by Brock Clarke
“So Mom doesn’t like these parties,” I said. I could see why, but something didn’t quite make sense to me. After all, my mother didn’t seem to have a problem with drunks in general, being one herself, plus being married to one, plus being mother to a son who was well on his way to becoming a drunk, too. So why would a few dozen more drunks in corduroy blazers bother her so much? “How come she doesn’t like these parties?” I asked my father.
“I have no idea,” he said, and that’s another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: be wary of a man who says, “I have no idea,” when asked why his wife doesn’t like something he’s done, which of course is just another way of saying be wary of men in general. “Maybe she doesn’t like what my guests do to the house,” he said.
“Speaking of the house—,” I said, “Dad, how long ago did Mom move out?”
“Move out?” my father repeated. “I wouldn’t exactly say she has. Her clothes are here, after all, or at least most of them. She comes back here to drink most every night.”
“Dad,” I said, “I saw her apartment tonight. I saw her in her apartment in Belchertown, in the Masonic temple. I know all about that.”
“Oh,” he said. His face fell a little and began to look more like the face of the stroked-out father I believed and wanted him to be and he perhaps wanted to be, too. “I’m sorry you have to know all about that.”
“Are you still even married?”
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“What is?” I said.
“Marriage,” he said.
“Do you still love her?”
“I love her very much,” my father said automatically. Did this mean he did, or he didn’t? If he had asked me the same question about Anne Marie, I would have given him the same answer, and I would have given it automatically. “I wish your mother weren’t in that apartment,” he said. “I wish she were here, with us.”
“So why isn’t she?”
“It’s complicated,” my father said again. I could see that “complicated” was the word he used to describe that which he didn’t understand, the way I used “accident.” My father dropped his eyes and then returned them to the letters. He picked one up and I could see his hand shake. He seemed more and more feeble and distracted with each passing second, and I thought I’d better finish asking questions before he fully reverted to the stroked-out father I’d been thinking he was.
“Dad, how many people have seen these letters?”
“Too many to count,” he said, and this seemed to please him. He rallied a little bit and started walking around the kitchen, waggling beer cans to see if they had any beer left in them, drinking out of the ones that did.
“Does anyone know where you keep the letters?”
“Of course,” he said. He sat down at the table and started flipping through the letters again. “Lots of people do.”
“Does anyone suspicious know where you keep the letters?” I asked. This was a weak question, and my father gave me a look as if to say, They all were, and so I thought about how to be more specific. What would a suspicious person look like, exactly? I asked myself, and immediately Thomas Coleman came to mind, especially since he’d seemed to know my father, knew where his bedroom was, and had been in this same home only the day before. Plus, I’d already fingered him as guilty to Detective Wilson, so I had some stake in his guilt. Plus, I didn’t think I had anyone else to name except my mother, and I didn’t want to name her, not unless I had to.
“Do you know someone named Thomas Coleman?” I asked him.
“I know lots of people,” my father said.
“He has blond hair,” I said. “He’s thin, has blue eyes.” I thought about it some more, wished there were more ways to physically describe the people who are ruining our lives. “Really thin,” I said again. “Does that sound like someone who has seen the letters?”
“Lots of thin people have seen the letters,” my father said, talking more to the letters than to me.
“Dad, pay attention!” I barked, the way a parent does to a child, and the way every child eventually does to his parent, too, taking revenge for being barked at so many years earlier, revenge being yet another one of the many kinds of sadness. My father’s head jerked up and he held it there, at attention. “Thomas Coleman’s parents died in the Emily Dickinson House fire,” I told him.
“They did,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I killed them.” It felt good to admit this finally, although every good feeling exists only long enough for you to ruin it, and I ruined this one by adding, “By accident.”
“By accident,” my father said.
“Do you know Thomas Coleman?” I asked. “Has he seen the letters? I’m pretty sure someone who has seen the letters tried to set fire to both the Bellamy House and the Twain House. They probably have the five other letters, too. Dad, please, think hard. Do you know a Thomas Coleman? This is important.”
My father thought hard; I could tell by the way the worry lines on his forehead deepened and multiplied. He even brought his index finger to his lips and left it there. Finally he said, “I have no idea. I’m sorry, Sam, but I don’t.”
“OK,” I said, and I believed him, and that will also go in my arsonist’s guide: don’t trust a man who says, “I have no idea,” but also don’t underestimate his capacity not to have one. “Dad,” I said, “you don’t think it could be Mom who tried to burn those houses, do you?”
“No,” he said. “Why would you ask something like that?”
“Because I’m pretty sure it’s a woman,” I said. “If it’s not this guy Thomas Coleman, then I’m pretty sure it’s a woman.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s complicated,” I said, throwing his favorite word back at him. “But trust me, I’m pretty sure it’s a woman.”
“Why would it be your mother?” my father said. He was really lucid now, his eyes suddenly clear of the booze and the letters and who knows what else that had been fogging them.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she’s not happy I came back. Maybe it’s because of me.”
“Don’t you ever say that!” my father yelled. I mean, he really yelled this, and then banged on the table, giving his fist the opportunity to yell, too. I don’t think he ever banged or yelled once when I was a child; usually he moped and then fled. I’m not sure which was worse, or better. Were these my only choices? Shouldn’t you get more than two choices? “Your mother would never do something like that to you,” he told me. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“OK,” I said.
“She loves you, you idiot,” he said. “You have no idea how much.”
“OK, OK,” I said. “But I’m still pretty sure it’s a woman, though.”
“Then it’s another woman,” my father said. “Go find another woman.” Of course he said this, and of course I listened, finding another woman being both the hope that keeps most men going and the hope that eventually does them in.
That was the end of that. After he told me to go find another woman, my father seemed to stroke out again. He put the letters back in the shoe box, tucked the shoe box under his arm, got up from his chair, and shuffled toward his bedroom. Before he left the kitchen, though, he reached with his free hand and picked up a book on the counter. “By the way,” he said. He held up Morgan Taylor’s memoir, then tossed it at me. I didn’t react quickly enough, and it hit me right in the gut, which, coincidentally, is exactly where the book jacket promised the book would hit me. “I read this. Am I supposed to be in here?”
“Well, not you exactly,” I said. “But the things you did, the places you went after you left Mom and me. Those are your stories.”
“If you say so,” my father said. He shrugged and then shuffled off to bed.
LIKE THE MANY SAD-SACK young male narrators of the books my mother made me read when I was a sad-sack young male, I went to bed that night without my supper, and for that matter without my lunch, too. My stomach was
rumbling angrily, keeping pace with the rumbling in my head. There were so many things to think about that I couldn’t properly think about any of them. When this happens, the only thing you can do is to locate one thought, the simplest one, the one nearest to you, and do your very best to eliminate it and then go on to thinking about the next thought you want to eliminate.
The thought closest to me that night was this: Morgan Taylor had stolen my father’s stories for his memoir. My father had read the memoir and said he wasn’t in it, even though those postcards he’d sent me said otherwise. When I was a child, I kept the postcards my father had sent in my closet, on the top shelf, in a manila envelope. I got out of bed, dragged a desk chair over to the closet, climbed up on the chair, reached up to the top shelf, and found the envelope. The postcards were inside: I read them like that, standing on the chair. They were exactly as I remembered, in my father’s handwriting, the handwriting I recognized from the “Drink Me” notes he left in the morning beside my hangover potion. I’d remembered the handwriting so clearly, in part, because it was the only time I’d ever really seen either of my parents write anything except for the illegible marginal comments they made on student papers and manuscripts, and even that writing wasn’t writing at all but rather symbols telling the writer to indent or not to. The way I figured it, my parents scribbled so much at work that they couldn’t bring themselves to write anything at home—not even a grocery list or a birthday card. Except for my father’s postcards. My father might not have remembered the postcards clearly, but here they were, written proof that something important had happened as I remembered it happening. Each postcard was signed, “Love, Your Dad.”
“I love you, too,” I said to the postcards, putting them back in the envelope and then putting the envelope back on its high shelf. The father downstairs was strange to me and unlikable, but the one I knew from the postcards was still here, with me, in my heart and on my high closet shelf. With one thing less to think about, I got back into bed and tried to go to sleep. I did, too, for three hours, until the phone woke me up. It rang and rang and rang—my parents didn’t have an answering machine, which seemed about right, because I don’t think the phone had rung once since I’d moved home—until it finally pulled me out of bed and downstairs, where the phone was. I picked it up and gave the usual greeting, and in response I heard a man whose voice I didn’t recognize say, “The Robert Frost Place, Sam. At midnight,” and then hang up. I put the phone back into its cradle, then walked into my father’s room. I was prepared to wake him, but he was already awake. The lamp on the end table was on. There was a box of wine on the end table next to the lamp, red wine dripping from its spigot onto the floor. My father was sitting in his chair, a glass of wine in one hand, the open box of letters in his lap. He was staying up late, drinking box wine, worrying about the missing letters, the way another father might stay up late, drinking coffee, worrying about his missing son or wife.
“Dad,” I said, “did you hear the phone ring?”
“Yes,” he said, then drained his glass. He placed the glass under the spigot, filled his glass only halfway, and then gave the box a disappointed glance that let me know it was empty.
“That was someone telling me that he was going to burn down the Robert Frost Place. In so many words.”
“Peter Le Clair,” he said automatically. “Ten State Route Eighteen, Franconia, New Hampshire.” He looked at me sheepishly and nodded. “I should have remembered that one.”
Part Four
16
New Hampshire was pretty. For one thing, it started snowing immediately after I crossed the state border, which gave me the feeling that it never stopped snowing in New Hampshire and that if I turned around and looked back at Massachusetts, I’d see a solid line of weather—on one side blizzard, on the other side nothing but palm trees and warm breezes. But I didn’t look back to check. I kept my eyes straight ahead, on the road, because it really was snowing hard and you could hardly see a thing with all the trucks barreling northward, the snow whooshing and blowing in their wake and into my windshield. It was like driving behind a fierce and terrible tsunami with Quebec plates. Then one of the trucks got caught in a rut of snow, veered to the left, through traffic and off the highway, and jackknifed into a ditch, after which all the cars panicked and started skidding here and there, and it was like bumper cars that had lost their poles while going seventy, in the snow, with some horrible visibility. It was a real mess, and I knew if I stayed on the highway much longer, I’d soon be in a ditch myself or worse, so I took the next exit.
It was magical off the highway, still snowing hard but no semis and no high speeds and so more heavenly and not nearly as blinding and hazardous; all in all, it was a much better-looking New Hampshire. I went through about twelve towns, lovely towns full of white clapboard houses and snow-covered town greens and sensible white boxy Congregational churches and covered wooden bridges, and even a gristmill or two paddling their way through icy streams, not getting much done for all their paddling, but still plucky and hopeful. I wished that I wasn’t just driving through and also that I’d learned to paint so I could be an artist and live in New Hanpshire and paint pictures of the towns. They were that handsome. I drove by an inn in Red Bell, and there were a half-dozen cars parked out front, all of them with out-of-state plates, people obviously on vacation. I’d never been on vacation myself, not really, and now I knew why people did it. People went on vacation not to get a break from their home but to imagine getting a new home, a better home, in which they’d live a better life. I knew this because as I drove, the hole that was me and my life was getting smaller and smaller and was being filled up with New Hampshire, or maybe it was only the idea of New Hampshire, but who cares, as long as it was filling up the hole. So maybe that’s what a vacation was for: to fill up the hole that was you not on vacation.
Because that’s what Red Bell was doing: it was filling me up and making me reflective, too. Now that I had seen the real deal, New England town – wise, I could see Camelot as Anne Marie had at first: cheap, sterile, and so lonely and, as far as homes go, no shelter at all from the cruel, cruel world. But if we could have moved here, near a gristmill, things would have been different. Was it too late? Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe Anne Marie and I could work things out in New Hampshire; maybe the boxy churches would help her forget my lying and would also help me to finally tell the truth; maybe my bumbling wouldn’t be so severe here, in Red Bell, or in one of its neighbors. After all, the place was so very old and had been through a lot, so you probably couldn’t do much to it that hadn’t been done to it already. The ancient, meandering stone walls, for instance: they were everywhere, and if the Indians and the British and generations of livestock hadn’t wrecked them, I didn’t see how I could do the walls much damage, either. They looked tough and permanent, those walls, but with the snow on them they looked soft, too, which was how I was starting to think of myself—or rather, was how I was starting to think of my future, New Hampshire self. Yes, New Hampshire was already doing strange things to me. After only an hour in the state, I had fully imagined life here with Anne Marie and the kids; it was easy to do so, easy to forget that Anne Marie was with Thomas Coleman now and wanted nothing more to do with me. I wondered if this was how my father had felt during his three-year exile—if he’d felt hopeful and dreamy about the prospect of a new life with his wife and boy in Duluth, Yuma, et cetera. It hadn’t worked out that way for him, exactly, but it would work out better for me and mine—of that I was convinced. Because everyone knows that the one constant in the human story is progress, and my father’s Duluth was not my New Hampshire, his familial disaster not mine, and so I pledged to look into local real estate prices and employment opportunities immediately after I found out who had called me, asking me to meet him at the Robert Frost Place at midnight.
But then I kept driving north, up into the White Mountains and toward Franconia, and it got so awfully poor and depressing that even the snow c
ouldn’t disguise it. First the clapboard houses lost their clapboards and took on some aluminum siding, still white but somehow dirty against the legitimately and naturally white snow. I felt bad for the houses, having to be compared to the white snow and failing so completely. It would probably have been better for the houses and the people in them to move south, where there was no snow to have to live up to.
Anyway, accelerating through time (because this trip took hours and hours—you could see why people in a hurry and with no eye for local detail are so completely devoted to the interstate), I drove farther north, and the trailers started popping up here and there, until there were only trailers and I started to miss the aluminum siding. Oh, those trailers were sad and made Mr. Frazier’s neighborhood in Chicopee seem like Shangri-la. They looked cold, too, sitting there on the open ground with no trees to protect them from the wind and the drifting snow. Some of the trailers had plywood entrances tacked onto their fronts or sides, and I could see the plywood jittering in the wind. Every trailer had a stovepipe coming out of its roof, sticking out of the tar paper like a lonely digit. The smoke came furiously out of these pipes, the wood burning double time so as not to spend any extra minutes in the trailers. There were wrecked cars in every yard, taking the place of the trees, and they, too, were covered with snow, the way the stone walls had been farther south. But whereas the snow had softened the boulders, the wrecks looked cruel as the rusted and warped fenders punched through the snow, making harsh holes in the drifts. I was in Franconia now, with the White Mountains everywhere, and it should have been beautiful, but it wasn’t. The mountains themselves seemed impossibly far away, as if they didn’t want to get too close to the trailers. It was awful, all right, so depressing, so poor, and by now the hole inside me—the hole where Anne Marie and the kids were, the hole that pretty Red Bell had started to fill—was as large as ever, and I’d forgotten about Red Bell entirely, couldn’t remember what made it so beautiful, couldn’t even conjure up a gristmill. This is what poverty does, I guess: it ruins your memory of more beautiful things, which is just another reason why we should try as hard as we can to get rid of it.