An Arsonist's Guide To Writers' Homes In New England Part 4

In many of my mother's books, the troubled narrator has a telling dream at a crucial moment, and so I wasn't at all surprised that night when I had one. A telling dream, that is.

In my dream I was standing in a cupola, four stories in the air, on the very top of a sprawling, gray-s.h.i.+ngled mansion. The mansion backed up to the ocean, and there was a storm. The white-lipped, whip-backed waves crashed against the boats, which were coming unmoored in the surf, their lines snapping off like overextended rubber bands. The water was a bruise; the sky, an even darker, more violent blue. Up in the cupola, my back was to the water, facing inland toward a compound of five slightly smaller s.h.i.+ngled mansions, and I was holding a red plastic gasoline can by its handle, daintily, like a purse. The smaller mansions were all on fire: there was more flame than wood, more smoke than structure. But there were people still inside the buildings, and they were leaning out windows, clinging to trellises. Each one was holding books; they were all burdened by books. Some of them were throwing the books out the windows; some were lowering overflowing sacks of books down the trellises toward men waiting on the ground below. There was one woman on top of a roof. She was wearing a gauzy, nearly transparent nightgown. Her hair was on fire: the flames ringed her skull like a crown, dripped down her long, curly locks like wax. I couldn't see her face, but it was obvious, in the logic of the dream, that she was beautiful and necessary. She was leaning against the chimney, beating her head with one of the books as if to put out the fire. The book was a hardcover, though, and the woman quickly knocked herself unconscious. Slumped against the chimney the way she was, I could see that the woman had no underwear on: her black pubic hair looked like a tattoo against her pearl white stomach and thighs. One of the men on the ground saw this, too. He became distracted, understandably, and while gazing at the unconscious woman's exposed nether regions, he, too, was knocked unconscious by a falling sack of books. Another man knelt to attend to his fallen comrade, then looked up and pointed to the woman on the roof. Her nightgown was flickering and hissing in the fire; the book, still in her right hand, caught fire and exploded. A severe, sharp cry came from the men on the ground, from the men and women in the windows and on the trellises. It appeared to be the first book lost in the fire. A great despair washed over them all. The men and women abandoned hope, hurled themselves out the windows and off the trellises. The men on the ground below did not attempt to avoid the falling bodies and were crushed.

It was quite a dream, all right, and not at all the kind I usually had. I usually had the kind in which familiar people showed up in unlikely places, like the one in which I found my boss sitting at my kitchen table, drinking coffee, which I found interesting my boss had never been in my house and didn't even drink coffee but no one else did, and when I relayed these dreams to my family, their eyes glazed over as if they were having a dream of their own. No, this dream was different, and I wished my family were around so I could tell them about it and prove what sort of fantastic dream life old Sam Pulsifer was capable of having although I'd have to edit out the pubic-hair part for the kids. Or maybe I wouldn't have told them after all, because the dream didn't make me feel so hot: my head hurt and I was breathing hard. After a dream like that, you're grateful that it was just a dream, that no matter how bad your actual life, it couldn't be worse than your dream life. That's how I felt until I went downstairs (the house was empty again, my hangover more familiar and less terrible, the hangover potion on the table again less urgently needed, though I drank it anyway), opened the Springfield Republican Springfield Republican, and discovered that someone had set fire to the Edward Bellamy House in Chicopee, Ma.s.sachusetts, not twenty minutes from where I sat, reading about it.

At first I didn't remember that Bellamy was a writer, and, by extension, that his house was a writer's house. The headline read LOCAL LANDMARK RECEIVES MINOR FIRE DAMAGE, as though the minor fire damage had come in the mail. Only after reading a little bit did I discover that Bellamy had been a writer and that his most famous book was Looking Backward Looking Backward. Only then then did the author's name and his book sneak through the fog of my hangover and appear in my memory bank. I put down the paper, walked to my father's room, opened the end table drawer, rifled through the box of letters, and finally found it: a letter from Mr. Harvey Frazier of Chicopee, Ma.s.sachusetts, asking me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House. The letter had been mailed only fifteen years ago (so said the postmark on the envelope), but it was so crinkled and smudged and creased that it looked like an ancient artifact. I put the letter in my s.h.i.+rt pocket, put the shoe box back in its not-so-secret hiding place, then went back to the newspaper article: it said that the fire damage was minor and that the fire department said the cause of the fire was "suspicious." I knew what that meant: they'd called my fire "suspicious," too, even after they already knew I was the one who'd accidentally set it. did the author's name and his book sneak through the fog of my hangover and appear in my memory bank. I put down the paper, walked to my father's room, opened the end table drawer, rifled through the box of letters, and finally found it: a letter from Mr. Harvey Frazier of Chicopee, Ma.s.sachusetts, asking me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House. The letter had been mailed only fifteen years ago (so said the postmark on the envelope), but it was so crinkled and smudged and creased that it looked like an ancient artifact. I put the letter in my s.h.i.+rt pocket, put the shoe box back in its not-so-secret hiding place, then went back to the newspaper article: it said that the fire damage was minor and that the fire department said the cause of the fire was "suspicious." I knew what that meant: they'd called my fire "suspicious," too, even after they already knew I was the one who'd accidentally set it.

A confession: my mother never let me read detective novels when I was a child, not even child child detective novels. Once, when my mother caught me reading an Encyclopedia Brown book (it was, I believe, about the neighbor's cat and who had caused it to go missing), she confiscated it and said, "If you want to read a mystery, read this." She handed me Mark Twain's detective novels. Once, when my mother caught me reading an Encyclopedia Brown book (it was, I believe, about the neighbor's cat and who had caused it to go missing), she confiscated it and said, "If you want to read a mystery, read this." She handed me Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson Pudd'nhead Wilson, which, as far as I could tell, was not a mystery but instead a book about black people who weren't, and white people who weren't, either, and an outcast New York fingerprinter and some Europeans and Virginians in Missouri, and the only mystery as far as I was concerned was how these non-Missourians got to the state in the first place, and why they then stayed there for as long as they did.

My point: if I'd ever read a real detective novel, about a real mystery, then maybe I'd have known what to do next. Instead I muddled through the best I could. I seemed to remember hearing, or maybe seeing on TV, that detectives drank impressively, even (especially) while on the case. So I had a drink, the last beer in the fridge, left over from the previous night's family binge. While drinking, I thought about who might possibly have set fire to the Bellamy House. Thomas Coleman was the first person I thought of, obviously. I knew he was going to make more and greater trouble for me, and maybe this was it. He would burn down the Bellamy House and somehow blame it on me. But then again, how would he even know someone wanted me to burn down the Bellamy House in the first place? After all, the letter was here, in my s.h.i.+rt pocket; I patted it to make sure.

But if not Thomas Coleman, then who? Could it have been Mr. Harvey Frazier himself? After all, he'd been waiting such a long time, and maybe he felt he couldn't wait anymore. Or maybe it was someone else entirely, someone I obviously hadn't yet thought of. I didn't know, but I decided to visit Mr. Harvey Frazier and find out. How I would find out, I had no idea. Again, if I'd read the right books, I might have known how to be a proper detective. And if I hadn't quit my job at Pioneer Packaging and had something else to do, then maybe I would have been too busy to try to be one. And if I hadn't been all alone, if there had been someone else in the house, then maybe they would have warned me: maybe they would have told me not to go near the Edward Bellamy House, just to stay put and not go anywhere. anywhere.

But then again, maybe that's who a detective is: someone with nothing else to do but act like a detective and with no one around to tell him not to.

MR. HARVEY FRAZIER of Chicopee, Ma.s.sachusetts, was awfully cagey for an old guy and pretended not to recognize me or my name at first. And he was old old, at least eighty, and spooky, too, because he opened his door just as I was ready to knock on it, as if he were expecting me right at that moment right at that moment. Even though I was startled, I managed to say, "Sir, it's me, Sam Pulsifer," then unclenched my knocking fist and extended my hand for Mr. Frazier to shake. He didn't shake it; instead he said, "I was about to walk," and then he did, right past me and down the street. He was difficult to read, all right, and suddenly I wanted not only to know whether he'd set the fire or not, but also to know him him, to really know know why he wanted what he wanted, to know him in a way I hadn't known anyone else not my parents or Anne Marie or the kids and you could say I was making up for lost time and missed opportunities as I chased after Mr. Frazier. why he wanted what he wanted, to know him in a way I hadn't known anyone else not my parents or Anne Marie or the kids and you could say I was making up for lost time and missed opportunities as I chased after Mr. Frazier.

He was fast, too. For an old guy. Or maybe the speed was part of his anger at me for not responding to his letter for so long. I jogged until I caught up with him, and then said, "A walk, huh?" and when he didn't take this conversational bait, I asked, "Where to?"

"Store," he said. He spoke with that serious, terse Yankee accent that always makes me feel I've done something wrong, and when he said "store," he sounded so ancient and formal that I imagined he was walking to an old-fas.h.i.+oned family-owned store, where he was going to buy something obsolete, like dry goods, whatever dry goods might be, or maybe tobacco, maybe some good-smelling pipe tobacco. But no, scratch that; Mr. Frazier didn't smoke and never had, I was guessing, not even before it was known to cause cancer, because tobacco was expensive or at least an expense and Mr. Frazier was a tight-a.s.s. I knew this because Mr. Frazier was wearing brown wool pants and a brown cardigan sweater and a houndstooth sport coat that were worn down to the last thin layer of fabric. He probably hadn't bought new clothes in thirty years, and he'd probably bought the clothes he had on at a department store whose name he wouldn't be able to remember, nor its location, although no doubt it was in a downtown somewhere, and no doubt it had gone out of business by now. Mr. Frazier would think the idea of new clothes silly. Absolutely ridiculous. Especially if you bought clothes made out of good, durable wool, which his had probably been before he'd worn them all to h.e.l.l, which was how I knew he was a tighta.s.s. I mean no disrespect when I say this. I was merely trying to get into his head, trying to get a bead on his whole psychology.

"What are you getting at the store?"

"Newspaper," he said, and I noticed that he didn't use articles, either, and I added that to his psychological profile. A few blocks ahead of us I could see a big chain supermarket, a Super Stop and Shop, and not a "store" at all. If this was where we were headed, I would add delusional delusional to his profile while I had it out and was working on it. to his profile while I had it out and was working on it.

Another thing about Mr. Frazier's getup: it was excessively heavy for the very warm Indian summer November day that it was, and it was also an excessively formal getup for a daily trip to the supermarket or store or wherever it was we were headed. Or maybe it was just our immediate surroundings that made it seem so. Because the neighborhood was really gone, and Mr. Frazier was the best-looking thing in it. There was garbage everywhere bottles, egg cartons, diapers and almost no cans to put it in. On the sidewalk someone had written in pink chalk, "Shamequa eat p.u.s.s.y." It was too bad because the neighborhood had once been very pretty, you could tell. The big white houses had probably been Victorian at one point, but they had been added onto so often that they now defied architectural cla.s.sification. Yes, I bet the houses had once been owned by families, good, respectable families, and they'd probably all dressed like Mr. Frazier, and the families had made sure that the houses had straight ridgepoles and well-pointed chimneys and elm trees and squirrels, and they, the families, could do this because they had jobs at Pratt and Whitney making airplanes or at the Indian motorcycle plant making Indian motorcycles or at Monarch making insurance premiums. But at some point between the wars, people started losing their jobs. It's an old story. They lost their jobs and then couldn't afford to keep their ridgepoles straight or their chimneys erect or their homes single-family, and the elm trees began dying and so did the people, or they moved and then then died, and the houses were aluminum-sided and divided into apartments-the multiple mailboxes, the tangled and bunched telephone and power lines, and the rusted cars parked curbside told me so. The neighborhood wasn't Mr. Frazier's anymore, it didn't need him, and how could this not make him good and mad? died, and the houses were aluminum-sided and divided into apartments-the multiple mailboxes, the tangled and bunched telephone and power lines, and the rusted cars parked curbside told me so. The neighborhood wasn't Mr. Frazier's anymore, it didn't need him, and how could this not make him good and mad?

Just then we pa.s.sed our first two human beings: two boys sitting on the front steps of one of those multifamily homes. They were s.h.i.+rtless and wore shorts that were not properly shorts, because they came down well past the knee. The boys were emaciated and their chests were as concave as mine had once been, and both of them had their nipples pierced with silver hoops. I wondered if air had escaped from the boys' chests with the piercing.

"Good afternoon," Mr. Frazier said as he pa.s.sed them.

"f.u.c.ked up up," one of the boys said. When he said the word "f.u.c.ked," he didn't exactly enunciate the c c and the and the k k but slurred the word straight into the final but slurred the word straight into the final d d. The other boy didn't say anything but just laughed and shook his head.

I wanted to say something to the boys, something like, Hey, what's that? What did you say? Hey, what's that? What did you say? or maybe, or maybe, Why don't you show some respect, punk? Why don't you show some respect, punk? But I was following Mr. Frazier's lead and he kept walking and so did I. He had to know, of course, that the boys were talking to him, but he probably didn't know to what exactly they were referring, and neither did I. Something was f.u.c.ked up, that much was clear, and it wasn't Mr. Frazier, no matter what the boys said. If anything was f.u.c.ked up, it was the boys. Maybe they weren't really boys at all: maybe they were grown men dressing like boys and acting like boys and not working adult jobs and not supporting their families, if they had families, and swearing like black people were supposed to swear, even though the boys looked white. The word But I was following Mr. Frazier's lead and he kept walking and so did I. He had to know, of course, that the boys were talking to him, but he probably didn't know to what exactly they were referring, and neither did I. Something was f.u.c.ked up, that much was clear, and it wasn't Mr. Frazier, no matter what the boys said. If anything was f.u.c.ked up, it was the boys. Maybe they weren't really boys at all: maybe they were grown men dressing like boys and acting like boys and not working adult jobs and not supporting their families, if they had families, and swearing like black people were supposed to swear, even though the boys looked white. The word wigger wigger came to mind -it was a word I'd once heard on television but I quickly got rid of it and didn't mention the word to Mr. Frazier. No, Mr. Frazier did not want any new words in his mouth or head; I knew this without having to ask. There were enough words in the world already, and too many of them were curse words, and too many young people cursed in such a way that you could not discern the object of the swearing and in such a way that made you think that this was simply the way they talked to one another, to strangers and it made it difficult to tell whether the swearing was friendly or threatening, whether the swearing was black swearing or white swearing, whether there was a difference, whether it mattered to the person who was being cursed, if he was actually being cursed. I imagined poor Mr. Frazier all alone in his house at night, his lights off and him standing at the front windows, not being able to sleep, just looking at the neighborhood, which is even darker than his house and so, so strange to him. Somewhere out there, Shamequa is eating p.u.s.s.y and then testifying to that fact on the sidewalk with her pink chalk, and the trash is rolling through the streets like tumbleweed, and the words "f.u.c.ked up, f.u.c.ked up, f.u.c.ked up" are blowing in the wind, and you can't get away from them or know if they refer to you or to someone else. It was f.u.c.ked up, all right. For Mr. Frazier, not knowing whether he was being cursed at or not must have seemed liked the most f.u.c.ked up thing of all. came to mind -it was a word I'd once heard on television but I quickly got rid of it and didn't mention the word to Mr. Frazier. No, Mr. Frazier did not want any new words in his mouth or head; I knew this without having to ask. There were enough words in the world already, and too many of them were curse words, and too many young people cursed in such a way that you could not discern the object of the swearing and in such a way that made you think that this was simply the way they talked to one another, to strangers and it made it difficult to tell whether the swearing was friendly or threatening, whether the swearing was black swearing or white swearing, whether there was a difference, whether it mattered to the person who was being cursed, if he was actually being cursed. I imagined poor Mr. Frazier all alone in his house at night, his lights off and him standing at the front windows, not being able to sleep, just looking at the neighborhood, which is even darker than his house and so, so strange to him. Somewhere out there, Shamequa is eating p.u.s.s.y and then testifying to that fact on the sidewalk with her pink chalk, and the trash is rolling through the streets like tumbleweed, and the words "f.u.c.ked up, f.u.c.ked up, f.u.c.ked up" are blowing in the wind, and you can't get away from them or know if they refer to you or to someone else. It was f.u.c.ked up, all right. For Mr. Frazier, not knowing whether he was being cursed at or not must have seemed liked the most f.u.c.ked up thing of all.

By the time we got to the store it was a Super Stop and Shop all right, but I was on Mr. Frazier's side now, and so it was a store I was in something like agreement with the boys: it was f.u.c.ked up f.u.c.ked up, "it" being the store itself, which was more parking lot than building. And it was f.u.c.ked up that those boys could speak to Mr. Frazier, that sweet guy, the way they had and suffer no consequences. Mr. Frazier had had to be angry, at least angry enough to burn down a house or to want someone else to burn it down. But why the Edward Bellamy House? That's what I didn't understand. to be angry, at least angry enough to burn down a house or to want someone else to burn it down. But why the Edward Bellamy House? That's what I didn't understand.

"Hey, what do you say, Mr. Frazier?" I said to him. "I have a couple questions for you."

Mr. Frazier didn't respond. He bought his paper from the machine outside the store (who knows why? Maybe as long as he didn't enter the building, he could in good conscience continue calling it a store), then turned and began walking back home. He was really setting a good pace, and I broke a sweat trying to catch up with him. Soon after I did, we pa.s.sed by those boys again, still sitting on the steps, as if waiting for us. You don't often get a second chance in this world to say what you wanted to say, or ask what you wanted to ask. So I stopped in front of them and grabbed a fistful of Mr. Frazier's jacket to get him to stop, too. Mr. Frazier didn't turn to face the boys but, like a spooked horse, looked at them sideways. I turned to face them, though, and I could feel my face get fiery red and I hoped that it shone on the boys like a beacon of sorts.

"Earlier," I said to the boys, "you said something to Mr. Frazier here."

"True," one of the boys said. They both looked exactly the same, with their faint mustaches, their flat alabaster stomachs, their nipple rings glinting and glistening in the sun.

"Well," I said, "I'd like you to apologize to him. I think he deserves an apology."

One of the boys shook his head, and said, "f.u.c.ked up." He said this without malice or slyness or any emotion at all. It was delivered as a statement of fact.

"Hey!" I said, because I couldn't take it anymore. Mr. Frazier had so much life left in him, but even if he hadn't, even when old people were taking up s.p.a.ce and air, they'd lived through a lot and you had to give them some credit and respect. I moved toward the boys in what I hoped was a menacing fas.h.i.+on. When I did so, they stood up-also menacingly-and I noticed that their white socks were pulled up very high, probably to their knees (I couldn't tell exactly, because of the length of their shorts). Why pull your socks so high? There was only one reason I could think of. these were the kind of guys who might have knives in their socks, except the socks were so high they could probably have hidden a short sword in there. Me, I had no weapons anywhere. Plus, my socks were the ankle-high kind and couldn't possibly harbor anything dangerous. I backed away from the boys, palms facing out, and as I backpedaled I whispered to Mr. Frazier, "Let's get out of here."

But Mr. Frazier ignored me. He turned his head slowly and slightly to look at the boys. Even that head-turning gesture was impressive. I wondered if it occurred to the boys how inferior they were to him. It was like watching a world-weary colossus swiveling to ask the puny villagers why they were pelting him with rocks. "To what are you referring?" Mr. Frazier said to the boy who'd spoken earlier.

"It's hot and you wearing some sleigh-riding sleigh-riding clothes, dude," the boy said, and then fanned himself with his left hand to remind us all of the heat. clothes, dude," the boy said, and then fanned himself with his left hand to remind us all of the heat.

"f.u.c.ked up," the other boy said.

"I see," Mr. Frazier said, and resumed his walking, beating the now rolled-up newspaper against his leg, keeping time with his outrage, which must have been huge. I fixed the boys with one last meaningful stare and then, before I could see how they'd respond, turned and ran until I caught up with Mr. Frazier.

His clothes: they were what was f.u.c.ked up, and all of a sudden Mr. Frazier was hot, very hot, his face nearly as red as mine ever got. He stopped beating his leg with the paper and began using it as a fan. The fanning would do no good; I knew this from experience because we both had powerful heating mechanisms inside us, big furnaces of shame and rage somewhere down there around our hearts and livers and other inner organs, and you can't cool the inside from outside. Mr. Frazier learned this truth quickly. There was an overflowing trash can on the corner and Mr. Frazier tossed the newspaper on top of the heap and crossed against the light, daring traffic to hit him, us. But there was no traffic and we reached the other side unscathed.

He kept walking, beating his leg with his hand (I bet he already missed his newspaper). I didn't say a word; I felt bad for the old guy. He was in worse shape than before I'd arrived, I could see that, and as if to ill.u.s.trate the point, he sat down right on the curb. I sat down next to him, glad for the rest. Like me, Mr. Frazier was breathing heavily, and again I feared for his heart and what I had done to it. Yes, I felt bad for him, and for myself, too, which has to be the truest kind of empathy. I wanted to help him but didn't know how. Was it possible that I was incapable of helping someone? It didn't seem fair. Was it possible that there was no such thing as fair? These were my questions, and I was about to think of others when I looked up and noticed that we were sitting in front of the Edward Bellamy House. There was a big, handsome brown wooden sign on the house that said so. I could read it clearly from our spot on the curb.

"Hey," I said, "there it is." And in my excitement, I pulled Mr. Frazier to his feet. It wasn't difficult: there wasn't much weight to him beyond his clothes. I pulled him up and dragged him across the sidewalk and to the house. I don't know how I missed it in the first place. Next to Mr. Frazier it was the best-looking thing in the neighborhood, even though someone had tried to torch it: it was gray with green trim and a neatly mowed lawn and electric candles glowing in the windows and a picket fence outside and even an antique black iron boot sc.r.a.per next to the front door. It was pretty. It was very, very pretty. You wouldn't have noticed anything was wrong with it except that it was ringed by yellow police tape, and there were some faint black singe marks near the foundation. It was like looking at a beautiful woman who'd just gotten a bad haircut. After all the ugliness we'd seen in the neighborhood, its beauty was a fresh, cool breeze on a hot day, and I still couldn't figure out why Mr. Frazier would want to burn it down. Why not burn the boys' house down if they were bugging him so? To burn this handsome old house was screwy and made no sense.

"Why?" I asked him. "Why would you want to burn that beautiful house down?" As I asked the question, I realized the answer was right in his letter, which I'd skimmed, but only far enough to know what what Mr. Frazier wanted me to burn and not Mr. Frazier wanted me to burn and not why why. So I pulled the letter out of my jacket pocket. But before it was all the way out, Mr. Frazier s.n.a.t.c.hed it away from me. I didn't even see his hand come between mine and the letter. His reflexes were that incredible. He was quite an old guy.

But he wasn't much of a reader, at least not without his gla.s.ses. It must have taken him half an hour to get through that letter, which he held right up to his face.

"Mr. Frazier," I said, "why don't you let me read that for you? It'll go faster."

He ignored me and was right to do so. Because I was wrong about his eyesight; or maybe I was right, but it had nothing to do with the glacial pace of his reading. It was obvious that Mr. Frazier simply loved what he was doing. He was like my mother in this respect. He really knew how to read and get something out of it, too, and while he was reading, his face started going through phases, like the moon. He made reading seem like something n.o.ble and worth doing life-altering, even. I again cursed myself for giving up reading so many years ago and vowed to continue reading Morgan Taylor's fraudulent memoir just as soon as Mr. Frazier finished with the letter.

Finally he did. I knew this because even though it appeared he was still reading his face was still very close to the letter I heard this sound, this familiar, repet.i.tive, guttural sound, and when I looked closely I saw that Mr. Frazier was crying, and his tears were getting all over the letter.

"Please, Mr. Frazier," I said, "don't do that, don't hey, why are you crying?"

"I miss you," he said in between heaving sobs.

And oh, that was terrible, much worse than the crying! Except that I couldn't figure out whom he was missing. It wasn't me, I knew that. For one, I was right there, next to him; for another, he wasn't looking at me. First Mr. Frazier stared at the letter; then he raised his head and seemed to look at an American flag sticking out of the porch flagpole stand. "I miss you," he said again, in the direction of the flag this time. So I walked over, yanked the flag out of its stand, and handed it to Mr. Frazier. But that flag didn't seem to be the thing he was missing: he immediately dropped it on the sidewalk and started crying again, really crying. I thought for sure his heart was going to give out this time, just fall out of his chest and right onto the sidewalk.

"Oh, I'm all alone, all alone," Mr. Frazier said. Then it was my heart I thought was going to give out. And then it was me who started crying: we were a duo of weepers, all right; we probably scared away the neighborhood cats.

"I'm all alone," he said again.

"I know," I said. "I'm all alone, too." Because no one was more expert in loneliness than yours truly: there is nothing more lonely than being an eighteen-year-old accidental arsonist and murderer and convict and virgin. So I told him that story, which of course he already knew in part. And because I had so much more story to tell and so many words with which to tell it, I went on a philosophical jag and told him that we spend most of our lives running away from loneliness, only to turn around and go and search it out, and as proof, I mentioned how I'd lied to my family for years because I was afraid to be alone, and then lied again on top of the lying, and in doing so I'd pretty much guaranteed that I would would be alone. Yes, even though I didn't know what the letter said, I knew what Mr. Frazier was talking about and why he would want to burn down the Edward Bellamy House and make a good, roaring fire out of the thing. I had seen and heard the reasons myself: the boys had told Mr. Frazier that he didn't look like them, or, I guessed, like anyone else in the neighborhood, told him in so many obscene words that he didn't belong anymore, that he was all alone. This was where the fire came in, because after all, you couldn't feel lonely sitting toes wiggling in front of a fire. This was a known fact: even if you were all alone in the world, as long as there was a fire (and the Bellamy House was the biggest, most beautiful house in the neighborhood, and so logically it would also make the biggest, most beautiful fire), you could stare into it and feel its heat and it would remind you of another, happier time, a time long ago when the world belonged to you, when you understood it, when you could live in it for just a few d.a.m.n be alone. Yes, even though I didn't know what the letter said, I knew what Mr. Frazier was talking about and why he would want to burn down the Edward Bellamy House and make a good, roaring fire out of the thing. I had seen and heard the reasons myself: the boys had told Mr. Frazier that he didn't look like them, or, I guessed, like anyone else in the neighborhood, told him in so many obscene words that he didn't belong anymore, that he was all alone. This was where the fire came in, because after all, you couldn't feel lonely sitting toes wiggling in front of a fire. This was a known fact: even if you were all alone in the world, as long as there was a fire (and the Bellamy House was the biggest, most beautiful house in the neighborhood, and so logically it would also make the biggest, most beautiful fire), you could stare into it and feel its heat and it would remind you of another, happier time, a time long ago when the world belonged to you, when you understood it, when you could live in it for just a few d.a.m.n minutes minutes and not feel so lonely and scared and angry. "You're not alone, Harvey," I told him. "You're just not." and not feel so lonely and scared and angry. "You're not alone, Harvey," I told him. "You're just not."

What was Mr. Frazier's response to this? He said (he was stone faced and dry eyed at this point), "Did you just call me Harvey?"

I thought he was objecting to my informality, and so I said, "Yes, sir, I'm sorry, Mr. Frazier."

"Harvey was my brother," he said. "My name is Charles."

At first I thought Mr. Frazier was lying, that he'd made up a brother out of thin air and as a proxy for his own wishes. As a kid I'd used this brother trick many a time myself, like when I accidentally threw a baseball through someone's window, or accidentally ate someone else's lunch in the cafeteria, or accidentally backed into someone's car in the high school parking lot after the junior prom, and I would have used it after accidentally burning down the Emily d.i.c.kinson House if I'd been thinking on my feet. But I realized Mr. Frazier wasn't making up his brother; making up a brother is easy, but it's much more difficult to cry convincingly about how much you miss the made-up brother when he's gone.

"OK," I said. "But why exactly did your brother want me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House?"

"Because he was. . . " And here he paused as if trying to understand his brother's reasons. "Because he was odd," Mr. Frazier finally said. "He had problems."

"I bet he was a reader, your brother, like you," I said.

"Yes," Mr. Frazier said. "He read too much. That was one of Harvey's problems. The world wasn't enough like the books. It was always disappointing him. But at least he had the position at the Bellamy House ..."

"Let me guess," I said, awed by the serendipity of it all. "He was a tour guide."

Mr. Frazier nodded. "He was a tour guide until the state had budget problems and they cut his position."

"And that really disappointed him," I guessed.

"Correct."

"And so he wanted me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House because he got fired."

"I suppose so."

"And now he's dead," I said, wanting to get all the straight answers while Mr. Frazier was in the mood to field the questions. "He's dead and you miss him."

For a minute I thought Mr. Frazier was going to start crying again, but he didn't. He looked at me a long time: once again his face started s.h.i.+fting, from anger to grief to resignation to nostalgia he went all the way through the range of human emotions. He might even have smirked a little, no small accomplishment for the grave old Yankee he was. Finally Mr. Frazier said wistfully, "Yes, I do."

"And so you finally couldn't wait for me anymore, and you took it upon yourself to set fire to the Bellamy House." It just came out of my mouth like that, as if I knew the truth and was only waiting for Mr. Frazier to congratulate me for knowing it.

Except he didn't. "No, no," Mr. Frazier said. He seemed genuinely surprised that I'd think such a thing. He even brushed off the front of his sport coat with the back of both hands, as though my accusation were lint.

"Well, who did, then?"

"I thought it was you," he said.

I a.s.sured him it wasn't me, it wasn't me, and he a.s.sured me again that it wasn't him, and we went around and around like this until we'd convinced each other of our innocence (was this a bad quality in a detective, I wondered, to be so easily convinced of a suspect's innocence?) and there was nothing more to say. I said my good-bye, shook his hand, and headed toward the van. Then I remembered I had one more question. When I turned around, Mr. Frazier was already on his porch I saw now that his house was just three houses away from the Edward Bellamy House and I asked him, "Hey, what's that famous book that Edward Bellamy wrote, again?"

At that Mr. Frazier really perked up; you could almost smell the book learning come out of him, out of his pores. "He wrote the novel Looking Backward Looking Backward. Among other, lesser works."

"Looking Backward," I repeated. "What was it about?"

"A utopia," he said before closing the door to his house behind him. He'd taken his brother's letter with him, I realized after the door was closed, but I decided to let Mr. Frazier keep it. Maybe he would cherish it, the way my father obviously cherished all those letters to me. Maybe Mr. Frazier would hold his brother's letter close to him and feel less lonely. In any case, I just let him keep it. This turned out, much later, to be something of a mistake on my part, but how was I to know that at the time? How are we supposed to recognize our mistakes before they become mistakes? Where is the book that can teach us that? that?

WHEN I GOT HOME it was just after five. I found my father in the living room, sitting on the exercise bike. He was dressed in gray gym shorts and a faded red tank top, and if he'd been wearing a headband, he'd have looked a lot like that fitness instructor who was so obviously gay that you thought he probably wasn't. My father wasn't pedaling the bike he was just sitting there with his feet on the pedals but I thought it was a huge accomplishment that he'd even managed to mount the thing in the first place. He'd even broken a little sweat. My father was drinking one of his forty-ounce Knickerbockers (someone must have gone to the store, unless he had a private stash); propped up in front of him, on the exercise bike's magazine stand, was Morgan Taylor's book. My father was flipping through the book, skipping forward one hundred pages and then back fifty, as though he'd never read a book before and wasn't sure how it was supposed to go. I couldn't tell how much of the book my father had actually read, but I could could tell he was reading: the good half of his mouth was moving along with the words, the words Morgan had stolen from him. tell he was reading: the good half of his mouth was moving along with the words, the words Morgan had stolen from him.

"Oh, hey, I'm really sorry about that, Dad," I said. He looked up when I spoke, and dropped the book off the stand and onto the floor, which was just about what that book deserved. I picked the book up, walked over to the hall, and threw it into the open front-hall closet, just to show what I thought of the book. "That guy had no right."

"No ... right," my father repeated: repet.i.tion, I'd learned by now, was his version of normal communication, the way jokes are for some people and sign language is for others.

"It's my fault, really," I said. "I'm the one who told him those stories about you."

"About ... me?"

"About where you went, what you did when you left us."

"You ... did?" my father asked. Only then, as though he was on tape delay, did his eyes slowly move through the air, following the book's trajectory. His eyes rested for a minute on the hall closet, as if trying to picture the book there among the winter coats and file cabinets and partnerless shoes he knew to be inside. "No ... right," he said again. My father looked at me in displeasure, then took an especially angry pull on his beer.

"I know," I said, bowing my head. "I'm so sorry."

We sat there for a while in silence, me ashamed, my father angry, waiting for our third to come and break the impa.s.se. Because this is what it also means to be in a family: to have two of its members break the family and then wait around for a third to make it whole again.

Finally, after fifteen minutes or so (my father had a cooler of beer near the base of the exercise bike and drank two beers, but he didn't offer me one and I didn't blame him), my mother showed up. She wasn't wearing exercise clothes: she was wearing green corduroy pants and a white s.h.i.+rt that somebody, for some reason, might call a blouse and not a s.h.i.+rt, and brown leather boots. She looked cla.s.sy, regal, like a man without being at all manlike, like Katharine Hepburn but without the shakes or the Spencer Tracy. She looked young, too, not at all like the fifty-nine-year-old woman I knew her to be. Her face was flushed healthy and outdoorsy in a way that made you think of a commercial for the most expensive, physician-endorsed kind of lip balm. My mother was carrying a twelve-pack of Knickerbocker: she freed one of the cans from the cardboard, threw it to me, and said, "I don't care why you're so gloomy, but stop." Then she turned to my father and said, "You, too."

"OK," I said, and my father grunted something that also sounded affirmative. I cracked the beer, took a long drink of it, and asked, "Hey, what did you do today?" Because it occurred to me that this is what family members ask one another after a long day, and it also occurred to me that I had no idea what my mother had done the previous three days I'd been home, either.

My mother was taking a slug of her beer when I asked this, and it was weird: there was a slight pause in her drinking, a hitch in her gulp, a slight but noticeable arrest in her imbibing, before she continued her drinking, finis.h.i.+ng the whole beer in one long swallow, as a matter of fact. "Work," she said, and then, without looking at me, she tossed another full can of beer at me, even though I was only half-done with the first one.

"What about you, Dad?" I asked. "What did you do today?"

It was more difficult to read my father's reaction, since he had so few of them and they were so spastic and incomprehensible to begin with. But I did notice this: my father glanced pleadingly at the television, as though asking it for help. Then he looked at his cooler, which was apparently empty, and to the cooler he said finally, "Work." As if in reward for his giving the right answer, my mother tossed my father a beer, the way a trainer throws a seal a fish. My father amazingly caught it, too, although in doing so, he nearly capsized the bike, and I had to run over and catch him and it before they crashed to the floor.

"What about you, Sam," my mother asked. "What did you you do today?" do today?"

I didn't know at the time whether my parents were lying or not, but I did know that it appeared appeared as though they were, and I decided then and there as a poorly read and unschooled detective learning on the fly that the key to telling lies is to act the opposite of those who might be liars. I looked my mother square in the eye and said, "Nothing," and then looked my father in the eye and said, "Nothing," even though he hadn't asked the question, which I'll admit probably hurt my credibility some. But while I was looking them in the eye, I was also wondering if they'd read the morning paper (I'd left it on the dining room table, but it wasn't there now), if they knew about the Bellamy House fire, if my father knew that I'd been looking through those letters and had even taken (and now lost) one, if my mother even knew about the letters at all. Who knew what that was the operative question for all of us. as though they were, and I decided then and there as a poorly read and unschooled detective learning on the fly that the key to telling lies is to act the opposite of those who might be liars. I looked my mother square in the eye and said, "Nothing," and then looked my father in the eye and said, "Nothing," even though he hadn't asked the question, which I'll admit probably hurt my credibility some. But while I was looking them in the eye, I was also wondering if they'd read the morning paper (I'd left it on the dining room table, but it wasn't there now), if they knew about the Bellamy House fire, if my father knew that I'd been looking through those letters and had even taken (and now lost) one, if my mother even knew about the letters at all. Who knew what that was the operative question for all of us.

"Well," my mother said, "we went to work and you did nothing. Another normal day."

"Just like it used to be," I said, thinking about when I was a kid and they would go to work, or said they did, and I did nothing, or said I did. We all drank to that, as was not true when I was a child, and drank some more, and they seemed to forget about the whole thing. My parents were very wise in their forgetting, of course, amnesia being, like a fixed mortgage, the thing that keeps your house your house. But I wasn't wise. I didn't forget. I got drunker and drunker, but still, the whole time I was thinking about my parents' normal days and whether they were anything like my normal day, and I was still thinking about this as I went upstairs. I took off my watch before climbing into bed. It's the expensive, indestructible sort of watch that tells you things the barometric pressure, wind speed, and high tide in the second-largest city in Sri Lanka, for instance that you don't necessarily need to know, but two of the useful things it does tell you are the time and the day of the week. And right then, my watch was telling me the time was 11:21 P.M. and the day of the week was Sat.u.r.day. It was Sat.u.r.day. "It is Sat.u.r.day," I said out loud, making it official. My parents had gone to work on a Sat.u.r.day, or said they had. For my father this wasn't so strange: apparently you could edit or not edit books on whatever day you wanted, and he'd always kept irregular work hours and days. But what sort of teacher goes to work on a Sat.u.r.day? The question exhausted me, and I fell asleep before I could begin to answer it. I had already looked into the Edward Bellamy House fire and now I was going to have to look into this, too. As everyone knows, once you start looking into one thing, you can't help but start looking into others.

9

And once you start looking into others, then apparently you can't stop others from looking into you. I learned this truth the next day when I woke up and found Thomas Coleman leaning over my bed, his face far too close to my own, as if trying to make sure I was breathing.

"What do you think you're doing?" he asked.

"What?" I said, and then, "Hey!" and so on as I scrambled out of my bed, threw on some clothes (like the first time I'd met Thomas, I was half-dressed and thought that maybe our second meeting would go better if I were fully clothed), went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and walked downstairs, Thomas following me everywhere I went until I settled at the dining room table, where my hangover potion and "Drink me" note were waiting. I sat down and did what the note told me to. Thomas was still standing; he looked more substantial than he had the first time I saw him, which had been less than a week earlier. It seemed as though he'd put on some weight; even his hair looked a little thicker and had a little wave to it now, and there was a little color to his face, and all in all he looked like a matinee idol almost all the way recovered from cancer and chemo.

"What do you think you're doing?" Thomas asked me again.

I didn't respond, this being one of the all-time most difficult questions to answer, especially if you're not doing anything or think you're not doing anything.