The Missing Person (30 page)

Until that moment, and throughout the years of her successful column jammed with the best recorded gossip of her time, Mary Maguire had remained unmoved by her subject matter. Now, on this hot July noon in Hollywood, on the eve of the decade of the fifties in which the Capital of the Stars declined into a provincial city, she was stopped, overwhelmed by the realization of her long, hard passivity before the spectacle of human need. Her familial duties past, she had circled her journalistic subjects like a buzzard, watching them, writing about them, waiting for more, avid for the rest of the story.…

Tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her face.
Have I cried since my mother's funeral?
she wondered. Now her profound sorrow astounded her. Tears flowed faster, her throat closed as though an interior flood had started at the back of her mouth. She put her head down, her ear against the bank of keys on her typewriter. Pity overcame her, she felt drowned in it, reducing her, for once, to the troubled, fearful, uncertain, and mourning creature of her columns.

After a few minutes she raised her head, wiped her face dry, pulled her chair to the table, rolled a blank sheet of paper into her typewriter and began to write:

Honey Moon is a beautiful young starlet, returned from the obscurity that followed her brief appearance as a child star. She has a thrilling voice, and the whole world is before her. She lives in a gorgeous home in Beverly Hills, a mansion that once belonged to Delphine Lacy. But it was not always this way for Honey. Quite the opposite.

She was born in Peoria. Her mother …

A year later, realizing that at last she had lost patience with the disappearances and reappearances of Franny Fuller, and believing that her readers were bored by her unending and unexplained acts, Mary Maguire wrote her last item about FF:

This reporter gives up. Studio officials will say only that she has broken her contract. Her Ex is in New York, reportedly. At Premium no one knows anything about her whereabouts. So what else is new? Phone at the Dolores Jenkins (once her stand-in-friend) residence is no longer connected. Last night at Romanoff's I asked Brock Currier if he knew where FF was. He laughed and said: “Not me.” Later spotted him at the bar with young and beautiful Honey Moon on his arm
.…

And Franny Fuller, she of many names for no person, she of mythic, yes, epic body and face, she who obsesses the nostalgic dreams of poets, athletes, and historians, who lives in the fantasies of old actors and young Arthurians, in the imaginations of painters and photographers, in the gossipy, yellowing files of newspaper morgues: What of her? What really became of her?

Let me tell you: She lingers in the umbra between celluloid eternity and the accident of mortality, caught and hung up like an escaping prisoner on the barbed wire of his enclosure. In her, the intimations of immortality are strong. She moves toward them, and then retreats, perched precariously on the swing of the unbearable present, and destined, like everyone else, for the final take on the shores of darkness.

About the Author

Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including
Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies
, and
Chamber Music
, has been literary editor of the
New Republic
, a nonfiction columnist for the
New York Times Book Review
, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1981 by Doris Grumbach

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7672-5

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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