because he had trained himself, under his parents and Naomi, not to hear too much of it, and because it seemed a small price to pay for the subsequent evening’s pleasure in his bed.

  These occasions were always without pressure or strain. After a pipe, while she smoked cigarettes, they would talk a little, and then retire for an hour or so upstairs, after which he would offer to accompany the lady back to her quarters. Somewhat perplexed by the courtliness of his demeanor, she would nevertheless know it was time to leave.

  By eleven Franklin was always back in his study. The last hour of the evening was reserved for a reading of the day’s work. His invariable bedtime was midnight, a time determined by the amount of sleep he knew he needed and the length of the comprehensive news report on Hitler’s advances he listened to every night on the radio. Because his chest was deemed weak (as his mother always reminded him) and his eyes even weaker (this of course was a fact, not a maternal opinion), his connection to the war was only peripheral. True, his verse plays took on a slight patriotic coloration.

  But the order and precision of his working life remained the same. At five of twelve he arranged the yellow paper in a neat stack and filled his pen for the next morning, emptied the waste basket and the ashtray, and locked the doors. He removed the telephone receiver from its cradle, lowered every shade in the house, closed all the doors to every room, and settled down to sleep in a rear bedroom chosen because it was small and situated away from the noises of the Square. He disliked being disturbed during his undeviating eight hours sleep, in preparation for a routinely creative morning.

  Before he was forty, and as a result of the careful strategies of his life plan, Arnold Franklin was a success. He was one of the few American poets able to live on the proceeds of his published poetry and his successful verse plays. His poems were read and explicated in literature classes in universities; he lectured at Harvard, at Carnegie Tech, and at other smaller places. His critical writing, incisive, often witty, and always pitiless, appeared in the literary quarterlies and in the small magazines. He was always in demand to read his own work. Hollywood made inquiries about his availability to do the scenario of The Lemming. He said he was not in the least interested.

  Arnold’s poetry turned to the right with the years and took on a new, ethnic significance. The fierce, adolescent, proletarian sympathies of his college years that gave his early manuscripts such stunning force gave way, with the predictable nostalgia of maturity, to strong sympathy with the despairs and urban failures of his lower-class Jewish family. With thi
s new, stern honesty came the sympathies of his readers. Even secure, white Protestant admirers could identify with his compassion for the outcasts, the self-aware fathers and self-sacrificing mothers, guilt-ridden sons and overwrought daughters that populated his poems and plays. At the End of My Rope, his third and most successful play, achieved a perfect amalgam of social indignation and ethnic angst, all of it couched in highly charged free verse.

  His work absorbed all his days, and much of his nights. He was now concentrating on a new manuscript, a rendering of The Tempest into modern terms. He might have gone on this way, working almost all the time on Tempest Two, as he intended to title his long poem, had Lou Price not bothered him late one afternoon.

  All that day the writing had gone well. He was halfway through the revision of a very difficult section when Price rang the doorbell.

  “Are you home, Arnie?” he asked foolishly when Arnold opened the door.

  “What do you think? Decide for yourself.”

  “Okey doke. I’ll start again. Can I come in? It’s four thirty. Time to cover the keys and bring out a bottle and a coupla glasses.”

  “So it is. Sorry, Lou. I’ve been working and forgot the time.”

  Price inspected the living room, at the end of which was Arnold’s worktable and typewriter. “Looks pretty orderly for a day’s work.”

  “You can’t really tell. I hide the waste basket behind the couch.”

  Price was Arnold’s literary agent. He was one of those Lilliputian men who makes up for his lack of stature by an abnormal show of toughness. In truth, he was a man with an unusually gentle nature, devoted to the service of others. Arnold and he had been friends in college, where Price was business manager of the newspaper Arnold edited.

  “I work better when everything’s in order,” Arnold said. Price knew this. Even in the editorial office of the campus newspaper, before Arnold could put a word on paper, he had to square away everything on his desk, clean the typewriter keys, open and answer the mail, and empty the ashtrays. Sometimes he so tired himself out with essential housekeeping tasks that he had no energy left to write, a consummation Lou knew Arnold deplored but still could not prevent.

  Arnold mixed Lou a drink and sat down opposite him across the coffee table.

  Lou asked: “Doing anything tonight?”

  “Not that I know of. Thought I’d stay home, have Josie get dinner for me, and then work some more. You’re welcome to stay. She always cooks enough for the cast of Hamlet.”

  “Thanks, but I haven’t had dinner at home since I was fifteen. If the plate doesn’t come covered with a silver protector I can’t eat what’s on it.”

  “Tough. Maybe Josie can send out for one.”

  “But I wanted to tell you. I have a swanky dinner date and I thought you could join us if you want to.”

  Arnold said nothing. Usually when Lou Price let him in on a date it was because he had a middle-aged client, divorced, widowed, or maiden, he thought might be good for him. Lou considered human relations part of his job. A bachelor himself, with unconventional sexual preferences, he believed everyone else should be married, settled, and working at top speed and effectiveness to provide him with salable manuscripts at regular intervals.

  Arnold asked: “Another client?”

  “Not like that at all. This one is something. Franny Fuller.”

  “Surely you joke. Why would she want to have dinner with you?”

  Lou stretched his miniature legs before him. Most of the time he sat down, at tables, at his desk, or on couches, because he had an idea he looked taller that way. Actually, seated beside a larger man, he took on the appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “I knew her a long time ago, through an old friend, Eddie Puritan, who was her first agent. My agency handles her now. She’s here for a few days. I’ve been assigned to dinner detail tonight.”

  “How nice for you. I thought she had a husband. That football player.”

  “Not anymore. She’s between husbands, as they say out West. Mary Maguire says the rumor is she’s going to marry her new leading man, some boy actor, the one with the jug ears, what’s his name, the one who made a comeback when he was eighteen, yeah, Jimmie Lombard. But we haven’t heard anything about it back here, at least not from her. But whatever. Tonight, Arnie my pal, she’s mine, all mine. And yours.”

  Arnold was bored by Lou’s narrative, uninterested in the prospect. He wanted to get back to his desk before dinner. He drank off the last of his gin and stood up.

  “Thanks, but no thanks, Lou. I’ll sit this one out.”

  Lou handed him his glass. “That’s very rude. Aren’t you going to freshen up this dry ice?”

  In the end, loosened by two gins, his concentration broken, and realizing he was tired of his own company in that room all day, Arnold agreed to go. They took a cab uptown to pick up Franny Fuller at the Plaza. Lou went to the desk to call to say they were there. She said all right, she’d be right down.

  They waited in the lobby for almost an hour. Twice Arnold decided to leave, and started to, and twice Lou stopped him. Finally she came down. There was a great stir in the lobby. The patrons of the hotel, rarely interested in celebrities, stood in their places that evening to look at Franny Fuller as she came through the lobby from the elevator. Lou Price rushed to meet her. She smiled down at the small, immaculate man in patent-leather evening slippers, his thin, oiled black hair glistening, his voice high and delighted. Arnold stood back, watching.

  Lou said: “Franny, this is Arnold Franklin, the poet. Arnie, this is—”

  “I know,” said Arnold. “How do you do.”

  Franny Fuller continued to look down on Lou’s shining head as though to quell his excitement. Then she turned her astonishing eyes, blue, depthless, and childlike, unseeing yet all-embracing, shallow and still full of a curious nameless glow, on Arnold. They all stood there, the interested spectators keeping their distance, forming a vague rim around them. Lou Price tried to set Arnold and Franny in motion.

  “Let’s get going,” he said. Arnold did not move. He stood looking at Franny Fuller.

  “I hope you don’t mind my barging in on your dinner,” he said. He realized he was staring at her but he could not look away.

  Franny Fuller said nothing.

  “Let’s go,” said Price. “I have a cab waiting.”

  In the cab Franny Fuller sat between the two men. She looked ahead as though she were memorizing the driver’s number, name, and picture on the card hanging on the dashboard. Then she said flatly, “The poet.” Clearly she had never heard of him before.

  “Oh yes,” said Lou eagerly, launching into a long account of Franklin’s career beginning with what he seemed to consider its high point—their college friendship.

  They went to the Roof Garden. An enormous orchestra played Cole Porter and Irving Berlin songs under a roof painted with stars and light-blue, floating clouds. Men and women in evening clothes drifted over the waxed floor, appearing bemused by the music and their memories, reclining against each other in nostalgic languor.

  Arnold asked Franny Fuller to dance. She shook her head. He found himself wondering if all contact between them had dried up irrevocably when she heard what his profession was. He fell into a silence of his own, leaving Lou Price to carry on.

  Lou’s head turned to and fro, he babbled on, becoming the comic fulcrum of a conversation now reduced to monologue. He talked to Arnold about Franny’s new picture, about the prospects of shooting on location in Arizona. To Franny he jabbered on about what a great honor it was to represent a poet who might win the Pulitzer Prize some day.

  Arnold tried to catch Franny Fuller’s eye. But she was staring ahead, apparently unaware of him. Her blue eyes seemed to have clouded over and turned dense, fixed upon the water tumbler as if she expected it to overflow at any moment. He asked again, “Will you dance with me?” There was a long pause. Then, sounding far away, she said, “All right.”

  They had plent
y of room in which to move. People on the floor recognized her at once, her whispered name spread through the Roof Garden, and everyone on the dance floor stood back to watch her. They asked each other: “Who’s the man she’s with?” No one seemed to know. Astonished at how much more beautiful she seemed “in person,” as they said to each other, than on the screen, they remarked upon every one of her features, her piquant lost-child look, her deep single dimple, her flood of gold hair beginning at the sharp point of her forehead, and most of all, her splendid, swelling breasts that strained against the seams of her dress.

  No one looked very long at Arnold. People seemed disturbed by his anonymity, by his clear unworthiness to be dancing with Franny Fuller: He felt himself to be conspicuously balding, middle-aged, nearsighted, thin, weak-muscled. But with this beautiful girl in his arms he grew, suddenly expanding into bulky life, elevated to a new height, merely by his closeness to her. Having always thought himself to be Someone, he could not fathom why he should now suddenly have become fluent, graceful, handsome, commanding, filled out.

  They danced four numbers together. Once started Franny was unwilling to stop. She seemed unaware that people were leaving the dance floor and others had come to take their places. Arnold knew their dinner was waiting but was afraid to suggest they go back to their table. Later, he was to learn that Franny Fuller was oblivious to food. After the first bite of anything she would grow bored, and after a few mouthfuls, like a child, she would have to be reminded to go on eating.

  As they danced he became aware of an urgency in his body. She clung to him, hid her eyes in his shoulder so that only the cascade of blond hair could be seen by the onlookers. She moved willingly, even eagerly, to his direction, as though she had abdicated all will to him. He was leading. After his years with Naomi, who disliked dancing but took control of their movements when he had persuaded her onto the floor, and after his few attempts to dance with the arid, determined young New York actresses in his plays, this was a new, fine feeling.