The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [42]
Anyhow, Dad arrived unannounced for Brown’s commencement in a burst of paternal instinct and insouciant parole violation. (He was arrested upon his return to Minnesota for casually disregarding the terms of his release, thus missing my college graduation, making a choice for her and delaying my own healthy arrival at indifference to him.) Dana was so amazed that he had come (to Providence) the week she was scheduled to enter real life and adulthood, that she believed he had arrived to tell her. She took him to her room, laid out all her later work for him, waiting to be praised by her daddy for having figured it all out. She faced his incomprehension at the end and saw at once that he had no congratulations or legacy to present, no key to a hidden world of elite secrets. She knew all that, of course. She understood that. She had been under other pressure as well, had, I assume, suffered other emotional setbacks. It wasn’t the worst breakdown in the world. She just couldn’t stop crying. And she started to talk about wanting to “stop feeling this way.” She probably didn’t mean that the way some interpreted it, but Dad took her to Health Services himself, passing through Brown’s campus gardens bursting with spring’s crow flowers, nettles, and daisies.
It wasn’t the worst crisis in history, not even the worst in the history of Shakespeare-loving, hyperbolic actresses, would-be Ophelias drowning in imagination, obsessive Frannys. But it kept her occupied that summer. When she came to live with me in September, she was very much herself, just with a certain overenthusiasm shaved away. She sometimes talked about having received a “cognitive diss.”
She forgave our father for not giving her $9 million, and, more to the point of reality, she forgave him for what she called “his unconvincing performance as a father.” I don’t know if they formalized it or if there was ever a specific moment when she knew the rebellion was over, but it was over. Unlike other anti-Stratfordians, once her initial psychological splinter was tweezed out, she let the whole stupid thing go. She came out of it where she began and gave Shakespeare back his life’s work (and gave her father back a loving, wiser daughter). She still loved the plays. She loved a lot of plays: Ibsen, Chekhov, Stoppard, Strindberg, Beckett, Ionesco, Dürrenmatt, Jonson. She could still quote almost all of Shakespeare, and recited passages from time to time, but she no longer spoke of an ancestor or a paternal genius. She was converted by the fire of her experience into a lover of works, not authors. I saw her once in rehearsal, when another actress said, “He must have lived this. The words are so heartfelt.” Dana just sighed and said, “Dunno.” She no longer cared, really, who wrote King John; she wasn’t grateful to Shakespeare for it—she merely loved it and was grateful to it. This is not a minor distinction, and I’ll come back to it later.
Fall of 1986, we moved in together in New York City. After those four years of unpleasant separation, I was relieved to be with her, to be able to look after her, to bathe again in the feeling I could find with no other person on earth, of being in company, known and loved, understood, often without even talking.
We could not quite afford a second bedroom in Manhattan. I had been hired as a junior copywriter in an ad agency—one of those jobs deemed so glamorous that they pay you very little. I affected a fedora in my business attire, but photos now reveal that the effect was less Bogart than Hasid. Dana, for her part, lived on waitressing tips. She was still fine-tuning her medications and was sometimes frighteningly manic, as