The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [75]
“Come on, fella, you had your turn, so toughen up,” I chided, a prim reaper.
Bert was like this, a little scared by my arrival, my adulthood, my demand for the family jewels. He covered that fear and sadness with a layer of artifice: he sat down heavily, puffed out his cheeks, and said, “Well, this has been a long time coming. I’m feeling a little old!”
He had the key in his own safe, which he kept behind a painting of an open, empty safe. The key was for a safe-deposit box. There’s no way to write that without sounding melodramatic. It didn’t feel overdone, though, as this parody of an old family retainer handed over my father’s long-guarded secret; it felt pathetic.
The box was downtown, at a local bank whose corporate ownership had switched several times in the recent disorders of high finance but which I always associated with the sponsorship of Minnesota Twins games, delivered to my bedroom on summer nights with the windows open, through a battery-devouring radio and a single white earphone, yellowed from use, pressed in place during the frustrating not-dark of summer bedtimes when I was expected to abide by the clock, not the sky, and so lay in bed clandestinely listening to Tony Oliva and Rod Carew and Harmon Killebrew and Bert Blyleven battle the endless tide of Tigers, Brewers, Royals, Angels. All those warm boyhood nights sponsored by this bank, its name and motto repeated every half inning until I fell asleep, the earphone falling onto the pillow decorated with Twins’ logos, the batters retreating into white noise.
Whatever spark of pride I had felt at being chosen over Dana quickly faded, maybe with the sight of Bert’s fear or with the thought of my childhood as a time of sleep and warmth, of her. So I called her as I left Bert’s. Whatever this gift of our father’s was, I would share it with her. “Dad asked me to do some project with him,” I said, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if he had, no doubt, a dozen other projects in mind for her. Forty-five years old, and I was a little boy boasting, casually cruel, cruelly casual to the woman who’d loved me best since before I was born. But, in the next breath, I self-corrected: “And I want you to come. It’s turned odd already, of course. I want to do it with you. We’ll have some fun.” We agreed I’d pick her up at her place and we’d go to the bank together.
When I arrived to fetch her, though, ready to let her open the box, keep whatever expired stock certificates moldered inside it, she was gone, and Petra was there, bearing excuses. Dana had been called for a last-minute audition and hurried off, urging me to carry on without her. I wondered if it was true, or if Dana was instead giving me my moment and protecting herself against any more of my sharp elbows. And then I asked the bearer of Dana’s regrets to join me instead for “a trip to a secret vault.”
“Ooh! The family vault! What’s it all about?”
“Dark Phillips business. Dana must have told you of our shameful past. You want in?”
“Absolutely,” she said, adopting a Scandinavian accent. She finished sending some message on her cellphone, her finger caressing its face. “Okay. The game is afoot!”
We drove my rental Taurus back across the river and spoke of Europe. “So you’ve got a wife and kids.”
“Kids. Not so much wife.”
“And you have a key to a secret,” she murmured in that Garbo accent, and I had to remind myself that she was talking about an actual key.
“How long have you been with Dana?”
Jana was nothing; Petra was everything. What mechanism can so alter us? How could everything I once thought was undimmable fire now seem shadowed ash? An adolescent could blame it all on (or credit it all to) the new love’s dawning glow: she was so much better, so much more, that all I’d loved before was revealed as dim and dun. Romeo has very little difficulty casting off Rosaline once he sees Juliet, easily downplaying all he had previously felt and suffered as mere fantasy, and we all take his side, and