The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [5]
I had spent some allowance on modeling clay and made him a diorama: the four of us together in our house (three shoe boxes cut open and taped together), our hands joined in a circle around the kitchen table, upon which was spread a vast, if not entirely recognizable, clay feast. This work expressed many of my fixations at eight years old: a reunited family, food (I was in the midst of one of my chubby spells, which correlated pretty well with his jail time), and religion (a shortlived fever, but it was climbing fast that year). The sculpture had suffered a bit in the cold, and white cracks had shot through most of the furniture and figures. I felt a round of pre-crying trembles revving up in my face. My father thanked me, complimented the “evident skill and passion involved,” pointed out his favorite parts, seemed pleased, I suppose. He promised me some lessons working with clay when he came home. He apologized that he couldn’t keep the gift where he was but asked me to protect it for him. That’s when my tears broke through the flimsy dam. I think my mother should have warned me that he wouldn’t be allowed to keep the diorama. I snuffled my promise to guard it until he was set free.
By then Dana couldn’t keep still another minute, and had no patience for me to have some emotional attack before her big moment. “Daddy, I have to give you mine now.”
“Can’t wait,” he said, and I thought he meant he literally could not wait because the guards were coming to haul him away.
“You have to wait, Dad! She worked hard for you,” I sputtered, rushing to protect Dana from heartbreak.
“Artie, it’s okay: I can’t wait, meaning I’m excited. Let’s have it, Dana.”
Her eyes were wide and she stood up at the table, her hands clasped in front of her chest. She began Portia’s big speech from The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene i. She shouted it at first, directly at one of the startled corrections officers standing next to the grated door leading back to the cells. The guard actually put up with it, or was too surprised to stop her, for a few lines, from The quality of mercy until Upon the place beneath before he barked, “Little girl, sit your ass down and keep it quiet or we are done today.”
Dana was never easy to cow; she was always much braver than I. She wasn’t scared by this giant with a nightstick, but she didn’t want to cause her dad any trouble or have her visit cut short. And so she surrendered her initial plan to recite the twenty-two-line monologue to the entire penitentiary Family Room, transforming it into the law courts of Venice. She had even picked out—she told me later, in the car ride home, weeping much more plentifully than I—which guard she intended to look at on line 197 with a piercing “therefore, Jew.” Of course, we were Jewish, but that didn’t mean she identified with Shylock or his vindictive interpretation of the law against the gentle Gentile merchant Antonio.
Shut down by the authorities, she composed herself and began again, more quietly. Too eager, too fast at first, she slowed down by the middle, and I watched them, from outside their circle of two, the two of them staring intently at each other in profile, an optical-illusion vase. My father’s upper lip hid between his teeth, and he nodded slightly as he tapped—pop POP pop POP—his stained and chewed-up fingernails against the flecked Formica tabletop to keep his girl in tight iambic rhythm through the speech.
She came to the end: “We do pray for mercy … This strict court of Venice / Must needs give sentence ’gainst that merchant there,” opening her palms to Dad as if he were Antonio, persecuted by some vengeful Shylock. Dana looked at him with a naked desire for praise, but then something happened that I didn’t understand for many years, if I understand it even now. My father took the next line (Shylock’s). He groaned, rather than shouted, “My deeds upon my head! I crave the law.” He was turning the original meaning (“don’t waste time with mercy, give me what my enemy owes me”) into something else (“punishment is what I deserve”). It