Free Come Back by Sky Gilbert Page A

spend time with you.” Now, I don’t think this would have been coming from Dr. Braithwaite himself, who is a very nice man and is always very cordial to me. I can’t help thinking of Amanda. . . . I could just hear her saying, “Oh, I’m in a mood today and I have to finish that sonnet and I just can’t bear having lunch with Canada’s pre-eminent gay playwright — not today, could you just put him off?” I know that’s what happened; I’m sure that’s what happened. And you know, it doesn’t matter if it is a preposterous idea, and it is. But the fact is that I will never be accepted by the Canadian literary establishment. And I would like to pretend I don’t care, but I do.
    Anyway, the whole thing set my paranoia off, but I vowed to myself that I would be a good boy and have a nice lunch with Dr. Braithwaite because I had a Shakespeare conference to set up. We wound up in a coffee shop because it was all that was open in the neighbourhood. “Will this be all right?” he asked. He is so nice — I just couldn’t say no. Well, we sat down and everything was very warm and chatty, and we really got to know each other. Did you know that Dr. Braithwaite is starting to lose sensation in his fingers? He must be sixty-five years old if he’s a day, and it made me very sad to think about it. He was trying to be blasé, and he is the very epitome of the absent-minded professor. But all I could think of was, does his dominatrix writer wife with the perpetually flippy hair, does she know about this? Is she taking him to clinics, or is she just too busy writing the next great Canadian poetry collection? So I was feeling very sorry for him, and he was giving me lots of great advice about the conference, trying to work in some Dekker stuff because that is also his area, you know, which I expected and was completely open to. Then when everything seemed perfect, and he said he was going to contact people he knew, like Stephen Orgel (I was very impressed!), I thought the conference was in the bag. So we were finishing our coffees and I decided to just throw in a little question about Shakespearean authorship. I didn’t anticipate his response, not for one moment, and even though it was quick and casual, it hit me like a ton of bricks. “So, I was hoping,” I said in an offhand way, “that I might invite maybe one scholar who could talk a little bit about the authorship question.” “Like who?” he asked. And I didn’t think there was anything wrong yet. “Well, like Peter Mittenstatt,” I said. “And who is he?” he asked politely. “Well, he wrote the first PhD thesis on the notion that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare,” I ventured. “Oh —” there was a pause; it was endless; a pause I will never, honestly, never, forget — “well, you couldn’t do that.” He said it just like that, just like it was the most absurd idea anyone had ever had. “Why not?” I asked. “Because,” he said, still looking very sweet and grandfatherly, “if you did that no one would come to the conference.” “Literally?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid they wouldn’t.”
    After that I tried to make conversation and be polite and smile, but I knew it was all over for me. I mean, so much is over. Why would I want to organize a conference when the whole reason for me running the conference — my major interest, the Shakespearean authorship question — would not and could not be a subject for discussion? I felt betrayed. Not by Dr. Braithwaite, who I still think is a kind man operating in a cruel and stupid system. Yes, I have to say it’s cruel. And I feel completely betrayed by it. And I don’t want to have anything more to do with it. What I don’t understand is, if it’s so ridiculous to think that de Vere is