The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (28 page)

We were walking through the darkening air, and the streetlights were buzzing on, one at a time. On the sidewalk in front of us we saw a sparrow. It was injured. It did nothing to escape our approach. One of its legs dangled uselessly. When I knelt down, it tried to hobble
away but I picked it up. I was surprised and a little uneasy at how fragile it seemed. There was blood on one of its wings and on its chest. There could be no nursing it back to health.

“Oh, we have to help it,” Dana sighed.

“I will,” I said, feeling her pity for the bird as pressure to prove my hard fitness for life and adulthood. I had to channel humane feeling into realistic manly action. “There were things a man had to be able to do,” I thought, likely misquoting the character from the possibly Graham Greene novel. In the book, the protagonist comes upon a wounded pigeon while walking in a London park with a woman he means to impress, and then shyly, almost embarrassed, he rapidly, manfully, mercifully twists the bird’s neck and drops it into the rubbish bin so the woman doesn’t have to see the creature suffer. He knew precisely how to protect her and end the animal’s pain.

I, on the other hand, was probably not very calm, never having done this before, as well as being overexcited at this chance to prove myself. I had never even touched a bird before this fateful moment. We walked from streetlight to streetlight, Dana repeating, “Oh, oh, the poor little thing,” and me trying to turn my back on her near a garbage can so she wouldn’t witness the simple, necessary act, although I can no longer fathom why I thought Dana would need protecting from it. I petted the bird and jogged ahead to the trash can on the corner, green and ribbed, with a black liner bag and painted with the words
CITY OF LAKES
. “What are you doing?” I heard her call. “There’s a …”

I hurried to do it. I twisted the little bird’s head, waiting for a quiet crack and quick, grateful immobility. Instead, it emitted a tiny squeak: I was only hurting it, perhaps merely annoying it, and in
my
alarm and panic that Dana would witness this secret ritual of kind men, worried that I couldn’t do what I had to do and what Dana needed me to do (whether she realized it or not), I then wrenched the bird’s head so hard that I tore its body nearly in half.

I held its head and much of a wing in one red hand. In the other clenched fist, shivering with adrenaline, was the organ-bunched breast, the other wing, the bubbling interior, the tendons and straw bones connecting the bird’s still-trussed halves. My hands and shirt
were sprinkled with blood and clots of stuffing, and I looked down and watched the bird finally, but by no means instantly or gratefully, die.

I pushed it all away from me into the trash, wadded some waiting newspaper over the body, smeared my hands on my jeans, and turned to Dana, whose face reflected my severe distress.

“You looked like a serial killer,” Dana said when I recounted this story over one of Petra’s flaky, honeyed desserts.

“It was not my finest moment.”

“Tell her what I was going to say, psycho, before you freaked on that bird.”

“Yeah, it gets worse. Dana stood there looking at me. And then she said she’d been trying to tell me that there was a vet still open on Lake Street.”

“And then you burst into tears,” Dana added, finishing the old story.

“And then I burst into tears, and Dana hugged me.”

“And I got sparrow guts all over my Suburbs T-shirt.”

“Oh, my God, you two must have been so cute,” Petra said, pinching both our cheeks.

M
Y AGENT AND
I made our brief, understated pitch to a roomful of people at Random House in New York, and more people were called in as we proceeded, each one signing nondisclosure documents as the price of admission. The publisher and the corporate counsel stayed in the meeting throughout.

To say the least, this was not the manner in which my previous contracts had been negotiated. My father was right: Shakespeare was holding doors for me that I could not open myself. The next ten minutes were unique in my agent’s experience. We were asked to stay in the room with water and fruit while everyone else left. Jennifer Hershey (my usual editor), the publisher, and the lawyer returned with a preempt offer eight minutes later.

I had presented the quarto along with the tentative reports of those few local Minneapolis professors I had consulted and a list of other professors around the country who were eager to be advisers and authenticators. I would be paid a very small fee pending the authentication process. Assuming that verification proved my claims, then the prepublication advance would be larger by multiples than any in my career, larger in fact than the total of my entire career, more than any sum my agent had ever negotiated in
her
career, and that advance still represents only a fraction of what everyone expects to happen next.

Random House would take over the Hydra-headed chore of authentication, collating reviews from Shakespeare scholars and from forensic tests of the document itself, though one of my terms (as Dad had coached me) was that the play would remain in my constant possession, with all testing done in my presence, in Minneapolis or elsewhere. (“All Arthur’s expenses paid first class if he has to travel for any testing,” Marly Rusoff, my agent, noted as if that were a mere formality, and everyone nodded as if that were a mere formality.) All examiners of the play would be required to study it in controlled conditions where copying would be impossible and only after being bound by bloodcurdling nondisclosure agreements. Random House legal would offer any assistance they could to my U.K. copyright attorney to accelerate the clearance of my right to assert ownership of the text.

Jennifer Hershey, the editor, cleared her throat and very tactfully, very sweetly said that they certainly wished to spare me any work I didn’t “feel like doing.” This included the editing, annotation, and Introduction. I didn’t have to put my name on any of it, if I wanted to “get back to your next novel, which we’re all really looking forward to.” We weren’t here to talk about me, plainly. I was free to go prepare some kind of high-tension financial instrument that could catch and contain the tsunami of royalties rolling my way.

But I refused to yield to my senior partner. I spoke with unpracticed and sincere eloquence. This was my family’s project. And I loved it. It mattered to my family and to me that our name be represented in the process and in the publication. It had to be that way.
Everyone happily nodded. Jennifer asked again, just to be sure I understood what kind of workload I’d be taking on, if I was certain I didn’t want to hand off the editorial tasks to an acknowledged Shakespeare scholar? I did not. “I would rather not publish with a house that didn’t trust me to handle this responsibility.” Silence.

“Fantastic then.” Someone new chimed in that they liked “the publicity story line,” but I could see them regrouping to attack again on this point later.

As the authentication process achieved “agreed-upon benchmarks of physical and textual authenticity,” I would be fed larger slices of my advance. In the meantime, Random House would manage all publicity and marketing, including the cover design and any supplementary material in the final edition. I would write an Introduction, which, I insisted (based on their obvious unwillingness to let me do the job at all), could not be abridged or altered without my consent. They inhaled, smiled, agreed. The Introduction would include a synopsis, a presentation of general historical context, and an essay outlining the evidence for the play’s authenticity. I would also oversee, with Jennifer, any other necessary work preparing the play for a “general audience.” I would give talks and publicity interviews as needed after publication. I also sold them the license to produce at a later date a paperback for theater use and to co-publish with the university of their choice an academic edition, with essays by eminent professors.

The house’s publicity machine was ignited. Jynne Martin, my usual publicist—and an award-winning poet in her own right, since, in this century, poets cannot rely on earls for their patronage—was excited on behalf of both her expertises and began mapping out how much to leak and when. In this dark era of a publishing industry out of joint, with omens of our destruction lighting up the night sky all around us, Shakespeare was galloping to the rescue, a man who’d cared almost nothing for the publication of his own works during his life. He would save our belief in ourselves as literate people.

My contract was drawn up faster than any Marly had seen in thirty years in New York publishing, and conciliatory replies to her clausal
quibbles were softly sighed by Random House legal in hours, not days.

Simultaneously, she opened similarly fruitful and nondisclosable negotiations with theater producers in London and New York, and with Hollywood studios. The results of those conversations are even now being rehearsed, financed, scheduled, scouted, shot.

I flew home to my sister waiting for me (alone) outside baggage claim. It was Dad’s release date, and Dana and I drove together to pluck him from prison.

I
RENTED MY FATHER A FURNISHED
one-bedroom apartment with floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over Lake Calhoun and the channel to Lake of the Isles, a place found for me by the novelist Robert Alexander, with whom I share an agent. These were my father’s first moments inside a building other than a prison or a hospital since 1987. Sailboats bobbed semi-inflated on the lake, and the slim wave crests were beginning to turn green and gold under the settling sun. He was sitting on a couch for the first time in twenty-two years. He wasn’t saying much, nor was I, other than obsessively offering him things. But he was more interested in the fine details of the world, an ancient infant. He would pick up throw pillows, squeeze them and laugh, then rise and walk to the window, press his hands against its warm glass. He made me recount and re-recount the meetings with the professors, the publishers, the details of our good fortune in the wilds of Manhattan. And I asked him why he thought the play had disappeared from history until he came upon it in that unmentionable country house.

“You didn’t tell them that, did you?”

“Of course not. Silvius’s attic.”

“Good. Good.”

“So what happened to
Arthur
all those years?” I asked with the most tenderness I had felt for him in decades, my hand on his dying back as he watched the boats like a little boy.

“It’s a natural question, Artie, but it’s the wrong question. No one can prove what happened. I can suggest a possibility that hasn’t yet been disproven. I know people will want answers, but the question is unreasonable: Where did this come from? What happened four hundred years ago that nobody wrote down?”

No, that reads too polished, coherent. He couldn’t talk like that last year. That was the gist of his answer, but it was not so smoothly spoken.

“People are going to want to know,” I said, pushing back, because I needed an answer for my Introduction, not because I had any doubt of my own.

But he said: “Stay calm about this.”
That
, he definitely said, and I laughed. I had asked as an interested believer, but he answered me as the chief of a criminal enterprise who has to talk down a jittery confederate, just when everything’s coming together so perfectly. “We don’t have to know everything. We can openly admit what we don’t know. What we may never know. It in no way reduces the wonder that is
Arthur
to say we don’t know where or how many times it was staged—diverse times, according to the cover. We don’t have to know how many copies were printed, or where the rest of them are. The cover says ‘corrected and augmented.’ That means there was probably an earlier printed version, an unauthorized bad quarto. But we don’t know. We don’t know and we don’t have to know if it was censored or banned or ignored. We know as little about some canonical plays. Remember: most things didn’t survive at all. There was probably more Shakespeare lost than we know. Most things don’t survive. This is what passing time means, Artie.” I remember those very words, and as he mumbled them he turned to watch the lake, and I felt at that moment—as I did several times in flashes over the coming month—a pity so profound that I would have (were he a sparrow) gladly torn him in half to end his scalding regret.

He turned to me and asked permission to look in the fridge.

“It’s yours.” I smiled with loving condescension. “You don’t have to ask. Dana and Petra filled it for you.”

He drank a Diet Coke,
extremely
frustrated (and knowing his frustration
was ridiculous) that Tab could no longer be had. “I was really looking forward to that. I’ve missed it.” He smiled at me and nodded several times as he drank, and I assumed it was love and relief, excitement for our project, and I’m sure it was all that, although eventually he asked, “What were we talking about?”

“What happened to
Arthur
between 1597 and the country house?”

“You didn’t tell them about the country house, did you?” he asked, again for the first time.

“No. Trust me. Attic.”

I took notes, the basis for an essay on this topic, an essay I am contractually bound to place in this Introduction, but which I can no longer honestly write. That was a different time. So now, to fulfill my terms, I offer my sincere notes of September 30, 2009, still preserved in the amber of my abbreviations, unedited. Contract fulfilled: