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

“I’m not smiling,” I said, although I was. Clearly Detective Wilson hadn’t followed me to New Hampshire, which had been my big fear; clearly he hadn’t seen me at the Robert Frost Place, at the bar, at the fire. And since he didn’t have the letter, he clearly didn’t know it was Peter who’d written to me, Peter being one of the other people who’d say with certainty that I’d burned down the Robert Frost Place. That was what I was smiling at, even though I said to Detective Wilson, “I’m not smiling.”

“Ever since you came back to your parents’ house,” Detective Wilson said, “there’s been trouble.”

“That’s true.”

“You should never have come back,” he said. Detective Wilson said other things after that, but once again I wasn’t listening to them. I was thinking about what he’d just said— You should never have come back —and how Deirdre had said the very same thing earlier that day. As every detective knows, the rhetoric of crime and the rhetoric of crime solving are the very same, and if Detective Wilson were trying to solve the crimes, did that mean that Deirdre had committed one of them? Had she been the one who’d burned the Edward Bellamy House, or tried to, or the Mark Twain House, or tried to, or both? Was she the other woman my father told me I should be looking for? Was she the other woman, twice over? Suddenly I had a hunch— hunch, I discovered, being exactly the wrong word, because once I’d had the hunch, I suddenly found myself sitting ramrod straight, with perfect military bearing, not hunched at all.

“What?” Detective Wilson said. “Why are you sitting like that?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Is there anything else you need to say to me?”

“It would be better if you’d just confess right now, Sam,” he said, consumed by a sigh that came from somewhere deep within him and drifted out his nostrils. “It just would be much, much better.”

“For whom?” I asked.

“For everyone,” he said, raising his voice now, raising your voice being the thing you do when you don’t know what else to do with it. “Just tell the truth.”

“It will make you feel better, dude,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. I was remembering, of course, the bond analysts and their theories about the memoirs they’d never written and how the one they had written hadn’t made them feel better and wasn’t their truth at all, or my father’s, either, and how maybe the search for the truth was as pointless as looking for it to make you feel better. “I have to shower,” I told him. “Are we about done?”

“So you’re not going to confess,” Detective Wilson said. “So you’re going to make this difficult. What the fuck are you smiling at?” But then he got up and stormed out of the house before I could tell him that I was smiling about my mother. When I was a boy, she would make me read all those books and then ask me questions, these tough questions about what the book might or might not mean, and I’d always say, “You’re making this difficult,” and she’d always tell me what I would have told Detective Wilson if he’d still been in the house: “It already is difficult.”

There was still the matter of the manila envelope. I turned it over and opened it. It was heavy and bulging, and I was pretty sure I’d find Wesley Mincher’s three thousand dollars inside. I did — three rubber-banded groups of one-hundred-dollar bills. But there was also something else in the envelope: a handwritten note saying, “Meet me at the Emily Dickinson House at midnight.” The handwriting wasn’t familiar. It wasn’t my father’s from the grocery list, wasn’t my mother’s from the postcards, either. I looked at my watch: it was half past five o’clock. Plenty of time for me to shower, change, drive down to the Student Prince, and then meet someone — and I had that hunch as to who it was — at midnight at the Emily Dickinson House, or at least where it used to be. I put the money and the note back in the envelope, finished my beer, went upstairs, and made myself a more presentable Sam Pulsifer. Then I went downstairs, grabbed another beer out of the fridge, walked out the front door, climbed into my van, and headed toward the Student Prince and my mother, not realizing I would see my parents’ house only one more time, which would be the last time anyone ever saw it.

One of the things it means to get older is that you start, in the overlong telling of your life’s story, to introduce each scene like so: “Here I was, in____again, for the first time in____years.” Which is just another reason you stay at home, or at least another reason the people listening to your story wished you had stayed at home.

But I hadn’t, and here I was, in Springfield again for the first time in five years. It was much grimmer than I remembered. Main Street was absolutely deserted; the check-cashing places that had replaced the Italian restaurants and candy stores were boarded up. Maybe there were no checks left to cash in the city. Half the bulbs on the Paramount Theatre were burned out, which didn’t matter because the marquee was blank and there was nothing playing there anyway. The gray concrete civic center — where I had seen this minor league hockey game and taken Anne Marie and the kids to see that Greatest Show on Earth — was closed for renovation, ringed by a ten-foot-high plywood fence, on which signs begged you to EXCUSE OUR MESS!! The grand old buildings lining Court Square — the courthouse, Symphony Hall, the Unitarian church — were still grand and illuminated by blindingly powerful spotlights, maybe to discourage looters. The barbershop next to the courthouse had clearly been closed for some time — its pole was stock still, its reds and blues faded — even though there was a sign in its window insisting it had been open since 1892. Kitty-corner to the barbershop, on the east side of Court Square, was an old storefront filled with dozens of discarded radiators, arranged in neat rows as though on display, as though to teach passersby something about the limitations of steam heat. I’ve never seen such a desolate place; there hadn’t even been any snow to help cover it up. Clearly, even the snow had decided the place was beyond help.

The entrance to the Student Prince was in an alley, just off Court Square. The door was solid wood, so you couldn’t see if there was light or darkness on the other side of it. There was no noise coming from inside, no music or human voices or clanging of dishes and glasses. I looked up, and there was Anne Marie’s and my old apartment, where we’d rearranged our furniture and bred our children. The windows were dark, as were the windows in every other apartment in the building. The wind was up, and so cold, but it, too, was completely and eerily quiet, as though Springfield didn’t deserve the wind’s whoosh and roar. It was one of those moments when the whole world felt empty, as if you were the only one in it and you wished you weren’t, wished you were in whatever world or antiworld all the people had fled to. It occurred to me that Anne Marie had lied to me about my mother’s working there. Why she would lie to me about that, I had no idea, except that maybe I would open the door and see the Student Prince was empty, and that would be a metaphor for the rest of my life.

But the Student Prince wasn’t empty. It was fire-code-violation full. Even though the Student Prince had three cavernous rooms with high shelves loaded down with German beer steins and coats of arms and Bavarian gewgaws from days gone by — even so, the place was full. Every table was taken and there was a line of people waiting to sit at them. It seemed as though every Springfieldian, past and present, was in the place, drinking a dark beer and waiting for their schnitzel. The roar of happy human voices was incredible and sounded like the wind personified, and for the first time, I knew what my mother had meant when she talked about it in the books she’d made me read.