An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (14 page)

“Why?” I asked him. “Why would you want to burn that beautiful house down?” As I asked the question, I realized the answer was right in his letter, which I’d skimmed, but only far enough to know
what
Mr. Frazier wanted me to burn and not
why
. So I pulled the letter out of my jacket pocket. But before it was all the way out, Mr. Frazier snatched it away from me. I didn’t even see his hand come between mine and the letter. His reflexes were that incredible. He was quite an old guy.

But he wasn’t much of a reader, at least not without his glasses. It must have taken him half an hour to get through that letter, which he held right up to his face.

“Mr. Frazier,” I said, “why don’t you let me read that for you? It’ll go faster.”

He ignored me and was right to do so. Because I was wrong about his eyesight; or maybe I was right, but it had nothing to do with the glacial pace of his reading. It was obvious that Mr. Frazier simply loved what he was doing. He was like my mother in this respect. He really knew how to read and get something out of it, too, and while he was reading, his face started going through phases, like the moon. He made reading seem like something noble and worth doing — life-altering, even. I again cursed myself for giving up reading so many years ago and vowed to continue reading Morgan Taylor’s fraudulent memoir just as soon as Mr. Frazier finished with the letter.

Finally he did. I knew this because even though it appeared he was still reading — his face was still very close to the letter — I heard this sound, this familiar, repetitive, guttural sound, and when I looked closely I saw that Mr. Frazier was crying, and his tears were getting all over the letter.

“Please, Mr. Frazier,” I said, “don’t do that, don’t — hey, why are you crying?”

“I miss you,” he said in between heaving sobs.

And oh, that was terrible, much worse than the crying! Except that I couldn’t figure out whom he was missing. It wasn’t me, I knew that. For one, I was right there, next to him; for another, he wasn’t looking at me. First Mr. Frazier stared at the letter; then he raised his head and seemed to look at an American flag sticking out of the porch flagpole stand. “I miss you,” he said again, in the direction of the flag this time. So I walked over, yanked the flag out of its stand, and handed it to Mr. Frazier. But that flag didn’t seem to be the thing he was missing: he immediately dropped it on the sidewalk and started crying again, really crying. I thought for sure his heart was going to give out this time, just fall out of his chest and right onto the sidewalk.

“Oh, I’m all alone, all alone,” Mr. Frazier said. Then it was my heart I thought was going to give out. And then it was me who started crying: we were a duo of weepers, all right; we probably scared away the neighborhood cats.

“I’m all alone,” he said again.

“I know,” I said. “I’m all alone, too.” Because no one was more expert in loneliness than yours truly: there is nothing more lonely than being an eighteen-year-old accidental arsonist and murderer and convict and virgin. So I told him that story, which of course he already knew in part. And because I had so much more story to tell and so many words with which to tell it, I went on a philosophical jag and told him that we spend most of our lives running away from loneliness, only to turn around and go and search it out, and as proof, I mentioned how I’d lied to my family for years because I was afraid to be alone, and then lied again on top of the lying, and in doing so I’d pretty much guaranteed that I
would
be alone. Yes, even though I didn’t know what the letter said, I knew what Mr. Frazier was talking about and why he would want to burn down the Edward Bellamy House and make a good, roaring fire out of the thing. I had seen and heard the reasons myself: the boys had told Mr. Frazier that he didn’t look like them, or, I guessed, like anyone else in the neighborhood, told him in so many obscene words that he didn’t belong anymore, that he was all alone. This was where the fire came in, because after all, you couldn’t feel lonely sitting — toes wiggling — in front of a fire. This was a known fact: even if you were all alone in the world, as long as there was a fire (and the Bellamy House was the biggest, most beautiful house in the neighborhood, and so logically it would also make the biggest, most beautiful fire), you could stare into it and feel its heat and it would remind you of another, happier time, a time long ago when the world belonged to you, when you understood it, when you could live in it for just a few damn
minutes
and not feel so lonely and scared and angry. “You’re not alone, Harvey,” I told him. “You’re just not.”

What was Mr. Frazier’s response to this? He said (he was stone faced and dry eyed at this point), “Did you just call me Harvey?”

I thought he was objecting to my informality, and so I said, “Yes, sir, I’m sorry, Mr. Frazier.”

“Harvey was my brother,” he said. “My name is Charles.”

At first I thought Mr. Frazier was lying, that he’d made up a brother out of thin air and as a proxy for his own wishes. As a kid I’d used this brother trick many a time myself, like when I accidentally threw a baseball through someone’s window, or accidentally ate someone else’s lunch in the cafeteria, or accidentally backed into someone’s car in the high school parking lot after the junior prom, and I would have used it after accidentally burning down the Emily Dickinson House if I’d been thinking on my feet. But I realized Mr. Frazier wasn’t making up his brother; making up a brother is easy, but it’s much more difficult to cry convincingly about how much you miss the made-up brother when he’s gone.

“OK,” I said. “But why exactly did your brother want me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House?”

“Because he was … ” And here he paused as if trying to understand his brother’s reasons. “Because he was odd,” Mr. Frazier finally said. “He had problems.”

“I bet he was a reader, your brother, like you,” I said.

“Yes,” Mr. Frazier said. “He read too much. That was one of Harvey’s problems. The world wasn’t enough like the books. It was always disappointing him. But at least he had the position at the Bellamy House …”

“Let me guess,” I said, awed by the serendipity of it all. “He was a tour guide.”

Mr. Frazier nodded. “He was a tour guide until the state had budget problems and they cut his position.”

“And that really disappointed him,” I guessed.

“Correct.”

“And so he wanted me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House because he got fired.”

“I suppose so.”

“And now he’s dead,” I said, wanting to get all the straight answers while Mr. Frazier was in the mood to field the questions. “He’s dead and you miss him.”

For a minute I thought Mr. Frazier was going to start crying again, but he didn’t. He looked at me a long time: once again his face started shifting, from anger to grief to resignation to nostalgia — he went all the way through the range of human emotions. He might even have smirked a little, no small accomplishment for the grave old Yankee he was. Finally Mr. Frazier said wistfully, “Yes, I do.”

“And so you finally couldn’t wait for me anymore, and you took it upon yourself to set fire to the Bellamy House.” It just came out of my mouth like that, as if I knew the truth and was only waiting for Mr. Frazier to congratulate me for knowing it.

Except he didn’t. “No, no,” Mr. Frazier said. He seemed genuinely surprised that I’d think such a thing. He even brushed off the front of his sport coat with the back of both hands, as though my accusation were lint.

“Well, who did, then?”

“I thought it was you,” he said.

I assured him it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, and he assured me again that it wasn’t him, and we went around and around like this until we’d convinced each other of our innocence (was this a bad quality in a detective, I wondered, to be so easily convinced of a suspect’s innocence?) and there was nothing more to say. I said my good-bye, shook his hand, and headed toward the van. Then I remembered I had one more question. When I turned around, Mr. Frazier was already on his porch — I saw now that his house was just three houses away from the Edward Bellamy House — and I asked him, “Hey, what’s that famous book that Edward Bellamy wrote, again?”

At that Mr. Frazier really perked up; you could almost smell the book learning come out of him, out of his pores. “He wrote the novel
Looking Backward
. Among other, lesser works.”

“Looking Backward,”
I repeated. “What was it about?”

“A utopia,” he said before closing the door to his house behind him. He’d taken his brother’s letter with him, I realized after the door was closed, but I decided to let Mr. Frazier keep it. Maybe he would cherish it, the way my father obviously cherished all those letters to me. Maybe Mr. Frazier would hold his brother’s letter close to him and feel less lonely. In any case, I just let him keep it. This turned out, much later, to be something of a mistake on my part, but how was I to know that at the time? How are we supposed to recognize our mistakes before they become mistakes? Where is the book that can teach us
that?

WHEN I GOT HOME
it was just after five. I found my father in the living room, sitting on the exercise bike. He was dressed in gray gym shorts and a faded red tank top, and if he’d been wearing a headband, he’d have looked a lot like that fitness instructor who was so obviously gay that you thought he probably wasn’t. My father wasn’t pedaling the bike — he was just sitting there with his feet on the pedals — but I thought it was a huge accomplishment that he’d even managed to mount the thing in the first place. He’d even broken a little sweat. My father was drinking one of his forty-ounce Knickerbockers (someone must have gone to the store, unless he had a private stash); propped up in front of him, on the exercise bike’s magazine stand, was Morgan Taylor’s book. My father was flipping through the book, skipping forward one hundred pages and then back fifty, as though he’d never read a book before and wasn’t sure how it was supposed to go. I couldn’t tell how much of the book my father had actually read, but I
could
tell he was reading: the good half of his mouth was moving along with the words, the words Morgan had stolen from him.

“Oh, hey, I’m really sorry about that, Dad,” I said. He looked up when I spoke, and dropped the book off the stand and onto the floor, which was just about what that book deserved. I picked the book up, walked over to the hall, and threw it into the open front-hall closet, just to show what I thought of the book. “That guy had no right.”

“No … right,” my father repeated: repetition, I’d learned by now, was his version of normal communication, the way jokes are for some people and sign language is for others.

“It’s my fault, really,” I said. “I’m the one who told him those stories about you.”

“About … me?”

“About where you went, what you did when you left us.”

“You … did?” my father asked. Only then, as though he was on tape delay, did his eyes slowly move through the air, following the book’s trajectory. His eyes rested for a minute on the hall closet, as if trying to picture the book there among the winter coats and file cabinets and partnerless shoes he knew to be inside. “No … right,” he said again. My father looked at me in displeasure, then took an especially angry pull on his beer.

“I know,” I said, bowing my head. “I’m so sorry.”

We sat there for a while in silence, me ashamed, my father angry, waiting for our third to come and break the impasse. Because this is what it also means to be in a family: to have two of its members break the family and then wait around for a third to make it whole again.

Finally, after fifteen minutes or so (my father had a cooler of beer near the base of the exercise bike and drank two beers, but he didn’t offer me one and I didn’t blame him), my mother showed up. She wasn’t wearing exercise clothes: she was wearing green corduroy pants and a white shirt that somebody, for some reason, might call a blouse and not a shirt, and brown leather boots. She looked classy, regal, like a man without being at all manlike, like Katharine Hepburn but without the shakes or the Spencer Tracy. She looked young, too, not at all like the fifty-nine-year-old woman I knew her to be. Her face was flushed — healthy and outdoorsy in a way that made you think of a commercial for the most expensive, physician-endorsed kind of lip balm. My mother was carrying a twelve-pack of Knickerbocker: she freed one of the cans from the cardboard, threw it to me, and said, “I don’t care why you’re so gloomy, but stop.” Then she turned to my father and said, “You, too.”

“OK,” I said, and my father grunted something that also sounded affirmative. I cracked the beer, took a long drink of it, and asked, “Hey, what did you do today?” Because it occurred to me that this is what family members ask one another after a long day, and it also occurred to me that I had no idea what my mother had done the previous three days I’d been home, either.

My mother was taking a slug of her beer when I asked this, and it was weird: there was a slight pause in her drinking, a hitch in her gulp, a slight but noticeable arrest in her imbibing, before she continued her drinking, finishing the whole beer in one long swallow, as a matter of fact. “Work,” she said, and then, without looking at me, she tossed another full can of beer at me, even though I was only half-done with the first one.

“What about you, Dad?” I asked. “What did
you
do today?”

It was more difficult to read my father’s reaction, since he had so few of them and they were so spastic and incomprehensible to begin with. But I did notice this: my father glanced pleadingly at the television, as though asking it for help. Then he looked at his cooler, which was apparently empty, and to the cooler he said finally, “Work.” As if in reward for his giving the right answer, my mother tossed my father a beer, the way a trainer throws a seal a fish. My father amazingly caught it, too, although in doing so, he nearly capsized the bike, and I had to run over and catch him and it before they crashed to the floor.

“What about you, Sam,” my mother asked. “What did
you
do today?”