The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

  “Those last group shows,” my mother reported much later. “So depressing.”

  But not for us. My father’s increasingly desperate and pathetic final efforts at being an acknowledged artist had no effect on me and Dana just yet. His anger at the world’s indifference was imperceptible to us, and that is to his credit, or due to children’s natural indifference. For us, the adult world was soda on wooden benches, paintings and stories, midnight glimpses of Saturnine astronomers, magic pancakes. Our father amazed us and won our love not because he treated us like children, but because we thought he was treating us like adults, and adulthood was just a much better childhood.

  3

  “IN SHAKESPEARE’S DAY, kids your age could speak Latin. Brains can soak up anything, but if you pour in Nancy Drew and TV shows, that’s all you’ll learn.” Our father started reading Shakespeare to us when we were six, and it worked for one of us: Dana was reading it to herself within a year. Her love and knack for Shakespeare were, to my eye back then, maybe a little forced—at least at the beginning, an obvious effort to please Dad. But dye sets in, and what was once an affectation can become our truest self.

  More significantly, this was the first time Dana and I did not agree about something important. I just didn’t like the stuff; Dana did. It is extraordinary to note it now, but I don’t think that had ever happened before. Still, I saw that it bound her to Dad, so I faked it for a while. That didn’t last, and soon I started wandering off when that fat brown book came off the shelf. This was a little—not to overstate it—traumatic for both me and Dana, I think, because, not long after the realization of this disorienting distance between us, Dad “went away” for the first time. Somehow those two events seemed related. They still do.

  My father’s arrest and conviction that first time was—to a seven-year-old—the bloody birth of awareness that the adult world is dangerous, a place where you could lose badly, and where my father was by no means in control. “Your father has to go away for a while,” says the brave and tearful mother hustled over from subconscious central casting when recollection fails.

  At that age, one is too selfish to understand it as her loss or even his loss or his imprisonment at all, only as our loss, and particularly mine. The child is punished with the father’s absence, and some arbitrary evil is to blame—not Dad, not yet. Possibly the child committed some crime himself and so has had his father taken from him? I’m told I cried for many nights running, scouring my conscience for the nasty thing I did, and even—God help me—trying to read Shakespeare as penance.

  Fortunately, I had a twin. Twins enjoy what the rest of humanity craves: a perfect communion with another person, the absence of all loneliness. We are born with that certainty, two yolks in a single shell. We carry it with us into consciousness. When self-consciousness is born in us, we feel part of something and someone else larger than ourselves. (We pay a terrible price, however. Unlike the rest of you, we know what it feels like and we have to give it up, breaking eggs to join you in this vain search for an omelette to absorb us.)

  Dad wasn’t gone long, that first time, and then he came back to live with us. But he went away again less than two years later.

  When we were eight or nine, after our parents were separated but before our mother remarried, she woke us early one winter Saturday. It was still dark, but that’s not saying much in a Minnesota January. She had already sprinted out to the garage to unplug the car’s core heater from the wall outlet, start the engine, and leave it to warm up as she sprinted back inside. Forced to eat and dress as if it were a school day, I crept along unwillingly, like a snail, but Dana was quickly ready, refusing food and hurrying into her coat and lunar footwear. We rode through the Minneapolis cold as the sky bleached and streetlights winked. We drove out of the city, through two-story suburbs, then one-story, through dreary flatland, past white and hibernating farms until we reached daylight and the minimum-security facility, where we were led into the Family Room, as that windowless, barred space of gray concrete was whimsically named.

  Our mother pointed out the table where we were meant to sit, and then she stepped away. I may be misremembering, or she may have said hello to him when I wasn’t looking. Either way, we were to present our belated Hanukkah gifts to him while she stayed far across the room reading the newspaper.

  Our father was brought out to us. I recall being disappointed that he wasn’t shackled. I don’t think I wanted him to suffer (although maybe I did; I don’t underestimate children’s preference for color over kindness). Rather, I was searching, I think, for some evidence of harsh treatment so that I could imagine rescuing him, or begin to accept that my crimes had led him to a dire and unjust end. Instead, his world just looked boring.

  I had spent some allowance on modeling clay and made him a diorama: the four of us together in our house (three shoe boxes cut open and taped together), our hands joined in a circle around the kitchen table, upon which was spread a vast, if not entirely recognizable, clay feast. This work expressed many of my fixations at eight years old: a reunited family, food (I was in the midst of one of my chubby spells, which correlated pretty well with his jail time), and religion (a shortlived fever, but it was climbing fast that year). The sculpture had suffered a bit in the cold, and white cracks had shot through most of the furniture and figures. I felt a round of pre-crying trembles revving up in my face. My father thanked me, complimented the “evident skill and passion involved,” pointed out his favorite parts, seemed pleased, I suppose. He promised me some lessons working with clay when he came home. He apologized that he couldn’t keep the gift where he was but asked me to protect it for him. That’s when my tears broke through the flimsy dam. I think my mother should have warned me that he wouldn’t be allowed to keep the diorama. I snuffled my promise to guard it until he was set free.

  By then Dana couldn’t keep still another minute, and had no patience for me to have some emotional attack before her big moment. “Daddy, I have to give you mine now.”

  “Can’t wait,” he said, and I thought he meant he literally could not wait because the guards were coming to haul him away.

  “You have to wait, Dad! She worked hard for you,” I sputtered, rushing to protect Dana from heartbreak.

  “Artie, it’s okay: I can’t wait, meaning I’m excited. Let’s have it, Dana.”

  Her eyes were wide and she stood up at the table, her hands clasped in front of her chest. She began Portia’s big speech from The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene i. She shouted it at first, directly at one of the startled corrections officers standing next to the grated door leading back to the cells. The guard actually put up with it, or was too surprised to stop her, for a few lines, from The quality of mercy until Upon the place beneath before he barked, “Little girl, sit your ass down and keep it quiet or we are done today.”

  Dana was never easy to cow; she was always much braver than I. She wasn’t scared by this giant with a nightstick, but she didn’t want to cause her dad any trouble or have her visit cut short. And so she surrendered her initial plan to recite the twenty-two-line monologue to the entire penitentiary Family Room, transforming it into the law courts of Venice. She had even picked out—she told me later, in the car ride home, weeping much more plentifully than I—which guard she intended to look at on line 197 with a piercing “therefore, Jew.” Of course, we were Jewish, but that didn’t mean she identified with Shylock or his vindictive interpretation of the law against the gentle Gentile merchant Antonio.

  Shut down by the authorities, she composed herself and began again, more quietly. Too eager, too fast at first, she slowed down by the middle, and I watched them, from outside their circle of two, the two of them staring intently at each other in profile, an optical-illusion vase. My father’s upper lip hid between his teeth, and he nodded slightly as he tapped—pop POP pop POP—his stained and chewed-up fingernails against the flecked Formica tabletop to keep his girl in tight iambic rhythm through the speech.

  Sh
e came to the end: “We do pray for mercy … This strict court of Venice / Must needs give sentence ’gainst that merchant there,” opening her palms to Dad as if he were Antonio, persecuted by some vengeful Shylock. Dana looked at him with a naked desire for praise, but then something happened that I didn’t understand for many years, if I understand it even now. My father took the next line (Shylock’s). He groaned, rather than shouted, “My deeds upon my head! I crave the law.” He was turning the original meaning (“don’t waste time with mercy, give me what my enemy owes me”) into something else (“punishment is what I deserve”). It seems to me now that it was an apology of sorts to his daughter, and an indulgence of his occasional taste for self-flagellation.

  Despite her triumph performing an inconceivable task no eight-year-old could possibly do (reciting, probably flawlessly, twenty-two lines of gibberish), filling me with pride in her ability to thrill Dad, she was convinced she hadn’t been good enough. That’s what she murmured to me in the back of that old blue Plymouth Valiant, her mittened hand in mine, my orange down jacket stiff from her tears freezing on my shoulder while the car strained to heat up in the twenty-below Minnesota air (forty below with windchill), our faces red and tightly inexpressive from the cold, our fingers burning blue, the hard vinyl seats and useless twisted blue seat belts. Of course she was crying because of having to say goodbye to her father, again, already in his second short prison term of our young lives, and she was crying because our mother had never sat with him, spoken to him, acknowledged him. But Dana told me, years later, that she was also crying because she had just suffered a strange disillusionment, the grisly death of a childish fantasy: Shakespeare didn’t crumble the walls, fell the guards, melt the system’s heart. Shakespeare didn’t fix everything, or anything, just gave a moment of pleasure that would linger on in two people’s minds (she didn’t think to include me or already knew better), and this was a thorned disappointment for the little girl prodigy, whose love for words and fantasy had far outgrown her ability to understand the real world.

  “Enough, Dana, please. Enough,” sighed our exasperated mother, tired of all the bawling.

  4

  DAD WAS OUT AGAIN the next year, 1973, when we were nine.

  In The Tragedy of Arthur, King Arthur is portrayed as a charismatic, charming, egocentric, short-tempered, principled but chronically impulsive bastard. He is a flawed hero, at best, who succeeds then fails as a result of his unique personality. Unable to find a solid self upon which to rely, he ricochets from crisis to crisis, never quite seeing how he has caused the crisis until it is too late, and then flying so far to the opposite extreme in a doomed effort to repair his mistakes that he inevitably makes things still worse. This description also fits my father, Arthur Edward Harold Phillips.

  In American literature and movies, the reigning Jew is still the meek scholar or the mild family man, although I’ve lately noticed a growing cinematic population of tough Jews, surprising hero soldiers, rebels, kickers of Nazi ass, the occasional gangster. But the Anglophilic, artsy, bohemian Jew is a rarer bird, assimilating into the Gentile world not from any desire to blend in but because he is too florid to prune himself to fit available Jewish types. This, somewhat, was my father: not bookish, as Jews in his day were meant to be, but flamboyantly literary. Not self-hating, but self-creating. Not interested in himself as a Jew at all, but by no means interested in anonymity.

  His imprisonments before the final one seemed even—sometimes—to amuse him, or at least he was so intent on playing out his created character that he would not let on to any disappointment at being convicted of a crime. He refused, at least in front of me, to take any of it seriously, as if it somehow had nothing to do with him. It was only much later that he ever indulged an urge to blame someone else, to resent or regret his life. A psychiatrist would (and did) perceive in this a diagnosable medical disorder. In older, more romantic days, though, it would have been a heroic attitude or the sign of a profoundly philosophical character. He was able to keep it up until that last sentence, when they snatched most of his life away.

  To this day, I do not know the extent of my father’s crimes or even most of his employers (clients, in his parlance). I know everything he was convicted of, some of which he admitted to, some of which he stubbornly denied in private even when he had pleaded guilty. He tended to downplay the seriousness of his offenses. “It’s really a question of misvaluation, an uneven distribution of knowledge between buyer and seller, just a market inefficiency, and so I’m going to jail,” he told me. This was in the case of a collector at auction paying more for a drawing than it might otherwise have been worth because my father had added a signature and a long, very supportive, typed and aged provenance, transubstantiating the small picture, temporarily, from anonymity to Rembrandtivity.

  When pompously asked if he had anything to say for himself before sentencing, my father, putting on a good show, reminded the court that he hadn’t drawn it, only signed it. “That hardly speaks in your favor,” lectured the judge, whom I, at thirteen, instinctively disliked, a puckered school-principal type, later to appear in various guises in my novels. “At least drawing it would mean you’d made something of value.”

  “No,” my father rebuked the judge. “Your Honor, I have to object to that. The drawing was, and now again is, without much value. While it supported belief, thanks to me, its value swelled a thousand-fold, and people loved it a thousand times more. Punish me for doing it badly: all right. For getting caught: fine. For failing the world: guilty. But don’t say I didn’t make something!” I applauded, expecting others would join me. If it had been a movie, the courtroom would have shaken with cheers that swallowed the limp gavel’s tapping, and some new evidence or technicality would have bubbled up to the attention of counsel.

  “Without parole,” concluded the judge. That was 1977.

  Truly criminal people, in my father’s view, were men like the Rembrandt Research Project, a squad of Dutch art experts who swept through the world’s museums a few years ago, like avenging angels of facts or Santa Clausicidal maniacs, downgrading this or that old master (even signed paintings) to the status of “School of …” or “In the style of …” or the smirky “Attributed to …” My father ranted about these guys when I visited him in the late 1990s, as if it were the only thing on his mind. “Who wants to be that?” he stormed from across some other Formica. “What kid dreams of growing up to be the tight-ass joykill who travels the globe waving his facts around and denying people pleasure? As if his facts prove anything.”

  “What difference does it make?” I asked.

  “All the difference in the world.”

  “Why? It’s the same painting. It just means you can’t be pretentious about it. But if you liked the picture before, you still like it now. It doesn’t matter who painted it.”

  “Aesthetic empiricism,” he replied blandly. “I know, but that’s rare, Artie. Fact is, most people like the brand name, and the brand name helps them enjoy the product and opens them to trust other products. So being the big Dutch queen who prances around snatching off the brands—even if he’s right, which there’s no saying he is, although I do know the truth in one case, and he is right—that stops a lot of people from learning what they like. They don’t want to say they like it, because they’re afraid the Dutch guy’s going to call them a fool for liking the wrong thing.”

  A few years ago I was reading a book of essays I’d been asked to review for Harper’s called The Curtain, by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera. In it he writes, “Let us imagine a contemporary composer writing a sonata that in its form, its harmonies, its melodies resembles Beethoven’s. Let’s even imagine that this sonata is so masterfully made that, if it had actually been by Beethoven, it would count among his greatest works. And yet no matter how magnificent, signed by a contemporary composer it would be laughable. At best its author would be applauded as a virtuoso of pastiche.” I was at home in Prague, lying in bed next to my wife, who was h
umming in her sleep. I hadn’t been to the United States in a few years, hadn’t seen my father in years, and I had lately noticed with some relief how rarely I thought of him with anger or pain, finally, and then, at Kundera’s provocation, I began to cry. I still don’t agree with the sentiment—that a name on a work of art matters—but it was my father’s view of the world, and that day in court when I’d applauded him alone, he’d won me over, when I was an overweight and otherwise underdeveloped thirteen-year-old, and my father could still, for a little longer, do no wrong, no matter how many times the state said otherwise.

  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.