The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (32 page)

Too much? Too melodramatic? (
By my assent he fashioneth complotment!
) Maybe. But such aesthetic quibbling does not apply at the moment of revelation.

The only payoff in exchange for this loss is the sudden and permanent clarity of vision, the X-ray eyesight, and the charitable evangelist’s belief that this clarity can be taught to others before they have to feel the pain themselves. Sometimes this is true: clarity can be suddenly contagious when a group labors together under a forgery’s illusions.

What makes something rapidly and obviously a forgery after it was, sometimes for decades, so obviously genuine? Go Google the van Meegeren Vermeers. A child could tell you that those Navajos and Down’s syndrome maids aren’t by the same man who painted
Girl with a Pearl Earring
. Read James Frey’s memoir now: an elderly Amish lady could find a hundred impossibilities. Sometimes better science opens our eyes, but often it feels more as if a spell has worn off. We blink and look around, rubbing the fairy dust from our eyes, wonder whether we might have dreamt it all. Once you know it isn’t Shakespeare, none of it sounds like Shakespeare. How could it? If I didn’t write
this
, it wouldn’t sound like something
I
wrote.

First things first: I was not going to allow the publication, obviously. I would end this farce. Equally obviously, you are reading this, and I have failed. All I can hope now is that the critics do the job for me. The wise ones will quote me right now and say, as they should, or if only out of fear of appearing like suckers, “It’s a parody, a pastiche, obviously false, an act of inexcusable chutzpah, temerity, pretension.”
Or will we hear instead, out of their fear of appearing like philistines, that it’s “a remarkable find, a treasure, certain to keep scholars and playgoers and Bardologists busy for years to come, a ripping yarn, quite possibly from the genius who gave us
Macbeth
”?

One day, someone will find something within the play to match what I found without: the wrong
something
. Maybe not even that, maybe there will be no flash of anachronism, no smoking verb fifty years out of place. Instead, someone trustworthy, far from our family dramas, will feel, as Coleridge felt of
Henry VI, Part One
, “the impossibility of this speech having been written by Shakespeare,” and everyone will wake up, and no one will even need to prove it, and this book will creep quietly out of print, and the 2011 edition will join the 1904 edition of this curiouser and curiouser family heirloom.

“He did it to me again,” I whined.

“To you?” My mother laughed. “Please. This was why I couldn’t have a life with him. Couldn’t put up with it. What sort of life is it, if the person is going to turn out not to be who you thought he was an hour before? You can’t live like that. Life isn’t about trying to make surprise and wonder. Life is hard enough when you’re trying to cobble together a biding sense of reality from one minute to the next. Life is impossible and unsteady enough. Look what it thinks up! Car crashes and cancer. Pregnancy and heartache. Then on top of that? To be married to someone who might be one person one day and another the next? Who shouts, ‘Surprise! All of life so far was just a wonder I worked up in the basement’?”

“But you said you’d made a mistake not staying with him. You said Sil was a bore. You said—”

“Oh, no. Dear, please. Arthur. Really. You seriously think I can give you words to live by? Oh, Lord, you do. Well, I’d best start watching what I say. Is that what you want? Simple thoughts, consistent? How dull we’ll be. Tell me again how you think he did it.”

If my father forged everything, this whole story is much simpler. Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, when he is showing
Girl with Lily
in Minneapolis art galleries to no acclaim and starting to win his first commissions “duplicating” paintings for insurance purposes, he thinks it through: What would be the single most profitable forgery
he could produce and how long would it take to pay out? What might be possible if he had infinite patience, if he was willing to wait even fifty years for the payoff? He realizes that the biggest prize—a fountain of copyrights—requires an entirely new Shakespeare play, no chance of a second copy ever appearing. That rules out the plays we
know
are lost—
Cardenio, Love’s Labour’s Won
, the ur-
Hamlet
—because they might still turn up. He writes the text. Somehow. Really? He sits around, stressed for unstressed syllables, in private, in
prison
? Having written the play, he fakes the 1904 edition, tests it, uses it to trick out expert criticism, weed out mistakes in vocabulary. Then, when he’s certain of the text, he forges the 1597 quarto. Selecting a real printer of the period, knowing which one would have no heirs, no estate, no possible line of textual ownership to this day (which has taken a full U.K. law office several months to prove), he produces a 1597 document with ink and paper that can pass modern forensic tests and academic readers. Tests that didn’t exist when he set to work in prison or before 1986, when he locked it in a safe-deposit box. Writing a play the disappearance of which can be well explained by Shakespearean studies that were developed only in the 1990s.

My mother interrupted me at this point. “Hmm. Arthur, you know the old line? Sometimes liars tell the truth. Listen to yourself. There were barely libraries in those prisons. Somehow he’s concocting sixteenth-century ink?”

“Maybe he had a partner. Why not Glassow?”

“Because Chuck Glassow’s a grocer and a thief, not a genius. And he’s been out of the country for twenty years. But, really, by now, who cares? Why are you getting so exercised about this? You have other things to worry about.”

“He’s willing to wait fifty years to see a profit, so he can leave it to his family and feel sentimental and like he made it all up to us. Nauseating.”

And more. He gets to know he’s pulled it off, his last thought as he dies, a smile on his face, alone in a furnished rental, paid for by his pigeon son. It’s the pathetic part of forgery, the snickering little mischief-maker. Still and always the wonder-worker, which role, no matter what he said, always contains an element of laughing at the
suckers, the farmers, the fake-Rembrandt buyers. And the ego! He adds to the world’s pleasure and mystery. Just a big fairy ring. It’s pitiful. He gets to feel like he’s Shakespeare. As good as Shakespeare. Not as good as 1600 Shakespeare, not as good as
Hamlet
, but as good as 1593 Shakespeare. As good as the first batch of history plays. He fooled everyone: academics, scientists, readers, critics. Us. Me. “He didn’t ask Dana to manage this,” I said, “because he knew she wouldn’t have done it. He couldn’t sucker her like he suckered me. She’s smarter than I am. And she’s not greedy enough.”

“Of course she is,” said Mom. “She’s an actress. You think she wouldn’t like more press time? ‘Actress Finds Shakespeare Play’? Please. But, Arthur, I don’t think … are you sure that index card says what you think it says? This is a lot of money.”

I have total sympathy for that position: it is a lot of money, and one should think very hard about one’s purported principles before throwing away a lot of money, especially money your long-suffering mother and romantically betrayed artist sister could use. I promised Mom I would think it over before I acted, and I wasn’t just being nice. I also wanted to drive to Petra’s to see who was where, reciting my one remaining article of faith as I motored over.

I tried. I waited and mulled over that index card, but I could (and still can) see only one interpretation.

B
ERT
T
HORN CALLED TO REVEAL
that there was a will. In the same call, he requested my “word as a gentleman” that his time consulting on the probate, as well as a lingering balance from my father’s old accounts, would be “taken care of appropriately out of proceeds.”

Besides that unfortunate reminder of my father’s legacy, the will itself cattle-prodded my most predatory suspicions. He had drafted it two months before his release from prison,
before
the visit where he haltingly, so sincerely, lured me into this folly. Nevertheless, he wrote it as if my participation were a certainty. First:

“I direct that my son, Arthur M. Phillips, serve as my literary executor,
and I direct that he see to the publication, protection, and promotion of the play
The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain
by William Shakespeare, so as to maximize the financial return from the play to its beneficiaries. I hereby give and bequeath ownership of my copy of the 1597 edition of that play, and all monies which may be derived therefrom, in the following percentage shares: 28 percent to my said son, Arthur M. Phillips; 24 percent to my daughter, Dana S. Phillips; 24 percent to my former wife, Mary Arden Phillips diLorenzo; and 24 percent to my friend, Charles R. Glassow, if he survives me. If he does not, I direct that his share be divided equally among the three other beneficiaries just named.”

Upon hearing that last name over the phone, my mother interrupted my reading with salty Iron Range profanity, circa 1945, in original pronunciation. I had been a little puzzled by the division of revenue when I first read it, but at the time I had only felt a bitter, head-shaking amusement at my father’s manipulations of me. I wasn’t moved to my own full-throated obscenity until his next stipulation:

“
The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain
was written by William Shakespeare. Should my son and literary executor, Arthur M. Phillips, at any time in the future attempt to publish, or cause the performance of, or in any other way disseminate the play under his own name, or in any way publicly imply that it is his own work, or the work of any writer other than William Shakespeare, then I hereby revoke the said gift and bequest to him, and his said 28 percent share thereof shall belong in equal shares to the other three beneficiaries named above, or their survivors, provided they take all available legal steps to enforce my direction.”

In other words, he could conceive only of a son as thieving as the father. Before he’d even asked if I would do it, he was defending against the possibilities that I would steal his play for my own fraudulent literary ambition (
Look at me! I wrote a Shakespeare play!
) or I would sink his plans out of spite (as I was the snitch who had squealed to Doug Constantine), and in either case, I would lose my inheritance. And he would sic his wife, daughter, and criminal chum on me to make sure I did the kingpin’s bidding.

I don’t think that in my entire life of wavering anger issues I have ever been more furious than I was at that moment in Bert’s crappy office, blinking up at his drop-tile popcorn ceiling, my jaw muscles straining, almost sprained, from the contortions and tensions of my face. Dana had come over after her matinee to join me for this meeting, and she laughed as I raged, broke a pencil, spluttered at the dead man’s lies, insults, hypocrisies. She patted her loony twin’s shoulder as I vowed to torpedo the whole smeared business. “His pathetic little performance, his sad-ass delusion, although that’s generous, the idea that he was insane, not just a liar.” That said, it seemed possible that by the end he thought he
was
Shakespeare, writing Will’s will. “I’m shocked he didn’t leave Mom his second-best bed.”

“Well, I do hate that guy,” Dana said as we left Bert’s office.

“I know. He’s dead and he’s still playing us.”

“No, no,” she laughed, down on Nicollet Mall now. “
Chuck Glassow
. I hate Chuck Glassow.”

“Really? You think about him at all?”

“You don’t? How can you forgive him? How many times did Dad go to jail while Chuck got off?”

Charles R. Glassow, owner of a quarter of our projected millions, did two years for the grocery store coupons tax scam and came out with fair prospects from other friends; my father was paroled after seven, mentally worse for the wear, and soon to go back in for the long one.

Before that, there was the wine. I honestly can’t remember how that one ended, and I don’t care enough about the unquestionable accuracy of this to look it up, but Chuck and my father had the idea of printing up exquisitely crafted labels for a French vineyard that didn’t exist, the promotional materials for the château and grounds, the history of the denobled family, even a pedigree of the vines, including scientific analyses of the soil and grafts. This was pre-Internet, so the arrival of an elite French red, priced above $150 a bottle, available only in small batches, preordered for the very best customers, was an unexamined boon for Minneapolitan oenophiles. The wine was a cheap American blend, chosen by Glassow and my father for its price, anonymous flavor, and unmarked corks and cork foil.

I don’t see any other explanation: Glassow’s presence in the will only confirmed what the index card had already revealed.

“Where are you going from here?” I asked Dana, a vague question, as I was desperate now to be told I was forgiven and free to move in with Petra, that Dana was happy. “What’s the latest?”

“We’re talking. I don’t know. I didn’t know there was so much wrong before all this. We have so much to sort out. Depths of misunderstandings—I can’t see to the bottom. Can’t see how it can end right. I don’t know. I think … I think she’s already seeing someone.”

“Really?”

“I wonder what Shakespeare would have made of psychopharm,” she sighed when I couldn’t find the air to form the questions I wanted to ask. “You know? We’ve taken all this crap for so many years. We’re more like everyone else when we’re on the junk, everything seems clearer and easier and less fraught, but a little less real, too. Hard to believe that would have seemed like a good idea to him. ‘Here, take this: you’ll be happy to be a glover like your dad. Here, take this: you’ll be happy to be a Protestant. Here, take this: you’ll be happy enough married to that old hag and living in Stratford.’ I don’t think so.”