The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

  Alfie was the part-time bartender at this restaurant, while he worked the rest of the time on the first of the three master’s degrees he would eventually earn. The year was 1953. He was twenty-nine. She was twenty-two. They fell in love for all the usual reasons. They were both handsome and unattached. They were working together, the kind of work that requires a sense of almost dancelike physical partnership, particularly at the busiest times of the evening, and they had the sense of dancing well together. And they liked each other’s stories, though later Alfie’s story was the least important part of who he was for Sylvia.

  But at the time, it was completely compelling to her—it was what did the trick. He told it to her over a series of late nights in the restaurant after they’d closed up and finished shutting things down. The other waitresses, the cook, and the dishwasher would all have left, slowly putting their coats on, sometimes having a drink or two before they went. Alfie and Sylvia would try not to seem as eager as they were for the others to go. When they were finally alone, they’d sit at a table out of sight of the front window, in case the manager came by to check on things—which happened every now and then—and talk.

  Or Alfie would talk, and Sylvia, rapt, would listen.

  This is what she learned: that he’d grown up in upstate New York, taken in at two months as a foster child by an older Italian couple after his mother abandoned him. There were other foster children in and out of the house, some of them troubled or delinquent, but none of them stayed for more than a year. Alfie was Francesca and Antonio’s forever, they made this clear to him. He felt himself marked by this, he told Sylvia. Chosen. He believed in himself because they believed in him.

  And they believed he was brilliant. He was bilingual—Italian was spoken at home. He could read at three. He was a math whiz. After his junior year at the regional high school, his teachers recommended he be sent away to boarding school—he needed more than they could give him to have a chance at a scholarship to a good college. And so he went to Hotchkiss for two more years, his first time mingling with people from a world other than his own. It made him realize, he told Sylvia, how much of what was understood to be intelligence and good breeding in American life was simply a matter of money. Money, and luck. He had to scramble to catch up with the other boys, both in his classes and socially, but by the beginning of the second semester, he had mastered this world. Talking to him, you wouldn’t have been able to guess his background. Only something a little wrong here and there—the ties he chose, his shoes, and then something odd, something slightly distanced or amused, in his stance toward the other boys. It took him a longer time, he said, to get in control of these details.

  After two years at prep school, he went to Harvard, a full ride, where it was much the same story. Success on success, strength to strength.

  Sylvia had felt her own life so completely ordinary next to his that she barely sketched it in. She didn’t stop to consider until later, much later, that this had seemed ample information to him, that he didn’t press her for details the way she had pressed him—though it was clear he was taken with the ease and privilege of her background. By the family roots in New England, the academic parents who traveled and had taken her and her brothers to various communities in South America; by her summer in France with the Experiment in International Living. Taken, too, by her recklessness and carelessness about all that. Certainly her story compelled him, but he was content with the outline, the bare bones.

  No, it was her feeling for all of his story, his past, that allowed their life together to happen. Her curiosity about every detail. Her belief in him and in his own version of himself. Brilliant Alfie! Who’d given the Latin oration at his graduation from Harvard, who could freely quote from Donne and T. S. Eliot, Kierkegaard and Freud, Marx and Dante. Who was an enthusiast, in contrast to her own, regretted coolness. Who was passionate, exacting in his acquisition of each universe he set out to understand.

  How could he do it? Keep straight the tics of various of Dickens’s characters, argue the politics of the Gilded Age or the NAACP, explain the difference between the atomic and the hydrogen bomb, care so much about all of it.

  When they went to hear Schubert, Liszt, Beethoven at Orchestra Hall, Alfie would get the scores beforehand and study them. While the music played, while Sylvia struggled just to listen, not to let her mind wander—to sex, to the question of whether they would marry, to money: how they would live if they did—Alfie’s attention was absolute. His fingers stirred restlessly on his legs as if with the urge to be a part of the music: to conduct, perhaps, or to play an instrument.

  They went to smoky bars on the South Side of Chicago and danced to Otis Rush, Little Walter, Muddy Waters. They went to the Near North Side to hear Max Roach, Dave Brubeck, Anita O’Day. They walked along the 57th Street Beach on a rainy day and came home to make love, their flesh chilled and damp. They went to street fairs, to jazz festivals, to little art galleries, to lectures at the university, to concerts downtown, to the Compass Players at Jimmy’s bar. There was nothing that Alfie didn’t want to know about, to talk about—politics, poetry, comedy, music, race relations, science.

  By the time Sylvia finally finished her master’s degree in English, with time off to have Frankie, Alfie was well into his own second master’s degree, in world religions this time. The first had been in economics. They moved to New Haven for his third master’s—in history—and Sylvia started the part-time teaching that would constitute her career, working as an adjunct in various small public and private colleges.

  Liz was in second grade by the time Alfie got his doctoral degree and, finally, his first full-time teaching job, at a little college in Iowa. By now Sylvia had come to understand that the restiveness, the eclecticism, of Alfie’s intelligence were going to be liabilities in the academic world he wanted to inhabit. More, she saw the wide-ranging quality of his many interests as, finally, self-absorption, a sort of armor against any deep human involvement. She had come to understand how distractible he was, which she hadn’t noticed at first. How he was always hurrying to the next universe to read about, to master, but never quite deeply enough. She was like her own one-person, skeptical tenure committee. What she wondered now when he launched himself into something new was What on earth will this lead to? What is the point?

  He was denied tenure in Iowa, and at four other colleges he taught in for various lengths of time. But finally, after his book on Jacob Burckhardt was published by a university press, they went to the small, not very distinguished school in Connecticut, Wadsworth College, where he was granted tenure and where they lived until his retirement.

  Through all this, his relations with the girls were another source of Sylvia’s disappointment and anger at him. While they were small, he was delighted by them in the odd moments his attention happened to light on one or the other, but he wasn’t really interested in them in any steady way—though, of course, being Alfie, he read Piaget, Erikson, Ariès, Winnicott. And he certainly wasn’t interested in any of the physical labor involved in their care. He had never changed a diaper, only rarely prepared a meal for them or helped feed them. Sylvia held herself partly to blame for this. They had had Frankie while she was still in his thrall, and she had felt then that his time, his work, were too important for him to assume any of these duties. By the time Liz came along, this had been established as their division of labor, and it seemed too late to ask for anything different.

  When the children began to have interests in the wider world, though, they commanded his focused attention, and each of them flowered under it. Sylvia could watch it, feel it happen—their turn away from her to him. She, who’d been overwhelmed by the work and responsibility of raising them on their erratic income while she also tried to have a work life of her own, she who’d managed all their moving around, she who’d changed their diapers, bathed them, fed them, read to them, sat up with them at night when they were ill or frightened, helped them with times tables, phonetics, costumes for sch
ool plays, who’d gone to field-hockey games, soccer matches, swim meets, theatrical productions, recitals—she began to fade into mere backdrop in their lives. While Alfie—brilliant Alfie!—stepped forward, center stage, to engage and dazzle them, as he’d once dazzled her.

  She understood the way she seemed next to Alfie: fretful, rigid, concerned with things they thought were of no real importance—money, deadlines, laundry, their SAT scores, their grades, groceries, getting things fixed around the house—who would choose these for preoccupations? Certainly Sylvia hadn’t. But they were things that had to be attended to, that someone needed to be responsible for.

  She was bitter about all this, she knew that. Jealous in some way, she supposed—an easy, hateful emotion she struggled with. She tried not to let it creep into her daily life, into her interactions with all of them, but she could hear herself sometimes—impatient and demanding, occasionally contemptuous—and she felt a dislike for herself more intense than anything she sometimes felt for Alfie.

  It was in these years that she thought of leaving him. It was beginning to happen all around them—in Alfie’s department, in their church: the separations, the divorces, the messy rearrangements of the marriages and friendships of couples their age. Even on their street in Connecticut there were two couples who had, in essence, swapped spouses. It took Sylvia several months to get straight which new couple was living in which house, with which children.

  She wasn’t sure whether she ever would have done it—left Alfie—and it didn’t matter in the end, because at about that time Sylvia’s mother died, of cancer. Her father had died several years earlier, so now a modest inheritance came to Sylvia and, more important, the house in New Hampshire, a house she loved, as she’d loved her grandparents, who had seemed, more than her parents ever had, to own it—and also, more than her parents had, to love her. Sometimes even now when she looked around, when she touched things, she felt their presence, particularly her grandmother’s.

  But mostly the house arrived in her life as a place where she could be alone, free of Alfie and whatever his current distraction or passion was. And it seemed this solitude was what she had needed all along. She’d go up and stay by herself for a weekend, occasionally a week, and return feeling glad to see him, ready for his energy to rescue her again, as it had when she was younger and unsure of her own direction. More occasionally Alfie used it as a scholarly retreat, a place to work, which left her alone. And this was enough, this and her work and her friendships, to restore her to a sense of herself.

  After a noisy dinner, dominated by the children’s conversation, by Alfie’s discussion of various books he was reading and his explanation of the Harper Prize, Frankie started to shoo everyone out of the kitchen so she could do the dishes. Clark said Liz should stay up for a while to visit with Frankie—he’d unpack at their house and get the children ready for bed. Sylvia persuaded Alfie to join her in walking down the hill with him and the children.

  She and Daphne walked slowly behind the others. Clark and Alfie were talking up ahead. Clark had Gordie on his shoulders, and Chas was running in circles around them, exploring things on one side of the road or the other.

  Down below, they looked at the state of the house, and Clark explained what he planned to do while he was here this time. As he began to run a bath for the children, they said good night and started up the road together.

  They were silent as they walked. Sylvia was thinking back over the events of the evening—feeling again her joy in her grandchildren, her private pleasure in her own children. Remembering, with a pinch of shame, how things had played out with them tonight, her tiresome public resistance to them. Yes: her contrariness. For this, too, she knew, she somehow held Alfie accountable, fair or not: surely she wouldn’t be as she was if he had not been as he was, would she?

  Now, as they walked slowly back up the hill, she was remembering the walks she and Alfie and the girls had taken many summer nights after dinner, before the evening activities started—those mild summer vacation activities: reading or doing a puzzle or playing a board game.

  On the walks, Liz usually ran ahead, as Chas had tonight, but Frankie would often lag behind to walk with Sylvia and Alfie and sometimes try to join in their conversation. Thinking about it now, Sylvia felt sad at how irritated she had often been with Frankie—with her clinginess, her wish to please, particularly her wish to please Alfie.

  She looked over at him now, frowning in concentration, as if he saw something that commanded his attention on the dirt in front of him. Or perhaps he, too, was thinking of all that had happened this evening.

  More likely something he’d read, or whatever he’d been talking about with Clark on the walk down.

  In the old days, Alfie wouldn’t have allowed the silence that had fallen between them. Neither of them had spoken since they left Clark’s house, and more and more now this was how they lived—side by side, silently.

  She could feel the low sun warm on her back. Their long shadows moved ahead of them on the dusty brown road.

  And then she noticed that he was walking oddly, jerking his leg and arm on almost every step. She watched him. Was it some sort of little seizure, perhaps? Should she say anything?

  “What are you kicking at, Alfie?”

  “The dog.” He sounded angry.

  “What dog?”

  “The goddamn dog.” He kicked, swatted out with his hand, and his shadow moved convulsively.

  She was without a response, confused. By what?

  Everything.

  His tone! When had Alfie ever used that tone? She watched him, she watched his shadow’s convulsive movements.

  And then she understood, abruptly, that that was what he was irritated at—his shadow. His shadow: the imaginary dog. Who leaped away every time he threatened.

  She was so shocked she didn’t know what to say.

  They walked on, Alfie lurching, grunting, Sylvia stunned to silence, until finally they arrived at the shadow of the stand of white birches at the end of the driveway and their own shadows were swallowed by the larger one of the trees. Alfie calmed down almost instantly. She could feel herself relax, and she realized she’d been holding herself in horrified attention.

  They turned into the driveway together, and when they emerged from under the trees, they were almost facing the sun as it was about to disappear behind the ridgeline below the meadow. This meant that their shadows were behind them and to their right, invisible to Alfie. He walked calmly the rest of the way home, his face seemed at peace.

  I should have said something, Sylvia was thinking. I should have helped him. But part of what she was feeling was that she hadn’t wanted to help him. She didn’t know how to, for one thing. But also she didn’t want to assume responsibility for him yet again. She was tired of being responsible.

  Wasn’t that it?

  When they came in, Liz and Frankie were sitting together in the living room. They hadn’t yet turned the lights on, and the room was bled of color. There was some odd tension in the air. Liz looked up brightly at them, and said, as if warning Frankie of something, “Here are Daddy and Mother.” There was a pause, all of them looking at one another.

  “And not a moment too soon, apparently,” Alfie said. Sylvia turned to stare at him. Back, it would seem. Back from wherever he’d been only moments before.

  “I’m off to bed now, my girls,” Alfie said. A faint smile played over his face. A mischievous smile. “So you can talk about me all you wish.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” Liz said. But she was smiling.

  “It’s true. Feel free.” He turned into the kitchen, passing Sylvia without looking at her.

  She heard him say, “Why is it so goddamn dark?” and the light behind her came on.

  Sylvia turned and went into the kitchen, too. Alfie was gone, down the hallway to his study, or maybe, as he said, to bed. She was aware of not caring which, of relief just to have him away, somewhere else, beyond her purview.

  She got a g
lass from the cupboard. In the pantry she poured it half full of gin and took a long swallow. She went back into the kitchen and got a tray of ice from the refrigerator. As she noisily popped three or four cubes out of it, she called out to the living room, “Do you girls want wine? Anything?”

  “No, nothing for me,” Liz said.

  “I’d have a beer,” Frankie called back. “If there are any left.”

  Sylvia poured herself a little more gin, enough to cover the ice cubes, and got a beer out of the refrigerator for Frankie.

  When she came back into the living room, Liz stood up, as if she’d been waiting for Sylvia’s return. “I’m going to head down,” she said. “Clark has his hands full. Plus I’m tired. Too much excitement around here for me.” She came over to Sylvia, embraced her quickly, a kiss on the cheek. She turned to Frankie. “See you in the a.m.,” she said.

  When Liz was gone, Frankie asked Sylvia if she wanted to sit on the porch. “The sunset looks to be one of those cinematic jobs,” she said.

  “Yes, lovely,” Sylvia said, distractedly.

  And it was cinematic. The very word. Almost garish. It went on and on, the moving cumulus clouds first golden, then a flaring orange, then slowly more pink. She and Frankie were talking through all this, but peacefully, lazily. They discussed the children. Frankie thought they were beautiful, and part of that, for her, was how fat they were—that was the word she used. How healthy, “in that lovely American way.” Her voice sounded sad, and Sylvia thought of the children Frankie worked with then, how the images of them must come to her here from time to time.