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the child support was late again. “Remember that when you start looking around. Or better yet, get your nursing degree, focus. You’ll graduate at thir- ty-three as long as you don’t get distracted. Just don’t be like me—or Mom. God, what a fucked-up mess I made of my life.”
August.” Though he doesn’t expect most of them to stop by, for their grades will be posted online, he does expect Agnes to come. Not that her essay is exceptional, only thorough with the occasional glimmer of real insight. She took his earlier advice and steered clear of too many personal asides or “digressions,” as he called them, and wrote a perceptive analysis of the role of those lines in The Winter’s Tale, all the while refer-
“But you have Zach and Tulia,” Agnes replied.
And for a moment Beth’s face, her tense body, softened at the words, the truth of them.
ring to others, thereby demonstrating her con- versance with the play. The queen returns to life because the king has finally recognized his wrong- doing. The spider in the cup that he talks about in the first act, the spider he believes to be his wife’s unfaithfulness, is his ‘fatal error,’ and he sees this. And that action saves him—saves all of them.
Agnes received twenty-five thousand dollars for carrying Joshua Leo Goldman to term. Initially, she planned to use that money to pay for her final year of nursing school, to buy a car that would be reliable enough to drive more than twenty miles, and maybe even to take a trip this summer. Al- ways she has wanted to see Ireland, and at this point, she hasn’t been anywhere other than the West Coast.
The queen was loving, and true, and their child is miraculously restored to them. (And here I find the fact that Shakespeare kept her alive to be really sweet but not entirely believable. I mean, a shep- herdess who is really a princess? Was Shakespeare reading fairy tales? Were there fairy tales in the sixteenth century?—‘A sad tale’s best for winter,’ the king’s son says. Not that I don’t love that end- ing. Who wouldn’t?)
But she decided to put some of it aside for Tulia and Zach. An educational IRA, she told Beth.
“How do you even know about that stuff?” Beth asked.
Peter laughed when he read Agnes’s parentheti- cal statement, even though he’d gone over all this in class, the fact that the late romances are so very different from the tragedies because in the romances what should have ended disastrously— in this case the king’s order that the queen be put to death—turns out well, thanks to magic, or a miracle. The queen isn’t really dead, nor is their daughter. There is an art that doth mend nature, change it rather, and yet the art itself is nature. The art that Shakespeare is secretly referring to, Peter told the class, is Art with a capital ‘A.’
“The Goldmans told me,” Agnes said, reminded of the hours she spent with the couple who coun- seled her on her future and invited her to come to their house later this summer, though she doesn’t think she will.
“Sometimes,” Beth said, “it’s really hard to believe that you and I have the same parents.”
“You’re right,” Agnes replied.
“Sometimes it is.”
~
21
The last day of May draws near, and the campus empties out. Peter plans to come into his of-
fice only once more before the summer holidays begin. The previous evening, he emailed his students in the Shakespeare seminar to say they could pick up their exams on May twenty-ninth. “After that, I won’t be around much before late
I understand that a romance is the total opposite of a tragedy. What I find impossible or at least amazing is that Shakespeare didn’t end with the tragedies. He was an old man when he wrote The Winter’s Tale. Why didn’t he end on a play like King Lear’s ‘Is man no more than this?’ That’s what astonishes me. Most people I know are unhappy or at least resigned—that’s the word, right?—by the time they’re fifty. If I can look at the