Read Online The Missing Person by Doris Grumbach - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œTry 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