The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [4]
More significantly, this was the first time Dana and I did not agree about something important. I just didn’t like the stuff; Dana did. It is extraordinary to note it now, but I don’t think that had ever happened before. Still, I saw that it bound her to Dad, so I faked it for a while. That didn’t last, and soon I started wandering off when that fat brown book came off the shelf. This was a little—not to overstate it—traumatic for both me and Dana, I think, because, not long after the realization of this disorienting distance between us, Dad “went away” for the first time. Somehow those two events seemed related. They still do.
My father’s arrest and conviction that first time was—to a seven-year-old—the bloody birth of awareness that the adult world is dangerous, a place where you could lose badly, and where my father was by no means in control. “Your father has to go away for a while,” says the brave and tearful mother hustled over from subconscious central casting when recollection fails.
At that age, one is too selfish to understand it as her loss or even his loss or his imprisonment at all, only as our loss, and particularly mine. The child is punished with the father’s absence, and some arbitrary evil is to blame—not Dad, not yet. Possibly the child committed some crime himself and so has had his father taken from him? I’m told I cried for many nights running, scouring my conscience for the nasty thing I did, and even—God help me—trying to read Shakespeare as penance.
Fortunately, I had a twin. Twins enjoy what the rest of humanity craves: a perfect communion with another person, the absence of all loneliness. We are born with that certainty, two yolks in a single shell. We carry it with us into consciousness. When self-consciousness is born in us, we feel part of something and someone else larger than ourselves. (We pay a terrible price, however. Unlike the rest of you, we know what it feels like and we have to give it up, breaking eggs to join you in this vain search for an omelette to absorb us.)
Dad wasn’t gone long, that first time, and then he came back to live with us. But he went away again less than two years later.
When we were eight or nine, after our parents were separated but before our mother remarried, she woke us early one winter Saturday. It was still dark, but that’s not saying much in a Minnesota January. She had already sprinted out to the garage to unplug the car’s core heater from the wall outlet, start the engine, and leave it to warm up as she sprinted back inside. Forced to eat and dress as if it were a school day, I crept along unwillingly, like a snail, but Dana was quickly ready, refusing food and hurrying into her coat and lunar footwear. We rode through the Minneapolis cold as the sky bleached and streetlights winked. We drove out of the city, through two-story suburbs, then one-story, through dreary flatland, past white and hibernating farms until we reached daylight and the minimum-security facility, where we were led into the Family Room, as that windowless, barred space of gray concrete was whimsically named.
Our mother pointed out the table where we were meant to sit, and then she stepped away. I may be misremembering, or she may have said hello to him when I wasn’t looking. Either way, we were to present our belated Hanukkah gifts to him while she stayed far across the room reading the newspaper.
Our father was brought out to us. I recall being disappointed that he wasn’t shackled. I don’t think I wanted him to suffer (although maybe I did; I don’t underestimate children’s preference for color over kindness). Rather, I was searching, I think, for some evidence of harsh treatment so that I could imagine rescuing him, or begin to accept that my crimes had led him to a dire and unjust end. Instead, his world