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

by Brock Clarke

  My mother sighed, then sat down on the stool next to me. All the sweetness seemed to have left her, all the smart meanness, too. She didn’t seem like Beth or even Elizabeth anymore, just a sad, tired woman who hadn’t found a name to fit her yet.

  “What do you want from me, Sam?” she said, closing her eyes and leaning against the bar.

  “I want you to tell me what happened with Dad thirty years ago.”

  She did. She was too exhausted not to tell me things anymore. So my mother told me about what had happened thirty-odd years ago. She’d been scheduled to stay in Boston overnight for a mandatory public school teacher’s conference, but when the day’s duties were finished early, my mother decided to come home that night and not the next morning. She thought my father would be pleasantly surprised—this was her exact thought when she walked into the kitchen and saw a woman sitting on her stove top, a pretty blond woman with her dress pushed way, way up her white, white legs, which were—as they said in some of my mother’s books—akimbo. My father was standing between the woman’s legs. His pants weren’t down at his ankles yet, but they soon would have been. You didn’t need to be a genius to know it was going to happen.

  “She loves to cook, but not like this,” my father said to the woman, and they laughed identical, low, gurgling laughs deep down in their throats. The “she” who loved to cook, but not like this, was my mother. You didn’t need to be a genius to know that, either.

  “Where was I when all this happened?” I asked.

  “You were upstairs, sleeping. I remember that. I remember not wanting to wake you up. I remember telling the woman to get out of my house, but quietly, so I wouldn’t wake you up. And she did.”

  “You said that same thing when I was a kid, the day Dad left us.”

  “I said what?”

  “‘She loved to cook, but not like this.’ You said that.”

  “I did?” she said, opening her eyes for the first time since beginning the story.

  “After you’d burned my sandwich.”

  “That’s funny,” she said. “I don’t remember that. I remember so many things, but not that.”

  “What did Dad say?”

  “He said that he was drunk and that it didn’t mean anything and that he loved me and that this was the first time it had happened and that it would never happen again.”

  “He did,” I said, recognizing most of his words as mine and feeling so ashamed—for the bad things I’d done and the borrowed words I’d used to excuse them. Why is it we can’t find our own words for the bad things we do? Is that part of what makes them so bad? “What did you do next?”

  “I kicked him out.”

  “I thought you kicked him out because he couldn’t decide what he wanted to do for a living and he was pathetic and driving you nuts.”

  “That’s just what I wanted you to think. I really kicked him out because he was cheating on me.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Yes,” she said immediately, just as my father had when I asked him if he loved my mother. My parents were certain they loved each other, and yet look at how they’d turned out. Maybe it would be better not to be so certain. Maybe love, and marriage, and life, and maybe anything that matters, would work out better if we weren’t so certain about them.

  “Mom,” I said, “why did Dad come back?”

  “Because I let him,” my mother said. “Because he said he’d made a terrible mistake. Because he missed us. Because he said he loved me and not that woman on the stove. Because he said he would never, ever see her again.”

  “And you believed him,” I said.

  “I did,” she said, and I could hear the voice the bartender no doubt heard when my mother talked about my father, the voice that wanted the story she told about her husband to be the truth, and the truth to be just a story. “I still do.”

  “Mom,” I said, as gently as I could, “you live in another apartment in another town. You come back to the house to drink, but then when it’s time to go to bed, you drive to your apartment. On Tuesday nights you don’t come home at all. There must be a good reason.”

  “There must be,” she said, nodding.

  “What is it?”

  She closed her eyes again, as though trying to remember the lies she’d told herself for so many years and now wanted to tell me. She kept her eyes closed for so long this time that I thought she’d fallen asleep. Then suddenly she opened them and said, “The apartment is a place for me to get away, that’s all.”

  “Get away from what?” I asked, because I wasn’t going to let it go. Because like Socrates and his method, I wasn’t going to let my mother get out of this conversation without her giving me the answer I wanted.

  “From life,” she said.

  “So what was our house for?”

  “A place to come back to,” she said. “For you, too.” She got up, tucked her tray under her arm, and said, “Time to get back to work.”

  “I know about Deirdre,” I told her, because I wanted everything out in the open, where we could see it, where we couldn’t ignore it anymore, and as I’ll say in my arsonist’s guide, once you get everything out in the open, you wonder why, oh, why would you ever want that.

  “How do you know about her?” My mother was trying to remain calm, but it was a losing battle. She went fierce and far away in the eyes, as though she’d just spotted her enemy from a great distance. She raised her tray and held it in front of her chest like a shield. “How do you even know her name?”

  “I met her at our house,” I said.

  “Our house,” she repeated, trancelike. “When?”

  “This morning,” I said. “I know you think it was me who burned down those houses. But it wasn’t. I think it was Deirdre.” I’m not sure my mother even heard this last part, though, because this is the way the human mind works, or doesn’t: when it understands that the worst thing has happened, it can’t think about the second- or third- or fourth-worst thing until it takes care of the first-worst thing, either by making it better or by making it even worse.

  “You weren’t ever supposed to know about her,” my mother said. “He promised.”

  “That’s why you sent me off to college, isn’t it?” I asked. “You knew Dad would go back to her, and you didn’t want me to find out.”

  “He promised,” my mother said.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t just divorce him,” I told her. “Why didn’t you just end it and move on?”

  “Why didn’t you just tell Anne Marie about the fire you set?” my mother wanted to know. “Why didn’t you tell her about the Colemans, about me, and about your father?”

  I didn’t answer her; I didn’t need to. Because we both knew that sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them. My mother was too scared to get a divorce, and I was too scared to tell Anne Marie the truth. It was that simple. Sometimes there is a simple answer. Sometimes things aren’t complicated at all.

  After a moment she placed the tray on the empty barstool, took off her apron, and put it on the tray. “Last week you asked me why I got rid of my books,” she said, looking me in the eyes. She was Elizabeth again, the mother she used to be, except there was a look of wild desperation in her eyes, and that scared me more than ever. “Do you really want to know why?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because,” she said, “they were always full of people like me, and her, and him and you and it.”

  “It?” I asked.

  “The house,” she said. “Our fucking house.” She said it the way Ahab might say to Ishmael, “Our fucking whale,” and now I understood, for the first time, why Melville had him talk about the whale so many times, over so many pages, and why my mother had made me read the book, so many times, over so many years. To my mother, our house was more than just its roof and walls and the furniture inside them, just as Moby Dick was more than just its blubber to Ahab.

  “Beth
,” the bartender said, “would you bring these drinks over to table twelve?”

  “No,” she said, and then she walked away from both of us, toward the door. There was a blue peacoat draped over an empty chair, and she grabbed it and put it on, even though I was pretty sure it wasn’t hers. She opened the door and the wind whipped her hair around.

  “Where are you going?” I yelled.

  “To see your father,” she yelled back, without turning around, before closing the door behind her.

  “What did you do to Beth?” the bartender asked when she was gone, and then, before I could think of a concise answer, he said, “You’ve had enough,” and he snatched my last, half-consumed beer away from me. He was right. I’d had enough; everyone had had enough, that was clear. Maybe that’s why Deirdre wanted to meet me at the Emily Dickinson House: maybe she’d had enough, too.

  25

  It was twenty minutes before midnight when I got to where the Emily Dickinson House used to be. The place looked much different at night than it had in the daytime just a few days earlier. There was easily a half foot of snow on the ground, but it had stopped falling sometime earlier, and the sky had cleared, so that you could name the stars above, assuming you’d learned their names in the first place. It was windier than before, though, and the scattered clouds were racing across the sky, and the spindly birches were waving in the wind and sometimes knocking into their neighboring white pines and maples. One of the nearby streetlights sent its flickering glow through the trees, and I kept expecting to hear an organ and see Vincent Price emerge from the shadows. Plus, there was a bone-chilling hoo, hoo sound coming from somewhere nearby, the classic sound of a haunting, although it could just have been the sound fraternity brothers make while ritually beating their pledges. The sound was spooky, whoever was making it.

  I made my way through the trees until I found Deirdre standing next to a wooden bench, a bench no doubt meant to commemorate the Emily Dickinson House. Deirdre was early, too. She was wearing a red jacket and a red scarf and red gloves and a red ski hat, all obviously part of a matching set. And this will also go in my arsonist’s guide: if you want to appear menacing, then don’t wear a matching set. Deirdre was the least spooky thing about the place.

  “Sam,” she said, “how does it feel to be back here?”

  “It feels excellent,” I said. “Terrific. Why am I here?”

  Deirdre looked confused. Her face puckered, an expression you might find attractive if you were looking to be attracted. I could imagine my father finding it attractive. Her hair was long and blond, as my mother remembered it, almost down to her shoulders, and Deirdre stroked it nervously with one of her gloved hands. “You’re here because I asked you to meet me here.”

  “I know that,” I said, “but why did you ask me to meet you here in the first place?”

  Right then the birch trees started creaking and swaying, double time, in an uptick of wind, making such a racket that Deirdre and I momentarily forgot what we were saying and looked at them. They were silvery white and so different from the trees around them. The pines and maples were all clumped together and sturdy, but the birches were thin and lonely, each of them far apart and like an only child among larger, happier broods. I knew from Mr. Frost that the birch was supposed to be the most New England of trees, and if that was so, then I couldn’t help thinking that New England was a very bad idea.

  Then the wind died down and the birches stopped making their noises and we returned to our conversation, which was, basically, why was I there?

  “Because this was where the Emily Dickinson House was, Sam,” Deirdre said very slowly, as if I were having trouble keeping up. “You burned her house down. It’s ironic.”

  “You’re right, it is ironic,” I said, except I wasn’t talking about the house: I was talking about Deirdre herself. She was clearly my double, my doppelganger in bumbling. She and I were our own matching set. I wondered if my father had fallen in love with her because she was like me, and fallen out of love with my mother because she wasn’t, and if love itself wasn’t something we, the products of love, then make impossible for our parents because we can truly be like only one of them. Maybe this is why people have more than one child: so that neither of the parents will feel jealous and lonely.

  “Does my father know you’ve asked me to meet you here?”

  “He doesn’t know anything about anything,” Deirdre said. “He doesn’t want to see me anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of you,” Deirdre said. Her voice shifted when she said that, and I could tell Deirdre’s hatred for me was the only thing preventing her from crying. “Because after what happened at the house, he felt ashamed. He said he couldn’t do it anymore. He told me he couldn’t ever see me again, and no matter how much we loved each other, it was over.”

  “Maybe you’re not really in love.”

  “We were in love,” Deirdre said. “Things were good.”

  “They weren’t so good for my mother.”

  “Things were good,” she insisted, “until you came home and messed everything up.”

  “Deirdre,” I said, “did you try to burn down the Edward Bellamy House?”

  As I said earlier, I’ve now become something of a reader and have read my fair share of detective novels and even a few essays on how to write detective novels, and so I now know that this shouldn’t have worked: you can never ask a suspect if she’s guilty, and you can never expect her to confess if she is; you must catch your suspect in the act, red handed. I know this now, and next time, if there is a next time, I’ll do things differently and by the book. But remember, I was a bumbler and didn’t know that I couldn’t ask this sort of question, and Deirdre was a bumbler and didn’t know that she couldn’t answer it.

  “I tried to,” she said, dropping her face into her red-gloved hands.

  “How about the Mark Twain House?”

  “I tried to,” she repeated, her voice muffled in her gloves. “I just can’t do anything right.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Because I knew this would happen,” she said, lifting her head out of her hands and looking straight at me. “I knew when you came home, Bradley would feel guilty and get rid of me and go back to your mother. I had to do something.”

  “So you tried to set fire to those houses, thinking I’d get blamed for it,” I guessed.

  “I can’t do anything right,” she said, weeping. Deirdre was wrong here, of course; Detective Wilson was running around trying to blame me for the fires and prove exactly how wrong Deirdre was. I hated Deirdre right then for doing what she’d done to me and my mother and father and even those homes, too. But I also empathized, because she’d tried to do these things out of love, and because she had bumbled the attempt, and I suppose this—the ability to empathize with the people we hate—is exactly the quality that makes us human beings, which makes you wonder why anybody would want to be one.

  “Sam,” Deirdre said, and I could already hear the desperate pleading in the way she said my name, could hear the way her voice was sandwiched between too much hope and too much grief. I knew what Deirdre was going to ask, and I was glad, because I knew how I would respond, knew I would answer with that mean little hammer of a word, that word that gives its speaker a feeling of the purest satisfaction, always followed soon enough by a feeling of the purest regret.

  “No,” I said, for my mother.

  “Your father is home right now.”

  “No,” I said, for myself.

  “I want you to go home and tell your father to take me back. You know he loves me. You can save us. He wouldn’t have done this for all these years if he didn’t love me so much, if I weren’t the one he really loved.”

  “No,” I said, for my father, even though—or because—I knew Deirdre was right.

  “You can have the three thousand dollars, the money in the envelope,” she said. I could hear the last gasp in her voice, the sad whine of it. “Please, S
am.”

  “No, no, no,” I told her, by which I also meant, Revenge, revenge, revenge.

  When I said my last no, Deirdre seemed to get tired, very tired. Her arms dropped to her sides and her shoulders slumped. “No,” she repeated dully, then reached behind the bench, picked up a red plastic gasoline can, and held it up in front of her, neck high, as though it were some sort of offering. I immediately wanted to take back everything I’d just said, wanted to take back each and every no, wanted to turn each no into a yes, the way Jesus supposedly turned water into wine, a loaf of bread into food for a crowd. And why did he do that? Was it because he was worried about his people, or about himself? Was it because he didn’t know if his people could live on only bread and water, or because he didn’t know if he could live with himself if he let them?

  “Deirdre,” I said, trying to be very calm, “I didn’t really mean all that.”

  “Maybe you did.”

  “Maybe I didn’t,” I said. “Please put down the gas can.”

  “I don’t want to live without your father, Sam,” Deirdre said. “I feel so dead without him.”

  “Maybe you’ll meet someone else,” I said.

  “Maybe I don’t want to meet someone else,” she said, and then she raised the gas can over her head and tipped it, dumping the contents on her head, letting it run in streams down her back and front. This happened so suddenly that I didn’t have time to do or say anything. Or at least this is what I tell myself. Because after all, I’d seen the gas can, and what did I think she was going to do with it? Was what happened next because of what Deirdre did, or because of what I didn’t do? Are we defined by what we do, or by what we don’t? Wouldn’t it be better not to be defined at all?