An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England Read online

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 lookin
g 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.

  Camelot was beautiful. There were no trees anywhere—it was as though Camelot had been nuked or had been the brainchild of the logging industry maybe—and each house was exactly the same except that some had powder blue vinyl siding and others had desert tan. There were elaborate wooden playgrounds in the backyards and mini–satellite dishes on every roof, and each driveway was a smooth carpet of blacktop and there wasn’t a sidewalk crack to trip over because there were no sidewalks, and each house had a garage that was so oversized it could have been its own house. There was the constant, soothing hum of lawn maintenance coming from somewhere, everywhere, even though the grass seed in front of most houses hadn’t matured yet and I couldn’t spot a lawn mower anywhere, and the sprinkler systems were all activated even though it was late September and too late for grass watering, the spray arcing and dancing in the streetlights, of which there looked to be about 150, all of them on even though it was the middle of the afternoon.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Wow what?” Anne Marie said. “Are you talking about that?” She pointed at a tan house that was exactly like the others except that there was that FOR SALE sign on the lawn. Anne Marie and I got out of the van; the kids were sitting in their seats, screaming about something, everything, but the windows were rolled up and their screaming noises were as soft and welcome as rain on the roof.

  “What are you thinking?” Anne Marie said finally. There was a weary, sighing quality to her voice, which I took for simple human fatigue, but which might have been resignation. I wish I’d paid more attention to Anne Marie back then, but I didn’t. Oh, why didn’t I? Why don’t we listen to the people we love? Is it because we have only so much listening in us, and so many very important things to tell ourselves?

  “Sam, what are you thinking?” Anne Marie asked again, because I hadn’t answered her, because I was still thinking about Camelot and the house.

  “Hello, life,” I said back.

  “Are you crying?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. I was crying, because I was so happy, because this was my new home, and because it was clean and perfect and I couldn’t imagine anyone knowing me here, anyone wanting to know me. My neighbors, were they ever to introduce themselves, and upon hearing that I was an arsonist and a murderer, would start talking about the virtues of Bermuda grass as opposed to Kentucky blue. I could not be normal in Amherst, but I could be normal in Camelot. I felt so happy, so grateful. I wanted to thank somebody. If there were any neighbors visible, I would have thanked them. But there weren’t any neighbors visible; they were all inside, minding their own business, and that was one of the things for which I was grateful.

  “Thank you so much,” I said to Anne Marie.

  “I guess you’re welcome,” she said, without having to ask what I was thanking her for, because that’s what our love was. We called the real estate agent and bought the house and said good-bye to the apartment over the Student Prince (it wouldn’t be a permanent good-bye, although I didn’t realize that at the time) and moved to Camelot, and for five years we lived there and I commuted my half-hour commute and the kids grew up a little and Anne Marie got a part-time supervisory job at the super housing-supply store, and for five years there was no story to tell and we were happy enough, as happy as anyone can expect to be. True, it took Anne Marie some time to find happiness: she cried the first year when she discovered that the fireplace was ornamental and always would be; she cried the second year when she found she could put her index finger through the surprisingly thin plaster walls without really trying so very hard and she did this repeatedly in her dismay, and the house probably still has the many finger holes to prove it; she cried the third year when our neighbors still didn’t know her name and she didn’t know theirs, either. This time she really cried and couldn’t stop, and I had to send the kids to stay with Anne Marie’s parents while she worked it out. But even Anne Marie seemed happy enough after a while, and if prison was my first not entirely unpleasant exile from the world, then this was my second, and not once was I recognized as the man who burned down the Emily Dickinson House, et cetera, and not once did I hear that voice, the voice inside me that asked, What else? What else? Not once, that is, until the man whose parents I accidentally killed in the Emily Dickinson House fire appeared at my front door one day, and then the voice returned and then I moved back in with my parents and reread those letters, and then the bond analysts showed up and started giving me a God-and-country hard time, and then people (not me! not me!) started setting fire to writers’ homes all over New England, and that’s when all the trouble started.

  2

  First, there was the man, the son whose mother (she was one of the Emily Dickinson House tour guides) and father happened, unknown to me, to be sharing a private, after-hours moment on Emily Dickinson’s bed when I accidentally burned the house down and killed them those many years before. He showed up in early November, on a Saturday, which was about right, since nothing ever happened in Camelot during the week. During the week, everyone worked and went to bed early and got up early and you couldn’t clip your toenails on your front porch for fear of bothering someone with the noise.

  Weekends were different, our chance to prove that we could pour gas out of a spout and into a hole and pull a cord and make noise and then cut some grass. I’d just finished cutting mine. There wasn’t much to say about it. It was short, and I’d cut it with a mower, the kind of mower all my neighbors used: one of those self-powered, space-age things where you stood on a platform and steered with levers at the handles. The mower moved so fast that it seemed to hover and basically did all the work for you. But still, I managed to work up a sweat while riding it, which caused me to take off my shirt, which got me in some trouble with my neighbors, my male neighbors (no women mowed lawns in Camelot; in this we were like the Muslims), who all wore big, padded recording-studio-type headphones while they mowed, and also huge, floppy hats and safety goggles and heavy-duty gardening gloves and long-sleeved oxford shirts and paint-spattered khaki pants tucked into the top of work boots. Except for tiny swatches of upper cheek and neck, there was no skin visible on them at all. My barechestedness ran counter to some unwritten subdivision behavioral code and had earned me some hard, disgusted stares from my neighbors. Every Saturday I reminded myself to remain fully clothed, but once I started sweating I could never remember to keep my shirt on and in this way fell into my own little unintentional piece of rebellion. I was like the patriot who kept forgetting not to dump the king’s tea into the harbor. This is not to say that because I sweated and took off my shirt and unintentionally rebelled, I was better than my neighbors. I wasn’t. I can’t remember any of their names, but they were all good people. I hope they’re well.

  I was sitting on my front porch, which was really just a concrete slab that we called a porch because we liked to sit on it. I’d just turned off my mower, the roar of it still in my ears, and so I didn’t hear the son of my accidental victims drive up, park his Jeep on the street, then walk up the driveway, didn’t know he was there at all until he was right in front of me. His name was Thomas, Thomas Coleman, although I didn’t know this yet. I was looking down in thought when he came up to
where I was sitting, and so I saw his feet before I saw the rest of him. He was wearing hiking boots, the waterproof kind.

  “Are you Sam Pulsifer?” he said. At the sound of the voice, a stillborn lump caught in my throat, because I thought I knew who this voice and those feet belonged to. I was sure it was a reporter. I hadn’t spoken to one in years, but I remembered the way they talked, always leading you away from your version of the truth and toward theirs; I remembered their tiny spiral-bound notebooks and the way they looked so eager to ask you their questions, to which they already knew the answers, and so disappointed in the way you answered them.

  “Yes, I’m Sam,” I said, then raised my eyes to look at the reporter and found that he wasn’t one, which I could tell at first glance. For one thing, no visible notebook. For another, no pen or pencil. And unlike the reporters I remembered, now that he’d asked his question and I’d answered it, he didn’t seem inclined to ask another one but instead just stood there and looked at me. I let him, and looked back, too. He was not so tall, but he was skinny, real skinny; I could tell this even under all his clothes. He was wearing lined jeans (I could see the red flannel peeking out from under the cuffs and over the hiking boots) and a flannel shirt over which he wore a corduroy shirt over which he wore a fleece vest, even though it was freakishly warm out for November, and if I’d known the guy better I would have told him that if he ate more he wouldn’t have to wear so many clothes. I was a walking, shirtless advertisement for that truth. And then there was his face, which was gaunt, and pale, so pale, and pockmarked, too; if my face was the flaming sun, then his was the cratered moon.

  “I’m Thomas Coleman,” he said.

  “OK, nice to meet you,” I said, and stuck out my hand, which Thomas didn’t take. His jaw started pumping a little bit, as if working up some saliva to spit on the hand I offered to him, and so I took it back.