by Jean Hegland
Though more and more when he tries to conjure them now, he finds the texts are unreliable, their webs torn, lines dangling unconnected. idle brain refuse thy name ’tis gone, ’tis gone, ’tis—
A crow drops from the sky to land on the lawn like a shiny new thought. John watches as it struts across the greensward, thrusting its black breast forward with each brash step. “Upstart,” he mutters, parroting the word the dissolute playwright Robert Greene used to dismiss his rival, William Shakespeare.
There is an upstart Crow, Greene complained as he lay dying in borrowed lodgings, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you. In Elizabethan England, bombast meant not only blustering language but also the padding men used to fill out their codpieces. John’s students always crow when he shares that fact with them.
He tells his students that William Shakespeare’s evolution from an insignificant glover’s son residing two days’ rough journey from London to a man of the theater that a university wit like Robert Greene might envy is a convergence of miracles that will never adequately be explained. It was a miracle for Will to have survived at all, when two-thirds of the babies born in his parish in 1564 died of the plague before they’d lived a year. And then it was another kind of miracle for a man of William’s raw genius and rare sensibilities to have landed in London so soon after the craze for theater swept the entire city, when everyone from apprentices to ambassadors—and even the Queen herself—craved plays, and the first purpose-built theaters were little more than a dozen years old.
John tells his classes that historians can only speculate and scholars only imagine what kind of crisis or opportunity first compelled young Shakespeare to leave his wife and three small children and strike out for London, that city crammed with marvels and horrors, with its palaces and prisons, its cathedral and its Tower, where the river was alive with salmon, swans, and watermen, and the bridge that crossed it was decorated with traitors’ heads, that city of lawyers, actors, and bookstores, threaded by streets with names like Pissing Alley, Dead Man’s Place, Gropecunt Lane, and Bear Gardens.
Bear Gardens, John muses while the crow goes on a-swaggering in the sun—such a blithe title for such a bloody spot—the street named for the bear-baiting arena that was its sole attraction. He has roused many a dull class by explaining how London’s early theaters were based on the same roofless, round, three-storied design as its bear-baiting arenas, and describing how Elizabethans loved watching chained bears being set upon by packs of half-wild dogs at least as much as they loved attending brandings, hangings, and plays.
Elizabethan playwrights had no thought of pleasing English teachers when they penned their dramas. Since more than half of the inhabitants of London were barely past adolescence when Shakespeare began to write, John likes to inform his students that a patron at the Globe theater would have been much more likely to be their age than his own. Three thousand people at a time—John marvels as a handful of sparrows scatters across the lawn and the crow cocks his head at some new fancy—three thousand rowdy youngsters crammed inside those wooden Os, the groundlings jostling in the crowded courtyard while their betters preen above them in the galleries, orange sellers, ale merchants, and whores all hawking their wares, everyone gossiping, flirting, and heckling the actors whenever their attention strays from the stage. To hold their audience’s attention, to ensure they would come back, an acting troupe had to keep those brawling crowds constantly enthralled.
They were creating something new, John exalts as the crow hops into the air and lofts heavily off into the shining day. Lord Strange’s Men, the Admiral’s Men, the King’s Men—they’d taken a genre that had moldered since its Grecian heyday nearly two thousand years earlier, and they were recasting it to fit their own yearning, teeming age. They were inventing a fresh way to tell a story, a new method to delight, distract, or perhaps even to expand the human soul.
It was a grand collaboration, John rhapsodizes, an unlikely alliance of authors, actors, and audience, all fueled by their desire to push the innovation further, to discover what else it might be possible for a play to say or—
“Dad?”
The voice is timid, tremulous, strangely familiar. John jerks alert with a snort, his speculations scattering like startled birds. But instead of twisting around to glare at his intruder, he keeps his gaze fixed on the scrap of world outside his window, studies the usurping ivy and the peering daffodils in hopes that this interloper will see how busy he is and let him be.
“Can I come in?” the voice persists. He’s heard that voice before—or at least he thinks he has—although he cannot at this moment pair it with a name or face. Even so, he feels an unexpected surge of delight to hear it now, though his pleasure is followed instantly by a tug of caution.
“May,” he suggests warily.
“Is that okay?”
Reluctantly, wincing at the torment in his hip, John turns in his chair to see a woman standing in the doorway. She is young, twenty-five, maybe, or twenty-seven, a slender woman, all juts and knobs, her brown hair tousled to appear rakish, though at the moment she only seems unkempt, her wafting skirt and sleeveless shirt evidence of the spring weather but perhaps suggestive, too, of something unfixed about her.
She looks eager and worried, breathless in some existential way as she takes a step into the room, reaches out a hand. A second later she steps back to the threshold, retracting her hand to press it against her heart.
“Daddy?” she whispers, her voice catching on itself. Clearing her throat, she repeats more firmly. “Dad?”
When John does not answer, she crosses the floor as if she were wading ever deeper into dark water until she stands in front of him, blocking his view of the windowed world beyond. For a moment she waits, looking down at him, and then she bends into a squat so that she gazes up instead.
Their looks touch. Awareness shivers through him, a complicated swirl of fury and yearning, recognition beyond the provenance of words.
“Dad?” she asks again, her voice wavering before she reaches the end of that short word, breaking it into two syllables, a million questions. “It’s been a while,” she offers with a small wry smile. “Ten years, I think—come August.”
“Ten years?” he echoes cautiously. Her face looks vaguely familiar, though unlike any daughter he’s ever known. Whoever she is, she must surely be misprized on that point. Perhaps she is a former student, or a young colleague. Or maybe his bank teller, or the hygienist at his dentist’s office. He has met so many people over the course of his travels and his career. Recently he has grown quite skilled at masking his uncertainty about their identities until he can garner the crucial clue that will tell him who they are.
“Do you remember me?” she asks. Her tone seems both beseeching and challenging.
“‘I remember thine eyes well enough,’” he says, borrowing lunatic King Lear’s reply to eyeless Gloucester as a ploy to buy more time. He feels pleased to have a visitor who is neither elderly nor officious, glad to have a guest who appears to have come for the sole purpose of seeing him. He bestows a smile on her, hoping to win some further hint.
“I’m Randi,” she says.
“I beg your pardon?” He tries to temper his surprise so as not to appear too old or out of date.
“Miranda,” she amends. “Your daughter, Miranda.”
Miranda, his mind echoes, Admir’d Miranda, and, worth What’s dearest to the world, and, my daughter, who Art ignorant of what thou art. Despite his inadvertent spurt of hope, he studies her face cautiously, searching for correspondences and suggestions—her eyes, her lips, her hair.
“Impossible,” he proclaims.
“Impossible?” Her laugh is tight and raw.
Judiciously, he announces, “My daughter has purple hair.”
“Purple?” Her hand darts to her head, though a second later her confusion is replaced by a kind of bemused discomfort. “That’s me
, Dad—I mean, it was. I did have purple hair, once, for a little while. Back when I was a teen.”
“Teen,” John muses, and when nothing better comes, he adds, “‘Eighty odd years of sorrow have I seen, And each hour’s joy wrack’d with a week of teen.’
“Who’s that?” he asks, suddenly sharp as a game show host.
“What?”
“Who says that line?” he prompts, settling grandly back into his chair to await her answer.
“I’m afraid I can’t say who.”
“Can you say what play?”
“I really don’t have a clue.” She is clinging to her smile as though she fears that she will never find another. “I never really learned my Shakespeare.”
“Your Shakespeare,” he tests the phrase. Pausing, he frowns, studies her once more. “Miranda?” he tries.
“Yes, yes.” An eagerness brims on her face like water wobbling above the rim of a glass. “Miranda,” she agrees. “Your daughter, Miranda—Barb’s daughter.”
“Barb.” He offers the name to his webby mind, gets ashes in return.
“Barb Bradley,” the girl urges. “My mother. Your second wife. She moved back to North Carolina. I haven’t seen her in a while,” she offers stiffly. “But I think she’s doing better now. At least she sounds like it, when we talk on the phone.”
His eyes travel her features warily, while she waits, brimming. But he’s seen that eager, abject look before—on a girl very much like her. And once more it triggers his righteous wrath, once more stirs an indignation so fierce he can hardly fit it into words. “Where have you been?” he barks.
“Me?” She rocks backwards on her heels, throws down a hand to keep from toppling over. “Down in Santa Cruz, the same as always.” She looks both frightened and defiant, and he recognizes that irksome expression, too.
“No,” he barks. “Previous … to presently. Where were you—” He pauses, suddenly tangled in too many tenses, too many afters and befores and other nows, “when you deployed, I mean, departed—when you left?”
“You were the one who left, Dad. Sixteen years ago—when I was ten—you left.”
“I?” he asks imperiously.
“You and Mom got a divorce. You moved up to Solano. That’s where you met Freya.”
“Freya,” he echoes, memories assaulting him like petals and hailstones stirred in a spring storm. “She had a fine mind, sharp and … keen. But not expansive, not … generous. She forgot, that’s what she said, forgot to tell me. Though I wondered, later.” Staring into some middle distance, he heaves a heavy sigh. “She took the Harvard job.”
“I know,” Miranda answers evenly. “I mean, I heard.”
“It was good, in the end. Riddance. I mean, resolution. She was …”
“What?” she prods when it seems he is straying from the path of his own thinking. “What was she, Dad?”
Her question returns him to the room. He studies his visitor, trying to read her hair, her slender arms, the yearning staining her expression. “Why are you here?” he blurts and watches as the yearning stiffens to wariness. “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” she answers promptly as a character in a sitcom. Running a hand through her hair, she adds, “Not a thing. I just thought I’d drop by. Sally said you might like to see me.”
“Sally,” he says more kindly. A long wait later, he adds, “How have you been?”
“Okay,” she hesitates for a moment. “Good enough. You know how it is—life, and all.”
“I know a little.” He nods sagely.
Another silence sags between them. She says, “How about you, Dad? How have you been?” As soon as she asks the question, she looks as if she would wish it back.
“Not well,” he answers. “Not well at all. I need to get to work. There’s work that needs … working on. Important work. My life’s work, I might say. We should go,” he adds, planting his hands decisively on the arms of his chair and making ready to stand.
“Oh,” she blurts, “I’m not really sure.”
“I’ve been here much too long, waiting for—”
“Hey, look,” she announces, rummaging in her bag, “I just remembered—I brought you something.” She produces a small beribboned box. “Do you still like chocolate?” she asks. When he does not reach to take the box from her, she urges, “I remember you always did.”
“I …” He hesitates. “Always did.”
“Would you like one now?” Untying the ribbon, she lifts the lid, sets the box in his lap. Leaning over to peer at the glossy mounds, she admits, “I’m afraid I don’t know what’s what.”
“None of us do,” he answers, taking a chocolate, popping it whole into his mouth, chewing it like bread. “Miranda,” he announces after he has swallowed, rolling the word across his tongue like another kind of sweet, tasting the hum and growl and lilt of it.
“What is it you do?” he asks, smiling down at her.
“Do? Me? You mean, for a job?” She teeters in her squat. “I work at a coffee shop.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A coffee shop.” She raises her voice slightly. Speaking more slowly, she adds, “I’m manager. I worked up, from barista.” She shrugs. “It pays the bills.”
“Selling,” he breathes in sharply. “Coffee?”
“And coffee drinks.” She shrugs, risks an ironic grin. “Espressos, cappuccinos, mochas—it’s a big deal these days. There’s actually quite a bit to know—origins, roasting times, brewing techniques. All the baristas have their own style—their own philosophy, I guess you could say. It’s kind of interesting, actually, but—”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’” He smiles almost dreamily, basking in the line. “‘Our,’” he adds with a nod. “That’s the Folio talking, and I’d agree. The Quarto’s ‘your’ seems too dismissive—don’t you think?—and Horatio is Hamlet’s only true friend. They’ve been students together at Wittenberg, after all.” His voice grows in authority as he speaks. “The irony Hamlet’s expressing is surely meant to include both of them—our philosophy. That’s Hamlet’s little jab at the limits of their learning, the limits of what any philosophy can uncover, a nod at the mystery beyond.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.” She sounds amused.
“I don’t remember,” John begins, though then he pauses for so long it seems he has forgotten what it was he does not remember.
“Yeah?” she urges cautiously. “What don’t you remember?”
“Where you got your degree.”
“My degree?” She gives a rueful smile. “I never went to college, Dad—at least, I haven’t yet.”
“Never?” A surprise bordering on affront sounds in his voice.
“Not yet. I know you’d’ve wanted me to, but it wasn’t a good time. There was too much else going on.”
“What,” he asks indignantly, “could possibly be more important than an education?”
For a moment she looks stricken. But when she answers, her tone is as pointed as his own. “Stuff,” she snaps, though at the sight of his stung expression, she seems to soften, “just a lot of different … stuff. Plus, I had no idea what I wanted to study.” She pauses as if consulting her thoughts, and when she speaks again, her voice seems to glisten. “But now—guess what? Just two days ago I sent off my app—”
“I thought you might like this,” a voice announces from the doorway, and a woman labeled MATTY bustles into the room carrying a straight-backed chair.
“Oh.” Miranda rises awkwardly from her squat. “That’s nice. Thank you.”
“At least it’s better than sitting on the ground,” Matty answers stoutly, placing the new chair so that it faces the window next to John’s.
“‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground,’” John says, his voice growing regal with channeled pain as he watches his visitor settle into her new seat, “‘and tell sad stories of the death of kings.’”
“Now, John,
” Matty admonishes, reaching down to give his shoulder a playful shake, “You shouldn’t go talking about sad stories. Especially now that your daughter’s here.” Turning to Miranda, she adds, “He says the funniest things, your dad. Sometimes they don’t make a lick of sense, but other times, they kind of seem to fit. Actually,” she continues musingly, “it’s that way for most of ’em, really, practically right up to the end. It’s amazing what some of ’em will come up with, just out of the blue—sometimes long after you think they’ll never talk again. Only the stuff that your dad says,” she adds, brightening, “it’s different, somehow, like—I don’t know—it sounds official. Like it’s straight out of the Bible or something.”
“It’s Shakespeare,” Miranda answers. “They’re lines from Shakespeare’s plays.” She makes a self-effacing smirk. “But I’m afraid I couldn’t say which ones.”
“You’re kidding.”
“He was a scholar—is, I mean,” she says, shooting John a vaguely guilty glance. “Though he’s retired now, I guess. He wrote books and taught.”
“You mean like Romeo and Juliet and stuff?” the stout one marvels. “We read Romeo and Juliet in my high school English class. Though if you ask me it wasn’t English at all. I was lucky I got a C. Shakespeare,” she repeats, shaking her head. “It actually makes more sense when your dad says it than back when I tried to read it. John,” she raises her voice as though she could include him in the conversation by yelling. “You never said that stuff was—”
But suddenly she is interrupted by a beeping coming from somewhere inside her bosom. “Oopsie,” she says, cramming her hand down the V-neck of her tunic, fumbling between her staunch breasts to pull out a monitor which she glances at briefly before announcing, “Gotta go.” As she heads toward the hall, she calls over her shoulder, “Have a nice visit, you two.”
“You never asked,” John says when she is gone.
He sits in silence, looking out the window. “This isn’t easy,” he tells the ivied wall.