by Brock Clarke
“OK,” I said, trying to act as though I were hearing this for the first time. This was difficult, though, in part because I knew all about it, but also because Detective Wilson wouldn’t let go of my hand. He wasn’t shaking it anymore, just holding it gently, as though trying to help me through an especially difficult time. Or maybe it was me helping him; he was young enough that this could have been his first case. Maybe that’s why he’d given us his title—detective—and not his first name, because he couldn’t believe he actually had one. A title, that is.
“Edward Bellamy was a writer,” the detective said. “He wrote books.” He smiled at me broadly, as if this were good news and he was pleased to be the one to spread it.
“Oh,” I said flatly, and then, as if just realizing the import of this news, I said, “Oh!” again. My intent was to make this “Oh!” sound panicked, concerned, and maybe even a little indignant, but not at all guilty. But it didn’t sound quite right, a little weak and insincere to my ears, and so I was going to let out a third “Oh!”—this one with a little more passion, a little more oomph. But my mother shot me a look that told me, more or less, to stop saying “Oh!” So I stopped.
“This happened last night,” my mother said, repeating herself, talking slowly, helping me through this. “We told the detective that you were here all night, with us, in this house.”
“That’s true,” I said, and it was.
“OK,” Detective Wilson said, only now letting go of my hand. I put it in my pocket before he could decide to take it back. He turned to my father. “So why don’t you show me that letter.”
“Letter,” my father said, and nodded. This was clearly something they’d spoken of before I’d arrived: all three seemed at ease with the fact of this letter’s existence and with the prospect of Detective Wilson’s taking a look at it. It was clearly something they’d already agreed upon. My father got up from the couch and lurched in the direction of his bedroom, and Detective Wilson followed him. From inside the bedroom, I could hear Detective Wilson ask my father, “Do you always keep the letters in this box? In this drawer?” I could hear my father mutter something affirmative. My mother remained on the couch and stared glumly into her coffee cup. “I could use a drink,” she said. “A real drink.”
“So,” I said, again attempting to sound casual and unconcerned, but no doubt failing, as I picked up a napkin off the coffee table and began strangling it out of nervousness, “what letter is this Detective Wilson looking for?”
“You remember that box of letters your father has, from all those people wanting you to burn down those houses?” my mother said, still looking in dismay at her coffee cup. “There’s one in there from some man wanting you to burn down the Edward Bellamy House. That’s the letter he’s looking for.”
“So you know about those letters?”
“Oh, yes,” she said.
“And Detective Wilson knows about those letters?”
“Oh, yes,” my mother said again.
“How does he know about them?” I asked.
“Your father told him.”
“He did?” There had been a little too much something in my voice—if I’d known exactly what it was, then maybe I’d have been able to keep it out of there in the first place. But whatever it was, my mother heard it. She raised her eyes from her cup, looked at me first with incredulity, then with pity.
“You thought it was just the two of you, didn’t you?” she asked. “That the letters were your little secret.” Before I could confirm this, my mother shook her head violently, as if to get me out of her head, as if I were one more unwelcome thought she did not want to get lost in.
But then again, I had plenty of new, unwelcome thoughts to get lost in myself. Someone besides me and my father and the letter writers knew about the letters—that was news enough. But what would Detective Wilson say when he found out that Mr. Frazier’s letter was missing? What would my father say, and my mother? Would I tell them the truth about Mr. Frazier and how he’d taken the letter? What if the truth sounded like a lie to them, as it surely would? What lie could I tell that would sound less like a lie than the truth?
“Well,” Detective Wilson said, emerging from my father’s bedroom. My father was right behind him: his eyes darted to me, then to my mother, then to me again, and then back to his bedroom, before he closed them, his eyes exhausted from all that exercise. Detective Wilson paused to let my father resume his place by my mother on the couch; he then looked at each of us in turn—first wide eyed and then squinty, which I think was supposed to convey suspicion but instead made him look as though he were having contact-lens problems. Detective Wilson seemed to be waiting for one of us to say something, just as I was waiting for him to say, The letter is missing. Which after some further eye contortions, he finally did.
My father didn’t say anything: he had been in the room, of course, and so already knew that the letter was missing. His eyes were still closed and I wondered if he’d fallen asleep. My mother and I didn’t say anything, either. We looked straight forward, at the detective, maybe to avoid looking at each other.
“It certainly is,” Detective Wilson said, perhaps responding to something he’d hoped one of us would say. “Do any of you know where the letter is?”
“No,” my father said. His eyes were still closed, but he said this word clearly, although with some agony. He opened his eyes and looked toward his bedroom longingly, then made a clogged whistling noise through his nose. He sounded like a congested train passing in the night.
“No,” my mother said.
“No,” I said, and then added, unnecessarily, “I have no idea where it is, either.”
After that, none of us Pulsifers said anything else. Detective Wilson tugged at his coat sleeves, then fiddled with his hood; for some reason he kept looking toward the door, as though he were onstage and his director was in the wings, about to feed the detective his cues. “OK, that’s all I need for right now,” he finally said, visibly drooping in the shoulders. “I’ll be in touch.” Then, without shaking anyone’s hand or even giving anyone his card, he practically sprinted out the door and into the night. My father disappeared into his bedroom to double-check, no doubt, the status of his precious shoe box and its missing letter. But my mind was still on Detective Wilson, who’d come looking for an answer and left behind all these questions. Why hadn’t he kept on questioning us until he’d gotten some answers? Was he a bumbler, too? Did anyone know what the hell they were doing around here? What sort of detective was he, anyway?
“What police department was Detective Wilson from?” I asked.
“You know, I don’t think he said,” my mother told me. I could hear my father in his bedroom moaning loudly and deeply, like a wounded cow. But my mother didn’t seem to notice. She was staring at me, her eyes full of questions, those questions orbiting the stationary suns of her pupils. Did you do something, Sam? she wanted to know. You just moved home: did you do something bad already? Oh, Sam, what have you done now? How have you disappointed me this time? She had these questions, all right, but she didn’t have to ask them. Because my mother, thank God, was a drunk, and this was another good thing about being a drunk: you always had a question that would trump all other questions.
“Who wants a drink?” my mother asked, then got off the couch and walked to the kitchen before finding out who besides her wanted one.
I WAS SO OVERFULL with questions that it wasn’t until five in the morning that I woke up and remembered what had earlier seemed like some of the most pressing ones. Why hadn’t my mother told me she’d been fired from her job? And what did she do every day when she was supposed to be at work? I could have waited until a decent hour to ask my mother these questions, but who knew, once I woke up, what other questions might need to be asked and answered? Who knew what other mysteries might yet pop up and obscure the old ones?
I got out of bed and made my shuffling, groggy way down to my mother’s room, the room my parents’ used to share. There is so
mething creepy and illicit about sneaking into your parents’ bedroom when you are young, and this is no less true when you’re an adult. The door was closed. I stood there for a moment, steeling myself to be stealthy, then carefully turned the knob and opened the door. Even in the dark, I could see that the room was as I remembered it. There was a wooden dresser to the right of the door, where my father kept, or used to keep, his clothes; kitty-corner to that was the mirrored walk-in closet where my mother kept her dresses and skirts. Kitty-corner to that was an end table with a phone and a digital clock and various framed pictures of her and me. And in between the table and me was the bed, my parents’ big queen-size bed, which was empty. No one was in it. I ran my hand over the bedspread and then sat on the bed itself to make sure. Not only was nobody in it, but nobody had been in it, either. The bed was made, the bedspread taut except for where I’d sat on it. There were two pillows at the head of the bed, and no heads had touched them, not that night, maybe not the night before or the night before that or …
So, despite my best efforts, here was another question, and first thing in the morning, too: Where the hell was my mother? There were so many questions that I began to wonder if I’d ever find any of the answers, if I even knew what an answer looked like anymore. And then I heard a thud downstairs. It was clearly the thud of the morning paper hitting the front door, and I realized that no matter what it looks like, an answer always sounds like a thud. That was my very thought, standing there in my boxer shorts. I walked downstairs, opened the door, brought in the newspaper, and began flipping through it in that half-zombie way you do in the too-early morning, looking for something that might wake you up.
I found it, right there in the local news section. In the early evening, someone had set fire to the Mark Twain House, in Hartford, Connecticut, forty-five minutes or so down the highway. The article said that the fire was “suspicious,” although I knew this to be the case without their having to tell me so.
Part Three
12
If I were to write the bond analysts’ memoir, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, my first piece of advice would be this:
Practice. For God’s sake, practice.
Whoever had tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House hadn’t practiced, that was obvious, and that was also true of whoever tried to burn down the Mark Twain House. But before I went to the Twain House that morning, and before I go there in memory here, I first had to sneak into my father’s room, open his shoe box of letters, and find out who wanted the Mark Twain House torched in the first place. Unlike my mother, my father was home: I could hear him in his room, snoring adenoidally and loudly enough to shake the house’s shake shingles. I opened the door to his room—it caught and then creaked a little, as doors in old houses do, but not loudly enough to be heard over the snoring—and then crept in the direction of the end table. There was a streetlight right outside my father’s window, illuminating the room until it was slightly on the bright side of pitch black, and I could just make out my father’s blanketed shape on the bed. During waking hours, he looked small, diminished, but on that bed, in that filtered light and under the blankets, my father looked oddly huge and mysterious, much more of a man than he actually was. I remember thinking how sad that was, that my father—and maybe all of us—was more impressive asleep than awake.
In any case, I located the end table in the mostly dark, opened the drawer as quietly as I could, and removed the shoe box from the drawer and then myself from the room. I walked to the kitchen; there was a half pot of coffee from the day before, and so I heated and drank it while I flipped through the letters. They weren’t in any particular order—Wharton was before Alcott, who was after Melville—but finally I found the Twain House letter. I carried the letter with me upstairs and put it in the pocket of the coat I’d wear that day, then showered, shaved, dressed, and generally made myself presentable to the world I wanted to investigate. Then I walked downstairs. About halfway down the stairs, I stopped: there was my father, walking back from the kitchen. He was wearing boxer shorts, and only boxer shorts, and looked oddly virile for the stroked-out sixty-year-old I knew he was: his arms and chest had some definition, and the skin under his arms wasn’t loose and didn’t sag earthward the way old-man underarm skin can; his stride was more hop than shuffle, and I almost yelled out something like, Hey, looking good, until I saw what he was carrying. In one hand, of course, was a big can of Knickerbocker. But in the other was the box of letters. My father was looking curiously at the box as he walked, as if the box were a stranger and my father was waiting for it to introduce itself. My father was still looking at the box as he disappeared into his room and shut the door behind him. What was my father thinking in there? Did he wonder who had taken the box out of his room and into the kitchen? Did he suspect it was me who had taken the box? After all, who else was there to suspect? Or did he assume maybe that he had done it himself while he was drunk the night before—the night before had been full of our normal familial drinking—and simply didn’t remember? This was yet another good thing about drinking, of course: not that drinking made you forget things, but that it made it possible for you to plausibly pretend you’d forgotten things. In any case, there wasn’t much use wondering about it: my father was back in his room with his box, and I had the letter, which told me exactly where to go and who wanted me to go there.
THE DAY ITSELF WAS MUCH different from the day I’d visited Mr. Frazier and the Bellamy House. This day, it felt like fall, real fall: the air was sharp in your throat, the wind was cold and looking for a scarf to blow around, and the sky was so blue it looked as if it had been chemically enhanced for maximum blueness. It was the kind of day where you would have smelled leaves burning somewhere if leaf burning hadn’t been outlawed. I felt nervous, much more nervous than I’d been while driving to the Edward Bellamy House, maybe because I’d read so much of Twain at my mother’s behest—he was my mother’s favorite, and I’d known this and wanted to please her, and so I had made sure to laugh at the things she’d told me were funny, and to shake my head admiringly at the things she’d told me were wicked. Or maybe I was nervous because the drive was longer than the drive to the Bellamy House and gave me more time to be nervous, and this would be another thing I’d put in my arsonist’s guide: for an arsonist just starting out, it’s perhaps easier to burn down a nearby home of an obscure writer rather than burn down a more famous writer’s house in a more distant city.
Once I got there, though, I saw that no one had really burned anything and that the Mark Twain House was going to be just fine. Again, there was yellow tape around the perimeter of the house; you could see some singe marks up near and around the first-floor windows, but nothing had really been permanently damaged except for some bushes that had caught fire and then been doused and were in a very bad way. The house itself was absurdly thick and tall—a normal Victorian house on growth hormones—and was surrounded by three other slightly less massive houses, and the whole compound reminded me of the houses in my dream of a few nights earlier, my dream featuring the many houses and the naked woman and the burning books, and maybe that’s why I found the whole place especially spooky and sad and uninhabitable. Maybe that’s what Twain had felt, too: he had built the place, the house of his dreams, and the whole thing was so impressive and dreamlike, finally, that he didn’t want to live there. There were no lights on in any of the main house’s windows, and the only humans on the property, besides me, were reporters: three or four television reporters in their sharp suits, followed by their cameramen with their high-tech gear, each one dressed in those many-pocketed khaki vests that would have looked good on safari. The reporters and the cameramen made me nervous, too, not because I thought they’d recognize me, but because they seemed so much better prepared, organized, and equipped than I was. But they were paying attention to the house and not to me. Besides, I’d seen what I’d come to see and knew the two things I now thought I knew: someone with access to my
father’s shoe box had memorized or copied the letters asking me to burn down the Bellamy and Twain houses; and the Mark Twain House had been burned, or not burned, by the same person who also hadn’t managed to burn the Edward Bellamy House. It didn’t occur to me that different people might fail at burning down different writers’ homes in New England in the same way. Always count on a bumbler to think that he is unique in his bumbling, to believe his bumbling is like a fingerprint, specific to him. The truth is that the world is full of bumblers exactly like you, and to think that you’re special is just one more thing you’ve bumbled.
AT LEAST I DIDN’T bumble the letter. I read it several times, and thoroughly, too. It was from an English professor at Heiden College, in Hartford, asking me to burn down the Mark Twain House as a present for his “lady friend,” who was also a professor at the college. His name was Wesley Mincher and hers was Lees Ardor. The letter was extremely learned—there were whoms and ones everywhere, and lots of complicated punctuation—but it was difficult to tell why he wanted to give her this present. And why would she want it? Why not a necklace, a cruise, or a car? Mincher couldn’t say, or at least I couldn’t understand what he was saying: professorial hemming and hawing is much denser than a layperson’s hemming and hawing, and I needed one of those big dictionaries that you can’t read without a magnifying glass to help me get to the center of his meaning. At the end of the letter, though, he finally got to it himself: “In summary, then, I wish for you to burn down the Mark Twain House because Professor Ardor believes Mr. Twain to be something of a [and here you could sense the ashamed pause, lurking between the lines] female pudendum.”
I had no idea whether the two professors were still together (the letter had been written eleven years ago) or if she still believed Twain was a female pudendum. I had a good idea what a female pudendum was, though, and I also had a good idea where I could find Professor Mincher: he’d included his office phone number on the letter. I called the number, but Mincher wasn’t there, and I didn’t leave a message. Instead I called the English Department number (Mincher had written his letter on English Department letterhead, as though his was a query letter and I were a journal). The woman who answered the phone said that Professor Mincher wouldn’t be in; but then I asked about Professor Ardor, who, as it turned out, had office hours that very morning.
