Tony Hastings picked up his car at the police station the next afternoon. It had been dried out and cleaned. It was full of memory, but never mind that. Bobby Andes had more news.
“We got the cause of death.”
Tony sat down, waited for it. Andes not looking at him.
“Your wife had a fractured skull. She appears to have been struck, hammer or baseball bat. Only once or twice. Your daughter had a harder time. She was strangled. Suffocated.”
He waited for Tony to think about it, with more to say.
“She also had a broken arm.”
“You mean there was a struggle?”
“Looks like it.”
He was watching Tony. “Something else,” he said. Tony waited. “They were raped.” He made this sound like the worst news yet, though Tony was not surprised to hear it. He was surprised to hear it, though.
Bobby Andes brightened. “I’ll tell you one thing. Seems you were right about that trailer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your friends took your folks there just like you said.”
“How do you know that?”
Hammer.
“We found your wife’s fingerprint on the bedpost.” As if that were good news.
“Oh my God. What about Helen?”
“Not hers, just your wife’s.”
“Well, whose trailer is it?”
Rape.
“Oh that.” Bobby Andes, knowing his business. “He’s clear. He lives in Poleville, uses it for the hunting season. The place had been broken into. Someone’s been living in it.”
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.
TWELVE
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.
Nocturnal Animals 11
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.”