The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [68]
Can I not blame anyone else, even a little? Perhaps my mother would be willing to bear a tiny share on her old shoulders. Why, yes, I see it now: During the peculiar wake/shivah that Dana had designed, my mother grew annoyed by some of Sil’s distant, too close cousins and asked me to take her for some fresh air. She moved quickly out the door and down the street, and I had to pick up the pace to keep up with her. She set off for the path around Lake of the Isles and we silently motored along for nearly half the lake before her energy (or anger) sputtered.
“How are you?” I asked.
“That’s a funny question. I just buried a husband.” We now walked slowly, arm in arm, me supporting her balsa-wood body, the bikers and roller skaters blurring by on both sides, the cocker spaniels in their Cuban-bandleader pants, the skyline of downtown Minneapolis across the lake, as self-contained as a snow globe.
“He loved you.”
“He did,” she said as if there were no arguing with that. “And he held up his end of the bargain. Probably better than I did. He loved me all the way to the end. Treated me well. Supported me. ‘Not wealth, Mary. I don’t think I’ll be able to do wealth. But we’ll be okay.’ ”
“You do a pretty good impression of him.”
“Suppose. Well, there’s not much to master, is the truth.” I let that lie, and soon enough she exhaled and her tone changed back. “He gave me everything he promised. Everything he had.”
“He did.”
“It would be pretty awful to say it wasn’t enough.”
“I don’t know. It depends who you said it to.”
“He was steady-state, Sil was. That was how he loved, too. He opened with undying love and, sure enough, it didn’t die. Until he did.”
“That’s beautiful. Love like that. People dream of that.”
“Do they? Do you?”
“I don’t remember right now, but I’m sure I have. I never heard you complain about him at all.”
“No. How could I? Can I? Can you say it was a mistake? It wasn’t. Odd: I had two good choices and got to have them both. Can’t really complain.”
I finally bit: “You seem good and ready to complain.”
“Can you complain while we’re sitting shivah, or whatever that thing is back there?” She pulled over to a bench under a linden tree and let the wheels and paws and running shoes flow past us. A snail, like an ornate, restless 2, crept across the back of the bench. My mother picked it up and carried it to some moss out of harm’s way. She sat back down and looked at the canoes on the rack across from us, and she started to talk. “For thirty-five years, almost—this October is thirty-five—thirty-five years he told me in word and deed that I was lovable. And so that’s what I thought I was. He was like a mild drug. As long as I was near him, it was enough, and it didn’t wear off, and I didn’t think I wanted for anything but his humble offerings. But it was so humble. I was so far above him and he was so lucky to have me. Flattery, but sincere. And I loved him. I did. I do. I just—Arthur, can I wonder a little? Your father. I count my blessings I got out when I did and stayed away how I did, and Sil was there to give me something smooth and different and better and save me and I was so far above him and … Honestly. Honestly? God damn it.” I flinched, then laughed at my overreaction, but I had never in all my life heard the slightest obscenity smirch her lips, no matter how badly Dana and I had ever behaved. “God damn it. A little less awe of me and a little more effort to astonish me—to make me think I was the lucky one? Would that have killed him? But to sit there and say, ‘Gosh, I’m a lucky man to have you put up with my low-grade self.’ He never made me feel like I had better watch my step or I’d lose him. God damn it.” She really liked how that felt now. “I could do no wrong in his eyes. What’s wrong with someone like that?”
“That he loved you so much?”
“No, that, that, that, that I was just a great idea, and he, he was such a, was