The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [83]
3) If it was published already, why can’t I find it anywhere on earth except Dana’s shelf?
And then I waited six days until he had email access again. He replied very briefly, just asked me to come in person. The next visiting day was three days later, August 14, and I pushed my rental car through the wall of mosquitoes that had descended onto the Minnesota prairie.
“Dad, what’s going on? First you can’t tell me in person, now you can’t tell me on email.”
We were back at the Formica of Infinite Gloom, but this time he was focused, intent. He leaned forward and made a visor with his hands, his middle fingertips meeting above his 3-D eyebrows. He whispered: “Answer me one thing first. You saw it. What do you think it is?”
“I have no idea. This really isn’t my thing.”
“Okay, fine. Okay.” He wasn’t angry, precisely, just frustrated and trying to hold that in check. “You doubt me. Okay. It’s just … time.”
He started talking. “In March of 1958, I traveled to England to do some work for a wealthy client. I went by ship. You can probably find the records, ship manifests or whatnot, prove it to yourself. Please do that. Please. Anyhow, my client, this fellow, he lived in a big country house.”
“What? Come on. Who? What kind of work? What country house? Where was this? No offense, but this sounds total—”
“Stop. Just please. I’ll get to all of it. I promise. You’ll see. You can check all of it. Anybody can.”
In March 1958, he traveled to England to do “some work for a wealthy client.” This fellow lived in a big country house, even though since the war, he’d had to open it to tourists two days a week, to help pay for upkeep. On this vast estate, in his big manor (sketched once by Constable, Dad mentioned), he had one of those inherited libraries that the family had been adding to for centuries. My father in that library was a fat man at the Jolly Troll smorgasbord. “He had a Third Folio, second issue,” among other treasures. “When I wasn’t working, I was there. Gardens and grounds and horses were not my cup.”
“Working. What work?”
My father had been asked to make a replica, “for insurance purposes, perfectly legal,” of a small painting in the house’s art collection. “I was doing a lot of that back then. My own stuff didn’t sell, I don’t know if you know, but. I had a good run at this sort of job for a while.”
“What painting was it?”
“Stop. Will you stop? For a minute? I’ll get to it.”
It was a nice gig. He was resident at the great house for sixteen days. He worked six or seven hours a day, while the light was good. The rest of the time, he was something more than staff and something less than an honored guest. He slept in an extra room and was allowed unlimited access to the library in his non-painting hours. He explored every shelf. “I wasn’t going to read the Shakespeare. I had read all of it, memorized half of it. I was looking for things I hadn’t seen before. I read a ton there. There were things you couldn’t get in those days, unless someone like this guy let you see his.”
Alongside that 1664 Third Folio, on the Shakespeare shelf, were a dozen or more homemade anthologies. “This is pretty common,” explained my father. Apparently, people used to buy those pamphlet-size quartos, and once they owned six or eight, they would have them stitched together according to whatever system they fancied, like a playlist, and then they’d have the assortment bound in a nice cover, “Morocco leather, maybe stamped Seventeenth-Century Drama or Shakespeare Comedies, which they then kept in the ancestral library.” They would handwrite a table of contents inside the front cover. “So this man, my client, had a couple long shelves of these homemades. Heaps of things to read.”
“Do you need to wear latex gloves with that kind of book?”
“What? Of course not. Why?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
So, one evening late in his stay, my father opens another of these books, and the handwritten table of contents on the inside front cover lists The Taming of the Shrew, Sejanus, Every Man in His Humour, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour