by Jean Hegland
“Confused about who you are?” Herb had scoffed when John finished talking. Punching John’s shoulder so hard he left a bruise, he said, “You’re a person, you germ. Get over it.”
The girls in the row in front of him are engaged in a whispered conversation concerning a member of the varsity football team when John turns the book over to read the title embossed on its faded red spine: The Merchant of Venice, and the author: William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare—
kick in the rear.
That’s the game they used to play at recess back in grade school, one boy ambling innocently alongside another on the playground, and then shooting a foot out to land a blow on the unsuspecting kid’s bottom. “Shakespeare, kick in the rear!” the kicking boy would crow, all the while keeping a careful eye out for teachers, who might take exception to that word, rear, almost as much as they would object to kicks and dirty shoes.
Back then John hadn’t really known what Shakespeare was. Like all the other words whose meanings he’d had yet to learn, it was just a set of sounds with its attendant cluster of apt or outrageous connotations. Shake. Spear. To his second-grade thinking, it had made a sort of wicked sense that a kick in the rear would be the outcome of a shaken spear.
But now that he is in junior high, he knows that Shakespeare is one of those famous authors who lived long ago, like Charles Dickens, Jane whatshername, or Edgar Allan Poe. He knows that in high school he will read Shakespeare, just as he knows he will someday study geometry and dissect a frog. Sitting in his eighth grade English class, he feels smug to be reading Shakespeare so soon.
He returns to the play where someone named Sal is talking about argosies and burghers and woven wings, and John is dismayed to find the lines make little sense. Flipping back to the dramatis personae page, he learns that Ant is not an insect at all, but a man named Antonio—a merchant of Venice—and that Sal is Antonio’s friend, Salario. One of the salads, John thinks now with an insider’s satisfied nod as he recalls how actors refer to those two interchangeable characters, Salario and Solanio, and the boy John was back in his salad days reads what Solanio has to say next,
had I such venture forth,
The better part of my affections would
Be with my hopes abroad. I would be still
Plucking grass to know where sits the wind,
Piring in maps for ports and piers and roads;
And every object that might make me fear
Misfortune to my ventures, out of doubt
Would make me sad.
John has only the dimmest inkling of what Solanio might mean. But he still wants to know why Antonio is so sad, and so he presses on, thinking as he reads how the smallest thing can make him sad—a toy soldier abandoned in a gutter, the curve of a girl’s neck beneath her ponytail, the cast of morning sunshine on his bedroom wall, the quiet after dinner.
It seems he is bursting with feelings that need to be shared, questions and ideas that ache to be asked or understood. But still Herb thinks he is a germ, still the other kids in his class are clueless, still the grownups at home are tired, preoccupied with taxes and mortgages and the neighbors’ broken fence, and lately, with some new worry that last month caused his parents to make a trip to San Francisco from which they returned laden with gifts for Herb and Johnny, though above their smiles their eyes seemed stark and stricken.
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage, where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
Alone in that crowded classroom, John feels those lines like a kick in the rear, like the suck of some great tide. He hasn’t known there are words for what he feels, hasn’t known there is anyone who might diagram his sadness, much less that it was William Shakespeare.
But in the next lines, the talk of sadness shifts to debts and loans and suitors, and it is hard to know what to take seriously and what is supposed to be funny. With its chests of gold, silver, and lead, its suitors and its ships, the play seems almost like the fairy tales his grandmother used to tell before she became so old and quiet and confused, though the play is much harder to follow than any fairy tale. Bewildered by the eddies and pauses in the story—Sir Oracle and Sibylla and Jacob’s lambs?—John begins to get lost in brambles of language. More and more, the things the characters do or say make no sense. Why would Antonio agree to lend Bassanio money he doesn’t actually have? Why would Shylock let Antonio borrow money without interest when he dislikes Antonio so much? What makes Portia such a prize? Why is it so bad to be a Jew?
As far as he knows, John has never met a Jew, though he’s stared at the photographs of the concentration camps in Life magazine, studied the twig limbs of the living and the cordwood piles of the dead and felt that awful shiver of horror, the fascination and perplexing complicity of a survivor. He is not quite sure what it means, to be a Jew, though he is generally grateful he does not have to be one. But when he learns that Antonio has spat on Shylock even before the play began, he feels a sudden deep connection with the man all the other characters call the Jew. Later, when Antonio admits he is likely to spit on Shylock again, John finds his sympathies skewed unexpectedly away from the merchant of Venice, and he wonders what part of the story he has misunderstood.
Not much, the newer, older John muses while his milk sits undrunk and the pizza on his plate congeals. He feels a paternal tenderness for both the ardor and the melancholy of that former self, feels a wash of pride for the innocent astuteness of his response to that troublesome play. He wishes he could have had that boy as a student. He could have done a lot with a kid like that.
Supper over, he is returned to his cell to find that someone has turned the lights on so the room’s interior is brighter than the gloaming outside. When John resumes his chair, he meets a faint image of himself hovering on the window glass, his own worried face separating him from the dimming world beyond.
And in a trice, time shifts so that he is facing another darkened window—the window in the little sitting room of their suite in the hotel off King’s Road—where he stares at another troubled version of his reflection. Furious and worried, seething with tension and trying to stay calm, he asks that dark reflection what he should do. It is two o’clock in the morning, or maybe three, but he has not yet been to bed. The air is saturated with the scent of the vast bouquet of lilies that the International Shakespeare Society sent to welcome him to London, though now the flowers’ swoony reek only adds to his unease.
When he lifts the window sash, a breeze sweeps the stuffy room. Leaning out into the night, he inhales until his lungs lurch from the effort, while he scans the street four stories below. But the only people he spies are a pair of late-night revelers stumbling along the pavement arm in arm. Even from that distance, it’s clear that neither of them is his errant daughter.
He has no idea how alarmed he should be. He only knows that three hours earlier, as he and Freya were returning to the hotel from seeing As You Like It at the Barbican, he’d felt more sanguine than he had in months—so pleased about the present and optimistic for the future that, like the Constable landscapes they’d admired in the Tate Britain earlier that day, even the past seemed to have taken on a rosy glow.
Three hours ago, he’d been eager for the coming morning, when he is scheduled to give the opening address at the ISS’s annual conference. He has an urgent message to share, one he believes with his whole heart, and which he hopes will do at least its small part in restoring sanity and significance to his profession. He has worked all summer on his plea for humanism, has worked harder than he has ever worked on anything before, but now when he imagines delivering that speech in less than six hours’ time, it seems more ordeal than opportunity, since he knows that even if Miranda were to reappear at that very moment, it is already much too late for him to get the rest he needs to be his keenest on the morrow.
Earlier that evening, he’d believed their trip was playing out well. He’d felt confident about th
e conference, and he’d also been hopeful that by the time their travels in England and Spain were over, Freya, Miranda, and he would have finally succeeded in fashioning a viable family out of the odd triangle of the three of them.
Freya had made it clear from the start that she had no interest in children of her own, and at first John had seen that as a good thing, since it meant Miranda would never risk being marginalized by a second family. Later, he’d come to realize that if mothering her own theoretical children did not appeal to Freya, mothering any actual children of his held even less attraction for her.
But Miranda had a mother. What she needed was a role model, and Freya was brilliant, determined, fiercely resourceful. Her own mother had died at thirty, her father wore dentures from the age of thirty-four, and none of her seven siblings had graduated from high school, while Freya had managed to win so many scholarships and grants that by the time she received her PhD, she had $20,000 in the bank. John hoped Freya’s drive would prove an antidote for Miranda to her mother’s indolence, that Freya’s intelligence would help Miranda learn to value intellectual pursuits.
Over the last half year or so, he’d seen signs that Miranda and Freya were beginning to appreciate each other, with the two of them connecting over the most unexpected things—horror films, and hedgehogs, and anchovies on their pizzas. When John proposed that Miranda join them in Europe, Freya’s only stipulation had been that she would need to have her own hotel room.
They’d had some rocky moments, to be sure, beginning when he and Freya arrived to bring Miranda to the airport, only to be confronted by the spectacle of her three huge suitcases and her newly dyed hair. But he’d managed to soothe and smooth and tease and cajole until both Miranda and Freya, and finally even Barb, had graced him—if not each other—with grudging smiles.
Later, in the San Francisco airport, while Miranda wandered off to stock up on magazines and candy for the flight, John had made light of her latest fashion decisions to Freya. Hair would grow, he’d assured his well-coifed wife, dye would fade, and he had no doubt that Europe had welcomed many a lavender-headed hoyden before Miranda. He’d even managed to provoke a laugh from Freya, when, misquoting Benedick’s thoughts on the necessity of procreation in his I did never think to marry speech in Much Ado, he’d punned, “The world must be purpled.”
On their ride in from Heathrow, Freya had taken the cab’s backwards-facing bench so that Miranda could enjoy the better view. Angling her lovely calves beneath the seat, she’d promised Miranda that the two of them would visit Madame Tussauds together, archly informing John that she expected those wax replicas of celebrities and murderers would offer her an excellent analogy to use in her next article on signs and signifiers.
Naturally, he was disappointed when Miranda announced she had no interest in attending As You Like It. But he wanted her to see he respected her agency, hoped she would learn to appreciate literature and the theater on her own terms and not just at his behest. Besides, he’d had to admit that an evening at the theater with Freya alone had its appeal. They had each been so focused on their own work that summer. Now he was looking forward to reviving their amour.
Miranda’s note was waiting on the table in their sitting room when they returned from the play. Her jet lag was keeping her from sleeping, she’d written, so she’d gone out for a little walk. She would be back soon. She’d signed her message, love randi. It was the first time John had ever known Miranda to butcher her name like that, and along with his annoyance at the lack of a comma and the lowercase r, he’d made a mental note he needed to warn her how “randy” would be interpreted in England.
He was more than slightly irked that she had not understood how foolish it was to traipse off on her own in a strange city at night, and he assured Freya that as soon as his speech was over, he and Miranda would have another chat about rules and expectations.
“She won’t be long,” he promised with a kiss that augured finer pleasures to come. “She’ll be back before you get your makeup off.”
But that had been three hours ago. Since then, Freya had taken a bath and done her nails, and, when Miranda still had not appeared, she’d opted for flannel pajamas instead of the negligee John had given her as a travel gift and gone next door to sleep while John waited in the sitting room to greet his wayward daughter.
Now, as the tardy-gaited couple disappears around the corner, John imbibes another draught of chill city air and tries to decide what he should do next. He’s already searched the hotel lobby and the bar. He made a round of nearby pubs only to find them closed. He interrogated the night clerk, who claimed to have noticed no lone young women during his shift, and certainly none with purple hair.
The clerk offered to contact the police, but John had been alarmed by that suggestion. Miranda was nearly seventeen, after all. For better and worse, being raised by her mother for the last six years had made her independent. Despite her miscalculation this evening, he still believes she is relatively streetwise. He doesn’t want to risk their relationship by inviting the London police force into it, doesn’t want to cause a scene where none is warranted—especially not in a foreign country, especially not when he has to give the most important speech of his career in six hours’ time.
Uneasiness growing in his belly like a tumor, he lowers the window and snatches up the phone. But when he hears the foreign dial tone spiraling from the earpiece, he replaces it in its heavy black receiver. As he returns to the window to scan the dark street one more time, a familiar round of questions begins to grind inside his head: maybe there was more he could have done for Miranda in these last few years, perhaps he should have suggested a change in the custody arrangements, or even offered to send her to a boarding school.
But now—and yet again—the counterarguments begin, since he hadn’t wanted to destroy Miranda’s equilibrium, fuel Barb’s resentments, or add extra stresses to his new marriage by proposing any changes prematurely. And in the meantime, hasn’t he done everything he could? He’s attended every school performance and teacher conference, padded his support payments with extra money for dance lessons and braces. He’s insisted on keeping up their regular schedule of visits despite all the commitments, distractions, and enticements in both his and Miranda’s lives of late.
Lowering the window, he stares into the eyes of his reflection while his thoughts return to the performance of As You Like It he and Freya had attended earlier that evening—the kindly Duke Senior celebrating his sweet life in the Forest of Arden while his daughter Rosalind relies on her native judgment and sparkling wit to conjure her own path through the working-day world. Of course John understands that a comedy is no recipe for living, and yet beneath its charming surface, As You Like It is laced with so many kinds of wisdom. When Duke Senior’s cruel brother tries to control his own daughter by commanding that she give up her friendship with Rosalind, Celia defies her father and runs away from home.
But Duke Frederick is a tyrant, John thinks, tearing himself from his memory of that night as if escaping an incubus. Frowning at the dark, lined countenance frowning back at him, he attempts to follow his thoughts about Shakespeare’s fathers and daughters further. Yet, although he can list many examples of miserable daughters—Juliet, Ophelia, Cordelia, and Hermia, to name just a few—tonight it strikes him that the merriest maidens in Shakespeare’s plays—Beatrice, Viola, Perdita, Rosalind, and the like—are those whose fathers have little or no presence in their lives.
But instead of harping on daughters, John finds his thoughts harking back to London, where once more he sees the black helmets and stubby billy clubs of the pair of constables he finally asked the clerk to summon not long before dawn, once more cringes at their supercilious manners, once more feels how surreal it seems to try to explain to those two strangers why he and Freya left Miranda alone all evening, why they did not call the authorities the second they realized she was gone.
Once again he feels the prickle and twist of escalating anxiety as the c
ity starts to brighten with the coming day, the time for his speech draws nearer, and still there is no sign of his daughter. Once more he tries to calculate to the second how long he can afford to wait for Miranda at the hotel and still make it to the conference on time, once more hears Freya’s hot rebuttal when he suggests she might stay behind in hopes of Miranda’s returning while he hurries on ahead. It won’t change anything, Freya counters, if neither of them is at the hotel when Miranda comes back; in fact, it might even do Miranda some good to realize that other people have lives, too. And if—as Freya severely doubts—something bad really has come from his daughter’s latest escapade, then Freya’s waiting at the hotel won’t change that, either. Miranda’s fate is out of their hands, and this conference, as Freya sourly reminds him, is at least as important for her career as it is for his.
Now he recalls how Freya’s annoyance ices the boxy taxi as they race down the Embankment towards the college, remembers how she crosses her legs and turns her head to glare out the window at the gray river they’d admired so contentedly from their Bankside restaurant the night before. When they arrive at the conference site at last, he leans across the miles of the cab seat to render her a kiss she winces to receive. Then he is thrusting a rough bouquet of banknotes at the cabby, then running down an endless marble hallway with a conference official trotting at his side, the flustered woman trying to assure both of them that everything will turn out brilliantly, while he apologizes for his tardiness and strains to camouflage his burgeoning consternation because it has just occurred to him that, amidst all the morning’s panics and confusions, he has left the text of his speech back in their hotel room.
He can see it there, as he jogs beside the breathless official—that little stack of pages waiting innocently next to his bed, his entire summer’s work summed up so succinctly, the key to all he wants urgently to impart.