The Missing Person (12 page)

“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 activity 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 belongings.

“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.

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.