The Arsonist (11 page)

He went over to where Frankie was sitting, pulling one of the chairs with a reed seat between her and Alfie. He sat down and turned to his sister-in-law. He started asking her about Africa, about her work. His attention was absolute, encompassing, and Frankie leaned forward into it, her face more lively than Sylvia had seen it since she’d been home. This was Clark’s gift, this affectionate attentiveness.

Sylvia turned back to Daphne, who had started to sing her a song she’d learned in school about a man who washed his face in a frying pan. As the little girl started in on the second verse, Sylvia heard Clark say, “And when do you go back?”

This is what they were all used to: Frankie would come to the country for a few weeks, be back and forth to the office in New York for a few weeks after that, and then leave again. She couldn’t hear Frankie’s response.

“What?” Clark said sharply.

Sylvia looked over at them.

Frankie spoke more loudly. “I don’t know, this time.”

“Don’t know
what
?” Sylvia said. Daphne stopped singing.

Frankie looked at her. Her mouth opened, then closed with a little noise. She lifted her hands and made a helpless, embarrassed face. She said, “When I’m going back.
If
I’m going back.”

There was a beat of silence. Then Liz said, “Cool. You’re going to
stay
.” She was grinning at Frankie.

Sylvia was suddenly aware of Alfie, shifting forward in his chair. He was watching Frankie, frowning. He cleared his throat. “But you … you live in Africa, don’t you?” He seemed alarmed.

“I have, until now,” she said.

He nodded, then smiled. “Yes. That’s just what I thought.” He leaned back, the discussion over for him.

Sylvia looked quickly around at the others. Liz was watching Alfie sharply, appraisingly, but Clark and Frankie hadn’t seemed to notice how odd this exchange was. He’d already started to ask her questions about her decision, and she was responding.

She was dismissive. Maybe she was just a little burned out, a little overwhelmed by the never-ending quality of the suffering, by the corruption. By the way in which aid work became complicit in all that.

“But what else would you do?” Clark asked.

Frankie shrugged. “New York is a possibility, I guess,” she said. “Something administrative there. Either with Hunger Relief Action or with another NGO.”

“New York!” Liz said. “But that’s so expensive.”

Frankie lifted her hands:
What can I do
?

“You’ll end up in an incredibly small apartment in some marginal neighborhood,” Liz said.

“Which sounds kind of romantic, actually,” Frankie said.

“That’ll wear off quickly,” Sylvia said drily. She turned to the others. “Frankie had a house to herself in Nairobi. She had
servants
.” Sylvia had visited her once for a week and stayed in Frankie’s house. It was set in a garden with a lawn encircled by five other bungalows. The whole compound was surrounded by a wall overgrown with bougainvillea, the top set with glinting razor wire.

“I had a housemaid, Mother.” Frankie’s gaze across the porch was level.

They had had this conversation several times before. Sylvia had been uncomfortable with the colonial aspects of Frankie’s life in Africa, with the privileged white world she inhabited when she wasn’t at work, with her ease instructing the people who worked for her. She had been surprised at Frankie. Disappointed in her, in some way.

“And a gardener, as I recall it,” she said now to Frankie. “And a
guard
.”

“But those weren’t just for me. They were for the compound.” There were, in fact, two guards that manned the entry gate, one during the day, one at night. Both carried
AK
-47
S
, Sylvia had been shocked to see.

“You would have had those things, too, if you’d lived there,” Frankie said. Her voice was cool, clipped. She sounded almost British, which Sylvia suspected was something she could turn off and on at will. Something that was, perhaps, useful to her.

Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t think I could live with someone always in the kitchen or always cleaning up after me. Much less guarding me.”

“You’d love a guard if the crime rate here shot up. If
people
were getting shot up.”

“
Who
’s getting shot, Mama?” Chas asked. He had come out onto the porch, too. He was looking from Frankie to Sylvia.

Liz wrinkled her nose at him, shook her head rapidly.
This is adult stuff. Nothing for you to worry about
.

Frankie persisted. Her voice was harder, actually angry now. “And I can’t imagine you and Daddy, say, brush hogging the pasture yourselves.”

“Mumma,
who
?” Chas persisted.

“No one, hon. It’s just a turn of phrase.”

“That’s something you won’t need to worry about once we get up here,” Clark said to Sylvia. She must have looked puzzled somehow, because he explained: “Brush hogging.” He was smiling at her, eager to please her, eager, perhaps, to change the subject.

But Sylvia’s irritation was immense now, general. She said, “Ah, but then I’ll worry about your taking work away from the locals.”

“Ah, but then I’ll
be
a local.”

A little silence fell. Liz said, “I think I’d ask a local about that.”

“Yes, I think that’s a club you might have to be asked to join,” Frankie said.

“Bullshit,” Clark answered genially.

Sylvia was thinking abruptly of a child she’d seen earlier today when she went to the village to get some stamps. Trailing his mother into the post office, he wore a T-shirt that said,
FLATLANDERS GO HOME
. She said, “I wouldn’t take anything for granted, Clark.”

Frankie laughed, abruptly.

“What?” Sylvia said.

“Oh, you’re just so … 
contrarian
tonight,” Frankie said.

Clark was nodding, smiling at Frankie. Liz grinned.

Sylvia said, “I wasn’t aware of that.” A lie.

Suddenly Daphne bent forward and kissed the back of Sylvia’s hand where it rested on her lap, a soft, light fairy touch. Sylvia, startled, looked at her, and she looked back, smiling, showing her small, scalloped teeth.

“That’s a
magic
kiss,” she said.

After a quick beat of silence, Sylvia said, “Thank you,” washed with love for the little girl, and with shame.

“Hey, may I have one of those kisses?” Clark asked. He was grinning across at his daughter, his delight in her game—in her very being—visible in his face.

“Yes!” Daphne answered. She threaded through the chairs around to
her father. He leaned over to receive the kiss on his cheek, but she said, “No. On your
hand
.”

He held his hand out, and she bent over it quickly, and then stood straight.

“Magic!” he cried. “Did it change me?”

“Yes,” she said gravely.

“Into a prince?” he said.

“No, Papa! It made you
happy
.”

“Oh, yeah!” He nodded. “That’s just what it did. I feel it.”

“And now I’ll kiss Mumma.” And she went to her mother and kissed her hand, and then, more shyly, Frankie’s, and finally Alfie’s. He seemed not to notice, Sylvia thought.

“What about Gordie and Chas?” Liz said.

“Mumma!” she objected.

“What?”

“Kids don’t need magic kisses. Only
adults
are not happy.”

Frankie laughed. “From the mouths of babes.”

Now Liz turned to Clark and began to tell him about the fires, two in a row, the first one so close, the second only last night. She repeated the local news her mother and Frankie had offered her earlier—that this second fire was, like the first, in an unoccupied house, the Ludlows’, and that, like the fire at the Kershaws’, it had essentially destroyed the place.

While they talked about all this, Sylvia was remembering the night before. The fire horn had waked her this time, though Alfie slept through it. When Sylvia got up and went into the living room, she could hear that Frankie was awake upstairs, moving around. She’d called up to her, and Frankie had come down. They’d sat together for a while, speculating about the possibility of a second fire.

Afterward, lying in bed again next to Alfie’s still form, Sylvia had realized how happy she had been for that hour or so, sitting with her daughter in her pajamas in the middle of the night, talking in low tones in the light falling into the room from the kitchen. It had taken her a long time to get back to sleep—some combination of that deep pleasure and then the disturbing notion of a second fire somewhere in the town.

Now Sylvia excused herself to go to the kitchen to put supper together.
A little while later, she was moving from the kitchen to the dining room with a stack of plates in her hands when she saw Alfie walking quickly down the hall to his study. And heard Liz’s voice from the porch: “Oh, for Christ’s sweet sake!”

What?
she thought. She went to the doorway to the porch, the plates still in her hands. What had happened? They were frozen, Clark standing, Liz and Frankie looking up at him.

And then she saw what it was: Liz was nursing Gordie. The little boy was half lying across her lap, and her T-shirt was hoisted up on the side where he was suckling. A sliver of her white breast showed, but most of it was covered by Gordie’s head.

“Mea culpa,” Liz said to Sylvia. Her expression was of a tired amusement. “I just forgot how much it bothers him.” She turned to Clark. “Forget it, sweetie.”

“Oh. Yes, Clark,” Sylvia said. “You know Alfie.”

“Well, Jesus, though. It’s just so … ridiculous.” But he sat back down.

“Did he
say
anything?” Sylvia asked.

“No, just upped and left,” Liz said.

“But you know he’s always been that way. If it’s any comfort, he didn’t even like it when
I
was nursing. As a matter of fact, I think he usually left the room then, too. After Frankie, I didn’t try again. Bottles for Liz, poor thing.”

Liz grinned. “No doubt that’s why I’m so much shorter than Frankie. But we’re almost done anyway, aren’t you, sweetie?” she said to Gordie’s still form.

She looked back up at the adults. “You know what it is,” she said. Her voice was full of mischief.

“What?” Clark said.

“He doesn’t like that reminder that we’re all animals.” She made a rooting, piggish sound, then stopped. “Well, that
women
are anyway.” She smiled meanly.

Frankie laughed.

“Well, he’ll have forgotten about it already,” Sylvia said quickly. “Why don’t you all go in and sit down? Just about everything’s on the table. I’ll go get him.”

Liz readjusted Gordie, lifting him to a sitting position and pulling her shirt down. He looked sleepy as he slid off her lap. Frankie and Clark were standing up, and now Liz got up, too.

“That’s the good news,” Liz was saying. “That he will have forgotten already. The bad news is, he’ll have forgotten it already.”

“Liz!” Frankie said, but she was smiling.

“So he’s worse?” Clark asked, his voice lowered.

Sylvia went to fetch Alfie, leaving the room before she had to hear Liz’s answer.

He was at his desk, in his study, looking out at the view, at the mountains. She spoke to him softly, and he turned to her. “Dinner’s ready,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “Delighted.”

She turned away quickly and went back toward the noise of the rest of the family. She didn’t want to look at Alfie, at his bland, empty face, so unaccountable for the feelings he’d stirred up on the porch.

Always so unaccountable
, she thought.

An engagement photo of Alfie and Sylvia standing in a lost garden, blowsy, blurry roses growing over an arbor behind them. Standing at least a foot apart, each looking directly into the camera, as if unaware of the other. Both of them are squinting just a bit against the bright sun.

Oh, but they are aware of each other. Both are smiling, smiling in precisely the same way—shy, secretive, sexual. The picture is charged with the connection between them, and with their wish to hide it, to keep it invisible, for themselves only.

They met the year after Sylvia finished college, when, because it seemed to her that she could become anything in the world she wanted to be, she was working at a small bar and restaurant on the South Side of Chicago as a waitress. She had done this more or less in defiance of her parents, both well-known academics and intellectuals. She wanted to claim a life as different from theirs as she could, though, as it would turn out, the next year she would apply to graduate school in English, and through the years after that, while she began to raise her family—first Frankie, an
accident, then Liz—she would struggle to complete her master’s degree in order to have a version, anyway, of their life. A version that turned out to be different from theirs primarily in its lack of distinction—they had plenty of that—and its marginality.

Alfie was the part-time bartender at this restaurant, while he worked the rest of the time on the first of the three master’s degrees he would eventually earn. The year was 1953. He was twenty-nine. She was twenty-two. They fell in love for all the usual reasons. They were both handsome and unattached. They were working together, the kind of work that requires a sense of almost dancelike physical partnership, particularly at the busiest times of the evening, and they had the sense of dancing well together. And they liked each other’s stories, though later Alfie’s story was the least important part of who he was for Sylvia.

But at the time, it was completely compelling to her—it was what did the trick. He told it to her over a series of late nights in the restaurant after they’d closed up and finished shutting things down. The other waitresses, the cook, and the dishwasher would all have left, slowly putting their coats on, sometimes having a drink or two before they went. Alfie and Sylvia would try not to seem as eager as they were for the others to go. When they were finally alone, they’d sit at a table out of sight of the front window, in case the manager came by to check on things—which happened every now and then—and talk.