In envy that my Lord Northumberland
Should be the father to so blest a son—
A son who is the theme of honor’s tongue,
Amongst a grove the very straightest plant,
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See riot and dishonor stain the brow
Of my young Harry.
Listening to those lines John feels a pang. His own father has never been so openly critical of him, but he knows his dad’s been disappointed by his lack of interest in sports and business. While John was home over Christmas, his father mentioned several times how Harve Rathmussen’s boy was in the agricultural business program, how bright Jim’s future looked. “It’s an up and coming field,” his dad suggested. “The scientific approach. What with the old-timers selling off their orchards, Harve says the big companies are hungry for bright young fellows to manage things for them.”
John is still pondering his failures in his father’s eyes when the scene changes, and instead of old men arguing politics, he is watching the king’s disappointing son himself—the young Prince Hal—sparring and carousing with a loud, large-bellied rogue named Jack Falstaff.
In his English class the following week, when Professor Gallagher espouses the then-prevailing view that Falstaff is a coward and a dastard whose friendship Prince Hal must deny in order to become an honorable and upstanding king, John will feel as crimson-faced as Bardolph for having misread Jack Falstaff’s character so completely, because that night in the theater, while he is discovering the story and meeting the characters for the first time, he falls in love with every aspect of that vast man—both the immortal Falstaff whose cry on the field of battle is give me life, as well as the immoral Jack who molds every moment to fit his own desires. By the time Professor Gallagher enumerates Dover Wilson’s condemnations of the fat knight, it will be too late for John Wilson to renounce his love.
But he is smitten with Prince Hal that first night, too, having failed to detect Hal’s cruelty toward Falstaff, or to notice any of the gibes that will later strike John as so obvious and unforgivable. Instead, he is seduced by the prince’s languor, by his easy laughter and cool temper. In Hal’s vow to redeem his misspent time when men least expect it, John thinks he recognizes a promise about himself.
Later, when he is introduced to the wasp-stung Hotspur, he also falls for him. Even though Hotspur is Prince Hal’s rival, John thrills to hear him swear it were an easy leap, To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac’d moon, laughs when Hotspur claims he would keep the king’s anger in motion by teaching a starling to speak Nothing but ‘Mortimer’.
In subsequent scenes, John meets more of Falstaff’s Boar’s Head Tavern friends—crafty Poins, red-faced Bardolph, and Mistress Quickly, and he is introduced to more of the court folk, too—Hotspur’s feisty wife and his feigning father, the superstitious Glendower, and Hal’s valiant younger brother—and as each new scene unfolds, John longs to join the characters onstage, not as an actor—he has no desire to act, nor any illusions about his abilities in that arena—but as he, himself—John Hubbard Wilson—claiming his place among their bright revels and fierce battles.
Intermission arrives as an intrusion. He does not want to leave his seat, does not want to break the spell of the play for anything as inane as a cup of coffee or a visit to the can. Around him, he overhears conversations about cars and clothes and college politics, and he feels a hot indignation that anyone could discuss such mundane matters after what they have just observed. It reminds him of the angry pain he’d known at his mother’s funeral when he spied Mr. Baker and Harve Rathmussen discretely shaking hands to firm up some business deal.
But when the house lights blink to signal the end of intermission, John feels an unexpected kinship with the people filing into the auditorium. As the theater rustles back to silence, he is suddenly struck by how they are all in that play together—he, the rest of the audience, the actors onstage—how the play is a thing they share, an act of communal imagining they are preparing to embark on.
Then he is lost again—or rather, once more captured and enraptured—his entire awareness cupped onstage. He has no idea what will happen next, no idea how the play will end. He hardly knows what to hope for. When King Henry tells his wayward son, Thou hast redeem’d thy lost opinion, John flushes with a vindication of his own. And when Falstaff is slain in battle at Shrewsbury, it does not matter to John that the villainous abominable misleader of youth once called his own soldiers warm slaves as he led them to their slaughter. Instead, tears burn John’s sinuses as he watches Prince Hal kneel beside the vast corpse of his corpulent friend, lamenting that he could have better spared a better man. And when the prince trudges sorrowfully offstage, and the vast corpse leaps up and stabs dead Hotspur in the thigh, John gasps and laughs and does not care if he disgraces himself by clapping at that irreverent resurrection.
After the final round of politics that ends the play, after the audience’s applause and the actors’ curtain call, John gathers his jacket and program and heads out of the auditorium. Swept along with the other theatergoers, he is buoyed by a gratitude whose source he cannot quite locate, but which seems to extend beyond the play and its long-dead playwright, and even beyond the actors he has just seen leave the stage. In the lobby, the people chatting and flirting and fitting on their coats appear much more vivid and interesting than they had when he’d arrived. In their features and expressions he thinks he can catch glimpses of the people he has just met onstage.
“What did you think?” someone asks, and when no one else responds, John turns to find a coed looking directly at him as she slips her arms into her trench coat.
“Me?” he croaks, his voice stiff.
“Sure,” she answers in defiance of the flush that is beginning to pink her neck beneath the sweep of her ponytail.
“I liked it.”
“I saw you laughing.”
“Actually, I liked it a lot.” He feels strangely as if he has been caught at something, but glad, too, to have an opportunity to admit it.
“It’s not true, you know,” she suggests, coyly fitting a scarf over her head. As he watches her tie the ends beneath her chin, he is reminded of the pretty actress who played Mortimer’s Welsh wife, the woman whose looks and kisses Mortimer could understand, although her language was a mystery to him.
“Not true?” he asks, pausing to hold the heavy door open for her and a small flood of other departing theatergoers, and then hurrying to catch up with her. “What do you mean?”
“The history isn’t accurate. It compresses the time of Henry the Fourth’s reign, and makes Prince Hal and Hotspur the same age when they were actually a generation apart.” Stopping on the sidewalk beneath a streetlamp, she looks up at him speculatively. An iced wind twists between the trees. In the street-lit night, it is difficult to see if her blush persists.
He can hardly follow her criticisms, but even so, it troubles him to hear her finding fault with the play. It seems like looking for a flaw in the way a bird flies, like questioning a kiss, to criticize any aspect of what he has just witnessed.
“And of course there was no historical Jack Falstaff, either.” She seems to be both teasing him and testing something, though he has no idea what, no idea how his answer might matter to her. Poised between annoyance and intrigue, he watches her, noticing the arch of her eyebrows, the curve of her lips, the way her scarf flutters in the dark breeze.
“So?” he says with a shrug and a grin.
“So you don’t care about facts, about historical accuracy?”
“Damn facts and accuracy,” he answers, offering her his arm with a gallantry that feels both novel and right. “It’s truth I care about.”
But here John wakes from his dream of that long-vanished time to find himself stranded in a worn leather chair, trapped in a wizened body and a strange, stiff, dizzy mind. A breeze wafting through the tree outside rouses the dappled shadows on the floor, and he wonders which t
ruth that young swain thought he meant, Hotspur’s ramrod attempt to shame the devil, Hal’s plan to be better than his word, or Falstaff’s bawdy claim that truth is like an old hostess—a man knows not where to have her.
It’s truth I care about. The words ring faintly back to him as if from some performance he barely recalls attending. He wishes he knew more about the boy who spoke them—that ardent, awkward kid who shares his name. And he wishes he knew who she was, too—that bold, shy girl who dared to claim that Falstaff wasn’t real. He wonders if she ever told him her name, wonders if she ever took his arm, wonders if they ever talked further about the play. But when he strains to follow those wonders any further, the images his mind finds shift like scarves in a cold wind—the scent of smoke, the taste of a kiss, a pair of empty glasses in a hotel bar—and before he can find the narrative that would explain what they might mean, the images drift away, leaving only a residue of loss where that story should have been.
“Tell me a story,” an eager voice begs. It’s a child’s voice, lisp and pipe, and hearing it, John feels a wash of pleasure. Tell me a story. As he’s claimed to many a class, humanity’s craving for stories is more primal than the urge for sugar, perhaps more urgent than the ache for sex. It’s stories that shape us, he likes to say, stories that give us purpose, stories that help us make sense of our strange lives.
“Merry or sad shall it be?” he asks the brown-eyed ghost-girl in his lap, and she twists around to study his face for a moment before she answers solemnly, “It’s okay if no one gets married. But I don’t like sad.”
Chuckling with proprietary pleasure, he scoops up her hand, helps her to hold it steady while he pours Cracker Jack from the box into her palm. “How should I start?” he asks.
“You know,” she answers, crunching contentedly.
“No, I don’t,” he teases.
“You know,” she urges.
“Maybe I’ve forgotten.”
“You haven’t,” she answers, complacently licking sugar from her fingers. “You wouldn’t never forget.”
“Give me a hint.”
“It starts with one.”
“One?” he echoes, momentarily genuinely perplexed.
“Ssss,” she hisses. “One-ssssss upon a time. And then you have to tell what there was. Once,” she says again, tapping his leg as if he were a horse she was spurring forward. “Up. On. A. Time.”
“Ahhh,” he answers, savoring the sounds. “One—ssss upon a time, there was …”
Then his memory seems to snag on another regret, though exactly what it is he cannot recall. Perhaps the story was too sad a tale, perhaps too full of sprites and goblins for the child’s liking. Though instead of trying to solve that mystery and risk facing its final sting, John allows his thoughts to slip sideways instead.
Once upon a time, he ruminates—like the sad or fabulous old tales in The Winter’s Tale. Or like The Winter’s Tale itself, that fairy story of a play that flies on Time’s swift wings from the wintery grim world of law-bound Sicilia to the lush, unruly shore of fair Bohemia. Once upon a time. He cannot now recall the name of the critic who first wrote about green worlds, but as sunlight crawls across the floor and inches up his legs to fill his empty lap with weightless gold, he remembers how once upon a time in a fit of midlecture inspiration, he’d found himself explaining the green world pattern in The Winter’s Tale by comparing it to The Wizard of Oz, describing how alike Sicilia and stern, gray Kansas are, how much Bohemia resembles the wonderful world of Oz, and even how, when the characters return to Sicilia or Kansas in the final acts, they discover that what they have accomplished in their green worlds has transformed their homelands, too.
It’s the victory of summer over winter, John rhapsodizes, the triumph of birth and growth over sere dead—
“Dad?” a voice asks, and John’s brain echoes, Dad. But instead of lines and phrases, the associations that come to him are temperatures, weights, and textures, feelings beyond the hold of words. Ire and irritation, instant and hot. An old fury, long retained. And beneath that, a tug of love so strong it pulls the air from both his lungs.
“Dad?” the voice asks again. Twisting in his chair, John finds a woman standing at the threshold of his room. An eager, tentative woman with tousled hair and strangely familiar eyes, she waits at the doorway as if wanting to be invited in. She carries a book—a big, thick, gilt-edged thing that she clutches to her chest like a hopeful coed on her way to class.
He’s seen her before, he’s sure of that. He feels both wary and deeply pleased to see her now.
“Dad?” she says a third time, her voice tight and hopeful.
“Where have you been?” he answers at last, careful to keep his voice neutral.
“I visited back in April—remember?—not long after you moved in.” She gives a swift wry shrug as she enters the room. “And here I am again.” Her voice has that patina of professional cheer he has had to endure all too often of late. Lifting a hand from his lap, he gives a vague wave in her direction as if he were fending off a sorry sight. His hip is paining again today, his bones ache. He has spent the morning working—or attempting to, or wanting to—though it seems as if his efforts have all been stale and unprofitable, and he does not now remember accomplishing a thing.
“It’s good to see you,” the woman persists. “You’re looking good.” But when he shoots a glance at her, he can read the subtext in her eyes.
Still, he is tired enough of his own company that he beckons toward the empty chair he suddenly notices sitting like a small deus ex machina beside his own. “Sit,” he urges. “Sit, sit. How are you? How’ve you been?”
Her expression freshens. She takes on a look of barely contained excitement that reminds John of the Christmasy anticipation of a child he’d once known. Lowering herself into the chair, she answers, “I’ve been fine, Dad, more than fine, actually. I just got some really great news—”
“Still in … coffee?” he asks.
“What?” The surprise on her face is replaced by a new swell of pleasure as she cries, “Yes, yes, I am!—I am still in coffee. You do know me!” she announces. “You remember me.”
“‘Whiles memory holds a seat in this distracted globe,’” he answers, tapping his forehead playfully. They share a smile that seems to curve between them like a rainbow. “Who’s that?” John asks a second later, the smile still alive on his face.
“What?”
“Who says that? Who speaks that line?”
The grin on the woman’s face does not waver even as she shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“Give it your best guess,” he urges genially. “It’s easy. He has more lines than any other … character.”
“I really don’t have a clue.”
“You’re not trying,” he admonishes, but his voice is like a tickle, warm and teasing. In another moment he concedes, “It’s Hamlet. The Great Dane,” he adds to earn another of her smiles.
“Do you remember how you used to teach me lines?” she asks, her expression nearly wistful. “Back when you and Mom were still together? I might have known it was Hamlet who said that about the distracted globe, but you left before we finished Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“I left?” He gives her a sharp, stern look, shakes his head.
“You used to give me Cracker Jack when I got it right—‘Lord, what fools these mortals be.’ ‘The course of true love never did run smooth.’”
An orange cat comes into view, creeping across the lawn as if stalking invisible prey. Like strangers on a bus, they watch as it places each paw daintily between the stems of grass, watch as it freezes for a moment in high attention, and then twists around to lick a hind leg.
“I’ve forgotten where you went to college,” John tells the cat.
“I didn’t, Dad,” the woman answers. “I mean, I haven’t yet, but—guess what?—yesterday I—”
“You never went to college?”
“It w
asn’t a good time, but now—”
“There was money, in the settlement. I made sure of that.”
“Really? Well, maybe I can still use it,” she says, her voice sparkling. “Because—get this—yesterday I got my acceptance letter—from the best school in the country! I can start in January. I haven’t gotten my financial aid package yet,” she prates, “so I don’t know exactly how much it will cost me, but I know it’s going to take a crazy lot of money, and I’m sure I can use all the help I—”
“Which best?” John breaks in to ask. “Harvard? Berkeley? There are any number that … aspire.”
“Not Harvard or Berkeley,” she answers gleefully. “Even better, for what I want to do. It’s a college called ArtTech.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“ArtTech.”
“Impossible,” he announces.
“According to U.S. News, it’s the best school in the country for computer game development.”
“Computer?”
“Computer game development.” She speaks slowly, giving every syllable its due. “It’s an entire college devoted to game research and development. It’s ultracompetitive, especially for someone like me who’s weak in math and programming. I still can’t believe I’m in,” she adds, shaking her head at the marvel of it all.
“Game … development?” In his mouth the words sound meager, or even vaguely obscene.
“It’s a whole new field, Dad—interactive entertainment. It’ll be an art someday, I’m sure of that. Right now, lots of games are still pretty much focused on sports or wars or errands, but what interests me is what else they can do, the world building and storytell—”