The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Page 4
My denials never moved him, I know. To his credit, even though he thought I had unbagged the cat, he wasn’t obviously angry at me. It was not going to be a big deal for him. He didn’t mind paying the fines, since he did acknowledge that the farmer (“a working man,” he said in one of his expansive friend-of-the-proletariat moments) had lost some money (though not nearly so much as he’d made from tourists paying to roam slack-jawed through our art).
His anger would have been preferable. Being wrongly accused of anything by anyone is bad enough to a boy, and I certainly didn’t like feeling myself pushed out of my father’s magic circle. But worse was that our wonder-working was wondrously worked into something grubby. All his talk about wizards fell away. He was just a semicompetent conspirator rethinking whom in the gang he could trust, like kids on a playground reshuffling, again, who was in and who was out. My father’s confidence in me (which was the early entry ticket to adulthood) and adulthood itself (a place of wonder-working and pranksterism) now both appeared childish, petty. I wasn’t very good at articulating this anger, other than to tell Dana over and over that he was a jerk.
“He knows it wasn’t you,” she reassured me, adjusting the troll dolls in the tabletop theater he had built her, the little black one smothering the little blond one with a tiny red pillow. “He believes you.”
“I know,” I lied, the troll grinning mischievously in its violence, its orange hair standing erect in murderous ecstasy.
My disappointment didn’t last. It wasn’t quite corrosive enough to free me permanently, and I look back now “across time’s moat” and I wish I could shake sense into that kid: “Enough,” I’d say. “That guy’s not what you want to be.” But younger selves refuse to follow older wisdom.
For my twelfth birthday, when I was deep in an espionage fetish, he made me a high-quality Soviet passport, with my stern photo expertly installed behind Cyrillic seals and visa stamps from my travels to North Korea, Vietnam, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. I knew that the work involved—the research, the hand stitching, the specialized glue and paints—reflected his sincere love for me. I also knew by then that love was only one element of such an extravagant gift: the rest was professional vanity and a quantity of probable felonious rehearsal.
For my thirteenth, he gave me a baseball signed to me by my hero, Rod Carew, the Minnesota Twins’ star second baseman and, later, first baseman and a Jewish convert from Panama, easily the coolest Jew within ten thousand miles of my house. It’s not that this item was so difficult to obtain. It’s just that by the time I was thirteen, I had started to assume that anything that passed through his hands was fake. I threw the ball away.
Later he gave Dana a sweet-sixteen present: a “consolation” driver’s license after she failed the exam twice. Since Dad was in prison when we turned sixteen, the license was made by Chuck Glassow, Dad’s college friend who, officially, owned a grocery store. We had known Chuck for years, and he used to come out for dinner with us occasionally when Dana and I spent weekends with Dad. He was a little like Dad, very well-read, but less flamboyant about it. He was taller even than my six-foot-one father. When I was twelve or so, with all my contradictory feelings about Dad and manhood simmering up to a boil, I still liked Chuck, though I was also ashamed that I thought my father lost in comparison. This diminishment of my father may have been unavoidable anyhow at that time; that’s part of being a twelve-year-old boy (as my own sons, now fifteen, continue to teach me).
I liked how Chuck swore. It was, I see now, an affectation, like quoting Latin and Greek (which he also did); his cursing was Runyonesque, calculated, cooked up. “She should consider blowing that attitude all the way out of her ass and lighting it on fire,” he said of one of the grumpy, antique waitresses at the Embers restaurant, and I thought he was a figure of high glamour.
He was an especially slender man, long and thin in every direction and every limb. “Artie,” he said after he saw me talking to a neighbor, a girl my age but already quite a bit more developed. “She’s too big for you. But I’m drawn in that direction, too. My lady of the moment? She and I? A Giacometti putting it to a Botero.” I didn’t understand the references, but the line made him laugh so hard he shook. I laughed, too, of course—a twelve-year-old having a grown man crack dirty jokes for him.
And then, a few days later, he mailed me a photograph—apparently taken in front of the Greek temple façade of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts—of a grimacing, wire-thin Giacometti statue putting it to a plump Botero statue, beatific at the rear intrusion. The huge composite statue stood to the left of the grand staircase. I had never noticed it there before, remarkably.
So I puffed my Huffy over to the museum, where I found the usual sculpture to the left of the main stairs: an angel with a sword standing on a wolf, or something, even more improbable than Glassow’s, all things considered.
From nothing, from a passing joke that occurred to him as he said it, Glassow had made this crazy and pointless photo, implying a sculpture that never was, a collaboration and history between two artists who never met, and a ribald sense of humor in the city’s fine arts museum. He remade the world in his own taste for no other reason than that it amused him. And he shared with me the fruit of that imagination because I had laughed back when he first thought of it, though I had only laughed because he said “putting it to.”
Glassow was (I noted with a dash of preadolescent bitterness) what my father wanted to be but wasn’t. (Of course, it was only due to my father’s training of me that I could appreciate and admire him.)
I remember him at Embers one weekend evening, taking coffee in the brown plastic mug and giving ten different explanations for the ten times we asked him, “Why are you wearing a tuxedo?”
“I’m going to the casino after, but I wanted to see you kids first.”
“There was a mix-up at the dry cleaner,” he sighed, shaking his head, breathing out smoke from his Chesterfield, a line of gray that tracked along the top edge of the red booth.
“Ask your dad. His idea of a practical joke, saying dinner with you three was black-tie tonight.”
His imagination inspired me and Dana to try out personalities around him. Something as mild as this game led us to put on different voices, attitudes, vocabularies, to see if, in disguise, we could sneak closer to the truth. “Baby,” said Dana like a tender mother, “baby, really, why so swank?”
“I’m going to a ceremony, a roast for a friend who’s getting a prize for his charitable work. Couldn’t be prouder.”
“Cut the crap, Chuck.” I tried a twelve-year-old tough guy. “What’s up?”
Chuck accordioned his cigarette butt into the black ashtray permanently stained gray inside its crenellations. “Fact is, compadre, I’m trying to impress a broad. I’m taking her first-nighting at the opera.”
“Come on, for real, Uncle Charles, please,” cajoled a young, young Dana, avuncularizing Glassow for the first and only time.
And this man, whom neither of us has seen in decades, now owns a quarter of my family’s coming fortune.
But I’m ahead of myself.
6
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, two gallants at school called Dana a dyke, and so I tried to fight them. When it was over, and my nose was broken into its current alignment, and the two bravos had triumphantly kicked me in the stomach, adding, “Arthur is a fag,” Dana, back home, set to work nursing my body and lacerated ego.
She didn’t bother with “you were really brave” or “those guys are jerks” or “you were outnumbered” or even “thank you.” We knew all that, and we both knew the other one knew it. And she knew how small I felt, how useless, how badly I had fallen short of some idea of myself as courageous and chivalrous, and, most of all, how ashamed I was that I couldn’t destroy someone who had hurt her.
I lay on the sofa, replaying the battle in my head, but with better results and snappier repartee. Dana brought ice in a cloth and laid it gently across my purple nose, unbloodied my cheek
s with wet paper towels, dropped aspirin into my mouth, and recited, “Being your slave, what should I do but tend / Upon the hours and times of your desire?” A puff of laughter started to build in the back of my throat, despite my condition, but it struck the bones and hollows of my face and quickly retreated as my eyes crossed and flooded.
“Listen to this. Listen,” she said, as if I had a choice. “The younger son needs to make money, and so he goes to the fair and challenges the wrestler, who is a complete brute, for a prizefight. Everyone says he’s insane, begs him to back out, but he won’t. Stubborn like you. The princess in the audience, probably really hot, sayzzzzzz …” She dragged out the word, and I heard the pages riffling, and I knew exactly what book was on her lap across the room from me, though behind my eyelids, closed under acid ice, all I saw were black fireworks. “Young gentleman, your spirits are too bold for your years. You have seen cruel proof of this man’s strength: if you saw yourself with your eyes or knew yourself with your judgment, the fear of your adventure would counsel you to a more equal enterprise. We pray you for your own sake to embrace your own safety and give over this attempt. That’s good, isn’t it? That’s what I would have said today. If I’d’ve known what you were going to do. And been able to speak that well.”
“Does he back down?” I mumbled and picked at the dried blood on my cheekbones, then wished I hadn’t.
“No.”
“Does he get his ass kicked?”
“No,” Dana admitted. “He beats the bigger guy and goes off to make his fortune. But that’s not the point.”
“The point is,” I hurried to conclude in self-pity, “I’m not a hero, and if you had stopped me you would have saved yourself this embarrassment.”
She was silent for a while. In my darkness, I complimented my stupid self that I had stymied her. After a bit, I heard her sigh, stand up, sit down again, more pages turning. “More? Really? Do I have to?”
“Wait,” she said.
Like most fifteen-year-olds (and most people), I was not delighted by Shakespeare, despite or because of my father’s indoctrination of us. The little of it I had read under duress in school had only confirmed the damage done by my family and had put me off the man forever. Most of it is a foreign language, excessively wordy, repetitive. It was either too much work to understand the characters or, alternately (since fifteen-year-olds are programmed to produce endless reasons why they don’t like anything), too easy: those awful soliloquies where bad guys reveal their plans or good guys swoon because they’re so in love.
“Here,” she said at last, a little victory in her floating, disembodied voice. “Here. Now listen. You’re seventeen years old. You don’t know how to fight, but you’re brave. And suddenly, you’re in charge of real soldiers. They push you out front, tell you that you’re king, tell you to rouse them to war. You don’t know anything about anything, about men in a group. You’re a kid. You’ve been raised as everyone’s favorite little boy, sheltered, coddled by women, and suddenly men are listening to you. To Arthur. Relying on Arthur. You don’t know war. Here’s what you know: girls, school, getting in trouble. But you’re naturally a hero, even if you’re not trained yet. So now listen to yourself.”
And she read his battle speech from Act II, Scene ii. Her voice was just deep enough an alto to pass as a teenage boy’s, and it worked. For the first time, it worked. The scene came to life for me, in my enforced darkness, and for this one moment, and then a whole afternoon, I thought Shakespeare was okay.
“Who waits for us within, fell Englishmen?
This Saxon pride set sail o’er Humber’s tide
And then conjoined to Pictish treachery
For but to cower, spent and quaking-shy,
Portcullised fast behind the walls of York,
As guilty lads will seek their mother’s skirts
When older boys they vex come for revenge.
But Arthur’s at the gate! ’Tis Britain’s fist
That hammers now upon the shiv’ring boards.
An English blood be thin as watery wine,
Then sheathe we now our swords and skulk away
With Saxon language tripping from our lips.
You’d con th’invader’s tongue? Absit omen.
Let’s school them then in terms of English arms,
Decline and conjugate hard words—but hark! Chambers
She sighs with gentle pleading that we come!
Now wait no more to save her, nobles, in,
And pull those Saxon arms off English skin!”
When she finished, she said, “Listen to it again. Arthur starts out with: the enemy is a little boy hiding in York because he pissed off us bigger boys, and we’re going to kick his ass. The soldiers don’t really go for that, so you reach again and you say, ‘If they conquer us, we’ll have to learn their language, and that’ll be like Latin class, which was a drag, wasn’t it? Anybody?’ Figure by now the troops are getting a little dubious about you. And then the cannons go off”—Chambers—“the battle’s going to start, and so you try one more time, last chance, and this time you nail it: York’s a babe and she wants us in her. And suddenly everyone starts to nod and grip their hilts, if you know what I mean.
“You could do that,” Dana said softly. “That’s what I saw today. You could figure out how to be a hero when you have to. You were outnumbered, didn’t know what you were doing, and you still fought like a hero.”
The Tragedy of Arthur was not necessarily her favorite back then, but she gave it to me that afternoon in April, in our living room, read the entire play to me. It took more than four hours, I’d guess. She patiently stopped to answer my vocabulary questions, stopped to replace the softening ice on my hardening face, stopped to make me something in the blender that I could bear to swallow, and April spring floated in and out through the open window, our mother and stepfather both late at work, our father far away in prison (no threat or irritant or better man), just me and Dana and this play, her thank-you to me for fighting for her honor.
She read to me from her little red hardcover of The Tragedy of Arthur, a simple but nicely done 1904 edition that has managed to accrue contradictory sentimental value for several members of our family. Its Edwardian frontispiece engraving (in a very nineteenth-century style) was of Act II, Scene iv, in which Arthur (depicted in an anachronistic late medieval suit of plate armor) hands over his shield and regalia to the Duke of Gloucester, the crucial scene in which Arthur orders the duke to swap armor with him and do battle in his colors so that Arthur can chase some Yorkish girl instead of going back to war.
I own that 1904 edition now. I have it in front of me. It is, as they say in the used-book trade, “slightly foxed,” with two or three small stains inside the boards. The cover is slightly frayed at the bottom corners, and the spine is faded. But otherwise it’s in excellent condition.
If curiosity has nibbled at you while reading this, you may be asking yourself why you can’t find your own copy in these easy Internet days. Where is the $285 used edition on your preferred online outlet? Where is the recent reissue by a small press looking for something quirky to win some buzz? Why is Random House bothering to publish the play with such fanfare if there was already a 1904 edition? Patience, please.
After the publisher’s information and date, the first blank page bears an inscription in faint pencil and formal early-twentieth-century handwriting: For Arthur Donald “Don” Phillips, with the compliments of the King’s Men Dramatic Society, King’s School, Edmonton, Ontario, June 14, 1915.
Always kept inside the book is the photo of my grandfather Arthur Donald Phillips appearing in that boys school production of the racy, violent Arthur play and the folded playbill, on canary-yellow paper, canary feather–soft at its creases, listing his name in the title role. The photograph is, as you can see, insane:
Whatever he is wearing, it has nothing to do with this play. The costume is neither of Arthur’s ostensible period (around A.D. 500, if he even existed)
nor of the style worn by actors in Shakespeare’s time to depict the early Middle Ages (some bits of armor over contemporary sixteenth-century clothes). No, my grandfather seems to be dressed in leftovers from a production of H.M.S. Pinafore, or something else eighteenth- or nineteenth-century and decidedly weird. The back of the photo, though, insists in black ink (and female handwriting?) that it depicts Don, as Arthur in Shakespeare, June ’15.
“Your grandfather, I gotta say, would have been perfect for that part,” our father used to claim, shaking his head at this photo and chuckling with hard-earned wisdom and acceptance. “The flawed hero. His personal charm wins him everything and his personal failings lose him everything. That fit your grandfather to a T,” sighed my dad.
And, sure enough, the second inscription inside the book, in multidimensional ambiguity, in blue ink, under the blue ink line drawn beneath the penciled school inscription, reads: To a new Prince Arthur, from his ever-loving Papa. 11/1/1942. My father would have been twelve when he received this gift.
I first learned of this 1904 edition when Dana and I were eleven, I think. I’m reasonably confident about the era: Dad was out of prison but had moved to a different apartment downtown. This one was above the Gay 90s, a progressive nightclub on Hennepin Avenue. I was lying on the sofa bed reading a comic book (Archie? Spider-Man?). Dana and Dad were in the kitchen, talking in low voices until Dana burst out with, “No way, José! And you have it? How long have you had it? Why didn’t you ever tell me? Can I please see it? Where is it? How did you get it?” Dana was in one of her states that can go by a lot of different names. The modern ones (manic, polar, over-stimulated, hyperactive) never much appealed to her, for good reason. It was an excitement my father found endearing but that my mother tried to tamp down as soon as she saw signs of it. Later, Dana would take pills, which she hated if they too much dulled these moods, but when she was a child, they were still just part of her “bubbliness.”