Voices from the Past Part 121

"The fault, father, is not in our stars, but in ourselves," I said to someone. "Yours is a fair name, fairer than mine...

"I am singularly moved when the sway of earth shakes like a thing infirm... this is not a dream, father."

On Jonson's bed, I went through h.e.l.lish days-thirst, hunger, the bungling doctor bungling me, cold, cold remembering, sweatful forgetting, spouting delirious lines from plays... I accused the world of every crime, and managed to include my own.

I was afraid alone, yet distressed to have others overhear my ranting. The bed boards gaped and between each board I sweated another chill.

"Will, here's your supper," Jonson said. "Will, here's breakfast. Will, I've brought you a book."

Pericles licked my hands. Lying under my bed, he thumped his tail, saying: "Get up, master, there are birds to chase along the Thames."

S

Without asking me, Jonson wrote to Ellen, and she came from Edinburgh. Was it her coming that pulled me through?

Her care, beauty, her hands, her smiles of rea.s.surance?

Love put on its Oberon and scrubbed the grey out of the windows.

Quintessence.

She found a better doctor, brought me better food, got Bill McFarland to look after me, an old friend of hers, agreeable yawning fatness, eating half our food behind my back, gossiping with Jonson's neighbors, bobbling and drooling his words, coddling me.

When I improved she took me to the park; later, we sailed the Thames...on sh.o.r.e larks sang... I was grateful and tried to repay too soon...on top of rolls of canvas at the stern.

At court there was a wedding celebration and a mock battle and fireworks spilled across the river: how the fireworks turned water into sky...the guns thundered.

"For us," she said. "For your recovery," she said. How like a paragon...

The diamond on her velvet blouse winked at me; I put my head on her lap: pain melted: seagulls mewed as our boat rocked gently.

S

So, Ashley and I settled our accounts. I saw him years later and we turned our backs on one another. I suppose he was embittered at my recovery.

The best of us is both partic.i.p.ant and confusion, but I, I am stranger because estrangements have put a lie to my living, making it stranger still.

Stratford

Monday morning

While recovering from my wound, my brothers, Jim and d.i.c.k, paid me a call.

They seemed quite uninclined to sit, skeptical of Ben, afraid of Pericles, contemptuous of the apartment with its ma.n.u.scripts and shelves of books. Wearing their farm clothes, they smelled of dung, dirt, and rain-soaked cloth.

Jonson, wanting to be friendly, told how Pericles acted during the duel, winking at me, falsifying his ferocity.

Brothers-were those men my brothers? Long ago, they had washed their hands of my life, Pilatewise. Mother praised them when I visited our home, ah me.

"I had heard that ya killed that-tar man, in yer duel,"

said d.i.c.k, pawing his kneecaps.

Jonson clapped him on the shoulder.

"Wish him better luck next time," he guffawed.

Jim and d.i.c.k had brown, flat faces, flattened by hunger, by defeat, l.u.s.t, work, illness and sorrow. They had lost their children during the plague. Their teeth were blackened, or missing. Their clothes...what is a bundle of dirty clothes topped by a voice and a dead mind?

The afternoon sun poured through the open door. "Your hair ain't red like it was," said Jim.

"You're getting bald," said d.i.c.k. "The hair's slipping down your neck."

Bells of London startled them and helped send them on their way, and I went to sleep, amused by Jonson's mimicry and laughter, as he sprawled in his chair, head thrown back, one hand on Pericles' mane.

Stratford

My brothers' visit reminded me of our hometown Ned.

Ned used to lie on the ground with pads underneath his shoulders: an anvil, weighing two hundred weight, was lowered on his chest by huskies, and three men with sledges bent a bar on it as he lay there. Ned performed at every Fair, girls ogling. The picture of him and his admirers delights me: hero with anvil and hammer. How I used to envy him. Ann thought he was a wonder. He was.

And now I wonder what became of him?

Henley Street

November 13, 1615

One night, Pericles and I got into a talk: he squatted by my bed and we went over the business of writing for a living... He said the market was poor. He said my plays were very wordy. He said he had it tough before I took him on and suggested I see if I couldn't buy stock in a Company, one that was really enduring, he said. "No use getting in with one that is here today and gone tomorrow.

Wisdom," he snuffed, "is a thing you get when they crowd you off the dock into deep water, or when you grab for a mutton bone and it isn't there."

Our talks were not long as a rule. Pericles could drop asleep when I was in the midst of telling him something interesting or trying out a few lines on him. If I offered him a chunk of bread his interest quickened, and there was tail action too. He could listen attentively to a stanza, let's say, if I held the bread (or piece of cheese, preferably cheddar) above his head, just out of his reach. I sometimes did this to improve his mind.

However, a week or so later there seemed no sign of improvement. Perhaps dogs, like some people, are impervious to poetry.