The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (29 page)

King James complaining about anti-Scottish plays is precisely the argument used to explain the disappearance from Shakespeare’s canon of
Edward III
, which was printed anonymously in 1596 and 1599. But this explanation was not first proposed, as nearly as I can tell from my amateurish research, until the 1990s. I know that
The Tragedy of Arthur
existed in 1975 at the latest, when my father showed us the putative 1904 edition. And I know the quarto was untouched in a safe-deposit box as of 1986. So if
Arthur
itself is a fake, then it benefits from an amazing piece of luck: it can justify its disappearance with a historical footnote that came
after
the play’s putative forgery.

Dad made a little joke at this point, which I can reconstruct verbatim from my notes on the yellow legal pad: “Of course, there was no Anti-Defamation League or women’s lib in 1623, so
Merchant of Venice
and
Taming of the Shrew
make the cut, but the Scotch were apparently very delicate souls, feelings easily bruised, and so two good plays are lost to assuage the tender kilted folk, ‘shrinking underneath the plaid.’ Amazed they didn’t demand a
Macbeth
rewrite.”

In my father’s fond and wishful notion of lifelong dedication and business-partner loyalty, Shakespeare’s friends come together in 1623 to make the folio. They oversee compositors of varying competence and sobriety at Isaac Jaggard’s print shop as they set nearly a million words of type in their late friend’s honor. Task complete, they retire to the pub and lift a glass to their monumental accomplishment, a second in old Will’s memory, and one each for every play they had to leave out.
Pericles, Cardenio, The Two Noble Kinsmen:
they can’t include acknowledged collaborations if the co-writers won’t agree (and far be it from me to criticize strict copyright protection). They can’t find a copy of
Love’s Labour’s Won
anywhere, because no one’s put it on for
ages, and no one ever liked it anyhow. And they can’t include
Edward III
and
The Tragedy of Arthur
because now there’s a Scotsman
on the throne
, and he is not going to put up with that old anti-Scot stuff that audiences used to eat up back in the nineties. So they go with the thirty-six plays they can. It’ll have to do. They hire some Dutch guy to engrave a cover picture of Will, they liquor Ben Jonson into the right mood to compose a dedication, and he subdues his own ego long enough to write something quite nice (maybe too nice, Ben’s ghost would say, since his preface is the seedling of the mighty oaken myth that Will wasn’t one of many or even first among peers but a timeless god who left mere mortals below).

My father came out of the bathroom, his bathroom. “I just closed the door to use the toilet,” he said, laughing. “How about that?” He walked over to the fridge, hesitated at its handle, then remembered the new arrangement, went ahead. He drank his next Diet Coke lying on the carpeted floor, and he watched the last light of his last September. “I am so pleased you and I are working on this side by side. It makes me so proud, you know. I am so proud of your success as a writer. You don’t have to worry about me fouling this up. I will stay far away from the project. I know that it couldn’t possibly have happened without you. I love you, Arthur.”

The second-to-last line is certainly a lie: this publication could very easily have happened without me. And that, like a canker in a rose, spreads corruption into all the neighboring sentences, too, and no argument of authenticity is ever enough to prove what cannot be proven.

I
MOVED OUT OF MY HOTEL
and into my father’s apartment as his roommate and caretaker. He had finally revealed the details of his medical condition to me and then to Dana, the inoperable and growing lump in his brain, for which all treatment seemed to him (and to me) far worse than the eventual death it promised. He wanted no
sympathy and no treatment. He couldn’t prevent the former, but he could in exchange for it insist on doing his part for “our work.”

“Yard sale,” he announced, intending to raise money for the project, though we needed none.

His worldly goods consisted of a few boxes of books, some jazz LPs and 45s from the fifties, papers and letters, some art supplies, all of which he’d stored in my mother’s basement. “Seriously? She let you do that?”

“I hope so. Will you call her?”

“You should call,” Dana said, the ridiculous, last-moments-of-a-romantic-comedy matchmaker tone convecting through her voice. She opened her phone and dialed for him, held it to his ear until he finally used his own hand, held Dana’s hand with his other.

“Hello, Mary,” he said, then paused for so long that Dana and I looked at each other with brows lifted, stunned that Mom had so much to say right out of the gate. Finally, he went on and our fantasies deflated: “This is Arthur. I’m in Minneapolis. Artie and Dana got me a place. I hope you’re keeping well. Say, I have some boxes with you, I hope, still. I need them. Maybe we should speak on the telephone. You must know how to call the kids. Or there’s a phone here, I think. So. Goodbye.” He handed the open phone back to Dana. “She has an answering machine,” he explained helpfully.

At Mom’s request, I picked up the boxes without him. (“Good sense,” Dad said, surrendering at once, the same man who two decades earlier had intended to outlive Sil and win her back.)

Meanwhile, Dana and Petra took him clothes shopping, though both of them adamantly denied responsibility for the T-shirt he was wearing the next day that read
I WOULD DO ME
.

He laid his few salable possessions on a blanket on the small patch of grass in front of the apartment building, everything but his private papers, and we sat on the stairs next to them, drinking Diet Coke. “Too sweet,” he said. “Lacks that lingering bite that Tab had.”

“That was the cyclamate. Turns out to be bad for you.”

“Literary executorship is a lot to ask.” He seemed worried about me, offering me an out. “It can certainly demand a lot of your time. Worse, probably put your own writing in the shade for a spell.”

I savored the concern; it was well made. “Don’t worry about that. My work will be there when we’re done. Besides, this is more important than my writing. It is, and that’s okay. We’re doing something world changing. And we’re doing it together.”

A year later, I am writhing to escape this web spun by two dead men, and literary executorship has become the most self-eradicating punishment Dante could have devised for an egotistical author. There was another writer born on my and Will’s birthday, a hero of mine, whose son also signed his life over to promoting and protecting his father’s works. I think of them both as these two other laughing corpses fling their bolas around my ankles.

But that day, I was eager to reassure: “You’ll be with us for a while longer, Dad. And, even after, you can count on me.” We sat under the painted bedsheet he’d strung up between two posts:
YARD SALE—I’M DYING
.

“You’re dying? Seriously?” asked a typical customer, torn between looking for a bargain and paying her last respects to the chipper old man.

“Well, it’s serious for me.”

“You’re really dying? You seem so cheery.”

“There are limited options for my mood. You’ll see someday.”

“Ha, ha, true enough, I suppose. Well, I’m sorry. And that’s amazing. You’re inspirational. How much for the Stan Kenton?”

A child’s memory is poor because extraordinary events—
I went to a party! I tied my shoes!
—occur in a world where Fridays are frequent but irregular, and hours swell and shrink. Older brains fritz because no event is sharp enough to trench into memory’s gravel. Eventually, little occurs that hasn’t occurred in a thousand identical yesterdays, yesterday and yesterday and yesterday sinking back and out of view behind you, and your neck is daily stiffer, resists turning to look. Life in prison only exaggerates this. He swam in the blue October sky.

“You know, you start, when your eyes are fresh, you look at a painting like
A View of Delft
, and you say, ‘My God! Look what that fellow can do! He can paint like that, and it looks just like the sky over Delft!’ and you are happy or ambitious or jealous or all of those. And then, all these years hurry by, all the middle part that clouds your eyes
and your brain. And then, you look at real clouds like these, and you think, ‘Hmph. That looks like that painting by what’s-his-name, the Dutch fellow.’ ”

“I remember the weather the day we did the UFO,” I said. “Like this.”

“Well, you should exert your memory a little more forcefully,” he said with a non-sequiturial whip crack of anger, “because that was July.”

We took in about sixty-five dollars that day, deducting the cost of the painted sheet. We threw out what didn’t sell, and after that my father owned some clothes, toiletries, and a box of letters. I asked him if he wanted to go to a museum, a library, a bookstore, a movie, a park, the beach, for a boat ride, if he wanted some cash and to be left alone. “I want to help with the play,” he said. “And sleep.”

There was real help he could now offer (when he wasn’t sleeping, which was sometimes fifteen hours a day): the professors were coming, and somebody had to keep a close eye on them.

As we were not going to let our billion-dollar pamphlet leave our sight, scholars either had to invite me and the book to their campus, or they could visit us on Lake Street. They were allowed as much time as they wanted with the quarto; they could take notes. They could not photograph more than four pages; they could not take the play out of the room.

My father or I would sit, reading on the couch or listening to my iPod—which device quite impressed my dad—and though some of the scholars grumbled about the restrictions (and I caught one with a pocket scanner when I came out of the bathroom), most viewed the situation as a common enough challenge of their field, and just being allowed to read the play thrilled most of them almost to giggling. They were a funny bunch, about what you would expect Shakespeare scholars to be. Some of them I quite like, and I am sorry to have dragged them into this; I hereby apologize, not for the last time.

“He’s quite dishy, isn’t he?” Petra said late one October afternoon of David Crystal, the world’s leading expert in Shakespearean linguistics,
who flew in from Wales to study
The Tragedy of Arthur
in my living room.

Petra and I were sharing a bottle of wine and then starting a second in the kitchen while my father slept and Dana was at rehearsal. Across the room, by the big windows, Professor Crystal had the play open on the glass table in front of him, his laptop displaying the online
OED
. He would occasionally laugh aloud or grunt or exclaim, “Well, look at that!” while he read, and seemed quite oblivious to Petra and me getting drunk and punchy across the bar in the kitchen, our hands brushing now and again, my imagination piloting us far into the future.

She left to pick up Dana, and I stayed as the sun set early, still a little drunk, watching this engrossed and happy linguist grow happier and more engrossed by the blue glow of his laptop lexicon, while I sank into melancholy, as the wine wore off, and Petra had been away from me and with my sister for minutes, then hours, and I was left with her lipstick on a wine glass, which I masochisto-moronically held on to while replaying and reconsidering the four moments in which the skin of her hand touched or nearly touched my own. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” I couldn’t help asking Professor Crystal, twice because he didn’t look up the first time.

“Sorry? Who?”

Which sounds better? (A) I am of melancholy temperament, enlivened now and then by bursts of high or hot spirit, never long-lived, or (B) I’ve been on antidepressants, antianxiety meds, and a Whitman’s Sampler of other mood stabilizers on and off since I was twenty-four, with uneven success.

I like the sound of (A) better, too. Oddly, even after diagnosis, medication, and improvement, I still had the sticky reputation within my family of being unnecessarily morose, something of a drama queen. Dana, despite our twinned similarities and her more concentrated formula of the same psychic chemistry, often seemed the sturdier of us two, living off an extra dollop of serotonin served up with that second X chromosome, happiness guacamole on a celery stick. This impression of her may have resulted because her highs were
higher than mine. Her lows were lower, too, but they were offset by everyone’s lingering memory of the peaks. That said, she was always more nervous about the pharmacology, frequently mourning the medicated murder of her edge, the melting of her mildly manic pole.

I was sitting on the couch, foolishly having diluted my own limited serotonin in shiraz, squeezing my temples to wring out a few more drops, shaking my skull for how close I had stood to Petra, how impossible the situation was I had allowed to develop. And, also, I festered in envy at the easy happiness of this bearded, spectacled genius Welshman across from me. I watched him read by the light of the single lamp, hunched over, reflected in the deepening black of the window, and he never looked up at me in the murk, not until my dreaming father cried out from the bedroom, “No, those are
my
hands!”

Professor Crystal noticed me then. He took off his glasses, since he couldn’t see me anyhow in my shadows, and he rubbed his eyes. “Well, it’s a lovely piece of creativity. It certainly
pops
like him at many moments. Guenhera and the nurse is lovely. Not ’97, though. No later than 1595, if it is him, perhaps much earlier, in fact. Mightn’t be him on his own. Probably a collaboration, especially if it is before ’93. He rarely flew solo back then.”

“But is it him? Will you authenticate it?”

“I need more time with it. All the language is right. But I need more time.” He considered me. “You know, if you had to say, what is the king’s tragic flaw?”

“He has bipolar disorder,” I said.