The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [106]
I was—from synagogue to graveyard—at my most piously devoted to my three articles of faith: (1) My father—despite it all—had loved me, wished things could have been different between us; (2) Petra—despite it all—loved me and would accept my love, and somehow Dana would be spared any real pain, and my boys would love her and me, and we would all rearrange somehow for the best and happiest ending to these early dramas; and (3) The Tragedy of Arthur was by William Shakespeare. These three apparently separate trees were one and the same, connected under the soil, sharing invisible groundwater and spliced, inseparable roots.
“I want you to take over this project,” I told Dana. “Or do it jointly with me. I want you to keep the play, write some of the essays. We have to share this. I don’t think I can back out completely and give it all to you—I would if I could, I swear to God, but I’m too late with the publisher on that. I should have done that in the first place, and I’m very sorry, really, truly sorry. But come in with me now. Please.”
A superstitious gesture, whistling in a graveyard, but heartfelt. I suppose I thought it might make Dana feel better, when she learned about me and Petra. I suppose it can be viewed as a somewhat crass offer, as if I were buying Petra off Dana in exchange for a share of a lottery ticket. I didn’t mean it like that, but I was afraid that’s how Dana took it, as if she knew how thickly delusion had caked over my brain.
“No,” she said. “Thank you, but he wanted you to do this. And you’re doing it for all of us anyhow. So don’t feel like you’re taking something from me, okay?”
38
IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK since I had found him and sat on the bed next to his body for an hour. It was easy enough now to throw away the few clothes and toiletries. All sentimental value lurked in the box of letters.
I read through the whole lot sitting at the table in the living room, where all those Shakespeare pros had read of another ambiguous Arthur. I read letters from his kids, his wife then ex-wife, his lawyers, the prison records like report cards. I found souvenirs of his art career, but I had hoped for a comprehensive catalogue of his forgeries, the basis perhaps—I felt the seductive whisper in the back of my mind—for my next novel. He’d kept nothing so rich, unfortunately, no roster of clients, no onymous mention of a country house in England. But there was this index card:
It is in faded pencil. It is undated but obviously old, softened by the caress of years. There is a number 14 in the upper left. The card has a vaguely Australiaform stain on it, which, when I found it, was also crusty and still adhesive enough to have stuck the card to the back of a mimeographed catalogue of a 1967 group show in an art gallery in Dinkytown, which included two pictures by AEH Philips (sic): Girl with Lily and Tired Mother. The back of that booklet’s last page has a twin (although inverted) stain to the one on the card.
There are four lines of writing. Under a doodled comet or approaching cannonball, two stylized arrows mark ideas or a to-do list. The first line reads, “explain Arthur in York.” The second arrow points to “Cumbria backs away.” Below these is a line of verse, lightly seasoned with scansion marks: “When Ríghteous mén would stánd alóof.”
The line is almost the last line of Act III—When righteous men in conscience stand apart—from a soliloquy in which the Earl of Cumbria backs away from his plan to assassinate Arthur (who never explains what he was doing in York).
My father was working out Cumbria’s words. This index card represents an early draft of the play, the only survivor of a deck of at least fourteen, still here only because something spilled on it, and it stowed away to the twenty-first century