An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [50]
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 shifting, 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 assured him it wasn't me, it wasn't me, and he assured 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. 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?
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 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,"