I knew the school would be open. Some people liked the editing room because it was largely empty, and in the studio one could play with the lights all night long. Students—in their way of working and in their enthusiasm for movies—were often those there late at night. So I did my best to act as if I was at home there. I had guessed the theater would be empty. And the precious 16mm print we had been seeing was still in its can.
“You ever seen Citizen Kane?” I asked her.
“What's that?” she said.
“There you are,” I said, as if addressing the inner voice of history. “They haven't heard of Citizen Kane. Greatest film ever made.”
“Who's in it?”
“Orson Welles, who also made it and inspired it and was only a few years older than us at the time.”
“Will I like it?” she asked. Her smile curled up the corners of her mouth. She had cottoned on that her only chance was to tease him rotten.
“If you give it a chance, you will.”
“You going to tell me what to look for?”
“Not a thing,” I assured her.
She put on a demure face. “Can I sit next to you and cuddle?”
This was a predicament and a test of a critic who felt as I did for her. All at once I felt shy: I wasn't quite sure that she hadn't been ready to be taken to some alley and propped up against the wall in some Gone With the Wind of necking. But I wanted to impress her and guide her. She saw my face fall into impossible arguments, and she wanted the fire back.
“It's all right, I'll watch it if I can hold your hand.”
I studied her, sitting in the tiny theater. She was more beautiful than she had been in my dreams for three or four years. “I love you,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” she whispered, and almost helplessly, chronically, she reached out for me. “Keep kissing me, won't you?” she said. “I love it.” I kissed her and I noticed that her breath had gone as flat as her voice could be. But then she breathed in and it was honeyed again, and her tongue was wrapped around mine.
“Is it really a good film?” she whispered.
“I love it.”
“I thought you loved me.”
“I do, I do.”
The screening of the great work nearly didn't occur, for the simple reason that the inspired lover could not thread the projector properly. Was he anyone for a girl to have faith in? So I went away for a moment to the editing room: a tall, gaunt Irishman was working there; he came in in the evenings after his day job on a documentary about James Joyce's Dublin.
“Whatisit?” he hissed.
“I wonder,” I said, “could you load a 16mm projector forme?”
“You can't do it?” he asked in disbelief.
“I have a friend who wants to see Kane.”
“Is she as pretty as she looks?” he asked.
“You saw her?”
“A glimpse.”
So, grudging and grumbling—which I would learn was his essential way (we would be best friends later)—Hickey left his masterpiece, nodded with drastic curtness to Margaret and froze her smile, and threaded the first reel of Citizen Kane into the Bell & Howell. “Are you ready?” he snapped at the two of us. I hurried to sit next to her. And then the lights went off and the middle of the night breathed off the screen.
“It's weird,” Margaret crooned in my ear. “Where are the credits?”
“Just watch,” I said, shifting a touch so that her arm could creep round me. Then that crested mouth was saying “Rosebud” to us.
“What did he say?” asked Margaret.
“Rosebud,” I told her.
“What kind of thing is that to say?”
“It's his last word.”
“Rosebud is a dying word?”
“Have you ever seen anyone die?”
“This is a strange way to start a film, by dying,” she said.
Well, we or they (do you see them there, together?)— probably tried our best at thirty minutes of that great movie (in a quite respectable print) before the undeniable allure of the life force took charge. I had been at times attentive, eager, and excited—the great rush of the news-reel set her going even if she complained that it was too quick for a newsreel. And she had made it to the little house on the prairie, the haunting moment when Agnes Moorehead lifts up the window, calls, “Charles!” and you hear the wind moaning in the distance. She had seen the sledge and the lovely, mortal way in which snow made first one pile and then another on it, and what does that image tell us about time and memory? She had seen the camera move from the face of the boy to the strange forbidding but iconic image of the mother.
And it was then that she placed her two hands firmly on the sides of my head, like a mother packing a child off to bed, and drew me away and out of the film and away from Orson Welles and into her own compelling moment. Once and for all.
“I won't bite you,” she murmured. But I didn't have to believe that.
On the bus later, going up the hill, she asked me, “So what is Rosebud?”
“It's the name on the sledge.”
“What sledge?”
“When the man takes the boy away, the boy hits him with the sledge. And then we see it with the snow piling up on it.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then at the end of the film, when no one has found out what Rosebud means, all of Kane's possessions are left, and the men move in to burn them in the furnace. One man picks up the sledge and the camera goes into the furnace with it, and just for a few seconds as it burns we see the word ‘Rosebud.’ And only we see it.”
“We?”
“The audience.”
Margaret smiled and said, “That's as it should be. We're the only ones who heard it.”
“What do you mean?”
“At the beginning.” She was figuring it out. “He says ‘Rosebud,’ and he dies?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you see the nurse come into the room then, through the broken glass ball. She can't have heard the word.”
I said, “It was just us there. You were watching.”
“What do you think I am?” she asked.
“Don't you know by now?” I told her.
“So what does ‘Rosebud’ mean?” she asked.
“His childhood, I suppose.”
“His mother sending him away?”
“That, and just the loss of his life.”
“Do you think everyone's life is like that?”
“It's ours to lose. Or find.”
“What about God?” she wanted to know.
I felt myself on the brink. “I can't believe in that,” I said.
“Nor me,” she said, and there was a bereftness, a loss of pity that broke my heart. “I get off here.”
“You don't have to.”
“Of course I do.”
“I'm walking you home.”
“Not all the way, please.”
“All right.” It was our contract for getting off the bus together. The streets were empty now. It was midnight. She walked as slowly as she could.
“It was a lovely night,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I don't know.”
“Why not?”
“Look, I didn't know I was going to bump into you, did I?”
“I'll call you, then,” I said. “It's not your mother still, is it?”
“It's nothing.”
“I have to see you.”
She nodded. “I'll give you a number. It's where I work. You can call me there.” I wrote it down, and she said, “Yes, that's right, I love you, Mr. Kane.” And we kissed just once more before Margaret darted away, calling out over her shoulder, “Don't get lost!”
CODA
THE STORY ENDS THERE? Well, no, of course not. Stories continue at least for as long as the leading characters live, and sometimes they go on much longer than that. But stories leave things out and introduce a shape, or an order, that no one noticed at the time or the mo
ment. And if this book, so far, ends with a large decision, still the larger quandary that prompts it is left unsettled. So I must admit that I recognize that you might feel you need and deserve more. I feel the same about myself.
There's one thing I suspected was slipping away as I was writing the book. And when I read it over again as a whole, I knew my fear was correct. My mum is not quite there, not like she was in life. And in a way, that is the final mark of Dad's influence. That he left us was a gesture that claimed our story as being lived in his shadow. So the shape of the story as it ended makes him seem strong, whereas my mother was far stronger.
Mum was not dramatic. She did not tell stories or dominate routine. But she was the heart of our order and sensibility. Hers was the face that the movie kept cutting away to for eighteen or nineteen years, to see how the soul reacted and measured what was happening. And just because she accepted a lot that she might not like—like my father, more or less—does not mean that you ever doubted or missed her response. She was like Margaret that night; her face was always there—smiling, expectant, teasing, ravishing—so the movie moved along. A lover can do that for twenty-four days or minutes, maybe. But doing it longer requires a strength and a calm out of the ordinary— and a trust that the rest of us will keep watching.
Once he left her, she could have insisted on that fact. She said people like her didn't get divorced in the 1940s. But as you might guess, the war gave a great boost to that formalization of escape. She might have told our small world that Dad was a liar and a cheat (the things he had hated in his brother), and I'm not sure what that would have done to him. Was she giving him another chance? Maybe, at first, but not for long. Was she taking the “easy” way out? I think some believed that, but in fact I think the situation with my father made her life increasingly difficult. If she had gone off on her own, with me, I daresay some other man would have “rescued” her. There were other men over the years, and it was all very discreet. But if she had given a sign of courage, or recklessness, I think she would have been settled again in a few years. But that risk frightened her.
Still, I don't think she anticipated or even noticed at first the strange pressure it put on my father, to remember and observe all the petty deceits until he reached the point where he could do nothing but get up and leave the room when the questions became too threatening.
When I ask myself the key puzzles—why did my father leave us? why did he keep coming back?—one answer that deserves attention is that he could not escape the challenge, the hopeless challenge, of having to respond to her steady presence as calm and love. So he lost, when he was very competitive. Because she had love's access to the storyteller when maybe three sentences one day—three honest sentences—would have made him his dad's boy. This is what happened.
A few years after the events just described, I got married. (Not to Margaret, but you knew that.) You might have supposed that my father came home every other weekend for all those early years out of some sense of kindness to me, to be a father, to be there, to take me to sports, to observe the formalities. And I hope I've made clear how real that company was and how much I gained from it. But by the time I was eighteen our relationship had easily outlived his “selflessness.” He was fifty-two, fit, lively He could have fashioned a new life. He could have said to me, Well, I failed, but I did my best, and I'm sorry we're at odds now. Maybe later.
And in 1960, at that point, as I know now, there was a woman who lived with him on the other side of London— not a quiet or patient woman—who must have been turning to fury or poison that she was without him every other weekend, as well as every Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and Bank Holiday Surely when she knew that I was gone she must have said, “Now—live with me. With us!”
He didn't. His schedule did not alter. You could argue that if everything came into the open, and if my mother chose finally to sue him for divorce and desertion, she would very likely have ended up with 10 Thirlmere Road (or a large part of its sale proceeds) as her due. And he hated to lose property, like any good Monopoly player. But he hated admission more. Maybe secrecy was his only hope—and that is close to madness.
A time came in the late 1960s when Dad played a key role in the negotiations by which the company he worked for was taken over by a larger company. He was a skilled businessman, and I'm sure he handled the plans very well. He was rewarded by being given early retirement by the new enterprise. This came as a great shock to him. (I don't think I ever saw him as emotionally surprised or unsteady.) And it erased his routine. He had no office to go to. He had no need for the other side of London. This was a moment at which he might have moved back to Streatham, the place where he kept his stamp collection—a telltale sign, some said. But if he had done that, then the other woman—let's call her Anne—might have gone to the courts as his common-law wife and got the house near St. Albans. So he kept coming home, using the car that had been part of his retirement deal.
In 1976, I was in America with my wife and three children. The marriage broke down (entirely because of my own behavior—so you have fair reason to wonder how deeply my father had affected me). My son and I came home from America on a boat, and while we were at sea my mother collapsed with a brain tumor. That was May 1976; she died early in September. The nursing process that went on that summer was interrupted by Dad coming home every other weekend and expecting to have his meals served to him. I remember making some of those dinners while the house was filled with Mum's repeated sighs, a helpless consequence of the tumor. He did not help either by caring for my mother or by making himself absent. It seemed as if he was coming home to serve his grotesque routine—and for nothing else.
My mother died, and Dad said he would be selling the house. In due course, he moved his stamp collection away. It was over twenty albums by then.
Not a word was said about his other life, or about the complex past. I sometimes tried to get him to talk, but still he would walk away and seek seclusion. Pushed closer and closer to intimate revelation, he steadily backed away. Of course, in private, he may have said his own “Rosebud.” But in life we have to say it to someone. That is why the word is just a dead end in Kane and a terrible sign of that man's isolation.
In time, he informed me that he had married again—to Anne—and that he hoped I would visit them. Thus, at last, I met the other woman. By that time, her prettiness (and I have seen pictures) had turned hard and insecure. Why not? We did not get along, and I daresay it would have taken more than my dad's meager diplomatic skills for us to have had a better chance at a relationship. He handled things as if he had just met Anne, but of course in conversation things came out that showed they had been together for years. I later found a wartime identification card, dated 1945, in which she went by the name of “Anne Thomson.”
He had an eightieth-birthday party, in 1988, attended by me, my second wife, and his first American grandson, as well as his English grandchildren. I tried again to get him to talk about the past. He refused. He went away. He seemed in a rage at being asked.
In April 1993, he and Anne were involved in a mysterious car accident. I say “mysterious” because it was never quite resolved who was driving or how it happened. By June, he was dead, having never recovered from the effects of the accident. I visited him in the hospital shortly before his death. He was unconscious, though doctors were uncertain as to the cause of this. Some thought he was seeking to die, or waiting. I held his hand and talked to him about the past. And I felt then that a couple of times he squeezed my hand in assent. Or to show he could hear. But maybe that's how I wanted to remember it. If he had passed in complete, unaltered mystery, it would only have been in character.
Anne died in December 1994.
But is mystery character or the denial of it?
Is it over now? Well, the key players are dead, except for me. And I am left to tell the story, or to try to work it out. I realized long ago that I was probably doing what I do—worrying away at stories—because of the posi
tion I was put in by life. And when I finished this book, I showed it to my wife—my second wife—and she said she liked it and she thought it was accurate in terms of what she had seen and observed. But she said I had cheated a bit: I had written the book of a person who felt happy and lucky because of his life. Whereas, she said, quietly and kindly, I had been damaged by it all. And I know she's right, and I accept that in the telling I have neither explained it nor healed the damage. But when I am gone, and my childen, too, it will be a very small story as lived by a tribe of people who left little trace. But every one of us, for better or worse, is the center of our universe for a moment. And all we can do to signal our dumb longing to posterity is to leave a photograph and children or try to tell the story.
When the time came, I received a few photographs from my father's estate. They are not good pictures. I think he hated being “caught,” whereas my mother loved the idea of the camera. You can see it in her gaze. When I look at the pictures of my father, though, I can see myself imprisoned there.
One other thing came with the pictures—a false mustache. It must have been something my father wore onstage once. I find it seductive and sinister—and the most personal thing of his I have.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID THOMSON has taught film studies at Dartmouth College, has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, and has been the editor of the Journal of Gastronomy. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Independent, The New York Times, The Nation, Movieline, The New Republic, and Salon. He was the screenwriter on the award-winning documentary The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind. His other books include “Have You Seen … ?;” The New Biographical Dictionary of Film; Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts; Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick; Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles; and three works of fiction: Suspects, Silver Light, and Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes. Thomson lives in San Francisco with his family.
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