Suspects

by David Thomson

  Her mother had spells of melancholy or worse. There was some weakness in the family line, like an angle to the nose or a color in the eyes. There was the year when Mary Frances and her mother sank into crisis simultaneously. It was hot and windy and Mr. Jed Harris came by, proposing to make Mary Frances a famous actress. It jostled her terribly. For three days she had to be tied to her bed. Laura and I took care of it. Their mother was in another room, groaning so steadily that it got on your nerves.

  Laura told me there would always be times like these, but I married Mary Frances in 1938 and took her to Bedford Falls. She cheered up a lot. We had Harry in 1940 and Bedford Falls had maybe its last great age during the war, dedicated to the soldiers far away and to self-sacrifice at home. I looked forward to the peace. I wanted to do my bit in ensuring that warriors coming home could have a house and a life to justify the fighting. But being left out of the war made me gloomy, and I had been a little influenced already by the dark holes of despair that overtook Mary Frances once or twice a year. We had another son, Travis, in 1945, but I could tell that Mary was near her brink.

  The crisis came in 1946. Uncle Billy—my right-hand problem at the Building & Loan—lost a packet of money. It looked like ruin, prison and an end to everything. I was out of my mind. I thought of killing myself, and it taught me how troubled my head was already that there was no real stamina for life there to sustain me. I would have done something, and left Mary Frances, Harry and Travis. I could not trust or believe in myself. It was a dreadful discovery, worse than the loss of the money and the prospect of exposure.

  Just before Christmas I went away for a few days to New York. It was subsequently called “the episode with the angel.” That was Mary Frances’s way of explaining it, the first sign of her refuge in religion. I went to see Laura, who had been in New York for several years. She was successful, it seemed, and I had a notion that she might loan me some money. I had never met her husband, Mark, before, and I was taken aback by the animosity between them. They had a daughter, Paula, but Mark paid no attention to her. He deliberately spoke of the ugliness he encountered as a policeman, and he brought unaccountably strange men to the house for beer and cards.

  Laura wanted to help me. She had developed so much and so well, it made me suspicious of Bedford Falls. I did wonder whether Mary Frances might have dazzled Broadway if she had been able to accelerate as Laura had. Laura looked like a film star; she looked like a magical Mary Frances, the woman my wife could have become but for me, our town and her illness. But I had to consider whether the last might not be aggravated by the first two.

  It was the last weekend before Christmas: Laura was buying presents, making arrangements, working at Bullitt’s, and trying to get some money together for me. She knew Mark would forbid it if he found out, and most of her money, at her own early insistence, was in a joint account. There were secret meetings and complicated plans. She and I met at the Pierre Hotel and she gave me an envelope full of money. I could hardly speak, but when I looked up she was weeping.

  “So you’ll be going now,” she said.

  There was so much gathered but untouched sentiment in us—the dark clouds of Mark and Mary Frances—the air brimming with Christmas and the way in which Laura resembled the wife I had wanted. There were a few hours before my train. We never discussed it. Laura went away and came back with a key. We went up to a primrose-yellow room and made love in the winter light. Then we left. I went to the station, and Laura to her apartment, the two of us due at our family Christmases.

  The Building & Loan was saved. Bedford Falls went on. We heard that Laura was pregnant again. Then in the spring of 1947, Mark McPherson came to town. He drove in, without warning. It all happened while I was at the office. He introduced himself to Mary Frances, admired Harry and Travis, sent Harry out into the yard, and raped my wife, as quickly and brutally as he could.

  I never saw him. Harry came to the office. He said, “Mommy’s ill,” very quietly, and took me home. Mary Frances was in the bathroom, naked, washing herself repeatedly. I never knew what Mark had told her, but she knew what he had done to her was for a reason, a rebuke. Harry may have understood more than she did, even if he was only seven. Travis was asleep in his cot. Mary Frances was demented, and an actress playing dementia. I have never known which for sure. The bad times come and go. She is like a character in a high-strung movie, like Olivia de Havilland as twins in The Dark Mirror.

  What else would you want to know? I am seventy-four and Mary Frances is sixty-seven. We live in the same house; the crises now have more room to hide in. I sold the Building & Loan to the Potter Corporation, and I am what is called comfortable now. I have a video recorder and a library of films. In addition I have two sons who have changed their names from Bailey and who will not see me, a daughter in Atlantic City and another in the south of France. Among the four of them, my children have been in on the killing of over a dozen Americans. They all have their own nightmares.

  I will go to Marquette again for a week in the summer, to the Thunder Bay Inn. I enjoy the lake, and the walks. There is a good library in the town and the people at the inn know me. Mary is married to Alphonse Poquette—Al, he prefers to be called—and they have two children, Tracy and Craig. Al is a little brusque. He finds me tedious, I think. Why not? I do not enjoy myself. But Mary invites me in to their part of the inn for tea sometimes. We talk, sitting there in the warm lounge, me with my uncertainty about who she is, never to be disturbed, she with her consistent, shallow friendliness, and both of us sitting beneath the glow of the lifesize painting of Laura that she inherited from her father.

  A version of my early life is played on television every Christmas, but my country rumbles on in the darker pattern of my years since then, torn between Santa Claus and the bogeyman.

  * * *

  I sleep less and less. With so little to do now, why should I be given more time?

  It was no longer night when I awoke, but there was still nothing but dark. The lights on our street go off at one in the morning. There is no sense of threat here. The night is a complete rest, or absence. So at five I can tell the several steps by which degrees of black are being withdrawn from the night. It is dark still, but a dark that has felt the first intimations of something else.

  I lay in bed another half hour. It was not unusual that George was not there beside me. When I saw the first streaks of reflection in the oval mirror I got up and put on the scarlet dressing gown he bought me in New York, his one time there. It is threadbare, but it was a Christmas present and I will not give it up. He has told me that I look like Santa Claus in it. I am tall still, for a woman, and I have white hair above the red gown. Anyone without his glasses might make the same eager mistake.

  Did he see that figure come down the stairs, stepping over those that creak, so the movement might look menacing, like a limp? I expected him to be asleep. I meant to shut the window and put a blanket round his shoulders. I have learned to do all that without ever waking him.

  But he was sitting as if thrust back in his chair, his head twisted so that it was turned to look at the staircase and at me. Did he see me? Was he so wrapped in what he was writing that he wondered if he saw a specter on the stairs and had his heart quiver, just once, and stop? Did George die, frightened, seeing me, looking like a figure in a play come to rescue or rebuke him? The look on his face matched either prospect. The wanting to know and see was frozen, his mouth open and the last run of dribble was like a snail’s trail on his chin. I saw the details, as if he had written me to be his discoverer.

  His book, this book, lay on the table in front of him. The pages looked like stones in the coming light. They have lived on the table for years, defending it against polish. Perhaps I can save the table now, if I pack up the pages.

  The book goes on and on about the actress I might have been, and the tragic player I became in this house instead. I have never understood such a waste of hope and worrying. I had none of the need to be an actress.
I was only a girl with a certain cautious talent, and too much shyness in social situations. I acted, I daresay, to find a husband. It was the only way I knew of showing I was ardent and attractive. I found George, but he could never overcome the guilt that he had stopped me being an actress. It was one of his ways of ensuring unhappiness.

  When truly he was the one of us who should have left. He had a chronic aptitude for the far-fetched stories of the movies. He was always seeing fatal nymphs in Tennessee towns, or hearing the engraved conversations that carry haunted lovers up to the screen, their faces torn by suspense. He could not look at anything without suspecting its capacity for story.

  But he was afraid of that world, and so he remained here in Bedford Falls, saying he was deaf, needed, too prosaic, too ordinary to travel, a man with an unsound heart. But he traveled all the time in his mind. For years on end he was in the exciting motion of pictures, carried away, leaving his body in the chair by the window, but not noticing that real people growing up and growing sad were waiting for him.

  The light now is pigeon gray. I will have to call the doctor, the mortician and the children, one after the other. There will be a quiet funeral in Nebraska, its plain loss not alleviated by long-lost daughters or the first rising notes of a rescue theme. We are all real here, and we have to bury the bodies when they have been abandoned.

  Mary Frances Bailey

  November 1984

  FILMOGRAPHY

  American Gigolo (1980), written and directed by Paul Schrader.

  Anatomy of a Murder (1959), directed by Otto Preminger; screenplay by Wendell Mayes, based on the novel by Robert Traver.

  Atlantic City (1980), directed by Louis Malle; screenplay by John Guare.

  Badlands (1973), written and directed by Terrence Malick.

  Beat the Devil (1954), directed by John Huston; screenplay by Huston and Truman Capote, from the novel by James Helvick.

  The Big Heat (1953), directed by Fritz Lang; screenplay by Sidney Boehm, from the novel by William P. McGivern.

  The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks; screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, from the novel by Raymond Chandler.

  Body Heat (1981), written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

  Casablanca (1942), directed by Michael Curtiz; screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, from the play Everybody Goes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison.

  Caught (1949), directed by Max Ophuls; screenplay by Arthur Laurents, from the novel Wild Calendar by Libbie Block.

  Chinatown (1974), directed by Roman Polanski; screenplay by Robert Towne.

  Citizen Kane (1941), directed by Orson Welles; screenplay by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz.

  Cutter’s Way (1981), directed by Ivan Passer; screenplay by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin, from the novel Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg.

  Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder; screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, from the novel by James M. Cain.

  The Gambler (1974), directed by Karel Reisz; screenplay by James Toback.

  Gilda (1946), directed by Charles Vidor; screenplay by Marion Parsonnet, from Jo Eisinger’s adaptation of a story by E. A. Ellington.

  The Godfather (1971), directed by Francis Ford Coppola; screenplay by Coppola and Mario Puzo, from the novel by Puzo.

  The Godfather Part II (1974), directed by Francis Ford Coppola; screenplay by Coppola and Mario Puzo, from the novel by Puzo.

  The Great Gatsby (1949), directed by Elliott Nugent; screenplay by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, from the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  The Great Gatsby (1974), directed by Jack Clayton; screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, from the novel by Fitzgerald.

  High Sierra (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh; screenplay by John Huston and W. R. Burnett, from the novel by Burnett.

  I Walk the Line (1970), directed by John Frankenheimer; screenplay by Alvin Sargent, from the novel An Exile by Madison Jones.

  In a Lonely Place (1949), directed by Nicholas Ray; screenplay by Andrew Solt, from an adaptation by Edmund H. North of the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes.

  It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), directed by Frank Capra; screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Capra, additional scenes by Jo Swerling, based on a story “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern.

  The Killers (1946), directed by Robert Siodmak; screenplay by Anthony Veiller, from the story by Ernest Hemingway.

  The Killing (1956), directed by Stanley Kubrick; screenplay by Kubrick, from the novel Clean Break by Lionel White, additional dialogue by Jim Thompson.

  The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), directed by Bob Rafelson; screenplay by Jacob Brackman.

  Klute (1971), directed by Alan J. Pakula; screenplay by Andy K. Lewis and Dave Lewis.

  The Lady from Shanghai (1948), directed by Orson Welles; screenplay by Welles, from the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King.

  Laura (1944), directed by Otto Preminger; screenplay by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt, from the novel by Vera Caspary.

  The Long Goodbye (1973), directed by Robert Altman; screenplay by Leigh Brackett, from the novel by Raymond Chandler.

  Lolita (1962), directed by Stanley Kubrick; screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov, from his own novel.

  The Maltese Falcon (1941), written and directed by John Huston, from the novel by Dashiell Hammett.

  Melvin and Howard (1980), directed by Jonathan Demme; screenplay by Bo Goldman.

  Morocco (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg; screenplay by Jules Furthman, from the play Amy Jolly by Benno Vigny.

  New York, New York (1977), directed by Martin Scorsese; screenplay by Earl MacRauch and Mardik Martin, from a story by MacRauch.

  Night Moves (1975), directed by Arthur Penn; screenplay by Alan Sharp.

  No Man of Her Own (1950), directed by Mitchell Leisen; screenplay by Sally Benson, Catherine Turney and Leisen, from the novel I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich.

  Notorious (1946), directed by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay by Ben Hecht.

  Out of the Past (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur; screenplay by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring), from his own novel Build My Gallows High.

  Paper Moon (1973), directed by Peter Bogdanovich; screenplay by Alvin Sargent, from the novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown.

  The Passenger (1975), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni; screenplay by Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and Antonioni, from a story by Peploe.

  Pickup on South Street (1953), directed by Samuel Fuller; screenplay by Fuller, from a story by Dwight Taylor.

  Point Blank (1967), directed by John Boorman; screenplay by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse and Rafe Newhouse, from the novel The Hunter by Richard Stark.

  The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), directed by Tay Garnett; screenplay by Niven Busch and Harry Reskin, from the novel by James M. Cain.

  The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), directed by Bob Rafelson; screenplay by David Mamet, from the novel by James M. Cain.

  Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay by Joseph Stefano, from the novel by Robert Bloch.

  Rear Window (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay by John Michael Hayes, from a story by Cornell Woolrich.

  Rebel Without a Cause (1955), directed by Nicholas Ray; screenplay by Stewart Stern, adapted by Irving Shulman from a story by Ray.

  The Shining (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick; screenplay by Kubrick and Diane Johnson, from the novel by Stephen King.

  Strangers on a Train (1951), directed by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay by Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith.

  Sunset Boulevard (1950), directed by Billy Wilder; screenplay by Wilder and Charles Brackett.

  Taxi Driver (1976), directed by Martin Scorsese; screenplay by Paul Schrader.

  The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed; screenplay and original story by Graham Greene.

  Touch of Ev
il (1958), written and directed by Orson Welles, from the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson.

  Vertigo (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, from the novel D’Entre les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.

  White Heat (1949), directed by Raoul Walsh; screenplay by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, from a story by Virginia Kellogg.

  Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978), directed by Karel Reisz; screenplay by Judith Rascoe and Robert Stone, from the novel Dog Soldiers by Stone.

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  by No Exit Press

  an imprint of Oldcastle Books

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  © David Thomson 1985

  The right of David Thomson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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