Suspects

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by David Thomson


  “But noticing depends on kindness.”

  Have you ever seen a younger man study something old, then wipe it from his mind, knowing he will live longer?

  “Those who notice most are often good at hiding,” said Converse. He got up and went away, leaving me to pay for his half-eaten breakfast.

  JACK TORRANCE

  Jack Nicholson in The Shining, 1980,

  directed by Stanley Kubrick

  Born on October 4, 1938, in Bedford Falls, Nebraska. I should know. He went away from there in 1954, east, to the great cities, calling himself Jack Torrance. He would do nothing except the most menial and humiliating jobs, for he had made up his mind to be an artist. Every night of his life he spent in movie houses. Then he went home to his room and watched more films on television until he fell asleep on their copycat plots. Then he got up and went to his work. He had no friends and he never made contact with his family. People vanish in this manner every day.

  By the time he was thirty, Torrance had decided to write. When he went to work, he took with him a black briefcase that contained the manuscript of all his writing. He was so unwilling to risk losing it. In time, he went back and forth from his job, operating copying machines, with two suitcases and a briefcase filled with paper. He had never shown any of his work to another human being.

  Then in 1973, he met and married a woman named Wendy. “What you got in the bags, hon?” she wondered. “Oh,” he said, rolling shyness and pride around in his smile, “just my books, my works.” “Can I see, hon?” It was an innocent enough request—it would have been unkind not to ask. “Why no, my sweet, certainly not,” said Torrance, smiling again at her crestfallen face. She looked like a little boy who had, all along, been pretending to be a grown woman.

  But as this married life went on—Jack hardly knew how—Wendy grew large with child. “Maybe you should get a better job, hon.” She had a way of almost talking to herself. “Now that we’ll soon be three. Why, you could teach, dear, knowing as much as you know. Wouldn’t you think?” And he simply watched her, letting his inner groan climb silently to where the gods of belles lettres could smile at it.

  He found a job in a private school in Vermont teaching English, and their son, Danny, was born there in the middle of a blizzard so severe that it delayed the arrival of the midwife, thereby allowing the death of Danny’s twin brother. “What do we call him, beloved? The better to distinguish him, I mean.” “Who, hon?” asked Wendy from her bed of convalescence. “The boy, the other one.” “I don’t know. Do we call him anything?” “Ah,” sighed Torrance, “shall we say Tony, then? I think it would make everything a little more meaningful.” “Sure, hon,” said Wendy, sucked at by Danny and overawed by Torrance.

  Vermont was not good, not with six months of winter, then mud and sticky heat for the rest of the year. Moreover, Torrance had begun to send his works to publishers, magazines and literati. They all came back, with a speed shown by the postal service on no other occasions. He was drinking. In one bourbon temper he had seized Danny and made to demonstrate a Luis Tiant curveball with him, only for the boy’s shoulder to be dislocated. In Dickensian contrition, Jack gave up drink, pouring eleven bottles of the amber out into the snow (keeping only a snifter for an emergency).

  To smooth over the ugly incident, they all moved to Boulder, Colorado. There Jack would settle to write his masterwork. But awkward realities intruded—the friendliness of neighbors, the humdrum need to make ends meet, Torrance’s own extraordinary laziness and the little chatter all day long between Danny and the imaginary being who lived in his mouth, Tony.

  Therefore Jack answered an advertisement requiring a winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel, deep, deep in the mountains. It was a large, old-fashioned luxury hotel, attractive and salubrious in the summer, but inaccessible from October to May. The management needed someone to be there, to answer the radio, maintain the heating and so on. It was an ideal job for a writer, and yes, of course there was room for Wendy and Danny, too. Room? Why there were 237 rooms, not to mention the variety of bars, restaurants, games rooms, solaria, ballrooms and hideaways.

  Torrance bundled his work and his family into their yellow Volkswagen and headed into the mountains in the first somber chilliness of October. They arrived as the last of the summer staff were leaving the Overlook, including the black cook, Hallorann, who took a special shine to Danny. Torrance was reminded by those departing of how an earlier caretaker—named Grady—had been so weighed upon by the isolation and the eerie serenity of the Overlook that he had chopped up his wife and two children, in small pieces, as if preparing a ragout.

  Life went on in the Overlook, Danny going up and down the monstrous corridors in his pedal car, Wendy making breakfast for three in a kitchen equipped for three hundred, and Jack in the privacy of an abandoned sun lounge conjuring up the mood and creatures of his fiction. He became a little more dreadful—I say this, and who could be more reluctant to admit it? He was churlish to his family, even while he was imagining going into one of the hotel’s empty bedrooms to find a tall, Nordic nude (a woman) arising from the bath to give him a wet embrace. But even in his dream he hated himself. For this siren changed into a hag whose ulcerous sores set him screaming. “Don’t whistle through your teeth, hon, puts my nerves on edge.” “Does it, dunghill?” And so on.

  What was he writing all the time, in those empty, sun-blanched rooms where the timbers creaked and the outer brightness of snow rose like a tide against the glass? All those years of solitary movie-going, a pastime that left him forever pale, had degenerated into a vast, God-forsaken novel (albeit masquerading as a work of reference) involving the characters from those movies, their lives enlarged beyond the scope of the films. A mad book, a unique book, but not his own book. And like all thieves, he went in dire terror of being stolen from. That was why he left a top-sheet on this pile becoming a book, covered with the dittos of one line, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

  In his mania, Jack was meeting Lloyd, a barman, in the Gold Room, and coming back from those imaginary conversations drunk. He had encountered a butler, Grady, in the crimson-and-white gentlemen’s bathroom, who had advised him to “correct” his family.

  Far away in Florida, Hallorann picked up a telepathic call for help from Danny, and set out for the Overlook. Torrance became violent, and Wendy had to homer him with a baseball bat, a Carl Yastrzemski, as it happens. She shut him up in the food store, but someone let him out—was it Grady? could a ghost open a door? Hallorann arrived only to have Jack bury an axe in his panting parka! Wendy and Danny fled for their lives, out into the moonlit snow. In a maze without a center, Jack chases his child, driven back into boyhood, until he stops, numb and weary, the steam of his sweat turns to frost and the last grimace of Torrance becomes an ice entrance to his dead mystery.

  Wendy and Danny make it away in the snowmobile that Hallorann has arrived in—that’s why he was needed. And in the hotel, the aimless eye of patience, with months to go before the thaw, sees a group photograph on the wall, with a young Jack there, Jacko even, and the date: July 4, 1921—it’s a holiday picnic, and isn’t that Evelyn Cross in a burning white frock, and. .?

  But no human eye saw that picture, and in the May that came, Jack’s stiff corpse was dropped in the earth, a bone for it, and Wendy was notified by letter.

  Ah, you say, what happened to that work-in-progress?

  I have a special fondness for Jack. He taught me that I might be mad, instead of just unhappy—quite a striking addition to my role. And then he sprang to life, so real a character that he chose to steal the half of the book already written and make off down the beanstalk. I had to give chase, of course, but through tears of love for him for seeing such promise in the story so far.

  VIVIAN STERNWOOD

  Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, 1946,

  directed by Howard Hawks

  Born in 1907, in the Sternwood mansion on Beacon Hill in Boston, Vivian was the first child of
Colonel, later General, Guy Sternwood (1869–1941) and his new wife, Millicent Webster, a great-grand-daughter of Daniel Webster. Vivian’s father was one of his country’s most respected soldiers. He had fought in the Philippines against Aguinaldo, and although trained as a cavalryman he had written a short book, An End to Horse Power (1904), that predicted many of the military developments realized in the First World War.

  During Vivian’s childhood, the Colonel fought in Mexico with Pershing, and then in 1917 he went to Europe. He was instrumental in directing the strategy of the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive, one of the few decisive attacks of the entire war. However, in October 1918, he was seriously wounded when a shell hit his car. Both legs were broken and there was extensive damage to his hips. He endured seven operations, and managed to walk a little until 1922. But, thereafter, he was confined to a wheelchair. Rather than suffer the New England winters, the Sternwoods moved to Los Angeles, to 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, a property purchased for the General by Noah Cross, an old colleague from the cavalry.

  Guy Sternwood’s last great defiance of his disability was to have another child, a second daughter, Carmen, born in 1920. She was thirteen years younger than Vivian, who came to fill many of the roles of a mother to Carmen when Millicent Sternwood died in 1925. With the General incapacitated, and looked after by John Norris, his orderly from the Western front, the two sisters resembled mother and child. Yet there was no affection between them. Vivian was tall, sophisticated and ruthless when she had to be. Carmen was a gamine, a child-woman, helplessly cunning. The sisters disliked each other, and kept company as a way of practising their malice.

  Vivian’s own life centered on her friendship with Evelyn Cross, the daughter of the Sternwoods’ benefactor, and a truer sister than Carmen. When Evelyn suffered her teenage breakdown, and had to go away to a family property in the redwood country, Vivian went as her companion. General Sternwood was happy that his family could repay the debt to the Crosses, but he was perplexed that Vivian would not tolerate the least mention of Noah Cross.

  In 1928, Vivian married Esteban Hernandez, an actor brought up from Mexico by B. P. Schulberg in the vogue for “Latin lovers” that followed the death of Valentino. Hernandez made a few films, with some success, especially Swords of Toril (with Barbara La Marr), but his accent was too heavy for sound pictures. Vivian had met him in 1926, at the Hearst ranch. She enjoyed his cheerful indifference to his own career and his stamina in bed. But, out of work and money, Hernandez went back to Mexico, to Agua Caliente, in 1930. He kept in touch with Vivian, but he knew she did not want to live south of the border, and he was developing business interests that kept him occupied. Simple divorce proceedings took place in 1931.

  By then, Vivian was keeping company with C. C. Julian, the Canadian entrepreneur whose fraudulent oil company had caused a scandal in Los Angeles in 1927. Divorced by his first wife, Julian was promoting mail-order schemes. He and Vivian were secretly married in 1932—for Julian had hopes of using her as a contact to the Cross fortune. A year later, Julian fled the country because of mail-fraud charges. Both Vivian and the thirteen-year-old Carmen went with him, by boat to Hawaii and then to Shanghai. Their revels came to an end in that city: Julian killed himself after a riotous party at the Astor Hotel. It was all Vivian could do to disguise Carmen’s part in the orgy and to put blame on “an allegedly nineteen-year-old secretary,” from Chifu, not seen again. Shanghai was Carmen’s coming of age. After that, she assumed any man wanted her, and she asked strangers if they knew how the Chinese screwed.

  Back in California, Vivian sent Carmen to the Rutledge school up in Mendocino. But no school could hold Carmen. She seduced those appointed to guard her, and then escaped while they slept. She came home on a truck she had picked up in Oakland and led out of its way by a day’s journey. The driver was pale and anxious to be rid of his passenger. Vivian had Carmen examined by a specialist. He said she was calculating, not mad. A nymphomaniac? No, merely a wanton, without inhibition.

  So Vivian got on with life and in 1936 she met Sean Regan. He was an Irishman, always spouting bits of Gaelic, an officer in the IRA, in America illegally, doing what exactly? Raising money, some said. But Regan was not energetic. He sat around, telling stories and drinking. He appreciated General Sternwood and he helped bring Vivian and her father closer together; she could be kind to her father when Sean was there. So she married him in a rush of gratitude. That was in 1937, a year when Vivian needed strong liquor or a man with the same effect. Evelyn had been killed on the streets, and nothing anyone could say altered the general opinion that she had been wayward and deranged, a discredit to her long-suffering and public-spirited father. We are in the hands of those who survive us.

  It was a year of betrayals. When Carmen met Regan she asked him to go to bed with her, just like that, in front of Vivian, the General and Norris. “Not just now, sweetheart,” Sean had said, and Carmen broke into peals of laughter as if they were all to take it as humor.

  But later that summer, Carmen found Regan out in the garden doing a little target-shooting with a pistol. She asked him to teach her. So he showed her this and that and gave her the gun. She held it in her small white hand, the fingernails dipped in red.

  “Will you now?” she wondered.

  “Will I what?”

  “What I asked.”

  He considered and he said, “You’re too determined, Carmen.”

  So she turned the gun on him and shot him in the stomach. He died at her feet, raving idiotically at her composure, so she kicked at his wound with her bare feet until the toes were crimson too.

  Vivian buried the body in an oil sump. She told Carmen never to tell their father, and the wide-eyed killer agreed. It was said that Regan had just gone away, as unexpectedly as he’d appeared. Vivian lived somewhere between widowhood and desertion. But then, in 1939, Carmen got into trouble again. A bookseller, Arthur Gwynn Geiger, sent the General several IOUs signed by Carmen. So the General hired a detective, a man named Marlowe, to clear it up.

  Marlowe wanted it all out—how Regan had been killed, how Carmen had posed for Geiger in pornographic pictures, and so on. Vivian waited, until 1941, when her father died. Then she went to Noah Cross, told him what she knew and what she guessed, and asked him if he could get Carmen into an asylum and make sure she stayed there.

  “At my discretion?” asked Cross, and Vivian was left to wonder what he might do, or have done, to establish Carmen’s insanity.

  “She’s not to be hurt,” she told him, and he sighed and smiled and said he’d never hurt a soul. Five weeks later, Carmen entered a hospital in Oregon. Noah Cross took care of the bills and arranged to have her watched night and day.

  Vivian was the last Sternwood left alive and free. She was rich and nowhere near old yet. She lived in a strenuous active way, drinking too much and not taking enough care over whom she met. She was reputed to have helped back Bugsy Siegel in his Flamingo Hotel, the beginning of modern Las Vegas. She was said to be the mistress of Jonathan Shields, the movie producer. She was a close friend of Samson DeBrier, and a hostess at some of his gatherings.

  Otherwise, she remained tall, illustrious and determined to get what she wanted. It was only that she wanted less, and was readier to seek the oblivion of drink, amusing company or sleeping in the sun. She died in 1972, of cancer. Her will and that of Noah Cross left provision for unending vigilance with Carmen.

  L. B. JEFFRIES

  James Stewart in Rear Window, 1954,

  directed by Alfred Hitchcock

  It was the turning point in Jeff’s life, and in the end nothing about it displeased him as much as that. He didn’t believe in turning points happening to him. He had photographed plenty of them: a tidal wave shattering a building, a figure lifted off the ground by the bullet that was killing it, a racing car stuck in midair, life-and-death instants. But he had been the cool recorder of them all, and he lived by the principle of never getting into the picture himself. Now there he was on all
the front pages, both legs in plaster, with a plan of the courtyard. He had even posed for one idiot, holding the telephoto lens up to his face. And the paper had gotten a picture of Thorwald and put it on the lens. “Peeping-Tom Pix Man Snaps Murder,” was the headline, as if he were the only voyeur in New York, a city of windows and vantage points.

  Was this what forty-two years of acquired craft had been leading to? He felt trapped, not just by another eight weeks in plaster—if there were no complications, and the surgeon had told him about what to expect at his age—but by the media, the phone and Lisa. Lisa Carol Fremont, a dame with class, turning on a light with each name. He had to marry her now. It was the will of the city and its newsprint love for a hero and a heroine. She could tell him she had proved herself in action, wriggling her hand at him to show him Mrs. Thorwald’s wedding ring on her finger. Giving him the finger and letting Thorwald work out the dotted line across the courtyard to where Peeper Pix Man was sitting and waiting.

  Lionel Bartleby Jeffries, born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, 1912. Graduated with honors in English/journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1934, the first student to get photo projects accepted for credit. He’d stayed in the Midwest for two years working on papers, getting quicker, building his portfolio. He never did atmosphere or portraits, just hard news stuff. He got a jewelry-store robbery on the Loop in Chicago, and he sold those pictures in New York and Europe—with old ladies scattering, and the bag in one jittery thief’s hand spilling open, pearls in midair like drops of milk. He was getting known.

  In 1937, he went to New York, freelancing. An old La Crosse contact led him to Joe Losey, who was making documentaries for the Rockefeller Foundation. He hired Jeff and it was good work, but Joe had been full of political angles; he liked emotional pictures of poor people. But they got along, arguing all the while, and on the side Jeff had taken a series of pictures of the Mississippi in flood: houses floating, with people perched on the roofs, rowboats full of chickens, that kind of thing. Life had bought three of them—it was his first time in the magazine.

 

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