The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  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 good-bye 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, as well, 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, promoting the small picture, briefly, 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 thousandfold, 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 humming 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 moth
er 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.

  “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 direct interpretation: I didn’t want him to be my father. I must have been so angry with him for the divorce, so ashamed of his imprisonment, 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

  BUT 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 repeated crashes 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 his studio apartment on Lake Street, above the bookbinder where his friend Chuck Glassow had found him a job. He’d been out of jail for more than a year, had stuck to his probation requirements, and seemed to have become a reasonably normal divorced guy. Our mother was more than willing to enjoy weekends alone with her new husband.

  We slept on an air mattress and, at bedtime, he would read to us: Alexandre Dumas or Arthur Conan Doyle if things went my way, Shakespeare if they didn’t. One June Friday the evening’s soporific, to Dana’s pleasure, was decided based on the date: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It did the trick for me quite quickly (especially as there was no baseball game on the radio that night), since I’m with Samuel Pepys on this one: “The most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”

  But I must have fought off sleep until at least Act II, Scene i (and that’s due to Dad’s vocal prowess), because I remember the conversation that followed from my father’s reading of the line: “And I serve the fairy queen, / To dew her orbs upon the green.” Dana asked what that meant, and Dad described “fairy rings”—little dark circles that appear in grass, which in Shakespeare’s nature-rich youth in green Warwickshire would have been a source of mystery and wonder mingled with fear. I may have mentioned that it sounded like a dull childhood if some rotting grass was a highlight, but I was nevertheless spun back under his spell, Elizabethan England greening in my imagination.

  Now, some future moments flow from this spring: (1) My sister’s dreadful college punk band, for which she “played” bass, the Fairy Rings (better than her other, earlier effort, Discomfort Women); (2) my eventual career as a novelist, possibly, since we were lying down, drowsy, in the drabbest conceivable space, and my father—who did have a way with his vocal effects and vocabulary—was extolling the greatness of anyone who adds to the world’s store of wonder and magic, disorder, confusion, possibility, “the wizards.” If he had been trying to hypnotize me for life ahead, it wouldn’t have been much different. (On the other hand, if I’d ended up a urologist, I would now point elsewhere for the first seeds of my adult splendor, I suppose); and (3) the very odd weeks that followed, the pinnacle of my love for the three of us as a team, culminating, however, in Dad’s arrest and plea bargain, fines, and community service down in farmy Nobles County, Minnesota.

  He said something along these lines (I am reconstructing thirty-five-year-old conversations to the best of my ability; they are almost certainly inaccurate): “In those days, you walked outside your house, or twenty minutes outside of London, and you were in an endless forest, as magical and terrifying as you can imagine. Wonders were in the grass, mysteries. Something invisible was trying to communicate with you, frighten you, charm you, maybe steal from you, or help you, lead you to riches or just laugh at you. Now, boring, boring, we know there aren’t grotesque fairies out there. We cut down those forests to prove it. We know what causes twenty varieties of discolorations of the turf. We have so many facts, and with them we can cut down anything.”

  I agreed wholeheartedly: Dad, forests, adventure, wonder, Dana, and I versus prisons, bulldozers, boring people, facts. That seemed precisely to explain the world.

  The following two weekends he asked for us again, and our mother continued to be improbably generous in sharing us, considering his performance as
a first husband and her full, inarguable custody. But my mother’s way of judging people was her own, and she never hesitated to let him be a father when he could. She didn’t hold her or our repeated disappointments against him. “That’s the way he is. Don’t expect anything else,” I heard her say more than once, though decades spun by before I could consisently follow that advice.

  He took us out to an extremely nice dinner two Saturdays later, at the Normandy Hotel, a Minneapolis fixture back then. The gift certificate he used to pay for the meal (without incident) is tinted in retrospect with a shading of doubtful authenticity. “The gift of a lady friend,” he claimed as provenance, a forged girlfriend vouching for a forged voucher. (The “lady friends” of those years when he was out of prison were often referred to but never produced, and, before I understood that they never existed, they may have inspired in me another strange unilateral competitiveness with my father. My subsequent compulsive behavior toward women, I can admit now, may have been an effort to show him and the world that I was not a forger. And there, just there! I wonder, replaying that meal, whether life really works like this: if he had thought of some other explanation for the gift certificate, or said nothing at all, would everything have ended differently today?)

  He returned to his theme as I tore into a tenderloin of pork covered in apples and cream: the world’s vanishing faith in wonder, in relation to the vanishing natural world, and in inverse proportion to its growing store of dubiously valuable scientific knowledge. Dana was rapt, I recall. I remember watching her watch him, and I began to be aware of how he looked at me slightly less often than at her when he spoke. I suspected I was getting less of his eye, which in turn made me mad, so I looked up less often from my food, which led him to address the only child who was showing any interest in him, so by the end, he didn’t look at me at all. I was already able to make others fulfill my own worst fears.