I wrote this in May 1994, when I was in high school. We had finished studying King Lear, and we were reading Janette Turner Hospital's novel, The Tiger in the Tiger Pit, in which the character of Edward, a father estranged from his youngest daughter Emily, likes to quote from Shakespeare's plays. Naturally, for my creative writing assignment I decided to write a chapter for The Tiger in the Tiger Pit in which Edward would quote from King Lear.
This was written when the internet didn't exist for me, and my experience of fan fiction was quite limited. Anyone who wants to comment or criticize is welcome to do so. Or, share a sample of your own intertextual writing.
Our Joy, Although Our Last And Least
Chapter XVII-and-a-half for The Tiger in the Tiger Pit
Edward
Awakening, it was all clear to him. This reunion was to be a fantasy of Bessie's, no more. Emily would not bring Adam today. She would come, but she would never bring Adam. No matter what Bessie said, he would not believe her. Emily might have brought Adam to New York, but she would never bring him to Ashville. She knew how much it meant to him, and she would pay him back for what had happened before. He could see her eyes, stinging with the reflection of his choleric stare, yet triumphant as she listened to his tirade. No, she could not bring Adam to see his grandfather when she was not sure of the reception she would have herself.
See what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?
So it is my fault, is it? It was my perseverence that made you so vindictive, my labours in the hope of being a father to you, of teaching you right from wrong, of giving you a stable basis for life. All my efforts have been redirected for a better purpose: to give you a common joke to laugh at, an antiquated morality to profane, an old man to condemn to eternal loneliness. Emily, if you don't bring Adam, if you don't introduce me to my grandson, if you don't allow me to see that my life has not been a failure, I no longer want to live. Emily, I am begging you.
Here I stand your slave, a poor, infirm, weak, despised old man.
The old man's end is near. Feel the tin box pulverizing his heart. See the shriveled skin, its moisture surrendered already, clinging to his fleshless legs. Hear the grating of his breath in his throat, like sandpaper wearing away the strength of his voice. Taste the foulness that rises from his belly. Smell his anger, his brutality in the air.
The tiger in the tiger pit is not more irritable than I.
The morning sunlight floods through the screen, over the bottles on the windowsill, onto the parched skin of his hands. Even the weather has aligned itself on Bessie's side. Well, he will face the world heroically. One by one, he takes the pills and tablets and aims for the rip in the screen. His hand falters, and he curses the cannibal of old age consuming his body.
Fool me not so much to bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger.
I remember now, Bessie! I too have made preparations. You will see that I am not a doll for you to dress up and play with. When Marta comes to your triumphal occasion tomorrow, you will know what I've felt every day I've spent by your side. Victoria, you will know that the world has not hurt you alone. Jason, you will know that your father was stronger than you will ever be. Emily, you will know what sacrifices I made that you could be born. You, Emily, owe your existence to my strength and uprightness!
Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, more hideous when thou show'st thee in a child than the sea-monster.
Emily, it was for you that I became what I am. For Tory's sake I took upon myself the responsibility of the nurture of young minds. For Jason's future I went to war and witnessed the brutality of human nature; his sensationalist preceptors would have been overwhelmed by it. But for you, Emily, I became a father. I learned to stand firm as a rock for you, to avoid your touch that I might protect your softness and my hardness from corruption.
I learned the rhythm of my heartbeat as I walked to the mailbox each morning, hoping that even one of the postcards I had sent would have returned to me. I learned to walk away with measured footsteps, denying for your sakes that anything was wrong.
All I expected was that you would stand firm for me in my old age. That this knotted tree might be shielded by its offspring from the fury of the storms.
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.
Will you not try to understand, Emily? Why I said what I cannot remember saying?
I said it so that Victoria's poems could scream "Unjust!"
So that Jason could be smug about Vietnam.
So that you could raise your wineglass to celebrate the existence of your basstard child.
Yes, I was true to you and your mother so that you could betray me. I loved you and your mother so that you could labour all your lives to make me detest you.
So be my grave my peace, as here I give her father's heart from her.
You could not have known, Emily, what your announcement meant to me. You did not know the thoughts that brought tears to my eyes. I never described the happiness I yearned for you to have. I never let you experience the one blessing of my old age, which you profaned: the love of a grandfather for his grandchild.
Why this would make a man a man of salt, to use his eyes for garden water-pots, ay, and laying autumn's dust.
I will never let you know, Emily. I can no longer be the man who purposed to make the conquest of your mother's love.
I have seen the day, with my biting falchion I would have made them skip.
He kicked away the litter that always seemed to flow across the porch like the shadow of a tree, and pulled open the screen door. Behind him it closed with a brittle slap that shook the trancelike haze enveloping the grimy-haired man stretched out prone over the couch. The man yawned expansively and subsided into an open-mouthed stupor. His son walked past him and up the stairs without a glance. He was accustomed to the usual afternoon domestic scene.
A slight-bodied woman came out of a kitchen, bringing with her the smell of turkey fresh from the oven. She stood at the foot of the stairs and called out, "Eddie! I need you to go to the store and get me some cranberries!"
The man rolled over and swore. "Can't you shut up, woman?" He swung his legs off the couch, lost his balance, and half crashed, half rolled onto the rug, knocking over a few empty bottles of beer. He swore again, and managed to stand up without the usual mishaps.
The woman ignored him, and went back into the kitchen. Eddie Carpenter came down to the kitchen, and out again.
"Mother says to give me two dollars for the cranberries."
"I'm not made of money."
"Give him the money if you have it, and let us have a proper Thanksgiving this year," the woman called out in her thinly-strained voice.
Eddie didn't look at his father as he took the money. Someday he would serve his mother the Thanksgiving dinner she deserved.
"If you walk fast, you'll be back in time for Grandma and Grandpa."
Eddie pretended not to hear. He wasn't looking forward to dinner with his grandparents. Grandma would complain that he wasn't growing fast enough, and his grandfather would ask him about girls as usual. He thought about their last visit, when his father had come in drunk with a floozy he had picked up in his favourite public house, having forgotten completely that his wife had invited her parents for dinner. It was better not to think of that. He walked past Mrs. Weston's house slowly, with his head held high. He would show Grandma that he was grown-up now!
On his way back, he heard Grandma's shrill voice emanating like a bomb alert from the kitchen window.
"...your lazy bum never gives a thought to your health! Keep it up and you won't have a bed to die in! Where's your boy? Isn't he man enough to take better care of you?"
Grandpa was standing alone in the door. "Well, Eddie! Take me for a walk and tell me all about the girls."
"Hello, Grandpa." Eddie never had much to say to the old man. They weren't the least bit alike.
"Speak up, Eddie! So, who's the lucky girl now?"
"No one, Grandpa."
"Don't know what's wrong with you, Eddie. I thought you took after me. You aren't the type that can't get a girl."
Eddie did not answer. He was looking at the patchwork the leaves made on the tall grass waving in the evening wind. The setting sun gleamed in every scrap of strewn foliage. It was such a sight as always made him think of what a woman should be like, a prism scattering ardent colours. Could Grandpa ever know how it felt to think such thoughts? It was like tearing open one of the bundles of pot-pourri he saw on the store shelves. Thinking these forbidden thoughts always made him feel warm all over and shiver with delight. But he could not say so because Grandpa would laugh and tell it all to his father, and his father would think it uproariously funny.
"Well Eddie!"
Grandpa broke into his thoughts. "You're almost a man now. Have you decided what you'll be?"
"No, Grandpa." He would not tell anyone that he really wanted to be a writer. A world-famous author, in the society of the most cultured minds and cultivated women in the country.
"Well, then, how about joining me in my store? Your mother would be happy if you worked for me. How about it?"
"I'd like to, Grandpa. When can I start?" Eddie pretended to be excited. He needed the money, and there were worse things a boy his age could do for a living. He could stomach selling shoes for a few years. Until he could support himself on his literary genius.
"Right away, Eddie. Right away. I knew from the moment I first saw you that you would grow up to be like me. You actually look like me when I was your age. But I had more life in me in my time."
Eddie didn't have a very good idea of when his grandfather's time had been, but it seemed a very long time ago. He wondered when his own time would come. When it did, he was determined, he would make it last and last. His mother was calling for the cranberries now, and he had to go inside to another sullen Thanksgiving dinner.
Thou must be patient; we came crying hither: thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air we wawl and cry.
No, I can never tell you this story. You do not even remember: one day when your mother sat down with you and helped you fill in the sketch of a family tree that your teacher had sent home with you because you could not complete it in school. That night she told me what you had asked her, and her own answer: two names and four dates, and a lifetime forgotten between them. I did not answer your mother. I got out of bed, went to the bookshelf, and returned with the album of her family's photographs. Expertly I opened it to the one photograph that staked my claim on the yellowing pages of her family history. A stiff and dignified man and a smiling woman on their wedding-day. Well-shaped faces and bright eyes, somehow unreal in their open gazes and in the absence of wrinkles. Your mother showed no surprise that I had looked through her album and seen the incongruity she had slipped within. Perhaps she understood my awe of the faces without names, nonchalant with pride taken for granted, that had their places in her history, and my willingness to forget the poverty-begrimed names known to me.
Yes. She understood me by then.
Your mother knows me well. She has loved me for fifty years, and loved you, the children we gave to the world. And her love brings her closer to all of us than we allow even ourselves. You will never catch your mother unawares. She will always know you better than you know yourself.
She has brought us all together because she understands us, and understands what we want, even before we dare to say it. She knows how much depends upon my seeing Adam.
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.
You don't know how I love your mother. You think I have trapped her like a lamb in a tiger pit, like a songbird in a cage. But the lamb has learnt to love the tiger, and the songbird sings through the bars of its cage. You are too young to know what miracles are possible. You have turned your back on such love as hers.
When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.
I forgive you, Emily. You know not what you do. I was a young fool myself.
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