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

But it was too late: Deirdre already had. She’d opened the door and stood there in front of me, a towel wrapped around her important parts, a blond woman vaguely my father’s age, and for that matter my mother’s age, too, and for that matter wrapped in a towel my mother had probably bought, long ago, back in the age when my mother bought nice things for the house and actually lived in it, too.

“Hello, Sam,” Deirdre said, then extended her right hand, holding the towel in place the way women do, through some complicated arrangement between inner arm and armpit and rib cage and breast. And not knowing what else to do, I took it. The hand, that is.

“HOW LONG?” I ASKED my father. We were sitting in the dining room, at the table, drinking beer. Deirdre had disappeared into my father’s room. I could hear a hair dryer in there, the steady hum and blast of its hot white noise.

“How long what?” my father repeated. His face was a mask of nonchalance, although I could feel his legs bouncing jackhammer-like underneath the table.

“How long have you been with Deirdre?”

“Off and on,” he said, “maybe thirty years.”

“Thirty years,” I repeated, doing the math. It wasn’t difficult to do. Thirty years. I was thirty-eight years old. That meant my father had been with this Deirdre since I was eight, which was, not coincidentally, the year my father left us for …

“Dad,” I said, “when you left us, where did you go?”

“I went to Deirdre’s.” I looked at him for a while, and my face must have continued to ask him, not what or why or when, but where, because he then said, “Northampton,” which is a town not far from Amherst. Maybe twenty minutes away. My father had lived twenty minutes away for three years.

“For three years?”

“Yes,” he said. “Where did you think I went?”

Instead of answering him, I handed him the postcards. What a relief it was to do that: what a pleasure it is to use someone else’s solid, reliable written words instead of your own less-than-reliable ones.

“I didn’t write these,” he said when he was through looking at the postcards. He put them back in the manila envelope and slid them halfway across the table, so that they rested between him and me like a fence between neighbors. My father still wore the mask of nonchalance, but now I thought I could see its little seams and stitches and all the things that were supposed to hold it together.

“No kidding,” I told him.

“That’s your mother’s handwriting,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“Why did she do that?” he asked, presumably rhetorically, except then he looked at me for the answer, which unfortunately I was able to give him.

“Because she didn’t want me to hate you,” I said. “Because she wanted me to think you were out finding yourself instead of living in Northampton with Deirdre.”

“She’s a good woman,” my father said.

“I know she is.”

“How do you know that?” my father asked.

“Because she’s my mother,” I told him, knowing now that the “good woman” to whom he was referring was Deirdre and not my mother at all. I took a long slug of my beer, then took a silent inventory of all the things I wanted to say.

“Oh,” my father said, and then the nonchalance cracked and fell off completely, and shame and regret took its place. His head dipped and seemed to be pulled toward the table, as if the table were one of the poles and my father’s head something newly magnetized. “Your mother is a good woman, too,” he said.

“You know”—my teeth were gritted, but the words made their way through and around them anyway, as the words you shouldn’t say always do—“it worked for a long, long time.”

“What worked?”

“Mom sent me the postcards because she didn’t want me to hate you. And it worked: I didn’t hate you. I never hated you until right now.”

My words had their intended effect: my father’s eyes got watery and then the rest of him seemed to get watery, too, his whole body sagging and turning to liquid except for his right hand, which kept its firm hold on the beer can. Then there was me, his son, across the table from him: the minute I said this mean, hateful thing, I, too, turned to liquid except for my right hand, with its firm hold on the beer can. Imagine if my mother had walked into the house right then and seen her two Pulsifer men, only thirty years separating their mirror images. Imagine what she would have thought if she’d seen us right then, just as the night before she’d seen me dancing with and kissing and groping the woman who was not my wife, and suddenly I understood exactly why my mother had thought she’d known me — I’d cheated on my wife just as my father had cheated on his — and I also understood that we hate our fathers only as practice for hating ourselves. If my mother had been there in the kitchen, I would have apologized to her, and then I might have apologized to my father, too, for being like him.

“Dad,” I said, “did you tell Mom I was going to New Hampshire?”

“I did,” he said. He was looking down at the table, refusing to meet my eyes. His voice was like a child’s, watery and high. “I told her yesterday morning when she came by the house. She asked where you were and I told her. And then she went after you.”

“Why?”

“Because she was worried about you. Because she didn’t want you to do anything stupid.”

“Too late,” I said.

“It usually is,” my father admitted.

“Did you tell anyone else?” I asked.

“I did,” he said. He raised his head slowly, looking stricken but also hopeful, as though by giving me one thing I wanted, he might be able to give me more than just that.

“Let me guess,” I said. “He was tall, thin, blond.”

My father nodded. “He’s one of my regulars. For maybe fifteen years now, week in, week out, except for this last week. He came by yesterday, right after your mother left. She almost hit him pulling out of the driveway. He asked me where she was going in such a big hurry …”

“And you told him.”

“I did,” he said. “That’s the guy you were asking me about?”

“Thomas Coleman,” I said. “You didn’t know his name?”

“He probably told me once, but I forgot it,” my father said, shaking his head. “I never thought it was important.”

I could picture Thomas telling my father, I’m Thomas Coleman, and then waiting for my father to recognize the name and say, I’m so sorry for what my son did. I’m so sorry about your parents, so sorry for everything. Finally, though, Thomas realized that he wasn’t going to get satisfaction from my father, so he tried to get it from me. I wondered if things would have been different if my father had recognized Thomas’s name and apologized, if one apology really could have made all that much difference.

“How about the bond analysts?” I asked. “Do you know them, too?”

“The who?” my father asked, and I described all five of them. When I was done, my father nodded, and said, “That sounds like the writer and his assistants.”

“The writer and his assistants,” I repeated.

“Five guys came around a couple of days ago, but only one of them talked. He said he was writing a book about you; he asked if I could tell him anything about you that he might not already know.”

“So you showed them the letters,” I said, already knowing he had. “I can’t believe you showed them the letters.”

“He said he was going to portray you sympathetically,” my father told me. “He said he was on your side.”

“Didn’t you think it was suspicious that there were five of them and not just one?” I asked.