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

“Name a book that I should like,” Lees Ardor said. “Name a book that’s so great I should like it.”

I thought hard about all the books my mother had made me read, about certain books that everyone knew were great, and of course I came up with Huckleberry Finn. It was my mother’s favorite book: when, as a boy, I’d asked her why, she always said she saw herself in it, although I never knew whether she saw herself in Huck, or Jim, or Tom, or the Duke, or maybe one of the minor characters. Plus, I was here because Lees Ardor’s man, Mincher, wanted the Mark Twain House burned to the ground, and so I thought maybe I’d learn something important about her and the case if I said, “What about Huckleberry Finn?”

“Huckleberry Finn my ass,” Lees Ardor replied. She smiled at me ingratiatingly, as if we had reached a kind of understanding, even though I didn’t understand what “Huckleberry Finn my ass” meant, and I don’t think Lees Ardor did, either.

I didn’t get a chance to ask her to clarify, though. Lees Ardor went into a fury of book and legal pad gathering, then stood up, walked past her desk and me, and said over her shoulder, “We’re late for class.”

Of course, I hadn’t introduced myself yet and so she must have thought I was her student, a student whom she didn’t recognize and whose name she didn’t know, even though the semester must have been more than half over by then. In any case, I got up out of that uncomfortable chair and followed her down the hall. The hall was beautiful, the most beautiful institutional hall I’d ever seen, and nothing at all like the halls at Our Lady of the Lake. There were no drop ceilings or water stains in the plaster, and it was all dark wood and marble, with even a few ceiling-tile mosaics here and there. Looking at the ceilings at Heiden College made you want to learn, whereas looking at the ceilings at my alma mater made you not want to look at the ceilings.

The students in Lees Ardor’s class, though, probably looked much the same as the students at Our Lady of the Lake. The boys wore backward baseball caps, and the girls wore low-slung jeans and cropped shirts that left a strip of white, white skin between the shirt and the pants. Besides me, there were only two other aberrant-looking characters in that classroom: a Richard Nixon kook wearing a gray three-piece suit and red paisley tie, and a kook who looked like a female Chairman Mao, with that famous bowl haircut and matching workingman’s denim ensemble, plus many facial piercings, including a hoop through her septum by which she could, I supposed, be led around. Those two were sitting in the back row, and I sat between them. They didn’t acknowledge me when I asked the girl, and then the boy, “Hey, what class is this, anyway?” But still I felt an unspoken kinship with them, the way the untouchables in the back row always do.

Lees Ardor had positioned herself at the front of the classroom and was staring at the class, her hair flowing behind her as though it were her head’s own academic gown. She stared for at least three minutes. At first I thought she was taking a silent form of attendance. But there were only fourteen people in the class — I counted — and it wouldn’t have taken her that long to figure out who was there and who wasn’t. Besides, she wasn’t really looking at us but rather at some spot on the wall at the back of the room, as if trying to bore a hole through it. Finally, still looking at the wall, she said, “Willa Cather is a cunt.”

“Whoa,” I said, apparently out loud, since several of the real students turned and looked at me before assuming their previous face-forward positions. They seemed unimpressed, bored even, by Lees Ardor’s pronouncement, but it threw me, that most forbidden of forbidden words, even though I’d read Wesley Mincher’s letter and should have been expecting it or something like it. I turned to the Chairman Mao kook and whispered, “Did she really say”—and here I paused, not daring to say that word myself, the most off-limits of all the off-limits terms for the female pudendum—“that word?”

“Yes,” she said. There was a strong, wet sibilance to the word, which made me suspect that she had a tongue ring, in addition to her many other piercings. She would have been in high demand as a model for Face and Metal, assuming there was such a magazine.

“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.”