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

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.
    â€œHis 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