The Arsonist: A novel Read online

  “What on earth is in here?” Sylvia asked.

  “Just the usual.” This was a lie. Frankie wasn’t sure why she hadn’t yet told her parents that she didn’t think she was going back. Mostly, probably, because she wasn’t absolutely certain she’d decided yet. And she didn’t know what else she wanted to do. What else she could do, really. If she were going to stay, she’d need to do something, and the blankness that rose in her mind when she considered this frightened her.

  “Then I’m getting older,” Sylvia said. “Weaker anyway.”

  “No. Not you,” Frankie answered. “No way.”

  Together they heaved the duffel into the back of the car. Then each of them came around and got in. As Frankie was fastening her seat belt, she said, “No Daddy. Boohoo.”

  “Boohoo, indeed. He’s mired in his own world, as ever.”

  They were pulling out of the parking area onto the paved town road. Frankie looked over at her mother, at her profile. She looked her age, her hair was white, and yet the effect she made when animated was of a person undeniably, sexually, female. For as long as she could remember, Frankie had thought of womanhood as a territory her mother had staked a claim to. In order to be female herself, to be sexual, she’d felt that she needed to get away from Sylvia. Sometimes, when she’d been home awhile—too long—she thought that was the point of Africa for her.

  “What world?” she asked her mother now. “I thought he’d retired from his world.”

  “Oh. That’s just not going to happen, I don’t think.” Her mother shook her head, an almost-grim smile playing around her mouth. “He has projects” Her voice put quote marks around this.

  In Frankie’s adult memory, her mother had always spoken of her father’s professional life this way, with a tone of only-slightly-veiled contempt, or disdain. It was something Frankie didn’t like in her mother, but she tried to resist that feeling now. It was too soon to give over to it. She said, “Well, good for him, I say.”

  “Mm,” Sylvia said.

  After a moment, Sylvia asked about the trip, and Frankie talked about it. Then about her work in south Sudan, where she had spent the last few months training and supervising the staff at the health centers her NGO was helping to set up. In turn, she asked her mother about the renovation of the farmhouse, which Sylvia explained in a depth of detail Frankie could tell she was enjoying. When they’d driven without speaking for a minute or two, Frankie said, “So, how does it feel, living here full-time?”

  Sylvia tilted her head to one side. “I’m not sure. It’s been raining off and on since we got here, so Alfie and I have been more or less trapped together in the house.” She made a face. “No fun.”

  Frankie had a quick sinking sensation.

  Sylvia spoke again. “But right now, it’s paradise. As you see.”

  Frankie turned and looked out her window. It was paradise, she thought. The afternoon sun touched everything with gold, so that the grass, the fields, every tree, all seemed an invented green, not of this world naturally. Even the air seemed golden—the light itself was speckled and glittery where it was caught slantwise by dancing motes, by miniature insect life. She sat, silent. They were passing the old familiar landmarks—the hills, the wide fields with early corn in precise, lush rows. Intermittently she could see the black river rushing by below the road, and every now and then, around a corner or on a rise, there were the mountains off in the distance, bluish in the early evening’s light haze.

  They passed a tidy farmhouse and barn she remembered well. A mile or two after that, a familiar abandoned house that had gotten more derelict in the last few years. For the first time in a long time, she was relaxed, she realized. Her mother at the wheel, these old signposts. She felt herself drifting into sleep.

  The road got bumpy, and Frankie opened her eyes. They’d turned off the asphalt village road onto dirt. Frankie sat up. They passed the Louds’ farm. There was a red tractor down in their fields, moving slowly through the tall grass, a bareheaded man, shirtless, driving it. Every rise and dip in the road were known to her now. Every house they passed had a name Frankie could attach to it, faces she could call up. They went right at the fork, and a minute or two later, there it was. Home.

  She corrected herself mentally. Not home. It was no more her home than the Connecticut house had been.

  They turned into the driveway. “Here we go,” her mother said. She pulled up to the closed doors of the small sagging unpainted barn, attached to the house, which served as a garage in winter.

  The air, when Frankie stepped out of the car, was cooler here. Was better, she thought, and remembered that she had always thought this, even as a child. It had been magic then, to arrive from wherever they were calling home that year. To feel the gift of some cleaner, finer life beginning. She breathed it in now. She stretched. Her mother had come around to the rear of the car and opened it, and together she and Frankie lifted the heavy bag out of the Volvo. Sylvia took the lighter bag, and Frankie followed behind her, pulling the heavy one over the resisting gravel and up the few steps to the little porch outside the kitchen.

  “We’re here!” Sylvia called as she stepped inside. She crossed the kitchen and disappeared into the dining room beyond. Frankie had just gotten the bag up over the threshold and into the kitchen when her father appeared in the doorway between it and the hallway.

  “Francesca,” he said with quiet satisfaction. He came forward and embraced Frankie, gently, less commandingly than her mother had. He stepped back, hands still on her shoulders, looking at her. “Frankie,” he said.

  “C’est moi,” she answered, stupidly.

  Sylvia bustled back into the kitchen, and Frankie’s father’s hands dropped; he stepped away from her.

  “We’ll have just a little light supper,” Sylvia was saying to Frankie, already moving on to the next step. “I know you’re ready to collapse.” And then: “Can you get that bag upstairs by yourself?” It was less a question than a directive, and Frankie felt it beginning, the irritation with her mother that was part of her life in her family.

  Her father made protesting noises: “Oh no, I can do that,” but Frankie said no, no, she would, and rolled the bag across the dining room. She could see that the table was already set for dinner. Her father trailed behind her and then stopped and turned back to where Sylvia was speaking to him from the kitchen. Alone, Frankie hauled the bag up the stairs, bouncing it heavily behind her on each one.

  In her room upstairs, the room she’d had every summer since she was a child, she unpacked a few things from her carry-on bag and then went down the long, narrow hallway to the bathroom. Standing there, bent over the sink, she could feel her body automatically accommodating the slope of the bathroom floor, a sense memory that felt completely familiar to her—everything tilted in this old house.

  She washed her face and brushed her teeth thoroughly at last. She looked at her watch: six-forty. She would try to stay awake until ten. Maybe nine-thirty. Back in her room, Frankie stripped off her airline clothes and put on the clean underwear, the slacks and shirt she’d packed at the bottom of her carry-on for just this moment.

  She was thinking about her parents, about their retiring here. She was aware of being immediately grateful for their move—it was always easier to enter America here, in the country, than it was in the small city in Connecticut they had lived in before now. Once, when she had gone to the supermarket there to pick up a few groceries for her mother—she’d been back from Africa for only a day or two—she had suddenly felt so overwhelmed by the abundance, by her inability to choose anything in the face of it, that she left her cart in the aisle and walked out, her heart racing.

  Here, everything was easier, simpler, more contained.

  Though things were changing here, too, she reminded herself, with people like her parents coming to live here permanently, as well as, she knew, refugees from New York and Boston.

  Refugees, she thought, and smiled ruefully. How different the meaning of
the word in this context than in the world she’d just come from.

  There were young people, too, moving up here. People like her sister, Liz, who was planning to live here full-time eventually. Her husband would work as a carpenter, a handyman, the same collection of odd jobs some of the townspeople did. Liz had said she wasn’t sure what she would do.

  In the old days, as Frankie was remembering them now, the lines had been more sharply drawn. There were the summer people, and then there were the townspeople. The summer people had work elsewhere, personal lives elsewhere, all of which were invisible when they were here; whereas the townspeople’s lives and their work were visible to anyone who cared to look—especially when they were working in the summer for the summer people.

  Now all those lines would be increasingly blurred. Frankie wondered how well that would work.

  Dinner was simple, elegant, something Sylvia was good at. A Niçoise salad, crusty French bread—you could get that now at the supermarket, she said, supplied by an artisanal bakery that had sprung up in Whitehall. There was a cheese shop, too, run by local cheese makers—they would have some tonight instead of dessert. She and Alfie had got into the habit, her mother said.

  “Oh! and Frankie—Liz and Clark and the kids are coming up at the end of the weekend. They’ll miss the tea, but apparently that can’t be helped.”

  A quick series of images of her sister rose in Frankie’s mind. Liz as an adolescent smiling wickedly at her in the backseat of someone’s car across the summer boys seated between them. Liz’s slender, naked body arced over the water on a night of skinny-dipping. Dark, pretty, sharp-tongued Liz, who’d surprised them all by marrying Clark, the posthippie hippie, as she called him. Gentle, easygoing, unflappable. Her opposite, it seemed.

  And the tea! The Fourth of July Tea. Frankie had forgotten it, as she’d momentarily forgotten even that the Fourth would be a holiday. Now her mother started to reminisce, as she liked to do, about her girlhood here, about the teas then, when the men wore pale seersucker suits, when the women wore hats and dresses and white gloves and stockings. “Girdles, of course, were the downside of that,” she said, and made a face.

  Frankie was remembering it, too, then—the grown-ups dressed up in church clothes, as she thought of those costumes then. The kids were made to dress up, too, but once they got to the tea, the parents ignored them, busy greeting one another at this formal, start-of-summer event. The kids were free to run wildly around, to grab as many cookies as they could get away with, to lob moist green clots of newly mown grass at one another.

  Later, in adolescence, the tea was more erotically charged. It was where you got your first glimpse of who was here this year, of the changes in the other summer kids. It was where you started the flirtations that shifted and shifted again over the following two months.

  “These days,” Sylvia was saying now, “the young people wear anything—blue jeans. Shorts, even.”

  Frankie had one glass of wine, two, and then realized she’d asked several times already if it was nine yet. At nine-thirty or so, after they’d done the dishes, after they’d settled in the living room and talked for a little while, she excused herself and went upstairs, stepped out of her clothes, and fell onto the bed. Only to wake, as she had, in the middle of the night. To start out on her long walk, thinking of everything she’d left behind. To turn back when she saw the car.

  2

  IT COULD HAVE BEEN SAID, it probably was said among certain of her friends, that Frankie was leaving Africa because of a love affair—but that was only part of the truth. The truth had to do with her work, her life generally. The truth was that it was that love affair on top of the other love affairs. The ones that ended because someone was transferred away, or chose to quit aid work, or just wanted to get away from Africa, or was married, or was, as with Philip, in some irrevocable way unavailable.

  As Frankie knew she probably was, too, she’d gotten so used to the inevitable ending to things. And although she liked to think of herself as still open to experience—to love, she supposed—she was aware that the evidence was pretty compelling against it.

  The work itself was part of what did it, of course. Ended things. But also began them. The extremity of it, the absorption in it, the fatigue, the high. The charge that passed among people laboring together in such hard circumstances, such challenging ones. The wish to take pleasure where you could, the sense that you needed it, that you had somehow earned it. Most of the people Frankie worked with felt this way. They joked about it, actually, they used it as a kind of aphrodisiac. They all had the feeling, living always so close to death, that they wanted somehow to affirm life. Sex was good for that.

  Timing had been part of her coming together with Philip. He was closing out an emergency surgical stint in Sudan—there was at least a temporary peace in the area, so the crisis, which was what Philip’s work was about, was just about over, for the time being anyway. Now a more normal, steady human misery was the problem. Malnutrition and hunger were a part of that everyday misery—and they constituted Frankie’s work. She was arriving just as Philip left, then, arriving to supervise the feeding station, to set it up the way her NGO felt it worked best so that the local people could take it over. He would go, and Frankie would stay, at least until things were working satisfactorily. An assured ending before it even began.

  Its beginning seemed foreordained, shut in together in the medical compound as they essentially were. This was what she told herself, anyway. What she always told herself, she realized. Later, when she asked herself, Why him? Why not one of the others? she didn’t have an answer, not really. She knew how easily it could have been one of the others. But at the time, she chose to see it as inevitable. Him, him and no other, the lie she told herself, the lie she always told herself, the lie that turned her on.

  It had started in more or less the usual way. They were sitting around talking after dinner, maybe seven or eight of them, all a little drunk. Several of them, Philip included, were smoking, and Frankie’s eyes were stinging a bit in the thick air. Someone had put an old Leonard Cohen tape on the boom box, and the voices in conversation were all pitched loud in order to be heard over it. They were speaking of the events of the day for each of them. Philip and Rosemary had done an emergency Cesarean on a fifteen-year-old girl who’d been in labor and bleeding for three days. Her family had carried her for miles, and then she’d been picked up by an aid truck coming out from the little airstrip. The baby was all right, but they weren’t sure if the mother would make it.

  Another of the doctors was monitoring a young man who had been running an unexplainable high fever for days, and there was a girl who’d cut herself accidentally, whose wound was badly infected. There was dysentery, gangrene, tuberculosis. They shook their heads at these catastrophes, at the ruination, the endless crises, the odd, gonzo rescue of someone. They laughed. They actually laughed. What else were you to do?

  Frankie’s day had been hard enough, but less dramatic, so she wasn’t talking as much as the others. Also, there was the fact that she’d arrived the day before and didn’t really know anyone yet. Still, she was glad for the macho silliness all around her. Glad because it was familiar, it was the lingua franca of this work. Glad because it made all of them easy to meet, easy to know. It made her feel at home, even though she was having to learn, once again, the layout of the compound.

  The room she was in was square, with a thatched ceiling and whitewashed walls, a concrete floor. There was a bench along each side of the table. Kerosene lanterns were set on it, and a jumble of glasses and beer bottles and ashtrays was scattered over it. In the intervals between songs on the boom box, she could hear workers cleaning up in the open-air kitchen. Philip had gone after dinner to the building where the medical staff was housed to get a bottle of Scotch he’d bought on his last trip to Nairobi, and now he was moving around the table, pouring shots for everyone.

  “Frankie,” he said as he filled her glass. He stood back. Light fro
m the kerosene lantern glinted in his glasses. “Such a very Ameddican name.” He was a Brit, definitely ritzy. Frankie had gotten so she could hear the class differences when the English spoke, even when those differences were being mocked, as they were now.

  “Francesca,” she corrected. “Such a very Italian name.”

  “But you’re not …?” He frowned.

  “No. I am, such an American. But in that American way, a bit of a mongrel.”

  “A Mongol?!” The music was very loud.

  “Mongrel. Mutt.”

  He sat down next to her on the bench, his legs turned the opposite way from hers, his back to the table. “You don’t look like a mutt. You look like … a setter. Irish. High-strung.”

  “Is this a game? Do I choose a dog for you now?”

  “It could be. I could use a game, after my day.”

  Someone called to him from the other side of the table, and he twisted around. The other doctor, Alan, made some gesture, and Philip laughed loudly. Frankie wasn’t sure if the gesture referred to her, but it irritated her anyway.

  “A Newfoundland,” she said.

  “What, darling?” he asked, turning back to her.

  “You know, one of those large, gentle bearlike dogs that leaves strings of slobber all over you.”

  “I would never,” he said, grinning. “Though I’d love the opportunity.”

  That was it. That quick. That direct.

  It was a little difficult to arrange, but they managed it over and over in the next month. Frankie had had a brief affair with an African man just before this, an affair that had ended because she wasn’t interested in marriage, wasn’t interested in moving with him back to the United States. He was angry about this. And then she’d been angry that this, finally, was what he had wanted. Was really all he had wanted. Then he was angry that she had the nerve to be angry at him. Who did she imagine she was? And the contempt he had had for her as a woman all along—a very African contempt—came pouring out.