Suspects

by David Thomson

  Murder altered Laura’s outlook. It brought a defeatist respect for violence that lasted all her life. It introduced her to Mark McPherson; and it helped her see that someone else, Waldo, might think less of her than her own estimate. She had been with men who disparaged their manliness: Waldo and Shelby Carpenter, the whimsical Kentucky cad who had not outgrown the wish to please everyone. McPherson reminded Laura of Mary Frances: he was haunted, he blamed those who flinched from his darkness, and there was that same hunched intelligence that expected rejection. McPherson made love to Laura as if she were his prisoner, a suspect he could grill for his pleasure. She liked that. She felt aroused when he put her in a small, stale interrogation room, turned the light on her and began to whip at her with questions from the shadows. “I’d reached a point where I needed official surroundings,” he said. And there, on the small scuffed table where confessions were signed, Laura arranged her voluptuousness and dragged his ungiving force into her. “Slut,” he whispered when she came, and her eyes leapt in appreciation.

  They were married in 1945: one daughter, Paula, was born in 1946; and then a year later Mark beat Laura so badly that no careful surgery could hide disfigurement. She never charged him, but the city threw him off the force. There was a divorce, and he went away with nothing much except that portrait of her—the thing he had fallen in love with and which no one else liked—and her last present to him. (Or last but one—there was that other cruel gift.) Mark McPherson went away, as if unfit for the world. Laura was sure he would not be back—as if she had disposed of him. He went away, but I never forgot him. It may sound foolish or conceited, but I trusted I would find him.

  Laura was finished as a model. But she had a daughter to support, and she guessed that television advertising was the coming rage. She made Bullitt’s, her agency, the leader in that field for fifteen years. She produced commercials, bringing the product together with visualizers, directors and actors, and foreseeing that commercials could be as beautiful and suggestive as small movies.

  She married Shelby Carpenter in the 1950s, but it was a marriage that barely disturbed the lives of the two people. A few years later they divorced, though remaining at the same level of frosted amiability. She moved to Los Angeles, consumed by work and Paula’s education. She sent the girl to Smith, and she saw in 1969 that Paula got a job at the ICM agency in Los Angeles. From that start, Paula Hunt became a powerful young packager in the entertainment industry. I saw her at the funeral, and we talked a little. It was not comfortable because I could not forget the rumors, after Laura’s suicide, that Paula had outmaneuvered her mother in an agency deal in 1971, taking a batch of clients Laura had regarded as hers.

  But when we buried Laura, Paula turned to everyone there, let her brown eyes swell with love and told us, “The modern awareness of personality would not be as it is without the career of my mother. She gave meaning to the old American dream that a nobody could be someone, and she did it with flair, with style, and with love.” The little speech appeared next day in the trades, like a handout. There is a frenzy from Nebraska, it is the mania of being in the middle, without seabreezes, of being unknown, and I have sometimes felt it in silk sheets on a hotel bed or in PR prose, a tremor in the smoothness.

  I am not cut out for this—God help me.

  I have always called her and thought of her as “Mary Frances.” Yet I never use anyone else’s middle name. It sounds a declaratory but conflicting name, or is that only because I know her? I wonder how different it would be if she were only one or the other?

  HELEN FERGUSON

  Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own, 1950,

  directed by Mitchell Leisen

  There are two Americas. I know you have heard this before; there are countless two Americas: north and south, Atlantic and Pacific, straight and crazy, National League and American League, the rising and the falling, blue cheese or creamy Italian. Let me suggest one more—I know it, because I have crossed over a few times.

  There is the America of the Interstates. This is a land like an airline map, of major cities held in place by straight lines, a grid of business, population and the certainty of being in the mainstream. Then there are the old back roads and places where no one would go except to live quietly in a small town with a main street and one of everything a town requires—a school, a church, a bank, a cemetery, a hotel verandah for the old-timers and a scarlet woman about whom they can make up stories. Take any state in the Union. Look at its map and find the green lines of the Interstates; then look away at the “empty” holes the green lines contain. Imagine the life there, with so many content to be unknown, and others who hope to get away and be recognized. This is the America torn between refuge and prison.

  Helen Ann Ferguson was born in one of the holes, at Bridgeport, California, in 1921. It’s sixty-five hundred feet up, in the Sierras, between Yosemite and the Nevada border. There are sparser holes. Bridgeport has skiing, extravagant scenery; it’s not far from Mono Lake, on a road to Bishop in the south and Carson City to the north. But it’s not on a main route; the Sierras are closed in winter, and Bridgeport is left to itself. The passable highway, 80, goes from Reno to San Francisco; and beyond Reno 80 is Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Omaha and Chicago. Bridgeport, California, and Caulfield, Illinois, must be about the same distance from the rush and throb of 80.

  Ann Ferguson, as she liked to be known, was the daughter of Bridgeport’s dentist, an only child who became a capable housekeeper when her mother died in 1936. Ann made her father proud: she brushed her teeth, she studied and she led an active, uneventful life. She did well in school, but never disputed her father’s opinion that it was foolish to send a girl to college. She took a short course that qualified her as a dental nurse, to help her father. She enjoyed cross-country skiing, and in the summer she was part of the swimming-and-tennis gang. She had boyfriends, and her father was mild to all of them, hoping that would avert seriousness.

  Ann was twenty-five when, suddenly, an upper front tooth went rotten. Her father pulled it and made the replacement. He took every care to make it fit, but he never saw that her full confidence in him had gone. Then Ann got involved with Jeff Bailey, who had taken over the filling station in Bridgeport. He was a mysterious figure, from far away, a man who paid his bills and never sought acceptance. In retaliation, the town called him a loner; but he was most alone in his own mind, and that was a little eased by the friendship of Ann and Dickie, a deaf-mute boy who helped at the station.

  Bailey—it is an old name—had been a detective, mixed up in New York gambling. There had been a woman and a killing, and Bailey had ended up feeling used. He had removed himself as far as he could, to a hole in the country; but then he had decided to make his living at the roadside so he could see who passed by. One day in 1947 someone recognized him, someone lost, on a back road, stumbling on a find. The old associations closed in, unsettled business, with debts to be paid and old attractions awakened with a glance or a forgotten perfume. Ann did whatever she could—no matter that her father and the town warned her about Bailey—but Jeff was found dead in a crashed car, along with the other woman from out of the past.

  Ann left Bridgeport. She went to San Francisco and met a man, Stephen Morley, whom she had encountered in the last frantic days of the Bailey episode. Morley had been an operative for a lawyer named Eels; he was a gambler, too, a ladies’ man, adept at the smaller forms of fraud and extortion. He seduced Helen Ferguson (she had made a small change in her name to get Bridgeport out of her system), and he made her pregnant. When she went to tell him, she discovered that he had left for New York. There was a note telling her not to be upset.

  She waited awhile, and then she followed him east. He was living in a cheap apartment on the Lower East Side with a blonde, Carol Mather. When Helen showed up, he laughed at her and said how did she know he was the father of the child? Helen believed he would relent. He did see her from time to time, when Carol was working; he slept with her again, and though
she despised him Helen could not appreciate that she did not need him. One day she called on him, knocked on the door to the apartment, and felt the horror of subterfuge and indifference when at last an envelope was slipped underneath the silent door. It contained some money and a rail ticket back to San Francisco. It all smelled of a gardenia scent she knew as Carol’s.

  On the train, she met a friendly couple, the Harknesses, Patrice and Hugh, not long married. They started talking for a simple reason: Helen and Patrice were both pregnant, and due at about the same time. Hugh Harkness had been in Europe on government work, and he had met Patrice there. She was an orphan: her only family was his, and she was on her way to meet them for the first time. They would get off at Chicago, and thence to Caulfield, Illinois (between Moline and Normal), where the Harknesses lived.

  But the train crashed in Ohio—the Maumee disaster of July 3, 1948. Helen and Patrice had been in the ladies’ room at the moment of impact; they were laughing and talking, and Patrice had asked Helen to hold her wedding ring while she scrubbed her hands (the smell of oysters from dinner). Helen slipped it on for safety, and was thinking of life’s ironies when the crash occurred. In the hospital, she was known as Patrice Harkness. The real Patrice had been killed, as well as Hugh. But the shock had started Helen’s baby, who had come into the world—delivered amid mud, flashlights and the groans of distress—as the son of Mrs. Harkness, the woman wearing the ring.

  She hated the dishonesty, but she was on a slope of providential force; and she had envied the couple on the train their future as rich as her warmest memory of small towns. Helen Ferguson went to Caulfield as Patrice Harkness, delivering a grandson and a hope for the future to Donald and Grace Harkness, who had lived there all their lives, consistent, quiet and attentive, like readers. As she met them, Helen felt fake, stepping into a myth. Her son was christened Hugh, and the dead Hugh’s brother, Bill, came home for the event. Helen liked him, but she knew he looked at her in a quizzical way; he noticed her false tooth.

  Helen slipped into happiness. The Christmas holiday was the best she had known, even if the fear of betraying herself never went away. She guessed that Bill was falling in love with her; she thought of her own son as Hugh Harkness. When she looked at him in a grandmother’s arms, her thoughts were no longer framed by the deception. And then Stephen Morley appeared, a blackmailer now.

  He had read of the crash, and gone to identify the body. He had looked at Patrice Harkness in the morgue and smiled. Yes, he said, poor Helen Ferguson, and the unborn child, too. But he had heard the story of two pregnant women in the ladies’ room and seen where the other one, Harkness, had her address. It’s the Irish in me, he chuckled, as he reconstructed the chance plot.

  He came to Caulfield and learned that Helen would be rich when Donald and Grace Harkness died. So he extorted money from Helen, and he compelled her to marry him: they drove to Iowa to do it. Helen wanted him dead. Grace, who learned enough of the story, planned to get a gun and shoot him; her own heart was bad, and she might as well do something bold and useful before she died. And then, one morning, in the rooming house in Caulfield, Morley was found shot. The two women were ready to own up, for they both suspected Bill had done it. But the police smelled gardenia. Carol Mather had shot her lover after learning he had married someone else, and put on extra perfume to be more herself.

  The shock killed Grace; Donald died fifteen months later. Caulfield was agog when the story came out, and in 1951 Bill and Helen, married now, moved away with their son, Hugh, determined to give him a happy home in one of the quiet, secret places in America. Let them go, there are perils enough in those quiet holes.

  DICKSON STEELE

  Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place, 1949,

  directed by Nicholas Ray

  “The king sits in Dunfermline town, drinking the blood red wine.” That line is set in my mind, like a stain in wood. I must have learned it in school, in Bedford Falls, on a winter day when the heating system clanked and grumbled and I wanted to be out skating, with Violet winking across the classroom, so sure she knew what I was thinking. The line has come back to me over the years, whenever I hear the word blood. Sometimes I get a little more of the poem; it goes on for pages, I think, about a sea captain sent on a mission by the king, Sir Patrick something or other. I think I recall that he has to find a woman—at sea? or on land? I don’t know. I can hear the class reciting a line about the king’s daughter and Noroway. What does it mean? Lines you can’t get out of your head, and the notion of a woman you search for but never quite find?

  I never knew that Dunfermline could bring it all back, too; it’s rarer than blood, I suppose, and so it might be more piercing. But I didn’t know that Dix Steele’s people had come from there, a town in Scotland. Two brothers, Andrew and Fergus, left there as young men in 1907, to come to America. They settled in Trenton, New Jersey. They had a hardware store and they started a mechanical repair shop; they were sure that the automobile was going to be big, but trouble. They worked every hour they could find, and they bought themselves a good old house on Spruce Street. Then one day, in 1912, Andrew was called to look at a bus that had broken down. It carried a traveling theatrical company, on its way to Philadelphia, and there was a dancer in the group, a Spanish woman, Adele Santana. As Fergus tells it, she took one look at Andrew and decided to have him. He had barely talked to a woman in his life, and here was this one, just as bright and noisy as a parrot. I asked Fergus why she snapped up his brother, and he answered, “Oh, there had been a wishing in Andy all along. She knew it. She touched it.” He may have meant that literally; somehow this tango dancer put her hot skin against his, and he was done for.

  They were married, and there was the boy, John Dickson Steele, born in 1914. Adele left them all when the child was two. She took off for the West, saying she had to be dancing again. Andrew died three years later, technically of the influenza that was so grim in Jersey. But he was a broken man before that. So Fergus became the boy’s guardian as well as uncle. He brought him up without a mention of Adele and Dix, I suppose, studied Fergus’s milky skin and sawdust hair and wondered about his own carbon looks. But there are things we can never tell our young, matters of shame and pride that we long for them to find out, but that are past our telling.

  Dickson Steele grew up clever and strange. He had no close friends, but he was always in demand. He could mend anything, or take it apart and explain how it worked. By 1930 or so, he was learning to fly, and he spent a lot of his time at the airfield in Trenton working on planes. Fergus wanted him to go to Princeton, and he was rich enough then to pay. But Dickson put it off several times, and he didn’t go to the university until 1934, when he was twenty.

  At the end of his freshman year he dropped out. He had done well enough, with distinction in engineering and literature. But he was bored, or displeased, and he took off for Manhattan. He knocked around there in 1935 and 1936, and somehow the hawk on Time’s cover, Jed Harris, took a shine to him. Harris was about the best known stage director in the city—he did The Front Page and The Green Bay Tree—and possibly the wickedest man in America. If you can go by reputation. You can’t, but there’s no harm in warning people. Harris had a genius for cruelty: it excited as much admiration as horror. He was like a fictitious villain, but alive and breathing and doing it to someone you knew. It was power that really attracted him. As a director, he let a story out slowly on stage so that you felt his control. It dripped on you.

  It was Dickson Steele who drove Harris across America in the fitful spring of 1938, when Harris was preparing Our Town and wanted to say he’d studied small places. That’s when they came to Nebraska, and Harris had his infernal night of talk with Mary Frances. I don’t call that Steele’s fault, or even proof of evil in Harris. It was understandable, what he said. She was an actress, still desperate to do it and just as desperate not to. They moved on, with Harris surer how to put on the play, and wreckage behind him.

  Harris, I believe, to
ld Dickson to get back to Princeton, and wrote a letter for him to the university saying he was not to be overlooked just because he was odd. So in the fall of 1939, he was a twenty-five-year-old sophomore, who got a name for cutting up professors in cross-talk. He had learned from Harris and given up all thought of hiding his difficult nature. But he was out again in 1940, and off to McGuire Field where he enlisted. They loved him. He had his license already, he knew engines and he was a natural killer.

  Dickson Steele rose to colonel in the air force. He was in combat in Europe, flying fighters in the Mediterranean, and thereafter he was stationed in Britain, a leader of the big bombing raids sent against Germany in 1944 and 1945. He was a fine officer, hard but inspiring, adored by his men. The war excited him; it gave liberty to all his hostile feelings. Pilots were encouraged to paint signs on their planes to show how many “kills” they had.

  He came back with a novel, Brucie and the Spider, published in 1946. Such an unnerving tale, about an American flier in Scotland during the war who meets a girl, Katriona Bruce, falls in love with her, begins to think she is a witch, and hears she has been murdered after he has gone away to win the war. The pilot remembers then all the little things that made him think there was another man, another darker lover, in her life. It was a short book full of rock and cold, harshness and tenderness. The novel was a critical success, and it did well enough to get Dixon Steele—he had made that his working name—out to Hollywood.