The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (7 page)

I was forced (by my father? my sister?) to babysit him and explain everything (clothes dryers, air travel, vending machines, vaccinations), and it was a chore. I loathed having to look after this fifty-year-old man, his frisky mullet warming the back of his neck above the stiff collar. I don’t know why, if I was so discontented with the task, I didn’t either (a) in my fantasy, demand to be relieved from my duty, or (b) in reality, stop fantasizing about punitive tedium.

Still I went on with my odd assignment, explaining the plot and premise of
Hogan’s Heroes
and
Gilligan’s Island
to the great man. (“The
conceit
and
argument,
” he would correct me.) He quite liked these shows, evidence to me even then of his limited brilliance. I demonstrated how to peel a Band-Aid when I cut my hand (and thus distracted myself just enough to prevent tears). I would send Shakespeare back to his own time with cures for the plague, explanations of electricity, suggestions for telephones. Later, the fantasy improved when I began to fuck with the Bard. “Some genius,” I scoffed, after I told him to cross the street only on a red light and he was crushed by a truck.

More pop psychology: the writer writes to create a world he can control and manipulate because he finds himself stymied by what the rest of you so blithely call “reality.” Yes, possibly.

The fourth and final inscription on the inside cover of the 1904 edition—
For Arthur, from Dana
—brought the book into my possession, but that was several years later.

F
OR
D
ANA’S THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY
—the day before my own—our father gave her the 1904 edition (with the same rules still in force) and a framed poster: an old Morris column ad for a 1930s London stage production of
Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Arthur
starring Errol Flynn as Arthur and Nigel Bruce as Gloucester. Dana
loved it and claimed never to be able to read the play again without picturing Flynn as the ne’er-do-well king. “Inspired casting,” she used to say. The poster hung above her bed. Don’t rush to Google that one.

Dana and I were, obviously, not identical twins but, as the family phrase had it, we were “something more than fraternal.” Our resemblance was not magical enough, not nearly, to fool anyone, to let us engage in Disneyish trickery against parents or teachers; nor did we even share enough of a vocal similarity before puberty to lure telephone Romeos into embarrassment. Still, thirty-eight or thirty-nine minutes her junior, I found her waiting for me in Abbott Northwestern’s delivery room, and if I depict her as waiting impatiently for me to emerge from our mother, as the clock swung past midnight on April 22, I don’t think it’s really too fanciful. Thirty-eight or thirty-nine minutes was the longest we’d been apart for months, since the moment we two ova had snuggled into place together (one of us cheating the rules, luging down our fallopian chute as the gates slipped shut behind us), and thirty-eight or thirty-nine minutes was the longest we were ever apart for some years to come. Bathed, fed, bedded down together, nursery schools through primary school (every year in the same rooms, at my mother’s request), we literally were never away from each other for more than a few minutes until we had our own friends in third or fourth grade. Even then—me playing baseball in some boy’s yard, her playing dolls in some girl’s rec room—there was a feeling that the separate time was in some way a research project
for
the other. I was experiencing baseball for her. Even if—practicing with a team after school—I wasn’t literally thinking of Dana, I was somehow gathering everything in to give to her: the weather, the plays, the feeling of a badly hit ball stinging my arms, the homoerotic towel whippery of the locker room. Even if I didn’t end up telling her everything, or anything, I stored it for her, lived it for her, and she knew it was all there if she wanted to ask.

I used to think of us as essentially identical if physically dissimilar. There was something beneath the surface that matched more closely than other people ever felt. Not everyone could see it, but for some (I’m thinking of Margaret Wheeler; I’ll come back to her), we were
literally interchangeable. I recall, when we were very young, an old woman in a beauty parlor asking us over and over, “And tell me again: which one are you, dear?” and my mother smiling at what she took to be the lady’s joke about obviously unidentical twins. But I saw the old woman’s sincere confusion. “Dana,” I answered, lunging at the rare opportunity, and the lady nodded, peered at me to find some distinguishing mark she could pin to her memory for “Dana.” Dana and I searched the beauty parlor’s mirrors together, then looked at each other, seeing plainly that whatever it was, you couldn’t see it.

She cried when she learned of Shakespeare’s own twin children, the brother dying young, the sister living on. “If something happened to you, I’d be alone forever,” she told me. A sweet and dreadful idea, but it leads to problems if nobody dies. If you’re alive only when you’re with the other, what remains for, say, a wife?

Shakespeare’s work teems with twins: perfectly identical twins who don’t know of each other’s existence, fraternal twins identically lovable despite different genders, separated twins in the employ of other separated twins, and it was through twins—
Twelfth Night
and
The Comedy of Errors
—that Dana first fell for Shakespeare. There she is on Dad’s lap, the fat collected works open on her own lap, both of them laughing about some Dromio or other, cheek to cheek and assigning each other parts, while I arranged blue plastic knights and archers on the black pentagons and white hexagons of the kitchen floor tiles, a monochromatic Agincourt raging on a flattened soccer ball.

My father looked down at me and recited from memory the famous band-of-brothers battle speech from
Henry V
. I listened until the odd words—
Crispin Crispian
?—reminded me of a breakfast cereal, and, hungry, I wandered across the room, looking for food, while Dad and Dana held off the French assault without me.

I admit that this seems a long way from an Introduction to a newly discovered Shakespeare play; this essay is fast becoming an example of that most dismal genre, the memoir. All I can say is that the truth of the play requires understanding the truth of my life.

That said, with the best of intentions, still I fall prey to the distortions of memoir writing. The memoir business has lately been an uneasy,
underregulated one, full of inflated claims and frenzied Internet debunkers, too many exciting drug addictions and Holocaust misadventures, too much delirious abuse. But even when one is
trying
to tell the truth, there is no guarantee to accuracy: I realize I have completely misportrayed my youth already, because retrospective importance (to me) doesn’t necessarily jibe with what actually happened (to everyone else). My strongest memories, my sensations of meaning and significance are all attached to the parent I saw less. The mathematical realities of incarceration and divorce dictate that the vast, vast majority of my youth occurred under the eye of my mother and her second husband, but it is my father, Arthur Edward Harold Phillips, who continually shoves his way to the foreground, wherever I turn memory’s camera.

In other words, this memoir is, despite my best efforts, already misleading.

M
Y SISTER PLAINLY PREFERRED
our father to our mother, and I preferred my sister to both of them. When he was gone, first to prison, then to his own apartment after the divorce and Mom’s marriage to the eternally patient Silvius diLorenzo (Window Sil, our father called him, citing his transparent personality), Dana was all mine. She and I fell into each other naturally, joyfully, once he was gone. Our mother encouraged it or, at least, didn’t discourage it by trying to be a child along with us or straining to impress us with wonder or Shakespeare.

My father delighted in us, sincerely if sporadically, but also delighted in being noticed and
witnessed
while being delighted to be a dad. Mom’s love was different. She felt she had done right by us by having twins and felt no need to intrude in our special relationship. She provided, disciplined, paid, drove, lightly applauded. She was a marathon parent, not a sprinter, an old-fashioned parent who could exist in her own world without longing to be part of ours.

Her name tells a uniquely American story: Mary Arden Phillips
diLorenzo. Mary: the assimilationist gesture of small-town Jews, second-generation Americans ready to use Gentile names to reassure the Lutheran majority. Arden: shortened from Sardensky somewhere between Vilnius and northern Minnesota. Phillips: the misguided first marriage, striving for something exalted and above ethnicity, something untenable in the real world. DiLorenzo: safety and stability restored, fantasies repressed, thanks to another straight-thinking, unromantic, early-generation immigrant group.

My mother was born in 1930 on the old Iron Range of Minnesota, a child of relative privilege in that humble community and depressed economy, so her family’s thorough-going and instinctive modesty was even more wisely self-protective. Her father was something of a town elder in tiny Ely, Minnesota, even serving—extraordinarily for a Jew—on the town council. As the town’s most successful grocer, Felix Arden was able to survive, if not exactly prosper, through the 1930s. The family didn’t suffer as much in the Depression as others, and Felix was known to provide free and discounted food for those in need, for which he was later honored by the town. As a result of his Christian generosity, the entire family shared in his reputation. Mary worked as his delivery girl to the housebound, and so gained a rather saintly aura. Her very un-Minnesota taste for fine clothes and displays of wealth were therefore largely forgiven, where anyone else would have been mocked or shunned in small-town Lutheran style. She was a regular at the Quality Shop over in Virginia, where the finest clothes on the Range could be had without the trek down to Minneapolis. She was a figure of powerful glamour there, looked up to by the shopgirls and even by the owner’s own beautiful and brilliant daughter. Silvius told me that the Quality Shop’s owner, in his annual trips to New York, would come back with gowns he chose particularly for the Arden girl from Ely. My mother’s clothes, hairstyles, and very unladylike motorcycle with sidecar (which I later used in one of my novels) were only admired and smiled on, since she had been the little girl bringing food through the snow not so many years before, never forgotten by the Swedes, Finns, Italians, and Poles of Ely.

It was one of those Italians, Silvius diLorenzo, who set his heart on
the grocer’s daughter with the long black hair and eyes so gray they were almost silver. Religious and class distinctions were very real, though, in 1950s small-town Minnesota, and Sil would have had to be a stiff-spined rebel to buck everything in his way for her, even if he could have won her. She might possibly have been in a position to make an unconventional marriage, if he was inclined to convert, or if she was inclined to marry at all, but she still had wispy ideas of moving away from Ely to become an actress in New York or Hollywood, or to achieve some other undefinable glory. She had never tried acting; it was just that too many old Swedish ladies had petted her hand as she delivered their food and told her she looked like a movie star.

Sil was the son of Italian immigrants (whereas my mom was the granddaughter of immigrants). His people worked, when there was work, in mining or on the docks over in Duluth. Sil tried his hand at boxing before being “knocked out enough to knock some sense into me.” His mother had a make-work servant’s job in the Arden household, though the notion of actually using a servant offended Felix and Annie Arden’s modest sensibilities, and Annie had to stop herself from doing Violeta diLorenzo’s work for her, lest she reveal just how much charity motivated the employment.

And so, for years, Silvius told me, he ached for my mother, the daughter of the house where his own mother folded the laundry. A fair student at Ely and a second-line wing on the school hockey team, he watched as she was squired to dances, as she rode through town with this or that boy in her sidecar, and as she prepared to go down to the University of Minnesota in 1949.

He declared himself to her that summer before she left, in a scene I heard from both of them. In Sil’s version, she barely noticed his presence, seemed puzzled by the whole thing. “She was imagining herself performing for the crowned heads of Europe or marrying one,” he said. Sil slunk away, embarrassed but lighter for having faced down his fear. “She was cold as a common executioner,” he told me, laughing by then, the late-round victor. “Silly, she called me. That was rough. When you’re beneath her contempt, when your mother’s cleaning her toilet. Now I can take it.”

“What, she still calls you Silly?”

“For years.”

I had never heard that.

My mother recalled it differently: “I was astonished. And felt so sorry for him. He’d gotten himself into quite a knot, really unnecessarily, and not for anything I did or was. I was hardly the best-looking girl in town. And, there was something else, too. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“I really do,” I said, just last year, after Sil had died, and I was in the midst of my own middle-aged romantic muddle and agony.

“I was terrified,” my mother admitted. “I thought, ‘Well, this is not a particularly strong offer for my hand, as an alternative to all my fantasies just over the horizon, and yet it’s not without some appeal.’ That’s what so worried me: I was tempted. And, really, by what? I didn’t know Sil that well. I didn’t know his finer qualities yet. All he was, then, was an offer. My first offer. I wasn’t in love with him, but he was a sweet, handsome man, strong, who seemed to love me, I don’t know why, and all that almost felt like enough. I could have said yes! And then I panicked: didn’t I want all the things I wanted? When you suddenly realize—even after a lifetime’s study—that you don’t know yourself very well, it’s a little terrifying. Sil, too: he couldn’t have done it, married a Jew, converted, done that to his family. If I’d said yes back then, we never would have gotten married.”