The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [9]
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BUT IF IN FACT that is how I felt one summer day at age nine, it was not permanent. Disappointment and separation were halting and uneven processes, shuffling back and forth like over-Thorazined mental patients. If I was resistant to my father’s gravity at age nine, he could, without much evident trouble, draw me back in before I was ten. I am a writer of stories, trained to think in terms of a character’s emotional “arc,” but my real-life, untidy path resembles not an arc but a failed rocket program, liftoff followed by repeated crashes back onto the launchpad, short orbital flights followed by long groundings, until, far off in the future, escape velocity is finally achieved and deep space collects me.
But not yet.
After the bus incident, he was still able to induce wonder, to preach wonder, and I could still love, listen, and gaze at this star, my sister’s hand in mine, my eyes on my father.
When we were ten, we started spending weekends with him in his studio apartment on Lake Street, above the bookbinder where his friend Chuck Glassow had found him a job. He’d been out of jail for more than a year, had stuck to his probation requirements, and seemed to have become a reasonably normal divorced guy. Our mother was more than willing to enjoy weekends alone with her new husband.
We slept on an air mattress and, at bedtime, he would read to us: Alexandre Dumas or Arthur Conan Doyle if things went my way, Shakespeare if they didn’t. One June Friday the evening’s soporific, to Dana’s pleasure, was decided based on the date: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It did the trick for me quite quickly (especially as there was no baseball game on the radio that night), since I’m with Samuel Pepys on this one: “The most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”
But I must have fought off sleep until at least Act II, Scene i (and that’s due to Dad’s vocal prowess), because I remember the conversation that followed from my father’s reading of the line “And I serve the fairy queen, / To dew her orbs upon the green.” Dana asked what that meant, and Dad described “fairy rings”—little dark circles that appear in grass, which in Shakespeare’s nature-rich youth in green Warwickshire would have been a source of mystery and wonder mingled with fear. I may have mentioned that it sounded like a dull childhood if some rotting grass was a highlight, but I was nevertheless spun back under his spell, Elizabethan England greening in my imagination.
Now, some future moments flow from this spring: (1) My sister’s dreadful college punk band, for which she “played” bass, the Fairy Rings (better than her other, earlier effort, Discomfort Women); (2) my eventual career as a novelist, possibly, since we were lying down, drowsy, in the drabbest conceivable space, and my father—who did have a way with his vocal effects and vocabulary—was extolling the greatness of anyone who adds to the world’s store of wonder and magic, disorder, confusion, possibility, “the wizards.” If he had been trying to hypnotize me for life ahead, it wouldn’t have been much different. (On the other hand, if I’d ended up a urologist, I would now point elsewhere for the first seeds of my adult splendor, I suppose); and (3) the very odd weeks that followed, the pinnacle of my love for the three of us as a team, culminating, however, in Dad’s arrest and plea bargain, fines, and community service down in farmy Nobles County, Minnesota.
He said something along these lines (I am reconstructing thirty-five-year-old conversations to the best of my ability; they are almost certainly inaccurate): “In those days, you walked outside your house, or twenty minutes outside of London, and you were in an endless forest, as magical and terrifying as you can imagine. Wonders were in the