An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (18 page)

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.

LEES ARDOR WAS AN
associate professor of American literature — it said so on the plaque on her office door — but she didn’t like literature, didn’t
believe
in it. I found this out after I knocked on her door, she opened it, and I stood there for too many seconds, staring at her hair. It was long, red, and straight: it was the sort of hair that demanded to be brushed religiously, two hundred times a day. Her hair was as shiny as a newly waxed kitchen floor, as mesmerizing as a hypnotist’s swinging gold watch, and it was the only physical characteristic of Lees Ardor’s that stuck with me. I’m sure she had others — she had a body, for instance, and it was wearing clothes; she had a voice and it was somewhere in the range of normal human voices — but it was her hair I remembered. Lees Ardor’s hair stood for the rest of her, the way Ahab’s peg leg had stood for him.

Anyway, I must have been staring at her hair for too long, because Lees Ardor put her fingers right under my nose and snapped them twice. The snapping brought me out of my trance. I stuck out my hand and asked, double-checking the accuracy of the door plaque, “Professor Ardor?” Without sticking out her hand to meet mine, she asked back, “And what, exactly, am I supposed to profess?”

This threw me some, I’ll admit, and because of that, I forgot to introduce myself and stammered for a moment or so before finally saying, “You profess literature,” and then I pointed at the door plaque, where it said so.

“I don’t
believe
in literature,” she said. “I don’t
like
literature, either.”

“But you’re a literature professor.”

“That’s correct.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. I knew from experience that it is exactly this response teachers most desire, because it makes them feel necessary. While at Our Lady of the Lake, I had understood so few things that I became something of a teacher’s pet.

“It makes perfect sense,” she said. “Does it not?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned her back to me, walked around her desk, and sat in her chair, the comfortable rolling sort of desk chair that you can lean back in until you’re nearly horizontal. The only other chair in the office was one of those ancient hard-backed wooden chairs that my stern Yankee ancestors probably made to be so uncomfortable that the Puritan sitting in it became miserable enough that he’d go back to work. I sat in it, across the desk from Lees Ardor. The desk between us, and the hierarchy of our chairs, made me feel diminished, like a lower life-form.

“Name a book that I should like,” Lees Ardor said. “Name a book that’s so great I should like it.”

I thought hard about all the books my mother had made me read, about certain books that everyone knew were great, and of course I came up with
Huckleberry Finn
. It was my mother’s favorite book: when, as a boy, I’d asked her why, she always said she saw herself in it, although I never knew whether she saw herself in Huck, or Jim, or Tom, or the Duke, or maybe one of the minor characters. Plus, I was here because Lees Ardor’s man, Mincher, wanted the Mark Twain House burned to the ground, and so I thought maybe I’d learn something important about her
and
the case if I said, “What about
Huckleberry Finn
?”

“
Huckleberry Finn
my ass,” Lees Ardor replied. She smiled at me ingratiatingly, as if we had reached a kind of understanding, even though I didn’t understand what
“Huckleberry Finn
my ass” meant, and I don’t think Lees Ardor did, either.

I didn’t get a chance to ask her to clarify, though. Lees Ardor went into a fury of book and legal pad gathering, then stood up, walked past her desk and me, and said over her shoulder, “We’re late for class.”

Of course, I hadn’t introduced myself yet and so she must have thought I was her student, a student whom she didn’t recognize and whose name she didn’t know, even though the semester must have been more than half over by then. In any case, I got up out of that uncomfortable chair and followed her down the hall. The hall was beautiful, the most beautiful institutional hall I’d ever seen, and nothing at all like the halls at Our Lady of the Lake. There were no drop ceilings or water stains in the plaster, and it was all dark wood and marble, with even a few ceiling-tile mosaics here and there. Looking at the ceilings at Heiden College made you want to learn, whereas looking at the ceilings at my alma mater made you not want to look at the ceilings.

The students in Lees Ardor’s class, though, probably looked much the same as the students at Our Lady of the Lake. The boys wore backward baseball caps, and the girls wore low-slung jeans and cropped shirts that left a strip of white, white skin between the shirt and the pants. Besides me, there were only two other aberrant-looking characters in that classroom: a Richard Nixon kook wearing a gray three-piece suit and red paisley tie, and a kook who looked like a female Chairman Mao, with that famous bowl haircut and matching workingman’s denim ensemble, plus many facial piercings, including a hoop through her septum by which she could, I supposed, be led around. Those two were sitting in the back row, and I sat between them. They didn’t acknowledge me when I asked the girl, and then the boy, “Hey, what class is this, anyway?” But still I felt an unspoken kinship with them, the way the untouchables in the back row always do.

Lees Ardor had positioned herself at the front of the classroom and was staring at the class, her hair flowing behind her as though it were her head’s own academic gown. She stared for at least three minutes. At first I thought she was taking a silent form of attendance. But there were only fourteen people in the class — I counted — and it wouldn’t have taken her that long to figure out who was there and who wasn’t. Besides, she wasn’t really looking at us but rather at some spot on the wall at the back of the room, as if trying to bore a hole through it. Finally, still looking at the wall, she said, “Willa Cather is a cunt.”

“Whoa,” I said, apparently out loud, since several of the real students turned and looked at me before assuming their previous face-forward positions. They seemed unimpressed, bored even, by Lees Ardor’s pronouncement, but it threw me, that most forbidden of forbidden words, even though I’d read Wesley Mincher’s letter and should have been expecting it or something like it. I turned to the Chairman Mao kook and whispered, “Did she really say” — and here I paused, not daring to say that word myself, the most off-limits of all the off-limits terms for the female pudendum — “that
word
?”

“Yes,” she said. There was a strong, wet sibilance to the word, which made me suspect that she had a tongue ring, in addition to her many other piercings. She would have been in high demand as a model for
Face and Metal
, assuming there was such a magazine.