The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Read Free Page A

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.
    She 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 sortsto 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
     
    D AD WAS OUT AGAIN the next year, 1973, when we were nine.
    In
The Tragedy of Arthur
, King Arthur is portrayed as a charismatic, charming,