Did Thatcher know, or care?

Film Moving Images Source considers the role of Charles Foster Kane's childhood guardian and why his mother signed the boy over. It's genius:

"As far as I know, no one has ever broached a convincing theory to explain this scene’s weirdness. When asked by my students, I’d never had one, either. That is, until several years ago, when a returning-adult undergrad student of mine, a Vietnam vet, seeing Kane for the first time in a basic film history course, shrugged and offered a luminous explanation. It’s simple, really, and implanted in what we do see in the film like a virus: the unseen deadbeat boarder with the fortuitous mine deed, named "Fred Graves" in the screenplay, was in fact Charlie’s father. This would mean that Charlie was a bastard born to a wayward married woman, which in the western territories of 1870 meant he was to be hidden, spirited off and hopefully forgotten, regardless of how much money one might be coming into."

You were expecting someone else?