The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (20 page)

Is it the dialogue headings down the left margin over and over again—
“ARTHUR PHILIP ARTHUR PHILIP ARTHUR PHILIP”—
that make me leery?

Dana called me in Prague, the night of July 18, 2009, to say that Sil, whose long illness I had come to permanently view as temporary, had taken a critical turn, and that I should fly to Minneapolis immediately if I wanted to say goodbye.

The next morning, on my way out of the apartment to the airport, my wife and I had one of those fights that are entirely unnecessary, in which everyone is simply reciting lines scripted by their worst impulses, a dull sequel to old fights, a dull prologue to later fights, a DVD frozen on the same stupid mid-blink face of a normally good-looking actor.

Jana’s mother, once such charming local color, so amusingly foreign and so obviously unrelated to my sexy Czech-model girlfriend,
was now a live-in nightmare and plainly the mother of my increasingly foreign and disgruntled wife. Jana’s mother and sister had both married men who were relentlessly and regretlessly unfaithful, and so the ladies had seized the opportunity while I was packing for my trip to Sil’s deathbed to express their breakfast-table certainty, in front of our twins, that I was having an affair. Jana—very much the child of her mother’s dour Czech unhappiness and sullen victimhood—allowed her buttons to be masterfully pushed. Reminders of my authorial unpredictability and American suspiciousness were ringing in the room, and Jana greeted me with tearful accusations in front of the boys and her nodding mother and sister. The script called for her to break something, so she indulged in a single dramatic but economical flying saucer and an alienating stream of Czech obscenities, amusing to Tomáš and Miloš, then almost fifteen and, for the time being, just about done with me anyhow. My steady, then angry (and truthful) denials launched her defensive weapon: she had slept with … it doesn’t matter whom. I said I didn’t believe her, which was a serious tactical blunder because I thought she was unattractive, did I? Broken by giving birth (a rather contemptuous sweep of the arm at my laughing sons) to
them
? I thought she couldn’t win another man?
“Arrogant American Jew!”
Oy vey.

And so—on the long flight, the endless day as time zones passed in one direction at the same speed that time passed in the other and noon held on and on for hours beneath me, and, later, disoriented in the JFK holding area where counterterrorism shades into countertourism—if I allowed myself to believe that Jana had cheated on me, then it was a delusion of jet lag and stress and sorrow, but one I could pull from my luggage again, further on in this story, as necessary.

I
ARRIVED IN
M
INNEAPOLIS
. My stepfather had died while I was nodding off in a pressurized cabin.

It was the end of a love story, great at least for its many possible interpretations.
Perhaps it was the comedy of Silvius the devoted lover whose dedication survived my mother’s false first choice (Shakespeare taught Jane Austen that trick). Or perhaps it was the tragedy of my mother settling for the dull, second-best offer, because her true love was too unsteady, flew too close to the sun, unable to tame himself to ordinary, human love—the poster on her daughter’s wall daily reminding her of
The Tragedy of
her first husband. How to define that second marriage to a first love? Each new scrap of evidence recolors all the rest, just as a good director can decide whether Henry V will be a hero, a brute, or a canny bluffer. The fewer the stage directions, the richer the possibility of each retelling.

“Oh, thank you for coming,” said my mother when I walked into the yellow kitchen, too late. She hugged me. She was grateful, as if I owed her nothing at all but was doing her some kindness, and I held her a long time, my carry-on bag trying to wedge its way between us. Dana stood to the side, sympathy personified.

Dana had moved back to Minneapolis six months earlier and been hired as the drama teacher at our old private school. Not long after, she was winning big roles in local theaters, doing much better than she ever had in New York. She had an apartment of her own but had been living with Mom since Sil was hospitalized for the last time. “I love it here,” she said when Mom had gone for a nap and we were having coffee in the kitchen, shrunken since our childhood. “I honestly feel”—she lowered her voice to a stage whisper—“that I’ve never been happier. Obviously, sad about Sil. I am. And I am, I am worried about what happens to Mom next, but I wish so much that you and Jana and the boys would come spend a month here. Everything’s different. I could almost say I’ve lived in a dream until now.” Dana took my hands. “It’s like I’ve never been happy before, like I didn’t know what the word really even meant. Everything else was just … preparing me. I have to tell you about someone I’ve been seeing. She’s moved in, actually.”

I
T IS TIME TO CALL
in the memoirist’s best friend: the changed name. I name my family, my poor sister, my German girl, my wronged wife. I call the villain of this story by my own or my father’s name. Yet one identity must be shrouded. What crime could justify this protection? Or, more likely, has the memoir come unmoored from memory’s safe harbor and now drifts off into black fantasy, and the desperate writer must do the legal minimum, lest the whole freyed tissue unravel?

No, she was real. She still is real, and if she was not as innocent as some, neither was she as guilty, not by a long distance, and I send her and her daughter all my worthless love and yet more concentrated apology.

What disguise can I tailor that will hide her from you while still showing you what she was? The more one loves, the more each detail matters. To smudge a line, pixelate the birthmark, drag a censor’s squealing black pen across her eyes, transpose two digits of her Social Security number—I am destroying her, and making all this more difficult to explain, because I will claim this one small memoirist’s privilege: if you saw her in every detail, up to her name, which fit her so snugly, you’d have done just the same as I. If you judge me harshly, it is only because, in my discretion, I am describing her so poorly.

No risk in confessing that she was ten years younger than Dana and I. Can I safely disclose that she was of another race? Of another religion? (One as irrelevant and inescapably identifying to her as Judaism had become to Dana and me.) Can I say she was a composer and musician, that she played the theremin, professionally, in films and in Minneapolis theaters? Or that Dana called her “my tigress of the Euphrates”? If true, how many people in Minneapolis now know at once whom I mean? If false, how odd are these colors, how far from comprehensible I’ve made her, and thus me and everything about to happen.

“And thus me.” For all I thought otherwise when I began this project,
I do want to be understood. I do want to be forgiven. I do want you to believe me and agree with me and approve of me. And if I cannot have your acceptance, then I’m tempted to say, “So be it, I’ll play the villain instead.” That’s what passes for psychological depth in
Richard III
, you know.

May I self-mitigate, allow myself some standard excuses? How about … Dana’s ties to the girl were weak, as strained as my own to my life back in the wilds of Bohemia? No. I saw no arguments between them, heard no doubts disclosed during twin-to-twin heart-to-hearts. No, Dana was in love, every bit as much as I later became, but she was there first, had made and received promises, had sought so long for just this love and could rightly expect her married and beloved twin brother, her long-ago best friend, to act with a scruple of decency. I knew all this. It was difficult, but not impossible, to will it out of mind.

Can I not blame anyone else, even a little? Perhaps my mother would be willing to bear a tiny share on her old shoulders. Why, yes, I see it now: During the peculiar wake/shivah that Dana had designed, my mother grew annoyed by some of Sil’s distant, too close cousins and asked me to take her for some fresh air. She moved quickly out the door and down the street, and I had to pick up the pace to keep up with her. She set off for the path around Lake of the Isles and we silently motored along for nearly half the lake before her energy (or anger) sputtered.

“How are you?” I asked.

“That’s a funny question. I just buried a husband.” We now walked slowly, arm in arm, me supporting her balsa-wood body, the bikers and roller skaters blurring by on both sides, the cocker spaniels in their Cuban-bandleader pants, the skyline of downtown Minneapolis across the lake, as self-contained as a snow globe.

“He loved you.”

“He did,” she said as if there were no arguing with that. “And he held up his end of the bargain. Probably better than I did. He loved me all the way to the end. Treated me well. Supported me. ‘Not wealth, Mary. I don’t think I’ll be able to do wealth. But we’ll be okay.’ ”

“You do a pretty good impression of him.”

“Suppose. Well, there’s not much to master, is the truth.” I let that lie, and soon enough she exhaled and her tone changed back. “He gave me everything he promised. Everything he had.”

“He did.”

“It would be pretty awful to say it wasn’t enough.”

“I don’t know. It depends who you said it to.”

“He was steady-state, Sil was. That was how he loved, too. He opened with undying love and, sure enough, it didn’t die. Until he did.”

“That’s beautiful. Love like that. People dream of that.”

“Do they? Do you?”

“I don’t remember right now, but I’m sure I have. I never heard you complain about him at all.”

“No. How could I? Can I? Can you say it was a mistake? It wasn’t. Odd: I had two good choices and got to have them both. Can’t really complain.”

I finally bit: “You seem good and ready to complain.”

“Can you complain while we’re sitting shivah, or whatever that thing is back there?” She pulled over to a bench under a linden tree and let the wheels and paws and running shoes flow past us. A snail, like an ornate, restless 2, crept across the back of the bench. My mother picked it up and carried it to some moss out of harm’s way. She sat back down and looked at the canoes on the rack across from us, and she started to talk. “For thirty-five years, almost—this October is thirty-five—thirty-five years he told me in word and deed that I was lovable. And so that’s what I thought I was. He was like a mild drug. As long as I was near him, it was enough, and it didn’t wear off, and I didn’t think I wanted for anything but his humble offerings. But it was
so
humble. I was
so
far above him and he was
so
lucky to have me. Flattery, but sincere. And I loved him. I did. I do. I just—Arthur, can I wonder a little? Your father. I count my blessings I got out when I did and stayed away how I did, and Sil was there to give me something smooth and different and
better
and save me and I was
so
far above him and … Honestly. Honestly? God
damn
it.” I flinched, then laughed at my overreaction, but I had never in all my life heard the
slightest obscenity smirch her lips, no matter how badly Dana and I had ever behaved. “God
damn
it. A little less awe of me and a little more effort to astonish me—to make me think
I
was the lucky one? Would that have killed him? But to sit there and say, ‘Gosh, I’m a lucky man to have you put up with my low-grade self.’ He never made me feel like I had better watch my step or I’d lose him. God
damn
it.” She really liked how that felt now. “I could do
no
wrong in his eyes. What’s wrong with someone like that?”

“That he loved you so much?”

“No, that, that, that, that I was just a great idea, and he, he was such a, was so, was such a—” And my mom was crying against me. “And then he up and dies first.”

Here’s the thing about Shakespeare: at the end of the comedies comes the wedding, the circle of life, the dance, the love that will lead to family and birth and life and then some unknown end. But there isn’t
this:
that after the marriage and dance, after the decades together, after the funeral, there is the woman, grown old and thoughtful and angry at herself for being angry at him, after everyone knows that everyone did their best, but who sits under the medlar tree and tries to say, “That was a
bore
” (God
damn
it). “I took the easy way, and I regret it.” If Dana and Harold Bloom are right, if we’re all just walking figments of Shakespeare’s imagination, then where in the canon is my mom, who could not quite say the truth about what she’d lived, that Sil’s love was not enough, that kindness and best efforts were not enough?

“Am I an ingrate? A shrew?”

“No.”

“I don’t really feel like one. I just know that’s the word for people who talk like this in this situation. Not even cold in the earth.”

“You can talk however you want to me.” If I later heard her words as a warning against living too little, risking too little, loving too little, playing it safe, well, one crime I will not cop to is ignoring motherly advice.

I didn’t know yet that her words were being banked, in some part of my cunning mind, converted to useful currency. I thought I was just being a good, understanding adult and son. But she spoke of regrets,
and I recalled Jana’s farewell address to me earlier that week, and I later saw the maternal regret as deeply wise license. She later said exactly the opposite to Dana (“Thank God for Sil. I got what I needed, I owe him everything, and I am so
blessed
”), demonstrating a mental flexibility that is evidence of wisdom or empathy or Alzheimer’s. Her conversation with me may just have been steam releasing, only a piece of her.

We walked back home, to the remnants of the remarkable event Dana had organized with help from some theater friends. When Mom and I walked in, the afternoon had progressed to one of Sil’s cousins singing Sinatra on the karaoke machine Dana had rented while martinis were being shaken up by a catering bartender in a Twins uniform with
MAUER
written on the back.