The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [8]
I would have said it was a strict borderline: I loved him without reservation until the age when reservations were required. And yet, my mother told me a story last year that I had forgotten (and still cannot recall), of an event from when I was nine years old and attending a summer day camp in Minneapolis. According to her, one afternoon the bus dropped me off at the corner where my mother always met me, but this day my father was waiting. I stepped to the last stair of the bus and saw him instead of her smiling in the sunlight. I turned back to the drug-addled camp counselor who was vaguely in charge of not losing us or giving us to strangers, and I said, “My mom isn’t here yet. I’m not supposed to wait alone.”
“It’s all right,” said Dad, stepping up to the bus. “I’m his father. Come on, Arthur, let’s go get an ice cream.”
“Great then,” said the counselor.
“That’s not my dad,” I said. “I don’t know that man.”
The counselor’s laughter grew nervous as I retreated back onto the shadowy bus and refused to budge from my brown plastic seat. I suppose a request for my father’s identification must have occurred to someone, and he must have been lacking. A call on a pay phone to my home may have been made, but it must have failed to draw out my mother. Apparently, I stuck to my story.
“He was very patient about it, evidently,” my mother told me. “He seemed to think it was reasonable. I would have been furious with you, but somehow he just smiled through it all.”
“I really did this?”
The counselor spoke quietly to me on the bus seat, trying to winkle some clue out of me, and I can imagine, but not remember, his expression of mingled doubt and concern. If this persistent man, standing laughing to himself on the corner in the August heat, wasn’t the kid’s father, what sort of criminality was he up to? And if he was the father, what was wrong with this annoying fat kid? And why wasn’t the dad shouting, settling this through force of will and parental entitlement?
“You held out all the way to the police coming,” my mother laughed. “I think you only gave in then because you were afraid they were coming for you.”
The police car arrived, and I glumly descended at last, forty-five minutes into this ordeal, took my father’s hand, and walked off with him for ice cream.
What was I thinking? I honestly remember none of this incident, and if it hadn’t been my mom—the least imaginative and fanciful member of my family—recounting it, I might have said she was trying her hand at fiction. But she was telling it straight. The most direct interpretation: I didn’t want him to be my father. I must have been so angry with him for the divorce, so ashamed of his imprisonments, so jealous of his relationship with my sister that fantasy’s appeal outmuscled reality’s prerogatives. Or, since I can’t remember a traumatic emotion, maybe it was all in fun. Maybe I was trying to play a misguided game with him, something I thought he’d enjoy. Maybe I was trying to impress him with my ability to re-create the world or myself. Maybe I already understood enough of what made him tick that I was imitating him. If so, by the time the police came, I would have known that I, like him, wasn’t good enough to do it forever. I may have stepped off the bus preparing for my first arrest, another Arthur Phillips off to serve time for failures in fantasizing.
Perhaps it was aggressive, a challenge to him to keep up. If he was so good at this sort of thing, I may have been dimly thinking, then I would be as good or better, and I deserved his respect as much as Dana did, or Shakespeare (who, by the time I was nine, had become a bullying, noxious presence). And, in this interpretation, his patient and friendly insistence that he was my father, his loving