The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [22]
“What, she still calls you Silly?”
“For years.”
I had never heard that.
My mother recalled it differently: “I was astonished. And felt so sorry for him. He’d gotten himself into quite a knot, really unnecessarily, and not for anything I did or was. I was hardly the best-looking girl in town. And, there was something else, too. Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“I really do,” I said, just last year, after Sil had died, and I was in the midst of my own middle-aged romantic muddle and agony.
“I was terrified,” my mother admitted. “I thought, ‘Well, this is not a particularly strong offer for my hand, as an alternative to all my fantasies just over the horizon, and yet it’s not without some appeal.’ That’s what so worried me: I was tempted. And, really, by what? I didn’t know Sil that well. I didn’t know his finer qualities yet. All he was, then, was an offer. My first offer. I wasn’t in love with him, but he was a sweet, handsome man, strong, who seemed to love me, I don’t know why, and all that almost felt like enough. I could have said yes! And then I panicked: didn’t I want all the things I wanted? When you suddenly realize—even after a lifetime’s study—that you don’t know yourself very well, it’s a little terrifying. Sil, too: he couldn’t have done it, married a Jew, converted, done that to his family. If I’d said yes back then, we never would have gotten married.”
My mother went away to the university down in Minneapolis, and Sil took work as a builder, learning engineering on the job (“like sergeants learn the lieutenants’ job while the lieuts are all at West Point”). After a year in the big city, a year of studying English literature during that department’s golden age (Allen Tate held a chair, hosting guest lectures—in the sports arena!—by the likes of T. S. Eliot), she came back for her first summer, and, she told me, “I was torn in half, really. I tried acting, once. Dismal. Studying was very hard for me. I lost all my confidence that first year. I didn’t think I could accomplish anything or even trust myself to know what I wanted to do, or could do. I thought I was just hopeless. But, still, Ely seemed smaller than ever, and there was Sil outside my door every evening asking me to go with him to shoot rats at the dump.”
As near as I could ascertain (a sweet, elderly modesty settling over their recollections now), some kisses were exchanged (in more hygienic surroundings, I hope), and the contractual significance of those kisses was interpreted very differently. According to Sil, my mother returned to the university for her sophomore year confused but determined to try her way in the larger world again, “without tying herself to a wop builder. A kiss doesn’t mean anything, Artie. You know that at your age, don’t you?” According to my mother, Silvius saw off his unpredictable fiancée, who was not yet tightly enough tethered to the kindly, safe fellow with a job and a modest plan for the future.
And that second year in Minneapolis, she met A.E.H. Phillips, as my father styled himself at the U of M. He was the wider world my mother had suspected was out there somewhere, and he was exploring, like her but less tentatively, the possibility of other selves. He was a painter already and dressed the part—berets, open-neck shirts, even capes. He was also better read than most of her Lit. classmates, with an uncanny memory, she said, “at least for seduction poetry. ‘To His Coy Mistress’ came pretty fast off his tongue, and Sonnet 119, and the cajoling parts of The Rape of Lucrece, if memory serves. And he taught me about my name.” Mary Arden, he informed her over wine, had been Shakespeare’s mother. She hadn’t known. “Probably what attracted him to me,” she said, not only out of modesty.
And here, finally, was the love she’d been expecting and fearing. The love that cannot be ignored or reasoned through, negotiated with, tamed, made cute or quaint or optional, a love as avoidable as act-of-God weather or resistant bacteria, the rebel army arriving in darkest night. I have known it only once, and I understood when