The Absence of Shakespeare

THE ABSENCE OF SHAKESPEARE / Robert Taylor, Jr. Phil AREUNION WAS to be held on the Chuckey. Phil—Philip Sheridan XA. he was named, the youngest son—was making all the arrangements , with the able assistance of his wife Willie, who, though married to him for two and a half years now, had never met all his family. In truth, here was a labor of love if ever there was one. How he relished the writing of the letters—Dear Brother, Dear Sister, Dear Uncle, Dear Aunt, Dear Cousin—and then the looking for replies, the keeping count of tentative and definite affirmatives. Even if Our Bob, dead these nine years, could not join in the festivities save in spirit, Uncle Alf promised to come up from Nashville—and Baxter all the way from Oklahoma City with Love and the three boys! Baxter was absolutely affirmative, and Alf, well, Uncle Alf could be counted on to show up speech in hand at any gathering of more than a dozen souls. Willie, Phil had said, you'll get to meet Baxter at long last. She smiled. She nodded her head. Tm glad, she said. He was always my favorite brother, even though seven years separate us. So I've heard you say, dear. Often. It's the truth. The truth can't be said too often. She supposed not. She was glad, at any rate, to see him in such good spirits, and of course she would help as seemed fitting and necessary, keeping in mind her first responsibility, which was to their own baby girl, as he well knew, family reunions notwithstanding. Oh, yes. Of course he knew that. It was just that sometimes he didn't seem to. Well, but he did. He was proud to be a father, proud to be a husband—hadn't he married her on his birthday, his thirty-fifth it was, a time of life when a fellow might legitimately reconcile himself to a life alone, the end of a line, letting his brothers extend themselves while he stopped, went no farther than himself. He thought increasingly of his brothers and sisters, of how it had gone for them, how it might yet go. They provided a measure of himself.Would that he could live up to them! Not to mention his father and his most distinguished uncles. What was a young man to do—to have done, that is, for he was no young man, baby boy of the family 108 · The Missouri Review though they might consider him. Why, it was 1921, and that made him thirty-seven years old, didn't it, and still here on the dear old Chuckey, a stone's throw from his father's house. But what was he to have done, where go, so many having gone before him and done such excellent deeds. You should not compare yourself to them, Willie said. You must go your own way. Lawyers they were, and physicians, and farmers. And politicians— plenty of politicians, dear Uncle Alf governor at last, like Our Bob before him. His own father called himself farmer, poet, and inventor, his invention of course, a repeating rifle that he lost the patent on because his neighbor Gatling invented it before him, or at least got to the patent office first (Father was vague on the point). So long accustomed to going back and forth, in a path already set forth, was it any wonder we grew old and chose to sit out our final years in rocking chairs. Made a kind of sense, didn't it really. Phil, that's no way to think. There's nothing new under the sun. There is no new thing under the sun. Ecclesiastes. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done. You do know your scripture, Phil. You don't have to remind me of my shortcomings, of how often my memory is no match for yours. He remembered. He did. He remembered much. And wasn't it natural, the reunion coming up, that he remember all the more? There was Baxter, standing so...