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By Root 813 0

his mistakes, and she needs the same thing. It’s not just a power play; she has a past—she only hints at her own errant behavior, but it’s there. And any Elizabethan audience would know the versions of the Arthur story where she’s an absolute ho-bag. She’s made her own mistakes in love. She wants to feel clean and new again, and something happened to them, back when they were kids. Something happened to her that was like imprinting. It was instantaneous. It might not have made any sense, but that doesn’t mean she can ever escape it. Look what she did to try to escape: she made herself watch him with other women. She roamed on her own. And she’s lived as a spinster, for a time anyhow. But she knows there’s only one way for her to go. Let’s read that scene again. Back from the start.”

But the door opened, and Maria jumped off the couch barking, and Dana came in talking: “Baby, you home? I nailed it, I so nailed it!” She came upon the two of us bent over the book, our gloved hands side by side. She had come from her callback audition for a production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, a late-career Shakespeare collaboration and, with its intimations of lesbian love, one of her favorites. She crossed to us, hugged me, kissed Petra, and then gasped as she saw the quarto’s cover page. “What is—Oh, my God.”

“It’s Dad’s. It’s what he told me to pick up. I don’t know what it is.”

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God! No. How?” She was shaking as she took a pair of gloves from Petra, kissed her with an apology for having forgotten to do it earlier, even though she had, and Petra stroked the back of Dana’s head. Dana put her face right down to the page and sniffed it deeply, twice, again, again. “It is, isn’t it? Oh, my God. How does …?”

She had visited Dad a month earlier, she said, and he hadn’t mentioned it. What did I know about it? Nothing, I said; Dad promised an explanation to follow. I peeled off my gloves and collapsed, exhausted, onto their sofa, left her and Petra to surround the little book. I wanted her to deal with it. It was already much too much for me. I played up my ignorance, my incompetence, my Shakespeare indifference, and especially Dad’s confusion. I told her to keep it safe and do whatever should be done with it. “Does it need some humidity-controlled chamber or something?”

She looked up, obviously unwillingly, and considered me awhile before she sacrificed herself: “No. No, no. He has some reason. It’s not for me.” She didn’t seem hurt, though I don’t know how she couldn’t have been. But she insisted that without invitation or instruction from Dad, it was not hers to intrude. “I just want—oh, my God, I just want to read it and touch it. Is it any different than the 1904?”

“I would love to compose the music for a production,” Petra said, her arm around Dana’s shoulder.

“Oh, you’d make it sing. What does it sound like?”

“There is so much you could play with. There’s Renaissance stuff, authentic to his layer, or you go darker, medieval or earlier, authentic to the setting, or you go out there, just bang away without a thought to the time …” She pulled off her gloves with her teeth and crossed the room to their upright piano, started in with a left hand somewhere between a Gregorian chant and a jazz walking bass line. Dana delicately lifted over the pages, found a favorite passage, and read aloud to the music that shifted tones and tonalities in response to her voice:

By Mordred’s holy seed might not we soon

Implant a prince ourselves to hold our claim

And with her womb prove Mordred’s right to rule.

Yes. Then will I obtain from England’s lords,

And vulgar tribune sorts who must be paid,

Such love, subjection, dread that may be bought.

Success made sure, I’ll turn resistant thought

To acting as a vengeful brother ought.

I loved them both, loved their love of the play, how quickly and instinctively they both leapt to play with it, to build on it, to breathe life back into it. It was obviously a Shakespeare play because these two women I loved so differently each loved it so much the same. I wanted to be part of it. I