The Missing Person (11 page)

Demp was relieved. Outside, the reporters had gone to find telephones to report to their papers the story of the nonmarriage. Photographers stayed on to take pictures of the solemn-faced couple, and of the Butts family looking down in embarrassment at their shoes. The players formed a wedge and moved past them so they got shots only of their broad backs. Franny and the Buttses took a taxi uptown, after Demp had called the hotel to cancel the dinner. Franny had not known of this plan.

“Where shall we all have dinner?” Demp asked Franny in the cab, holding her two cold hands in his. The twins sat on jump seats facing them, the Reverend on the other side of Franny, and Tunney up with the driver behind the glass divider.

The Reverend looked glum. Even though it had been their lateness that had caused the cancellation of the ceremony, he felt there was something ominous, something very wrong about the whole event. His exclusion from performing the rites, by virtue of their decision not to have the ceremony in Prairie City, was a sign to him that all was not well with Demp and this odd, beautiful, silent girl, that this marriage was, somehow, an uncommon solution, a compromise, for an enigma the nature of which he could not plumb.

“Not awfully hungry, Demp,” Franny said.

“Oh, Franny,” he said, infinite pity in his voice. “Come on. Have some dinner with us.”

“How about Jack Dempsey's? I've heard a lot about that place,” said the Reverend.

“Great!” said Sharkey, bouncing in his seat.

“We can't eat there, Father,” said Demp gently. “People would mob Franny in there. It has to be somewhere quieter.”

The question was resolved by simple division. Franny and Demp went to the hotel suite he had reserved for them at the Astor with the promise that he would join his family later for dessert and coffee. The Reverend, by now hardened into disapproval of everything that was being done, and the other Buttses walked up Broadway to Jack Dempsey's. Demp called room service and ordered two dinners. But when they came, Franny was not hungry; he had to eat them both.

Demp entertained her by talking about his family. Of all of them, only the twins seemed to interest Franny. He had caught her watching them during the wait. That night she asked about them. “What are they like?”

“Like?”

“I mean, when they're together. Do they act like one person, the same person?”

Demp was nonplussed. “I don't know. Sometimes, I suppose. They're very much alike and sometimes you think you're talking to one of them and it turns out it's the other. Sometimes they tease and won't tell you who you're talking to.”

“No, I don't mean that. I mean—well, I don't know, I don't know how to say what I mean. Do you think that, when they look at each other they see themselves?”

“I don't know. Why do you ask that?”

“I guess because I think it would be wonderful to find out about yourself, how you look, what you're like inside, from your twin.”

“It would be strange, wouldn't it?”

“Oh no, Demp. Not if you really didn't know. It would be wonderful.”

Dempsey never made it to Jack Dempsey's.

Next morning, deeply contrite, Demp breakfasted with his father downstairs in the hotel's coffee shop. He outlined in great detail the plans for the day. “The magistrate will marry us this afternoon, he says. The team guys can't be there, but you will be …”

The Reverend did not reply.

“Won't
you?” Demp suddenly took fright at his father's silence.

“Demp, do you really think you can be happy with this girl?”

“I don't know, Father. But I love her. Right now I'm more worried about her being happy with me. I'm not so much, you know.”

The Reverend was looking at the sports page of the
Daily News
as he drank his black coffee. A headline said
NO HITCH FOR SOLID CITIZEN BUTTS, FF.
Beneath it was a picture of Franny and Demp leaving the waiting room. Demp was scowling into the camera, his dark tie pulled away from his opened shirt collar. Behind him the Reverend could see himself. Inexplicably, in the picture Franny was smiling, that charming, all-embracing smile that had succeeded on the screen because it seemed to include in its warmth every adult male in the world. It was the only time in that unfortunate afternoon and early evening, thought the Reverend, that he remembered her smiling. That smile, he thought, must belong to her profession, must be evoked only as a public thing.

“Why do they call you Solid Citizen in the papers, Demp?”

“Oh, you know. From a small town in Iowa, preacher's son, no drinking or smoking, all that. The guys on the team called me that, and some sportswriter picked it up.”

“Sounds sort of scornful, doesn't it, to you?”

“Well, I suppose it is, when you consider that most of the other guys live it up more and get into the papers a lot because they have fights with guys in bars who remind them of their fumbles or something. I'm kind of a quiet one, I guess, so that's how I come by it.”

“How about this marriage? Will you still be Solid Citizen Butts if you marry this movie star? And another thing I wanted to ask you. Doesn't she have any family, a father or a mother? Who are her people?”

“Hard to say, Father. I really don't know anything about them. She's never mentioned anything about them. But I love
her
. That's what matters. And she needs me.”

“Yes, I'm sure she does. But I'm worried about you and what will happen to you, Demp. Do you need her?”

“I love her. That's about it.” Demp stopped, and then he said, smiling ruefully at his father, “The only thing I regret about it all is, well, you know, I wish Maw could have been here.”

“Yes,” his father said, and folded his paper. “Well, what are we going to do now? Want to get Miss Fuller and sight-see with me and the boys? We've never seen anything here, and we thought we might like to go to the Statue of Liberty.”

“I'll ask Franny,” said Demp, without hope.

Upstairs, Franny was still asleep. On the floor on her side of the bed was a round pile of discarded clothes from the night before that reminded Demp of cow plop on the farm. He picked up the clothes and neatly folded each piece on the chair. Then he sat down on the bed and shook her gently.

“It's almost eleven, Franny. Do you want to go to see the Statue of Liberty with Father and the boys and me?”

“For God's sake, Demp.”

“Well, then, can you be dressed and ready by three? The appointment with the magistrate is for four. And someone from the Price Agency is camped in the lobby. He's mad as hops because you didn't let them know about yesterday. I mean, today.”

“Demp, don't leave me. I'll get up if you stay.”

“And bathe?”

“Okay, Demp. And bathe. If you stay.”

So he did. His father said nothing when he told them he couldn't come with them to the Statue of Liberty and that he'd meet him and the boys at three forty-five. At City Hall.

“Business as usual,” said Sharkey, the family joker. “We'll be there.”

They were all assembled on time, the magistrate, now flattered into good humor by the attentions of the press, was in a jovial mood. He told reporters he remembered something Bernard Shaw had said, and that he thought this marriage might well produce a prodigy, a beautiful football player or an athletic movie star. The reporters chuckled dutifully at this, practiced as they were at responding automatically to remarks by public officials, no matter how foolish.

Demp and Franny were interviewed by reporters as they left the magistrate's chambers. Demp talked nervously, in a tight voice, to hide Franny's silence. Yes, they were honeymooning right here in New York. No, he was not willing to say at what hotel. No, they were not returning to Hollywood after that, he had been given some time off, and so had Franny. Yes, Franny loved football and expected to come to as many of the games as she could before shooting started on
The Mermaid and the Shepherd
, her next picture. No, not before next month. They'd have a lot of time together first. Yes, the Reverend Butts (a gesture in the direction of his father who said nothing and stared at the cameras) approved of the marriage. Why else would he and his family have come east from Iowa to be at the ceremony? Yes, these are my brothers, Sharkey, Sully, and Tunney. Yes, named for the …

“And how does it feel to be Mrs. Butts, Miss Fuller?” Franny looked at the questioner. She appeared to be almost alseep, standing up, her eyes wide open.

“Who?
Oh, yes.” Bulbs flashed from all corners of the room. The photographers wanted shots of her with everyone. They caught her from every angle, expressions of delight, ordered by them, crossing her face and evaporating into her hair, her eyes remote but lovely, her upturned nose alive and tilted toward them like a sharp warning of some inner storm, her famous smile, with its unilateral dimple, flashing out instantly when called for and then retreating fast, like a timid pedestrian at the changing of the light.

The photographers were still taking pictures as the wedding party climbed into taxicabs. One of them caught Franny looking back, crouching to enter the cab, Demp's hand on her buttock. The picture was picked up and syndicated, with the story of the famous marriage, at the top of Mary Maguire's column in the
News
. Arnold Franklin, the poet whose first verse play had just been successfully produced on Broadway by the Atelier Company, sat in his study in New York reading the morning papers. He always went through two, the
Times
and the
Daily News
, for the great variety of language and rhetoric they afforded him, he said. He studied the picture of Franny Fuller and her new husband, Dempsey Butts, in the
News
. Outside his closed door, Arnold Franklin could hear his wife, Naomi, running the vacuum cleaner with her characteristically angry, jabbing movements. He stared at the celebrated face in the paper, and at Butts's incongruously placed hand, at the cab driver's leer and the mindless faces of bystanders on the periphery poking their faces into the camera's eye.
She looks like a small animal, caught, at bay. Going to ground but still trying to smile. What an incredibly beautiful woman
, he thought.

The first two years they lived together peacefully. Franny's career went well; she advanced to roles the Studio called “serious.” She played a French
cocotte
whose mother had been a madam, and who yearned for legitimate family life. She was wildly successful in her first musical, in which she danced (after weeks of tutoring by a New York choreographer) and suggested convincingly a song-and-dance star of
The Ziegfeld Follies
because another singing voice was substituted for hers.

The Depression, which had dampened the real life of most Americans, had an inverse effect on the films Hollywood produced. Sensing correctly that escape films, garish and lavish musicals, and lush costume dramas would raise the spirits of the population, Hollywood filled its already elaborate Palaces with palatial films. It was the Golden Era of the golden film capital, and Franny Fuller, its golden girl, served it well. Her pictures were touted as “pure escape”: In those depressed years that was felt to be the best that could be said for a movie.

The economic recovery did not make itself felt until war clouds had been gathering over the European continent for some years. Despite the deep isolationist feelings of most of his parishioners, Demp's father was urging upon the young men in his church, and his sons, the thought of service to the already involved neighbor to the north. Demp decided to offer himself early to the armed services of his own country, a move he knew would please his father. But for some reason he could never understand, he was turned down by all of them. Even the Air Corps, said to be accepting small, athletic men for the cockpits of pursuit planes, did not want him. Something about his kneecaps, they said, although he had never felt anything too much out of the way with them. He accepted their rejections cheerfully and went back to playing football.

For three years he tried to adjust two inflexible schedules so that Franny and he could meet at one coast or another. He lived with the fiction that if only these could be straightened out they would be able to return to the unvarying, tideless love they had enjoyed with each other at the start. Finally they were able to arrange a month, whole and uninterrupted, together.

In that month, he tried hard. They stayed at a friend's house in Greenwich Village. It was the Christmas season. Walking through Washington Square on cold evenings, having dinner at the Jumble Shop and the Colony (where the neon had failed on its sign and the blacked-out final letter gave them much hilarity) on 8th Street, going to movies and then to dingy Village night clubs: he was able to do all these things with her in relative privacy.

They were together for long periods of time without speaking to each other. At first Demp regarded this as an advantage, a sign of their closeness. Then he realized it was because they had nothing to say to each other. The silences began to make him uncomfortable. They spent less and less time out of doors, more days and nights in the back bedroom of their borrowed house, lying side by side on the bed in a strange communion that represented not marriage, not sex, not the concelebration of the rites of pleasure, but merely mutual peace. Outside the snow piled up in the streets and in the little backyards. A cold wind rattled the panes of glass in their windows. Demp felt like a refugee who had found a warm but temporary haven. “We are,” he told Franny, “orphans in the storm.”

Everyone else in the city seemed to be celebrating hectically. England was at war, and there was a feeling it was only a matter of time before it would be in these streets and bars.

Demp and Franny spent New Year's Eve in the bedroom. Franny sent Demp out to buy champagne and zwieback for a midnight snack. They took the binoculars to watch the parties in the neighborhood. One was in progress on the third floor of an apartment house on Charles Street. Sitting cross-legged on their bed, passing the champagne bottle back and forth between them, they watched four couples celebrating the New Year in a climax of hilarity. Three of the men, all of whom seemed to be wearing pajama tops in place of shirts (later Demp decided they were wearing Palm Beach shirts,
not
pajama tops), held a fourth man at the window's edge, his head hanging over the sill, a steady scream flowing from his O of a mouth, or so they thought watching through the closed window. They could hear nothing.