Tony and Susan (8 page)

The news was dark and cold, Laura and Helen in the trailer. ‘Damn,’ Tony murmured. Struggle.

‘Right. We got other prints too.’

‘Where?’

‘The trailer has a couple. Tell you something else. The prints on the car ain’t yours.’

‘Good,’ Tony Hastings said. Good. Why did he say that? ‘Have you checked them against the prints in the trailer?’ Tony Hastings, detective. What good would that do?

‘Too soon. It takes time, man. We’ll have to check the prints in the trailer against the owner’s, see if we can separate out. But I’m hopeful. The owner hasn’t been there since last fall. It looks promising.’

‘I guess it does.’ Tony Hastings polite but reluctant to admit anything was promising. It was too late for that.

‘We’ve sent them to be checked. You’ll be hearing from me.’

Bobby Andes was pleased. To Tony Hastings it was all too late. It was long before he realized he himself might have needed to be cleared in the minds of the police by those stranger’s prints on his car.

Dark, Edward, heavy. With a last paragraph that could ruin the book. There’s no doubt: it’s risk time for Edward, an intersection, where to go. Whether to pursue the evil men and be a mystery, or pursue Tony’s soul and be something else. Susan likes the problem in this chapter: what to do with the rest of the day when you get the bad news. What would she do if she lost Dorothy, Henry, Rosie? That’s a taboo question she doesn’t dare think about except by imagining Tony. Damned if she knows.

She foresees a possible objection she might make later (not yet) to Edward’s raping those women before killing them. Crimes against women, a cliché she hates. It depends on what you expect of her, if you don’t ask her to enjoy your sadism which would only be masochism for her. She always knew Edward liked violence despite his pursed lips. The violence of his restraint, his deliberate gentleness, his secretly angry pacifism.

She remembers giving him advice on how to write. How audacious that now seems. She said, you need to stop writing about yourself, nobody cares how fine your feelings are. He replied, Nobody ever writes about anything but himself. She said, You need to know literature, you need to write with literature and the world in mind. For years she was afraid she had killed something in him, and she hoped his turning to insurance meant he didn’t mind. But this book looks like a different
kind of answer. She wonders how much contempt or irony lies behind his choice of subject, and she hopes he is sincere.

This other memory comes up out of nowhere: boy and girl like brother and sister, longer ago, in the rowboat at the shore, while up in the house above the rocks, she can’t remember. He flings a cigarette hiss into the water about something.

Bathroom free now, they say, with water probably all over the floor. One more chapter tonight.

Tony Hastings, civilized, was raised by gentle people, intellectual and scholarly, mannerly and kind, his father a college dean, his mother a poet. He grew up in a brick house with a brother and sister and pets, they fed the birds and went to the Cape for the summer. He learned to hate prejudice and cruelty. As a young man he was courtly and considerate of women. He married for love and became a professor and bought a house and had a daughter and bought his own summer place in Maine. He read books, listened to music, played the piano, and had his wife’s paintings on the walls of his house which was surrounded by a lawn with an oak tree. He kept a journal. Sometimes he suspected that being civilized concealed a great weakness, but since he could not conceive a remedy, he clung to it and took pride in it.

Before this thing happened, his great fear had been that civilization would break down and drop him in the rubble. Nuclear war, or anarchy, or terrorism. How terrible for mankind if all the labor of centuries were destroyed. His evening reading supplied alternative disasters: carbon dioxide turning all to tropics and desert, the sun blistering us through the
disappearing ozone. And always the nearer possibility of getting caught in the machinery, as when cars crunch on the highway.

Now he thought, I have seen it. I know what’s out there, the walls of Troy. In the shock of his loss, Tony Hastings knew the importance of remaining civilized, with a bomb behind his eyeballs that would blow up if he was not careful. The way was to defuse it with delicate ritual operations. The importance of remembering who he was, Tony Hastings, professor, resident of, son of, father of. Reciting his name as he walked along the road in the dark. Organizing words, constituting thought. Shaving carefully around his mustache. Preparing for what would be given him to feel.

He read magazines in the motel because it was important to keep his mind active. He resisted tears because it was important to have control of his face. He declined to let Merton drive him home because it was important. It was important to recognize the importance of things, for he knew now that everything important was important, nothing was more important than importance.

In the morning before his car was ready, he called the Frazer and Stover Funeral Home, recommended by Bobby Andes. He said, ‘This is Tony Hastings. I don’t know if the police have told you about me.’

The man had not been told. He had a singer’s voice, kind and unsurprised. He said, ‘I take it you don’t want cremation?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it.’ Not true. Tony remembered a year or two ago when Laura said, ‘I assume we’ll all be cremated when we go,’ and Helen protested, ‘Don’t cremate me, for God’s sake.’ So he said, ‘My daughter was afraid of cremation.’

‘I understand,’ the man said. ‘We’ll prepare the bodies and ship them to Cincinnati to handle the ceremonies at that end. Whom would you like us to ship them to?’

Tony had no idea. He didn’t know where to have the funeral, either. They were not churchgoers, and he didn’t know what to do. ‘Don’t worry,’ the man said. ‘We’ll fix you up, one step at a time. It all works out in the end.’

After Frazer and Stover, Tony Hastings called long distance to Jack Harriman, who had drawn up Laura’s will. It was identical with his, each left everything to the other. There wasn’t much of interest to a lawyer, dresses and shoes, pans and kitchen knives, paints, canvases, easel. He fought off Harriman’s expressions of sympathy. ‘I just want to know what to do. Whether we have to seal off the house.’

Everything in his suitcase was damp, and he spread his clothes to dry on the empty second bed in his room. The next morning he had an early breakfast and paid his bill. He felt odd leaving without speaking to anyone, so he called the police office and said goodbye to Bobby Andes.

The car worked well enough and he had not forgotten how to drive. He headed out to the Interstate, conscious of being alone in the car. With the waterlogged bags of Laura and Helen like bodies in the trunk. A pang in leaving them behind, desertion. Not so, they will follow – on a plane or in a truck, he did not know. The day was preparing to be hot, the sky white, the wooded ridges and fields across the valleys attenuated, unbodied, pale and filmy. He drove fast but attentively. He said to himself, I am under unusual stress. Therefore I must pay attention to my attention and drive with care, and he drove with care.

The evil Interstate had regained its innocence. It was now a broad white track, busy with trucks and speeding cars trying to pass. He did not try to find the place on the other side where they had been stopped, and soon it was behind. He looked at the drivers of the other cars. Families, couples, single
men, salesmen. He said, I have not been traumatized for driving on the highway. What happened to me was exceptional, one in a million. Most drivers here are ordinary people, and if I had to stop and wait for help I would be quite safe. I am not afraid of the cars passing me, for I know they are merely driving faster than I, just as I am driving faster than others.

He worked to keep thrusts of shocked thought from interfering with his attention. The emptiness of the car in places they had passed three days before. He came down from the woody mountains into Ohio farmland, the sky still white and the far fields faint in the thick air. He made regular stops for coffee, gas, meals, taking care not to stop where they had stopped before.

His mind was busy. Against the march of high-tension towers across a field to the smoggy horizon, he saw imprinted the curve of a road at night with the bearded man named Lou, and he saw his car parked in the turnout while Lou told him to drive on, that ain’t yours, your car’s a four door, and he knew by Laura’s fingerprint on the bedpost that she and Helen were there at that moment, in the trailer among the trees with the dim light in the window, in the presence of two men named Ray and Turk.

He went through it again, while unconsciously passing trucks and exceeding the speed limit. They must have just got there. They were standing probably by the door while Ray gripped Laura by the arm and Helen looked around for a way to break loose, and Laura said, ‘Let us go, you can’t do this to us.’ At that moment, they perhaps heard the other car going by with a surge of hope which died when the car went on, and in the window the faded ruffly curtain with rose blossoms and leaves, placed in the window by the hunter’s wife, concealed the scene from the night.

Then he would force the following moment to ensue, wondering what overcame them, whether it was Ray using a knife on Helen’s throat to force her mother to disrobe, or twisting Helen’s arm until it broke to force the mother’s compliance, or if there was a gun although Tony had seen none. ‘They were raped,’ Bobby Andes said, with a bed to imagine just below the flowered curtain, and a bedpost for Laura’s fingers to grab, pulling up with all her strength against whoever was pushing her down. Screaming and fighting. Violent men – their clawed fingers digging into the soft shoulders of his wife, his daughter, forcing them down in terror on a bare mattress with violent springs, cramming hate into the warm love Tony knew and his daughter’s unknown future.

Driving into the hot blaze of ill-defined afternoon sun, he did not want to know how they died, it would be easier to leave it blank like all the other blank spots in the history of the world. But he did know. These were not anonymous victims of the world but Laura and Helen, a blow to the skull, strangulation. Making it impossible not to recapitulate, Ray and Turk (and Lou too, probably, going back to the trailer after leaving Tony in the woods) smashing the hammer and squeezing the fighting little body against the wall, god damn I said shut up.

He arrived home early in the evening. He steadied himself when he saw the house, standing so still like a picture of life. The oak tree on the front lawn, the slope on the side with the lilac bushes and Mr. Husserl’s house above. He braced himself again when he unlocked the door and went in and found it empty. The kitchen, cleaned up as they had left it, in the unlit living room Laura’s two paintings on the wall in dim twilight. You knew it would be hard, he said, this is only to be expected. He brought in the waterlogged suitcases and dufflebags, took
them up to Helen’s room, dumped them on the floor. After a while he turned on the lights.

The telephone rang.

‘You home?’

‘Yes.’

‘I saw it in the newspaper.’

‘You did? Who’s this?’

‘You got home all right?’

‘Yes. Who is this?’

No answer. He looked in the refrigerator. He would need milk and juice and bread for breakfast. He didn’t want to go out tonight, he didn’t want anyone to see him. To hell with it.

The phone rang again, Lisa McGregor of the
Tribune
, wanting an interview. He pulled down the shades. He sat in the living room, facing Laura’s empty chair, not knowing what to do. He went upstairs and dumped his clothes, still damp, into a laundry bag. He undressed and went to the bathroom and found his way to the bed in the dark. He seemed to be in a narrow track, and everywhere he went, he was surrounded by the tangible absence.

The next day was deliberately busy. He went to Jake’s Coffee Shop for breakfast, hoping nobody would recognize him. He called Bill Furman and had a long conversation, which made him feel more civilized, and he allowed Bill to take responsibility for arranging the funeral and spreading the word. While he was talking he noticed a colorful van parked in front of the house, in the shade of the oak tree. It was from a local television station. A smartly dressed young woman in a business suit came up the walk, followed by two men carrying equipment. She wanted a statement. She said, ‘Are you in favor of the death penalty?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to answer that question just now.’

Later he went to Lot Hill. Mr. Camel showed him a plot of ground on a slope facing the back fence and a row of backyards. He stopped at the monument company, rock of ages, granite. He added up the costs indifferently. At home again, he swept the downstairs and stuffed his clothes in the washer and dryer. Clean sheets and towels for his brother in the guest room and his sister in Helen’s room, thinking, this is civilized. I am doing things I never did before, which is good for me. At the airport he met Paula, who embraced him and wept, and they stayed on to meet Alex’s plane. In the house that night, they were their parents’ three reunited children, though separated by adult life for so long they felt like strangers. Still, people in the house, talk in the kitchen, made a difference. The future was like a newborn wild beast, which their talk domesticated. What kind of life would Tony live now, should he keep the house, how well could he take care of himself? Paula made plans, she bought supplies, she interviewed Mrs. Fleischer. There were drinks and then dinner, which Paula cooked, and there was a lot of memory and nostalgia. They agreed that after Tony’s visit to Paula at the Cape, she would come back in September to help him dispose of things. He would go to Alex in Chicago for Thanksgiving and to Paula again in Westchester for Christmas.

In the front row at the Unitarian Church, he sat insulated between Paula and Alex while the sunshine streamed through the windows. A lake into which the violent memory sank and violent motion ceased. Sunshine with music and quiet voices. In front, two strange oblongs, side by side, covered with white cloth. Tony Hastings vaguely aware the church was full of people, people peeking to get a look at him. Colleagues. Friends of Laura, he not sure who. High schoolers, friends of Helen’s. Shaking hands afterwards.

People he knew and people he didn’t, crying and embracing. The tide rushed through him, and he cried too.

The next morning he and Paula closed the house and flew to the Cape. After taking off the plane flew over the city. The air was clear, the streets and blocks crisp and distinct. He looked for the small green patch of Lot Hill, but he was rising away from them in a capsule, and perhaps it was not Lot Hill. The ground shifted and he couldn’t tell, it was or it wasn’t. Then it was white cotton clouds and all the world as sea.

Ray said to Lou, you fuckin sonofabitch you let him go, now he’ll tell, and Lou said how the hell was I supposed to know, and Ray said, Hey mister, your wife wants you, and Paula said, ‘We’ll have a good time at the beach, won’t we?’