The Missing Person (27 page)

“‘I'll fix you. You'll go down the drain with the scum.'”

One night after dinner Franny said: “Do you know about dubbing?”

“No, what is dubbing, Beauty?”

“For sixteen weeks I worked on a picture called
The Deafening Silence
. Ever hear of it?” For a moment that night Franny forgot that she had not told Ira about her occupation.

“No, never heard of it. Didn't know you worked in pictures.”

“Well … well, this once I did.
The Deafening Silence
was a sweet name for that stinker because after we'd started it they made a lot of changes and wrote in a scene with me singing to this orphan boy that nobody in the story knew couldn't hear. Then they liked the way that bit came out so all through that tearjerker I was supposed to sing to him, and then later to some tramp friend of his who turned out to be the
hero
for god's sake, I forget how
that
happened. So well, after we'd been shooting a few days it was decided that my voice wasn't right for the songs or that I flatted too much or something. So they decided they would dub Janet Faith's voice in for mine. She's a girl at Premium who never makes pictures or at least you never see her in pictures but her voice can do anything. She sounds like people think
you
would sound if you were singing. Time comes for those scenes, and you get all dressed and made up and they do your hair, and they arrange the lighting on you, and then before they start shooting they brush you up again, and then Reuben calls for cameras and you make yourself go out there—and you
mouth
those words. Nothing,
nothing
comes out of you. They don't even let you sing the song while they're shooting so that it will seem right to you at the time because then, they say, the cords in your neck stand out too much or you breathe too hard or your gums and tongue show too much or some damn thing like that. The longer you do this, like those ventriloquists they had in vaudeville if the dummy is taken away from them, the worse it gets. Nothing comes out, you get to feel, because nothing is in there to come out. You could be dubbed by anyone who wants to speak through your mouth and you can't do anything to stop them. You know what it makes me think of? Of feeling awfully sick and leaning over and thinking now you're going to puke and nothing comes.
Nothing
. Nothing even to be sick with, nothing inside to come out. No voice, no song, everything gone. The deafening silence of Fanny Marker who lost her voice.”

For the first time in all the nights of confession Ira Rorie felt confused.

“Who is Fanny Marker?”

Franny hesitated. Then she said: “Oh, I forgot. That's my name.”

He wanted her to stay, he had begun to be used to sharing the space in Jeanette, he was over his first fears of her whiteness, and he loved making love to her. So the end of their time together, a matter of his irritation and her stubbornness, came as a blow to him. On the seventh day of her life in Jeanette, on the eve of the New Year, he got ready to go for his evening at the Y.

“Come on, Beauty. We need a bath. You and me both. To celebrate the New Year.”

He had been to the Y two days before but Franny had said then that she was too tired to go with him.

“Come on. Your Y is right near the one I go to.”

She said nothing.

He put his jacket on and, crouching, moved toward the door.

“Coming?”

“No, not this time.”

He couldn't make her come. He left in a fury, slamming the door. He was angry because he had a passion for personal cleanliness (He'd been called a dirty nigger too many times and once had overheard two white boys in the locker room at the pool say that all niggers stank. “You can smell them come into the room,” one of them said.) and could not bear the increasingly heavy effluvium in the car. He had relished its fresh, clean, newly painted odor, compounded of gasoline fumes and the camphor flakes he used in the crevices of the bed-seat cushions. But now he was conscious that the air in the car had become fetid. He blamed it on his unwashed companion.

When he came back at ten o'clock, exercised and scrubbed, shining with health, soap, and the natural gleam of his brown skin, she was gone. He made no effort to find her in the night. But he mourned her loss the more since all his anger had disappeared in the workout gym and the long walk back to the parking place where he had left Jeanette and Beauty. He had returned full of forgiveness. Long after her musty sour smell had left the car, and after he had discovered, from a magazine picture, who Beauty-Fanny Marker really was, he thought with longing of her occupation of Jeanette. He had loved that white girl, for all her lack of hygiene. He treasured the note she left under the lamp. It said:

Dear Ira: I am moving on. I liked it very much in Jeanette. You were very good to me. It was kind of you to have me.

First she had signed it
FANNY MARKER
. Then she scratched that out and wrote
BEAUTY
. The note was folded. On the outside, in a flash of memory about someone else rare to her, she wrote:

For
JACK JOHNSON

9

Return

Alone, every evening like clockwork, Dolores had two whiskey sours before dinner. It took her almost as long to make the drinks as to drink them, but she enjoyed the process. It was a positive action against the inertia that inhabited her daily life. Since the extended absence of her mother she had been able to introduce a new order into her life. But systemization of things, while it satisfied something in her, intensified her loneliness. Another person's presence, which might disrupt the strict regimen one laid down for onself, she thought, made one feel irritated, it was true, but also alive.

Approaching thirty, Dolores Jenkins was a large-boned, intelligent, somewhat hearty, comradely kind of woman who chain-smoked, pulling hard upon the cigarette and inhaling as though she wanted to feel the smoke deep in her abdomen. Her features remained good, but became somewhat bolder; she had the kind of face that, as it took on flesh, looked overemphatic on the screen. Having surrendered all claim to a career in pictures, she became capable, efficient, pleasant, and a very good friend to those who knew her. She kept a list of their birthdays (and those of her nieces and nephews in Alabama) and anniversaries, and a reserve stack of appropriate cards to send. Composed by the poets at Hallmark, the sentiments were accurate records of her true feelings. She cared about the health, happiness, longevity, and marital bliss of everyone she knew, especially after she felt she had lost her own chances for some of these things.

Accustomed by now to the thought that marriage and success were not a possibility in her life, this evening she discovered that the remaining gifts of fortune would soon elude her. She had spent the long, rainy New Year's Day with Reuben, Louis Fleischer's secretary, and two studio people reviewing the places everyone had already looked for Franny Fuller. They made plans for tomorrow, the final day of searching in the more unlikely hideouts—good hotels and resorts. The search had been hampered by the necessary secrecy that had surrounded it, broken down yesterday when Mary Maguire had become curious about the long holdup on the Fuller-Currier picture and came to visit the lot.

“That snoop,” said Charlene when she saw her and then, in an especially embittered mood, Charlene had given her the whole story. Clearly too good and too big to confine to her column, Mary had arranged with her editor for more space and then discovered her story on the front page with a big byline. The wire services picked it up and by now
FF DISAPPEARS
was on the front page of every paper in the country.

Dolores's morning had begun at seven when she reported, unnecessarily she was sure, for work, and did nothing. She spent the afternoon in strategy conference about the whereabouts of Franny and then, tired by the long and pointless day, she had come back to her apartment, to her two whiskey sours, while hot water ran into the tub. For her this was, like smoking, one of life's major delights. She sank into the steaming water, scented and softened by a bath oil she was fond of, with a sigh of pure pleasure.

Lying back in the water, and exploring her own flesh the way women do when they are alone and nude, Dolores discovered the lump in her remaining breast. After the first intense shock she found she was saying to herself:
Of course it is small, no bigger than a pea. I am fine otherwise. They will cut it away, a small white scar, that's all
. And then, like the second tremor of an earthquake, a lesser shock because one has already been warned by the first, she accustomed herself to the idea of the lump's fatality. Amazed at the rapidity of this accommodation she lay without moving in the bath, still savoring its warmth, the odors that rose around her.
Think about not thinking. Be the perfect stand-in if ever you were. Can I be the same now as I was before I found it? Am I on the way, this moment, to becoming a corpse? And have I already accepted it? Is my life on the thin edge when, just a few moments ago, it seemed assured, guaranteed?

Dolores climbed out of the tub, watching her footing carefully, and then smiling at her concern. Drying and powdering herself with a kind of extraordinary compassion, she thought, she felt like a devoted mother caring for her mortally ill child. She chose a robe from her closet, the one Franny had given her.
Poor lost Franny and her presents. And now her poor doomed stand-in
. She put it on, feeling clean, warm, soft, and on this side of death again.
How was it possible that this well-being could be threatened by a pea of a lump? Impossible
.

Then, all at once, as she lit a cigarette she was flooded, almost overcome, by the immensity of a new realization:
not to be, not to be ever again, in the gulf of timeless time that stretches out, that I am allowed to conceive of, but will not be allowed to live to know. Cut off, not in the unimaginable future, but soon. Now. Dear God, I will not think of it now
.

Dolores stood in front of her window, looking down at the street, smelling the sweet, live odor of baking bread, her fist pushed into her mouth, her teeth clenched down on her knuckles, like a small boy holding back his screams.
I
will not be dead. I will not be quiet and wait for it. I will scream and cry, everywhere, for everyone to hear. I won't stand still for this indignity to me. I will not allow the rest of the world to go on without me. I will be heard! Oh yes. Write a Letter to the Editor: I would like to protest, to take issue with, a lump in my …”

The scream that came from her, in revolt against the decree she had just received was heard by no one. Traffic passing on the street drowned her out. She thinks:
Perhaps I am not screaming at all, just acting a scream which will later be dubbed in, so that the real thing is lost or never existed
.

It was not a scream that sounded in her ears, but the telephone. It took a few seconds for her to realize this and to make the adjustment, to change the name of the sound from scream to phone ringing. When she reached the phone her heart was pounding with fright,
because of the noise? or has it been beating so furiously ever since the discovery of the pea?

“Yes?”

“This is Franny.”

“Franny?
Franny!
Where are you?”

There was a pause and then Dolores heard: “Can I come there?”

“Of course. But where are you?” This was the natural question of a weary searching-party participant who had covered every conceivable place in the past week. “Do you want me to come and meet you?”

“No. I'll come there.” She hung up before Dolores could say anything more.

Dolores dressed rapidly in slacks and a peasant blouse, thinking selectively about each article of clothing she put on, using total absorption to hold off the possibility of relapse into the abyss. Scrupulously she chose the color of the shoes she would wear, entirely involved in the act of accumulating matching articles of clothing.

She put on the coffee pot, measuring four cups of water and four level tablespoons of coffee with the exactitude of a diabetic approaching his dinner. Then she thought she might straighten up the parlor a bit and, when this decision was made, she felt restored. In the simple acts of housekeeping she had, temporarily, lost her terror. The voice of the lost Franny Fuller had stilled the fearful pounding of blood in her ears. She found herself singing:

I'd like to get you

On a slow boat to China

singing the lines over and over as if they were the only lines she knew, or as if they contained some significance that only repetition could establish.

“Slow boat to China,” she was singing when Franny rang the doorbell. Dolores almost pulled her through the door in her delight at seeing her. Once inside she hugged her, her cheek to Franny's, and found that her clothes were damp.

“Where in God's name have you been, Franny? Down a well?”

Franny laughed, her old, familiar, frank, charming child's laugh, instant and gay, so that the beguiling dimple shot into view, like a signal flag from a ship at sea hoisted to greet those on land.

“It's raining out.”

“But before that … all this time?”

“In a car. A huge Cadillac with a john and a kerosene lamp and copies of
Literary Digest.”

“By
yourself?”

“No.”

This was all she would say at first. They sat on the sofa and talked in the confidential way of the dressing room, Franny still in her damp work clothes which she did not want to take off.

Franny seemed interested in the saga of the search for her and paid attention to each detail, querying Dolores about who did
what:
“Did Demp really come from Florida?” She kicked off the slippers that Ira Rorie had lent her and revealed her dirty, sockless feet which she quickly drew up under her. Dolores ignored them, knowing better than to mention a bath to her. She offered her a cigarette. Franny said no thank you in her polite half-whisper. Dolores remembered too late that she did not smoke: for Franny cigarettes were too complex a pleasure, like driving a car. She could never manage the simultaneous possession of the pack, the matches, the ashtray, and all the little procedures of lighting, flicking, drawing, and blowing.