The Missing Person Read online

  “Who? Oh, yes.” Bulbs flashed from all corners of the room. The photographers wanted shots of her with everyone. They caught her from every angle, expressions of delight, ordered by them, crossing her face and evaporating into her hair, her eyes remote but lovely, her upturned nose alive and tilted toward them like a sharp warning of some inner storm, her famous smile, with its unilateral dimple, flashing out instantly when called for and then retreating fast, like a timid pedestrian at the changing of the light.

  The photographers were still taking pictures as the wedding party climbed into taxicabs. One of them caught Franny looking back, crouching to enter the cab, Demp’s hand on her buttock. The picture was picked up and syndicated, with the story of the famous marriage, at the top of Mary Maguire’s column in the News. Arnold Franklin, the poet whose first verse play had just been successfully produced on Broadway by the Atelier Company, sat in his study in New York reading the morning papers. He always went through two, the Times and the Daily News, for the great variety of language and rhetoric they afforded him, he said. He studied the picture of Franny Fuller and her new husband, Dempsey Butts, in the News. Outside his closed door, Arnold Franklin could hear his wife, Naomi, running the vacuum cleaner with her characteristically angry, jabbing movements. He stared at the celebrated face in the paper, and at Butts’s incongruously placed hand, at the cab driver’s leer and the mindless faces of bystanders on the periphery poking their faces into the camera’s eye. She looks like a small animal, caught, at bay. Going to ground but still trying to smile. What an incredibly beautiful woman, he thought.

  The first two years they lived together peacefully. Franny’s career went well; she advanced to roles the Studio called “serious.” She played a French cocotte whose mother had been a madam, and who yearned for legitimate family life. She was wildly successful in her first musical, in which she danced (after weeks of tutoring by a New York choreographer) and suggested convincingly a song-and-dance star of The Ziegfeld Follies because another singing voice was substituted for hers.

  The Depression, which had dampened the real life of most Americans, had an inverse effect on the films Hollywood produced. Sensing correctly that escape films, garish and lavish musicals, and lush costume dramas would raise the spirits of the population, Hollywood filled its already elaborate Palaces with palatial films. It was the Golden Era of the golden film capital, and Franny Fuller, its golden girl, served it well. Her pictures were touted as “pure escape”: In those depressed years that was felt to be the best that could be said for a movie.

  The economic recovery did not make itself felt until war clouds had been gathering over the European continent for some years. Despite the deep isolationist feelings of most of his parishioners, Demp’s father was urging upon the young men in his church, and his sons, the thought of service to the already involved neighbor to the north. Demp decided to offer himself early to the armed services of his own country, a move he knew would please his father. But for some reason he could never understand, he was turned down by all of them. Even the Air Corps, said to be accepting small, athletic men for the cockpits of pursuit planes, did not want him. Something about his kneecaps, they said, although he had never felt anything too much out of the way with them. He accepted their rejections cheerfully and went back to playing football.

  For three years he tried to adjust two inflexible schedules so that Franny and he could meet at one coast or another. He lived with the fiction that if only these could be straightened out they would be able to return to the unvarying, tideless love they had enjoyed with each other at the start. Finally they were able to arrange a month, whole and uninterrupted, together.

  In that month, he tried hard. They stayed at a friend’s house in Greenwich Village. It was the Christmas season. Walking through Washington Square on cold evenings, having dinner at the Jumble Shop and the Colony (where the neon had failed on its sign and the blacked-out final letter gave them much hilarity) on 8th Street, going to movies and then to dingy Village night clubs: he was able to do all these things with her in relative privacy.

  They were together for long periods of time without speaking to each other. At first Demp regarded this as an advantage, a sign of their closeness. Then he realized it was because they had nothing to say to each other. The silences began to make him uncomfortable. They spent less and less time out of doors, more days and nights in the back bedroom of their borrowed house, lying side by side on the bed in a strange communion that represented not marriage, not sex, not the concelebration of the rites of pleasure, but merely mutual peace. Outside the snow piled up in the streets and in the little backyards. A cold wind rattled the panes of glass in their windows. Demp felt like a refugee who had found a warm but temporary haven. “We are,” he told Franny, “orphans in the storm.”

  Everyone else in the city seemed to be celebrating hectically. England was at war, and there was a feeling it was only a matter of time before it would be in these streets and bars.

  Demp and Franny spent New Year’s Eve in the bedroom. Franny sent Demp out to buy champagne and zwieback for a midnight snack. They took the binoculars to watch the parties in the neighborhood. One was in progress on the third floor of an apartment house on Charles Street. Sitting cross-legged on their bed, passing the champagne bottle back and forth between them, they watched four couples celebrating the New Year in a climax of hilarity. Three of the men, all of whom seemed to be wearing pajama tops in place of shirts (later Demp decided they were wearing Palm Beach shirts, not pajama tops), held a fourth man at the window’s edge, his head hanging over the sill, a steady scream flowing from his O of a mouth, or so they thought watching through the closed window. They could hear nothing.

  “Like a silent movie, isn’t it?” said Franny. She seemed exhilarated by the spectacle. “What do you think they’re doing?”

  “Depends on how drunk they are.”

  “You know, Demp, what I like about binoculars? The feeling that just for this moment, this once, someone else is being looked at. Secretly, you know …?”

  Demp nodded. He had never felt burdened by the eyes of the fans upon him. But he was one of many on the field. He could understand how the one always watched would feel relieved at being at the other end of the glasses. The binoculars trained on the party, he saw one of the women, her face a massive grin, pour brown-colored liquid into the open mouth of the upside-down victim, who was now gasping and coughing. He passed the glasses to Franny.

  “Look. I think they’re trying to drown him.”

  “What’s that they’re pouring? Scotch?”

  “Can’t tell from here. Might be. Or tea. Or even urine.”

  “Oh, Demp, how terrible. Make them stop.” Franny began to tremble, still staring through the glasses at the window across the way.

  “I’m just joking, Franny. Come on over here and lie down with me. Forget about them.”

  He should have known better, he thought, than to have made that joke. He had learned that threats of catastrophes like this poor drunk being half pushed out of a window would not move her, but she would be badly shaken by an indignity like urine in the mouth. Oceans fascinated her, but she was terrified by small ponds in which the water came to her knees. In anonymous crowds she felt safe; a single man staring at her threw her into a panic. They spent the rest of the night lying chastely together, his arms around her while she shook or sobbed in terror. Finally she fell asleep, and he watched the pale, flat New York City dawn break over the patch of river.

  At the start of the new year, after a month borrowed from each of their lives, their peeping-tom existence ended. The games played themselves out in the borrowed house while Demp learned there was no way to rescue and re-create the good moments he remembered from their past. Franny went back to California to work on a new picture and Demp went with her, for a while. There were still two months before training camp opened.

  But he could not stand waiting for her in the house with no provision for physical activi
ty except a strangely shaped swimming pool that had a crack in it somewhere and would begin to empty itself soon after it was filled. After a week in Beverly Hills Demp took a train across the continent to Florida where he had arranged to meet some teammates for a month of fishing and conditioning. Their marriage was over. He was relieved to be returned to the world of men and movement, away from the static, isolated, sleepless world of Franny Fuller Butts.

  Of course (Demp always reminded himself later) no one, after the first hour of their marriage, ever called her that. That was the least of his concerns. He knew he would never be able to equal her luster. But he never worried about her name. No one in his right mind would tie a name like Butts to this fragile, luminous child. Sure, it served a quarterback pretty well. It was even kind of descriptive. It was fine for a blunt, down-to-earth preacher of the Open Bible Church and his sons. But neither the name nor the concept of marriage which it represented could be fastened for very long on the golden child-woman he had married.

  Demp had been in Florida for three weeks when the telephone rang in his hotel room at three o’clock in the morning. He struggled to the surface of a sleep so profound he was almost drowned in it to hear Franny whisper: “Come right away, Demp.”

  “What…? Oh, Franny. What’s the matter? What happened?”

  “I can’t tell you now, but you’ve got to come over here.”

  It must have been the time, or the idea of the distance between them that she had diminished by her command “come over here,” or perhaps the week at the Keys he was looking forward to, that made him, for the first time since he had taken her home three years ago and stayed almost a week, say, “No, Franny, I can’t come now.”

  “Demp. No fooling this time. Please come.” He heard the sound of urgency in her whisper, but to his ears it was an old sound. He thought it probably signified that she had run out of grape juice, or couldn’t find her eyebrow tweezers, or was getting panicky because her supply of Benzedrine or Seconal or Nembutal was almost gone. Or Olivia her housekeeper was on her day off. So many similar emergencies of the same magnitude, at five in the morning or at one in the afternoon as he was leaving the locker room for the field, had made him jump and run, at once, as if he had been called upon to rescue a child from a burning bedroom. This time, he thought, he would not go, he could get away with it, just this once.…

  “Are you coming now, Demp.” The question came across the wires in the form of a flat command. This made him angry.

  “No, Franny, I just can’t. Won’t you tell me what’s the matter?”

  “I can’t tell you. Just come here.”

  This time the sorceress’s whisper, the siren’s song, did not move him to act on her behalf. He said goodnight to her and, thinking he would call later in the morning to see if he could get her to tell him her “troubles,” he went back to sleep. In the morning when he called, Olivia answered. She said Franny was not there. Demp was angry, asked no questions. Before Olivia had a chance to say anything else he hung up. He decided she must have gone to work, having recovered from her night’s panic, and he put it all out of his mind.

  A week later he read in Mary Maguire’s column in the Miami Herald: “… FF is resting quietly in Cedars of Lebanon. Exhaustion, the Studio says, although rumor hath it that it may be more serious.… Ol’ Johnnie Barleycorn, maybe?”

  Demp made rapid airline arrangements and got back to the Coast that night. At first he had trouble getting in to see her. A hospital guard had been stationed on her floor, another guarded her door against the persistence of the press. For once he decided to pull his weight.

  “For Christ’s sake, get out of my way. I’m her husband.”

  Franny lay in bed in a room banked with flowers, like a funeral parlor. The odor of slowly dying roses was overpowering. She was curled up in the center of the bed, wormlike, a small inert curve, almost a remnant of humanity, her wild, bright hair the sole evidence of life. He knew she was awake, he could tell, as he stood beside the bed, by the slight motion of her eyeballs under her blue eyelids, but she would not respond when he spoke to her.

  “Come on, Franny. It’s Demp. Talk to me. What happened?”

  She would not talk to him, or even look at him. She had cut the thread of her confidence in him and he could not get her attention. He left the room and waited near the guard until her doctor came and then went back into the room with him, standing in the corner so that Franny would not see him. He watched the doctor take her pulse and blood pressure and listen to her heart, while she lay inert and unresponding. Then the doctor reached under the covers, pulled her legs apart and bent down to look. From where he stood Demp could see nothing of Franny but her yellow hair and the raised white sheet.

  The doctor asked Demp to step outside for a minute. In a few moments he came out, shut the door behind him, and walked over to Demp. He was a hearty, sleek-looking young man with thick-lensed glasses.

  “I’m Doctor Harry Bernstein,” he said, thrusting his hand toward Demp. “Of course, I know who you are. I saw you play last year when I came to Frisco for a convention. You’re …”

  “Yes,” said Demp, too preoccupied to notice the doctor’s outthrust hand. “What’s wrong with Franny—uh, Miss Fuller. I mean, Mrs. Butts.” There was something slickly professional about the doctor that confused Demp. He wanted only to hear what he had to say and then to be rid of him. “Tell me.”

  “She’s had a miscarriage.”

  “You’re kidding. How could that be? You must be wrong.”

  Doctor Bernstein’s professional manner did not desert him. His medical training had elevated his view of himself to a place where he disliked at sight anyone who challenged anything he said. But he valued Franny Fuller as a patient and he was determined not to antagonize her husband.

  “A miscarriage,” he said firmly, and then added, “Of which she was not entirely innocent.”

  “You’re a liar, a damned liar,” said Demp. He clenched his fist in Doctor Bernstein’s face. “Why would she do something like that?”

  The doctor held on to his temper with difficulty. “You’re her husband, Mr. Butts. You ought to know the answer to that better than I do. Let’s call it what I think it was then, fella, shall we? A self-induced abortion. Like that better?”

  Demp abandoned any attempt to make sense of what Doctor Bernstein was saying. “I don’t understand,” he said lamely. “I didn’t know.”

  “So.” Suddenly the doctor knew he had the lead. With Demp in this bewildered state, attack in any direction would succeed. “I had a bad time, believe me, patching up what she did, or had done to her, I don’t know for sure which. I couldn’t question her properly without letting every damn scrub nurse and intern in this hospital know about it. Not to mention those reporters hanging about, gasping for news every time I go past them, like fish out of water. So, fella, just say thank you, Doctor Bernstein, for doing what you did. Don’t give me any trouble. And don’t ask a doctor questions if you’re not prepared to hear the truth.”

  Demp started toward the door to Franny’s room. Over his shoulder, but not stopping, he said in a flat tone, “Thank you, Doctor Bernstein, for doing what you did. And Doctor, don’t call me ‘fella.’” He opened the door to Franny’s room and went in. She was still stretched out in the same position but now her eyes were open. He knelt beside the bed.

  “It’s okay now, Franny. You’ll be okay.”

  “Go away, Demp.”

  “Okay, I will. But I’ll be back. Tomorrow.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  What she meant was that she didn’t want him anymore, even tomorrow. So much she said. Under the simple words he heard the rest, that he had failed the last of her impossible tests and was to be permanently expelled from her presence, like the peasant boy who loses the princess because he ignores the witch’s instructions. He kissed her gently on the forehead, told her he’d see her soon, and went back to the house to gather up his belo
ngings.

  “Goin’ on another trip, Mr. Butts?” asked Olivia.

  “You might call it that, Olivia.”

  “We’ve been havin’ a time out here, you know that?”

  Demp wanted to know the details, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Large, brown, motherly Olivia, her fat arms folded over her heavy bosom in the classic posture of maternal judgment, didn’t wait to be asked. She launched into a lengthy narrative which muddled together Franny’s discovery of her pregnancy, her frantic calls all over the country in an effort to locate him because she had lost the itinerary he had left with her, and Olivia’s discovery of her in bed in the morning.

  “Blood everywhere, see, and Miss Franny lyin’ there, starin’ at me, not sayin’ nothin’. I do wish you’d been here, Mr. Butts, it was awful, jess bloody awful.”

  “Yes,” said Demp, turning back to his packing.

  “When we expect you back, Mr. Butts?” she asked, carefully. Olivia understood that the details, which she could not resist supplying, had wounded Demp.

  “When Mrs. Butts calls me,” said Demp, “I’ll come. I’ll leave a copy of my schedule.”

  But she never called.

  4

  The Poet

  Liberal, sensitive, intellectual, critical, cynical: Arnold Franklin had always managed to subdue the forces around him to his master plan for himself. At CCNY he had edited the newspaper on his own radical terms while still able to compel the admiration of the college’s administration for his competent student journalism. At the very moment he was being praised by the president he attacked him as reactionary and niggardly. Franklin published his own poetry in the college literary magazine; his work was much admired and emulated by other poets among the students.

  Franklin combined his poetic talent and his fondness for the theater by writing plays in verse. His first, The Lemming, written two years after college, was performed by the Atelier Company. It was violent, radical, shocking, and vaguely poetic. But he possessed what Lawrence Langer, in writing about the play, called a genuine sense of theater. The Lemming did so well on 14th Street that it was moved to Broadway. On the Sunday of the week before the Broadway opening, in The New York Times, Franklin lashed out at Broadway audiences who were, he wrote, the natural enemies of what his play had to say. The article was a brave piece of defiance, effectively bolstering both his ego and the ticket sales at the box office.