The Missing Person (24 page)

“From now on, you wait outside,” said Arnold to Dempsey. “You create too much of a diversion. They don't listen to what we're asking about.”

Arnold and Reuben went into a few places that might once have been El Chico, Dempsey thought. It netted them nothing except a repetition of the Pico experience, unbelieving laughter at their description of Franny, and hasty retreat. During the process Arnold was beginning to feel somewhat vague and loose-jointed from the beers he drank at each stop. Dempsey was growing depressed by the fruitlessness of the search. Reuben was still exalted.

In the fifth bar Arnold wanted to stop and settle there. Demp, who knew they were getting nowhere, was willing. Reuben was adamant: “No. If Mr. Butts says she knows this neighborhood, there's a chance someone around here may have seen her.”

Dempsey admired the director's determination, but he was too tired after his flight and his sleepless night to go on.

“Try the Y,” he said. “She once said to me that she stayed there when she went away. I remember that. Although I never knew whether she was making it up or not.”

“Take the car, Reuben,” said Arnold, throwing him the keys. “We'll wait here for you.” He ordered two scotches without looking at Dempsey, who made no protest. He was ready for one.

Reuben picked the keys out of the air, aping the gesture of a skilled shortstop, and left. Dempsey and Arnold drank their scotches in silence. By the time the fourth round had arrived they had loosened up and begun to talk to each other, Arnold in the thick-tongued way he did when he had drunk a lot of alcohol, Dempsey with his usual exaggerated hesitancy in the presence of anyone whose intelligence awed him.

Absorbed and drunk, Arnold talked of himself and Fanny. Dempsey broke into his story:

“Why do you always want to call her that?”

Arnold reddened. “It's her real name, isn't it?”

Demp said: “Well yes, I suppose, but, well, not now. And she hated that name.”

Arnold nodded and went on with his narrative. When he stopped, Dempsey spoke only of Franny and rarely mentioned himself. Both of them reminisced in low, funereal tones, as though they had come together at a wake.

Arnold: “Beautiful, god, so beautiful. And so stupid. Profoundly, exhaustingly, everlastingly stupid. Couldn't find her way to the end of a simple, declarative sentence. A mind like Swiss cheese.”

Dempsey: “Yes, I guess so. But a lot of the time she seemed well, more distracted, by things inside herself that I couldn't know about, couldn't even guess about. So she didn't hear what was said or see much of what was going on around her. Maybe that's what made her seem stupid.”

Arnold: “I started out knowing she was sick. But I was idealistic enough to think I could help cure her. Now I know there's no way. If I stay around in this ward I'll catch whatever she has. I've got to get out.”

Dempsey: “Once she told me about a dream she had when she was a little girl. She was standing up in church somewhere, Utica, I guess it was, and she looked down and found she had no clothes on. I suppose lots of people dream things like that. Except it was queer. Franny said she felt glad, not embarrassed, that she had nothing on because she hated her junky hand-me-downs her mother made her wear and she knew even then that what she had underneath was really good, and now, standing there nude in church, everybody would know that, and she could feel good, it being all she had that was hers.”

Arnold: “God, I must have heard every damn dream she ever had. She told them to me endlessly. I understood most of them. They were obvious. They fitted the whole picture, they were composed according to classic psychoanalytic patterns, fully intelligible and easily interpreted. But in spite of this, she eluded me. I suspect it was because actually she wasn't there at all, not even when she was telling me her dreams. There was nothing …”

Dempsey: “Something would come over her in public. Her face would … well, as she smiled and bent her head to the side. Like a magic cloak, something in stories, something that made her shine, put a glow around her. Everyone, even people who didn't know who she was at first, would turn to look at her.”

Arnold: “Perhaps. It must have been a cloak like the one Medea sent to Creon's daughter. When she put it on, it consumed her in flames.”

Dempsey: “I never heard about that. But I remember I was never unhappy about that glow of hers in public. When I think of it now I remember feeling
big
in it, bigger than usual, lit up by her. Sometimes now I'm ashamed that it was that way. That wasn't what you'd call a noble reason for being with her. I took from her, a lot of times.”

Arnold: “Yeah. But gave it all back, I'll bet. In spades.”

Dempsey: “I suppose. But that look, that glow, that thing that Franny was …”

Arnold: “No one could ever give her all she asked for. Not if every able-bodied man of draft age in the Western Hemisphere marched in platoon formation through her bedroom, his pack loaded with gin laced with grape juice …”

Dempsey: “And zwieback. Is she still on that kick?”

Arnold: “And zwieback. And the contents of the U.S. pharmacopoeia.”

Dempsey: “I sometimes wish I'd tried …”

Arnold: “What?”

Dempsey: “To … talk to her more. I'm terrible at that. When she said nothing, which was most of the time we were together, I'd say very little. Now I think maybe my silence scared her. Maybe she needed to be told over and over about my feelings for her, all the time, and I could never do that easily. Or do it at all, most of the time.”

Arnold: “I'll tell you what she needed, chum. She needed you. Me.
All
of you.
All
of me. The whole boy. Nothing less.”

Dempsey: “Maybe. Even so, I could have …”

Arnold: “Even so, chum, I never will …” They spoke at once.

They talked on. Arnold drank more, Demp nursed his drink without any desire to finish it. The bartender wiped glasses with the end of his spotted white apron and began to sweep behind the bar. They paid no attention to these signals. Caught up in their absorbing autobiographies, they never noticed the tense of their revelations and their reminiscences as they talked to themselves and to each other: In their talk, Fanny-Franny had been dead for years.

Assaulting the fiery hill to free the enchanted princess, Reuben Rubin thinks only in the future tense. He drives slowly through dark, deserted streets, parking the flashy car in front of one dingy, late-night bar or restaurant after another, climbing out wearily to talk to the bartender or the proprietor (Moriarity, Pete, Jack, Fats, Ollie, Papa), climbing back in and setting off again slowly. He fantasizes about the possibility that her inviting look might soon rest upon him, the same look he had directed her to give to that clod, Brock Currier. He luxuriates in the thought that he might be the one to find her, to witness the sudden unfolding of her unbearably lovely smile lighting the air between them as she realizes his love, puts her hand in his, fires his whole being with shocks so profound (because of that touch) that he thinks he will never again be immune to any slight motion of hers.

He is incensed at Dempsey Butts and Arnold Franklin:
O ye of little faith
. To have had her, and let her go, and not to burn now, as he burns, to have her back, to allow themselves to be anesthetized against her pain by drink.… Reuben drives her car with great care as though it, too, were holy, or perhaps it is that there is something holy in the air within it. He is wrapped in his vision of her, he is Dante searching for Beatrice, Petrarch trying to find Laura.…

Then he remembers that Butts had said: “The Y.”

Reuben asks a gas station attendant who is locking up his pumps where the Y is. He gets elaborate directions which, in his enchanted state, he forgets completely when he arrives at “the first light.” He cannot remember whether he was told to go left or right there. Wandering in the direction he thinks he was sent, he comes upon the square yellow-brick building by accident, and feels elated at having found it. Only when he sees a handsome, well-groomed Negro in a brown straw hat come down the stairs and turn onto the street, walking with the jaunty, satisfied stride of someone who has just finished exercising, does he realize that this is the wrong Y.

The Negro stares briefly at him and then at the car as he passes. Reuben drops his eyes, ashamed of his grubby clothes in the presence of the immaculate Negro. Without energy to start the car again, Reuben sits, following the Negro's brisk steps as he runs to the corner and, in one nimble motion, leaps aboard a bus that has only half-stopped. The bus lumbers away down the avenue. Reuben reaches up to tighten his gray tie over the open button of his shirt, turns on the ignition, makes a slow U-turn on the empty street, and starts out on the last leg of his quest, to find the women's Y.

Franny Fuller had been missing for more than a week when Arnold Franklin gave up the search and went back to the East Coast. At the end he hadn't been looking too actively. His post had been home, maintaining telephone connection between the house and the searchers in various places in Southern California. He felt military and efficient, like a central figure in an underground alarm center during a war, yet removed from the action: estranged, objective, impersonal.

Even this peripheral activity had exhausted him. He did no writing. There was little need to do anything on the film he was involved with: shooting had stopped for some retakes. Besides, there were those Two Competent Young Men.… He felt he had to leave.

What purpose does all this shoring up
, he thought,
this sustaining of Fanny Marker of Utica, serve? Is there any chance that this
angst
she produces in all of us will enrich me, or will I end like a spendthrift wasting his capital? Will I wake some morning and find all my blood has been transfused into her? I believe I am worth saving. I am no longer sure she is, and if she is, that I can save her
.

Franklin's leaving California, if only for a few weeks, as he claimed, was taken by the other searchers as desertion. But he no longer cared. Suddenly he needed an injection of New York. He took the City of Los Angeles east to Chicago and, in the comfort of its lush parlor-car seats, worked on a draft of a new, long poem.

8

The Car

Ira Rorie worked for the State of California. A 4-F because of a childhood bout of rheumatic fever that left his heart uncertain, and because most of the whites with his education had been drafted and then commissioned, he settled into the kind of job Negroes rarely got: He was director of the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health, with “thirty people under me,” as he described it. He had his own office, glassed in and square-shaped like a giant ice cube. All around him secretaries and clerks typed, filed, interviewed clients.

At five o'clock when he finished work, he took his brown straw hat down from the coat tree in the corner of his cube, locked the confidential right-hand drawer, and walked through the room full of white assistants, saying goodnight right and left as he went.

Employees made it a point to smile at him because they disliked him, the Negro director of them all, separated from them in his glass cubicle. He was the boss, and this was offensive to them. Ira Rorie was well aware of their dislike so, when the chance arose at the end of a day, he would pat one of them on the head as she bent to shove papers away in a lower drawer or reach for her purse from under her chair. He knew he shouldn't do this; but it was the only concession he made to the feeling about him he sensed in the outer office. This breach of office decorum and racial separation informed them that he knew. Because of their dislike he would outrage their sense of his place in the scheme of things.

Rorie was always the first to leave the office, another prerogative he assumed to himself. This night was Christmas Eve, but he ignored the holiday. It was five exactly when he went through the revolving doors of the building. He walked across the parking lot full of Fords and Chevys until he came to the gas station at the end of the street. In the office of the station he nodded to Alex, who pumped gas on the day shift, and picked up his car keys from a hook over the cash register.

Alex said: “Merry Christmas, sir,” and Ira smiled pleasantly at the dark-skinned, elderly attendant.

Ira said: “And to you.”

At the back of the service alley was a shack where he kept his car. Walking toward it from the station he always felt the same intense rush of pleasure. He was leaving the office, the daytime source of his strength as a man, and going to the other, his home.

His car, a black 1940 Cadillac, of the kind that is rented for a funeral to bear the principal mourners to the cemetery, jutted so far out of its garage that the door could not be closed over its mammoth bumper. He stood looking at its shining rear end and then, as he always did, gave it a tender pat on its left fender, walked slowly along the sleek flank and opened the driver's door. Settled into the seat he murmured, as he did every evening, “Hiya, Jeanette.”

Ira Rorie had named the Cadillac for the movie soprano whom he greatly admired. On the screen she seemed to him slim and aristocratic, with a high, narrow nose and a grand, aloof look, a long, curving, horsy neck and the suggestion of inner warmth, like his car.

“Good ol' Jeanette,” he said, sitting low in her on a wicker seat close to the pedals because his legs were short. Delaying to push the starter and pull out the choke, he reviewed all the appurtenances of the mahogany-paneled dashboard, some of them standard, others wired into place by himself. The additions were distinguished by their knobs, which were gold-plated and elegant; the anonymity of their function made them look like the gold trimmings on a bandsman's uniform, bright and gaudy.

“Ol' girl,” he murmured, and pulled the ignition knob. Jeanette started with a low, even purr, making no protest, seeming to follow his instruction with pleasure, like a pliant girl being led in a waltz.
My girl
, he thought. He backed her out carefully, turned her in the narrow alley, and started out of Los Angeles through the flat, commonplace lower-middle-class houses. At a traffic light, as he approached the edge of the city and inched his way in the heavy traffic toward Beverly Hills, he took off his brown straw hat and pressed a button on the dashboard. From under it a small drawer moved out, almost at his hand. He took out a black cap and placed it on his head. With its visor of shiny plastic material, it made him look as he might well have been expected to look all the time, like a clean, well-appointed chauffeur on his way back from an errand for his employer. He put the brown straw hat into the drawer, pressed the button again, and watched with pleasure as it slid noiselessly back into its slot.