The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Read online

  My mother interrupted me at this point. “Hmm. Arthur, you know the old line? Sometimes liars tell the truth. Listen to yourself. There were barely libraries in those prisons. Somehow he’s concocting sixteenth-century ink?”

  “Maybe he had a partner. Why not Glassow?”

  “Because Chuck Glassow’s a grocer and a thief, not a genius. And he’s been out of the country for twenty years. But, really, by now, who cares? Why are you getting so exercised about this? You have other things to worry about.”

  “He’s willing to wait fifty years to see a profit, so he can leave it to his family and feel sentimental and like he made it all up to us. Nauseating.”

  And more. He gets to know he’s pulled it off, his last thought as he dies, a smile on his face, alone in a furnished rental, paid for by his pigeon son. It’s the pathetic part of forgery, the snickering little mischief-maker. Still and always the wonder-worker, which role, no matter what he said, always contains an element of laughing at the suckers, the farmers, the fake-Rembrandt buyers. And the ego! He adds to the world’s pleasure and mystery. Just a big fairy ring. It’s pitiful. He gets to feel like he’s Shakespeare. As good as Shakespeare. Not as good as 1600 Shakespeare, not as good as Hamlet, but as good as 1593 Shakespeare. As good as the first batch of history plays. He fooled everyone: academics, scientists, readers, critics. Us. Me. “He didn’t ask Dana to manage this,” I said, “because he knew she wouldn’t have done it. He couldn’t sucker her like he suckered me. She’s smarter than I am. And she’s not greedy enough.”

  “Of course she is,” said Mom. “She’s an actress. You think she wouldn’t like more press time? ‘Actress Finds Shakespeare Play’? Please. But, Arthur, I don’t think … are you sure that index card says what you think it says? This is a lot of money.”

  I have total sympathy for that position: it is a lot of money, and one should think very hard about one’s purported principles before throwing away a lot of money, especially money your long-suffering mother and romantically betrayed artist sister could use. I promised Mom I would think it over before I acted, and I wasn’t just being nice. I also wanted to drive to Petra’s to see who was where, reciting my one remaining article of faith as I motored over.

  I tried. I waited and mulled over that index card, but I could (and still can) see only one interpretation.

  39

  BERT THORN CALLED TO REVEAL that there was a will. In the same call, he requested my “word as a gentleman” that his time consulting on the probate, as well as a lingering balance from my father’s old accounts, would be “taken care of appropriately out of proceeds.”

  Besides that unfortunate reminder of my father’s legacy, the will itself cattle-prodded my most predatory suspicions. He had drafted it two months before his release from prison, before the visit where he haltingly, so sincerely, lured me into this folly. Nevertheless, he wrote it as if my participation were a certainty. First:

  “I direct that my son, Arthur M. Phillips, serve as my literary executor, and I direct that he see to the publication, protection, and promotion of the play The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain by William Shakespeare, so as to maximize the financial return from the play to its beneficiaries. I hereby give and bequeath ownership of my copy of the 1597 edition of that play, and all monies which may be derived therefrom, in the following percentage shares: 28 percent to my said son, Arthur M. Phillips; 24 percent to my daughter, Dana S. Phillips; 24 percent to my former wife, Mary Arden Phillips diLorenzo; and 24 percent to my friend, Charles R. Glassow, if he survives me. If he does not, I direct that his share be divided equally among the three other beneficiaries just named.”

  Upon hearing that last name over the phone, my mother interrupted my reading with salty Iron Range profanity, circa 1945, in original pronunciation. I had been a little puzzled by the division of revenue when I first read it, but at the time I had only felt a bitter, head-shaking amusement at my father’s manipulations of me. I wasn’t moved to my own full-throated obscenity until his next stipulation:

  “The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain was written by William Shakespeare. Should my son and literary executor, Arthur M. Phillips, at any time in the future attempt to publish, or cause the performance of, or in any other way disseminate the play under his own name, or in any way publicly imply that it is his own work, or the work of any writer other than William Shakespeare, then I hereby revoke the said gift and bequest to him, and his said 28 percent share thereof shall belong in equal shares to the other three beneficiaries named above, or their survivors, provided they take all available legal steps to enforce my direction.”

  In other words, he could conceive only of a son as thieving as the father. Before he’d even asked if I would do it, he was defending against the possibilities that I would steal his play for my own fraudulent literary ambition (Look at me! I wrote a Shakespeare play!) or I would sink his plans out of spite (as I was the snitch who had squealed to Doug Constantine), and in either case, I would lose my inheritance. And he would sic his wife, daughter, and criminal chum on me to make sure I did the kingpin’s bidding.

  I don’t think that in my entire life of wavering anger issues I have ever been more furious than I was at that moment in Bert’s crappy office, blinking up at his drop-tile popcorn ceiling, my jaw muscles straining, almost sprained, from the contortions and tensions of my face. Dana had come over after her matinee to join me for this meeting, and she laughed as I raged, broke a pencil, spluttered at the dead man’s lies, insults, hypocrisies. She patted her loony twin’s shoulder as I vowed to torpedo the whole smeared business. “His pathetic little performance, his sad-ass delusion, although that’s generous, the idea that he was insane, not just a liar.” That said, it seemed possible that by the end he thought he was Shakespeare, writing Will’s will. “I’m shocked he didn’t leave Mom his second-best bed.”

  “Well, I do hate that guy,” Dana said as we left Bert’s office.

  “I know. He’s dead and he’s still playing us.”

  “No, no,” she laughed, down on Nicollet Mall now. “Chuck Glassow. I hate Chuck Glassow.”

  “Really? You think about him at all?”

  “You don’t? How can you forgive him? How many times did Dad go to jail while Chuck got off?”

  Charles R. Glassow, owner of a quarter of our projected millions, did two years for the grocery store coupons tax scam and came out with fair prospects from other friends; my father was paroled after seven, mentally worse for the wear, and soon to go back in for the long one.

  Before that, there was the wine. I honestly can’t remember how that one ended, and I don’t care enough about the unquestionable accuracy of this to look it up, but Chuck and my father had the idea of printing up exquisitely crafted labels for a French vineyard that didn’t exist, the promotional materials for the château and grounds, the history of the denobled family, even a pedigree of the vines, including scientific analyses of the soil and grafts. This was pre-Internet, so the arrival of an elite French red, priced above $150 a bottle, available only in small batches, preordered for the very best customers, was an unexamined boon for Minneapolitan oenophiles. The wine was a cheap American blend, chosen by Glassow and my father for its price, anonymous flavor, and unmarked corks and cork foil.

  I don’t see any other explanation: Glassow’s presence in the will only confirmed what the index card had already revealed.

  “Where are you going from here?” I asked Dana, a vague question, as I was desperate now to be told I was forgiven and free to move in with Petra, that Dana was happy. “What’s the latest?”

  “We’re talking. I don’t know. I didn’t know there was so much wrong before all this. We have so much to sort out. Depths of misunderstandings—I can’t see to the bottom. Can’t see how it can end right. I don’t know. I think … I think she’s already seeing someone.”

  “Really?”

  “I wonder what Shakespeare w
ould have made of psychopharm,” she sighed when I couldn’t find the air to form the questions I wanted to ask. “You know? We’ve taken all this crap for so many years. We’re more like everyone else when we’re on the junk, everything seems clearer and easier and less fraught, but a little less real, too. Hard to believe that would have seemed like a good idea to him. ‘Here, take this: you’ll be happy to be a glover like your dad. Here, take this: you’ll be happy to be a Protestant. Here, take this: you’ll be happy enough married to that old hag and living in Stratford.’ I don’t think so.”

  “What if it was for his daughter, though?” I said. “For someone he loves. Judith has been distracted with melancholy ever since her twin brother died, she’s hanging out down by the river, making bouquets of symbolic flowers. You think Shakespeare wouldn’t run down to the apothecary for some Zoloft?”

  “And some Mucedorus for his cold.”

  She had a double that day—matinee and evening shows—so I dropped her at the theater, hugged her, and flew to Petra.

  I came in talking, a little buzzy. “Are you going to tell her, or should I? I think she knows already, on some level. I think she senses a shift is coming. I think she’s okay with it. I think she’s going to be happy in a way. We’re all going have to work on this, obviously, but—”

  “This isn’t where you should be,” Petra said. “There’s nothing more here. We’re done.”

  It’s a storytelling puzzle, really. What breakup has ever occurred that is dramatic to anyone other than the participants? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it makes for a passably entertaining show because the lovers are driven literally insane by fairies, and their breakup talk is unhinged and vicious. In my case, I just went into a state where I didn’t hear her, and hoped if I didn’t acknowledge it, she’d stop saying it.

  “Are you going to tell Dana?” I asked again.

  “Of course not. Why would I want to hurt her?”

  “Because you—She thinks you’re seeing someone else. Are you going to stay with her?”

  “I don’t know. No. I don’t know. Please go.”

  “You’re going to change your mind.”

  “I won’t.”

  “This is just nerves. Jitters. This is just before the ending. We decide the ending.”

  “It’s not nerves.”

  “This will pass. We just have to get to—we have to decide, or it won’t—the ending is ours to decide.”

  “No.”

  “I love you. Petra, I love you.”

  “That will pass.”

  “No. It won’t. It won’t pass.”

  “But it will. Of course it will. It always does. And then something else can be the ending instead.”

  “I’m going to prove to you that we work. Just wait. Just promise me you’ll wait.”

  40

  THE NEWS OF THE FIRST scholarly authentication came by voicemail. My editor called, jubilant. She whooped, “It’s happening! It’s really happening! You knew it and they’re proving it! Congratulations!” and some other people cheered in the background, an office full of pigeons celebrating because they’d stumbled onto a bag of poisoned corn. I pitied them for how they would feel when they learned the truth. I knew this had to be stopped; I’d put it off long enough. Although, yes, true, the temptation was to keep my mouth shut. I won’t deny it. Especially upon learning that we had at least one professor on our side, which moved me around the board game’s path to another payment. “A check will go to Marly’s office this week. I’ll make sure of it,” Jennifer said, signing off. I confess: I wanted the money. I like money. There.

  I didn’t really expect there would be any more assenting professors after this; I assumed we’d only brought aboard some junior adjunct monkey from Podunk Polytech, probably an anti-Stratfordian anyhow and thus easily deluded, or some tenure-famished conniver ready to authenticate just to make a name. The payment for first authentication wasn’t all the money in the world, and I figured there wasn’t going to be any more money since we would never achieve the next benchmark. And so I decided to—shall we say—think a bit longer. Guilty.

  But other impulses were stronger: pride in my own career, for example. I did not aspire to be famous only by dint of my father’s crimes, even if we were never caught. And I was plenty afraid we would get caught, which would be worse for my career and pride: I’d be unmasked and unread. Nobody reads Clifford Irving’s novels anymore. (Look him up.) Even if we weren’t caught, and my millions typhooned in, I’d be earning criminal revenue, just as my father would have done. This was my shoulder angel’s conclusive, pitchfork-bending argument: I refused to resemble my father in any way. Also, let’s not forget vindictiveness: I was not going to let him get away with it, even if that cost me $10 million. A display of virtue might also impress Petra, whose faith in me could be restored and who occupied those thoughts of mine that were not wrestling the play.

  41

  DANA TURNED UP at the apartment, now a dull bachelor pad, an hour after I’d left her a voicemail saying I was going to call off the publication. “Oh, how could you?” she asked at the door, and I feared she was talking about Petra.

  “He played me. He played both of us,” I moaned, hoping we would land in comfortable old patterns of emotional discharge, hoping she wouldn’t say Petra was taking her back. “He thought he could put this past me? He didn’t know me.” I showed her the index card, which didn’t interest her for very long.

  “That? Are you kidding? Have you even read the play? He gave it to you. Have you read it? What sort of person—How can you back out now?” She was very angry, which triggered my own anger in response.

  “You didn’t want to do it at all. You told me you wouldn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, but you did do it. He counted on you. You promised him. He was making it up with you. I didn’t need that. And he wrote the will before you two made your—You can’t take the will as an insult. You and he hadn’t yet—Besides, you have Glassow to deal with now. If he thinks you’re degrading the value of our shared property? He’ll sue you. You think he’s in this for your reputation? Or literature? You debunk his money at your own risk. Mom could probably use the money, too, you know. If you care. You can keep my share if it soothes your issues.”

  “I’m not negotiating for more money. Thanks. And I don’t have issues.”

  “Have you read it? Really read it? You didn’t notice that it’s about you?”

  “Oh? So you agree he wrote it.”

  “You chuckleheaded, whinnying, braying ass. It’s about you, like a dozen other books I can think of. So either Dad wrote it for you, or he asked you to make it famous because he recognized you in it. So don’t come wailing that he didn’t know you. He gave you this, this everything. What do you still want?”

  (That’s an illusion, of course, a trick of perspective, the idea that the play is in any way “about” me. It can equally be said to be about a man born in Stratford in 1564—maybe on April 22 or 24, by the way—or about an apocryphal boy king in Dark Ages England or about my father or his idea of me or my grandfather or Dana in armor or or or.)

  “Who wrote the play, Dana?”

  “You promised Dad.”

  “But it’s a fake. It’s a crime.”

  “What a Puritan prig! What do you care?”

  “My reputation?”

  “You believe your press kit now? Your reputation? From those novels?”

  “Nice.”

  “Sorry. But come on. Seriously. I don’t care who wrote it. It’s beautiful. I’ve loved it since we were ten. Dad gave it to me first anyhow, you know. It’s not yours to humiliate. It’s beautiful. It’s part of my life now. More than Measure for Measure. More than Cymbeline. More than Pericles. Henry VI. It’s better than Edward III, you shit, which everyone is canonizing as fast as they can, and that doesn’t even have his name on it. What’s wrong with you? Seriously, answer that: what is wrong with you?”

  “He gave it to you first? That’s grotesque. H
e gave you a forgery. With his father’s forged dedication. An heirloom of bullshit. How can you forgive him for all that?”

  “Forgive him? I don’t think—It’s not an issue here.”

  “And you know that this is all a scam. For money. He’s dancing in Shakespeare drag to make money.”

  “But he didn’t sell it when he was alive. He sat on it. If he forged it, he forged it for you. It’s his love for you.”

  “So you admit it’s a forgery.”

  “I don’t care. You’re going in circles. If Shakespeare wrote it, then you’re a dick. You’re going to lose Mom a pile of money, and you will go down in literary history as that moron who couldn’t tell the real thing when he read it. Or if Shakespeare didn’t write it, then you’re still a dick, because you’re throwing Dad’s love for you—and for me, by the way, if you care—back in his dead face. And why? Because your feelings are hurt? You want me to tell you that Angelica is as good as Othello? Fine: ‘Arthur, Angelica is as good as Othello. Dad thought so, too.’ Good enough? No? You have to kill both fathers at once: that’s what this is. You’re the first person ever to suffer from a double oedipal complex, and one of your dads is four hundred years old. Quick: muster up a grievance against Sil and you could do a triple lutz. Man. If Dad wrote it, he’s got you bound up but good. You have to say Arthur isn’t good enough to be Shakespeare, don’t you? And you hate Shakespeare! Or are you going to say Arthur’s not bad enough to be Shakespeare?”