Suspects

by David Thomson

  The grim confrontation urged Kane to the abyss. All chance of doubt was sucked away in the roasting air of melodrama. He defied Gettys and Emily, he ignored the qualms in Susan. Let the loving people decide. Susan knew then and there that he would marry her, that she would be powerless, and that the marriage would be a disaster. She could see an avenue of pillared unhappiness ahead of her.

  They married on the run in Trenton in 1917, and the honeymoon yielded place to singing lessons. Kane missed his son. He tried to squeeze love out of his life to reduce the pain. He treated Susan like a property that had to pay off. Even Matisti, her singing teacher, felt for her, the most forlorn student he had ever had. Matisti recognized her ordeal and fell in love with her, despite her strangled voice. Amid the horrors of the Chicago opening, he made bravura, restorative love to her; it was almost a teacher’s duty. But Kane blamed him for her failure; Matisti was sent away. The mortifying tour of Salammbo continued and in 1920 Susan sought to kill herself.

  Then, he relented, and in a matter of weeks it was as if opera had never existed. He removed her from it and put her down elsewhere, as the hostess of the growing Xanadu. So she lived in Florida, too pale-skinned for suntan, in a house too large for contentment. She became an expert on jigsaw puzzles, a listless center of picnics, a half-forgotten companion to a man who no longer thought of being funny. She left him in 1932, walking out on all of it with just a couple of suitcases.

  She became a chanteuse, singing in small, smoky lounges, talking to an audience who had come to see notoriety and who were ready to needle her into gossip. For a few years she managed, and in 1938 she put her money into the El Rancho in Atlantic City. She sang there, but she was the show. She’d drink with the customers, or on her own. She was there in 1940 when Kane died, and there drunk when Thompson, the reporter, came to interview her.

  It was easier after he died, like the light coming back at dawn after a sleepless night. She gave up singing and decided to make a success of the place in Atlantic City. She changed her name again, got rid of it all. Over the years she won respect on the East Coast, and she enjoyed hiring other, younger singers and running a clean house. She never married again. There were other men, but after Kane she did not trust real feelings. She could only wonder whether she wasn’t just a figure in someone else’s great drama. So she said who needs it? She died in 1978, in Atlantic City, an old lady known for her tough kindness.

  RAYMOND

  Paul Stewart in Citizen Kane, 1941,

  directed by Orson Welles

  Anyone who ever went to Xanadu between 1927 and 1940 knew him. Sometimes guests passed their weekend there, or their week, without ever seeing Kane. But it was Raymond who greeted them, who made sure they were comfortable, and who saw to it that their car was ready and waxed when they left. They all knew Raymond’s number on the house phone. It was Raymond who happened by in the rose garden to name all the varieties, he organized the menus for the picnics, and he personally put the catsup with the silver on the dining table. He was all-knowing, and he was discreet; he could hide a drunk or supply some cocaine. He ran the place. It was his kingdom. He even gave himself to rumor, chuckling if someone asked whether he was really a Cajun. “Just cagy,” he answered, and the smile flattered the questioner. Far more than Kane, Raymond knew that Xanadu was a hothouse of unconfirmed possibilities.

  But no one was sure if Raymond was his first or his last name, or whether he was Ray Raymond, or Ramon Ramone. Was he American or Italo-American? His accent slid and his complexion fluctuated, like a movie with replacement footage. He disappeared not long after the deal giving Xanadu to the nation. No one knew where he went, but who remembered where he had come from?

  He had been hired personally by Mr. Kane. Yet no service contract was ever found. No one was sure how Raymond had been paid. His small room was stripped bare before he quit. The one personal trace left was the tidy circle of grease on the wall where he had sat up in bed doing whatever he did. He had handled all the petty-cash arrangements and he could have taken a small fortune out of the several household accounts without anyone knowing.

  Afterward, people wondered. Had Raymond been a spy? Was he the plant of the government, the FBI, organized crime—or all of them? If someone really knew where the bodies were buried at Xanadu, wouldn’t all those interests (and others) value a piece of his time? After all, everyone went to Xanadu; it was where show people sought privacy. That couldn’t fail to make the world wonder and worry. Moreover, it had been palpable all along: Raymond ran the place. He was the one who said, “It was Rosebud,” wasn’t he? It was Raymond who presided over the burning of so much.

  MARY KANE

  Agnes Moorehead in Citizen Kane, 1941,

  directed by Orson Welles

  There are mothers in a quiet stir of dementia because of the family’s ruin, mothers moldy with decay propped erect at an upstairs window; there are mothers whose deaths allow the real story to grow; there are mothers waiting in breathless anticipation to know whether their lover is their son. An only child is a matter of choice or fate, but an only mother is an inevitability. The mother has this advantage over wives for any man—his way of selecting a wife makes him doubt the dream that there is a one and only true wife for him; yet maternity gives him that assurance with the first heartbeats of consciousness, or like the three beats on a stage before the play starts. We could marry anyone, but mothers are as fatal as character.

  This is the most perplexing mother of them all, the mother who does not just explain a story but whose existence shows the need for story. We tell stories to clear away the darkness of family history and influence, things in life we are not brave or intelligent enough to explore. Every narrative utters the secret pain of family.

  Mary Clay was born in 1832, in England. She came to America when she was eight, her own mother dying on the voyage. With her father, she went by wagon to St. Joseph, Missouri. They lived there for several years, during which he worked as a sign painter. In 1856, when she was twenty-four, Mary traveled to Denver, Colorado, to take up a position as housekeeper. In that city, she met James Kane, a saloonkeeper, and in 1858 they were married.

  Since they both had some experience in running establishments, it seemed sensible for them to open a boardinghouse in New Salem, Colorado, in 1859. It was in the mining country and there was demand for a clean house where God-fearing miners and their relatives might stay, secure in the knowledge that the premises were not also a brothel. To that extent, the boardinghouse reflected the dominance of Mary in the marriage. There were those who saw Jim less as her husband than as the odd-job man she employed.

  Fred Graves was such an observer. He came to New Salem in 1864, a year after the birth of the Kanes’ son, Charlie. Graves was an attractive young man, limping away from the war, a jack-of-all-trades but a prospector for the moment, just bursting to shout “Eureka!” He had a room at the Kane boardinghouse, and he talked to Mary a good deal in the long winters. Graves may have been simply her companion, but there were suspicions in Jim’s mind. He knew he was a disappointment to his wife.

  Graves went farther west in 1868, worn out by mining and the hope of being lucky. He owed six months’ rent at that time, and he had no money after he had bought his ticket to San Francisco. But Mary let him go and only half an hour before he left Graves thought to give her the deeds to his fruitless mine. He scribbled out the deed of sale and hurried away, jaunty with the prospect of change. Always change.

  Once or twice Jim Kane went to look at the old mine. He kept his liquor in the shaft. And once, in 1870, Mary took young Charles to show it to him. They walked into the cold tunnel, hand in hand, talking about ghosts from the old Indian burial ground. They had a lantern and they saw the way blocked ahead of them. There had been a fall, recently it seemed. Charles asked his mother about the flickers he could see in the rock from the lamplight. She guessed it was nothing, but she came back later to look more closely. She carved out one piece of rock veined with glitter, put
it in a bag and took it down to the assay office.

  The Colorado Lode would be known by 1900 as the earth’s third richest gold mine. Mary hired a geologist to examine it, and then in 1871, when she knew, she closed it down.

  “What are you doing?” said a bewildered Jim. He thought the mine had been blessed by his booze.

  She wrote a letter to Walter P. Thatcher on Wall Street and he wrote back saying he thought it could be managed. Mary Kane had proposed that a trust be set up by Thatcher to run the gold mine and hold it and its profits until Charlie’s twenty-fifth birthday. At that time, the whole thing would be his, the capital and all the reinvested money. As part of the deal, Thatcher was to take Charles away to Chicago, to be his guardian, and to ensure that he had an education and upbringing that befitted a rich young American.

  The boy would not see his parents, but he would only appreciate that absence gradually. In return, the Thatcher Trust would pay Mary and Jim Kane fifty thousand dollars a year until they were both dead. Jim argued it, but Mary was adamantine. Why, oh why?

  The mine was hers. Jim was a waster. Maybe he loved Charlie, but he was a bad influence. Yet he was a weak man, and his son was strong enough to handle him. Mary might have left Jim fat-rich, drunk and happy in Colorado. She could have gone east with Charles. She could have guided his education. She could have lived with him and seen him. Did she think she would hinder him or make him ashamed? Or was Mary Kane not truly interested in her son? Did she prefer the freedom and the fifty thousand dollars for herself? Was there that dreadful loneliness in her of being mystified by family expectations? Couldn’t she pretend for the boy?

  She never saw Charles again. Jim didn’t stay in Colorado. He went the way of Graves to California, and he was dead by 1874. Mary had bargained with him. He could have all the fifty thousand dollars of the first year and his liberty in return for leaving and abandoning his claim to all future moneys. It was so immediate a bounty, Jim could not resist it.

  Mary Kane remained in Colorado, stayed on in New Salem. She did not appear to use or understand her own freedom. People said she was cold and miserable, but she may have wanted just to be alone. She did not look for a new man or change her ways. She died in 1888, having used her money to build a large hotel, the Overlook, on the site of the old boardinghouse. It would become a fine establishment in its day, a hotel fit for dreams.

  All of Mary Kane’s things were shipped east when she died, to a warehouse in New York—her clothes, her glass and chinaware, the wood stove and the sled her father had made for her with the painted rosebud on it still pink and fresh.

  SALLY BAILEY

  Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City, 1980,

  directed by Louis Malle

  Not quite Miss America, maybe, but as lovely as you’d want to see, living in a shabby apartment, getting in at one in the morning, weary and afraid that she smells of the oysters she spends the night serving. This young woman has gone east out of an inexplicable desperation, or one that she has never paused or troubled to convey to those left behind. It was assumed, and so no one could deal with it; hopes are dreams, but so are camouflage and evasion.

  She was born in what she thinks of as an unsophisticated fastness of the Midwest; she prefers to forget it now, and seldom owns up to it. I have heard she tells the story of being from Saskatchewan. No one says she has run away, or is missing. Her parents understand approximately where she is, and she assumes they have that rough idea. She counts on them not to ask questions. There’s nothing to report to the police; nothing to hire a private detective for. But just suppose the father went after her, not chasing—just wanting to know, then she’d do anything to get away, go wild, run from her apartment leaving clothes, a hot iron and snapshots behind her.

  When she gets home at night, she turns on one muted lamp—as if it were a signal, as well as tender golden illumination for what she has to do. She takes off her shirt and throws it on the floor. She has done that all her life, and she lives for the ideal of a new shirt every day. The old ones are shameful, tossed in the trash. Then she arranges herself in the mirror and slides the chemise off her shoulders, off her breasts. There, in Atlantic City, six nights a week, she cuts open a lemon and squeezes its juice on her arms, on her breasts, rubbing the juice between them, in her armpits and absentmindedly on her nipples. So as not to smell of fish, thinking that the place she comes from was so far from the sea.

  Does she know the instant when the man across the way, Lou Guarini, an elderly dandy with silver-plate hair and a cautious walk, looks up from his dark to watch this young woman at her toilet? He is old enough … old enough, anyway. What a strange, circuitous route it is that she went so far away and yet is now willing to have an old man spy on her in this intimate situation, a lover if he was twenty feet closer. The shy are always exhibitionists in another part of their lives.

  She was twenty-eight when she got to Atlantic City, not less than young but a little battered in her innocence, with startled eyes that had seen more than she could ever admit. She had hopes of becoming a croupier, wearing black and white and arbitrating fortune. There was a school of instruction at one of the casinos—the Alexander—with a genuine Frenchman imported to teach the talk, the ease and the sublime acceptance of chance. Sally met the old woman who ran the casino, not long before she died, and the raddled blonde looked her up and down.

  “How old did you say you were?”

  “I didn’t say,” said Sally.

  “I didn’t think you did. If you had, I wouldn’t have asked you again because I’d have remembered.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “You’re old already.”

  “I want to learn.”

  “Yeah? What are you running away from?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Like hell it’s nothing.”

  “My mother. My mother, my father.”

  “Where?”

  “Nebraska.”

  “Speak French?”

  “Sure.”

  She had a few sentences rehearsed which came out fine, and the old woman grinned and told her okay. So Sally took the course, and she worked in the fishbar in the evenings to pay the rent. Then her sister, Chrissie, arrived, pregnant from Sally’s ex-boyfriend, Dave. Somehow Dave had gotten hold of this cocaine, but the Mob came after him and they killed him. At least Chrissie’s kid wouldn’t have to bother with a father!

  Sally didn’t know how to handle the funeral and that’s when this Lou character stepped in, Mr. Practical, Mr. Experience. But he had a lover’s look in his old pink eyes, and he confessed to Sally how he studied her at night. She didn’t know whether to be shocked or wise, so she reacted as if it were nothing much. She made love with Lou that night, and she knew enough to be kind and to enjoy her generosity. It was slow and then quick, but he was gentle and very eloquent. She felt safer with him than she had in ten years.

  A couple of hoods humiliated him the next day in front of her, and she saw how old he really was. She wanted him to be able to melt away, he was so close to tears. But there was something about him, or about what she had done for him. A few nights later, he shot the two gangsters like someone in a movie. It turned out he had been dealing in Dave’s cocaine. In a matter of a few days, magic had reached down and touched him, turning tarnish to true silver. He was rich, and he had won the love and respect of a young honey.

  They went off together, saying they were going to Florida for a good time. The first night they stopped at a motel and they made love again. The next morning, while Lou was in the bathroom, she took some of his money. Did she mean him to see her? Kindness repaid kindness. It was his greatest pleasure just to watch her. This was the way of not saying outright she had to go her way. He declined to notice the theft. He let her take his car and he hitched back to Atlantic City.

  Sally drove to Baltimore, she traded the car and she got a plane to Paris and then to Nice. She knew that was near Monte Carlo, and she was wondering how she’d look in a black croupier�
�s suit with a white silk shirt, a fresh one every night.

  Chrissie, Christina, she’s still in Atlantic City. She writes often, long, placid letters on lined paper, telling me everything she’s been doing (nothing much), and how my grandchild is (Albert). My eye flies through the letters. They are too detailed and calm for me, I suppose. She is a good girl, good but undemanding. That’s what I want to say. She tells me her life is working itself out, and that she is full of great hopes. That’s all very well. She has her own business, faith healing. Apparently she hears from the others, off and on. It seems she is our center now, poor thing. She says I must come to Atlantic City, and bring Mary Frances. But I flinch at the prospect of all the arrangements.

  GILDA FARRELL

  Rita Hayworth in Gilda, 1946,

  directed by Charles Vidor

  For something like twenty years, men she had just met were always telling Gilda, “You should have been in pictures. I mean that sincerely.”

  They were speaking their truth, but they were ill at ease because they knew the world took that line for a lie—being the sort of men they were. So they felt badly about themselves, and sometimes they went away thinking Gilda was a coquette who’d led them into it. But they weren’t just telling Gilda she was sexy or beautiful. They felt something else—it might be the way the light picked up the back of her head, or her trick of looking past people, so that they felt unnoticed, like a movie camera. Or perhaps it was because with Gilda there was always what you heard—reputation—and her intense, impatient amusement when she was there with you, her presence.