The Missing Person (3 page)

She remembered his feet. He was a sheet-metal worker at the time he lived with them. He wore a hard silver hat and huge heavy gloves and a stiff, sweaty jacket to work. After he got home he took off his high boots and left them in the front room of their flat. Fanny could smell them when she passed them going to the john; they smelled like old vomit. His socks were stiff and black on the bottom. He'd leave them hanging off the tops of his boots and walk away, and then she saw his feet, always dirty. But the worse thing was, he had little pads of black hair on his toes, and the first and second toes on each foot were grown together with a yellow skin between them. She was terrified of those feet, and of him. He walked around the apartment barefoot, following her mother into the bedroom, leaving his boots there near Fanny's daybed in the front room, like a movie stand-in for him.

The way he behaved toward her convinced Fanny she was what he kept telling her she was—beautiful. She could never find anything to say to him when he called her that. Even then, she realized, she never knew what she was going to say until she said it—so it was hard for her to begin. Jerryboy talked mostly to her mother, about the men at work and his union. Her mother would tell him about the girls at the beauty parlor and the customers they “worked on.”

Jerryboy and her mother went out a lot together nights after work. Fanny would then have the flat to herself. She would lie on their bed with her knees pulled up to her chin, her arms clasping her legs, and stare, dreaming, at the ceiling. She would think about the Stars on the Silver Screen, about plucking her eyebrows and her widow's peak and whitening her hair like Harlow. In her daze she put on her mother's stockings with spider clocks and high heels like Carole Lombard wore and walked around like Joan Crawford, her hips swaying, into the lights of the Premiere, curvaceously (a word she had learned from the gossip columns) leaning toward a curly-haired young man on one side of her, and a slick-haired older man on the other. Both would gaze fondly down at her (they were both very, very tall) as they advanced through the cheering crowd into the theater. But she would smile brightly into a camera hidden in a velvet curtain.

The fantasy would spread. She saw herself, not Carole, not Joan, but
her
face, the side with the dimple, hers, Fanny Marker's. Then she would seem to cry out, “No, not that name, for Christ's sake! Laverne Lucienne! Melinda Courtney!” A beautiful name was what she was searching for, to go with the beautiful face she had and the Star she was going to be.

The dream went on and on. She forgot her mother, the beauty operator who gave marcels, shampoos, and perms, encased in her all-in-one, her large bosom flattened under a white uniform with short, pink-cuffed sleeves. Gone was Jerryboy at night or the somebody before him but just like him: “My roommates,” her mother called them. No webbed feet in the bedroom, no groans and grunts, no sounds like the bed straining and giving way, no more mysterious scuffling noises.

Fanny would walk, bathed in light that came down in pointed beams from the sky. The soft, black night would be shot through with those lights and where they came together, like in geometry, there she'd be, Melinda Lucienne, the vamp of all the Jerryboys' dreams. But way out of reach, untouchable, her dimple shining and shadowy like a crater on the moon. Silver, glowing: “Look at her up there!” the Jerryboys would scream.

She lived in her daze most of the time she did not have to go to school. It made her mother angry. Her mother was a big woman, with a face that had once been pretty but was now round and somewhat flat. She looked friendly. Her eyes creased when she smiled; she had what Perc was to call “laugh lines.” But Fanny knew they meant nothing. Her mother's face changed fast, and then she looked as though she were sizing Fanny up and would never come to any good opinion of her. She seemed always to be judging her and disliking what she saw. Fanny never noticed her using that look with Jerryboy or the other men she knew. But with Fanny it was always there. Jerryboy would say, “Leave the kid be.” Then her mother would look away from Fanny, and the laugh lines would appear again as she looked at Jerryboy. She'd throw her head back so her neck would seem thinner. But when she looked back at Fanny she'd be estimating again, like when the butcher held up a piece of lamb for her to see over the glass counter. She gave Fanny the same look.

Fanny had been named for her. Her father, whoever he was, left before she was born, so she was given her mother's whole name, like a boy gets with junior tacked on to his father's whole name. She became Fanny Marker, the daughter of Fanny Marker the mother. Mary Maguire liked this fact and put it into her book. She asked Franny if she missed not having a father. Franny said she didn't: “Hell, who is a father? Someone like Jerryboy but older, maybe?”

Franny told Mary Maguire that her mother always reminded her that she was both mother and father to her. Once, in the year before Fanny left home, her mother told her that again: “I am your mother and your father and you'd better not forget it.” Fanny laughed and said, “Sure, Pop,” and her mother, her eyes cold with fury, had slapped her face hard.

“Call me Daddy, Bubbles,” Jerryboy said to her once, and laughed.

“Are you a daddy, Jerryboy?”

“Somebody's, I'll bet,” her mother said in her low man's voice, almost like a growl.

“You can be damn sure,” he said and laughed again.

Jerryboy didn't like two Fannys in one flat, he said, so he called her Bubbles after a stripper he once knew. She hated the name, she hated him.

Arnie once told Franny he could remember every place he had ever lived growing up in Brooklyn, the beach at Far Rockaway he went to in the summer, even all the movie theaters he had gone to with his sister Saturday afternoons before the prices changed. He said that growing up had only one thing wrong with it. It had a way of dimming all those good memories, weakening all the happy rituals of going away and coming back and moving, all the relationships to places and neighborhoods of one's childhood.

Fanny could not remember one of the places she had lived in. They were all the same. She always had to sleep in the front room that had some kind of orangey or green wallpaper or flowers or something, and rotogravure photos of the Grand Canyon or New York at sunset thumbtacked up over the chesterfield. Once she had slept in the hall when the front room was too small for a daybed. For her, summers were no different from any other season, only hotter. But she did remember the men who had lived with them, a man named Fry who her mother called Frenchy, and someone called Benjamin something or other who her mother called Benjyboy. She seemed to like that kind of nickname, as though she were a mother to them all. She was older than most of them. After a while they'd leave, like sons do when they grow up. One she threw out when she heard the cops were after him for something he'd done in Syracuse.

But Jerryboy. He was the one Fanny remembered best. He picked on her whenever her mother stopped doing it, especially when she was daydreaming and not answering him. While she dreamed, she sucked on the ends of her hair. Jerryboy would sweep his hand across Fanny's face and pull the hair out of her mouth.

“Stop that, damn it.”

She would look at him and say nothing.

“Why do you do that, for chrissake?”

“Do what?” She moved away, thinking he was going to hit her, not knowing she was doing it.

“Eating your hair like that.”

“Oh that. I dunno. Do I do that?”

Then he'd laugh and suddenly come toward her and poke at her cheek with his thick black nail. Her mother was changing her uniform in the bedroom and putting on her pink wrapper, sighing as she unhooked her all-in-one. As she performed this ritual she had a habit of singing in a low monotone, especially when she was annoyed or angry, the song that was her favorite:
“It cost me a lot, but there's one thing I've got / It's my ma-a-an
.” Fanny could hear her in the bedroom singing it aloud to herself, and sometimes, with a stagy smile and her hands holding her breasts, she'd sing the lines to Jerryboy.

She looked out the door, the weighing look on her unsmiling fat face. Jerryboy stopped laughing and went into the kitchen for a beer. Fanny returned to her dreams. It was Mary Maguire who wrote about it as Frances Fuller's “Grimm childhood.”

Until Fanny was fourteen she didn't think too much about how bad it was. Utica really wasn't there for her, or school for that matter. When Mary Maguire asked her, she couldn't remember the names of the schools she had gone to, or the addresses of the flats they had lived in. They were just a series of places to lie down in and dream. She lived there, reading movie magazines and thinking about her face, and about the other beautiful people and the Great Things that had happened to them. She believed that these things would happen to her. She waited, her eyes shut against countless wallpaper patterns, curling linoleums, and the sounds from her mother's bedroom, for the events of her dreams to occur:
A sunburned jewboy in white flannels and saddle shoes comes into Schwab's Drugstore at Hollywood and Vine. She is there on a stool sipping iced tea. He looks at her and his black eyes widen and he comes over and stands, staring down at her as if he can't believe what he sees. Then he says, “Where've you been, beautiful?” In his breast pocket behind his four-pointed navy silk handkerchief is a little case. He takes it out and hands her a card from it. It says
,
JEROME ALLAN MARCUS
III Vice–President, Star Theatrical Agency.
And then Melinda Lucienne or Laverne Courtney thanks him and smiles her one-dimpled smile, mysteriously, like the sleeping beauty who'd known all the time about the prince coming to wake her. From then on her real life as a Star would begin
.

The day it happened Fanny had come home early, because she skipped school. When her mother left for the beauty parlor Fanny came out of the house with her and then walked around a while on the downtown streets waiting for the movie to open. That's what everyone called it, the movie: actually it was named the RKO Palace. At noon she bought the first ticket sold that day and went in.

She always remembered the movie they were playing that day, because it was the first time she had ever heard actors talk. To her infatuated sense Willis Lord and Catherine Dale were thrilling and beautiful persons, speaking poetry. She wanted to see
Their Marvelous Night
again, she had filtered out all the inexplicable noises that invaded the film and heard nothing but “I Love You” repeated again and again by the ardent hero to the pliant heroine in his arms. But she was afraid to stay later than two fifteen because her mother sometimes left work early.

She felt odd coming out of the theater in daylight. The dark stale air inside had seemed real. Now the outside daylight was a false, staged atmosphere. She walked the two blocks to the trolley stop, thinking how much the sun was like stage lighting. The movie's reality went on unrolling in her head, and she had the eerie feeling that she might meet Willis Lord or Catherine Dale at the stop, rather than the people who usually waited there.

On the trolley she fell into a dream. Enormous figures lived on the screen, breathing down at her in the dark. To her the actors and the characters were one; their screen love had united them in her mind. She imagined lovely rooms in which they must live, with windows to the floor and gauze curtains blowing in from a wind from the Sound or the sea. Or maybe they had an apartment on the top floor of a building in New York overlooking the Park, with a penthouse terrace full of potted trees and wicker chaise longues. From it they could see the river when they weren't in each other's arms gazing at the Park. The two actors loved each other gently, tenderly, exclusively, although there was another man who loved Catherine, hopelessly; they were all friends. All of them ate wonderful roasts but you never saw them chew their food. They made a great ceremony of mixing drinks in silver cocktail shakers, but they only sipped them and then put them down and forgot them.
They never did things like wash their hair or pick food out of their back teeth. They never had colds or went to the john or cut their toenails, or puked
, thought Fanny gratefully.

Riding past the drab, red-brick houses of Utica, Fanny conjured up again that
real
world and its people. She never gave much thought to the process of getting into this world because, in her daze, she was already there, even when she was at home eating at the card table with her mother and Jerryboy and listening to them argue about all the food he ate and the water he wasted in the bathroom. Fanny was a continent away from them and from the flat in Utica. She was Vilma Banky's houseguest in a duplex apartment. From a white boudoir she talked on a white telephone to Conrad Nagel.

That afternoon Fanny came home to an empty flat. She stretched out on the double bed in her mother's room and began to shape her eyebrows. She was trying to elevate the arch of the right one to look like Norma Shearer's. Supporting the magnifying mirror between her legs she bent her head toward it, holding the tweezers carefully so as not to pinch her skin.

Then she heard the key in the door and Jerryboy's heavy boots. He closed the door behind him, and she heard him turn the lock. She called out, “Mom'll be home pretty soon,” but by then he was at the bedroom door, smiling at her. She began to feel queer.

He sat down on the stool in front of her mother's chest of drawers which was draped with an organdy skirt so it would look like a dressing table, and began to unlace his thick boots with his dirty hands, not looking down at all but smiling steadily at her as he did it.

“Bubbles,” he said, “whatcha doin' home?”

“Nothing,” she said, “nothing. Why are you?”

“Nothing special. Laid off for a coupla weeks. Goddamn plant shut down. Whatcha expect after the banks conked out last month? Everything's gone straight to hell.”