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

“He’s really good to the kids, Sam,” Anne Marie says.

“I’m glad.”

“He’s good to me, too.”

“OK,” I tell her.

“I’m sorry,” she always says, and I always ask her what I asked my mother that first night I moved back home, seven years ago now: “What happens to love?” I asked her, my mother, and now I ask Anne Marie.

“I don’t know,” Anne Marie says, just telling the truth, that being just one of the many enduring qualities that makes me love her, still, still.

“I still love you,” I tell her.

“Well, me, too,” she says, by which she means, I think, that love endures, but that it isn’t everything, and it isn’t ever what we want it to be, which was probably what those books my mother made me read and then got rid of were trying to tell me, and us, which was just one of the reasons she got rid of them.

Speaking of my mother, she doesn’t visit me much. The prison is two hours northeast of Springfield and hard to get to if you don’t have a car, which my mother doesn’t anymore. She doesn’t have a license, either. My mother lost both in a drunk-driving accident, two weeks after I came here. She’s moved out of her place in Belchertown and into my old apartment, the one above the Student Prince, so she can walk to work and not drive and still drink.

So my mother doesn’t visit me much, but she does take the bus up at least once a year, for my birthday. I turned forty-five just last week, and she brought me a present: a worn, creased, used-up copy of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.

“Happy birthday,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “How did this thing get so beat up?”

“I have no idea,” she said, but she did have an idea, and so do I. My mother is reading again, the way you always return to something you’ve quit, like drinking, which my mother hasn’t done. Quit, that is. I know that, too: I can always smell the Knickerbocker on her breath, her clothes, coming out of her pores. But I don’t tell her what I know, and I don’t tell her that I’ve already read and reread the book since I’ve been in prison. It’s about a utopian community, about how a group of people in Massachusetts tried to become one big, happy family and failed completely.

“Thanks a lot,” I told her. The guard came over and made sure I hadn’t been given contraband, saw that it was only a book, and then left us alone. Once he was gone, I asked my mother, “Do I look forty-five?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “Do I look sixty-six?”

I didn’t answer. To be true, she looks older than sixty-six. She’s still thin but looks stooped and wizened now, not fit at all. Her hair is mostly gray, and her face looks grayer, too, and lined with deep wrinkles, the sort no cream can make vanish. She looks like an old woman who was once beautiful. Maybe it’s all the drinking that’s aged her so. Or maybe it’s my father: not necessarily that she killed him, but that she hoped once she’d killed him, things would change and she would stop loving him so much, stop hating him so much, stop missing him, stop feeling so lonely, and she hasn’t. But my mother never talks about my father, and I don’t ask her about him, either. And for that matter, my mother has never asked me about Deirdre. She knows that Deirdre killed herself. But she’s never asked me for details, never asked me why I was with Deirdre that night in the first place. She’s never asked how I feel about Deirdre’s being dead, about my not saving her. You never ask your son how he feels about the suicide of his father’s lover, just as you never ask your mother how she feels about killing your father, just as you never answer your mother when she asks whether she looks her age.

“You never answer your mother when she asks whether she looks her age,” I told her.

“I suppose that’s going in the arsonist’s guide, too,” she said.

Because my mother knows about the arsonist’s guide, and the other book, too. I’ve told her all about them, let her read the rough drafts of some of my chapters, too, and already she’s started giving me advice: about what in the books seems softhearted and softheaded; about whether I’m as big a bumbler as I say I am, or whether I’m an even bigger one. But mostly she doesn’t seem to know what to say about the books. Maybe that’s why she’s started reading books in general again, so that she’ll know what to say about mine.

“I have to go,” she said, getting up from her chair. “My bus leaves in a half hour.”

“OK.”

“Are you behaving yourself?”

“I am.”

“Please behave yourself, Sam,” she said. “I want you to come home to me.” Then my mother stood up, kissed me on the cheek, and left me sitting in the visiting room until, maybe, my next birthday.

Because this is what my mother seems to want, more than anything: she wants me to come home to her. My mother knows that if I behave myself I’ll be out in a little more than thirteen years. And when I do, she wants me to move in with her, into her new and my old apartment. There is a job waiting for me at the Student Prince — she’s already cleared it with Mr. Goerman and Mr. Goerman’s son, who was the bald, mustachioed bartender, apparently. I have a job washing dishes and busing tables, if I want it. My mother tells me that I could drink for free, which I admit, after twenty years of not drinking, would be a plus. I’ve made my mother no promises, but who knows? I’ll be finished writing my books by the time I get out of prison, and maybe then I will be done telling that story for all time. And after you’re done telling your story for all time, then who knows what happens next? Maybe I’ll do what my mother wants: maybe I’ll move in with her and take that job at the Student Prince. Maybe then we’ll be happy. Maybe we’ll live our lives quietly, and maybe we won’t ever need to talk about the past, about the loves we’ve lost or the people we’ve killed or the fires we’ve set. Maybe we’ll be like normal people, people who, after a long day’s work, want to do nothing else but have a drink and read a book. And maybe, then, I’ll be able to tell that story.

Thanks to the following people, places, and things:

The very helpful and superbly titled A Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Miriam Levine.

The great Student Prince Restaurant on Fort Street in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The Giustinas of Springfield and the Clarkes of Mashapaug, wherever you happen to be and under whatever aliases you happen to be traveling.

The Taft Fund, the Ohio Arts Council, and the University of Cincinnati for their financial support.

The editors of and at New England Review, Vermont Literary Review, failbetter, and Sarabande Books, who first published sections of this novel, often in dramatically different form.

Rupert Chisholm, former bond analyst.

Chuck Adams, Brunson Hoole, Michael Taeckens, Craig Popelars, and the rest of the good people at Algonquin, and my agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman.

And finally, to all my usual aiders and abetters: you know who you are.