by Marge Piercy
He rushed into the kitchen, looking around. “Ray,” he called, “are you up there?”
Tom came down first, his eyes at their heavy-lidded somberest. He looked enormous towering over Ross. For a moment Daria thought he might actually pick up Ross and throttle him. “Who are you?” Ross barked at him.
“Hi, Rusty, how’re you doing? A sad business,” said the brisk little man coming down behind, dusting off his hands. “This is Tom Silver, he’s a contractor your wife has looking at the house to see if it can be repaired. But I think we’ve come to the unhappy conclusion it would take the full insurance money to make a start.… I understand you’re separated and dividing it?”
Ross glanced at Daria with disbelief. “Repaired?”
“I’m abandoning the idea,” she said sweetly. “You understand abandonment. Mr.… Ray? I want you to look into the possibility of arson. I believe this fire was intentionally set.”
“Dear lady, that’s a serious charge.” The brisk little man dusted his hands again. “I understand from Rusty here you’re in the midst of a somewhat acrimonious divorce. Sad business. Happens to everyone. We don’t want to drag bitter domestic quarrels into business matters. I work with your brother often, dear lady, and I’m sure he can explain to you how unwise it is to try to use insurance companies to carry out battles better confined to your lawyer’s jurisdiction. I’m quite satisfied the fire started in the furnace room and spread rapidly through the extremely dry wood of an old house.” He and Ross walked out together, although not before Ross had peered for some minutes into the dining room. Computing an inventory of what remained?
Tom followed them to the door. “You won’t mind, I’m sure, if we bring in someone else to examine the fire’s spread?”
“Someone else?” Ross stopped, turning to frown at Tom. “What business is this of yours?”
“Houses are my business,” Tom spoke slowly, his hands clasping each other behind his back. “I have a colleague who knows a bit about fires too. I’m sure you’d both be delighted if he looks things over.”
Ross stood, obviously eager to be gone and obviously confused. “Look things over for what? Our claim is in. Ray assures me there’s no problem.”
“Mr. Silver,” the adjuster said, “tell your client that if she causes trouble, she causes it mostly to herself. Certainly she can dispute her own claim. My company would be pleased not to pay. But is that really in her best interest? We can cut off our noses to spite our faces, in these matters.”
Tom followed them out and watched them off. Then he told her, “I’m going to desert you for a while. I have to find my pal Donald. He’s one of our experts. I want him to take a look. He’s a private detective who does mostly security work these days, but he used to be an insurance adjuster himself. He knows one hell of a lot about fire. I want him and his camera here.”
“Do it. I have hours of packing.”
“Daria, be very careful walking on these floors. You’re all right on this side of the house, but the rest is too dangerous.” He paused again, at the door. “You won’t be scared here?”
“In broad daylight? Ross won’t be back. He couldn’t wait to leave.”
“I didn’t hit him. You have to give me credit. Someday soon, I’m going to lay him out flat. But today I didn’t.”
“I also thank you for not coming on any stronger in front of Ross. I know that was harder than not hitting him.”
“How could you stay with that creep so long?” he burst out.
“He didn’t start out being that creep.”
“I bet he always was,” Tom said. “I’m off to look for Donald.”
Donald was a middle-aged, middle-sized, carefully nondescript man balding in a semicircle and peering through bifocals. He hummed as he worked, taking little samples of char, of floorboard. He had a camera and lights that he set up. He had a sketchpad on which he drew arcane diagrams with arrows. He had a steel measuring tape and a pocket recorder like hers on which he made notes.
Tom drew her aside. “We’re paying him two hundred plus lab expenses. I’ll split it with you.”
“Why should you?”
“Because it’s all my idea and nothing may come of it. I want Donald in on it. He’ll do some simple tests for an accelerant—probably gasoline.”
“That’s not the upscale accelerant of choice of your more polished torches,” Donald interrupted his rendition of “Some Enchanted Evening.” “But if this is the same bug we have in Allston, he uses kerosene usually, sometimes gasoline. He’s skillful with it. Nothing fancy for him. No electric timing devices. Just a book of matches, a bit of soaked fusing and some well-placed accelerant. A few oil-soaked trailers from the original set—”
“Trailers?” Daria repeated.
“Kerosene or oil soaked papers or rags—something to lead the fire quickly where the torch wants it to go.” Donald motioned them out of his next snapshot. “His art is in placing his set and his trailers well in the building structure.”
“He knows his building,” Tom said wryly. “We want this evidence for us, Donald, not for the police.”
Daria paused, wrapping glassware in towels. “What do we want it for, then?”
“To scare the shit out of Walker, so he’ll make a settlement and you can be rid of him.”
“That’s fine with me.” She went back to her packing. “We’re going to need a lot of trips in the van.”
“This won’t take me long.” Donald was humming “Oklahoma” as he lowered a ladder into the hole in the dining room floor. “Pump-a-dumpah dumpah, Dah dee dah de dah de de dee! We had a guy a couple years ago leaned to fireplace logs, broken open. Very fine job. Combusted completely in the ensuing blaze. And one torch, remember, Tom, who liked a forty-watt bulb in a box of sawdust. What have we here? Hmmmmm?” Something was being scraped across the cement floor below as Donald sang “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!”
When he emerged from the hole in the floor, he was carrying more of his sample cases. “One thing these guys forget is, fluids flow downhill. And your basement floor is quite uneven, Mrs. Walker. Under where I gather some kind of rack stood on the north wall, I got a nice sample broken loose which I think even to the nose is kerosene, definitely kerosene.”
“You might turn up some alcohol mixed in under there. We had some wine against that wall.”
“Thanks for warning me. Although alcohol is so volatile.…”
“When I spoke about arson to the fire chief and to the insurance adjuster, they acted as if I’m crazy. Am I crazy? Don’t try to please Tom. Tell me the truth, I beg you. Was this an accident?”
He fixed his mild gaze on her through his bifocals. “First of all, arson falls between the cracks. The fire department, they have enough trouble putting out fires. They rush from one to the next, understaffed, overworked. What do they want to know about arson? They don’t have the funds. The insurance companies, they pass on the cost to you, the policyholder. Even in neighborhoods where they have fires every week, if you have enough money, there’s always somebody who will insure you. If the reputable companies won’t touch it, there’s Fair Plan. If Fair Plan won’t touch it, there’s Lloyd’s of London. There’s the so-called unlicensed companies beyond them.”
“You haven’t answered my question.” Daria planted herself firmly between Donald and the door. “Am I crazy to think this is arson?”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. You might be mistaken. I’ll know when my lab results are in. But frankly, the spread, the rapidity of the spread, makes me highly suspicious. And even to the nose I’m convinced there was kerosene used. Unless you had some stored right against the furnace, how did it get there? And under where your wine rack stood? My opinion is that someone poured a nice puddle of kerosene smack in the middle of your basement floor and probably had trailers to lead the fire up the steps and into the first floor hall. I got some nice char samples there. But I won’t be quoted on this till I have my lab results—understood?” When Donald left, humming
“The Rain in Spain,” he said over his shoulder, “Results in a couple of days. Be in touch.”
The next morning as Daria was waking from what would be, she hoped, her last night homeless, she had a call from Dorothy. “They’ve cancelled on us. Monday same time.”
Although Daria had dreaded the deposition proceedings, she had looked forward to being over that hurdle. Now she would go off once again to the house site, where Sandra María and Ángel would be coming by with a U-Haul.
That afternoon Tom pried out the window of Daria’s study, and with Peggy’s help they were able to recover her files. It was a gloomy task, picking through the shattered and baked debris. What was destroyed by the fire and what survived felt wholly arbitrary. She had her Robot Coupe and no washing machine; she had Ross’s old law books and no living room furniture.
Daria was now an official member of SON, a legal resident of Tom and Fay’s neighborhood. Sandra María and Daria had a phone installed, electricity connected and their mail forwarded. Nothing had come of Daria’s attempt to talk to the insurance adjuster about arson, except that Donald had come through with what looked like solid evidence that the fire had been set. Sandra María and Daria were moved into their new flat in high discomfort. They were camping out with what furniture they had salvaged from two fires, plus what friends and SON members donated. Their couch was a mohair relic from Fay’s basement with strong smell of old dog in the upholstery. Daria had her bedroom furniture, including her old bed with its permanent scorched aroma, and Mariela had what there was of Tracy’s, who came home Saturday to help.
“Allston,” Tracy said, appalled. “But why did you want to move here?” In one quick move Daria had rushed more than halfway back toward East Boston. Make do, that was Daria’s new motto. What other course of action lay open to her? As Gretta had, she could move into a small apartment in a neighborhood considered better; but just as romance had not been her choice as a palliative for loneliness, moving into an exorbitantly expensive and tiny apartment was not her remedy for class slippage. Keeping her new family intact was her priority, and however minimal this flat might be, it fulfilled that need.
The fit was tight. They had three bedrooms, but that arrangement left no room for Tracy and no office for Daria, who had to set up Peggy in the living room. “We’re going to persuade the second floor tenants to move up to the empty top floor apartment,” she said with false cheer to Tracy. “The top floor’s been completely renovated, so that deal ought to be attractive to the Wongs. Then we’re going to turn the first and second floors into a duplex. You’ll have a nice big room—I promise, ducks.” She tried to sound confident, but she knew nothing could happen until the insurance money came through, or until her divorce settlement was worked out. Monday was to be deposition day, when all the actors—husband, wife, their respective lawyers and accountants—would collect in Dorothy’s office with the court stenographer who would take the official record of their sworn testimony.
“But why couldn’t Tom fix up our own house?” Tracy kept asking, until Sunday morning Daria took her by on the pretext of checking for more salvage. Tracy wept openly on the return to Allston, but dropped the subject of moving back.
Daria had said little about the fire, from queasiness at accusing her husband to her daughter, but now Tracy began to ask about how the fire had started and exactly what had happened. She could lie or she could tell the truth. “Mama, there’s something you’re not telling me. What is it?”
Daria sneaked off to consult Sandra María. “Of course you have to tell her,” Sandra María said, squeezing Daria’s shoulder. “You have to warn her about him. She has to know what you know.”
Daria adopted what she herself considered a cowardly ploy: she gave Tracy Donald’s report. It was highly technical, she knew, but its meaning was in the end clear. In Donald’s opinion, the fire had been professionally set.
“But who would do it?” Tracy demanded. “You don’t have enemies like that. I mean, the kerosene and all. I can’t imagine why this guy would make that up—and I guess you suspected something, or I can’t see you bringing in some detective. But who would do it? Do you have any idea at all?”
“I’m afraid I do.… Sometimes when people are getting a divorce, they start to hate each other. They don’t remember they ever loved each other—”
“Daddy? He couldn’t. He couldn’t try to—I can’t believe it.”
“You don’t have to believe it. I hate even to tell you what I suspect.”
Tracy sat down on a box of books with her head fallen forward against her chest, Sheba on her lap brooding. Daria left her alone. She felt guilty about telling Tracy and yet compelled to do so. She was freshly angry at Ross for presenting her with such a prickly dilemma.
Tracy’s new boyfriend Scott was coming by to take her back to school with him at eight Sunday evening. At seven-thirty, Tracy knocked on Daria’s door. “Mama, I just wanted to tell you. I reread that man’s report and I thought about it. I don’t want to believe it, I don’t, but you’ve never lied to me. I’ve been considering it all, and I know you wouldn’t say it if you didn’t have good reasons to think it’s true about Daddy. So I wanted you to know I believe you even if it hurts, and I’m on your side.”
“Ducks, I don’t want you to have to be choosing up sides.”
“Mama, after that, there’s no option, is there?”
After Tracy left, Daria and Sandra María were united in a conspiracy to pretend they liked the move, a conspiracy Mariela refused to join. Mariela woke screaming from nightmares, Mariela whined and wept and complained. She wanted Torte. She wanted to go to her Lexington school with her new friends, not to the old school she had disliked before. She couldn’t stand to change schools again. It wasn’t fair! She wanted her yellow dress with the red flowers, she wanted her fuzzy bear Jorge, she wanted her Christmas doll with yellow hair, she wanted her little chair they had just given her, her own size. Mariela was angry, sulky, disobedient. Getting her to bed at night was no longer a pleasure but an act of war.
They must make do, they kept saying to each other with feigned cheer. The living room was a fine ample room with a corner fireplace shallow but handsome and a big bay window on the street. They had no dining room, for what had originally been one had been converted into a bedroom and bath. The other two bedrooms with a bath between them were on the other side of the central hall, long and dark and echoing, that led back to the big light kitchen with a pantry off it. The flat had been partially modernized: the bathrooms redone, air conditioner boxes installed, the floors stripped and refinished, the electricity rewired and brought up to code. But the kitchen had not been touched, furnished with twenty-year-old appliances—a refrigerator that shook when it ran, which was most of the time, a stove whose oven had to be lit with a match, whereupon it caught with a great dangerous whoosh of gas, ugly metal cabinets nailed up at a tilt, a sink whose faucets dripped reverberatingly at the resonance agreed most effective by professional interrogators. They were in the midst of ripping out the old kitchen and moving the Lexington kitchen into the flat entire.
Daria had moments of sharp angular depression, especially when she woke in the new room which she had not yet had time to decorate, whose windows had unsightly tan roller shades on them, and when she walked out into the flat with its makeshift arrangements. Then she felt overwhelmed by the work they must do simply to make the flat endurable. No amount of labor would turn this into her old and beautiful house, but she tried to persuade herself that this abode too held promise. The yard was unkempt and long neglected, partially paved over when the building had been cut into small apartments. She would break up the old paving and reclaim it for garden. Gradually she must transplant her favorites, making a new garden here. They had only a handkerchief square in front, but their lot was reasonably deep behind. They were up on a hill near a big park.
The cats mooned at the windows, but showed no signs of intending to trek back to Lexington. Nonetheless they must wait
until she had the backyard in order before she could begin to let them out. What she missed most was a house she had turned into her own and loved, a garden she had created as a source of fresh vegetables and cut flowers but far more, as an aesthetic pleasure in every season. From childhood on, she had lacked ability to draw, never demonstrated the least grasp of light and shade and framing with a camera. She could scarcely sew on a button. She had never taken up knitting or crocheting. Aside from her work with food, her only talent appeared to be gardening. In the garden she sculpted. With flowers and their colors, with the shapes of tall stately lupine and delphinium, with the sharp steeples of veronica and anchusa, with the buttons of marigolds, with the enormous rosettes of dahlias, the bonnets of columbine, she made sculptures, placing light green against dark green, setting both off with the occasional grey of santolina and wormwood and the far more occasional yellow of sedum. There she had given her mother a setting that would have pleased her. She would not move Nina’s ashes until she could make her a worthy garden.
Sandra María, burned out for the second time, had lost far more than her books and class notes. Every time she had begun to create a decent life for herself and her child, she was slammed back to the starting line. Although she had kept a complete copy of her rewritten thesis in her library carrel, she had lost most personal effects she retained from the first fire, clothing, jewelry, photographs, letters.
Daria missed most having her own place to write. Little of her manuscript material or files had been destroyed. The Selectric had to be replaced because of water damage, but it was insured. She felt as if Ross had tried too to deprive her of a means of making a living, attacking her workplace as well as herself. The book was not going forward, because all her energy and Peggy’s went into reproducing what had been lost, while camped awkwardly in the middle of a living room.
She missed Torte and still felt guilty—guilty and angry, with a cold fury gathering under her brisk exterior. She felt an equal grief for the house, that had endured many generations and preserved something of all the women who had lived in it. Now it was slashed open and spoiled, violated, dead. She lacked the morning light slanting through the mullioned panes onto the trestle table, although she was glad she possessed at least that object from her previous life. She had her dishes and glassware, but nowhere to put them, so they stayed in their boxes. Tom would create cabinets for them, he had promised. Tom thought she was not angry enough with Ross, but he was wrong. Her anger had turned cold in her, but it had not weakened. Still married to Ross, she felt vulnerable. She wanted passionately, she wanted without cessation or interruption of focus, to be free.