The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [95]
My contract was drawn up faster than any Marly had seen in thirty years in New York publishing, and conciliatory replies to her clausal quibbles were softly sighed by Random House legal in hours, not days.
Simultaneously, she opened similarly fruitful and nondisclosable negotiations with theater producers in London and New York, and with Hollywood studios. The results of those conversations are even now being rehearsed, financed, scheduled, scouted, shot.
I flew home to my sister waiting for me (alone) outside baggage claim. It was Dad’s release date, and Dana and I drove together to pluck him from prison.
34
I RENTED MY FATHER A FURNISHED one-bedroom apartment with floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over Lake Calhoun and the channel to Lake of the Isles, a place found for me by the novelist Robert Alexander, with whom I share an agent. These were my father’s first moments inside a building other than a prison or a hospital since 1987. Sailboats bobbed semi-inflated on the lake, and the slim wave crests were beginning to turn green and gold under the settling sun. He was sitting on a couch for the first time in twenty-two years. He wasn’t saying much, nor was I, other than obsessively offering him things. But he was more interested in the fine details of the world, an ancient infant. He would pick up throw pillows, squeeze them and laugh, then rise and walk to the window, press his hands against its warm glass. He made me recount and re-recount the meetings with the professors, the publishers, the details of our good fortune in the wilds of Manhattan. And I asked him why he thought the play had disappeared from history until he came upon it in that unmentionable country house.
“You didn’t tell them that, did you?”
“Of course not. Silvius’s attic.”
“Good. Good.”
“So what happened to Arthur all those years?” I asked with the most tenderness I had felt for him in decades, my hand on his dying back as he watched the boats like a little boy.
“It’s a natural question, Artie, but it’s the wrong question. No one can prove what happened. I can suggest a possibility that hasn’t yet been disproven. I know people will want answers, but the question is unreasonable: Where did this come from? What happened four hundred years ago that nobody wrote down?”
No, that reads too polished, coherent. He couldn’t talk like that last year. That was the gist of his answer, but it was not so smoothly spoken.
“People are going to want to know,” I said, pushing back, because I needed an answer for my Introduction, not because I had any doubt of my own.
But he said: “Stay calm about this.” That, he definitely said, and I laughed. I had asked as an interested believer, but he answered me as the chief of a criminal enterprise who has to talk down a jittery confederate, just when everything’s coming together so perfectly. “We don’t have to know everything. We can openly admit what we don’t know. What we may never know. It in no way reduces the wonder that is Arthur to say we don’t know where or how many times it was staged—diverse times, according to the cover. We don’t have to know how many copies were printed, or where the rest of them are. The cover says ‘corrected and augmented.’ That means there was probably an earlier printed version, an unauthorized bad quarto. But we don’t know. We don’t know and we don’t have to know if it was censored or banned or ignored. We know as little about some canonical plays. Remember: most things didn’t survive at all. There was probably more Shakespeare lost than we know. Most things don’t survive. This is what passing time means, Artie.” I remember those very words,