The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [23]
She delayed bringing him home, left Sil’s letters of inquiry unanswered, avoided introducing him to her parents when they came down to Minneapolis. When she told Arthur of the existence of a mild rival back north (“I was just trying to keep him in the game,” she insisted), my father took note, smiled pleasantly, and set quietly to work. When she finally did take A.E.H. up to Ely to meet her family, Silvius was gone. “Oh, I suppose I noticed,” my mother told me. “I may even have asked. I don’t remember.”
Sil was nowhere to be seen because he’d received his draft notice. It had apparently been delayed in the mail, because he was expected to report to a fort in North Carolina for basic training in ten days’ time, prior to deployment to Korea. Sil certainly didn’t have the higher-education waiver my father had, but he didn’t argue, didn’t make the valid claim that he was his mother’s and sisters’ only real source of support. Having arranged something with Felix and Annie to take care of Violeta (a loan, Sil insisted, which he swore he would repay), he set off on the trains to Minneapolis to Chicago to D.C. to North Carolina. When he arrived, the army had no record of his call-up. The clerk examined his notice. It was absolutely authentic in every way; it simply didn’t correlate to any list or file the army could find, while Sil waited at a motel a mile from the base. At last, ten days later, in some effort to square a bureaucratic circle, the U.S. Army issued him an honorable discharge, granting him the rank of private, first class. “So I owe your dad for that,” he said.
In the meantime, my father had met my maternal grandparents, presenting them, at the end of the visit, with a hand-painted Sardensky family tree, stretching its roots back into Lithuania two generations further than the family had previously known, and culminating in the line connecting Mary Arden to A.E.H. Phillips, a proposal Mary had agreed to an hour earlier while Violeta overheard, sobbing, through the air vent that led to the laundry room.
Felix and Annie, both charmed by and dubious of the flashy Minneapolis painter, agreed to the match, and a date was set after their graduation, two years into the future. Mary drove Arthur back down to Minneapolis, averaging eighty miles an hour, and Sil returned to Ely two weeks later, his military career complete, his girlfriend engaged to someone else.
He learned the news from his mother and sent Mary a telegram offering her his warm congratulations and friendship. Stop.
“I felt like I’d won a contest, got cast in a film or a fairy tale,” my mother said. “Because I was a fool.”
“I really wasn’t trying to be clever about it,” Sil told me of that telegram. “I just wanted to lose gracefully. And I knew, too, even then, that this was the end for me. I wasn’t doing any more love.”
9
I AM CONTRACTUALLY BOUND to write a synopsis of The Tragedy of Arthur. One act at a time, I think; I don’t want to lose readers because Shakespeare puts them off. It’s for his own good.
So: Act I: In the Dark Ages, Britain is constantly at war. Uter, effectively king of England and Wales but nominally king of all Britain, faces invading Saxons and also the rebellious northern kingdoms of Scotland and Pictland (eastern Scotland). Mad with lust, Uter rapes the wife of the Earl of Cornwall, then kills the earl and marries the wife, installing a new earl. Because of the ceaseless war, he sends his newborn son, Arthur, product of that rape, to live with the Duke of Gloucester in a relatively safe corner of Britain. There, the boy, rarely if at all seen by his parents, grows up spoiled and impulsive, charming and flighty, despite the duke’s loving guidance. He is educated to become king, but also always prepared to flee Britain should its enemies conquer