Patricide

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Through all this, Dad’s work had continued. It was a joke to suggest that the man was a womanizer when the deeper truth was, he was wed to work.

  Dad had recently finished a project—a lengthy novel set in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, the era of World War II, post-War and Cold War America. Gleefully he’d been telling interviewers that he’d “named names and burnt bridges”—even as he insisted that Patricide was purely fiction. There was anticipation in publishing circles, for a novel by Roland Marks invariably managed to excite controversy. Feminists loved to hate him; haters of feminism loved to praise him; every Jewish literary figure had a strong, even vehement opinion about him; and there were the ex-wives, one of them the moderately famous Broadway actress of a certain age who’d said some very damning—and funny—things about Roland Marks in uncensored TV interviews. In any case he’d put the manuscript in a drawer, and would not look at it for another six months. He was anxious about his work, and superstitious. If he waited too long to revise, he might die before he finished! The novel would be published posthumously. He would be criticized posthumously, for not having polished it to Roland Marks’s characteristic high sheen.

  “Daddy, don’t fret! You always say the same things.”

  “Do I? The same things?”

  “You’ve been worrying about ‘dying too soon’ since you were in your fifties. That’s twenty years at least.”

  “Those were premature worries. But now . . .”

  I’d hoped that Dad would ask me to help him with the novel in some way—fact-checking, retyping. But he wasn’t quite ready to share Patricide with anyone else, just yet.

  Patricide. A strange title.

  It was not an attractive title, I thought. But I dared not ask Roland Marks what it meant.

  That day Dad had been going through a copyedited galley of an essay he’d written for the New York Review of Books with the intriguing title “Cervantes, Walter Benjamin, and the Fate of Linear Art in a Digital Age.” Roland Marks was as impassioned, and often as unreasonable, about his non-fiction work as he was about his fiction: he’d ended up revising most of the essay, and yet he was still dissatisfied. And his head ached, and his eyes hurt. (No one knew, but me, that Roland Marks had a still-mild case of macular degeneration for which he was being treated by injections to the eye, at an enormous expense only partly covered by his medical insurance.) He couldn’t bear any more reading today, he said—“Or thinking. I’m God-damned tired of thinking.”

  It was Thai food my father had ordered, from a Nyack restaurant. For our Thursday dinners we alternated among several restaurants—Chinese, Italian, Thai—which my father found not too terrible, though nothing like his favorite New York restaurants, to which he was usually taken as a guest.

  On our domestic Thursdays we often watched television in the remodeled sunporch while we ate take-out dinners from the Thai Kitchen, reheated in a microwave.

  “What would you like to watch, Dad? ”

  “Anything. Nothing.”

  I knew that he was still thinking of Cameron whose last name he’d forgotten. I knew that he was anxious, embittered, and yet hopeful—that was Roland Marks.

  He’d been unjustly angry with me earlier, but he’d forgotten why. Now he was unjustly angry with the gawky ponytailed blond without remembering why. He said, taking the TV wand from me, “Anything distracting. Entertaining. But something.”

  This wasn’t so. My father couldn’t tolerate TV advertisements. I would have to find a movie for us, on one of the few cable channels without interruptions.

  “What about A Stolen Life—Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. The Bridge on the River Kwai—William Holden. The Entertainer—Laurence Olivier.”

  “The Entertainer.”

  “You’ve seen this, I think?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen The Entertainer—‘I think.’ When you’re seventy-four you’ve seen everything. But not recently. And Olivier is brilliant.”

  I brought in our heated-up Thai food from the kitchen, on trays. I used attractive earthenware plates and paper napkins of a high quality that almost resembled cloth napkins. I would have opened a bottle of wine for us but Dad avoided alcohol in the evenings because it made him sleepy. I tried not to notice the anger in his face, and the sorrow beneath. I fussed over him as I always did, tried to chide and joke with him, for he expected it of Lou-Lou, no matter what mood he was in.

  The love-affair of a daughter with her father encompasses her entire life. There has never been a time when she has not been her father’s daughter.

  I thought None of them can take my place. None of them can know him as I do.

  It was so, Laurence Olivier was brilliant in a role in which he, one of the great actors of the twentieth century, plays a second-rate vaudeville entertainer in a dreary English resort town—Brighton?—who, from time to time, onstage, in the spotlight, amid burlesque routines of stultifying banality and vulgarity, reveals flashes of genius.

  Olivier was so compelling in the role of Archie Rice, so utterly convincing, both my father and I sat in silence, enthralled. Roland Marks could not think of any clever remark to underscore what we were seeing—the saga of an aging, hypocritical, hollow-hearted vaudeville comedian who connives to make a comeback by exploiting his elderly father, and finally killing him. Yet Olivier’s character is so very human, my eyes filled with tears of sympathy. He’s a fraud, but “charming”—women continue to adore him! He’s a heel, and a cad, and a drinker, yet it was love I felt for the man, impersonal as sunshine.

  There is a particularly poignant scene midway in the film in which the young Joan Plowright, in the role of Archie Rice’s daughter, tells the “entertainer” that he can’t possibly be serious about marrying a naïve young woman who has been seduced by his charisma—“She’s my age! The age of your daughter!”

  Archie Rice is chastened, embarrassed. But his daughter’s scandalized plea makes no difference: he’s determined to marry the second-place beauty-contest winner just the same, in order to borrow money from her father.

  Dad began to laugh. Dad had been picking at his Thai food, that was too spicy for him though he’d insisted on ordering hot. And now something pleased him mightily.

  “Here’s a fact, Lou-Lou: Olivier married that very actress, Joan Plowright, within a year. He divorced Vivien Leigh and married Plowright who was young enough to be his daughter.” It was a curiosity, how Roland Marks seemed to know so much of popular culture, which in his books and lectures he disdained as drek. Now Dad laughed his loud Rabelaisian laugh, that made me shudder.

  Though he hadn’t had any wine, Dad was very sleepy by the time the movie ended. (The final scene of The Entertainer, when Archie Rice is disintegrating onstage before a sadly diminished audience, had made him laugh, initially; then cast him into a bleak mood I thought it most prudent not to notice.) I helped him up the stairs, said good night to him and cleaned up downstairs; it gave me pleasure to darken the rooms of the house, preparatory to leaving, and returning to my condominium in Skaatskill.

  Except: before I left, in Dad’s study I looked for a note-sized piece of paper. I knew it was there somewhere, and finally I found it in plain sight beside Dad’s shut-up computer: Cameron S., 212 448 1439, cslatsky@columbia.edu.

  Crumpled it and took it away in my pocket.

  Thinki
ng This will do no good, probably. But I will have tried.

  *

  It was my vocation: to spare my father from rapacious females.

  I hadn’t done a very good job of it, you might say. And you’d be correct.

  I tried to protect Dad from harm. At least when he wasn’t traveling abroad and far off my radar. I was the constant in his life, I wished to think.

  Swarms of women, of all ages, tried to attach themselves to Roland Marks in one guise or another. Some were wealthy socialites eager for celebrity-writers to perform—“For zero bucks,” as Dad said dryly—for their charity fund-raisers; some were young like Cameron Slatsky, relatively poor, unattached and, who knows?—desperate, if not deranged. No one is so alert to the dangers that beset a famous man than a daughter.

  It’s true, Dad might have been seeing quite reasonable women, divorcées or widows just slightly younger than himself, yet not embarrassingly young—except that Dad wouldn’t have been seen in public with any woman within two decades of his age.

  In Washington, D.C., a few years ago, where Dad had been honored by the president at the National Medals ceremony in the White House, he’d been accompanied by a chic skinny girl who might’ve been a model, very gorgeous, and so young that the president’s wife had said, utterly without irony: “It’s so nice of you to bring your granddaughter to our ceremony, Mr. Marks!”

  It’s well into the twenty-first century. The era of Women’s Liberation was the 1970s, or should have been. Yet, women are still bound to men. The majority of women, regardless of age. And a famous man attracts women as a flame attracts moths—irresistibly, fatally. Some of the most beautiful moths want nothing more than to fling themselves into the flame which destroys them.

  “Go away. Steer clear of him. Don’t you know who he is?”—often I wanted to cry at the foolish women.

  My own mother, in fact. Poor Mom had been clinically depressed, frankly suicidal, for years after their divorce, though she’d seen a succession of therapists and “healers” and had been prescribed a virtual buffet of tranquillizers, anti-depressants, organic and “whole” foods. (She’d been a rising young editor at Random House when Roland Marks had met her but she’d quit her job, at Dad’s insistence, shortly after they were married.) As a mother she’d often been distracted and hadn’t been able to focus, as she’d said, on her children, as she’d have liked; for Roland Marks was her most demanding child.

  Belatedly, Sarah has tried to be a “devoted” mother—too late for my sister and brothers, I think.

  In a divorce, a child invariably chooses one or the other parent to side with. It was never any secret, though he’d moved out of our house and out of our lives, I’d sided with my father.

  Though my mother was the one who’d loved me, and cared for me.

  My father never knew that I’d spared him the embarrassment of an ex-wife-suicide.

  I’d been twelve at the time. Mom had been still fairly young—not yet forty-five. Dad had been living elsewhere for several months as details of the “separation” were being worked out. (In fact, there was to be no “separation” everyone but my mother and I seemed to know.) She’d told me in a matter-of-fact voice, as if she were discussing the weather: “I don’t think that I can go on, Lou-Lou. I feel so tired. Life doesn’t seem worth the effort . . .”

  “Please don’t talk that way, Mom. You know you don’t mean it.”

  I was frightened because in fact I didn’t know that my mother didn’t mean it. In the slow, then rapid decline of her sixteen-year marriage with Roland Marks, she’d lapsed into a chronic melancholy. When I’d been a little girl it was said that she’d suffered from postpartum depression but in fact, as people close to our family knew, it was my father’s infidelities that wore her down.

  She might’ve divorced him—so one might think.

  My sister Karin, my brothers Harry and Saul were impatient with my mother. Her weakness was a terror to us all. She frightened them as she frightened me but, cannily self-absorbed adolescents as they were at this time, they reacted by ignoring, rebuffing, or fleeing her, as I did not.

  One afternoon when I returned home from school I couldn’t find Mom, though I knew she was home. And then I did find her, locked into an upstairs bathroom.

  I could hear her inside, beneath the noise of the fan. She was talking to herself, or sobbing; when I knocked on the door, she told me please go away.

  But I didn’t go away. I continued knocking on the door until at last she opened it.

  I don’t think that I will describe what I saw.

  I will spare my mother this indignation, out of numerous others.

  I called 911. I may have screamed, and I may have wept, but I only remember calling 911. For already at the age of twelve I was Lou-Lou the brave, the stout, and the reliable.

  It was for the best, Mom was saying. Her eyes were dilated, her voice was faint and cracked. He’d all but told her—told her what to do . . . He’d shown her how, in his new novel. How to clear the way for an impatient husband who has fallen in love (guiltily, ecstatically) with a younger woman . . .

  Mom was referring to Roland Marks’s newest novel Jealousy in which an unloved wife kills herself in these circumstances and is much mourned, much regretted, even admired by survivors for her sensitivity, generosity.

  I held my mother, waiting for the emergency medical workers.

  I thought If I weren’t here she would die now. He would have killed her.

  Dad came to see my mother in the hospital, repentant, remorseful, very quiet. He brought her flowers. He brought her new books in bright paper covers, conspicuously women’s fiction of the kind Roland Marks scorned. He took certain of her relatives, visiting the hospital, out to dinner at a good restaurant. He spent time with my sister, my brothers and me. And after Mom was discharged from the hospital, he filed for divorce.

  Except at court dates and incidental meetings at family events, Roland Marks would never speak to my mother again.

  AND YET, I loved him best. Can’t help it.

  *

  “My God, what’s that? A tooth?”

  He was astonished. He was aghast. Yet you could see that already he was formulating the terms in which he would relate the story to his friends: how his teenaged athlete-daughter Lou-Lou was struck in the mouth with an opponent’s hockey stick, tripped and fell on the field entangled in opponents’ feet, yet nonetheless managed to scramble erect and grip her stick hoping to continue in the frantic game until—at last—though it could not have been more than a few seconds—the referee pulled her out of the game.

  “Hell, Dad. I’m OK.”

  The athlete-daughter was me. Panting, dribbling blood down her chin, staining her lime-green hockey-team uniform. Cursing but laughing. The referee hadn’t seen how badly I’d been hit.

  “Jesus, Lou-Lou! Is that a tooth?”

  It was. A front, lower tooth, with a bloody root, in the palm of my shaky hand.

  “I’ve got plenty more, Dad. It doesn’t hurt one bit.”

  This was true. In the adrenaline-charge of the moment, my bloodied mouth didn’t hurt. Spitting blood to keep from choking didn’t hurt.

  Worth it, to see the aghast-admiring look in my father’s eyes.

  Before the sheer physicality of life, Roland Marks seemed at times mesmeriz
ed, paralyzed. His large intelligent eyes blinked and shimmered like an infant’s eyes yearning to understand, yet overwhelmed by understanding.

  “Dad, hey—don’t look at me like that. It’s not like, you know—I’m some kind of fashion model, and now my career is ruined.” And I laughed again, and spat out blood.

  I was scared, but high. No sensation like being high on adrenaline!

  I was Roland Marks’s exemplary daughter, his favorite daughter, but I was no beauty. Gamely my father liked to compare me to certain classic paintings—female portraits—by Ingres, Renoir, even Whistler—but my broad Eskimo-face, my small eyes given to irony, my fleshy sardonic mouth resisted mythologizing. Hulking and needy, but disguising my need in robust good spirits and a laugh that, as Dad noted, sounded like fingernails scraped upward on a blackboard, I resisted idealization.

  I’d weighed nine pounds, twelve ounces at birth. So I’d been told many times.

  I wanted to scare my fastidious father, a little. He’d almost missed this game. He’d wanted to miss this game, but I’d begged him on the phone the night before—my mother had arranged not to come to Rye so that my father could come—and so he’d given in. But I knew he’d resented it. He’d had other plans, in Manhattan. I wanted to suggest now in my swaggering manner that, even as I assured him I felt fine, really I’d been stunned, shaken. Violence had been done to me by a meanly-wielded hockey stick which despite my big-girl body I hadn’t been able to absorb. And I wanted to punish Roland Marks for staring so avidly at certain of my teammates—my friend Ardis and the sloe-eyed Estella with thick dark hair like an explosion of tiny wires. He’d even gaped after some of the St. Ann’s girls.

  “Maybe the tooth could be put back in? Some kind of fancy orthodontic surgery . . .”

  Roland Marks was looking faint. Nearly wringing his hands. The sight of blood was confounding to him. Infamously he’d written about female blood—a notorious passage in an early novel, frequently quoted by hostile feminist critics as an example of Marks’s unconscionable misogyny.