An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

by Brock Clarke

  I got a little lucky myself that night, or thought I did. I walked over to where Morgan had placed the envelope in the snow. Sure enough, it was Peter’s letter to me, written those six years earlier, asking me to do what the bond analysts themselves had just done. I read the letter right there, in the light of the fire, learned exactly why Peter had wanted me to do what the bond analysts had done themselves. Morgan had no doubt left the letter there to be found by the police or fire department and thereby to incriminate me, whereas he could have saved himself the trouble and just trusted that I would eventually incriminate myself. I put the letter in my pocket.

  That accomplished, I stood there for a while, watching the fire. It was beautiful—huge and crackling, and with more sparks and explosions than the Fourth of July, which is further proof that fire is the most impressive of the four elements—much more beautiful than the house itself had been. Although the house and the fire had a lot in common: a fire was a thing you created and admired, the way the person who’d built the house must have admired it, too. But no matter how beautiful the fire was, it wasn’t particularly helpful and that saddened me: I knew now that the bond analysts had called me (or at least one of them had), and I also knew that they had burned the Robert Frost Place, and so those questions were answered. But those answers didn’t bring me any closer to knowing who had tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House or the Mark Twain House. What good was answering one question when you couldn’t answer the others?

  I heard the crunch of tires on snow, and so I turned away from the fire and crept back to my van. Before I got too close to it, I could hear an engine running, could see headlights boring through the night and bouncing off the snow, and so I slipped behind another white pine, white pines being as plentiful in New Hampshire as Volvos were in Amherst. It was another Lumina, and at first I thought it was my mother, but as it passed by, I could see Detective Wilson, hunched over the steering wheel, hauling ass in the direction of the burning Robert Frost Place, no doubt in search of his own answers to his own questions. When he was out of sight, I ran to my van and then headed back to Amherst. Because sometimes a detective shouldn’t try to answer the tough questions, being not so tough himself. Sometimes it’s better to let someone else answer them for you.

  20

  I remember the day my father left us. It was a Saturday. I remember this because I didn’t have to go to school that day and so was witness to the aftermath. My mother and I watched, side by side, from our living room’s bay window as my father backed out of the driveway in his Chevy Monte Carlo. It was October, late, and the trees were missing their leaves, their bony branches waving good-bye to my father and his car. The trees knew he was leaving, too, and when he did, it was as though he pulled my mother’s face with him. The face of the pretty, modest woman I’d known as “Mother” stretched out as she watched my father pull away from the curb, and when he was out of sight, it snapped back. Now the face was harder, the blue eyes sharper, the mouth tighter, with a little smirk at the corners. This new mother of mine was less pretty but more beautiful than my old mother, which is to say, I guess, that prettiness is something to like and beauty is something to be scared of, and I was scared of it, and her. My mother walked around the house, picking up magazines, records, coasters, couch cushions, and framed family pictures, staring at them as if not believing they were actually hers, and then tossing them aside. That scared me, too.

  “You’re hungry,” she finally said, turning suddenly toward me, as if just then remembering that though my father was gone, I was not. She was right: it was lunchtime, and I was hungry. “I’ll cook something,” she said, then retreated to the kitchen. I remained in the living room, picking up the things she’d scattered and in general staying out of her way, until I smelled something burning in the kitchen and went to see what it was.

  The smell came from open-faced broiled cheese and tomato sandwiches, my favorite thing to eat for lunch. My mother had burned them to something resembling bread-shaped coal. She had rescued the sandwiches from the broiler, but too late, and was waving a towel over the charred mess and laughing, too loud and hysterically, and that also was scary. She was singing over and over, “She loved to cook, but not like this,” as if it were a lyric to a song, a popular one I should have known but didn’t. I said to my mother, “I don’t know that song.” Then, for some reason, thinking I’d let her down by not knowing the song, I said, “I’m sorry,” and started crying.

  This calmed my mother down, other people’s hysteria being a well-known cure for your own. She stopped singing, made me another broiled cheese and tomato sandwich, and paid attention and didn’t burn it this time. While I ate, my mother told me the first of her stories about the Emily Dickinson House, which, as everyone knows, I accidentally burned, just like my mother accidentally burned that sandwich.

  Speaking of that sandwich, by the time I finally got back to Amherst from New Hampshire, it was nine in the morning, and I hadn’t eaten anything in almost twenty-four hours. I was so hungry I would even have eaten my mother’s by now thirty-year-old burned broiled cheese and tomato sandwich. So I stopped off at my parents’ house to have a little breakfast before heading on to my mother’s apartment in Belchertown. My father’s car was parked in the driveway, and I figured while I was getting something to eat I’d ask him a few questions. The bond analysts had obviously stolen the Robert Frost Place letter from my father, and probably the four letters he couldn’t remember, too. But how had they known where to find the letters, or even that they existed? Did my father know the bond analysts? And then there was my mother. How had my mother known that I was going to the Robert Frost Place? Had my father told her? Why had he done that? Had he told my father-in-law, too? And why had they followed me?

  I opened the door and could immediately hear the ping and splash of the shower, meaning, of course, that my father was taking one. I went to the kitchen, intent on eating whatever I found in there, and fast. There were Knickerbocker beer cans scattered around, as usual; on the kitchen table, there was what appeared to be a shopping list that read, “Milk, cereal, beer, wine, flowers, cheese, bread,” and so on. There was nothing unusual about that, necessarily, and in my hunger I nearly forgot about it until I considered the handwriting itself: it was absolutely unfamiliar, absolutely nothing like the other notes, nothing like the notes that said, “Drink me,” or the note that said, “I think I know you,” and, it now occurred to me, also nothing like my father’s postcards. I took the note from the night before—the note my mother had left on my windshield up in New Hampshire—out of my pocket. The shopping list and the note were clearly written by two different people: one who dotted the i’s, the other who didn’t; one whose writing was cramped, one whose writing was expansive. These were two different writers. The writer who had written the notes had not written the grocery list. I knew my mother had written the note on my windshield, which meant my father had written the grocery list. But the postcards? Who had written those?

  I dropped the grocery list, ran upstairs to my bedroom, pulled a chair over to the closet. I stood up on the chair, and for the second time in two days I took the envelope down from the top shelf, took the postcards out of the envelope, and read them. I read them for the handwriting and not the content and then compared the handwriting on the postcards to the handwriting on my mother’s note. They had been written by the same person. Then I compared them to the grocery list. And then I looked at the postcards themselves. From Florida there were two large, barely bikinied breasts with the familiar coconut joke underneath; from Wyoming there was a bucking bronc, its back legs kicked upward toward the postcard’s northern border—but the postmarks on the postcards read not Boca Raton and Cheyenne, but rather Amherst, Massachusetts. This, of course, made perfect sense: my father hadn’t sent them at all (which is why he hadn’t seen himself in Morgan Taylor’s memoir). But my mother had, and my mother had sent them from Amherst, because that’s where she lived, with me. But why had she done tha
t? Why had she pretended to be my father sending me postcards from places he’d never actually visited or lived in? And if my father hadn’t been doing all these things in far-off places, then where had he been? On that October day when he left us, and my mother sang her mysterious lyric and burned my sandwich and made me cry, where had my father gone? And what had he pretended to be once he got there?

  “Dad!” I yelled out, charging down the stairs and armed with the postcards. “Dad!” Just after I yelled, I heard the shower kick off and so I positioned myself outside the downstairs bathroom door, my head filled with questions and waiting for my father to give me the answers.

  “Sam?” I heard the voice coming from behind me, from the kitchen and not the bathroom. I knew it was my father’s voice without having to turn around, the same way I knew the notes and postcards were written by one person, the grocery list by another. If I were a real detective, I might have had a voice and handwriting expert to tell me these things for sure. But this is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: sometimes you have to be your own expert, and then after you acquire this expertise, you sometimes wish you hadn’t.

  “Sam, look at me,” my father said. This wasn’t the stroked-out father, not the drunk one, either, but rather the insistent, scared father, the father wanting to spare his son from seeing that which no son should see. “Sam, turn around right now.”

  I didn’t turn around. I kept my eyes fixed on the bathroom door, which opened slowly, creaking the way doors in movies and old houses do, and my father’s voice creaked a little bit too as he yelled, “Deirdre, don’t open the door!”

  But it was too late: Deirdre already had. She’d opened the door and stood there in front of me, a towel wrapped around her important parts, a blond woman vaguely my father’s age, and for that matter my mother’s age, too, and for that matter wrapped in a towel my mother had probably bought, long ago, back in the age when my mother bought nice things for the house and actually lived in it, too.

  “Hello, Sam,” Deirdre said, then extended her right hand, holding the towel in place the way women do, through some complicated arrangement between inner arm and armpit and rib cage and breast. And not knowing what else to do, I took it. The hand, that is.

  “HOW LONG?” I ASKED my father. We were sitting in the dining room, at the table, drinking beer. Deirdre had disappeared into my father’s room. I could hear a hair dryer in there, the steady hum and blast of its hot white noise.

  “How long what?” my father repeated. His face was a mask of nonchalance, although I could feel his legs bouncing jackhammer-like underneath the table.

  “How long have you been with Deirdre?”

  “Off and on,” he said, “maybe thirty years.”

  “Thirty years,” I repeated, doing the math. It wasn’t difficult to do. Thirty years. I was thirty-eight years old. That meant my father had been with this Deirdre since I was eight, which was, not coincidentally, the year my father left us for …

  “Dad,” I said, “when you left us, where did you go?”

  “I went to Deirdre’s.” I looked at him for a while, and my face must have continued to ask him, not what or why or when, but where, because he then said, “Northampton,” which is a town not far from Amherst. Maybe twenty minutes away. My father had lived twenty minutes away for three years.

  “For three years?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Where did you think I went?”

  Instead of answering him, I handed him the postcards. What a relief it was to do that: what a pleasure it is to use someone else’s solid, reliable written words instead of your own less-than-reliable ones.

  “I didn’t write these,” he said when he was through looking at the postcards. He put them back in the manila envelope and slid them halfway across the table, so that they rested between him and me like a fence between neighbors. My father still wore the mask of nonchalance, but now I thought I could see its little seams and stitches and all the things that were supposed to hold it together.

  “No kidding,” I told him.

  “That’s your mother’s handwriting,” he said.

  “No kidding.”

  “Why did she do that?” he asked, presumably rhetorically, except then he looked at me for the answer, which unfortunately I was able to give him.

  “Because she didn’t want me to hate you,” I said. “Because she wanted me to think you were out finding yourself instead of living in Northampton with Deirdre.”

  “She’s a good woman,” my father said.

  “I know she is.”

  “How do you know that?” my father asked.

  “Because she’s my mother,” I told him, knowing now that the “good woman” to whom he was referring was Deirdre and not my mother at all. I took a long slug of my beer, then took a silent inventory of all the things I wanted to say.

  “Oh,” my father said, and then the nonchalance cracked and fell off completely, and shame and regret took its place. His head dipped and seemed to be pulled toward the table, as if the table were one of the poles and my father’s head something newly magnetized. “Your mother is a good woman, too,” he said.

  “You know”—my teeth were gritted, but the words made their way through and around them anyway, as the words you shouldn’t say always do—“it worked for a long, long time.”

  “What worked?”

  “Mom sent me the postcards because she didn’t want me to hate you. And it worked: I didn’t hate you. I never hated you until right now.”

  My words had their intended effect: my father’s eyes got watery and then the rest of him seemed to get watery, too, his whole body sagging and turning to liquid except for his right hand, which kept its firm hold on the beer can. Then there was me, his son, across the table from him: the minute I said this mean, hateful thing, I, too, turned to liquid except for my right hand, with its firm hold on the beer can. Imagine if my mother had walked into the house right then and seen her two Pulsifer men, only thirty years separating their mirror images. Imagine what she would have thought if she’d seen us right then, just as the night before she’d seen me dancing with and kissing and groping the woman who was not my wife, and suddenly I understood exactly why my mother had thought she’d known me—I’d cheated on my wife just as my father had cheated on his—and I also understood that we hate our fathers only as practice for hating ourselves. If my mother had been there in the kitchen, I would have apologized to her, and then I might have apologized to my father, too, for being like him.

  “Dad,” I said, “did you tell Mom I was going to New Hampshire?”

  “I did,” he said. He was looking down at the table, refusing to meet my eyes. His voice was like a child’s, watery and high. “I told her yesterday morning when she came by the house. She asked where you were and I told her. And then she went after you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she was worried about you. Because she didn’t want you to do anything stupid.”

  “Too late,” I said.

  “It usually is,” my father admitted.

  “Did you tell anyone else?” I asked.

  “I did,” he said. He raised his head slowly, looking stricken but also hopeful, as though by giving me one thing I wanted, he might be able to give me more than just that.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “He was tall, thin, blond.”

  My father nodded. “He’s one of my regulars. For maybe fifteen years now, week in, week out, except for this last week. He came by yesterday, right after your mother left. She almost hit him pulling out of the driveway. He asked me where she was going in such a big hurry …”

  “And you told him.”

  “I did,” he said. “That’s the guy you were asking me about?”

  “Thomas Coleman,” I said. “You didn’t know his name?”

  “He probably told me once, but I forgot it,” my father said, shaking his head. “I never thought it was important.”

  I could picture Thomas telling my father, I
’m Thomas Coleman, and then waiting for my father to recognize the name and say, I’m so sorry for what my son did. I’m so sorry about your parents, so sorry for everything. Finally, though, Thomas realized that he wasn’t going to get satisfaction from my father, so he tried to get it from me. I wondered if things would have been different if my father had recognized Thomas’s name and apologized, if one apology really could have made all that much difference.

  “How about the bond analysts?” I asked. “Do you know them, too?”

  “The who?” my father asked, and I described all five of them. When I was done, my father nodded, and said, “That sounds like the writer and his assistants.”

  “The writer and his assistants,” I repeated.

  “Five guys came around a couple of days ago, but only one of them talked. He said he was writing a book about you; he asked if I could tell him anything about you that he might not already know.”

  “So you showed them the letters,” I said, already knowing he had. “I can’t believe you showed them the letters.”

  “He said he was going to portray you sympathetically,” my father told me. “He said he was on your side.”

  “Didn’t you think it was suspicious that there were five of them and not just one?” I asked.

  “It takes a lot of people to publish a book,” he said. “Trust me, I know.”

  “Dad,” I said, “do you still work at the press?”

  “No,” he confessed. “I’m retired.” This could have been the same kind of retirement as my mother’s, but I didn’t care enough to ask, and I didn’t have to ask where he went during the day, either, every day, even on a Saturday. My father had been at Deirdre’s for three years, and I guessed he still went there.

  “Does Mom know about Deirdre?”

  “She does and she doesn’t,” my father said. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try,” I told him.

  “Bradley, we need to go.” This was Deirdre, right behind me. She might have been there the entire time, listening to us. I didn’t turn to face her, though. I didn’t look at my father, either. I kept my eyes fixed on the kitchen table as he hauled himself out of his chair and out of the kitchen. As he passed by me, my father put his hand on my shoulder and left it there for a couple of beats. When he did that, I didn’t hate him anymore, I really didn’t, and maybe this is why people do so many hateful things to the people who love them: because it’s so easy to stop hating someone if you’ve already started loving them.