The Missing Person Read Online Free Page B

into the kitchen for a beer. Fanny returned to her dreams. It was Mary Maguire who wrote about it as Frances Fuller’s “Grimm childhood.”
    Until Fanny was fourteen she didn’t think too much about how bad it was. Utica really wasn’t there for her, or school for that matter. When Mary Maguire asked her, she couldn’t remember the names of the schools she had gone to, or the addresses of the flats they had lived in. They were just a series of places to lie down in and dream. She lived there, reading movie magazines and thinking about her face, and about the other beautiful people and the Great Things that had happened to them. She believed that these things would happen to her. She waited, her eyes shut against countless wallpaper patterns, curling linoleums, and the sounds from her mother’s bedroom, for the events of her dreams to occur: A sunburned jewboy in white flannels and saddle shoes comes into Schwab’s Drugstore at Hollywood and Vine. She is there on a stool sipping iced tea. He looks at her and his black eyes widen and he comes over and stands, staring down at her as if he can’t believe what he sees. Then he says, “Where’ve you been, beautiful?” In his breast pocket behind his four-pointed navy silk handkerchief is a little case. He takes it out and hands her a card from it. It says , JEROME ALLAN MARCUS III Vice–President, Star Theatrical Agency. And then Melinda Lucienne or Laverne Courtney thanks him and smiles her one-dimpled smile, mysteriously, like the sleeping beauty who’d known all the time about the prince coming to wake her. From then on her real life as a Star would begin .
    The day it happened Fanny had come home early, because she skipped school. When her mother left for the beauty parlor Fanny came out of the house with her and then walked around a while on the downtown streets waiting for the movie to open. That’s what everyone called it, the movie: actually it was named the RKO Palace. At noon she bought the first ticket sold that day and went in.
    She always remembered the movie they were playing that day, because it was the first time she had ever heard actors talk. To her infatuated sense Willis Lord and Catherine Dale were thrilling and beautiful persons, speaking poetry. She wanted to see Their Marvelous Night again, she had filtered out all the inexplicable noises that invaded the film and heard nothing but “I Love You” repeated again and again by the ardent hero to the pliant heroine in his arms. But she was afraid to stay later than two fifteen because her mother sometimes left work early.
    She felt odd coming out of the theater in daylight. The dark stale air inside had seemed real. Now the outside daylight was a false, staged atmosphere. She walked the two blocks to the trolley stop, thinking how much the sun was like stage lighting. The movie’s reality went on unrolling in her head, and she had the eerie feeling that she might meet Willis Lord or Catherine Dale at the stop, rather than the people who usually waited there.
    On the trolley she fell into a dream. Enormous figures lived on the screen, breathing down at her in the dark. To her the actors and the characters were one; their screen love had united them in her mind. She imagined lovely rooms in which they must live, with windows to the floor and gauze curtains blowing in from a wind from the Sound or the sea. Or maybe they had an apartment on the top floor of a building in New York overlooking the Park, with a penthouse terrace full of potted trees and wicker chaise longues. From it they could see the river when they weren’t in each other’s arms gazing at the Park. The two actors loved each other gently, tenderly, exclusively, although there was another man who loved Catherine, hopelessly; they were all friends. All of them ate wonderful roasts but you never saw them chew their food. They made a great ceremony of mixing drinks in silver