by Jean Hegland
He thought he had been blessed with a joy as hard-won and undeserved as that of the precious winners in The Winter’s Tale. He’d believed his sixth act, too, would be a happy one. But he’d been too old to play Prince Florizel, John thinks with a hot fierce flush. He’d learned how love works long ago. “Sonnet 116” and bearing it out even to the edge of doom notwithstanding, he’d understood for over half a century that there is no evil angel but love.
Love is a dream from which one wakes older but no better, wiser only in sorrows. Love fades. Or rots. Or never really was. Or if there were a sympathy in choice, war, death, or sickness did lay siege to it.
The course of true love never did run smooth; he remembers chanting out that line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream for some small child, a girl of six or eight, who, sitting on his lap, laps up his words. Studying his lips with her brown eyes, she frowns and listens, nods in time to his recital, and then repeats the lines herself, occasionally getting stuck until he leans in to whisper what comes next as if they were sharing the breaking of a rule.
He feels again the delicious warmth of her slight weight, sees again how she strains, squinching up her face as if she might squeeze the lines from her brain like toothpaste, while he nods his encouragement, circling his hands as if to coax the next words from her. He remembers his delight when she announces she is ready to recite the whole speech, remembers how she begins as intently as a long-distance runner, and then, when it is clear the end is in sight, how she breaks into a wide, proud smile as she chants the final lines:
“‘Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream
Brief as the lightening in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth;
And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.’”
“Brava!” he cries when she is finished. Snatching up her hand, he pumps it in the air. Reaching down beside his chair for their box of Cracker Jack, he fills the doubled cup of her palms with caramel kernels.
“‘So quick bright things come to confusion.’” Lying stiff as grief in his single bed, John listens as that ghost-girl lisps those lambent words. Her mouth is not yet hard enough to pronounce the r in bright, the th sound in things. He knows another surge of pride at her precociousness, though at the same time he feels a pinch of remorse at the pessimism in the lines he is teaching her. The jaws of darkness do devour it up—he wishes he might somehow protect her from that doleful fact—swift as a shadow, short as any dream
And yet it is the truth. Even in the comedies the characters know that. Love comes to confusion. Always. And so quick. And not just love, but all bright things—every shine and spark, each pulse and hope and effort—everything extinguished, lost or squandered. So quick bright things
Even Shakespeare came to confusion, John reflects bitterly, when he wrote his final plays—those foppish romances with which he ended his career. Once, John had planned to end his own career as their champion. Until quite lately he had believed the romances were evidence of some brave new vision, proof of art’s power, of humanity’s capacity for grace and growth.
But tonight he agrees with all those other critics—whose names at the moment he cannot quite recall—who complained that Shakespeare’s romances lack motivation and coherence, who called them moldy or meanly written, lame, vigorless, or absurd. It’s not their wide gaps in time John objects to now, not their shallow characters or their knotty plots, not their strange mix of moods—comedy piled on tragedy like peppermint on licorice in the double-scoop ice cream his brother once dared him to eat. It’s not even that those plays are cut of the same fabric from which myths and folktales come. It’s that the particular myths they harken to are hoaxes, the tales they are bred from filled with baseless promises—or cruel lies.
It is requir’d You do awake your faith, commands Paulina in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale as she restores the statue Hermione has been to her own dear life again. Once upon a time John had called that scene sublime. But tonight he cannot forget that Hermione’s transformation from stone to flesh is not a real epiphany but only a cheap theatrical trick. Tonight he is appalled to realize that, like all the characters simpering through their happy tears onstage, he ever let himself forget the true costs of that moment: Paulina’s husband devoured by a bear, Hermione and Leontes’s son long dead, their daughter Perdita raised apart, and the witty and forthright Hermione so silenced after her awakening that she might as well still be made of marble.
Forget and forgive, Lord Cleomenes advises King Leontes, and soon Leontes is rewarded with a lovely daughter and a living wife. Forget and forgive, John broods in his lonely bed—as if forgiveness can mean anything if forgetting comes first, as if forgiveness matters more than understanding. But it’s understanding that lends the comedies their happy endings. It’s understanding that makes the tragedies so much more than sorry tales. It’s understanding—not forgetting—that humans need and crave. It’s understanding that John still strains for, even in this poor cell.
“I don’t unnerstan.” In his mind’s ear he hears someone making that complaint. In his mind’s lap, he feels her, too, perched like a sparrow on his thighs and knees as she leans towards the bright little book he holds in front of them. “The. Sun.” She is straining to name the letters on the page, struggling to match those names to sounds, trying to make those sounds fit into words.
“Did. Not.” Word by word she trudges across the page, serious as a spelunker entering a dark new cave, and when she reaches a word that makes no sense to her—shine, for example, with its feigning final e, she announces her confusion more as an affront than an admission. “I don’t unnerstan.”
“It. Was. Too. Wet. To play.” She can’t be more than four, and she is working so hard she is nearly shaking. “So. We. Sat. In the. House.
“All that. Cold, cold. Wet. Day.” He remembers her pride when she deciphers the first page, her delighted, excited, breathless conviction that reading is the key to everything.
He’d believed that, too, he thinks now with a pang. He’d believed that words and stories and literature could teach people how to think and how to feel, that art could alter the world. He’d staked his life on that.
Reade him. That’s what those saints John Heminge and Henry Condell wrote in the preface to their collection of William Shakespeare’s plays, the Folio they published seven years after his death in their attempt to still time and keep the memory of their sweet friend and worthy colleague alive.
Reade him, they advised, and againe, and againe. And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him.
Reade him. That’s what John has always urged his students—freshmen or graduate students alike. He tells them not to worry about the criticism, not to pay too much attention to what anyone else has said. Just reade him for yourself, reade him until you understand him.
And let him reade you.
Though now he thinks it was all for naught, all that reading, all that care and work. Like Prospero, the magician and sometime Duke of Milan in Shakespeare’s last great Tempest, he had dedicated his life to studying the liberal arts and bettering his mind. But look where it ended him—warehoused in some lonely cell with nothing to show for all his labor but defeat, regret, and yearning.
For years he’d tried to tease his students toward epiphanies, had striven to entice them with the delights of thinking and the promise of understanding, but tonight he wonders if even one of them was ever really affected by his efforts.
He’d placed his faith in literature and the liberal arts. But art is not potatoes. He’d known that long ago. Art cheats and mocks and misleads. It’s the airiest of nothings, the basest of all lies. If it’s Prospero�
��s so potent art that lends him the magic he needs to rule his isle, trap his enemies, and make his daughter a queen, in the end it’s that same art that Prospero must abjure simply to win his dukedom back again.
Closing his eyes, John listens as familiar voices come clamoring to speak his griefs. Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth
So much has been lost—not just mirth—but everything that matters. So much has been banished or forgot, so much ruined or misconstrued. The jaws of darkness do devour it up All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly. The best is past Thou’lt come no more
Sally said there was still time. But Sally is gone now, too.
Suddenly, he is sobbing. He is crying as if he has always been crying, crying as if he will never stop, crying for every loss he has ever known, for all the losses still to come. Sobs rip his chest, tears sting his cheeks. So much is wrong, so much is gone, and what little is left cannot piece out any comfort at all.
“Mistah Wilson, Mistah Wilson, wat’s de matter?” A hand rests on his shoulder. He looks up through his tears at the bottom of a woman’s face, her tawny neck and chin, her small dark nostrils. “Wat’s wrong?” she asks. “Is dere anyt’ing you want?”
There are so many matters, so many wrongs, so many things he wants. It dizzies him to try to name them all. He wants his mother back, and wants his dear wife. He wants his daughter to return in time, wants her to uncurse him, to understand his point of view. He wants enough sleep, wants his speech written down in front of him, wants his audience to listen to him.
But suddenly he is accosted by the biggest wrong of all, the epiphany that reduces every other matter to dust:
It was right for his speech to be a failure.
It was right for his speech to be a failure, since what he had been defending was a lie.
ANOTHER DAY.
Or perhaps the same day, in this strange disjointed time, in which great swaths of his life seem to have never happened, while other moments keep returning like old friends. Or bad pennies. Or the Twilight Zone reruns Barb used to stare at on TV.
He’s sitting in some anonymous green room, sitting in a leathern chair he swears he recognizes from some other where, watching out of a picture window as leaves swirl and fall, golden leaves that caper in the air like glowing garden sprites. He can watch those leaves forever, their twirl and loll. He’d forgotten—or had he never known?—how beautiful a falling leaf can be.
Sally comes to see him. Speaking of beauty. Sally, his bee holder. She comes sometimes, though never enough, and never now. Never when he needs her as much as he needs her in this very now.
Sometimes she stays away so long he forgets she has ever been, so that when she returns, he has to learn her all over again. Though other times when she’s gone he can’t forget her for a minute, and he keeps asking after her, asking and asking and asking when she will come again.
Her face is thin and worried when she comes, and her pain pains him. She hugs him, holds him, prates, and strokes his hand. She says she misses him, claims that nothing’s the same without him, that she thinks about him all the time. She tells him she’s been working hard. She says her bees are thriving, promises she’ll be able to spend more time with him soon, now that the hives are nearly winterized. It’s been a good year, she tells him, she thinks she’ll be able to keep the business, stay in their home. She tells him she’s proud of him, says she knows this hasn’t been easy, wishes there’d been any other way. She tells him he’s been brave and selfless. She says she loves him.
Her eyes say she loves him, too, though her voice sounds tired and lorn, so weary it cracks his heart. He nearly wishes she did not love him, it seems to hurt her so.
Now and then, when she sees he is feeling talkative, she’ll ask him about a play. Then she’ll hold his hand and listen as he recites some lines or expounds on what he knows. Sometimes the plots confound him, and sometimes characters wander in from other plays, but often both he and she are surprised at how much he still has to say.
He has been ruminating on the romances mainly, or trying to, because even in this meager chamber there are so many interruptions to his work. A moaning crone. A dancing leaf. A lass come to mop the floor. He has been thinking about those beguiling romances—though he can’t always recall their names—how they pretend that errors can be forgiven, that families can be reunited and kingdoms can be restored, how they try to claim that life is so rife with second chances that even people who were lost at sea or changed to stone can return to their homes and resume their loves unharmed.
Once he had argued that their lack of realism is in service of a higher truth, but now that he is two decades older than Shakespeare ever lived to be, now that he has seen what Shakespeare did not live to see, John regrets he ever defended those final plays. Because despite their glister and shimmer, despite the lilt of their poetry and the loveliness of their songs, in the end they take the coward’s way out, valuing faith and forgetting more than growth and understanding.
But the tragedies feign, too. Or at least he suspects they do. With their blithe advice to go forth and have more talk of these sad things, with their implication that a man might understand his life before he leaves it, don’t they, too, try to pretend there is more than dusty nothing waiting at the end?
“A story’s only sad if it ends before things get happy again.” He remembers someone saying that, a little grave-eyed girl. He remembers her climbing onto his lap, remembers her wiggling to get comfortable with a proprietorial ease that pleases him no end, remembers her solemn explanation, “It’s like how if ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ had stopped after the wolf had aten Grandmother instead of waiting till the woodcutter chopped her out. You have to wait for the ending you like,” she adds with stern conviction, “and then stop there.”
He remembers feeling charmed and proud, remembers thinking how many happy endings the world must surely hold for a girl who understood the shape of stories so well. But she was wrong, John thinks, staring back into a bitter past. And he was wrong not to warn her, there and then. Because beyond every happy ending is another tragedy. And beyond the final tragedy is mere oblivion.
That woman is back. Not his beloved copesmate, but the other, wafting one. He is glad and sad and mad to see her, such a muddy stew of simple feelings, like red and blue and yellow crayons all blended into brown.
“Dad!” she announces gaily, as if that in itself were a good thing. She wears hempen breeches, a parti-colored jerkin, her hair looks tempest tossed.
“A piece of him,” John agrees charily. But something stirs in the regions of his heart, not a spark exactly but the dull glower of long-banked coals. He’s seen her before, he’s sure of it, though she seems different now. She’s changed, even if he can’t say exactly how. He wonders why she has sought him out in this hollow cell.
“Why are you here?” he wonders aloud.
“I wanted to see you, Dad,” she says as she sits down. “I wanted to see how you’re doing, maybe give it another chance.” But her voice sounds too hale, the laugh she ends her wants with seems oddly culpable. He is not at all sure he should place his trust in her.
Out on the lawn, a man appears with a wheelbarrow and a rake. Planting the barrow by the wall, he commences to comb the turf for golden leaves.
“I’ve been thinking,” John says at length. “About … green worlds.”
“What?”
“Green worlds. Where characters go,” he continues, his voice gaining a lecturer’s timbre despite how he stumbles among his words, “to be, transformed. Topsy … turvy places. Like mazes, carnivals. Beyond the hardened … hierarchies, city or … court. Outside of time. They’re where the greatest change … occurs, not in … cremental, but … almost instant. As if, confusion is all … it, takes.”
“Oh, right,” she answers swiftly. “I remember. Green worlds—you talked about them last time, too.”
“Green worlds,” he agrees, “and not just … the comedies or … romances. Lear, too, I … think, the … heath,” John offers as the barrow man gathers a golden pile. “Maybe Juliet’s … orchard. Even Falstaff’s … green fields. But. It’s all a … jokes—a hoax, I mean. A lie.” He gives a harsh, hard sigh.
“Green worlds don’t exist,” he says, shifting his gaze from the raker to focus on his daughter.
“Well, sure,” she laughs, “They’re made-up stories.”
“A hoax,” he answers sternly. Speaking rapidly as if he were determined to finish his thought before it vanishes, he continues, “Stories, art, poetry, even. The … plays. You don’t see, it … last. I mean, don’t see … the last, of it. The change comes. And the play ends. We never see. How, it plays … out. Freya was right,” he ends bitterly, “It was all a dead. White man’s … game.”
“A game?” she echoes with a sudden keen interest, and though her question is equivocal, it seems to ease his mood a little.
“I’ve forgotten,” he replies, “where you went, to … college.”
“I didn’t go.” She speaks quickly, and suddenly her tone seems nervous, even needy. “I mean, I haven’t yet. But I’ve been trying, these last few months. I’ve been working really hard at it. I got accepted and everything. I was supposed to start in January.”
She pauses, watching out the window as the man crams his glowing piles into a black plastic bag like a billowing shroud. “But two weeks ago I got the financial aid package, and now I don’t see how I can possibly do it.” When she continues, her voice is brittle. “I’ve crunched the numbers a million times, and there’s just no way I could go without ending up at least a hundred thousand dollars in debt.
