An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (19 page)

“Why?”

“We’re reading
My Ántonia
,” the Chairman Mao kook said. My face must have looked as baffled as I, its owner, felt, because she clarified: “That’s a book. By Willa Cather.”

“I know that,” I said.
My Ántonia
was another book my mother had made me read, and I remembered it well: the sweeping Nebraska prairie, the waist-high snow, the transplanted Scandinavians and Slavs and their work ethic, the strong women in calico always drinking strong coffee. And then there was Ántonia herself, who, as I remembered, was plucky, among her other notable qualities. “But why did she call Willa Cather” — and here I summoned all my courage and finally got it out — “a cunt?”

The Chairman Mao kook didn’t flinch when I said the word. “Professor Ardor thinks all writers are cunts.”

I turned to the Richard Nixon kook to get his take on the matter, but he wasn’t paying any attention to us at all. His eyes were fixed on Lees Ardor; he had this aroused, glazed look on his face and kept smoothing and stroking his tie, and you didn’t have to be an English major or a reader to know what
that
symbolized.

Meanwhile there was a discussion going on in front of us. One of the normal, scantily clad college girls had said about
My Ántonia
, “I liked it.”

“What do you mean by
like
?” Lees Ardor asked, in the same tone she’d used when she asked me what she was supposed to
profess
. There followed a long debate about what it meant to
like
something. I didn’t pay much attention to this at all, not so much because I didn’t understand the discussion, but because it flew so far below the radar of my interest. Finally they exhausted that topic, I mean really exhausted the hell out of it: even the air in the classroom seemed weary.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” one of the other normal, scantily clad girls said.

“What is she talking about?” I asked the Chairman Mao kook.

“Professor Ardor’s mother died,” she whispered back. “She canceled classes last week so that she could go to the funeral. It was in Nebraska.” She paused again, fingered her nose ring like a thoughtful bull, and then added, “That’s also where
My Ántonia
is set, by the way.”

“I knew that, too,” I said. “I’ve
read the book
, you know.”

“Her mother died of cancer,” she said. “The really bad kind.”

I could hear something shift in the Chairman Mao kook’s voice, could hear the boredom and knowingness seep out and the empathy flow in. I could see the change in her female classmates, too. They sat up in their chairs and leaned toward their teacher, and you could almost feel them waver in their dislike for Lees Ardor. The men did not care — they were slumped down in their chairs, as usual, their baseball caps pulled down over their faces in an attempt to either hide or call further attention to their apathy — but the women in the class
cared
about Lees Ardor: her mother had died, after all, and they had just read
My Ántonia
, and no doubt they were thinking what I was thinking. No doubt they had visions of Lees Ardor’s melancholy return to the great sweeping North American prairie. On the prairie, the students probably imagined, there were self-strong women in calico showing off their self-strength during Lees Ardor’s mother’s funeral and drinking strong coffee afterward. And then there was Lees Ardor’s mother herself, who (so we imagined, speaking for the female members of the class, whom I considered myself one of at that moment) was as strong and as stoic as any woman in Nebraska — strong when her husband had died ten years earlier of a heart attack and she’d had to sell their farm, strong during the six months she was dying of leukemia. Lees Ardor’s mother was so admired by everyone who knew her that they felt no need to say so over and over again, and there were no teary toasts in her honor because, it was agreed, Mrs. Ardor would have hated such a gesture. Lees Ardor, I imagined, had been so moved by this stoic show of respect that she cried at the funeral, cried out loud for the first time she could remember. She put her hands over her face when she wept, and her crying sounded oddly far away, as if she were a princess holed up in some distant castle. Lees Ardor’s mother was gone from the world and there would be no one else like her, and now there was just Lees Ardor herself. Lees Ardor could never carry on her mother’s legacy, she knew that. How could she emulate her mother when she could barely stop crying long enough to accept the strong coffee from her mother’s cronies, who would soon also die stoically? I’d imagined all of that, sitting there in my desk chair, and I bet the women in the class had, too, and in doing so we’d imagined our way into empathy for Lees Ardor. Someone even sucked back a sob, which Lees Ardor did not appreciate. I know this because she stared furiously at the class — her hair glinted like armor in the buzzing overhead lights — and said, “My mother was a cunt.”

This was too much: there was a collective gasp, and then all the women in the class left en masse, even the Chairman Mao pierced-tongue kook. Almost all of the men left, too, not because they were offended by the word “cunt,” I’m pretty sure, but because they hadn’t been paying attention and saw the women leaving and probably assumed class was dismissed early. Then it was just me and Lees Ardor and the Richard Nixon kook, who was looking at her as though in the throes of both fear and love. He was probably one of those buttoned-down guys who couldn’t love anyone unless he was terrified of them. Lees Ardor’s repeated use of the word “cunt” had no doubt made him fall for her hard.

“Get the hell out of here,” Lees Ardor told him. The Richard Nixon kook went pleasurably limp in his desk chair and then got up, wobbly legged, and left the room. Lees Ardor crossed the room and closed the door behind him, then sat in one of the student desk chairs and started crying with such force that I was afraid that her eyes were going to fall out of her head and onto the desk, smearing the graffiti. And then, as if the weeping wasn’t enough for her, Lees Ardor began banging her head, softly at first and then harder and harder, like a woodpecker determined to serve its purpose without its beak. I was afraid she was going to do some real damage, to herself and her forehead and to the desk.

“Please don’t cry,” I told her. I had said the same thing to Mr. Frazier just two days earlier. Was this what a detective did, after all? Did a detective try to get his suspects to stop crying long enough to ask them the things he needed to know? “Please don’t.”

“I loved her, so much,” Lees Ardor said.

“Your mother?” I guessed.

“Yes,” she said. “Why did I call her that?”

“You don’t really think she’s a cunt, do you?”

“No,” she said. “I
loved
her.”

“Then why did you call her that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh yes, you do,” I said. Because I’d often given this answer — “I don’t know” — to my mother when I was a boy and confronted with an especially difficult question, and I’d also tried it with my packaging-science professors, and none of them had accepted “I don’t know.” I bet Lees Ardor didn’t take that sort of answer from her students, either, and now I wasn’t going to take it from her. “Tell me why you called your mother a cunt.”

“Because,” Lees Ardor said. Her head was down on the table, her hands locked behind her head as though she were being arrested, and so the words came out muffled but with force, probably because she’d been wanting to say them for so long. “Because I didn’t want to be a character in the book my students had been reading.”

“You didn’t want to be Ántonia,” I said, although I wasn’t really thinking about that book, or even about Lees Ardor: I was thinking more about my mother and how she had given up her books and whether it had done her any good. Which character did my mother not want to be anymore? I wondered. Were there so many characters in her that the moment she stopped being one, she immediately became another?

“That’s right,” Lees Ardor said. She picked her head up and looked at me urgently, as though she was saying something important for the first time ever. “I didn’t want to be the hard-bitten character who had endured tragedy and come out a better, more sympathetic person.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t understand,” she said, and started wailing again. “I want to be a
real
person.”

“I do understand,” I said. Because I was pretty sure I did, and I was also pretty sure I knew why she didn’t believe in literature or like it very much, either. She didn’t believe in or like books because she feared being a character in them and thus not a real person, whatever that was, and not knowing what a real person was made her hate the books even more, the books and the words within them, too, and then that hatred extended to all words everywhere, like “cunt,” which was a word she loathed but could not stop using and which, like all words, was lousy and inadequate. Maybe it was words, all of them, all of them that could gesture feebly toward your anger but not do justice to the complexity of it, that made her — or her Wesley Mincher — go out and contact a complete stranger and ask him to burn down the Mark Twain House. This theory came out of my head, fully formed, like that Greek god’s daughter, who leaped out of his skull and into the ancient world, fully formed.

Then I made a mistake. Empathy makes us do things we shouldn’t, which makes you wonder why it’s one of our most respected emotions. Empathy made me touch Lees Ardor, gently on her back, just to let her know that I understood what she was going through and that I was there, as her detective, to comfort her. But it seemed as though she didn’t want a detective
or
a comforter. At my touch, she leaped out of her chair and turned to face me. Her tears disappeared almost immediately, as though made of an especially fast-drying sort of salt. “Who the hell are you, anyway?” she asked.

“I’m Sam Pulsifer. Your” — and here I paused, as anyone would have — “
manfriend
, Professor Mincher, wrote me a letter a long time ago, asking me to burn down the Mark Twain House.”

Her face changed dramatically then. Outrage and suspicion took the place of sadness, as so often happens. “So you’re fucking Sam Pulsifer.”

“I am,” I said, although the way she said it made me wish I weren’t. Lees Ardor looked at me in such disbelief that I thought it might move the discussion along if I gave her some form of identification. So I took my driver’s license out of my wallet and handed it to her. She looked at it, looked at me, looked at it again, and then said in a low, hissing voice, “You owe us three thousand dollars.”

“I do?” I said.

“You do,” she said. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m not pretending,” I said.

“You are,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said, and we went around like this for a while, like enemies without weapons and armed with only a very limited vocabulary. Finally I decided just to ask the question that might end the fight: “Why do I owe you three thousand dollars?”

“Fine,” she said. Then she adopted a theatrically bored tone, to let me know she was playing along but not at all happy to do so: “You owe us three thousand dollars because that’s what we paid you to burn down the Mark Twain House. Which you did not do.”

“Did you pay me in person?” I asked, playing along myself.

“No,” she said. “You sent Wesley a letter saying you would be willing to burn down the house for three thousand dollars. Wesley agreed. He left the money in an envelope inside a dumpster next to the Cumberland Farms, right down the street from the Mark Twain House. That was yesterday at noon. You were very specific in your instructions.”

“I guess I was,” I said. “Except that wasn’t me.” And before she could respond, I said, “If that was me, then why would I show up right now, after I hadn’t successfully set the fire you paid me to set, so that you could then demand your money back? Now that I had your money, why wouldn’t I just disappear?”

She thought for a while, her forehead wrinkled, as if I were an especially difficult passage in a novel and she were trying to unpack me. Who knows, maybe she was trying to figure out whether I was a character, too, and if so, which one or ones.

“Shit,” Lees Ardor finally said. “We’d better go see Wesley.”

WESLEY MINCHER AND LEES ARDOR
lived in West Hartford, in a home much like my parents’: an old, musty colonial home full of rooms that all looked like studies and not the living and dining and parlor rooms they had probably been designed to be. Each room had towering, overflowing bookcases, and dim lighting, and the shabby look of neglect and intellectual wear and tear. We found Wesley Mincher sitting in the biggest of all these rooms: he had his legs propped up on a settee, and he immediately struck me as someone who probably didn’t get enough exercise and had diabetes. His face was yellow, although that might have been from the lighting. He was reading a book, an ancient-looking, clothbound book whose pages were probably as yellowed as Mincher’s skin.

“Wesley,” Lees Ardor said, “there is someone here to see you.” He didn’t answer her, even though they were only a body length apart. “Wesley,” she said again, but with more sweetness in her voice, as though she loved the way he didn’t answer her. She said his name five more times, her voice sounding as if she were saying not, “Wesley, Wesley,” but rather, “Love, Love.” Still no response. It wasn’t that Mincher was deaf; no, he was one of those distracted academics who are so lost in their own heads that it takes them a long time to realize that they might be needed in the world outside their skulls. But finally he did hear: he looked up and saw her and gave her a big, fond smile. He even put down his book, or rather he slid it into a protective plastic sleeve, the way Anne Marie might have slid a sandwich for Katherine’s lunch into a plastic sandwich bag. I had designed both kinds of bags, by the way, or at the very least worked with someone who had.

“Wesley,” Lees Ardor said, “this is Sam Pulsifer.”

“I am a fourth-generation Mincher from the North Carolina foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains,” Wesley Mincher said, apropos of nothing. He had a southern accent, the gentle, lilting kind. My father had edited many books by southern historians about southern history for the university press, and I’d met a few of what he called “his authors,” had heard him talk about those authors, and so I immediately pegged Wesley Mincher for what he was: he was a character, too, the sort of southern character who believed that being a southern character had something to do with misdirectional doublespeak, and losing the Civil War and not wanting others to talk about it but not being able to stop talking about it yourself, and having wise, lugubrious old folks and front porches for them to sit on, and black people, always black people, about whom you knew everything and about whom no one else knew shit, and the idea that self-criticism is art but criticism from outside is hypocrisy, and wise, folksy sheriffs and God and farm animals and good food that wouldn’t be good if you ate it in a restaurant and not in your mama’s kitchen, and a set of whitewall tires leaning up against the barn that would look good on the 1957 Buick that you had a funny story to tell about.