by Marge Piercy
Tom’s face twisted in scorn. “Did you see it? Did you just see what he’s doing to that house?. Aluminum siding over that fine old clapboard. Aluminum awnings. The man is crazed for aluminum. Then a stupid picture window smack onto the building across.”
“Are we down on him for bad taste, or because we think he’s a torch?” Daria asked. It took her a moment to figure out why she was taking mild offense. Because what Lou was doing to that building reminded her of how Joe had fixed up his house in Medford before he moved his family south after her parents. “And we should give high points to Ross then. His rehab where that fire happened is staunchly bourgeois and very tasteful. His condo in the North End is an architect’s dream.”
“Lou’s a small operator who’s in too deep.” Sandra María spoke from the dining area of Tom’s apartment. She had covered the table with a big chart she was working on. Daria had provided much of the data, along with Sandra María and Tom’s older research on local landlords, the detective work down at the Registry of Deeds that had originally brought them to picketing Ross. Now Sandra María was turning all of their findings into a neat graphic display. It was Tom and Sandra María’s theory that when they finished the chart, they would be able to predict who was going to have a fire next and perhaps even which buildings were likely. “Lou does almost all his work himself. He doesn’t care whether he rehabs or burns, almost a roll of the dice. If he’s flush he rehabs. If he’s broke, he burns.”
“That fire on Brainerd totalled his building,” Tom said. “We have more careful fires over here: just to empty a building and provide capital for the rehab. Obviously if he is the local torch, he has the know-how to do a controlled burn. He’s a tidy workman, I’ll give him that.”
“Careful, huh?” Fay snorted over the pile of envelopes she was addressing. “Jesus, what short memories. Nobody remembers little Bobbie Rosario anymore? And whoever the hell that other body was, a bum or something.”
“We don’t know he was the torch for every fire,” Tom said. “Although we do have that tentative link between Walker and Lou.”
Daria said, “I hope you haven’t convinced each other that every fire that happens around here is arson.”
There was a long silence. Sandra María continued filling in the chart on a window shade that covered most of the dining-room table, and the other three went on putting out their mailing to call a meeting.
“I’ll be so damned glad when this Waltham job is done, I’m going to throw a party,” Tom was saying. “We have another job under way I really like, but they’re driving me crazy out there.”
“Yeah? What’s wrong?” Fay asked, licking stamps and making a sour face.
“We’re almost done, and suddenly they decide a window’s in the wrong place and let’s move it.”
“Well, don’t they have to pay?” Fay asked.
“It’s not that.” Tom shrugged. “We did it once and we did it right. It won’t be right done over. I hate undoing what we did. I have to rip out the bookshelves I put in for them. It’s the waste of it.”
“You mean you won’t do as good a job the second time?” Daria asked.
“Of course not. Because we did it once. It doesn’t feel right.”
Sandra María stepped back from her chart and cleared her throat. “Daria, I’m afraid I have to say I think your estranged husband is due for a fire. Too much outflow and not enough coming in. He’s stuck. He’s used the mortgage money for buying more buildings and I doubt he has the capital to rehab. Now money is looser again, he’s got to get moving while the market’s opening up. He can’t get his money out if he doesn’t rehab soon and start going condo. The only way he can finance it is from a convenient little fire. It’s his turn, I’m telling you.”
Saturday afternoon, Tom insisted they go for a drive, alone, the two of them. Where they drove was an old town house in Cambridge near Inman Square. “This is where we’re working.”
“Where the people made you keep taking out windows and putting in windows?”
“No, I wouldn’t show you that. It makes me ashamed. You want to bet they’ll take a year to pay us? We’re just starting another job in Watertown, but this one you can see what we do.… I wanted you to know.”
Basically the first two floors had most of the interior walls removed and the outer walls stripped down to plaster and original fireplace brick. “We opened up the downstairs to one large room with interruptions, and then a bath added and what’s a sort of exercise room-cum-guest room-cum-study. That’s what those rings are for. The wife hangs from them.”
Even with the walls incomplete, she could recognize that Aaron Aardvark did handsome work.
“Oh, sure, we’re good,” he said. “We turn down more jobs than we take on. And what we do is good clean work. We give value. We save buildings and turn old buildings into homes that will stand a long time.”
“Why are you saying this so apologetically? You think I’m Andrea, I want you to be a professional man and go to an office?”
“I worry about that sometimes. Sure. But my work, it’s gentrification too. We’re not working for developers like Walker or his partners or Petris. We’re hired by young professionals who are buying run-down houses and improving them. But it’s the same thing in the long run. People without money can’t afford us.”
“But it isn’t quite the same. You aren’t forcing people out.”
“Boston has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country. Sometimes when they buy buildings, there are tenants they get rid of. Then there’s less housing for the folks who need it the most and have the least choice. I know all that. We make a living by providing a service for the affluent.”
“But I don’t feel you’re ashamed of what you do.”
“I like it. I can’t help liking it. But I want you to know, I do see it in context.”
Daria walked through from room to room, imagining them growing day by day into a home. “I’m glad you brought me here. I don’t know why it should matter to me, but it does—to know exactly what you do.”
“Because with your husband, you didn’t.”
“Check. Because I didn’t. Because I don’t want to live without knowing how I’m living ever again.”
“You’re tired of being innocent?”
“You shouldn’t be so surprised, that I listen to what you say.” She turned toward him. He was standing on a patch of recently redone flooring, not yet stained to match the rest of the floor. A pattern of red and gold lay on one arm from a stained-glass window the sun glimmered through. Her flesh gave a kind of invisible lurch toward him that made her smile. She had a sense of physical kinship with him, standing there in the midst of his work. His hands were workman’s hands like her father’s had been and her grandfather—a stonemason. She imagined them meeting back a hundred years when both their families had been peasants. They would have met, been attracted and married with the dumb surety of routine. No, for he was seven years younger than she was, although she scarcely thought about that any longer. And they were not dumb. They made love in words and they tried to communicate, increasingly. She could not say why she felt so moved for him, standing there with his hand splayed on the wood as if communing with it.
“Surprised? I’m flattered. No, that sounds stupid. I mean, that’s what I want—for us to listen to each other.” He turned away as if embarrassed, caressing the wood of the stairway. “I’m putting in a closet here, part linen closet, part bookcase. I like the proportions. I finished it with this curve, very gentle, see?”
They went for an early supper to the North End, parking under the expressway. Over his manicotti he started talking about Lou again. “He grew up in Brockton. Got in trouble in high school for dealing pills. Picked up once in connection with a stolen car ring, but not prosecuted. No trouble with the law since, probably ’cause he got out of Brockton, away from whoever he was hanging with in those days. Put in a year or two at Bridgewater—the college not the prison.”
“What do
you care about his background? You’re as obsessed with him as I was with Gail Abbot-Wisby. You’ve been researching him!”
Mario wasn’t in, but Aldo, his second-in-command, hovered near them as if to try to guess from their expressions if they were enjoying the food sufficiently.
“He married in his twenties. Still with the same woman. They have three boys and a girl. The oldest boy helps him sometimes—he’s thirteen.”
“You’re around the same age,” Daria said slowly, “background similar—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Tom said roughly, signalling for more wine. “Don’t think I haven’t figured out why he bugs me. We both come from stone working-class families who got a little comfort. Neither of us made it up and out. I became a carpenter finally and he became an electrician. He does crappy rehabs. If I was him, I’d do a better job. He’s more competent at burning than building.”
“Tom, you’re very different people, with different tastes, different politics. He’s not your doppelgänger or alter ego.”
“What goes through his mind when he burns people out? I don’t understand. I can’t see into him.”
“Maybe he thinks he’s just doing the job he’s paid for. Maybe he says to himself, great, I made a clear two hundred tonight or whatever they pay him. Maybe he thinks well, there’s the kid’s dental bill, and let’s hope another job shows up real soon.”
“He knows people live in the buildings. I just don’t understand how he thinks about it, what he feels when he lights a place where people are sleeping upstairs.”
Had she sounded that irrational in her fixation on Gail? “What he thinks makes little difference, right? They say that pyromaniacs experience … pleasure. I mean; they say they have an orgasm.”
“He’s no pyromaniac. He only burns what he’s paid to. It’s a job. But how does he justify it? What does he tell his wife?”
“What came of the meeting last night?”
“Patrols. We’re patrolling the couple of buildings Sandra María decided Walker’s likeliest to have torched. They never burn in the daytime, so we figure we need a night watch. If Walker’s planning to burn either Number Twenty-seven or the house where Bobbie died, he’s not going to find it easy.”
The conversation had become unreal to her. They would all see nothing was going to happen. She need not argue on Ross’s behalf, because time would prove Tom wrong. In the meantime, their patrol might frustrate burglars anyhow. “People liked the chart?”
“They were pretty impressed. Now if we can only get the authorities to look at it.… Mac and Fay have been batting back and forth between the police and the fire department. They say with the layoffs, they have no one to cover arson and besides it’s somebody else’s business and besides we have no proof.”
“But Sandra María said there’d been legislation passed setting up a special arson force.”
“On paper. Lost in the budget cuts. You know what politicians do when you finally persuade the media there’s a problem. They set up a task force to study it and issue a report a year later. They hold a big conference and put out some more paper and then they go back to business as usual.” He mopped up the last of his sauce. “This was good food. I wish you could come to meetings, Daria. I miss you there.”
“After my divorce,” she temporized. Meetings were not for her. “That’s my recipe. Years ago I worked here.”
Early Tuesday morning a phone call came to her in Lexington from an excited Fay. “Someone tried to burn Number Twenty-seven last night. Old man Schulman was on patrol. He don’t have the keenest ears in the world and they pried open the basement door before he came on them.”
“Did he catch them?” Daria asked.
“How in hell could he do that? Use your noodle. We’re not trying to get ourselves killed, right, but the opposite.”
“Did he see who it was?”
“Not to give any kind of description. One guy wearing a leather jacket was on the steps inside. He thought he saw another guy with him when he ran, but Mr. Schulman wasn’t sure. After all he was pretty excited and it was two A.M.”
But don’t you think they were probably looking to rip off a television set or something?”
“Around here we get that kind of shit in the afternoon mostly. But they weren’t into no carry and cash operation. They left their calling card behind. Right outside the basement door, deary: a big drum full of gasoline and nice well-soaked papers, ready to go up.”
“Oh.” Daria was silent. She was becoming so defensive that she recognized if she hadn’t spent the night with Tom, she would have almost been ready to accuse him of playacting to prove his point. But not Mr. Schulman, an Orthodox Jew living on a disability pension with a sick wife and a prize dahlia garden out back: he wasn’t engaging in charades. Someone had actually tried to burn Number 27.
Early Saturday morning she had a call from Ross. “I want to come by this morning and get the last of my stuff out. What I still really want. The papers in my study, the darkroom equipment, my summer clothes. I’ve got two men coming by with a truck and I’ll be there by the time they show up.”
“You should have given me more warning—”
“Don’t bother being there. I have a key.”
“All your papers are in boxes in the basement, against the north wall. They’re labelled.”
“What did you do? Go through all my stuff?”
“I needed the room.”
“What for? Your bowling league? You’ve got a barn of a house ten times bigger than you need anyhow. You didn’t have to mess up my files.”
“You’ll find them in order, inside the boxes. And I do need the space—” She was about to mention Sandra María and Mariela, when he hung up on her.
He did not seem to know she had taken in roommates, interesting because Dorothy had indicated Ross might resort to a private detective to discover if she were seeing anyone. Apparently not. She had been convinced the possibility would not occur to him. Her family’s line on Daria was that she represented the nice dull mommy model, unsuited for romance or adventure. She realized that never in her life had she caused Ross to be jealous of her.
She had been sorry he had not allowed her to mention Sandra María and Mariela, because she wanted to demonstrate to him how much her life had changed, but as she dressed hurriedly and made herself presentable, she decided silence was for the best. Why give him any leads on what she had been doing? He might deduce her connection with SON. She attended none of their public meetings, so that only the inner core knew of her involvement.
Sandra María drove off to the library in the old Dodge Ángel had found for her. Mariela was home, but Daria gave her a little speech about saying nothing to Ross about living there or who her mother was.
Mariela was very interested in Ross when he arrived at ten, his Mercedes pulling into the garage into the old spot beside her Rabbit he had always used to occupy. A small van arrived at the curb right after him. As Daria opened the door, without giving him a chance to use the key, Mariela was right behind her, peering out to see the famous monster.
Ross stared at Mariela. “Who’s that?”
“I’m Mariela, but I don’t remember my last name,” Mariela said smugly.
“The daughter of a friend,” Daria said. “I’ll show you where your boxes are piled.”
“I don’t see what call you had to rifle my files,” Ross barked, heading for the basement stairs. “You have plenty of room here.”
“I don’t see what business it is of yours how I use my space,” she said. “I threw nothing out. I simply boxed it. It’s been over four months since you moved out. That’s a long time to store your things for you.”
When Ross disappeared downstairs, Daria whispered to Mariela, “Go hang around the movers and ask them anything that comes into your head. But be sure to ask them where they’re moving all this stuff. Put on your jacket first.”
Mariela had the answer in five minutes. “Hamilton,” she said proudly. “That’s a plac
e, not a name like it sounds. Did I find out right?”
“Perfect.” They watched the two men and Ross carry up his files and darkroom equipment. Then Ross came back into the kitchen and motioned Daria to follow him through the rest of the downstairs. “I want the Sandwich glass and the two camphor Victorian hens-on-the-nest dishes. That Spode candlestick. The Seth Thomas rosewood clock. The Haviland tea set. Let’s see.” He consulted a list in his pocket. “Definitely that Hadley chest in the hall.”
“Don’t you think we should divide things formally? I’ve submitted a list to the lawyer of all our antiques and semiantiques.”
His face took on that frozen look she had grown to fear over the years, that meant she had thwarted or crossed him. It used to precede not an explosion but rather a massive withdrawal.
“I want my things now. I’m not asking for much.” His voice took on a quavery timbre of self-pity. “I’m not asking for half, even. Just the few things that I really care about.”
“You don’t have room for Torte but you have room for Sandwich glass and a Hadley chest.… Oh, never mind. Sure, take what you want, so long as I keep a list.”
“What happened to the living room?” He demanded, as if caught off guard.
“I got rid of that carpeting I could never stand.”
“Where’s that cutdown ladder-back chair we had dated to 1790?”
It was in Mariela’s room. “I have to look for it,” Daria said. “I’m not sure.”
“How can you not be sure?” He directed the men to the Hadley chest. Daria had to run quickly and unpack it, full of tablecloths and napkins. She had Mariela carry them into the dining room.
“Ross, this is rather an imposition, marching in here without warning and trying to carry off half the house. I’m going to try to reach my lawyer for advice.” She had Dorothy’s home number, if she wasn’t in her office.
“All right, all right. Where’s that marble-topped bureau?”
“That’s in Tracy’s room. It’s hers, Ross. It was given to her. By us. You can’t take it back now.”