An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (3 page)

“That’s silly,” she said when I told her this after we were married. “I wasn’t too beautiful for you to speak to. I never thought so, not ever.”

“If you didn’t think you were too good looking,” I asked her, “then why didn’t
you
come up and talk to
me
in the first place?”

“That’s a good question,” she said, and I never did get the answer.

But back to our senior seminar, where we were to choose our paths, and Anne Marie’s path was lids — those plastic travel lids you put on your coffee and soda cups. This was in the spring of our senior year, and Anne Marie had the misfortune of giving her presentation right after James Nagali, the only other male student at Our Lady of the Lake, who gave a masterly speech on new soap-dispensing technologies. James was from Ivory Coast, and immediately after graduation he went to work for Ivory soap, but I don’t think there’s any connection.

Our teacher for the seminar was Professor Eisner, a mostly bald man who looked like a walking advertisement for forehead and who, it was rumored, had screwed up a supposedly revolutionary sanitary napkin packaging design that had cost Procter and Gamble a million dollars or two — which was why, the rumor went, he had ended up teaching us. Professor Eisner gushed over James’s presentation, but not over Anne Marie’s. He pointed out certain structural flaws in her lid designs; he asked her rhetorically if she knew what it felt like to have hot coffee pour not into your mouth but onto your chin and down your neck; he asked Anne Marie if she had learned nothing in her four years as an Our Lady of the Lake packaging-science major; he asked her if she had any contingency plans for when the offers from all the prestigious firms didn’t come rolling in. “Because roll in they certainly will not,” he said.

It’s true that Anne Marie wasn’t exactly a born packaging scientist, and it’s also true that her lids, had they ever been manufactured (they weren’t), would have burned a few faces and spawned a few lawsuits. But still, I didn’t like the way Eisner was talking to her. I looked over at Anne Marie, and while she didn’t look a bit upset, not anywhere near tears — she was a tough one, and still is — Anne Marie
was
playing with her gold crucifix necklace in an agitated manner, and I felt I had to say something in her defense.

“Hey, Professor Eisner,” I said. “Ease up a little. Be nice.” It’s true I didn’t exactly scream this at the top of my lungs, and it’s also possible that Professor Eisner might not have heard me at all, because he moved right on to the next presentation, but the important thing was that Anne Marie heard.

“Thank you,” Anne Marie said to me after class.

“For what?” I asked, although I knew, because, of course, I’d said what I’d said so she’d thank me, because there’s not a pure motive in me or in anyone else, I don’t think.

“For standing up for me.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Would you like to have dinner?”

“With you?” she asked.

This was just the way she talked — bluntly and always in pursuit of the simple truth — and it didn’t suggest anything negative about her true feelings for me. As proof, we did have dinner, at this German place in Springfield called the Student Prince. She was the rare thin Italian girl who liked German food; you couldn’t talk her out of the Munich sausage platter, and this was just one of the reasons I fell in love with her. And then a month later we slept together, in my apartment, which happened to be directly above the Student Prince. There must be something of my modest parents in me, because I won’t say anything about the sex except that I enjoyed it. But I will say that I missed my virginity, maybe because I’d had it for so long, and right afterward — my face so hot and red it felt like something nuclear — I said to Anne Marie, “I was a virgin.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, “I wasn’t.” She put her hand on my blazing cheek, and you could see the sweet sadness in her eyes, the pity for the thirty-year-old virgin I’d just been. I’d never seen a person’s heart so over-large and weak with real emotion, and so I asked, “Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” Anne Marie said. There may have been pity behind her saying yes, but there was love, too: in my experience, you can’t expect love to be unaffected by pity, nor would you want it to be.

Moving quickly now: We graduated. A few months later we were married, with the wedding at St. Mary’s, the reception at the Red Rose in the South End. Anne Marie’s family paid for it and was in attendance (more on them eventually), but my parents were not, mostly because I didn’t tell them about it. When Anne Marie asked, “Why aren’t you inviting your parents to our wedding?” I told her, “Because they died.”

“How?” she wanted to know. “When?”

“Their house burned down,” I said, “and they died in the fire,” which just goes to show that every human being has a limited number of ideas, and which, as you’ll see, ended up being pretty close to the truth. Anyway, my answer seemed to satisfy Anne Marie. But the truth was more complicated. The truth was, I could hear that voice in my head asking
What else? What else?
and I couldn’t be sure if it was my voice or my parents’.

Anne Marie and I took our honeymoon in Quebec City, and since it was December and cold, we skated, which reminded me of my parents’ applauding my skating on the golf course pond, so many years ago, and of how nice that was. It should also have reminded me of how badly my parents and I ended up, but I was me, and Anne Marie was Anne Marie, and we weren’t my parents, and this wasn’t any pond but the mighty Saint-Laurent (St. Lawrence) River, which was frozen over for the first time in who knows how long and everyone was speaking French and things were different enough to make me think that history does not necessarily repeat itself and that a man’s character and not his gene pool is his fate. We talked it over that night in our room at the Château Frontenac and Anne Marie was game, and so we decided to make a baby.

We made one; it was a girl. We named her Katherine, after no one in particular. By the time she was born, I was already turning heads at Pioneer Packaging, helping to make antifreeze containers that were more translucent than previously thought possible. Katherine was a good baby: she cried, but only to let you know she hadn’t stopped breathing, and it never bothered us much, and it didn’t bother the people downstairs at the Student Prince, either. They would often bring up plates of cold schnitzel for her to gum when she was teething. During our first Christmas we strung blinking lights around our windows, and on Christmas Eve, Mr. and Mrs. Goerman, who’d owned the Student Prince for fifty years, brought up platters of creamed whitefish and several bottles of Rhine whine and we toasted the birthday of the baby Jesus, and all in all, this might have been our happiest time.

Then, two years later, we had another child, a boy named Christian, after Anne Marie’s father, and suddenly the apartment we loved got too small, and suddenly the smells from down in the restaurant became too strong and we started eating potato pancakes in our dreams. One day Anne Marie came up to me looking like a less happy, more tired version of the woman I’d married just three years earlier and Christian was shrieking in the background like a winged dinosaur fighting extinction, and she said, “We need a bigger place.”

She was right: we did. But where? We liked Springfield just fine, but the Puerto Ricans had moved in and Anne Marie’s parents and the other Italians had moved out, to West Springfield and Ludlow and so on, and while we didn’t want to live where they lived, we didn’t want to live in Springfield, either — not because of the Puerto Ricans who would be our neighbors, but because of what the Mirabellis would say about them when they came to visit. This was one of the things the College of Me preached — avoid heartache, even at the expense of principle — and it was one of the few things it got right.

So Springfield was out, but we had to go somewhere. One day Anne Marie said, “I hear Amherst is nice. What about Amherst?”

It should be said here that I hadn’t told Anne Marie about my past, and right then I wanted to, badly: I wanted to tell Anne Marie everything — about the Emily Dickinson House and how I’d burned it, accidentally, and the people I’d killed — and by the way, it wasn’t the first time I’d wanted to tell her such a thing. I should have told her right away, I know this now and I knew it then, but new love is so fragile and I thought I would wait until it got stronger. But then time and more time went by, and now my original crime was compounded by the crime of not telling her about it for so many years and things were too complicated and I couldn’t tell her the truth.

So I said yes. Amherst. Why not? We put the kids in the minivan and headed up to Amherst. On the drive up I convinced myself of things, crazy things. I told myself that we’d get to the town and find an old, lovely New England house in old, lovely New England Amherst, move in, then present my house, my wife, my kids, my job, myself, to my parents, who would have by this point begun to miss me.
I’ve changed
, I would say. And they would say,
Us, too. Welcome home
. Because the heart wants what the heart wants, and the heart was telling me,
Don’t be ridiculous, they’ve forgiven you, all of them
. Saying,
It’s time, it’s time, it’s time
.

It wasn’t time. This was on a Friday. Amherst was exactly as I’d remembered it: the leafy, prosperous streets, which were filled with so many Volvo station wagons it was like mushrooms in a cave; the two-hundred-year-old houses with their genteelly overgrown lawns, their tiger lilies and blue mums and birch trees and historical markers; the white college boys with dreadlocks playing their complicated Frisbee games on the sweeping town green; the white clapboard Congregational churches and the granite Episcopal churches and the soaring spires of the college everywhere visible over the high tree line; the well-scrubbed college girls barely dressed in workout clothes; and the boat-shoed and loafered professors drinking their coffee on the sort of wrought iron outdoor patio furniture that looks too delicate to sit on even if you were as wafer thin as most of the college girls were. All of this was familiar to me, but it didn’t make me feel happy, didn’t make me feel at home. I felt like a cousin once removed, which meant, I guess, that you weren’t really a cousin at all: you were estranged from blood relation in some permanent way, and my remove from Amherst was that I had burned down the most significant of its significant, beautiful, aged houses, had killed two of its loafered citizens. A cousin once removed was not a cousin; a criminal citizen was not a citizen.

This was a big disappointment, the biggest, because I’d taken up packaging science, and I’d forgotten my literature, forgotten that you can’t go home again, and so I thought that Amherst — the town where I’d grown up, the town where both my parents had grown up, the town where both their families had lived for two hundred years — would still be my hometown. How could it not? Was I not the town’s own humbled prodigal son? Did not every town need someone like me, someone — as the song says — who was lost but now was found? But from the driver’s seat of our minivan, I had the definite feeling that Amherst would never be my town again, that the town itself wouldn’t stand for it, that they didn’t need a prodigal son, that a prodigal son was exactly what they
didn’t
need. We drove past my old high school: there were bars on the windows where there hadn’t been before I went to prison, armed uniformed guards out front where before there’d been old-lady hall monitors with whistles, and I imagined that the bars and the guards were there to protect the students from me and not some teenage crazy in a trench coat stuffed with homemade ordnance. I could hear the principal during assembly that morning:
We were not vigilant and he burned down the Emily Dickinson House and killed two people in the bargain. But we are ready for him now
. I imagined that after school the students and their parents, and for that matter the whole town, would — à la
Frankenstein
— take up their torches and pitchforks and drive me out of town and leave me — lurching, grunting, monstrous with my scarred and stitched body and the bolt through my head — wandering, lost in the strange, cruel world, never to be heard from again.

“What do you think?” Anne Marie asked me, her face happy and expectant, about the opposite of how mine surely looked.

“Pitchforks!” I said. “Torches! Monster!”

“What?” she asked. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” I said, and I kept driving, in a kind of trance, so that Anne Marie’s cries of “Wait!” and “Where are you going?” and “We haven’t looked at any houses yet — hold on!” were something out of the faint, distant past and I had trouble hearing them. Yes, I kept driving, right past Chicopee Street, where my parents lived, and then out of town, and for five more years I was pretty glad I had. Soon we were on Route 116 and out of Amherst proper, and this, too, was familiar — the small brick ranch houses that housed the Asian grad students at the state university, and the student laundromats and the family-owned greengrocers and the tiny, poorly stocked nonchain video stores in which you couldn’t ever find the movies you wanted. But soon things began to change. First, there came the river of superstores: the super garden-supply stores and super toy stores and super children’s clothing stores and super building-supply stores and super furniture galleries and super supermarkets and so on. The buildings that housed these superstores were as cheap looking as they were big, just oversize tin pole barns with parking lots so huge that the entire town of Amherst could have fit comfortably inside. Amherst didn’t seem big enough to justify all these superstores and their parking lots; it was like building a
sub
without first building the
urb
.

But these stores were just an introduction to what had
really
changed: what had really changed were the subdivisions beyond the stores, the subdivisions where ten years before there had been only broadleaf tobacco and corn fields, subdivisions with signs at the gated entrances that said
MONACO ESTATES
and
STONEHAVEN,
and with streets named Princess Grace Way and Sheep Meadow Circle. I drove around these subdivisions, looking for a
FOR SALE
sign and not finding one until we turned into a subdivision named Camelot — so said the wooden sign carved into the shape of a castle.