The Missing Person (7 page)

“I did not see her that I remember. But I often think of Novarro in
A Lover's Oath
…”

“His real name,” said Willis very carefully because his lower lip was growing stiff with drink, “is Ramon Samaniego, did you know that? He is Mexican, not Spanish as his fans think.”

“So? I did not know. But I thought he was very good in
Ben Hur
. Wonderful. Like some Roman divinity.”

“You know why, Delphine?” Willis asked, very quietly.

“Because he was a very fine actor?”

“No. Because that picture was
silent
. He was a foreigner, and had only a little English, but it did not matter. Because the stupid noises of animals and chariots and whips, and the inane chatter of gladiators and charioteers could not be heard. The idiot noises of lips sucking together during a kiss were not audible. Only the vision of a beautiful and brave man. Braver and bigger than the people in the theater knew themselves to be, showing them what he felt with his face, his body. That was what acting was. Now actors talk, and lose their divinity, their
elevation
, in a way. People who have to listen cannot dream, cannot be entranced, cannot
worship.”

Delphine was silent.

“Silence brought us into a kind of communion. Noise—sound—talk—destroyed it. I am relieved to be away from all that—pandemonium, that acoustic hell.”

Delphine said: “Is the chicken too heavy with sauce?”

Willis did not answer. He was thinking of the carnivorous fate of Marie Prevost, his mind moving in its customary backward and vertical shuttle.

He picked at his food. His left hand held his wine glass and he took long draughts from it, then filled it quickly.

“Try some of the good chicken, my love,” Delphine said, ignoring the shaking of his hand as he poured from the bottle, and the little spots of color that appeared on the linen mat at his place. “You must eat more, you know, to stay well.”

He smiled at her, a look full of gratitude for her presence in his kitchen. She could not bear to insist further about the food. He said nothing, and stopped pretending to eat.

Delphine said: “Lord, dearest, do you remember that we said we might go to that late party for Premium's star, what's her name, I don't quite recall. It might be pleasant to get out a bit. Would you care to go?”

Willis said: “I don't think so. You go, love. I won't mind.'

But neither of them went. They sat together in companionable silence, she consoling him with her calm, beautiful eyes, he enveloped in his satisfying haze of gin and the distant past.

In three years Franny Fuller had become “a household name,” Mary Maguire said. The Studio had long ago legitimized the affectionate diminutive bestowed on her by Eddie Puritan; the formal name was abandoned.

Franny's acceptance by the American public was immediate and enthusiastic. A man named Simon Sais (“Ha! ha! Hard to believe, huh?” he wrote to Franny) who had a fleet of trucks in Duluth, Minnesota, started a Franny Fuller Fan Club within six months of her first big role. Soon there were twelve such clubs around the country, the largest in Venice, Florida. Corresponding secretaries of the clubs wrote every month to their Star, informing her of their activities (picnics for members and their families, exhibitions of their scrapbook collections, matinee parties to her pictures, and evening gatherings to display and trade still photographs of Her). A fan club member in Martinsburg, West Virginia, wrote to her every day including Sunday: the press of letters from him, and all the others, and the requests for autographed photographs, became so great that the Studio hired a full-time respondent to handle Franny's fan mail.

Her appeal at the box office surprised even the Premium moguls who had planned a modest advertising campaign to familiarize the public with her person. It never proved necessary. After her first appearance, at the announcement of a new picture, lines would form, stretching like a great snake around the Loew's Premium Theater in New York, the Criterion in Chicago, the Paramount in Los Angeles. Theaters in smaller cities and towns would be crowded with customers long before the trailer, the Pathé News, and Popeye the Sailor had played themselves out.

Simon Sais wrote to inform Franny that
Tess
had been held over at the Zenith in Duluth for seven weeks. “We go every Monday night—twenty-two of us—and we are so glad they have not changed the show.”
Silver Screen
, usually the springboard for rising stars, responded to Franny Fuller's exuberant, paying fans by a series of articles on her, each one outdoing the other in extravagant praise and almost wholly invented biographical detail.

She was famous. Premium Pictures was enriched. The secret lives of her fans were expanded by their dreams and fantasies, their social lives by club gatherings to talk about her and gaze at her glossy image.

As Franny flourished, Eddie Puritan declined. His face seemed very gray to her. He was always tired. He would fall asleep in a chair in her living room and sleep there all night. When he woke in the morning his eyes were brighter, his face a little less pale. He smiled at himself for having conked out that way, his wide, boyish, red-gummed smile full of gold flashes. He said, “See ya, Franny,” and went home to sleep some more.

A doctor told Eddie he ought to go to the hospital for a checkup. When Franny went to visit him there (gathering together all her courage because she was afraid of hospitals and the sight of people suffering), he was lying in bed with a tube in his arm and a pipe running into his nose. Something was dripping into his vein from a bag hanging over his bed. Lou Price was there, dancing around the bed like a frenzied dwarf, making feeble vaudeville jokes, trying to distract Eddie. Once outside Eddie's room Lou's manic look became strained. He told Franny that Eddie had cancer in his blood.

“His chances are not too swift,” he said, and looked as if he were about to cry.

Once more Franny went to visit Eddie in the hospital. She saw very little of his smile or his flashy teeth. Then, in a few weeks, he seemed to get better. When he was able to leave the hospital, Lou took him back East. Franny was working on location in Nevada at the time and did not get to say goodbye to him. He died in New York, very fast. She never forgot him, even when her fortunes had moved far ahead of where Eddie Puritan could have taken them. Her mother had lowered her, judged her, found her no good, worth nothing. Eddie had seen beyond her outside and persuaded her of her own substantial reality. True, in his eyes she had caught an appraising look, but it was different: there she read his high estimate of her. She believed it, for a while.

All that came to an end with Eddie's death. After he was gone, she felt herself slipping, changing, falling. Pictures of her satisfied men's needs, the fumblings in the dark for the secret things men do, alone and in private places, to themselves and to women. The shadow of herself up there belonged to their fast, wet dreams. Men stuck her picture in their footlockers or tacked it to the inside of their college desks or pasted it up on locker doors in gyms. She imagined she could see her name
FRANNY FULLER
painted across their hot eyes as they looked at her. She was this thing men paid to look at in the dark, their hands twitching at the sight of her, their peckers stiff against their flies as they watched her shadow.

Eddie Puritan, the agent of her real self, the slate man for all her inner takes, was the only one (until she married Dempsey Butts) who thought Fanny Marker was a person. And then, of course, he died.

3

The Quarterback

Dempsey Butts was a small, lithe boy, twenty-two years old when the Mavericks of San Francisco signed him up a week after his graduation from college. He hated the idea of going to the West Coast to play football. But he had a passion for the game, and for the kind of solid, out-of-doors, sweaty, hard-pounding, second-effort life he'd been taught to respect by his family who were his other passion.

Dempsey's father, Wendell Butts, was the Sunday minister of the Open Bible Church. The rest of the time he farmed three hundred and fifty acres of feed corn and soy beans, and raised Poland China pigs. Dempsey's mother, Emma, was a pale, slight stick-figure of a woman with a wilted, unsubstantial body and a thin, kindly face. She had been the daughter of a farmer and was now a farmer's wife as well as the mother of four loving and athletic sons. The effort of all her roles seemed to have consumed her until there was little left but her small bones, her pale wrinkled skin, blue-veined legs, and gallant, fragile, bony head. She was less a woman than a sparrow. She fixed on her husband and her “boys” the bright beam of her birdlike eyes, loving everyone she looked upon. They in turn respected and loved her frailty and treated her like a convalescent.

The Buttses' two-story white-frame house with a green veranda that went around three sides, ringed by a few wind-breaking cedars, three silos, and huge white barns, was the hub of their lives. There they slept and ate, played and rested, joshed, and said their prayers, and asked their little concerned questions of each other: “Better today, Maw?” and “Still hungry, son?” and “Any of that plum jam left?”—loving queries that made up most of their conversation.

Their house was a good quarter mile from their nearest neighbor's; it was, somehow, self-sufficient. Everyone in it felt surrounded by warm, protective mutuality. Before the family settled down at any gathering, for a meal or on the veranda in the early evening where they told jokes or made farm plans or gossiped about the outside world, they went through a familial ritual of checking: “Did the bandage hold right on that ankle, Tun?” or “Pretty good day for drying, Maw?” and “Find the stuff from the store I picked up, Dad?”

The Buttses were selfless, generous people who took on a strong sense of themselves only when they were assured of the wholeness and safety of those around them. The climate of the family was masculine, all the children being boys. This accentuated the small flame of frail femininity that burned in Emma Butts. Gentle, almost humbly ashamed of their gross good health and utile bodies, the Butts men hovered over their wife and mother, carrying things for her, waiting on her, in a synecdoche she always used when describing them, gratefully, to the neighbors, “hand and foot.”

None of the Buttses smoked or drank, or much liked to read or even listen to the radio except for the baseball games. Now and then on a Saturday night they all went to the movies in Prairie City. But their pleasures were primarily muscular. They loved large meals, working outdoors, throwing footballs to each other or kicking them against the barn. They walked because they loved the feel of dirt roads and grassy paths under their feet, they talked to each other about the farm, the seasons, sports, they drove farm machinery with the pure pleasure that came to them from visible accomplishments and physical activity.

They loved the rituals of Sunday, the early-morning baths, clean clothes, ties and shined shoes, then the wait on the veranda for Maw. The five men drank their coffee together there, standing up, looking out at their fields. There was the customary jostling for position when Emma came down looking like a bird shining after a rain, to go to church with them. On her narrow neck she usually wore oversized white plastic-ball beads. They made her look pathetic and proud.

“Spiffy. You look right spiffy,” said the Reverend Butts to his wife.

Three sons squeezed into the back seat and one sat over the hump in front to give Maw enough room. The church was only a few miles away, in the heart of Prairie City, and had a congregation of sixty-eight. Wendell Butts read the service and then delivered his sermon. It was full of down-to-earth sense, his “grass-roots approach to living and to God,” as he liked to call his sermons. His figures of speech were invariably athletic. He talked of his service to God as being “God's waterboy.” Fighting against sin he described as “keeping the opposition, the Devil, off balance.” A happy family was an “all-star team.” To the farm families and the townspeople in the congregation these football references proved Butts's acquaintance with the wider world. He made them feel cosmopolitan and knowledgeable. To the Buttses listening with admiration from their pew, his allusions combined in a cheerful, Sabbath way, their abiding interests: God, football, the farm, and their love for each other.

The Buttses took great pride in good health, even Emma who had little of it herself but seemed to be sustained by the display of theirs. The oldest son, Dempsey, was small for a football player, with much of his mother's gentleness about him. He was “wonderfully put together,” as she said. He could run very fast and for long distances without getting winded. His muscles lay smooth and flat on his bones; nothing bulged as he moved. Everything in his body operated with the greatest economy. Even his corn-silk hair lay flat against his narrow head. His brother, Tunney, younger by a year, was taller, darker, and much heavier, like their father, with unusually wide shoulders, long arms, and broad, capable hands. “A born pass receiver,” his father said when Tun had attained his full growth and had already decided he wanted to be a farmer.

The young twins, Sully and Shark, loved football too, but their eyes were poor, the result of an overlong stay in incubation after their premature births. Good-naturedly, but without much hope, they ignored their handicap and practiced incessantly, throwing the football between them as they walked to high school or helped their mother in the truck garden, priding themselves at not hitting any tender shoots. “Old Four Eyes” they called each other: their names were Sharkey and Sullivan. In his youthful passion for the sport of boxing, Wendell Butts had bestowed the names of famous fighters on his sons, “as incentive,” he told them later, “to work hard and be good, really good, at something.”

As was only fitting for the eldest, Dempsey was the first to obey. During his last year in high school he led his team to the state championship; the University in Iowa City sent a scout to see him play. He was offered a scholarship to the University of Iowa which had a coach known throughout the middle west for building winning teams.