The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Page 18

  Finally, on a foam pad, inside a sealed plastic bag, was a book about the size of a thin paperback.

  I straddled the border of laughter and anger. This was not my thing, had nothing to do with me. Was he so cell-shocked that he had forgotten which of his kids liked this stuff? “Dana will be sorry she didn’t come,” Petra said, her Scandinavian clowning still half audible, and I was even more irritated because I felt suddenly and strongly that I had done something wrong. “I feel like Dana should be here,” Petra confirmed my fear. “What is it?”

  It was a quarto edition, dated 1597, of the play The Tragedy of Arthur, or, to be more accurate to the title page, The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain. The same play that our family owned in its 1904 edition, given to my grandfather for his contributions to his Canadian high school’s drama club. A play Dana read to me when I was a kid, but which otherwise I had never heard of or thought about. A Shakespeare play. His name was there on the title page.

  Petra was staring at it, frightened to touch it, her face right next to it. “This is real? He has a real …?” Her excitement now began to affect me in that overly dramatic basement. Her excitement burned through one layer of necessary doubt, because the obvious answer to “This is real? He has a real …?” is “No. Of course not. Of course he doesn’t.” My father, of all people, a forger, owned and had kept hidden for decades a real 412-year-old document? No. Empirically disproven by everything I knew about him. Yet, that day, it was just me and Petra and an object that reflected her enthusiasm, inspired short-breathed excitement in her, and, as I wanted to inspire that, too, I didn’t quite disbelieve. “Can we read it?” she asked.

  Belief, credulity, confidence. When one looks back, belief resembles nothing so much as a virus, and only as you recover do you realize how fever-addled you were. My immune system was vulnerable as I stood in that bank vault. What had left me exposed? What had blinded me, left me like a certain talk-show host cooing at the moral power of an improbable memoirist, left me like Dutch art experts certain that Vermeer painted the van Meegerens, left me like all the Shakespeare scholars who daily add their names to the roll of endorsements for The Tragedy of Arthur?

  I held on to at least a facsimile of healthy skepticism. “This is interesting.” We agreed to pack it back up and take it to their apartment, to look it over and wait for my father’s promised explanation by email. We were in this together, Petra and I; I felt that more than I felt anything else. We should go find Dana; I felt that second most of all. “Should we wear latex gloves or something when we touch it?” I asked.

  “Oh, I have boxes and boxes of them at home,” she said, smiling enigmatically, and I let her carry the BANANAS out of the bank, to the car.

  She wasn’t kidding about the gloves, as it turned out, which I found very funny, especially when she pretended to be too embarrassed to explain why she had them (something innocuous to do with cleaning a theremin, she finally confessed). We examined the play and then read it aloud, sitting and standing side by side, our heads together, our hands occasionally touching in their prophylactic latex.

  A printed book from the 1500s is not immediately easy to read, even if you are not standing two inches away from a woman you are overwhelmingly attracted to. The type is wobbly and squished in places, faint then blotted. Spellings are strange, and they can vary even from page to page. In Arthur, for example, both “moue” and “moove” serve as “move.” There are no j’s, and u and v are interchangeable. There are varieties of s we don’t use anymore that look like f’s, and so forth. Acts and scenes are only sometimes numbered, and exits and entrances aren’t always clear. Punctuation seems pretty random. There are mistakes and variations of characters’ names in the speech headings. On two speeches the Master of the Hounds is inexplicably labeled “Kempe.” You get used to it eventually. Petra and I did, together, over a long summer afternoon at her place.

  We had to repeat certain sentences several times to grasp their meaning. We often stopped to look up words online. Petra frequently wanted to find a picture as well, to have a visual sense of the play’s flowers, towns, rivers, apples.

  The play was more or less what I recalled from thirty years before, when I was fifteen and had a broken nose and Dana read the whole thing to me to cheer me up. I could almost feel that odd movement of shifting threads in my fractured sinuses when Petra and I came to the scene where King Arthur rallies his troops for the first time.

  “What is this thing?” Petra asked more than once during our reading. She also said, “Oh, I love that line” and “I can’t believe we get to read this” and “Do you think Shakespeare ever touched this exact copy?” and “My God, he was so amazing” and “He was the best” and “I have goose bumps—look!” and “To read something new!” and I lost a breath as I recalled that we were coming closer and closer to a scene where Arthur kisses his new queen, and my desire and hope galloped far ahead of the main body, and my mouth went dry, and I prayed that Dana would not come home yet.

  We had been at this for more than an hour, perhaps two, turning each page with the utmost care, the paper smooth and pale, the thread and glue that held the leaves together still intact but obviously stiff. We stopped to marvel at this wonder. “So is it yours? Did he give it to you?” she asked. “What does he want you to do with it? How does he have it?”

  “I have no idea. Let’s keep reading.” I knew that the kiss was coming and, like a teenager, I imagined it would somehow transform everything if we could read it, like this, side by side, hunched over the booklet, taking turns being princes, kings, soldiers, dog trainers, shepherdesses, messengers. Our hands touched now and then, and if the play—if Shakespeare—told Petra to kiss me, I felt sure she would do it. Act III, Scene i:

  Soft, kiss me, Guen, half-close thy lovely eyne

  And in this wispen dawn of gold-flecked mist

  We catch our breath and hear the lark’s first song.

  Soft, kiss me, Guen, and take this flowered crown

  And sit with me in shade and kiss me, Guen.

  There were no stage directions. But she reached up and stroked my cheek with the latex-armored back of her hand, and I pressed my cheek against those twice-sheathed bones, certainly justifiable by the script, but my heartbeat betrayed a method actor’s seriousness.

  “She’s waited so long for him,” Petra said. “She’s put up with all his wandering. It’s a strange sort of love, isn’t it? She’s literally watched him with other women and she’s ready to forgive him all of it.”

  “You don’t believe him? He says he’ll give it all up for her.”

  “I do believe him. I don’t believe her. I think she just wants to be queen and she’s taken the measure of him. She’s playing him. She knows she has nothing to offer politically. The French ambassador is in the hall ready to offer up a princess with land and wealth. Guenhera has nothing comparable—she plays dumb about it, but that’s pretty tongue-in-cheek. But she has something else: she offers up youth, doesn’t she?”

  “She’s not that much younger than Arthur.”

  “Not her youth, his youth. She reminds him of being a boy in the woods, playing at being a king. Before the war, before the double crosses, the politics. She offers him a new childhood, and he leaps at it. Look at this: he can’t propose fast enough. She plays his impulsiveness like a master. He could be drunk. He’s about ready to marry France, and she has him in a few minutes, begging her to believe his sincerity—not just to sleep with her but to give her the crown. He’s begging. Shakespeare in fifth gear—man, oh man.”

  This was the second time I’d had this play explained to me by a woman.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “He knows what she’s up to. He’s not a fool. He’s just done with the past, or wants to be, and he wants to erase his mistakes, and she needs the same thing. It’s not just a power play; she has a past—she only hints at her own errant behavior, but it’s there. And any Elizabethan audience would know the vers
ions of the Arthur story where she’s an absolute ho-bag. She’s made her own mistakes in love. She wants to feel clean and new again, and something happened to them, back when they were kids. Something happened to her that was like imprinting. It was instantaneous. It might not have made any sense, but that doesn’t mean she can ever escape it. Look what she did to try to escape: she made herself watch him with other women. She roamed on her own. And she’s lived as a spinster, for a time anyhow. But she knows there’s only one way for her to go. Let’s read that scene again. Back from the start.”

  But the door opened, and Maria jumped off the couch barking, and Dana came in talking: “Baby, you home? I nailed it, I so nailed it!” She came upon the two of us bent over the book, our gloved hands side by side. She had come from her callback audition for a production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, a late-career Shakespeare collaboration and, with its intimations of lesbian love, one of her favorites. She crossed to us, hugged me, kissed Petra, and then gasped as she saw the quarto’s cover page. “What is—Oh, my God.”

  “It’s Dad’s. It’s what he told me to pick up. I don’t know what it is.”

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God! No. How?” She was shaking as she took a pair of gloves from Petra, kissed her with an apology for having forgotten to do it earlier, even though she had, and Petra stroked the back of Dana’s head. Dana put her face right down to the page and sniffed it deeply, twice, again, again. “It is, isn’t it? Oh, my God. How does …?”

  She had visited Dad a month earlier, she said, and he hadn’t mentioned it. What did I know about it? Nothing, I said; Dad promised an explanation to follow. I peeled off my gloves and collapsed, exhausted, onto their sofa, left her and Petra to surround the little book. I wanted her to deal with it. It was already much too much for me. I played up my ignorance, my incompetence, my Shakespeare indifference, and especially Dad’s confusion. I told her to keep it safe and do whatever should be done with it. “Does it need some humidity-controlled chamber or something?”

  She looked up, obviously unwillingly, and considered me awhile before she sacrificed herself: “No. No, no. He has some reason. It’s not for me.” She didn’t seem hurt, though I don’t know how she couldn’t have been. But she insisted that without invitation or instruction from Dad, it was not hers to intrude. “I just want—oh, my God, I just want to read it and touch it. Is it any different than the 1904?”

  “I would love to compose the music for a production,” Petra said, her arm around Dana’s shoulder.

  “Oh, you’d make it sing. What does it sound like?”

  “There is so much you could play with. There’s Renaissance stuff, authentic to his layer, or you go darker, medieval or earlier, authentic to the setting, or you go out there, just bang away without a thought to the time …” She pulled off her gloves with her teeth and crossed the room to their upright piano, started in with a left hand somewhere between a Gregorian chant and a jazz walking bass line. Dana delicately lifted over the pages, found a favorite passage, and read aloud to the music that shifted tones and tonalities in response to her voice:

  By Mordred’s holy seed might not we soon

  Implant a prince ourselves to hold our claim

  And with her womb prove Mordred’s right to rule.

  Yes. Then will I obtain from England’s lords,

  And vulgar tribune sorts who must be paid,

  Such love, subjection, dread that may be bought.

  Success made sure, I’ll turn resistant thought

  To acting as a vengeful brother ought.

  I loved them both, loved their love of the play, how quickly and instinctively they both leapt to play with it, to build on it, to breathe life back into it. It was obviously a Shakespeare play because these two women I loved so differently each loved it so much the same. I wanted to be part of it. I didn’t know my part or how to play it, but a part was coming, and I imagined it somehow bringing us all together, me with Petra, and Dana satisfied to be our loving sister.

  She came out of their bedroom with the red 1904 edition of The Tragedy of Arthur and started to compare the two texts. They weren’t perfectly matched. They weren’t so far apart as to be significant, but here and there a word was changed, a line was changed, even some sequences of four or six lines were in the 1597 quarto but weren’t in the 1904 hardcover.

  “It has Shakespeare’s name on it,” Dana kept saying. “I knew it. I did. I always knew it. Pet, Dad used to ask me if I thought it was Shakespeare, and I did, and now this has his name on it! This is so huge. I’ve never seen anything on this anywhere. Lost Arthur plays, you hear about, but this—so huge.”

  “It doesn’t settle it,” I said. “There were cases of printers using his name to sell books he hadn’t written.”

  “It settles it for me,” Dana announced.

  She sighed and made me take it with me after dinner, packed it in its bag and case and canvas and crate. “I wish I could keep it,” she said.

  “So keep it.”

  “No. I can’t. He wants you to do something with it. So. Please take it now and tell me as soon as you hear from him, please.”

  “Okay.” I kissed her cheek.

  “Bye, Arthur,” Petra called from across the room.

  27

  THE NEXT DAY WAS EMAIL DAY at the big house, and I read my father’s long letter on my laptop at the hotel. The job he had in mind for me was larger than anything I had fantasized, and my predominant emotion was pride—he wanted me and only me to do this for him, with him, because he loved me and my abilities. And we would be partners in something unprecedented, earthshaking.

  That pride, in turn, triggered some guilt. He was trusting me, and I still sometimes felt I was partially to blame for his lengthy term, and that old daft desire to make everything right rushed through me. By helping him, I would fix what I could of all that I had broken.

  And guilt, in turn, triggered resentment, the nibbling feeling that if I was going to help, then I was also owed, or would be rewarded by some universal system we wishfully call karma or God’s bounty or whatever, but is really just the little child in us expecting a prize. And I thought of Petra.

  And then came the scheming: this project would require me to stay in Minneapolis for quite a while. I shook that off, scolded myself, sent Dana and Petra my silent blessings.

  DATE: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 15:05:02 -0600

  You went to Bert? You found it OK.? It was there? You have it somewhere safe? So now you have seen it. Do you need to put your finger in my wound? Fine. Do what you need to be sure. Be careful with it Itis old. And it cannot be out of your sight with another person. They cannot copy it. That is important. This is the most important, No copies. It iss complicated. Do your worst. Be skeptical. I am counting on you for that now too because I do not have any doubts anymore and that is surely not helpful. Microscope it or x-ray it or bombard it with lasers. I do not know what they do nowadays. My residence here would imply that I never really did. Ask experts to read it and judge the words and style. I could recommend people for some of this, but you would not trust them if I do, so do your way. When you are done you will know what I already kno. Which means whatever you are doing now is a delay for us, so go fast. But do what you need to do to believe. Catch up with me. That is not fair, because I have a fifty year lead. But catch up. And when we are together, and you know you are holding a play written by William Shakespeare, then you and I will be partners, though you, my son, will be the senior partner (not including Shakespeare).

  “The senior partner (not including Shakespeare).” That line still affects me strangely. I feel it like one of these twinges in my lower back that make me compensate immediately. The surge of pleasure (then the parenthesis with a counteracting dose of resentment). I am his favorite (except for others). I am necessary to him (though not as much as some). I am his writer (not including that other guy).

  When you are ready, we start. But motives, I suspect. You suspect. I suspect you suspect my motives. O.K. that�
��s O.K. You should, of course you do, though I could wish you didnot. Or I could wish you need not That I had not done all this to make you need no suspicion of my motives. Or that despite all I had done, you would recall that I NEVER DID IT TO YOU, never sought your unearned confidence, or with your confidence filched a dime or a dime’s worth of prestige from anyone. So. Motives. The noise in this place shatters concentration. I cannt keep a straight line. When I left you, I went and laid down. Someone was banging on his bunk up a few levels shouting “MARRY ME! MARRY ME!” Fine. Motives. Obviously money. I will explain when I see you next. When can you come again? No, I will write. Money obviously. There is a lot of money in this. But not for me. None for me. Arthur. I do not need money, and I wiill not be around to spend. Money for you. Dana. Your mother. Finally. And honorably gained! At last. What else? A gift to you. Fame for you. Your own writing is grand and you are rightly praised for it. And your name is crucial to our task. But this is a different magnitude and success in this gambit accrues to you (and Shakespeare).

  (There it is again.)

  You will be toasted for this! The proximity of your name next to his! You introduce this for him, and he then introduces you to millions of readers. You do him this favor and he owes you and repays you right away in spades. He lights the way and you can do whatever you want after this. You said publishing was in trouble. He will save it. And you.

  I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do. I didn’t understand what it mattered if this quarto was real or what it proved, considering someone had published the play before—we had the 1904 edition, and my grandfather had acted in it in 1915. I was no expert in any of this and didn’t keep up with the latest Shakespearean discoveries, but finding a copy of a play that everyone already knew about seemed pretty minor, though if it was a museum-quality relic, then I assumed it would be worth some thousands, perhaps. I may even have fantasized that it was worth $10,000 or $50,000. Still, why so excited, Dad? Perhaps that sounded like a million to 1987 ears.