The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [211]
But I must have fought off sleep until at least Act II, Scene i (and that’s due to Dad’s vocal prowess), because I remember the conversation that followed from my father’s reading of the line: “And I serve the fairy queen, / To dew her orbs upon the green.” Dana asked what that meant, and Dad described “fairy rings”—little dark circles that appear in grass, which in Shakespeare’s nature-rich youth in green Warwickshire would have been a source of mystery and wonder mingled with fear. I may have mentioned that it sounded like a dull childhood if some rotting grass was a highlight, but I was nevertheless spun back under his spell, Elizabethan England greening in my imagination.
Now, some future moments flow from this spring: (1) My sister’s dreadful college punk band, for which she “played” bass, the Fairy Rings (better than her other, earlier effort, Discomfort Women); (2) my eventual career as a novelist, possibly, since we were lying down, drowsy, in the drabbest conceivable space, and my father—who did have a way with his vocal effects and vocabulary—was extolling the greatness of anyone who adds to the world’s store of wonder and magic, disorder, confusion, possibility, “the wizards.” If he had been trying to hypnotize me for life ahead, it wouldn’t have been much different. (On the other hand, if I’d ended up a urologist, I would now point elsewhere for the first seeds of my adult splendor, I suppose); and (3) the very odd weeks that followed, the pinnacle of my love for the three of us as a team, culminating, however, in Dad’s arrest and plea bargain, fines, and community service down in farmy Nobles County, Minnesota.
He said something along these lines (I am reconstructing thirty-five-year-old conversations to the best of my ability; they are almost certainly inaccurate): “In those days, you walked outside your house, or twenty minutes outside of London, and you were in an endless forest, as magical and terrifying as you can imagine. Wonders were in the grass, mysteries. Something invisible was trying to communicate with you, frighten you, charm you, maybe steal from you, or help you, lead you to riches or just laugh at you. Now, boring, boring, we know there aren’t grotesque fairies out there. We cut down those forests to prove it. We know what causes twenty varieties of discolorations of the turf. We have so many facts, and with them we can cut down anything.”
I agreed wholeheartedly: Dad, forests, adventure, wonder, Dana, and I versus prisons, bulldozers, boring people, facts. That seemed precisely to explain the world.
The following two weekends he asked for us again, and our mother continued to be improbably generous in sharing us, considering his performance as a first husband and her full, inarguable custody. But my mother’s way of judging people was her own, and she never hesitated to let him be a father when he could. She didn’t hold her or our repeated disappointments against him. “That’s the way he is. Don’t expect anything else,” I heard her say more than once, though decades spun by before I could consisently follow that advice.
He took us out to an extremely nice dinner two Saturdays later, at the Normandy Hotel, a Minneapolis fixture back then. The gift certificate he used to pay for the meal (without incident) is tinted in retrospect with a shading of doubtful authenticity. “The gift of a lady friend,” he claimed as provenance, a forged girlfriend vouching for a forged voucher. (The “lady friends” of those years when he was out of prison were often referred to but never produced, and, before I understood that they never existed, they may have inspired in me another strange unilateral competitiveness with my father. My subsequent compulsive behavior toward women, I can admit now, may have been an effort to show