The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (8 page)

My mother went away to the university down in Minneapolis, and Sil took work as a builder, learning engineering on the job (“like sergeants learn the lieutenants’ job while the lieuts are all at West Point”). After a year in the big city, a year of studying English literature during that department’s golden age (Allen Tate held a chair, hosting guest lectures—in the sports arena!—by the likes of T. S. Eliot), she came back for her first summer, and, she told me, “I was torn in half, really. I tried acting, once. Dismal. Studying was very hard for me. I lost all my confidence that first year. I didn’t think I could accomplish anything or even trust myself to know what I wanted to do, or could do. I thought I was just hopeless. But, still, Ely seemed smaller than ever, and there was Sil outside my door every evening asking me to go with him to shoot rats at the dump.”

As near as I could ascertain (a sweet, elderly modesty settling over
their recollections now), some kisses were exchanged (in more hygienic surroundings, I hope), and the contractual significance of those kisses was interpreted very differently. According to Sil, my mother returned to the university for her sophomore year confused but determined to try her way in the larger world again, “without tying herself to a wop builder. A kiss doesn’t mean anything, Artie. You know that at your age, don’t you?” According to my mother, Silvius saw off his unpredictable fiancée, who was not yet tightly enough tethered to the kindly, safe fellow with a job and a modest plan for the future.

And that second year in Minneapolis, she met A.E.H. Phillips, as my father styled himself at the U of M. He was the wider world my mother had suspected was out there somewhere, and he was exploring, like her but less tentatively, the possibility of other selves. He was a painter already and dressed the part—berets, open-neck shirts, even capes. He was also better read than most of her Lit. classmates, with an uncanny memory, she said, “at least for seduction poetry. ‘To His Coy Mistress’ came pretty fast off his tongue, and Sonnet 119, and the cajoling parts of
The Rape of Lucrece
, if memory serves. And he taught me about my name.” Mary Arden, he informed her over wine, had been Shakespeare’s mother. She hadn’t known. “Probably what attracted him to me,” she said, not only out of modesty.

And here, finally, was the love she’d been expecting and fearing. The love that cannot be ignored or reasoned through, negotiated with, tamed, made cute or quaint or optional, a love as avoidable as act-of-God weather or resistant bacteria, the rebel army arriving in darkest night. I have known it only once, and I understood when she told me she felt herself voluntarily enslaving herself to him, “and if he’d said we were moving to Ely and I was going to wash toilets and he was going down the mines, I’d have had to do it. I wouldn’t have asked if I was
happy
about it. I just would have gone. That’s who he was.”

She delayed bringing him home, left Sil’s letters of inquiry unanswered, avoided introducing him to her parents when they came down to Minneapolis. When she told Arthur of the existence of a mild rival back north (“I was just trying to keep him in the game,” she
insisted), my father took note, smiled pleasantly, and set quietly to work. When she finally did take A.E.H. up to Ely to meet her family, Silvius was gone. “Oh, I suppose I noticed,” my mother told me. “I may even have asked. I don’t remember.”

Sil was nowhere to be seen because he’d received his draft notice. It had apparently been delayed in the mail, because he was expected to report to a fort in North Carolina for basic training in ten days’ time, prior to deployment to Korea. Sil certainly didn’t have the higher-education waiver my father had, but he didn’t argue, didn’t make the valid claim that he was his mother’s and sisters’ only real source of support. Having arranged something with Felix and Annie to take care of Violeta (a loan, Sil insisted, which he swore he would repay), he set off on the trains to Minneapolis to Chicago to D.C. to North Carolina. When he arrived, the army had no record of his call-up. The clerk examined his notice. It was absolutely authentic in every way; it simply didn’t correlate to any list or file the army could find, while Sil waited at a motel a mile from the base. At last, ten days later, in some effort to square a bureaucratic circle, the U.S. Army issued him an honorable discharge, granting him the rank of private, first class. “So I owe your dad for that,” he said.

In the meantime, my father had met my maternal grandparents, presenting them, at the end of the visit, with a hand-painted Sardensky family tree, stretching its roots back into Lithuania two generations further than the family had previously known, and culminating in the line connecting Mary Arden to A.E.H. Phillips, a proposal Mary had agreed to an hour earlier while Violeta overheard, sobbing, through the air vent that led to the laundry room.

Felix and Annie, both charmed by and dubious of the flashy Minneapolis painter, agreed to the match, and a date was set after their graduation, two years into the future. Mary drove Arthur back down to Minneapolis, averaging eighty miles an hour, and Sil returned to Ely two weeks later, his military career complete, his girlfriend engaged to someone else.

He learned the news from his mother and sent Mary a telegram offering her his warm congratulations and friendship. Stop.

“I felt like I’d won a contest, got cast in a film or a fairy tale,” my mother said. “Because I was a fool.”

“I really wasn’t trying to be clever about it,” Sil told me of that telegram. “I just wanted to lose gracefully. And I knew, too, even then, that this was the end for me. I wasn’t doing any more love.”

I
AM CONTRACTUALLY BOUND
to write a synopsis of
The Tragedy of Arthur
. One act at a time, I think; I don’t want to lose readers because Shakespeare puts them off. It’s for his own good.

So: Act I: In the Dark Ages, Britain is constantly at war. Uter, effectively king of England and Wales but nominally king of all Britain, faces invading Saxons and also the rebellious northern kingdoms of Scotland and Pictland (eastern Scotland). Mad with lust, Uter rapes the wife of the Earl of Cornwall, then kills the earl and marries the wife, installing a new earl. Because of the ceaseless war, he sends his newborn son, Arthur, product of that rape, to live with the Duke of Gloucester in a relatively safe corner of Britain. There, the boy, rarely if at all seen by his parents, grows up spoiled and impulsive, charming and flighty, despite the duke’s loving guidance. He is educated to become king, but also always prepared to flee Britain should its enemies conquer the island.

As the play opens, Prince Arthur is seventeen. In the midst of a boar hunt, he becomes distracted by a shepherd girl and abandons his hapless foster father, Gloucester, to pursue her. Gloucester worries what sort of king he is raising for Britain and, coincidentally, Shakespearily, a messenger then arrives with news of King Uter’s death; he was poisoned by the Saxons. Unaware of this, Arthur talks with the shepherd girl, attempting to seduce her. Their flirtation is broken up by the calls of courtiers hunting for the new king.

In the meantime, the northern kingdoms of Scotland and Pictland are thrown into turmoil by the news of Uter’s death and Arthur’s accession. Mordred, the heir to the more powerful Pictish crown, insists that Arthur is illegitimate and the throne of all Britain belongs to
his family. He tries to rouse his father, the king, into fighting for the crown, but his dying father refuses.

Back in London, Gloucester, as lord protector, struggles to convince the squabbling English nobility to support their new king. They do agree to accept Arthur, but only in response to northern insolence: they torture the Pictish messenger bearing Mordred’s claim to the throne. Act I ends with Arthur in a soliloquy realizing the difficulties he faces, weighing his legitimacy, doubting his suitability to be king, ashamed that he is not the man his father was, yet daring himself to proceed, more out of anger with his rivals than any real desire to rule.

None of this, I suppose, strikes me as any more stilted or formulaic than other Shakespeare first acts.

Dana kept the 1904 edition of
The Tragedy of Arthur
for all those years, and except for the occasion when she read it to me and my newly smashed nose, I never opened it, never looked at it on her shelf, never thought about it. But after our father showed her the book when she was eleven, the two of them discussed it ad nauseam (my nauseam, anyhow). Dad challenged her to prove its authorship to him, and she rose to the task, producing letters and essays and comparisons of vocabulary and style. They also developed a bantering game about the play: they would propose explanations to each other for its exclusion from the collected works, the First Folio, bouncing theories back and forth. “It was a gift to a lover, a private closet drama,” Dana proposed at age fifteen, not coincidentally during one of her periodic all-encompassing romantic obsessions, the details of which only I knew. “He wrote it for a secret lover, and when she didn’t like it, he extravagantly promised it would never be performed. She made him swear he would burn it, and he agreed. He wouldn’t let his company have it. The play fell into oblivion. When it was time for them to publish the folio, none of them even remembered the abandoned play.”

Dad picked up the story and ran, all of us well behaved and calm now on these family visits to prison: “That’s good, Dana, that’s good. Then his widow found the manuscript. Anne tried to sell
Arthur
back to the King’s Men to include in the folio, but they didn’t offer her
much for it, thought they could get it from her by preening, all prestige, ‘We’re the King’s Men, after all.’ She should be pleased just to have their attention.” Dad was in the first months of his third prison sentence, and his mind was much taken by treacherous and cheap colleagues, convinced as he was that someone had betrayed him in his latest downfall.

“While she was stewing over their haughty attitude,” Dana continued, “a strange man came to her door with flowers, saying he wanted to meet
her
, admired
her
. He listened to her complaints about dead Will, never at home, left the good bed to the kids, all his groupie girlfriends, and this stranger is very sympathetic. At the end, she agrees to give him the
Arthur
play for a few pounds, maybe a few kisses thrown in, and off he goes with the manuscript of the forgotten play. Now, what did he do with it?”

(Did I on this visit shyly, pathetically show him the short story I had had published in the high school literary magazine? I hope not, but it seems quite possible. And if I did, would any reaction from him have been good enough? I hope so, but I suspect that by then he and I were locked in unbreakable mutual dissatisfaction.)

Dana’s fantasies about secret lovers and seducers who trade kisses and sympathy for knowledge were not entirely unsourceable. Her crushes at this time—tenth, eleventh, twelfth grade—were painful for me to watch. She was so eager and yet so worried about being discreet that she made her desires and her true self invisible to the beloved parties, even as she threw herself into their company, into friendship, never giving the slightest hint of romantic interest. For obvious reasons, she didn’t dare confide in anyone except me. She would probably have avoided me, too, if she’d had to screw up her courage and reveal herself, but we were still—at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—transparent to each other (though some smudges were beginning to appear). She never had to take the plunge and say to me, “This is who I am.” I just knew. She risked no rejection from me, and she knew that, too.

In high school, when the rest of us dreamt of being original but strived to be like someone we knew or some archetype, Dana was already, if uneasily, her own true self. She wasn’t the “outsider girl” or
the “artsy girl posing to be noticed for her offbeat originality.” I mean that she was already something only a few people ever become, even in adulthood. She could see the world as it was, take it as it was, could usually read people and situations (even if they didn’t know themselves perfectly) and then make her own decisions about how she would exist in that world. She understood her emotions far earlier than anyone else I knew, lived unpressurized by peers. She did not fake or judge unfairly. All this would be unique enough, even without the superficial talents that also defined her.

She didn’t deny to herself that she was gay, and when that part of her grew enough to assert itself, she accepted it without a blink of shame or regret. Until she called it by that name to herself, she was just someone who looked to other girls to feed her desire for love and intimacy, because that felt natural. That
was
natural. I was the exception, but even then I felt that I was no longer enough for her, and would soon be even less.

She wanted love in general, and this or that girl in particular, so badly that she was often vulnerable to terrible suffering. She was quasi-scientific in her planning and her calculations about whether this field hockey girl or that moody sculptress might possibly feel the same, but when the time came she was always just their good pal. Still, rumors spread (thickly and forcefully enough to break my nose).

In those early days, she was a funny blend: for all her skill in reading other people, she was still inept at gauging their desires. This is probably normal for someone as bookish and theatrical as she was. Adolescence produces all sorts of variations of incomplete emotional development; it’s the island of Dr. Moreau of human personality. My own lumpy and bizarre self was top-to-bottom, inside-and-out unappealing, while Dana at least looked good and was certainly motivated by good feelings: she loved art and loved life, loved her family and her friends, and was only sad because she wanted to love more and to feel a flood of such love washing over her in the same volume that she was ready to let it wash over another person. This, of course, led to pain.

She was learning a very difficult skill, much more complex than those being learned by the conventional girls and boys, far harder
than the skills practiced by the lascivious would-be lotharios, so Dana necessarily loved awkwardly. She was by no means ready to tell the world what she was; she only hoped by some osmosis to sense others like herself. But in 1979, in a Minneapolis private school where we were scholarship kids with a definite cloud of pathos hanging over us, it was not at all clear that there were
any
confirmed lesbians to be found amid the kilts, or even any girls open to experimentation among the smokers, the punks, the potheads, the actresses, or the field hockey squad that captivated me and my sister alike.