The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (13 page)

Instead, family pride steadily swells over four centuries, and the moment of revelation from father to eldest child takes on ceremonial significance. A dying Devere explains the situation to his heir. A Phillips boy is usually told of the secret the night before his bar mitzvah (we apparently converted back to Judaism at some point). The bet, the secrecy, the issues, the feuding school boards were all explained to the next head of the family. Papers were signed, introductions made, running tallies of royal command performances updated.

The score was maintained by the same trusteeship, always with the decreasingly science-fictional date of 2014 in mind, when the winner would cash in. But here complexities arose, especially as command performances became rarer and the monarch no longer kept an official company of actors. It’s easy to say that between 1603 and 1616, Shakespeare’s troupe, the King’s Men, performed 187 times for James I, but should they count a 1712 performance of
Coriolanus
where Queen Anne fell ill in the first act? What of walkouts? In 1888, the future Edward VII commanded a performance of
Troilus and Cressida
but was nowhere to be seen at the curtain call, as he was off leading
his
secret life as Jack the Ripper.

And what of films? Elizabeth II went to cinema premieres to see Olivier’s
Henry V
and Branagh’s
Henry V
, but what about her DVD rentals? Pay-per-view? Dana wrote to the public relations office of Buckingham Palace, but didn’t feel the answers were definitive. She was left with her best guess from all her research. By 1985, with twenty-nine years until payday, the score stood nearly tied at 1,401 performances for plays by the Earl of Oxford and 1,384 for those by Ben Phillips, our ancestor, author of the unrecognized and never-commanded
Tragedy of Arthur
and—Dana could prove textually—all of her other favorite Shakespeare plays as well.

D
ANA WAS NO LONGER ADDING
to the story by the second half of college, but it still unrolled in her psyche. Her anger at Dad—paroled in March of our senior years—had not completely vanished, and as long as she was still angry, she would cling to a little anti-Stratfordism, her “screw thee” to Dad. And if she was going to cling to rebellious looniness, she was going to cling at least to her own version, the one where she would inherit $9 million in 2014.

Ironically, the (anti-)intellectual position she had taken (“Shakespeare didn’t write the plays, Dad”) led her to this fable in which that same Dad would eventually take Dana aside and tell her the good news about her inheritance: “Here is our family secret, and you are the one to see it to its end!” (It always struck me, though, that 2014, the 450th birthday, was far too convenient for us. The 500th—far likelier a target—would mean it would be my kids’ victory, with elderly, whiskered Aunt Dana drooling in the corner.)

In all her research, she never came upon a reference to
The Tragedy of Arthur
. Textually, she put it in its place, dated its composition, traced its thematic and linguistic characteristics to the Feivel plays around it (
King John, Richard III
, the
Henry VI
trilogy), but she never found a single word about
Arthur
. “Didn’t you think that was odd?” I asked her just last year.

“Nope.”

I believe that this smaller self-delusion was part of the larger one gestating in her at the same time, and that the authenticity of
Arthur
was tightly bound in Dana’s subconscious to the authenticity of her father’s love for her. She could not afford to believe that he could have lied to her about Shakespeare. This linkage was so strong that—as with any anti-Stratfordian delusion or pre–Iraq War WMDs—the absence of proof could not be tolerated as proof of absence.

I don’t know what I thought at the time about all this. I really didn’t much care or take much note. These ideas were just a continuation of the Shakespeare “thing” I had never taken part in, so I didn’t see her trouble coming. But now I think that she fantasized, even believed
on some level, that eventually Dad would really tell her the good news. She had thatched together this tale with the sticks and mud of her life and dreams, my father’s life, literary history, stove-piped historical research. When I asked, “But you don’t actually
believe
this, do you?” she replied, “But that’s just it. If it’s true, you wouldn’t know it yet.”

She had begun in rebellion, rejoicing when she irritated him with her letters. But she ended, when he came to her Brown graduation in May 1986, depending on him even more than when she was an idolizing and constantly disappointed little girl, her fantasy life overflowing its allotted space.

I don’t want to overstate her breakdown around the time of our graduations. A lot of people feel the stress of that period of life and suffer a temporary loss of bearings. It wasn’t the worst crisis ever.

On the other hand, a lot of people suffer the same stresses that Dana suffered without any ill effects. The crisis did knock her out for a few weeks, and did lead the rest of us to treat her a little gingerly in the coming years. I suppose, despite my own flirtations with the psychiatric industry, that this was the first time I really thought of Dana and myself as essentially different.

That is an odd admission, I see. We were twenty-two years old, of different sexes, different experiences, different opinions. I had been angry at her, jealous of her, cruel to her, hurt by her cruelties to me. But this was the first time I ever really saw us as fundamentally different people: I would not have a breakdown. I would not become so involved in an illusion that I would lose track of reality. I would not collapse at the shock of my fantasy’s evaporation in the cold air of truth. I was, in fact, comfortable with reality, and, even as I pitied my sister—felt real pain in her pain—I took a certain pride in my healthy coldness. I was made of stronger stuff, and I liked it. (All these beliefs were false, unfortunately.)

Anyhow, Dad arrived unannounced for Brown’s commencement in a burst of paternal instinct and insouciant parole violation. (He was arrested upon his return to Minnesota for casually disregarding the terms of his release, thus missing
my
college graduation, making a choice for her and delaying my own healthy arrival at indifference to
him.) Dana was so amazed that he had come (to
Providence
) the week she was scheduled to enter real life and adulthood, that she believed he had arrived
to tell her
. She took him to her room, laid out all her later work for him, waiting to be praised by her daddy for having figured it all out. She faced his incomprehension at the end and saw at once that he had no congratulations or legacy to present, no key to a hidden world of elite secrets. She knew all that, of course. She understood that. She had been under other pressure as well, had, I assume, suffered other emotional setbacks. It wasn’t the worst breakdown in the world. She just couldn’t stop crying. And she started to talk about wanting to “stop feeling this way.” She probably didn’t mean that the way some interpreted it, but Dad took her to Health Services himself, passing through Brown’s campus gardens bursting with spring’s crow flowers, nettles, and daisies.

It wasn’t the worst crisis in history, not even the worst in the history of Shakespeare-loving, hyperbolic actresses, would-be Ophelias drowning in imagination, obsessive Frannys. But it kept her occupied that summer. When she came to live with me in September, she was very much herself, just with a certain overenthusiasm shaved away. She sometimes talked about having received a “cognitive diss.”

She forgave our father for not giving her $9 million, and, more to the point of reality, she forgave him for what she called “his unconvincing performance as a father.” I don’t know if they formalized it or if there was ever a specific moment when she knew the rebellion was over, but it was over. Unlike other anti-Stratfordians, once her initial psychological splinter was tweezed out, she let the whole stupid thing go. She came out of it where she began and gave Shakespeare back his life’s work (and gave her father back a loving, wiser daughter). She still loved the plays. She loved a lot of plays: Ibsen, Chekhov, Stoppard, Strindberg, Beckett, Ionesco, Dürrenmatt, Jonson. She could still quote almost all of Shakespeare, and recited passages from time to time, but she no longer spoke of an ancestor or a paternal genius. She was converted by the fire of her experience into a lover of
works
, not
authors
. I saw her once in rehearsal, when another actress said, “He
must
have lived this. The words are
so
heartfelt.” Dana just sighed and said, “Dunno.” She no longer cared, really, who wrote
King John;
she wasn’t grateful to Shakespeare for it—she merely loved it and was grateful to
it
. This is not a minor distinction, and I’ll come back to it later.

Fall of 1986, we moved in together in New York City. After those four years of unpleasant separation, I was relieved to be with her, to be able to look after her, to bathe again in the feeling I could find with no other person on earth, of being in company, known and loved, understood, often without even talking.

We could not quite afford a second bedroom in Manhattan. I had been hired as a junior copywriter in an ad agency—one of those jobs deemed so glamorous that they pay you very little. I affected a fedora in my business attire, but photos now reveal that the effect was less Bogart than Hasid. Dana, for her part, lived on waitressing tips. She was still fine-tuning her medications and was sometimes frighteningly manic, as far as diners were concerned: “Please, really, have a great,
great
day today, okay? Okay? Please?” she told some customers with dreadful urgency, or so she claimed. She was determined to succeed as a stage actress and so was waiting tables, modeling a little, and, later, working as an “exotic dancer.” She came home her first night from that with five times the tips she’d ever made as a waitress. She didn’t mind the work, she told me, but threatened to quit if I ever set foot in the place. She began to call herself a “sex worker” because she liked the exploited proletarian sound of it, although she only ever danced and stripped. Always a Brown graduate in women’s studies, she referred to the club’s owners as sex industrialists or captains of sexual commerce.

We alternated the bedroom and the living room futon couch, a week at a turn. Of course, if either one of us brought someone home, then the bedroom was the prize. When she wasn’t working late or preparing for an audition, we used to go out together, sometimes with friends, but sometimes the two of us would simply feel the same urge at the same time. “Mmmm, you know what I really want to do tonight?” she might ask at the very moment when I was noticing the growling crescendo of my own identical appetite.

I drank more than she did. I say this not as a memoirist’s excuse, but only to report accurately the way we lived in those happy years, in
many ways the happiest of our lives. We were far from the parents, back in each other’s daily influence. We were in love with the idea of ourselves. We were sure something great was coming or, at least, that what we had and what we were would roll forever on. Shot free of the rhythms of college schedules, we were suddenly in an eternal now, with no worries that it would ever end, or that it should.

Dana probably felt otherwise, obviously. I casually threw around those “we”s in the last paragraph. My recurrent obtuseness about those nearest to me has never really been cured (even in those days when I was trying to write fiction late at night, examining the feelings of imaginary people). When I look more carefully at those New York years, I have to admit that what I saw as a paradise of good feeling and absence of anxiety was possibly something else for her, and so her later relationships likely meant more to her than I may have realized. (“May have.” How easily the memoirist can make himself seem a little innocent, a little lovable, endlessly extenuating his own guilt, nibble by nibble.)

But I cannot help it: my own memory seems strong and accurate enough; the recollection of my feelings in those days overwhelms all quibbling. I was happy, and, I will insist, she was happy. Retrospective thoughtfulness can make the past too bleak, as if one is gazing backward through welder’s glasses.

So I say that it
was
good. We used to go out together, would dare the other to talk to this or that woman in a bar. We shared an appreciation for the female form. “Well, there is a divinity that shaped
her
end, that’s for damn sure,” I recall Dana exulting over one possible love. By then her eye for likely targets was nearly infallible, far better than mine.

Which was good, because I could absorb rejection after rejection like a fat man taking body shots. Dana, however, had not been toughened up by her summer of sorrow. She was still Dana—impassioned, engaging, lovely, willing to be open and vulnerable—and she took rejections hard.

That said, she was also much more of a man in these matters than I was. She seemed a perfect gentleman in how she treated the women who would pass me on the couch—once in the darkest night, the toilet
belching in gratitude for their visit, and once again in the morning, fiddling with the locks and apologizing as I groaned and peeled a resistant eye. In those years, Dana was the sort of man I wished I could be: effortless, honest without hurting anyone, open to others’ feelings and needs without bearing responsibility for their assumptions. My one-night stands ended with pained awkwardness; hers left satisfied.

When I think of how I became a writer, I do recall the countless occasions when my father told me something like “There is no higher calling for a man than to create things, and to create worlds out of words is the highest form of creation.” This seems a likely psychological seed, obviously. It also equates writing with a sort of con job (building illusions with a reader’s own imagination, then being far away when the pigeon realizes there’s nothing real at all in the experience).