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

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.