The Missing Person (28 page)

“Where was this car, Franny?”

“Everywhere.”

Fantasy
, thought Dolores.
She's not back yet
.

“I mean,” Franny went on, “he parked it everywhere, a different place every night.”

“He
who?”

“A man. Very, very nice. Negro. The car was a Cadillac. Huge. Black too. And, oh yes, I forgot, named for Jeanette McDonald.” Franny was speaking very earnestly now.

Off again. We won't work next week if she's like this
.

But Franny seemed well in other respects, calm, interested, open. Dolores asked her if she was hungry and she said yes she was famished. They brought a snack to eat from the coffee table, a mixture of refrigerator findings so miscellaneous and ill-matched that it suited Franny perfectly. She ate a little of each thing: chocolate icebox cookies, maraschino cherries in their syrup, hot-dog relish, herring, and pickled beets in a tangle of raw onions. Franny elaborated on her story, giving details about the meals she and the black man had cooked in the car and the things they had kept in their icebox. Dolores, convinced that each new contribution to the fantasy of the Car dangerously established its reality for Franny, tried to change the subject. She moved boldly into an idea she had been thinking about for a long time.

“Do you know very much about psychiatrists, Franny?”

“Sure. Arnie has one. And Reuben.”

“I have a friend—a stand-in for Delphine Lacy—whose father-in-law is one. He's a great fellow. If you would talk to him you might not … have these spells.”

“Do you mean going off, Dolores? I
want
not to have them.”

“And these … these dreams …”

“What dreams do you mean?”

“Oh, like the black car and all.”

Franny stared at Dolores, her smile gone, her eyes almost blank with surprise. The room seemed to grow warm with her consternation.

“Oh Dolores, was that a dream? Oh
no
. Was it, do you mean, like … a daze? Was it
really
only a dream?”

Dolores, moved by the beautiful child's plea, lit another cigarette and thought:
And Fate's insult to me, the mortal outrage growing in my breast, is that a dream too?

10

The Silent Star

The war had ended. Servicemen, too long exiled from their familiar and comfortable American world, cleared their footlockers and sea chests, discarding, with some regret, the glossy images pasted inside, photographs that had sustained them through long empty evenings. They returned, not to Betty Grable and Franny Fuller, but to their homely, more immediately gratifying wives and girlfriends.

Sugar, butter, and shoes reappeared in profusion in stores, minus the tag describing how many ration coupons were required for their purchase. Los Angeles was crowded with new cars, suddenly burst from the crop of Detroit factories like released prisoners. One saw their elated owners at the wheel, driving proudly into the suburbs. New things supplanted patriotism in the population. During the six years of the war, civilians had, secretly, felt unjustly deprived of the pride of purchase.

Hollywood welcomed back the drafted heroes, rewarding them with extravagant films starring the queens of Technicolor. Three theaters in the picture capital showed glittering extravaganzas with seductive names:
Cobra Woman, The Gayest Bachelor
, and
Diamond Horseshoe
. Their leading ladies were advertised to possess flaming passions and million-dollar legs. The restraint of the war years, in which curvaceous (a word Mary Maguire made current) stars were compacted into couturier-designed service uniforms, was over. Hollywood was in its proper business; the whole country was ready once more to relax into garish foolishness, the luscious world of colored glamour, the sounds of roaring, overpopulated musical spectacles.

Willis Lord had avoided all contact with the war. He smiled when his friend Delphine wrote to ask if he would like to celebrate the Japanese surrender together. His war had been fought, and lost, fifteen years before. This new, national victory meant little to him. But yes, certainly, he wrote to her, come at the usual time on Friday, the usual day. “We will celebrate together, whatever you wish,” he said.

Delphine arrived with provisions for dinner, bags full of the meat and butter so long rationed to civilians. They talked in their customary vein, of their dead friends, their failed comrades from the old days, the few acquaintances who had died in airplane crashes on their way to entertain the troops, or in combat, the deterioration in the quality of movies since the coming of sound. Delphine did not mention that her recent picture had been nominated for an Academy Award and that the Studio had assured her just this morning that she was likely to be named best actress for her role in it. Exhausting her prepared list of suitably dolorous subjects, Delphine fell silent.

It was then that she thought of one other matter, the news of Franny Fuller's disappearance from Hollywood and her suspension by Premium Pictures. Delphine said that, of course, she knew only what she read in the papers. But she elaborated with some details she had overheard on the set, about poor Franny Fuller's failed marriage to a poet who had just won the Pulitzer Prize.

“Who, exactly,” Willis asked, “is Franny Fuller?”

“A girl with little talent and a face and figure now very much admired,” Delphine said. She filled her glass, thinking that if she drank more there would be less for Willis. “She is strange, makes a practice of disappearing so that she can't be found by the Studio. Her last picture had to be suspended entirely because it would have cost too much to reshoot with another star.”

Willis smiled, his small, drunken smile that she recognized at once. “Do they know where she goes? Or why she disappears?” His questions were further evidence of his state; rarely did he ask for more details of her stories of doomed persons.

“If anyone does, I do not know about it.”

“How old is Franny Fuller?”

“Quite young, I should think. Or at least, very young to
us
. She once sent me a fan letter. It said something childlike: ‘I want to thank you for being such a wonderful actress.' Some small, sweet sentence like that. I was very touched.”

“I would be too,” said Lord. “My fan mail stopped some time ago.” The glass of wine slipped through his fingers, landed against his almost full plate. Amber liquid flooded the creamed chicken.

“I
am
sorry. Careless of me. Perhaps I've had too much. I'll lie down for a bit,” he said. “In the other room.”

With exaggerated care Willis walked through the stuccoed arch that separated the kitchen from the living room. He sat down gingerly in the exact middle of the couch. Delphine followed him.

“Do that, my dear. Rest a bit while I straighten up. Then we'll talk some more. Although not too much more …”

She almost said, “… because I have an early call,” but she stopped in time. It would not have mattered, she saw, as she pulled a mohair afghan over him. He was asleep, his hands folded on his chest in a touching gesture of drunken obedience or perhaps, she thought, of saintly resignation. She patted his bald spot and said to his sleeping head: “Goodnight, my Lord.”

Delphine had sold her famous old mansion and now lived elegantly in a vast apartment at the top of the Laurel Grove Hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard, not far from the ocean. Her housekeeper was a discreet, elderly Finnish lady who also served as her masseuse. In her frugal French way, Delphine worked hard and saved rigorously, wasting little time or money on Hollywood's frenetic social life, taking vacations abroad between pictures abroad. She answered none of her fan mail herself, turning over all but her lightweight foreign letters to studio secretaries who sent out typed replies over her forged signature. Sometimes, to the more caloric correspondents, they enclosed a glossy photograph with her signature in a white replica on the black edge of her gown. She made no public appearances, posed for no advertisements, and would not be interviewed by magazine editors or presidents of her fan clubs.

She thought of her work, and the place in which she lived, as a long but temporary apprenticeship to the life she planned to live, when, in one stroke, she would put motion pictures behind her, leave the apartment, the lot, and the city, and go to Paris. In Hollywood she felt in hiding, not only from fans who were both men and women, but from the people who worked with her in pictures and from those executives who wanted to extend their authority into friendships with their women stars.

Paris was her spiritual home. The day after retakes on a picture were finished, she would pack and be gone on the City of Los Angeles to New York where she would sail aboard the
Ile de France
. On the high seas, she spent her time alone in her stateroom, reading, and eating lightly from the elegant and elaborate display of dishes the infatuated chef sent to her. It was a time of purification, a conscious shedding of artifice, publicity, hyperpyrexia, and the flagrant, exaggerated sexuality of the American screen, all of which she thoroughly despised.

By the time the ship had landed in Le Havre, Delphine Lacy, beloved of vast audiences in America and abroad, symbol to them of barely suppressed sexual passion and intelligent, radiant beauty, felt renewed, refreshed. She retrieved her luggage, had it stowed in the trunk of a limousine she had ordered in advance in New York, and settled back in its darkened interior for the drive to Sèvres, and her reunion with the enduring love of her mature life, the French aristocrat and couturier, Alicia Desroches.

Delphine had been abroad two months. Willis Lord's loneliness, even after the softening effects of gin, began to trouble him. He played out unending games of solitaire, setting up an elaborate three-personed population for his card table. The man at his left bought the pack for fifty-two dollars from him. The man across from him bet against the player. Then he proceeded into the game, hoping always that he would not be able to win, disheartened if success seemed imminent. To work it out inhibited his playing further games that morning, or afternoon, interfering with his assigned day's work which was striving to win at solitaire, betting, competing against “the house” or the ghostly occupants of his table. All the time he was turning up cards, peering down nearsightedly to see them, matching red to black, and shifting piles from one declining number to another, he hoped for failure. Almost always, he lost.

On one of his infrequent walks to the grocery store (the liquor store delivered what he required three times a week) he saw on the rack a magazine with a highly colored photograph of Franny Fuller on the cover. He stood staring at the smiling face. Then, in a rare gesture of extravagance, he paid twenty-five cents for the magazine, called
Silver Screen
, and took it home with him.

Most of that day he sat in his easy chair, staring alternately at an unfinished game of solitaire and at the face of Franny Fuller, at her white chiffon evening gown falling from her beautiful shoulders, at her incredibly narrow waist and luxuriant hips, all photographed in primary colors.

Toward evening he felt himself moving, out of the chair and toward the opposite wall where there was a movie camera on a tripod set up and directed at him, in his easy chair.

“Other profile,” he said to himself, cranking the handle of the camera and peering into the eyepiece. He turned his face to the left, entering easily into his old habit of watching himself as he performed every small act of his days and nights, a saving voyeurism that gave him distance from his urge toward self-destruction. It kept him company. When he woke in the morning he turned in bed and smiled at the camera now moved to a corner of his bedroom, its tripartite legs spread out over his wicker hassock, behind it a knickered, capped cameraman who looked very much like him as a young man. In the silence of his first motions: getting out of bed, putting on his slippers, raising the shade at the window, moving into the bathroom, he could hear a director instructing him on the next step. The wonderful sound of direction over silent motion—the way in the old days the director would guide the actors without disturbing the progress of the quiet scene—spurred Willis into living through his day.

“Go to the kitchen now, slowly, don't rush it. Now over to the icebox, take out the eggs. With your right hand, so you don't interfere with the camera. The butter, then the eggs. Now turn to the left, smile a little at the prospect, walk, not so fast, not too fast, to the range.”

Willis would act as he was instructed to, knowing that the camera was recording the grace and precision of his every move. This day, and every other day in his life, was being filmed, edited, the film spliced, pieced, canned, and shelved, for his eternity.

Silence had not come upon him gradually. So great was his anger at sound that he lost the desire to speak to anyone for a period after his retirement, as though to do so would betray the validity of his hatred of talkies. He had his telephone removed, and when the tubes in his Stromberg-Carlson burned out he never replaced them.

Once his voice was silenced he decided on further withdrawals. He found his nearsightedness increasing. Through a blur he saw the familiar objects on his nightstand, his kitchen table, his reading stands and desk. But he decided, perhaps because he felt the eye of the camera upon him, not to have glasses made. In his retreat, using the invested returns of his once-lavish salary (he had won the battle with MGM over his canceled contract), the cameras grinding away and following him from room to room, Willis Lord resigned himself to living in the satisfying past, the edges of the distant landscape softened by gin, his circle of friends narrowed to Delphine.

But she was in Europe. He felt his loneliness even more keenly when he knew she was not in the city. The camera zoomed in upon him, too close, too constant. He heard the director's commanding voice, urging him out of his chair, but he had not drunk enough, or perhaps it was that he had drunk too much? to obey him It was dusk. He told the cameraman he was going to take a walk, he scooped some change from the top of his bureau, put on his wide-brimmed felt hat and the brown officer's coat he had worn in
Their Marvelous Night
, and went to look for a street corner that contained a telephone booth. At the door to his house he turned and instructed the cameraman that he would be back shortly. “That's all for now,” he said. The director raised his megaphone and shouted through it, “Cut!” The camera fell silent, and he was free to make his telephone call unobserved.