The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

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.
    “He was very patient about it, evidently,” my mother told me. “He seemed to think it was reasonable. I would have been furious with you, but somehow he just smiled through it all.”
    “I really did this?”
    The counselor spoke quietly to me on the bus seat, trying to winkle some clue out of me, and I can imagine, but not remember, his expression of mingled doubt and concern. If this persistent man, standing laughing to himself on the corner in the August heat, wasn’t the kid’s father, what sort of criminality was he up to? And if he was the father, what was wrong with this annoying fat kid? And why wasn’t the dad shouting, settling this through force of will and parental entitlement?
    “You held out all the way to the police coming,” my mother laughed. “I think you only gave in then because you were afraid they were coming for you.”
    The police car arrived, and I glumly descended at last, forty-five minutes into this ordeal, took my father’s hand, and walked off with him for ice cream.
    What was I thinking? I honestly remember none of this incident, and if it hadn’t been my mom—the least imaginative and fanciful member of my family—recounting it, I might have said she was trying her hand at fiction. But she was telling it straight. The most directinterpretation: I didn’t want him to be my father. I must have been so angry with him for the divorce, so ashamed of his imprisonments, so jealous of his relationship with my sister that fantasy’s appeal outmuscled reality’s prerogatives. Or, since I can’t remember a traumatic emotion, maybe it was all in fun. Maybe I was trying to play a misguided game with him, something I thought he’d enjoy. Maybe I was trying to impress him with my ability to re-create the world or myself. Maybe I already understood enough of what made him tick that I was imitating him. If so, by the time the police came, I would have known that I, like him, wasn’t good enough to do it forever. I may have stepped off the bus preparing for my first arrest, another Arthur Phillips off to serve time for failures in fantasizing.
    Perhaps it was aggressive, a challenge to him to keep up. If he was so good at this sort of thing, I may have been dimly thinking, then I would be as good or better, and I deserved his respect as much as Dana did, or Shakespeare (who, by the time I was nine, had become a bullying, noxious presence). And, in this interpretation, his patient and friendly insistence that he was my father, his loving explanation to the mildly amused cops, his purchase of ice cream for me nevertheless, his general portrayal of a “father” (albeit one who didn’t discipline me for this irresponsible charade) was his victory: he had portrayed a dad more convincingly than I had portrayed an attempted-kidnapping victim.

5
     
    B UT 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 repeatedcrashes 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