Brock Clarke - An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

“No,” my mother said.

“No,” I said, and then added, unnecessarily, “I have no idea where it is, either.”

After that, none of us Pulsifers said anything else. Detective Wilson tugged at his coat sleeves, then fiddled with his hood; for some reason he kept looking toward the door, as though he were onstage and his director was in the wings, about to feed the detective his cues. “OK, that’s all I need for right now,” he finally said, visibly drooping in the shoulders. “I’ll be in touch.” Then, without shaking anyone’s hand or even giving anyone his card, he practically sprinted out the door and into the night. My father disappeared into his bedroom to double-check, no doubt, the status of his precious shoe box and its missing letter. But my mind was still on Detective Wilson, who’d come looking for an answer and left behind all these questions. Why hadn’t he kept on questioning us until he’d gotten some answers? Was he a bumbler, too? Did anyone know what the hell they were doing around here? What sort of detective was he, anyway?

“What police department was Detective Wilson from?” I asked.

“You know, I don’t think he said,” my mother told me. I could hear my father in his bedroom moaning loudly and deeply, like a wounded cow. But my mother didn’t seem to notice. She was staring at me, her eyes full of questions, those questions orbiting the stationary suns of her pupils. Did you do something, Sam? she wanted to know. You just moved home: did you do something bad already? Oh, Sam, what have you done now? How have you disappointed me this time? She had these questions, all right, but she didn’t have to ask them. Because my mother, thank God, was a drunk, and this was another good thing about being a drunk: you always had a question that would trump all other questions.

“Who wants a drink?” my mother asked, then got off the couch and walked to the kitchen before finding out who besides her wanted one.

I WAS SO OVERFULL with questions that it wasn’t until five in the morning that I woke up and remembered what had earlier seemed like some of the most pressing ones. Why hadn’t my mother told me she’d been fired from her job? And what did she do every day when she was supposed to be at work? I could have waited until a decent hour to ask my mother these questions, but who knew, once I woke up, what other questions might need to be asked and answered? Who knew what other mysteries might yet pop up and obscure the old ones?

I got out of bed and made my shuffling, groggy way down to my mother’s room, the room my parents’ used to share. There is something creepy and illicit about sneaking into your parents’ bedroom when you are young, and this is no less true when you’re an adult. The door was closed. I stood there for a moment, steeling myself to be stealthy, then carefully turned the knob and opened the door. Even in the dark, I could see that the room was as I remembered it. There was a wooden dresser to the right of the door, where my father kept, or used to keep, his clothes; kitty-corner to that was the mirrored walk-in closet where my mother kept her dresses and skirts. Kitty-corner to that was an end table with a phone and a digital clock and various framed pictures of her and me. And in between the table and me was the bed, my parents’ big queen-size bed, which was empty. No one was in it. I ran my hand over the bedspread and then sat on the bed itself to make sure. Not only was nobody in it, but nobody had been in it, either. The bed was made, the bedspread taut except for where I’d sat on it. There were two pillows at the head of the bed, and no heads had touched them, not that night, maybe not the night before or the night before that or …

So, despite my best efforts, here was another question, and first thing in the morning, too: Where the hell was my mother? There were so many questions that I began to wonder if I’d ever find any of the answers, if I even knew what an answer looked like anymore. And then I heard a thud downstairs. It was clearly the thud of the morning paper hitting the front door, and I realized that no matter what it looks like, an answer always sounds like a thud. That was my very thought, standing there in my boxer shorts. I walked downstairs, opened the door, brought in the newspaper, and began flipping through it in that half-zombie way you do in the too-early morning, looking for something that might wake you up.

I found it, right there in the local news section. In the early evening, someone had set fire to the Mark Twain House, in Hartford, Connecticut, forty-five minutes or so down the highway. The article said that the fire was “suspicious,” although I knew this to be the case without their having to tell me so.

If I were to write the bond analysts’ memoir, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, my first piece of advice would be this:

Practice. For God’s sake, practice.

Whoever had tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House hadn’t practiced, that was obvious, and that was also true of whoever tried to burn down the Mark Twain House. But before I went to the Twain House that morning, and before I go there in memory here, I first had to sneak into my father’s room, open his shoe box of letters, and find out who wanted the Mark Twain House torched in the first place. Unlike my mother, my father was home: I could hear him in his room, snoring adenoidally and loudly enough to shake the house’s shake shingles. I opened the door to his room — it caught and then creaked a little, as doors in old houses do, but not loudly enough to be heard over the snoring — and then crept in the direction of the end table. There was a streetlight right outside my father’s window, illuminating the room until it was slightly on the bright side of pitch black, and I could just make out my father’s blanketed shape on the bed. During waking hours, he looked small, diminished, but on that bed, in that filtered light and under the blankets, my father looked oddly huge and mysterious, much more of a man than he actually was. I remember thinking how sad that was, that my father — and maybe all of us — was more impressive asleep than awake.

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.