An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (34 page)

One of the things it means to get older is that you start, in the overlong telling of your life’s story, to introduce each scene like so: “Here I was, in
_——
again, for the first time in
_——
years.” Which is just another reason you stay at home, or at least another reason the people listening to your story
wished
you had stayed at home.

But I hadn’t, and here I was, in Springfield again for the first time in five years. It was much grimmer than I remembered. Main Street was absolutely deserted; the check-cashing places that had replaced the Italian restaurants and candy stores were boarded up. Maybe there were no checks left to cash in the city. Half the bulbs on the Paramount Theatre were burned out, which didn’t matter because the marquee was blank and there was nothing playing there anyway. The gray concrete civic center — where I had seen this minor league hockey game and taken Anne Marie and the kids to see that Greatest Show on Earth — was closed for renovation, ringed by a ten-foot-high plywood fence, on which signs begged you to
EXCUSE OUR MESS!!
The grand old buildings lining Court Square — the courthouse, Symphony Hall, the Unitarian church — were still grand and illuminated by blindingly powerful spotlights, maybe to discourage looters. The barbershop next to the courthouse had clearly been closed for some time — its pole was stock still, its reds and blues faded — even though there was a sign in its window insisting it had been open since 1892. Kitty-corner to the barbershop, on the east side of Court Square, was an old storefront filled with dozens of discarded radiators, arranged in neat rows as though on display, as though to teach passersby something about the limitations of steam heat. I’ve never seen such a desolate place; there hadn’t even been any snow to help cover it up. Clearly, even the snow had decided the place was beyond help.

The entrance to the Student Prince was in an alley, just off Court Square. The door was solid wood, so you couldn’t see if there was light or darkness on the other side of it. There was no noise coming from inside, no music or human voices or clanging of dishes and glasses. I looked up, and there was Anne Marie’s and my old apartment, where we’d rearranged our furniture and bred our children. The windows were dark, as were the windows in every other apartment in the building. The wind was up, and so cold, but it, too, was completely and eerily quiet, as though Springfield didn’t deserve the wind’s
whoosh
and
roar
. It was one of those moments when the whole world felt empty, as if you were the only one in it and you wished you weren’t, wished you were in whatever world or antiworld all the people had fled to. It occurred to me that Anne Marie had lied to me about my mother’s working there. Why she would lie to me about
that
, I had no idea, except that maybe I would open the door and see the Student Prince was empty, and that would be a metaphor for the rest of my life.

But the Student Prince wasn’t empty. It was fire-code-violation full. Even though the Student Prince had three cavernous rooms with high shelves loaded down with German beer steins and coats of arms and Bavarian gewgaws from days gone by — even so, the place was full. Every table was taken and there was a line of people waiting to sit at them. It seemed as though every Springfieldian, past and present, was in the place, drinking a dark beer and waiting for their schnitzel. The roar of happy human voices was incredible and sounded like the wind personified, and for the first time, I knew what my mother had meant when she talked about it in the books she’d made me read.

My mother — I didn’t see her at first. I walked through all three rooms: the barroom, to which I’ll return in a moment; the largest dining room, filled with large families eating their large meals at large tables; and the newest of the three rooms, lined with mirrors and populated by men pretending to like the cigars they were smoking, and wearing Red Sox hats — that regional symbol of self-love and self-hate and male-pattern baldness — and talking loudly about how good their business was or was not, and half-watching something reality-based on TV. In each room, there were waitresses, squads of them, dressed in formless, sacklike white dresses. They’d worn these dresses five years earlier, too, and I couldn’t tell then and I couldn’t tell now whether they were authentic German barmaid gear or a new German immigrant’s idea of what Americans might want to think of as authentic German barmaid gear. In any case, they were still wearing the dresses. But my mother wasn’t among them, not that I could see, and so I retreated to the barroom, the room to which men looking for a woman always retreat. I found an empty seat at the bar, sat on it, and waited for the bartenders to notice me so I could order a beer, a big one, even though I’d had so many big beers already that day that they’d stopped having much effect except to make me want to keep drinking them. It was so crowded, though, that it was at least ten minutes until I was served, by a young guy — younger than me — with a shaved head and an old guy’s waxed handlebar mustache. It had taken him so long to take my order that I ordered two large doppelbock beers to save him and me time.

“You with somebody, buddy?” he asked me, handing over the two large beers in two heavy glass steins.

“Nope,” I said. The bartender looked at me, and then at the beers, and then at me again, as if to say, like my mother in her note,
I think I know you
. And who knows: maybe, like my mother, he did.

I sat there awhile and drank one beer fast, and the next one at regular speed. The bar noise and its makers advanced and retreated, advanced and retreated, but pleasantly, not like an army but like a tide coming in and going out, a tide coming in and going out that wouldn’t make you wet as you listened to its dreamy tidal sounds. After a few minutes, or maybe it was an hour, I saw old Mr. Goerman, the owner, working the tables, shaking hands, and slapping backs. He was older, a little more raisined in the face, a little more pretzeled in the spine, but recognizably Mr. Goerman. Like the bartender, he also had a waxed handlebar mustache, and I figured maybe they were made to wear those mustaches, the way the waitresses were made to wear their white sacks. In any case, it was good to see him. I caught his eye, hoisted my nearly empty second stein in his direction. He waved back, and a warm feeling came over me, that sort of warm feeling you get when you’ve been recognized, remembered, and told in so many words that you belong. But then I watched Mr. Goerman wave to pretty much every other person in the Student Prince that night, and he couldn’t have known everyone to whom he waved. So I kept drinking my beer, and that helped maintain my warm feeling long after it should have faded, which is of course yet another reason why people drink — in fact, the main one.

The bartender noticed that I’d finished the second of my two beers, and he must also have noticed that I hadn’t done anything suspect while or after drinking them. He must have pegged me as the sort of guy who likes to peacefully order and drink his two big, strong beers at once, because he brought me two more.

“What do you say about something to eat?” he asked, gingerly twirling the sharp ends of his mustache.

“What a good idea,” I said. No sooner had I said it — drunk time being drunk time — than there was in front of me a platter layered with five different kinds of Munich sausage with a dollop of hot mustard on the side, and on another platter a layer of creamed whitefish, surrounded by a border of hard crackers. Both of these platters appeared from behind me, one platter coming around me from the left, one from the right, the deliverer right up against my back. It was the way food wouldn’t be served in a restaurant unless you were being served in a pleasant dream by a very attractive person who wanted you sexually, or unless the server knew you well.

The server knew me well. It was my mother. I turned to face her; she was wearing the white sack. I recognized it, too — not from the other waitresses, but from that night a week earlier, when I’d first come home and seen my mother and she’d looked like the Lady of the Lake. She wasn’t; she was a waitress at the Student Prince. I silently handed her one of my beers and she took it and drank it quickly, then handed the empty stein back. Still, she didn’t say anything. I didn’t
want
her to say anything, because I was afraid that she, like the Mirabellis, would call me by a name that would not be Sam, but Coleslaw or some other name by which she could say she no longer knew me or no longer wanted to.

“Sam —,” she finally began, but before she could get any further, I leaped off my stool and hugged her for using my right name. She let me hold her and hugged me back a little, too. My mother smelled like applesauce, which she must have served that night; when I was a child, she often smelled like applesauce, which she must have served me then, too.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, still holding her, talking into her hair.

“I work here,” she said, pushing me away a little.

“I know that,” I said. “But why here? Did you know Anne Marie and I used to live upstairs?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s why I work here. And that’s why I used to drink here before I worked here.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I just wanted to be close to you, Sam, to know where you were.”

“But why didn’t you just come upstairs and let me know you were so close?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want to be too far away, but I didn’t want to be too close, either.”

“Of course you didn’t,” I said. My father left us but moved only twenty minutes away; my mother wanted to be in the same building as me, but not in the same apartment. I moved back to Amherst, but not too close to my parents; and then I moved back into my parents’ house, which was not too close to my family in Camelot.
Not too close
was our family curse, the way incest was for some royal families and hubris for others. “But wait,” I said. “We moved to Camelot five years ago.”

“I know.”

“But you’re still here. Why?”

“Hey,” a waitress said to my mother as she careened by with her full tray of dishes and steins, “Beth, I could use some help. Table six.”

“I’ll be right back,” my mother said to me, and then she walked off in the direction, I assumed, of table six.

“Beth!” I called after her. “I knew you seemed like a Beth now!”

“You know Beth?” the bartender said. I sat back on my stool and swiveled to face him. Two freshly poured steins of beer sat between us on the bar.

“I’m not sure,” I told him.

“She’s a sweetheart,” he told me.

“She is?” Of all the many words I’d heard used to describe my mother, “sweetheart” had never been one of them. I’d never even heard my father call her that. I wondered if he ever called Deirdre that. I wondered if my mother wondered if he ever called Deirdre that. “Beth is a sweetheart?”

“Sure she is,” the bartender said. “Just look at her.”

I turned and did. My mother was standing at a table in the barroom, talking with a man and his son. The man was a genuine, prematurely white-haired Yankee Brahmin sheathed in dark corduroy and wool, and waterproof in his duck boots. His son wasn’t even a little bit Yankee or Brahmin. He was a baggy-pants-and-expensive-sneakers kid wearing headphones who would have been the same kid if he’d grown up in New Jersey or California. He was the sort of kid who would get older and move to Phoenix and hustle insurance in a mean glass tower and water his grass in the desert. I could hear the father lecturing my mother about something or other, because he was that sort of Brahmin: the sort who felt compelled to give you a lesson on some important subject or other. No doubt that’s why his kid was wearing headphones. My mother
Elizabeth
wouldn’t have been lectured for ten seconds. She would have ripped the headphones off the kid’s head and told the Brahmin where he could stick them. But not
Beth
. She stood there with a pleasant expression on her face and listened until the Brahmin was through with his lesson; then she tousled the kid’s hair as she headed toward the kitchen. My mother was a Beth, all right, and Beth was obviously a sweetheart.

“You’re right,” I said. “Beth is a sweetheart.” I must have said this in such a way as to give the impression that I was smitten, because the bartender grimaced empathetically, and said, “Sorry, bud, she’s married.”

“Married,” I said, waving my hand, by which I meant to communicate,
Who isn’t?

“Yeah, but she’s
really
married,” the bartender said.

“Have you met the guy?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but she talks about him
a lot
.”

“What’s she say about him?”

“He’s got a big brain,” the bartender said, and then, maybe sensing that I didn’t have one, he tapped his forehead with his forefinger.

“I bet he reads books,” I said.

“He gets
paid
to read books,” the bartender said, shaking his head, as though wondering who would pay a person to do such a thing, which, after all, he’d probably do anyway. The bartender poured himself a free beer, then began drinking it, still shaking his head at the good fortune of some men. “
And
he’s got a woman like Beth.”

“Do they have any kids?” I asked.

“Just one. He’s a scientist.”

“Packaging scientist,” I said.

“You know the guy?” the bartender said. “She talks about
him
a lot, too. Says he’s brilliant. A good son, to boot. You’ve never seen a woman love two guys more than she loves her son and husband.”

“Lucky guys,” I said.

“They are,” the bartender agreed, and then he moved to the other end of the bar. I knew now why my mother had stayed at the Student Prince after I’d moved to Camelot. At the Student Prince she could be Beth, a sweetheart with a terrific husband and son. But in Amherst, she was Elizabeth, a drunk ex-teacher who lived by herself in an apartment in Belchertown while her drunk husband was back in their house, where he’d been carrying on with another woman for thirty years, and her excon son was getting kicked out of his own house, quitting his job, kissing other women, and possibly (my mother thought) once again burning down writers’ homes in New England. I understood everything now: if I were my mother, I’d want to be Beth at the Student Prince, too.