The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [77]
Finally, on a foam pad, inside a sealed plastic bag, was a book about the size of a thin paperback.
I straddled the border of laughter and anger. This was not my thing, had nothing to do with me. Was he so cell-shocked that he had forgotten which of his kids liked this stuff? “Dana will be sorry she didn’t come,” Petra said, her Scandinavian clowning still half audible, and I was even more irritated because I felt suddenly and strongly that I had done something wrong. “I feel like Dana should be here,” Petra confirmed my fear. “What is it?”
It was a quarto edition, dated 1597, of the play The Tragedy of Arthur, or, to be more accurate to the title page, The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain. The same play that our family owned in its 1904 edition, given to my grandfather for his contributions to his Canadian high school’s drama club. A play Dana read to me when I was a kid, but which otherwise I had never heard of or thought about. A Shakespeare play. His name was there on the title page.
Petra was staring at it, frightened to touch it, her face right next to it. “This is real? He has a real …?” Her excitement now began to affect me in that overly dramatic basement. Her excitement burned through one layer of necessary doubt, because the obvious answer to “This is real? He has a real …?” is “No. Of course not. Of course he doesn’t.” My father, of all people, a forger, owned and had kept hidden for decades a real 412-year-old document? No. Empirically disproven by everything I knew about him. Yet, that day, it was just me and Petra and an object that reflected her enthusiasm, inspired short-breathed excitement in her, and, as I wanted to inspire that, too, I didn’t quite disbelieve. “Can we read it?” she asked.
Belief, credulity, confidence. When one looks back, belief resembles nothing so much as a virus, and only as you recover do you realize how fever-addled you were. My immune system was vulnerable as I stood in that bank vault. What had left me exposed? What had blinded me, left me like a certain talk-show host cooing at the moral power of an improbable memoirist, left me like Dutch art experts certain that Vermeer painted the van Meegerens, left me like all the Shakespeare scholars who daily add their names to the roll of endorsements for The Tragedy of Arthur?
I held on to at least a facsimile of healthy skepticism. “This is interesting.” We agreed to pack it back up and take it to their apartment, to look it over and wait for my father’s promised explanation by email. We were in this together, Petra and I; I felt that more than I felt anything else. We should go find Dana; I felt that second most of all. “Should we wear latex gloves or something when we touch it?” I asked.
“Oh, I have boxes and boxes of them at home,” she said, smiling enigmatically, and I let her carry the BANANAS out of the bank, to the car.
She wasn’t kidding about the gloves, as it turned out, which I found very funny, especially when she pretended to be too embarrassed to explain why she had them (something innocuous to do with cleaning a theremin, she finally confessed). We examined the play and then read it aloud, sitting and standing side by side, our heads together, our hands occasionally touching in their prophylactic latex.
A printed book from the 1500s is not immediately easy to read, even if you are not standing two inches away from a woman you are overwhelmingly attracted to. The type is wobbly and squished in places, faint then blotted. Spellings are strange, and they can vary even from page to page. In Arthur, for example, both “moue” and “moove” serve as “move.” There are no j’s, and u and v are interchangeable. There are varieties of s we don’t use anymore that look like f’s, and so forth. Acts and scenes are only sometimes numbered, and exits and entrances aren’t always clear. Punctuation seems pretty random. There are mistakes and variations of characters’ names in the speech headings.