The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [30]
I remembered, thanks to reading this, the details of my tenth birthday. Dana built me a model baseball field, cardboard and artificial grass (from an Easter basket), painted, all in scale to some tiny Twins figurines she had bought with her allowance. It must have taken her hours and days to build it, hours in secrecy away from me in Mom and Sil’s modest house, and since there was so little such time in those days, she must have been thinking of me and working for me for nearly all of April. In tiny letters on the back of the jersey of the figure up to bat she had painted PHILLIPS and the number 29 (Rod Carew’s number).
Silvius was not yet Mom’s husband then but her boyfriend, a stocky and balding fellow whose remaining, not-yet-fatted-over muscles impressed me a great deal. He did indeed take me to Met Stadium to see a Twins game for my birthday, though not until April 28, when the Twins beat the Milwaukee Brewers, even though Carew disappointed, going either 1-for-4 or 0-for-4, I believe. I have my ticket stub still, now that I am older than that stocky, balding fellow was and my own hair has thinned to the point where it looks as if I’ve had a not very convincing plug job on a much balder head. My mother bought me a boxed paperback set of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which has moved with me from home to home, across oceans, for thirty-six years now and is held together by yellowing tape of its own. And my father presented me with a 1974 Topps-brand baseball card, in mint condition, in a protective plastic sleeve, with Hall of Fame–quality career statistics, of the Twins’ second baseman: me. My chubby young face sits comfortably on a man’s body in full swing, and visible just behind my blurring bat, a sign held up by a front-row fan: GO, ARTIE!
It was the finest birthday of my life, and I hold out no hope of ever topping it in whatever years remain.
From hate to love to apathy and back again. Therapists and I have schemed and attacked the locked box that contains the answer to the question, “Why did I hate my father for so many years?” Armed with intricate lock-picking tools, we passed aggregate months poking at my psyche, jabbing at its impenetrable front (not a lock at all, only a crafty and detailed trompe l’oeil), searching it for a spring, finally whacking it with the hammer of antidepressants, dunking it in the acid of hypnosis. Still, it keeps its sepulchral secret.
I loved my father, of course, but I did finally have to admit that I hated him. His arrests when I was a boy were evidence first of police conspiracy and harassment, unfairness against my daddy; but later they proved his disregard for us, for me, his apparent preference for prison over my company. In parallel, there was my love for him and my admiration for his work and for his theory that, as a doctor makes the world healthier or a lawyer makes it more precise, he made the world more wondrous. This belief must have had—the shrinks and I are in concord about this—some effect on my becoming a novelist. That and my total lack of skill at baseball. (Somehow sensing this, an online reviewer of one of my novels wrote, “Phillips swings for the fences but manages only to wedge his bat up his own ass.”)
Protective of my mother, whom he failed, and jealous of his love for Dana and vice versa, I would gladly dress myself in noble garb now and claim (or just memoir-manipulatively imply) that I hated him for what he did to them, how miserable Dana was every time he was taken from her. I could make a case.
We were fifteen when he was sentenced to prison yet again. It was a