An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (24 page)

“If you say so,” my father said. He shrugged and then shuffled off to bed.

LIKE THE MANY SAD-SACK
young male narrators of the books my mother made me read when I was a sad-sack young male, I went to bed that night without my supper, and for that matter without my lunch, too. My stomach was rumbling angrily, keeping pace with the rumbling in my head. There were so many things to think about that I couldn’t properly think about any of them. When this happens, the only thing you can do is to locate one thought, the simplest one, the one nearest to you, and do your very best to eliminate it and then go on to thinking about the next thought you want to eliminate.

The thought closest to me that night was this: Morgan Taylor had stolen my father’s stories for his memoir. My father had read the memoir and said he wasn’t in it, even though those postcards he’d sent me said otherwise. When I was a child, I kept the postcards my father had sent in my closet, on the top shelf, in a manila envelope. I got out of bed, dragged a desk chair over to the closet, climbed up on the chair, reached up to the top shelf, and found the envelope. The postcards were inside: I read them like that, standing on the chair. They were exactly as I remembered, in my father’s handwriting, the handwriting I recognized from the “Drink Me” notes he left in the morning beside my hangover potion. I’d remembered the handwriting so clearly, in part, because it was the only time I’d ever really seen either of my parents write
anything
except for the illegible marginal comments they made on student papers and manuscripts, and even that writing wasn’t writing at all but rather symbols telling the writer to indent or not to. The way I figured it, my parents scribbled so much at work that they couldn’t bring themselves to write anything at home — not even a grocery list or a birthday card. Except for my father’s postcards. My father might not have remembered the postcards clearly, but here they were, written proof that something important had happened as I remembered it happening. Each postcard was signed, “Love, Your Dad.”

“I love you, too,” I said to the postcards, putting them back in the envelope and then putting the envelope back on its high shelf. The father downstairs was strange to me and unlikable, but the one I knew from the postcards was still here, with me, in my heart and on my high closet shelf. With one thing less to think about, I got back into bed and tried to go to sleep. I did, too, for three hours, until the phone woke me up. It rang and rang and rang — my parents didn’t have an answering machine, which seemed about right, because I don’t think the phone had rung once since I’d moved home — until it finally pulled me out of bed and downstairs, where the phone was. I picked it up and gave the usual greeting, and in response I heard a man whose voice I didn’t recognize say, “The Robert Frost Place, Sam. At midnight,” and then hang up. I put the phone back into its cradle, then walked into my father’s room. I was prepared to wake him, but he was already awake. The lamp on the end table was on. There was a box of wine on the end table next to the lamp, red wine dripping from its spigot onto the floor. My father was sitting in his chair, a glass of wine in one hand, the open box of letters in his lap. He was staying up late, drinking box wine, worrying about the missing letters, the way another father might stay up late, drinking coffee, worrying about his missing son or wife.

“Dad,” I said, “did you hear the phone ring?”

“Yes,” he said, then drained his glass. He placed the glass under the spigot, filled his glass only halfway, and then gave the box a disappointed glance that let me know it was empty.

“That was someone telling me that he was going to burn down the Robert Frost Place. In so many words.”

“Peter Le Clair,” he said automatically. “Ten State Route Eighteen, Franconia, New Hampshire.” He looked at me sheepishly and nodded. “I should have remembered that one.”

New Hampshire was pretty. For one thing, it started snowing immediately after I crossed the state border, which gave me the feeling that it never stopped snowing in New Hampshire and that if I turned around and looked back at Massachusetts, I’d see a solid line of weather — on one side blizzard, on the other side nothing but palm trees and warm breezes. But I didn’t look back to check. I kept my eyes straight ahead, on the road, because it really was snowing hard and you could hardly see a thing with all the trucks barreling northward, the snow whooshing and blowing in their wake and into my windshield. It was like driving behind a fierce and terrible tsunami with Quebec plates. Then one of the trucks got caught in a rut of snow, veered to the left, through traffic and off the highway, and jackknifed into a ditch, after which all the cars panicked and started skidding here and there, and it was like bumper cars that had lost their poles while going seventy, in the snow, with some horrible visibility. It was a real mess, and I knew if I stayed on the highway much longer, I’d soon be in a ditch myself or worse, so I took the next exit.

It was magical off the highway, still snowing hard but no semis and no high speeds and so more heavenly and not nearly as blinding and hazardous; all in all, it was a much better-looking New Hampshire. I went through about twelve towns, lovely towns full of white clapboard houses and snow-covered town greens and sensible white boxy Congregational churches and covered wooden bridges, and even a gristmill or two paddling their way through icy streams, not getting much done for all their paddling, but still plucky and hopeful. I wished that I wasn’t just driving through and also that I’d learned to paint so I could be an artist and live in New Hanpshire and paint pictures of the towns. They were that handsome. I drove by an inn in Red Bell, and there were a half-dozen cars parked out front, all of them with out-of-state plates, people obviously on vacation. I’d never been on vacation myself, not really, and now I knew why people did it. People went on vacation not to get a break from their home but to imagine getting a new home, a better home, in which they’d live a better life. I knew this because as I drove, the hole that was me and my life was getting smaller and smaller and was being filled up with New Hampshire, or maybe it was only the idea of New Hampshire, but who cares, as long as it was filling up the hole. So maybe that’s what a vacation was for: to fill up the hole that was you not on vacation.

Because that’s what Red Bell was doing: it was filling me up and making me reflective, too. Now that I had seen the real deal, New England town – wise, I could see Camelot as Anne Marie had at first: cheap, sterile, and so lonely and, as far as homes go, no shelter at all from the cruel, cruel world. But if we could have moved here, near a gristmill, things would have been different. Was it too late? Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe Anne Marie and I could work things out in New Hampshire; maybe the boxy churches would help her forget my lying and would also help me to finally tell the truth; maybe my bumbling wouldn’t be so severe here, in Red Bell, or in one of its neighbors. After all, the place was so very old and had been through a lot, so you probably couldn’t do much to it that hadn’t been done to it already. The ancient, meandering stone walls, for instance: they were everywhere, and if the Indians and the British and generations of livestock hadn’t wrecked them, I didn’t see how I could do the walls much damage, either. They looked tough and permanent, those walls, but with the snow on them they looked soft, too, which was how I was starting to think of myself — or rather, was how I was starting to think of my future, New Hampshire self. Yes, New Hampshire was already doing strange things to me. After only an hour in the state, I had fully imagined life here with Anne Marie and the kids; it was easy to do so, easy to forget that Anne Marie was with Thomas Coleman now and wanted nothing more to do with me. I wondered if this was how my father had felt during his three-year exile — if he’d felt hopeful and dreamy about the prospect of a new life with his wife and boy in Duluth, Yuma, et cetera. It hadn’t worked out that way for him, exactly, but it would work out better for me and mine — of that I was convinced. Because everyone knows that the one constant in the human story is progress, and my father’s Duluth was not my New Hampshire, his familial disaster not mine, and so I pledged to look into local real estate prices and employment opportunities immediately after I found out who had called me, asking me to meet him at the Robert Frost Place at midnight.

But then I kept driving north, up into the White Mountains and toward Franconia, and it got so awfully poor and depressing that even the snow couldn’t disguise it. First the clapboard houses lost their clapboards and took on some aluminum siding, still white but somehow dirty against the legitimately and naturally white snow. I felt bad for the houses, having to be compared to the white snow and failing so completely. It would probably have been better for the houses and the people in them to move south, where there was no snow to have to live up to.

Anyway, accelerating through time (because this trip took hours and hours — you could see why people in a hurry and with no eye for local detail are so completely devoted to the interstate), I drove farther north, and the trailers started popping up here and there, until there were only trailers and I started to miss the aluminum siding. Oh, those trailers were sad and made Mr. Frazier’s neighborhood in Chicopee seem like Shangri-la. They looked cold, too, sitting there on the open ground with no trees to protect them from the wind and the drifting snow. Some of the trailers had plywood entrances tacked onto their fronts or sides, and I could see the plywood jittering in the wind. Every trailer had a stovepipe coming out of its roof, sticking out of the tar paper like a lonely digit. The smoke came furiously out of these pipes, the wood burning double time so as not to spend any extra minutes in the trailers. There were wrecked cars in every yard, taking the place of the trees, and they, too, were covered with snow, the way the stone walls had been farther south. But whereas the snow had softened the boulders, the wrecks looked cruel as the rusted and warped fenders punched through the snow, making harsh holes in the drifts. I was in Franconia now, with the White Mountains everywhere, and it should have been beautiful, but it wasn’t. The mountains themselves seemed impossibly far away, as if they didn’t want to get too close to the trailers. It was awful, all right, so depressing, so poor, and by now the hole inside me — the hole where Anne Marie and the kids were, the hole that pretty Red Bell had started to fill — was as large as ever, and I’d forgotten about Red Bell entirely, couldn’t remember what made it so beautiful, couldn’t even conjure up a gristmill. This is what poverty does, I guess: it ruins your memory of more beautiful things, which is just another reason why we should try as hard as we can to get rid of it.

Peter Le Clair’s address: 10 State Route 18. I found his place because of the hand-painted number 10 on the mailbox, which was bent face downward, almost off its pole, as if ashamed of its address. His trailer was the same as the others except for one thing: Peter himself was standing at the trailer’s one front window, watching as I pulled into his driveway. His face disappeared from the window, and seconds later the tan plywood door to the black plywood addition swung open and there stood Peter, five-day beard and flannel shirt and no coat, holding a gun. Except it wasn’t a gun — my eyes and assumptions were playing tricks on me — it was a plunger (Peter had real plumbing problems, in addition to his other problems). Still, Peter looked mighty threatening. He was big, much taller than six feet, with a chest that was full barreled to my half. There was a doghouse in front of the trailer, right next to my minivan, and a dog howled from inside it but didn’t come out. I wished I were in the doghouse with the dog, who knew Peter better than I did and could probably give me a few pointers about how to please its master. Or maybe the dog was trying to do just that, through its howling, which was loud and echoing from inside the doghouse.
Go away
, it might have been howling.
Go away, go away
.

But I couldn’t go away. For one thing, it was only six o’clock, and I had to stick around until at least midnight to find out who had made that phone call and why. And for another, I had nowhere else to go, nothing left to do. Perhaps Peter’s trailer in Franconia was as close to home as I was going to get. Perhaps, for a man like me, there was no longer any such thing as a true home and so I couldn’t be picky, couldn’t just sit in the van and refuse to come out because the homes were depressing and their inhabitants were large and menacing. Yes, I needed to get out of the van. Now that I knew that, the dog’s howling took on a different meaning, and instead of
Go away, go away
, it was
Get out of the van, get out of the van
. I got out of the van.

Boy, it was cold. The sort of heart-clutching cold where after being out in it for a second, you can’t bear another one. Even Peter and his plunger were less frightening than the cold. Plus, it was still snowing hard and I didn’t have a hat, and if I stayed out there much longer, I’d be buried like the wrecked vehicles in the yard. There were three of them, to the left of the doghouse; I could see their antennas sticking out of the snow.