The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [6]
Despite her triumph performing an inconceivable task no eight-year-old could possibly do (reciting, probably flawlessly, twenty-two lines of gibberish), filling me with pride in her ability to thrill Dad, she was convinced she hadn’t been good enough. That’s what she murmured to me in the back of that old blue Plymouth Valiant, her mittened hand in mine, my orange down jacket stiff from her tears freezing on my shoulder while the car strained to heat up in the twenty-below Minnesota air (forty below with windchill), our faces red and tightly inexpressive from the cold, our fingers burning blue, the hard vinyl seats and useless twisted blue seat belts. Of course she was crying because of having to say goodbye to her father, again, already in his second short prison term of our young lives, and she was crying because our mother had never sat with him, spoken to him, acknowledged him. But Dana told me, years later, that she was also crying because she had just suffered a strange disillusionment, the grisly death of a childish fantasy: Shakespeare didn’t crumble the walls, fell the guards, melt the system’s heart. Shakespeare didn’t fix everything, or anything, just gave a moment of pleasure that would linger on in two people’s minds (she didn’t think to include me or already knew better), and this was a thorned disappointment for the little girl prodigy, whose love for words and fantasy had far outgrown her ability to understand the real world.
“Enough, Dana, please. Enough,” sighed our exasperated mother, tired of all the bawling.
4
DAD WAS OUT AGAIN the next year, 1973, when we were nine.
In The Tragedy of Arthur, King Arthur is portrayed as a charismatic, charming, egocentric, short-tempered, principled but chronically impulsive bastard. He is a flawed hero, at best, who succeeds then fails as a result of his unique personality. Unable to find a solid self upon which to rely, he ricochets from crisis to crisis, never quite seeing how he has caused the crisis until it is too late, and then flying so far to the opposite extreme in a doomed effort to repair his mistakes that he inevitably makes things still worse. This description also fits my father, Arthur Edward Harold Phillips.
In American literature and movies, the reigning Jew is still the meek scholar or the mild family man, although I’ve lately noticed a growing cinematic population of tough Jews, surprising hero soldiers, rebels, kickers of Nazi ass, the occasional gangster. But the Anglophilic, artsy, bohemian Jew is a rarer bird, assimilating into the Gentile world not from any desire to blend in but because he is too florid to prune himself to fit available Jewish types. This, somewhat, was my father: not bookish, as Jews in his day were meant to be, but flamboyantly literary. Not self-hating, but self-creating. Not interested in himself as a Jew at all, but by no means interested in anonymity.
His imprisonments before the final one seemed even—sometimes—to amuse him, or at least he was so intent on playing out his created character that he would not let on to any disappointment at being convicted of a crime. He refused, at least in front of me, to take any of it seriously, as if it somehow had nothing to do with him. It was only much later that he ever indulged an urge to blame someone else, to resent or regret his life. A psychiatrist would (and did) perceive in this a diagnosable medical disorder. In older, more romantic days, though, it would have been a heroic attitude or the sign of a profoundly philosophical character. He was able to keep it up until that last sentence, when they snatched most of his life away.
To this day, I do not know the extent of my father’s crimes or even most of his employers (clients, in his parlance). I know everything he was convicted of, some of which he admitted to, some of which he stubbornly denied in private even when he had pleaded guilty. He tended to downplay the seriousness of his