The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [41]
13
DANA WAS NO LONGER ADDING to the story by the second half of college, but it still unrolled in her psyche. Her anger at Dad—paroled in March of our senior years—had not completely vanished, and as long as she was still angry, she would cling to a little anti-Stratfordism, her “screw thee” to Dad. And if she was going to cling to rebellious looniness, she was going to cling at least to her own version, the one where she would inherit $9 million in 2014.
Ironically, the (anti-)intellectual position she had taken (“Shakespeare didn’t write the plays, Dad”) led her to this fable in which that same Dad would eventually take Dana aside and tell her the good news about her inheritance: “Here is our family secret, and you are the one to see it to its end!” (It always struck me, though, that 2014, the 450th birthday, was far too convenient for us. The 500th—far likelier a target—would mean it would be my kids’ victory, with elderly, whiskered Aunt Dana drooling in the corner.)
In all her research, she never came upon a reference to The Tragedy of Arthur. Textually, she put it in its place, dated its composition, traced its thematic and linguistic characteristics to the Feivel plays around it (King John, Richard III, the Henry VI trilogy), but she never found a single word about Arthur. “Didn’t you think that was odd?” I asked her just last year.
“Nope.”
I believe that this smaller self-delusion was part of the larger one gestating in her at the same time, and that the authenticity of Arthur was tightly bound in Dana’s subconscious to the authenticity of her father’s love for her. She could not afford to believe that he could have lied to her about Shakespeare. This linkage was so strong that—as with any anti-Stratfordian delusion or pre–Iraq War WMDs—the absence of proof could not be tolerated as proof of absence.
I don’t know what I thought at the time about all this. I really didn’t much care or take much note. These ideas were just a continuation of the Shakespeare “thing” I had never taken part in, so I didn’t see her trouble coming. But now I think that she fantasized, even believed on some level, that eventually Dad would really tell her the good news. She had thatched together this tale with the sticks and mud of her life and dreams, my father’s life, literary history, stove-piped historical research. When I asked, “But you don’t actually believe this, do you?” she replied, “But that’s just it. If it’s true, you wouldn’t know it yet.”
She had begun in rebellion, rejoicing when she irritated him with her letters. But she ended, when he came to her Brown graduation in May 1986, depending on him even more than when she was an idolizing and constantly disappointed little girl, her fantasy life overflowing its allotted space.
I don’t want to overstate her breakdown around the time of our graduations. A lot of people feel the stress of that period of life and suffer a temporary loss of bearings. It wasn’t the worst crisis ever.
On the other hand, a lot of people suffer the same stresses that Dana suffered without any ill effects. The crisis did knock her out for a few weeks, and did lead the rest of us to treat her a little gingerly in the coming years. I suppose, despite my own flirtations with the psychiatric industry, that this was the first time I really thought of Dana and myself as essentially different.
That is an odd admission, I see. We were twenty-two years old, of different sexes, different experiences, different opinions. I had been angry at her, jealous of her, cruel to her, hurt by her cruelties to me. But this was the first time I ever really saw us as fundamentally different people: I would not have a