The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (10 page)

My sister’s girlishly precise handwriting (better than mine even now), in pink ink, fills four pages of lined notebook paper on this occasion. The pages still cling to one another at the twisted spade ends where each sheet was from its spiral binder ripped, and here and there my father nursed the creases with Scotch tape, now as yellow as watered Scotch. I asked myself, as I read this and other ones not long
ago, biting my lips and grinding my exhausted eyes to jelly with the heels of my hands, if it was possible that my father forged this letter. I didn’t recall writing any letters to him, though I did find in his bundles two short, businesslike documents assuring him of my warm birthday wishes to him. But this! Here is Dana as a girl: precociously literate, naturally and profoundly loving,
Lear
-quoting, funny, insightful, looking out for me.

I remembered, thanks to reading this, the details of my tenth birthday. Dana built me a model baseball field, cardboard and artificial grass (from an Easter basket), painted, all in scale to some tiny Twins figurines she had bought with her allowance. It must have taken her hours and days to build it, hours in secrecy away from me in Mom and Sil’s modest house, and since there was so little such time in those days, she must have been thinking of me and working for me for nearly all of April. In tiny letters on the back of the jersey of the figure up to bat she had painted
PHILLIPS
and the number 29 (Rod Carew’s number).

Silvius was not yet Mom’s husband then but her boyfriend, a stocky and balding fellow whose remaining, not-yet-fatted-over muscles impressed me a great deal. He did indeed take me to Met Stadium to see a Twins game for my birthday, though not until April 28, when the Twins beat the Milwaukee Brewers, even though Carew disappointed, going either 1-for-4 or 0-for-4, I believe. I have my ticket stub still, now that I am older than that stocky, balding fellow was and my own hair has thinned to the point where it looks as if I’ve had a not very convincing plug job on a much balder head. My mother bought me a boxed paperback set of
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
, which has moved with me from home to home, across oceans, for thirty-six years now and is held together by yellowing tape of its own. And my father presented me with a 1974 Topps-brand baseball card, in mint condition, in a protective plastic sleeve, with Hall of Fame–quality career statistics, of the Twins’ second baseman: me. My chubby young face sits comfortably on a man’s body in full swing, and visible just behind my blurring bat, a sign held up by a front-row fan:
GO, ARTIE!

It was the finest birthday of my life, and I hold out no hope of ever topping it in whatever years remain.

From hate to love to apathy and back again. Therapists and I have schemed and attacked the locked box that contains the answer to the question, “Why did I hate my father for so many years?” Armed with intricate lock-picking tools, we passed aggregate months poking at my psyche, jabbing at its impenetrable front (not a lock at all, only a crafty and detailed trompe l’oeil), searching it for a spring, finally whacking it with the hammer of antidepressants, dunking it in the acid of hypnosis. Still, it keeps its sepulchral secret.

I loved my father, of course, but I did finally have to admit that I hated him. His arrests when I was a boy were evidence first of police conspiracy and harassment, unfairness against my daddy; but later they proved his disregard for us, for me, his apparent preference for prison over my company. In parallel, there was my love for him and my admiration for his work and for his theory that, as a doctor makes the world healthier or a lawyer makes it more precise, he made the world more wondrous. This belief must have had—the shrinks and I are in concord about this—some effect on my becoming a novelist. That and my total lack of skill at baseball. (Somehow sensing this, an online reviewer of one of my novels wrote, “Phillips swings for the fences but manages only to wedge his bat up his own ass.”)

Protective of my mother, whom he failed, and jealous of his love for Dana and vice versa, I would gladly dress myself in noble garb now and claim (or just memoir-manipulatively imply) that I hated him for what he did to
them
, how miserable Dana was every time he was taken from her. I could make a case.

We were fifteen when he was sentenced to prison yet again. It was a brutal sentence—ten years—for what I must admit now doesn’t seem like that dreadful a crime. And yet I would have had him executed for it when I was fifteen. It could not have been more disgusting to me. Even now, when I am almost as old as he was then, I find myself as embarrassed as a teenager to write down the details.
He was a worker of wonders! He expanded the world’s possibilities! He was a wizard! He was teaching me to be just the same as him! I wanted to be him!
Well, he got ten years (and served seven) for a grubby little tax dodge. How measly was this wondrous expansion of the universe? His partner in wonders, Chuck Glassow, owned a chain of mid-market grocery
stores and had, for many years, been successfully claiming reduced revenues for tax purposes by gathering up newspaper coupons that hadn’t actually been used in his store. Unsatisfied by the tax relief he had won with this game, he had my father print fake coupons with higher discounts and for products that didn’t actually have coupons, further reducing the store’s apparent revenue and tax liability. That was it. The marvel of it all. Glassow got five and was out in two, and Dana only ever admitted being angry at him, never at Dad. But I took it as a betrayal—of us, of the ideals and philosophy he taught us—and my anger scoured my insides, burned my love for him out of me, ablated my heart’s interior walls.

When I came home from baseball practice Dana was on her bed, her eyes bruised from crying, her knees drawn up to her chest under that Errol Flynn poster:
The Tragedy of Arthur! Held Over!
she had added as a handwritten banner diagonally across the top. I was raving: “He’s a criminal, and that’s all he is! All that talk about art and love and wonder. He’s just a low-life!” Dana started to defend him, but I was in full howl and would not hear a word for him. “You’re the one mourning this!” I shouted. “He’s not coming to your show, is he?” (Adolescent disappointment is so common because the opportunities for damning parental absence are berries on a bush: if not her sculpture exhibit, my baseball game, her recital, etc.) She didn’t say anything, finally, and the pleasure of being angry
and
right was (and still is) a delicious brain-chemical cocktail, and a moral license unrevokable until the mood passes. “He’s a bastard for doing this to you,” I nobly concluded. My sister crying harder and harder proved that I was right and that I was helping.

The next day was the last of the school’s short fall baseball season, and my anger was the star. I took it out on Doug Constantine, my on-again, off-again best friend since I was six years old and the son of Ted Constantine, persistent prosecutor of my father. My anger was equally unjustifiable and natural. The proximate cause was a collision over a fly ball, me wheeling back from second base, Doug coming in from right field, both of us knocked to the ground with the ball dribbling behind us, two runs scoring, game over. Later, I told him that he’d been typically unwilling to back off where he wasn’t needed
while he screamed—
screamed
—that I was a pig, that nothing was good enough for me, that I had to be loved for everything and by everybody, had to snatch up everything.

The most remarkable element of this—far more remarkable than two friends shrieking at each other, then pushing each other, then wrestling, then swinging hard at each other’s faces in a locker room while other friends and teammates circled around to watch, none of the twenty boys tempted to step in and end the flailing fisticuffs—was the display of the fractured adolescent mind. Here were two promising young men who could do trigonometry, speak French, recall dates of presidential elections, map atoms, analyze Hemingway and Twain, yet neither one of them could have accurately said why he was fighting his best friend. Both would have cited a common display of baseball clumsiness, but they would have been wrong. I was angry that his father had imprisoned mine and that my father probably still thought I was the snitch; he was angry (to carry on the baseball terminology) that I had reached second base with Ellen Harrison, a girl I hadn’t known he liked and in whom I’d had very little interest to begin with and, oddly, exactly zero interest after my hands had touched her breasts, all desire vanishing like October snow on a Minneapolis sidewalk. The battle was joined again in the woods behind school, our wet hair picking up leaves and moss as we rolled in the dirt and smacked at each other’s faces with pinioned arms, like boxing T. rexes.

This scene of two friends fighting without understanding the cause gives me some respect for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and it is a pity we had no fairies to clean up the mess we made of our friendship in that disenchanted forest. The green, hazy enmity from that day floated on and on and never quite dissipated. Later, in a new twisting away from reality, I convinced myself that it was my father’s fault that my friendship with Doug ended. If my father had not been a criminal, Doug’s honorable, dull father would not have been forced to prosecute him, and I would not have been forced to choose (as I later interpreted the situation, forgetting Ellen Harrison’s role entirely) between friendship and family.
I chose family!
I told myself.
Like a fiery Capulet! And in spite of my own self-interest!
I wasn’t invited to Doug and Ellen’s 1988 wedding.

A
CT
II
OPENS WITH
one of those ostensibly “funny” scenes, in which characters speak in something more like the normal manner of Shakespeare’s time, not iambic pentameter. They are often lower-class characters and are supposed to be both comic and wise, or at least that’s how they’re treated now. In the case of
The Tragedy of Arthur
, it’s the servant in charge of King Arthur’s hunting dogs, reminiscing about what a fun kid Arthur used to be. He discusses with his apprentice boy whether Arthur will be a warlike king or will bring peace to Britain. Does it prove anything that they refer to a dog named Socrates and that my father supposedly had a Scottie named Socrates when he was a boy? I don’t honestly know that this is definitive. There must be some statistical likelihood we could calculate: What are the chances that my father could have a dog as a child and then grow up to discover the only copy of a play that referred to a dog of the same name? One in a … Or he lied about having a dog named Socrates. Or he lied about finding a play by William Shakespeare. I’m trotting ahead of myself.

Arthur then leads his troops in the siege of York, beating the allied Pict-Saxon-Scot army, forcing them to retreat to Lincoln, where they have secret reinforcements lying in wait. Arthur, thinking he has won the war, decides to stay in York for some vague purpose, telling Gloucester to lead the army to Lincoln in his place, disguised as the king. Arthur promises to arrive before any battle. A chorus of common soldiers leads us to Lincoln, with another dreary scene of earthy “humor,” boring me enough to convince me that the whole play is authentic. Lincoln turns out to be a large battle. Arthur is late arriving from York, so Gloucester leads the fight dressed as Arthur and wins a tremendous victory, killing Hebrides, the heir to the Scottish throne. Arthur arrives in time to take all the credit and review the prisoners, including the Saxon chief as well as Mordred and his brother. Feeling generous, even proud of his generosity, and trying to be unlike his father, he frees most of the prisoners on promises of
good behavior, keeping Mordred’s brother as a hostage. Arthur’s most militaristic noble, the Earl of Cumbria, is disgusted by the show of mercy.

Arthur’s childhood friend Constantine, the Earl of Cornwall, arrives to offer reinforcements and to share Arthur’s vision for a unified, peaceful Britain, a world totally unlike the dark years of his father’s reign. Before Arthur can achieve that goal, however, the paroled Saxons break the truce and attack yet again. Arthur is enraged by his own leniency and charges off to yet another battle. Mordred’s father dies, making him King of Pictland, and he maneuvers to become King of Scotland as well. Mordred also learns that Arthur has killed his brother in anger over the Saxon attack, and Mordred’s hatred for the English king continues to grow. He vows revenge.

Yes, Arthur has a childhood friend named Constantine. I noticed that, too. But Holinshed’s
Chronicles
(the Renaissance book of history that Shakespeare used for many plays) tells the story of Arthur and Constantine, so it’s probably on the up-and-up.

When Dana visited me in college, October of freshman year, Dad was three years into that sentence for the coupon scam. She came to my dorm straight from the train station, and my roommates and I had her stand in front of a red curtain, directly behind the giant hanging cardboard Ohio driver’s license we had made, with a space cut out for a face. Bill attached the removable letters with her new name and new birth date, I took the Polaroid, Ivan trimmed, and Ronnie laminated. An hour after she arrived, we went out drinking on our new IDs, and on our second Scorpion Bowl at the Hong Kong, she confessed that she had squealed about the crop circle to Doug Constantine, back when we were ten. She had kept her mistake from everyone for eight years, and I cycled between awe at her discretion, shame at her indiscretion, and anger that she had let Dad think for all those years that I was to blame.

In the play, Arthur’s father kills a noble and replaces him with Constantine’s father. Then Arthur kisses and ends up marrying Constantine’s sister, rejecting a better offer from the French. In real life, Constantine French-kissed Arthur’s sister before she rejected him,
and then Constantine’s father reported Arthur’s father to the sheriff of Nobles County. (If my father did not distort our family life to forge this play, I am left with the uncomfortable possibility that we have lived a distorted version of Shakespeare’s imagination, which, ridiculously enough, is what one Shakespearologist claims: we are all the Bard’s inventions.)