The Missing Person Read online

  The bedroom became a kind of nursery, a timeless, encapsulated place where they lived as loving children. Slowly she seemed to recover. On the last day and night of their marooned life she talked more to him than she had before. They spoke of their careers, he told her about football.

  “If I’m still in it,” he said, ruefully.

  “Why wouldn’t you be?”

  “I’m AWOL from training camp for some time now.”

  “So am I, from the Studio. There’ll be hell to pay, I suppose. What day is this?”

  Demp had to go into the kitchen to study a wall calendar hanging behind the door. He came back. “Sunday,” he said.

  She was a week late, she said, reporting for the picture. But the first week didn’t matter that much. It was mostly fittings and briefing on the part, so she might just get away with it. From under her bed she fished out a soft, bulky book, her script, and began to look into it. The long separation from the world was almost over. Franny, Demp saw, was making small overtures toward return. He knew he was now free to speak of his own plans.

  “I can get a train out tonight, or a plane if I’m lucky,” he said.

  Her head bent over the typed pages, Franny seemed not to hear. It was always to be this way. As her need and her panic receded she became almost indifferent to her rescuer upon whom, hours before, her very survival seemed to depend. He told her he would be back as soon as his schedule permitted. He told her he loved her, and wanted to marry her. To all his sentences she smiled, as if from a long way off, and said nothing. She was at her white dressing table when he bent to kiss the top of her head, and he realized that she was revived and beautiful in the mirror image that he saw. It was the image he shared with the world. As he got to the door and looked back she was already absorbed in doing something to her face, staring intently at it in a hand mirror. She said nothing more to him. He called a taxicab from a phone in the entrance hall and then walked out to the hedge that surrounded the property to wait for it to come. Standing there in the same clothes he had put on a week ago, he felt curiously unlike himself.

  Waiting, he had a vision: he saw a row of starched white shirts on the hooks behind his bedroom door in Prairie City. The sight went away as quickly as it had come, and he was left on the road in Beverly Hills, asking himself questions: What had he done with this week? What would he tell the coach and the team he had been doing? For that matter, how would he explain it to himself, tomorrow? Whom had he saved? He didn’t know. And had he lost anything? He couldn’t tell that either. He had the disoriented feeling of an amnesia victim slowly groping his way back to identity.

  The taxicab came. To his long-cloistered eyes, the driver looked very strange, like a man from another planet. Telling him where he wanted to go was an exertion. The words sounded odd to his ears, as though he was using a language new to his tongue or moving painfully from long silence to unaccustomed speech.

  All the way to the hotel, where his bag, he discovered, had been left for him with the bell captain, to the station, to San Francisco, and then out to the camp, he could not shake the eerie feeling that he had returned from visiting the Wizard of Oz or the Castle of the Sleeping Beauty or the Enchanted Forest. Something almost supernatural had happened to him. But he told no one where he had been or whom he had been with. He accepted the disciplinary measures issued against him for his absence, and agreed without protest to pay the large fine. He had a sense that none of it had anything to do with him, Dempsey Butts, the lover of Franny Fuller.

  The feeling persisted. He found he was not listening to what his teammates were saying, he could not keep his mind on memorizing the plays the coach was trying to teach him, he was indifferent to the reprimands, the threats, the warnings. Three weeks later, certain he was sealing his fate with the Mavericks, at least for this season and probably forever, he asked for a few days off, went to the station, and took a train to Los Angeles. He was going, he felt, to rescue the enchanted princess in her castle, drawn back there by an invisible silken thread unwound from the magical ball she had given him.

  Franny had insisted on a New York ceremony because a series of personal appearances in that city brought her there and then too, she told Dempsey, “My life began there, with Eddie Puritan.”

  By the time eight of Demp’s friends from the team, players, two coaches, and one of the owners, had assembled downtown at City Hall, it was late in the day. Luxuriating in the numbers and the warmth of the whole gathering, Demp still was consumed with impatience. He sat with Franny, holding her hand, moving from one side of the bench to the other, afraid she would forget he was there. She seemed to have retreated into a daze, aware of what was happening yet not personally involved in it. Demp had the feeling he should be snapping his fingers before her eyes, if only he dared, to keep her awake. In the bleak, brown-painted waiting room which smelled of generations of anxiety and clothing, full now of other nervous couples dressed up for their own occasion, apprehensive and uneasy in these official, decayed surroundings, they all waited for Demp’s family to arrive.

  They waited for almost two hours.

  The room grew heavy with heat and breathing. The other couples had, one by one, disappeared into the room marked Chambers and not come back. Outside, newspaper reporters and photographers clamored for pictures of Franny and Demp, but the clerk in charge of the waiting room had been instructed by the city magistrate not to let them in. At five thirty the Butts family still had not arrived. By then Franny was in a state beyond recall. She sat far back on the inhospitable brown bench, her feet pulled up under her, her profile seeming to be carved along the silky grain of her fair skin and tousled blond hair, immobile, looking utterly terror-stricken.

  Demp’s family had been very late getting to New York on the train which had broken down for hours outside of Chicago. From Grand Central Station they went to the Astor Hotel to change their clothes and then had some trouble getting a taxicab to take them downtown in the rush hour. At quarter to six they arrived at City Hall, sweating in their unaccustomed dark suits and shirts and ties, silent with awe in the presence of the athletes and the Movie Star.

  Demp pulled Franny to her feet and led her over to his father. He had carefully planned the introduction and he carried it off well. “Dad,” he said softly, “this is Franny. Franny, this is my father, the Reverend Butts.”

  Franny whitened under her careful make-up. Demp had told her that his father was a minister, but until she heard him introduced the fact did not seem to pose any serious threat to her. She stared at him, her brilliant blue eyes wide.

  “Hi ya,” she whispered. Demp put his arm around her. “He’s a great guy, Franny. Don’t let him frighten you. He only looks serious because that’s his job.”

  Franny managed a smile. The Reverend Butts reached out to pat her shoulder but only managed to reach Demp’s arm.

  “She’s a real beauty, Demp,” he said appreciatively, as though Franny were not there. “You’re a real lucky fella. You’ve really called the right play this time.” Demp could tell his father had rehearsed the speech many times.

  Franny did not understand this reference. She had frozen again into an attitude of deep absorption, like a sentinel standing guard who dreams of being somewhere else. She held Demp’s hand, desperately trying to find a sticking point for her attention.

  “What time is it?” asked Demp of two of his teammates hovering just behind him, their eyes fixed on Franny. In his excitement Demp had forgotten to wear his watch.

  “About six.”

  “I’ll see if I can find the magistrate.”

  While Demp was gone his teammates and the Buttses stood around in small whispering groups, like people waiting for an overdue airplane. There was none of the usual premarital gaiety because, at the center of the room, wrapped in visible and impregnable solitude, the bride-to-be kept lonely watch, involved only in communicating with herself. Excluded from her notice, the men in the room did not feel free to approach her, could only look at
her, amazed and confused by her beauty, not comprehending her isolation. Like Blake, they questioned fearfully, not so much the object she was as the daring hand that had framed it, the imagination that conceived it. About her perfect body and face there seemed to be something infinite, mythic; it kept men at a distance. Not moving closer to her was a discipline they enforced upon themselves, a religious exercise. They were, they felt, in the presence of a great Mystery.

  Demp came back. “He’s not here anywhere. No one can find him. They say he may have left the building.”

  The magistrate had, a half-hour before. Furious at having been kept waiting for more than an hour and a half (the assigned appointment had been for four), especially by celebrities to whose whims, by virtue of the bench, he felt superior, he had clapped his black fedora to his bald head and stomped out, muttering to the clerk about football players and movie stars. Even an apologetic telephone call, when Demp learned where he was, would not bring him back. There was nothing for everyone to do but leave.

  After Demp’s half-hearted attempt to set a time for the next day, half-hearted because everyone but the Buttses and Franny knew that his teammates had to leave very early the next day for the West Coast, the players went back to their hotel. Demp had invited them all to a celebratory dinner at the Astor after the ceremony but, once they saw it was not coming off, they left the waiting room discreetly, without mentioning dinner.

  Demp was relieved. Outside, the reporters had gone to find telephones to report to their papers the story of the nonmarriage. Photographers stayed on to take pictures of the solemn-faced couple, and of the Butts family looking down in embarrassment at their shoes. The players formed a wedge and moved past them so they got shots only of their broad backs. Franny and the Buttses took a taxi uptown, after Demp had called the hotel to cancel the dinner. Franny had not known of this plan.

  “Where shall we all have dinner?” Demp asked Franny in the cab, holding her two cold hands in his. The twins sat on jump seats facing them, the Reverend on the other side of Franny, and Tunney up with the driver behind the glass divider.

  The Reverend looked glum. Even though it had been their lateness that had caused the cancellation of the ceremony, he felt there was something ominous, something very wrong about the whole event. His exclusion from performing the rites, by virtue of their decision not to have the ceremony in Prairie City, was a sign to him that all was not well with Demp and this odd, beautiful, silent girl, that this marriage was, somehow, an uncommon solution, a compromise, for an enigma the nature of which he could not plumb.

  “Not awfully hungry, Demp,” Franny said.

  “Oh, Franny,” he said, infinite pity in his voice. “Come on. Have some dinner with us.”

  “How about Jack Dempsey’s? I’ve heard a lot about that place,” said the Reverend.

  “Great!” said Sharkey, bouncing in his seat.

  “We can’t eat there, Father,” said Demp gently. “People would mob Franny in there. It has to be somewhere quieter.”

  The question was resolved by simple division. Franny and Demp went to the hotel suite he had reserved for them at the Astor with the promise that he would join his family later for dessert and coffee. The Reverend, by now hardened into disapproval of everything that was being done, and the other Buttses walked up Broadway to Jack Dempsey’s. Demp called room service and ordered two dinners. But when they came, Franny was not hungry; he had to eat them both.

  Demp entertained her by talking about his family. Of all of them, only the twins seemed to interest Franny. He had caught her watching them during the wait. That night she asked about them. “What are they like?”

  “Like?”

  “I mean, when they’re together. Do they act like one person, the same person?”

  Demp was nonplussed. “I don’t know. Sometimes, I suppose. They’re very much alike and sometimes you think you’re talking to one of them and it turns out it’s the other. Sometimes they tease and won’t tell you who you’re talking to.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean—well, I don’t know, I don’t know how to say what I mean. Do you think that, when they look at each other they see themselves?”

  “I don’t know. Why do you ask that?”

  “I guess because I think it would be wonderful to find out about yourself, how you look, what you’re like inside, from your twin.”

  “It would be strange, wouldn’t it?”

  “Oh no, Demp. Not if you really didn’t know. It would be wonderful.”

  Dempsey never made it to Jack Dempsey’s.

  Next morning, deeply contrite, Demp breakfasted with his father downstairs in the hotel’s coffee shop. He outlined in great detail the plans for the day. “The magistrate will marry us this afternoon, he says. The team guys can’t be there, but you will be …”

  The Reverend did not reply.

  “Won’t you?” Demp suddenly took fright at his father’s silence.

  “Demp, do you really think you can be happy with this girl?”

  “I don’t know, Father. But I love her. Right now I’m more worried about her being happy with me. I’m not so much, you know.”

  The Reverend was looking at the sports page of the Daily News as he drank his black coffee. A headline said NO HITCH FOR SOLID CITIZEN BUTTS, FF. Beneath it was a picture of Franny and Demp leaving the waiting room. Demp was scowling into the camera, his dark tie pulled away from his opened shirt collar. Behind him the Reverend could see himself. Inexplicably, in the picture Franny was smiling, that charming, all-embracing smile that had succeeded on the screen because it seemed to include in its warmth every adult male in the world. It was the only time in that unfortunate afternoon and early evening, thought the Reverend, that he remembered her smiling. That smile, he thought, must belong to her profession, must be evoked only as a public thing.

  “Why do they call you Solid Citizen in the papers, Demp?”

  “Oh, you know. From a small town in Iowa, preacher’s son, no drinking or smoking, all that. The guys on the team called me that, and some sportswriter picked it up.”

  “Sounds sort of scornful, doesn’t it, to you?”

  “Well, I suppose it is, when you consider that most of the other guys live it up more and get into the papers a lot because they have fights with guys in bars who remind them of their fumbles or something. I’m kind of a quiet one, I guess, so that’s how I come by it.”

  “How about this marriage? Will you still be Solid Citizen Butts if you marry this movie star? And another thing I wanted to ask you. Doesn’t she have any family, a father or a mother? Who are her people?”

  “Hard to say, Father. I really don’t know anything about them. She’s never mentioned anything about them. But I love her. That’s what matters. And she needs me.”

  “Yes, I’m sure she does. But I’m worried about you and what will happen to you, Demp. Do you need her?”

  “I love her. That’s about it.” Demp stopped, and then he said, smiling ruefully at his father, “The only thing I regret about it all is, well, you know, I wish Maw could have been here.”

  “Yes,” his father said, and folded his paper. “Well, what are we going to do now? Want to get Miss Fuller and sight-see with me and the boys? We’ve never seen anything here, and we thought we might like to go to the Statue of Liberty.”

  “I’ll ask Franny,” said Demp, without hope.

  Upstairs, Franny was still asleep. On the floor on her side of the bed was a round pile of discarded clothes from the night before that reminded Demp of cow plop on the farm. He picked up the clothes and neatly folded each piece on the chair. Then he sat down on the bed and shook her gently.

  “It’s almost eleven, Franny. Do you want to go to see the Statue of Liberty with Father and the boys and me?”

  “For God’s sake, Demp.”

  “Well, then, can you be dressed and ready by three? The appointment with the magistrate is for four. And someone from the Price Agency is camped in the lobby. He’s
mad as hops because you didn’t let them know about yesterday. I mean, today.”

  “Demp, don’t leave me. I’ll get up if you stay.”

  “And bathe?”

  “Okay, Demp. And bathe. If you stay.”

  So he did. His father said nothing when he told them he couldn’t come with them to the Statue of Liberty and that he’d meet him and the boys at three forty-five. At City Hall.

  “Business as usual,” said Sharkey, the family joker. “We’ll be there.”

  They were all assembled on time, the magistrate, now flattered into good humor by the attentions of the press, was in a jovial mood. He told reporters he remembered something Bernard Shaw had said, and that he thought this marriage might well produce a prodigy, a beautiful football player or an athletic movie star. The reporters chuckled dutifully at this, practiced as they were at responding automatically to remarks by public officials, no matter how foolish.

  Demp and Franny were interviewed by reporters as they left the magistrate’s chambers. Demp talked nervously, in a tight voice, to hide Franny’s silence. Yes, they were honeymooning right here in New York. No, he was not willing to say at what hotel. No, they were not returning to Hollywood after that, he had been given some time off, and so had Franny. Yes, Franny loved football and expected to come to as many of the games as she could before shooting started on The Mermaid and the Shepherd, her next picture. No, not before next month. They’d have a lot of time together first. Yes, the Reverend Butts (a gesture in the direction of his father who said nothing and stared at the cameras) approved of the marriage. Why else would he and his family have come east from Iowa to be at the ceremony? Yes, these are my brothers, Sharkey, Sully, and Tunney. Yes, named for the …

  “And how does it feel to be Mrs. Butts, Miss Fuller?” Franny looked at the questioner. She appeared to be almost alseep, standing up, her eyes wide open.