The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [17]
Always kept inside the book is the photo of my grandfather Arthur Donald Phillips appearing in that boys school production of the racy, violent Arthur play and the folded playbill, on canary-yellow paper, canary feather–soft at its creases, listing his name in the title role. The photograph is, as you can see, insane:
Whatever he is wearing, it has nothing to do with this play. The costume is neither of Arthur’s ostensible period (around A.D. 500, if he even existed) nor of the style worn by actors in Shakespeare’s time to depict the early Middle Ages (some bits of armor over contemporary sixteenth-century clothes). No, my grandfather seems to be dressed in leftovers from a production of H.M.S. Pinafore, or something else eighteenth- or nineteenth-century and decidedly weird. The back of the photo, though, insists in black ink (and female handwriting?) that it depicts Don, as Arthur in Shakespeare, June ’15.
“Your grandfather, I gotta say, would have been perfect for that part,” our father used to claim, shaking his head at this photo and chuckling with hard-earned wisdom and acceptance. “The flawed hero. His personal charm wins him everything and his personal failings lose him everything. That fit your grandfather to a T,” sighed my dad.
And, sure enough, the second inscription inside the book, in multidimensional ambiguity, in blue ink, under the blue ink line drawn beneath the penciled school inscription, reads: To a new Prince Arthur, from his ever-loving Papa. 11/1/1942. My father would have been twelve when he received this gift.
I first learned of this 1904 edition when Dana and I were eleven, I think. I’m reasonably confident about the era: Dad was out of prison but had moved to a different apartment downtown. This one was above the Gay 90s, a progressive nightclub on Hennepin Avenue. I was lying on the sofa bed reading a comic book (Archie? Spider-Man?). Dana and Dad were in the kitchen, talking in low voices until Dana burst out with, “No way, José! And you have it? How long have you had it? Why didn’t you ever tell me? Can I please see it? Where is it? How did you get it?” Dana was in one of her states that can go by a lot of different names. The modern ones (manic, polar, over-stimulated, hyperactive) never much appealed to her, for good reason. It was an excitement my father found endearing but that my mother tried to tamp down as soon as she saw signs of it. Later, Dana would take pills, which she hated if they too much dulled these moods, but when she was a child, they were still just part of her “bubbliness.”
I came into the tiny kitchen at this point. She could not calm herself down; there was a slight edge of anger to her voice. I could detect it, at least, even if my father was laughing with a sort of condescending pleasure at having triggered her state. She resented the existence of a secret from which she had been excluded, even one to which she was now about to be admitted.
Usually, the more excited Dana became at that age, the more my mood matched hers. She was the emotional leader, quicker to both joy and despair, and I would generally rise or descend after her, never quite as high or low, though always wishing I was up or down there with her. This day, however, the discovery that her buzz was Shakespeare-induced prevented me from joining in with anything other than the most quenchable curiosity, and I wandered back and forth between couch and kitchen.
I tried not to care, but it was impossible not to want to be part of their excitement and to win back, a little, some piece of both of them. “Arthur, good, you’ll find this interesting, too,” Dad said, but not very convincingly. “Grab a perch.”
They were sitting very close to each other, and my father had the book on the table, with his hands pressed on it, holding it closed and holding it close, away from Dana’s impatient fingers sliding back and forth on the wooden table’s white plastic surface. He began to explain to me again what he had told her, but she interrupted, bouncing in her chair: “No, no, let me tell