The Arsonist (17 page)

When she came to sit with him to wait for the water to boil, there was a little silence. He was frowning at her, as though something about her was confusing or disturbing to him. He leaned forward, almost squinting. He said, “Did you … make me come here?”

This seemed so absurd that she couldn’t help laughing. “With my magical powers, you mean?”

His eyes widened. “Do you …? Are you …?”

“No, no, no. I’m just teasing, Dad. I don’t have any
powers
. None.” He didn’t look reassured, and she made her voice gentle. “Maybe you just wanted to see me,” she said. “Maybe you came just for a visit.”

His face relaxed. “Yes. That must have been it.” He looked up at her, smiling. “Maybe I thought I’d like some tea.”

“Well, let me take care of that. Easily done.” She stood and busied herself setting up a little tray, poking around on the shelves and in the lower cupboards, assembling cups, saucers, milk, sugar. Two spoons, two old, faded cloth napkins from a wicker basket on one of the shelves. The teakettle whistled, and she poured water over the bags, then carried the tray to the table. Ceremoniously she set things out for him, for herself. She poured the tea and sat down. As she added the purling milk into her cup, she noted that he was putting spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his. She decided not to say anything.

As one, they raised their cups, they sipped.
Too hot
, she thought.
Goldilocks
. He set his down, too, and sat back and looked around again. Then he smiled at her. He said, “Sometimes I get … confused. You may have noticed.”

Frankie took a deep breath, she was so surprised, so unready for this admission. But she wanted to be steady for him. She said, “I have, Dad. Yes.”

“I think it’s something to do with my … memory.”

“Probably it’s not quite as good as it used to be.”

“Well, whose is?” He said this jauntily, cheerfully.

“So true,” she said.

They were silent for a minute. She felt the air stir and looked out the windows at the dark sky over the rising meadow.

He cleared his throat, as if to call her back. “But mine is getting rapidly worse,” he said.

“Yes, I think that is true.” She looked back at him. In spite of his appearance, he was
there
, she could see it in his eyes.

“I think it’s likely I have Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“It was a fascinating story. I read it.” He was almost smiling.

“What story?”

“Oh, one of the books. The books for the … the prize. The prize I’m working on.”

“The Harper Prize.”

“That’s right. A fine book, explaining it, how the brain is slowly more or less strangled. It would seem.”

She didn’t know what to say. In some ways, he sounded so much like himself, interested in this new subject he wanted to master.

He had some more tea and set his cup down. “Fascinating, too, in a way, to be on the receiving end of it.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“No, no,” he said. “No pity. You know the Larkin poem.”

“I don’t.”

He laughed, his sudden, gentle apology of a laugh that tilted his head slightly back. “I don’t either anymore, but for a few lines. ‘What do they imagine, the old fools?’ ” He smiled. “That’s me,” he said. “An old fool. Larkin describes the way one thinks as one descends, the way the past and the present become confused. And dreams, in the mix. It’s quite … true, I think.” He sat for a moment, looking at nothing—the table, the teacup: the blank look returned to his face. And then he seemed to gather himself. “The last line answers the question,” he said to her.

“What question?”

“ ‘What do they imagine?’ ” He raised his finger, as he often did, she thought—a gesture she would remember later. “ ‘We shall know.’ ”

She didn’t say anything.

“Your mother and I, we can’t really talk about it. But I want you to know this, that I do understand it. I know what’s happening to me.”

“All right.”

“Sylvia and I …” He trailed off, and shook his head.

He looked up, out the window, where the trees were bending sideways under the sudden audible lashing of the wind. He said softly, “Odd way. To disappear.”

“You’re
not
disappearing.”

“Oh.” He raised his eyes to her. “Yes. I am. When your brain changes, you become … another. There’s a story, in the book, about a man with a brain injury. A trauma. A sweet man, gentle. Who becomes profane.
Lewd
. This will happen more slowly to me, and doubtless in a different way. But like him, I will disappear. The consciousness I’ve cultivated with … well, with so much
vanity
, I suppose”—he lifted his chin and laughed once, lightly—“will go.” He sat, looking at his hands holding his teacup.

After a moment, he said, “It raises the question, doesn’t it: when a person is changing, as I am, at what point are they no longer who they were? The person … the person is partly the structure of the brain, it seems. So, I will be … someone else. I will cross a line. At some point.”

“It will be a long time, Dad. You have lots of time still to be you.” Her voice was flat, defiant.

“I think you’re trying to make me feel better, Frankie.” He smiled and looked utterly like himself. Alfie. Her father.

“Well, why wouldn’t I?” she said.

“Don’t.” His voice was gentle.

After a moment, she said, “All right.”

“What I’m trying to say to you is that it won’t be me it’s happening to anymore. It simply won’t matter, not to me. Not to who … I’ve been, before this, all my life. And that, my dear, is a comfort to me.”

“Cold comfort.” She could hear the anger in her voice.

“But comfort,” he said.

She reached across the table and put her hand on his. He turned his up, underneath hers, and held it. They sat that way for a moment.

Then he released her hand and sat back. They were quiet a minute more. The refrigerator kicked on with its intestinal rumble.

She felt a need to keep him talking, to turn the conversation to anything else, really—but to keep it going. “How is the rest of your reading? Reading for the prize?”

“Ah!” he said. And with pleasure visible in his face and audible in his voice, he launched himself. He spoke of another book he thought might be put forward and the reasons why.

When she had asked the right number of questions, when they’d fallen into a silence she was more comfortable with, she said, “Shall we walk back up together?”

“What a nice offer,” he said.

“I’ll just be a minute.” She went into the bathroom and quickly brushed her hair, which had curled wildly in the humid air. She put on lipstick. Then she went into the bedroom to change out of her work clothes, splattered here and there with dried joint compound. She was quick: she was aware of him, waiting in the kitchen, she worried that he’d get up and leave without her. Which would be fine, except that he’d agreed to wait. And she wasn’t sure he’d remember that.

But he was still sitting at the table when she emerged from the bedroom.
My sweet father
, she thought, thinking of his bravery in talking to her about his illness, of his elegance in turning then so easily—for her sake, really—back to the prize. She chose not to think, for the moment, of the various ways he’d creeped her out over the last few weeks.

He looked up at her. “I meant to tell you,” he said. “There was a fire.”

“I know, Dad.”

“No, there was another fire.
That’s
what I came here for—to tell you that.”

She stood there, momentarily speechless. This had moved too quickly for her—his shift from being so present to this, now, which she assumed was old news about one of the fires she already knew of.

But then it occurred to her that there
could
have been another fire. A fourth fire. Or would it be the fifth? But there was no good way to ascertain that with him, was there? No question that would make it clear.

“That’s just awful news, isn’t it?” she said, hoping she sounded concerned enough.

“Yes, it is,” he said. And got up.

Together they walked slowly up the road to the old farmhouse, chatting
about the weather, about Liz’s children, about the first of the wild blueberries, just ripening. A perfectly reasonable conversation. The rain started, lightly, just as they got to the back porch.

Sylvia looked up from her desk in the corner of the living room as they came in from the kitchen. Her eyes tightened, and moved quickly from one of them to the other. “Well, this is an unexpected pleasure.” She set down her pen.

“I would have called, except …” Frankie held her hands up. “No phone.”

“Was Alfie down with you?” Sylvia turned to him. “You went down to visit?” There was something sharp in her tone.

“Yes.” Alfie and Frankie said it together.

Sylvia’s lips pursed. “I wish you’d told me,” she said, after a second or two. She looked at her watch. “Well, may I offer you a drink?” she said to Frankie. She stood up. “It’s almost five. This would be on the up and up.”

“I will if you’ll join me.”

“I certainly will. Alfie? A drink?”

“No, no. I’m going to read for a bit, I think.”

“As you wish.”

Frankie followed her mother into the kitchen and sat down at the small white table. She looked out at the rain, falling gently but steadily now.

Her mother got an ice tray out of the refrigerator and stood at the sink, noisily whacking the cubes out. She fixed each of them a gin and tonic with a wedge of lime. She set out a plate and put crackers on it, and a thick slice of hard cheese. She brought this over to the table and sat down opposite Frankie. She turned on the light hanging on the wall over the table. Harsh lines leaped to her face. “What a gray, unpleasant day it’s turned into,” she said, looking out the window. “Clark and Liz got out just in time.”

Frankie thought what an odd verb choice that was:
got out
.

“What have
you
been doing all day?” Sylvia asked.

“Oh, Sheetrocking and rolling.” And then, to her quizzical face, “Applying joint compound to all the Sheetrock seams and the exposed screw heads at Liz’s house.”

“Ah!” she said. “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“It’s something to do. It makes me feel helpful, which I’m grateful for.”

“Yes, I can certainly understand
that
.”

“Can you?”

“Alfie’s not the only one who retired, you know.”

“Of course. I do know that.” Though she hadn’t given it much thought, her mother’s work. What it might have meant to her to give it up. Somehow they’d all always seen her work as primarily utilitarian, a matter of finances—they needed the money. It was Alfie’s work they talked about at the dinner table, Alfie’s work that led them from one home to another. Alfie’s work that was
important
. “So what do you imagine for yourself, in your retirement?” she asked.

“I suppose I can’t say, really. But something. Something that will let me find a way to feel … at home, here.”

This startled Frankie further, this turn of phrase. “But don’t you feel at home? I mean, it’s been your summer home for so long. And your family’s.”

“That’s so. Of course that’s so. But summer has always been vacation time. Time
away
from home. No, the only time it was really home was when I lived here through the year, with my grandmother.”

“That’s the time your parents were in South America, right?”

“Yes. They’d taken my brothers, but left me here.” She stopped for a moment, looking out the window as if seeing something there. Then she looked back at Frankie. “But I think in the end what that year made me see was how much it wasn’t my home.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh …” She shook her head, screwed up her face. “I don’t know. I was itchy to get out, that’s all. Everyone’s itchy to get out at that age. You certainly were.”

“And I did, didn’t I?”

“Very thoroughly, I would say.” She sipped at her drink and set it down. “No, the person who feels at home here is Alfie. He loved it from the get-go.”

Sylvia cut herself a slice of cheese and pushed the plate over toward Frankie. Without looking at her daughter, she said, “He just meandered down?”

“Yes. I’m not sure he knew why, exactly.” This was the first time Frankie had acknowledged aloud to her mother that she knew there was something wrong with Alfie.

“Thank you for bringing him back.”

“I’m happy to.” They were quiet a moment.

“I should have kept an eye on him, but I … I just didn’t.” Sylvia sighed.

“Is it Alzheimer’s disease, do you think?” There. She’d said the words, too.

And Sylvia didn’t flinch. “I don’t know,” she said. “He has an appointment in a couple of weeks to see a new doctor here for some tests. I’ve talked to this one ahead of time about my concerns. That was impossible in Bowman because the doctor there had been Alfie’s for so long that he wasn’t willing to discuss Alfie with me behind his back. This time we’re starting out that way—behind his back.” There was a kind of fury in her voice, but Frankie thought it was anger at the situation, at what she was being forced to do, rather than anger at Alfie, so she didn’t respond to it.

Instead she said to her mother, “He thinks it is. Alzheimer’s.”

“What do you mean?
Alfie
thinks it is?” She sounded incredulous.

“Yes. He’s read about it—well, haven’t we all? But he’s got a book about it, a prize book. Anyway, he was very articulate about it just now. He knows he’s …” She made a face. “
Disappearing
is the word he used.”

“He said that to you?”

There was something so sharp in her tone that Frankie thought she’d made a mistake—that she shouldn’t have started to talk about this with Sylvia. But she’d launched herself, she couldn’t retreat now. “Yes. I thought he was very brave.”

Sylvia was smiling. A bitter smile. “No doubt.” She had a long swallow of her gin and looked out the window again. “He wouldn’t dream of discussing it with me.”

Frankie was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “I’m sorry, Mother.”