The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [20]
Shakespeare’s work teems with twins: perfectly identical twins who don’t know of each other’s existence, fraternal twins identically lovable despite different genders, separated twins in the employ of other separated twins, and it was through twins—Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors—that Dana first fell for Shakespeare. There she is on Dad’s lap, the fat collected works open on her own lap, both of them laughing about some Dromio or other, cheek to cheek and assigning each other parts, while I arranged blue plastic knights and archers on the black pentagons and white hexagons of the kitchen floor tiles, a monochromatic Agincourt raging on a flattened soccer ball.
My father looked down at me and recited from memory the famous band-of-brothers battle speech from Henry V. I listened until the odd words—Crispin Crispian?—reminded me of a breakfast cereal, and, hungry, I wandered across the room, looking for food, while Dad and Dana held off the French assault without me.
I admit that this seems a long way from an Introduction to a newly discovered Shakespeare play; this essay is fast becoming an example of that most dismal genre, the memoir. All I can say is that the truth of the play requires understanding the truth of my life.
That said, with the best of intentions, still I fall prey to the distortions of memoir writing. The memoir business has lately been an uneasy, underregulated one, full of inflated claims and frenzied Internet debunkers, too many exciting drug addictions and Holocaust misadventures, too much delirious abuse. But even when one is trying to tell the truth, there is no guarantee to accuracy: I realize I have completely misportrayed my youth already, because retrospective importance (to me) doesn’t necessarily jibe with what actually happened (to everyone else). My strongest memories, my sensations of meaning and significance are all attached to the parent I saw less. The mathematical realities of incarceration and divorce dictate that the vast, vast majority of my youth occurred under the eye of my mother and her second husband, but it is my father, Arthur Edward Harold Phillips, who continually shoves his way to the foreground, wherever I turn memory’s camera.
In other words, this memoir is, despite my best efforts, already misleading.
8
MY SISTER PLAINLY PREFERRED our father to our mother, and I preferred my sister to both of them. When he was gone, first to prison, then to his own apartment after the divorce and Mom’s marriage to the eternally patient Silvius diLorenzo (Window Sil, our father called him, citing his transparent personality), Dana was all mine. She and I fell into each other naturally, joyfully, once he was gone. Our mother encouraged it or, at least, didn’t discourage it by trying to be a child along with us or straining to impress us with wonder or Shakespeare.
My father delighted in us, sincerely if sporadically, but also delighted in being noticed and witnessed while being delighted to be a dad. Mom’s love was different. She felt she had done right by us by having twins and felt no need to intrude in our special relationship. She provided, disciplined, paid, drove, lightly applauded. She was a marathon parent, not a sprinter, an old-fashioned parent who could exist in her own world without longing to be part of ours.
Her name tells a uniquely American story: Mary Arden Phillips diLorenzo. Mary: the assimilationist gesture of small-town Jews, second-generation Americans ready to use Gentile names to reassure the Lutheran majority. Arden: shortened from Sardensky somewhere between Vilnius and northern Minnesota. Phillips: the misguided first marriage, striving for something exalted and above ethnicity, something untenable in the real world. DiLorenzo: safety and stability restored, fantasies repressed, thanks to another straight-thinking, unromantic, early-generation immigrant group.
My mother was