An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (23 page)

“I know where Mom is,” I said to my father, but he didn’t hear me, or pretended not to. The other man did hear me, though; he looked up and smiled at me in the vacant, unperturbed fashion of the truly punchy. He was approximately my father’s age, maybe a little older, was wearing a beat-up gray corduroy blazer, and had a nose that might have been Rudolph’s had Rudolph been a boxer — a bad one. There were two forty-ounce Knickerbockers on the table in front of them, and empties scattered around the kitchen.

“Now, this,” my father was saying, “this is one of my favorites. It’s from a man in Leominster who wanted my son to burn down the Ralph Waldo Emerson House because he had been named Waldo, after Emerson, and no one had ever let him forget what a stupid name he had.” I, too, remembered the letter: the letter writer had said that he probably should have wanted me to burn down his parents’ house, too, for naming him Waldo in the first place, except they were dead and he was now living in their house and the mortgage was paid, free and clear, and if I burned it down, he’d have to pay rent somewhere else. My father handed the letter to the man across the table, and the man looked at it blankly, as if it were a picture of people he didn’t know; then he put it on the table. “And this letter,” my father went on, “is from a woman who wanted my son to burn down Herman Melville’s house in Pittsfield …” And so on. What matters here was not only what my father said, but how he said it. He slurred slightly when he spoke, but there was nothing halting or stroke damaged about his speech. I heard and saw and understood this clearly now. I was seeing my father, not by himself or with my mother, but in his element, and this is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: seeing your father in his element will make you feel sad. I had been sad when I thought my father had had a stroke and was partially paralyzed, but at least then he could be considered heroic. This was a different kind of sadness, a deeper one, a sadness you feel when you discover that the person you love is not the person you thought you were loving. Would I wake up the next morning and find my father sad in a totally different way? How many different kinds of sadness were there in the world, anyway?

“But this is odd,” my father was saying, although the man across the table from him wasn’t exactly listening anymore: his hand was curled around the beer can, but his eyes were closed and his neck was fighting a losing battle to keep his head from crashing to the table. “There seem to be some letters missing.” My father gathered all the letters, stacked them, and then began flipping through them, his lips moving as he took inventory. He finished the inventory, then took another one. The man’s head fell to the table with a dull
thunk
, but my father didn’t notice. Perhaps not wanting to be further ignored, the man got up from the table, a lump already formed on his forehead, and left the room and then the house: I could hear the front door open and then shut. My father didn’t notice any of that, either. “I just don’t understand,” he said.

“Which letters are missing?” I asked him gently, because as far as I could tell, he wasn’t aware of me standing there, and I didn’t want to scare him. Except he didn’t seem surprised at all to hear my voice. Maybe he’d known I was there the whole time, or maybe he didn’t care.

“The Edward Bellamy House letter, of course,” he said. “But there are six other letters missing, too.”

“What are they?” I asked. I knew full well that the Mark Twain House letter was missing, since it was in my pocket. Sure enough, my father named it, and then added, “But then there are five others that are missing, too. I just can’t figure out which ones.”

“How do you know that many are missing, then?”

He looked at me with pity. “You were sent one hundred and thirty-seven letters. There are only one hundred and thirty letters here.” He knocked himself on the head, as though to dislodge the forgotten names.

“Did you know that someone tried to burn down the Mark Twain House last night?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father said. He turned to look at me for the first time, although his face was empty of anything except worry and bafflement. “That’s how I can remember the Mark Twain House letter, because I knew someone had tried to burn it down. Your mother told me. She also told me that whoever did it didn’t do a very thorough job.”

“How did she know that?” I asked him.

“I suppose she read it in the paper,” he said. “How did
you
know it?”

“I read it in the newspaper, too,” I said, which was the truth, or part of it. And then: “Dad, I saw Mom leave the house earlier.”

“Yes, she was here,” my father said, starting to count the letters again. “And then she left.”

“She didn’t look happy,” I said.

“There was a bit of a mix-up,” my father said. “I have one of these parties every Tuesday. Your mother tolerates the parties as long as she knows when they are so she won’t be around. That’s why they’re every Tuesday.”

“Today is Monday,” I said.

“That was the mix-up,” he admitted. “I thought it was Tuesday. So I called everyone and said, ‘Where are you? Get over here.’ ”

“Tell me about the parties, Dad,” I said, although I could picture them pretty well already. They would be populated by men like the old, red-nosed guy who’d earlier bounced his head off the kitchen table, men whose natural and sole habitat was the college town: failed or failing graduate students, drunk professors or book editors like my father, all of them wearing corduroy jackets in various stages of disrepair. These guys had once had their
fields
— Victorian literature, tropical botany, the cultural import of the manual typewriter — but one day they discovered that they didn’t
like
their fields anymore, not as much as they liked to drink, anyway. And the only thing they liked as much as drinking was
oddity
, which made sense, since they were both odd and drunks themselves. My father and his free booze and his son the arsonist and murderer and all those letters fit both those bills. I could picture all of them, every Tuesday, showing up at my parents’ house and drinking their booze and listening to my father read those letters until they’d exhausted most of the liquor and my father had exhausted most of their curiosity and they drifted away, until there was only one red-nosed guy left, always the drunkest one, the one with nobody to see and nowhere to go and nothing to do except sit at the kitchen table and drink the last Knickerbocker and listen to my father drone on and on and on about the letters, the letters, the letters, the way he’d talked to so many drunks before. I knew this without my father telling me, even though he did, in so many words.

“So Mom doesn’t like these parties,” I said. I could see why, but something didn’t quite make sense to me. After all, my mother didn’t seem to have a problem with drunks in general, being one herself, plus being married to one, plus being mother to a son who was well on his way to becoming a drunk, too. So why would a few dozen more drunks in corduroy blazers bother her so much? “How come she doesn’t like these parties?” I asked my father.

“I have no idea,” he said, and that’s another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: be wary of a man who says, “I have no idea,” when asked why his wife doesn’t like something he’s done, which of course is just another way of saying be wary of men in general. “Maybe she doesn’t like what my guests do to the house,” he said.

“Speaking of the house —,” I said, “Dad, how long ago did Mom move out?”

“Move out?” my father repeated. “I wouldn’t exactly say she has. Her clothes are here, after all, or at least most of them. She comes back here to drink most every night.”

“Dad,” I said, “I saw her apartment tonight. I saw her in her apartment in Belchertown, in the Masonic temple. I know all about that.”

“Oh,” he said. His face fell a little and began to look more like the face of the stroked-out father I believed and wanted him to be and he perhaps wanted to be, too. “I’m sorry you have to know all about that.”

“Are you still even married?”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“What is?” I said.

“Marriage,” he said.

“Do you still love her?”

“I love her very much,” my father said automatically. Did this mean he did, or he didn’t? If he had asked me the same question about Anne Marie, I would have given him the same answer, and I would have given it automatically. “I wish your mother weren’t in that apartment,” he said. “I wish she were here, with us.”

“So why isn’t she?”

“It’s complicated,” my father said again. I could see that “complicated” was the word he used to describe that which he didn’t understand, the way I used “accident.” My father dropped his eyes and then returned them to the letters. He picked one up and I could see his hand shake. He seemed more and more feeble and distracted with each passing second, and I thought I’d better finish asking questions before he fully reverted to the stroked-out father I’d been thinking he was.

“Dad, how many people have seen these letters?”

“Too many to count,” he said, and this seemed to please him. He rallied a little bit and started walking around the kitchen, waggling beer cans to see if they had any beer left in them, drinking out of the ones that did.

“Does anyone know where you keep the letters?”

“Of course,” he said. He sat down at the table and started flipping through the letters again. “Lots of people do.”

“Does anyone suspicious know where you keep the letters?” I asked. This was a weak question, and my father gave me a look as if to say,
They all were
, and so I thought about how to be more specific.
What would a suspicious person look like, exactly?
I asked myself, and immediately Thomas Coleman came to mind, especially since he’d seemed to know my father, knew where his bedroom was, and had been in this same home only the day before. Plus, I’d already fingered him as guilty to Detective Wilson, so I had some stake in his guilt. Plus, I didn’t think I had anyone else to name except my mother, and I didn’t want to name her, not unless I had to.

“Do you know someone named Thomas Coleman?” I asked him.

“I know lots of people,” my father said.

“He has blond hair,” I said. “He’s thin, has blue eyes.” I thought about it some more, wished there were more ways to physically describe the people who are ruining our lives. “Really thin,” I said again. “Does that sound like someone who has seen the letters?”

“Lots of thin people have seen the letters,” my father said, talking more to the letters than to me.

“Dad, pay attention!” I barked, the way a parent does to a child, and the way every child eventually does to his parent, too, taking revenge for being barked at so many years earlier, revenge being yet another one of the many kinds of sadness. My father’s head jerked up and he held it there, at attention. “Thomas Coleman’s parents died in the Emily Dickinson House fire,” I told him.

“They did,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I killed them.” It felt good to admit this finally, although every good feeling exists only long enough for you to ruin it, and I ruined this one by adding, “By accident.”

“By accident,” my father said.

“Do you know Thomas Coleman?” I asked. “Has he seen the letters? I’m pretty sure someone who has seen the letters tried to set fire to both the Bellamy House and the Twain House. They probably have the five other letters, too. Dad, please, think hard. Do you know a Thomas Coleman? This is
important
.”

My father thought hard; I could tell by the way the worry lines on his forehead deepened and multiplied. He even brought his index finger to his lips and left it there. Finally he said, “I have no idea. I’m sorry, Sam, but I don’t.”

“OK,” I said, and I believed him, and that will also go in my arsonist’s guide: don’t trust a man who says, “I have no idea,” but also don’t underestimate his capacity not to have one. “Dad,” I said, “you don’t think it could be Mom who tried to burn those houses, do you?”

“No,” he said. “Why would you ask something like that?”

“Because I’m pretty sure it’s a woman,” I said. “If it’s not this guy Thomas Coleman, then I’m pretty sure it’s a woman.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s complicated,” I said, throwing his favorite word back at him. “But trust me, I’m pretty sure it’s a woman.”

“Why would it be your mother?” my father said. He was really lucid now, his eyes suddenly clear of the booze and the letters and who knows what else that had been fogging them.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she’s not happy I came back. Maybe it’s because of me.”

“Don’t you ever say that!” my father yelled. I mean, he really yelled this, and then banged on the table, giving his fist the opportunity to yell, too. I don’t think he ever banged or yelled once when I was a child; usually he moped and then fled. I’m not sure which was worse, or better. Were these my only choices? Shouldn’t you get more than two choices? “Your mother would never do something like that to you,” he told me. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“OK,” I said.

“She
loves
you, you idiot,” he said. “You have no idea how much.”

“OK, OK,” I said. “But I’m still pretty sure it’s a woman, though.”

“Then it’s another woman,” my father said. “Go find another woman.” Of course he said this, and of course I listened,
finding another woman
being both the hope that keeps most men going and the hope that eventually does them in.

That was the end of that. After he told me to go find another woman, my father seemed to stroke out again. He put the letters back in the shoe box, tucked the shoe box under his arm, got up from his chair, and shuffled toward his bedroom. Before he left the kitchen, though, he reached with his free hand and picked up a book on the counter. “By the way,” he said. He held up Morgan Taylor’s memoir, then tossed it at me. I didn’t react quickly enough, and it hit me right in the gut, which, coincidentally, is exactly where the book jacket promised the book would hit me. “I read this. Am I supposed to be in here?”

“Well, not you exactly,” I said. “But the things you did, the places you went after you left Mom and me. Those are
your
stories.”