An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (9 page)

When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing — or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don’t and can’t get anyway. In any case, I knew that greatness was the thing my father had left us to find.

And then he came back. Maybe
What else? What else?
had been the question before my father left us, and maybe he thought by leaving us he’d answer the question or at least stop hearing it, and maybe he never stopped hearing it; maybe none of us ever do. I can’t say for sure: neither of my parents mentioned why he came home, and I never asked, and together, through our silence, we conspired to make it one of those family secrets that had to remain secret if we were to remain a family. My mother had told me, after my father came back, that my father was “sensitive” about what he’d done while he was gone and that I should never mention the postcards to him. She never told me why my father should be so “sensitive” about the postcards, and again, I never asked. I put the postcards in an envelope and stowed them way toward the back of my highest closet shelf and never mentioned them again. But no matter what his reasons, my father came home and got his job back at the university press, and we forgave him, or at least I did. Because he was my father, and I’d missed him.

“I’ve missed you,” I said.

“Mother,” he said.

“What about her?”

“Yes, Bradley,” said a voice from behind me. “What about me?”

It was my mother, of course, I knew this without turning around, and so I didn’t, at first. I sat there with my back to her, imagining all the things I’d say to my mother, all the well-deserved grief I’d give her about my poor, crippled dad and the filthy house she’d left him in and the stories she’d told me when I was a boy and what a ruin they’d made of me and my life and so on. When I turned around to face her, I would be eloquent and fierce, I knew that much. Maybe it was remembering the arson letters and their possible proximity that made me feel this bold — the letters and my father’s talk of my could-be greatness. Maybe it was because I’d seen this mother-son moment so often in the books my mother had made me read, and so I knew how it was supposed to go. Whatever the reason, I felt powerful and righteous, like an avenging angel or something. And what do you do when you become an avenging angel? You turn around and tell your mother about it.

So I turned around to tell my mother about it. There she was, standing in the doorway. I couldn’t get a good look at her — maybe because it was late and my contacts were dry and cloudy, and because the hall light behind my mother made her seem hazy and mysterious and bathed in white, like the Lady of the Lake, whom my mother had also made me read about those many years before. I couldn’t see her clearly, is the point, and so I couldn’t see the expression on my mother’s face when she said, “Your wife kicked you out of the house, didn’t she?”

One of the things that mothers are good for, of course, is cutting to the heart of the matter, and in cutting to the heart of the matter, my mother had also sliced off some of my good feeling. Whether I was an avenging angel or not, my wife still thought I was a cheater and a liar and still hated me, I still couldn’t see my kids, and I still couldn’t go home to Camelot. Anne Marie had kicked me out, maybe for good. That was the truth, and my mother saw it, and suddenly I was tired, so tired.

“I’m so tired, Mom,” I said.

“OK,” she said. My mother turned and walked out of the doorway and into the hall, and I followed her, wordlessly, through the blackened rooms, up the stairs, to my old bedroom. Because this is another thing mothers are good for: they know how to get at the truth, and then, when that truth makes you too tired to hear any more of it, they know when to guide you through the darkness and put you to bed. My mother opened the door to my bedroom, turned to me, put her hand on my cheek, and said, “Get some sleep, Sam.” I was so grateful for that, so very grateful, and to express my gratitude I did exactly what my mother told me to do. I slept.

Now that I’ve returned home, to the very bedroom where my mother told me all those stories about the Emily Dickinson House — the stories that, as you know, caused me to inadvertently burn the house to the ground — perhaps it’s time to clear up some misunderstood or misreported facts about that famous fire.

I did not, as the prosecutor argued at my trial, “case the joint” earlier on the day of the fire. I merely took the Emily Dickinson House tour, the official two-dollar tour, along with a group of students and their teacher from some school called Dickinson College (“No relation,” the teacher joked, and oh, everyone laughed and laughed). The teacher tossed a pen from one hand to the other as she walked. The students all wore ski jackets. If I was guilty of “casing the joint,” then so were they.

I was not, as the
Hampden County Eagle
suggested, a southerner who hated Yankees. True, before the tour began, I did sign the guest book “Sidney,” from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but only as a joke and to sound mysterious. As Mrs. Coleman might have been able to tell you if I hadn’t killed her in the fire, I regretted the joke immediately because she read what I had signed and said, “Nice to meet you, Sidney,” and I didn’t speak for the entire tour for fear of not sounding southern.

It was certainly not the case that, as one of the Dickinson College students testified in court, I was agitated and not a little maniacal during the tour. I was a kid, a normal kid, normal as kids get and as normal as I am now. It’s probably so, however, that I was a little
restless
. I was restless because, after my mother’s stories, I expected there to be something exceptional and sinister and mysterious about the house. There wasn’t. We were shown a glass case displaying one of Dickinson’s letters; we were shown her bedspread, which was red with white daisies; we were shown her furniture, which, Mrs. Coleman explained, was not actually her furniture but rather a faithful reproduction of what her furniture would have looked like. Oh, it was dull! Nothing like my mother’s stories. So I was probably restless — I remember yawning overloudly in boredom once and everyone looking at me — and that’s probably why I broke into the house later on that night: to see what I could see when the tour guide and the students and their teacher weren’t around.

It was not true, again as the prosecutor argued, that I killed the Colemans “in cold blood.” I didn’t even know they were in the house. I’ve said this many times, although it seems to satisfy no one nor make them happy, which is the truth all over, which makes you wonder why everyone wants to hear it so badly.

It was not true, as rumor had it around my high school (I went back to the high school while I was out on bail, which was where I heard the rumor), that the whole thing had been some sort of sex club gone horribly wrong. It is correct that I’d
thought
of inviting this girl China, whom I knew well enough and wanted badly, in the way boys are supposed to want girls with exotic names and their own cars, which China also had. And it’s true that, as far as China was concerned, I had sex on the mind, prominently, in the very front of the lobe. But I didn’t invite her to break into the Emily Dickinson House with me that night. I knew better. I did! Do you think I wanted to have sex with someone in that house after the stories my mother had told me? Especially the story about the time two kids from the high school (again a boy and a girl — “mere babes,” my mother called them) bought a six-pack of Knickerbocker beer and decided to break into the Emily Dickinson House.

These were the same young children grown up, still nice but not quite as nice as they might have been. My mother stressed that these kids thought too much about what they were doing and what they’d like to do. Their fall lay in the calculation, and I took the lesson to be “Don’t calculate,” and to this very day I try not to. They walked and made out at the same time, a difficult trick, to be sure. The boy carried the six-pack in a plastic bag with handles; he had condoms in his wallet and a mini-crowbar in his jacket pocket. He was secure in his physical ability and in his equipment and calculated that if he couldn’t blow the door down, he’d pry the lock. The door usually gave way easily, though; it was an old door, slightly rotten, and swung open right when you kicked it the first time, as I know very well to be true.

My mother told me this story when I was fourteen, after my father came back, and after my father came back my mother’s stories both hardened and became easier, less tense but more gruesome, as was the case with the story about the kids with the six-pack and the condoms. Oh, it was a mess. They walked into the house and started going at it, and soon enough, bits of bone, flesh, tendon, began flecking the walls, crawling under dressers, hopping into the mail slot and sticking there: a cruel change-of-address notification. Imitation gold rings, baseball caps, hair bands, condoms, and full beers were found conspicuously in view, leftovers, the breathing out after a long swallow. A reminder of the evil of illicit sex and its punishment. It was a scene, all right, a regular bloodbath those kids got themselves into, and it seemed obvious to me that if I were ever to have sex, it would never, ever be in the Emily Dickinson House.

So no sex, and no sex club. Of course, I can’t say how far Mr. Coleman got with Mrs. Coleman that night. After the fire was through with them, they were just so much bone and connective tissue. That much I know.

And it was not true that I was, as my first-grade teacher testified, a “little firebug.” Not true! As proof, she told, in court, about the time on the playground when I was six, when she found me burning an anthill with a magnifying glass, or trying to (there were clouds that day, too many of them). Let me tell you, I was not the only kid in Miss Frye’s class that tried to torch an anthill and learn a little something about solar power in the bargain. And let me tell you, what happened in first grade had no bearing whatsoever on what happened in and to the Emily Dickinson House. I had forgotten all about the anthill, in fact, and wasn’t thinking of fire at all that night when I broke into the Emily Dickinson House. I was thinking of my mother’s stories — like the one in which Emily Dickinson’s corpse was hidden in one of the house’s many secret compartments and came to life (or at least became ambulatory) only when there was a full moon. There was a full moon that night, and out of nervousness I was smoking a cigarette — which was a new habit, a short-lived one, too — when I heard a noise. Who knows what it was? It could have been the house creaking or a tree moving in the wind. It could have been the Colemans, enjoying their last private moment on earth together. Or it could have been Emily Dickinson, as glassy eyed as your best movie zombie, breaking out of her secret compartment and heading full steam in my warm-blooded direction. Whatever, I dropped my cigarette at the noise and hightailed it out of the house and so didn’t notice that my dropped cigarette had lit a heavy living room drape on fire, which set the living room rug on fire, and so on. So. Accidental fire starter? Yes. Firebug? No.

But you know what
is
true? My mother’s stories were good, or must have been. The judge pointed this out at my trial, the sentencing part, when my defense attorney was again explaining why I was in the Emily Dickinson House in the first place, and I was explaining again about my mother’s stories. The judge interrupted and said, “Those must have been some good stories.”

“I guess they were,” I said.

“But then again,” the judge said — and he was really editorializing here, but I guess his robes and his elevated seat and his handsome wooden gavel gave him the right — “if a good story leads you to do bad things, can it be a good story after all?”

“Come again?” I said. “I’m not following.”

“I’m afraid I’m not, either, Your Honor,” my lawyer said.

“I agree,” said the prosecutor, who was exactly the same as my lawyer except that he wore a cheaper suit and was touchier because of it.

“Bear with me,” the judge said. “It’s an interesting question, is it not? Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story? Can a story be said to produce an effect at all? Should we expect it to? Can we blame the story for anything? Can a story actually
do
anything at all?” Here he looked at me learnedly, over his glasses, and you knew right then that he’d always longed to be a college English professor instead of a judge and that he subscribed to all the right literary periodicals and magazines. “For instance, Mr. Pulsifer, can a story actually be blamed for arson and murder?”

“Huh,” I said, then acted as if I were thinking about the question, which I should have been; instead I turned and looked at my mother, who was sitting behind me in the courtroom. There might as well have been a neon sign on her forehead that flashed the words
DEFIANCE, OUTRAGE, REGRET,
much like our driveway would flash the words
MURDERER
and
FASCIST
in the years to come.