Suspects

by David Thomson

  Julia was sent off to an asylum. Her father said that her fits put her in peril. They were accelerating in frequency and delirium. She needed professional care. Bruno was not permitted to visit her. But he learned where the asylum was, from his father’s canceled checks, and he could get there in a day’s journey. He would howl outside the barred windows, like a wolf. Julia was moved to Arizona.

  And so Bruno decided that he should kill his father. No need to touch his mother. She was so bereft he could handle her. But his father had taken away his most precious companion. With Jonathan dead, Bruno could assume control of the family affairs and have Julia released. The two of them could live together and play all the games they chose.

  He had to discover a way of disposing of his father, and here Bruno’s delicate genius—always derided by the father—came into its own. He dreamed up the principle of exchanged murders: two people, strangers, meet and offer to commit each other’s murders. They will have an alibi on the crucial occasions. The police will see their motive, only to be confounded by the immovable explanations that on that night they were at dinner with the Carstairs in Connecticut or flying to Minneapolis. So long as the two parties stayed strangers, the arrangement would work. Bruno loved the simplicity of the plan.

  Guy Haines was the ideal other, a semi-famous man, an athlete, such a good guy. Bruno hated him, and he could tell that Guy flinched whenever he touched him. No one would suspect them. So he followed Guy’s cantankerous wife, Miriam, to the funfair, spirited her away from her hick beaux, took her on a boat ride to an island of love and strangled her there, squeezing until the fussy spectacles fell off her face. It was so easy. She thought he was a gentleman and was quite ready to be abused.

  But Guy proved stuffy. He pretended to be horrified at the news, then he delayed over his part of the bargain. Bruno gave him a plan to the East Hampton house with his father’s bedroom clearly indicated. But he could read Guy’s lazy mind, and it was Bruno there in the bed (in one of his father’s robes) the night Guy came to the house to warn Mr. Anthony. Oh, the foolish look on the idiot’s face.

  A little pressure was in order. So Bruno went back to the funfair to leave Guy’s lighter there: it had crossed tennis rackets on it, ideal as a clue. He made the journey and stayed overnight in a not very prepossessing hotel to give Guy time to catch up. Best of all would be if the cops could nab Guy and the lighter in one swoop, with his guilty hand reaching out for the rackets. While he waited, he sent a postcard to Julia in Tempe: “Flying to you shortly, love. The world is slowly working itself out. There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.”

  Guy did follow Bruno. They met up on a carousel and as it whirled round, faster and faster, the calliope racing, the enameled plaster horses plunging up and down in their effort to get away, Bruno wondered if Julia’s fits were like this. He was thinking of her, and of how soon he would be with her, in arid zona, when the whirlpool of noise, fun and happiness cracked and he became a dead man with the lighter there in his open hand. If the police noticed it, they would realize what he was trying to imply. Guy would have to kill his father, and everything would be all right. He would go all the way to Arizona and carry Julia out of her prison. Perhaps she wouldn’t know him now. If it was madness, why, madness must have its advantages. In which case he would marry her.

  DOLLY SCHILLER

  Sue Lyon in Lolita, 1962,

  directed by Stanley Kubrick

  “Husband at home?” he croaked, fists in the pockets.

  Thus reunion, not in the Indian Ocean and not a waltz into darkness, but at grimy Coalmont, the last house on Hunter Road, all dump and ditch, on September 23, 1952, he near the end of his journey, she frankly and hugely pregnant and exhaling “We-e-ell!” at the sight of him. HH meets Dolly Schiller, after all these years. She, the seventeen-year-old, had married Richard “Dick” Schiller, gotten pregnant and wanted to pay off their debts so they could move to Alaska, where he had been promised an opening in his very specialized corner of the mechanical field. It was the last time Lo and HH clapped eyes on each other. He gave her four thousand dollars to ease the way, he elicited the lowdown (it had been dramatist Clare on the QT who’d had his way with her), and then he drove off through the drizzle of the dying day noticing that the windshield wipers could not keep the moisture from his eyes. She was dead three months and two days later, during childbirth, on Christmas Day, up in Gray Star in Alaska, where not all facilities matched Dick’s mechanical field. HH was dead too, of coronary thrombosis, in legal captivity just before the start of his trial for the murder of Clare Quilty. So the three of them were wiped off the board, without issue, in three months.

  Dolores Haze was the daughter of Charlotte (née Becker) and Harold Haze, conceived on a 1934 honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and born on January 1, 1935 (what a chance alighting on holidays) in Pisky, itself in a corn, coal and hog-producing area. At that time, HH was twenty-five, Paris-born and Lo-bound, still not quite married to Valeria Zborovski. How astonishing it is to look back on your life, busy and vital at the time, it seemed, and to realize you were still twelve years away from your date with destiny, and might as well have stayed in bed as gone to the wedding.

  HH came to the U.S., after being divorced by Valeria, in early 1940. He wrote a history of French lit. for English students, he went on an Arctic expedition and he was in and out of asylums. It was in 1945 that the widow Haze and her Dolores moved to Ramsdale, New Hampshire. HH was then hot out of an asylum where he had contrived his own recovery by games of wordplay, dream-scheming and general storytelling (rather of the lo-and-behold variety). He too came to Ramsdale, looking for a summer’s quiet concentration. He would have lodged with the McCoos, but their house burned down, and so, at a loss, he was sent to 342 Lawn Street, where Charlotte and her Lo resided. Who says there is not some omniscient author dealing out the hands? Where are we if those two do not meet? And what caprice is it that can say, “Why not in Ramsdale, New Hampshire?” with a straight face?

  HH first saw her there, on May 30, 1947, feeling like the fairy-tale nurse to a lost princess, for she was the spitting image, the look-alike, of his childhood sweetheart, Annabel—hence HH’s love of the moment of truth in a twelve-year-old girl.

  Well, things moved fast, and so they must, for a nymphet’s prime does not last long enough for a slow coach. On June 21, they had a tussle on the sofa, or—as it were—by just touching her HH set all paradise loose and let a happy hand slide up her sunny leg until she rolled off the sofa. Then Charlotte packed her off to camp and on the same day accepted HH’s distracted proposal of marriage—legalized in a few days while Dolores was still away. Six weeks after that—talk about “Days of Our Lives”—Charlotte found the journal in which HH had been penning up a storm for Lo and ran outside in tumult, meeting a suitably swerving car. Kaput. The howl of brakes, the soft bump, and the renewal of summer’s whispering silence.

  So, on August 15, HH goes to collect Lo from camp. He takes her that night to a hotel in Parkington, The Enchanted Hunters, where daughter and stepdad share a room (342!) and the stark act of love, adding their names to a register that included Marie Samuels, Georges Beaulieu, Carl Proffer, Clare Quilty, and P. H. Vazak, among so many others—such are the summery delights of Parkington.

  They spent a year then exploring America, a year of motels—ideal places for slumber, argument, reconciliation and insatiable, illicit love that has no home—and travel among the wondrous places and place-names of the country, without a worry about the Mann Act. It was a year of Little Iceberg Lake, Hell’s Canyon, Death Valley, Hot Coffee, the Grand Tetons, Mission Dolores, Milner Pass, Scotty’s Castle, Goose Necks, Poker Flat, Phoenix, Arizona or Alex, Mississippi. They were insects, the two of them, endeavoring to crawl in and out of every tiny, exotic place, the happy-bored patrons of an endless drive-in, they always in the car, and it, the changing scene, dissolving in and out on the wraparound white screen. A movie tour, with all the sett
ing suns and painted deserts bloody as fruit salad in the best flicks of 1947–48—Duel in the Sun, Pursued, Out of the Past, Body and Soul, Lured, Kiss of Death, I Know Where I’m Going, Brute Force, Ramrod, They Won’t Believe Me, Dark Passage, Red River, Force of Evil, State of the Union, A Double Life, Sleep, My Love, I Remember Mama, Unfaithfully Yours, A Foreign Affair, No Minor Vices (I can’t go on…).

  Later: and so in the dying summer of 1948, Dolores Haze enters Beardsley College for Girls, where she is cast in the play The Hunted Enchanters by Clare Q——y. HH sniffs a rival, maybe the driver of the Aztec Red pursuer so much in the corner of his eye. He aims for a second transcontinental idyll (always HH’s dream) with Lo. And on July 4, 1949, as epochal as a bomb test on Bikini, CQ makes off with Lo. Thus start the sad years of HH, the looking and the waiting, the searching and the hoping, until on September 22, 1952, he receives the Hello, Dad letter from Dolly Schiller in Coalmont.

  I am not put off or shocked just because an older man, far older, should see and want to touch the firm, innocent beauty of a rosebud. No, and not surprised either that after bloom the rosebud falls away and there is as little left as there is on the blank page at the end of a book or the pale screen after a show.

  BERNSTEIN

  Everett Sloane in Citizen Kane, 1941,

  directed by Orson Welles

  He had a law degree, the result of night school and toiling at his books till two a.m., then getting up at six to be at the factory by seven. It was a relentless routine for seven years, for Nathan Bernstein was far from brilliant. It took the edge off his youth, and made him seem ten or fifteen years older than his real age. But he never let himself be resentful. He didn’t practice the law he worked so hard to master; he never turned into a smart Jewish lawyer. But he felt better for having the law degree, a little more worthy and safer if anything ever happened. And studying law had taught him to talk. The studies took away any social life; but he never complained, not even to himself. There are men who would as soon push themselves near death as risk the horror of being laughed at by a lady. Perhaps Bernstein looked at all the doubt and anxiety in courting, and gave it up for work. But a man like that, a man so caught up in business that he did not notice growing old, could harbor private visions of romance that never faded.

  He was born in Hoboken in 1859, in sight of Manhattan but outside its privileged aura. He scanned the city’s surface so many early mornings, the columns black but burnished by the sun rising behind them. Then, at the end of the day, the setting sun threw a low platinum light back on the city, which gave it depth and warmth. Its grays became mauve and the browns turned gold and ginger. Throughout the day and during his lifetime, Manhattan came to look more magical and exalted from New Jersey, more like an illusion. The increasing row of monuments loomed over the ragged Jersey shore, like civilization on the edge of swamp and wilderness.

  Bernstein’s parents were Austrian; his mother spoke no English; his father was a pawnbroker. Yet Bernstein became chairman of the board of Kane Enterprises, sitting in solitary splendor on top of the Inquirer Building after Kane had gone. Kane’s will left instructions for Bernstein to keep the use of the office and the title for as long as necessary. The tycoon had always trusted loyalty; it was the surest kind of friendship. And Bernstein had never once picked up the cynicism to think badly of Mr. Kane, or regard him in less than the light in which Kane saw himself. Even when the boss lied or manipulated, Bernstein kept his eyes on the glorious career requiring the deceit. He loved Kane, and Kane knew it; but neither man ever spoke of it.

  Bernstein was twenty-eight when he answered the advertisement in the New York Chronicle:

  Gentleman newly arrived from the West, possessing funds and ideas, requires general manager who will be tireless but amusing when tired.

  The interview that followed a month later, when Kane returned from Lisbon, was not prolonged:

  “Mr. Bernstein… .”

  “Yes, Mr. Kane?”

  “Ah … I was thinking. Have we met?”

  “I answered the advertisement.”

  “Exactly, Mr. Bernstein. This … newspaper.”

  “Yes, Mr. Kane?”

  “Think it might be fun to run a paper?”

  “Well… .”

  “Could you manage a paper, Mr. Bernstein?”

  “I believe I could.”

  “Could you manage me?”

  “Not if you noticed it.”

  “Mr. Bernstein, I believe we are going to be fine friends.”

  Nathan Bernstein was Kane’s general manager when they took over the Inquirer in 1890. That meant he hired and fired people, handled contracts and parties, and generally oversaw the affairs of a man who reckoned he might, if he had to, lose one million dollars a year for sixty years.

  In 1896, when he was thirty-seven, Bernstein was going over to Jersey on the ferry. It was a Sunday afternoon, but he had spent his morning at the office. It was a hot afternoon, and he felt sticky in his business clothes; not that he owned much else. He saw the other ferry coming in as his pulled out—two slow boats clanking and honking as they passed—and he saw a girl standing by its rail, all in white, carrying a white parasol, excited to be in the city for the rest of the day. Perhaps she was going to meet a boyfriend; she didn’t look more than twenty. Bernstein didn’t speak to her, and she never noticed him. For years afterward, he looked for her on the ferry, but he never found her. And he never forgot the smile on her face, a smile for the day, the old ferryboats, or a rendezvous twenty minutes away. In that moment, he had seen the years of his empty future stretched ahead of him, and he smiled with the sadness of a fulfilled man.

  Nathan Bernstein died in his office in 1945, days after the news of victory in Japan. The obituary in the Kane papers misspelled his name.

  SUSAN ALEXANDER KANE

  Dorothy Comingore in Citizen Kane, 1941,

  directed by Orson Welles

  At eight o’clock in the evening, on West Seventy-fourth Street in New York, sometime in 1915… . It had rained hard an hour earlier, and the streets were still empty of people. There is all the poised tension of a trap in the air. Charles Foster Kane was on one of his nocturnal walks to the Western Manhattan Warehouse, going down to the waterfront with only a cane as company—perhaps he never intended getting there. But he set out on that walk often; it might have been established that he used Seventy-fourth Street. Then it would only need a fresh, muddy puddle, a passing carriage, and Susan Alexander, half-moaning with the pain of a toothache, half-laughing.

  It sounds contrived, the kind of chance meeting to make a man of power suspicious. Did Jim Gettys construct the scene, guessing that it could grow into a “love nest,” to destroy his best opponent’s best chance? Or was there some more mysterious director of fate at work? It is not that Kane was a philanderer, likely sooner or later to get caught in an affair. He seems so timid with love, sex or women; they are all like statues he bought in Greece but never bothered to unwrap. No, he needed a special kind of sentimental occasion: the atmosphere of his mother and the presence of a novice; someone who would be entertained by his amateur magic without knowing who he was; someone with a career he could fashion. The arrangement is so astute. If Gettys was this clever, lucky New York to have such a boss. Only a great and important man would know how open he was to a nobody, a cross-section of the American public.

  Alexander was not her name. It was the strong but romantic name she took for herself when both her parents were dead. She had the choice down to Alexander, Mallory or Rivers, all more musical than Stock. The Stocks were of German descent, born New Yorkers, who had been able to move up from the Lower East Side to Seventy-fourth Street. Susan was born there in 1894. But by the age of eighteen, she was on her own in the world, employed in the sheet-music department of Seligman’s. She did not quite read music, but she had hopes of being a singer and it was a comfort to her to be in the music business.

  Then, that wet night in 1915, she went down to the drugst
ore to get something for her toothache, and she met this large man dabbing at the mud thrown up on his face by a carriage. She offered him hot water and took him home; there was nothing seductive about that, not until her tender imagination asked to leave the door to her apartment open. That small ajar was like an idea occurring to the dirtied man. And because she had laughed—without any malice, women laughing do not have to be fearsome—he took it into his head to entertain her. He could waggle both of his ears at the same time; it was something he had learned at Harvard from a Venezuelan. He put his hands together and made shadow silhouettes of animals on the wall. Before long she sang for him, in that small salon voice, pretty, brittle and afraid of any larger hall.

  A year later, the gubernatorial race was on, and Kane could not visit Susan as often as he wanted. If he had won the election, in all that euphoria and busyness, he might have dropped her—not without a generous gift, but still dropped her. Gettys could not let it go. He divined that all Kane needed to finish himself was a challenge; there was a ruinous need in the newspaperman for politics to be glorious, touched by honor and drama. He would be a terrible governor when the job bored him; it was a rare act of public spirit in Gettys to ensure that the state was spared Kane. He sent a simple note to Mrs. Kane, and on the night of the great oration at Madison Square Garden she invited her husband to go up to West Seventy-fourth Street with her.