Patricide

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In this matter of the serial womanizer, it’s the elderly serial womanizer you want to marry.

  At Dad’s age, and at her age, Cameron Slatsky would prevail: she would survive. The other wives had been sloughed off like old skins.

  How many American (male) writers, including writer-friends of my father, had entered into marriages exactly like this! Elderly distinguished men with international reputations who’d long ago worn out their first wives; who’d married women young as their daughters, or younger; in some cases they’d even sired children, of the age of their grandchildren. The dominant male married the subservient female: there could be no question of equality in these relationships.

  My father’s friend the poet Mordecai Kaplan had been committed to a psychiatric nursing home by his wife who was forty years younger than he; at the time, Kaplan was eighty-nine. The fiery young woman, herself a poet, had managed to acquire his power of attorney—“When a man gives up his power of attorney, he’s finished. Like castration, it’s final,” my father said. Kaplan’s middle-aged children tried to protest; tried to get a court injunction, to take him from the home; younger poets who’d been his students came to his rescue, or tried to; Roland Marks had pleaded with the wife but they’d had an ugly scene and she’d ordered my father never to try to see her husband again, or she’d have him arrested. She might have been mentally unbalanced, this young wife. (Not so young: at least forty.) She’d made a project of pursuing and capturing Mordecai Kaplan and plucking him from his wife of more than thirty years. The Kaplans’ marriage had been a reasonably happy one and yet, as Dad liked to say—Instead of the brain, there’s the male genitalia.

  Eventually, the situation spilled over into the press. There was an article sympathetic to Kaplan and his supporters, and by implication critical of the wife, in the New York Times. Still, Mrs. Kaplan refused to allow anyone to arrange for her husband to be moved from the nursing home; though he wasn’t senile, only just physically frail and needing a wheelchair. She succeeded in restricting his visitors, which was the deepest blow. She succeeded in curtailing his letters to family and friends, from the nursing home, by threatening the staff with lawsuits. She’d been named Kaplan’s executrix in his will and so she was to have total power over his estate, when he died; she would inherit his many copyrighted titles, his royalties, his letters, his treasures—everything.

  I thought that I would bring up the example of my father’s tragic friend to him but I knew that Dad would respond angrily: “Look. Mordecai was ninety-two when he died. I’m twenty years younger, or nearly. His wife was a vicious psychopath. My wife will be my closest friend.”

  I could not bear to hear Dad say those words—My wife.

  “Dean Marks? Is something wrong?”

  My assistant Olivia stood in the doorway of my office, looking very concerned. She was a gracious woman of approximately my age, whom I’d inherited with the dean’s office. Quickly I told her that my father had a medical condition—“Not an emergency. Minor. But upsetting.”

  Olivia asked if there was anything she could do?

  “Thank you, Olivia, but no.”

  Then, a few minutes later, ringing her in her office: “I think that I’m going to be leaving a little earlier today. . . . Could you cancel my appointments, please?”

  “NOT GOOD, Lou-Lou. Terrible news.”

  But it was news my father could only share with me.

  The lawsuit initiated by the aging Broadway actress Sylvia Sachs had gone badly for Roland Marks. In addition to the large sum of money he’d had to pay Sylvia at the time of their divorce six years before, he now had to pay $750,500. The judge had somehow been convinced by Sylvia’s lawyer that her claim to have helped written—“supplied primary material for”—my father’s most recent novel wasn’t preposterous, as everyone knew it was; he’d been convinced that Roland Marks was a “sexual predator” and “exploiter of women.” All of Roland Marks’s fiction written since he and Sylvia had begun living together was the result of “intimate, protracted conversations” between them; at least two of his female characters were based upon Sylvia, she claimed. (It was true, my father had published a devastating portrait of a vindictive, small-minded “quasi-Broadway” actress in a recent novel, but the character was a fictional construct, not in some way a “real person.”) Years before, my father had been found liable for “defamation” of Avril Gatti in the novel Travesty, couched in the tones of his hero Rabelais. Travesty could not be confused with “realistic” writing—of course. This genre of fiction was a kind of tall tale told with a ribald gusto, male speech addressed to male readers, as distorted a reflection of “real people” as Japanese anime figures are distorted. Anyone with more than a high school knowledge of literature would have understood that Roland Marks’s portraits of people out of his personal life bore the relationship that Francis Bacon’s or Picasso’s portraits bore to their subjects. Where there is art, there is no literal representation.

  Yet, the words Avril Gatti had contested were damaging, and damning, read aloud in the silent courtroom by the litigant’s lawyer in a voice of fastidious disgust. No one dared laugh: no one wished to laugh. I’d wanted to protest: “But my father is a great writer, like Rabelais! You can’t put an artist on trial.”

  Of course, this could only have made things worse. Such special pleading for the uniqueness of the artist doesn’t go over well in a democracy.

  Even now, Avril Gatti wasn’t finished with litigation, my father had been warned. And just yesterday, this devastating award to Sylvia Sachs!

  My father’s lawyer had suggested an appeal. And so my father was going to appeal.

  “They can’t touch future work of mine, at least,” Dad said bravely. “Now—I have to live.”

  It was a solace to me, that my father discussed the lawsuits with me rather than with Cameron. Or at least, in addition to Cameron.

  My opinions were more valuable to him, than hers. For I’d known the litigants involved—my fierce stepmothers.

  I DID not like these conversations about the future, that left me faint and anxious. For I could not truly envision a world in which Roland Marks did not live, even if Roland Marks’s living caused pain for some persons including me.

  I did not want my wonderful father to die. I did want the besotted old fool of a father, who’d become infatuated with a girl who might’ve been his granddaughter, to—well, pass away.

  That Dad was both wonderful and a besotted old fool at the same time was difficult to comprehend. Like juggling two large and unwieldy clubs above my head, risking the prospect of being struck by one or both.

  In his life, Dad believed in a tragic destiny for humankind: there were shelves in his library crammed with books about the Holocaust, many of them memoirs. He’d known Holocaust survivors, of course; a few had been his relatives, from Eastern Europe. But in his art, Dad believed in the sunnier realms of comedy: the idiosyncratic twist that the human imagination could give to any story, no matter how steeped in sorrow. To Roland Marks, comedy meant freedom; tragedy meant imprisonment.

  He’d developed elaborate arguments on the subject. He’d published essays on the subject. He’d resented the predilection of certain reviewers for the “tragic vision” over the “comic vision”—to Dad, shaping comedy out of contemporary American life was much more challenging than shaping tragedy. He was furious that his oeuvre might be confi
ned to the second tier, beneath works of tragedy. It didn’t help to consider that Shakespeare’s most profound works were his tragedies and not his comedies.

  In recent novels, in the interstices of antic and convoluted plots, Dad had taken up speculating about mysticism. Not Jewish mysticism, not the Kaballah, which would have made a kind of sense, but his own mix of idiosyncratic interpretations of Zen Buddhism, Hindu pantheism, and 1960s sexual liberation. (Dad did not ever “do” drugs—he considered drugs dangerous as a “leveler” of intellect and imagination.)

  But ordinary life with its sane perimeters and marital and parental responsibilities did not much appeal to my father, for its very ordinariness. You could not win awards—you could not win a Nobel Prize—by writing about ordinary Americans leading ordinary lives.

  Cameron once said to me: “Lou-Lou? Does Roland really—you know—believe in this ‘spirit stuff’? Or is it kind of wishful thinking?”

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  Though I might have said My father is a secular Jew, a rationalist. He is not a half-baked mystic.

  “Oh, no—I couldn’t ask him. Roland would be offended. The novels he writes he says are ‘fiction’—not him. What’s in the novels is a kind of bread baking, he says, with all sorts of ingredients, and spices—and yeast: it’s there to make the bread rise, and bake. That’s the purpose. Not if you ‘believe’ in yeast, you just use it.”

  Cameron spoke so ardently, with such wide-set unblinking eyes, I found myself staring at her, at a loss for words.

  IT HAD been hinted to me from the start of my deanship at Riverdale College that one day, before too long, I might be invited to take over the presidency. And so when the president asked me to have lunch with her privately, in the dining room of the president’s residence, I prepared myself for this possibility. Thank you so much. But with a current crisis in my life—my family life . . . I think the responsibility would be too much.

  It was flattering to be asked, however! Flattering to be considered.

  Though, as Dad would point out, Riverdale College is “pretty small potatoes.” He’d have preferred me to stay at classy Wesleyan, or “move up” to one of the Ivies.

  The president of our college knew very well who Roland Marks was, of course. She asked about him at our luncheon and I said, with an airy laugh, for I’d been feeling light-headed after a very bad sleepless night, “He is entering upon his final folly.”

  The president chose to interpret this as a witty, though not a very funny, remark.

  Quickly I said, more seriously: “Oh, he’s fine. He has just completed a major new novel—Patricide. You’ll probably be hearing about it in about a year. Over spring break I hope to read it, and confer with him about it, as I usually do with his novels . . .”

  So we spoke of Roland Marks for a while. The president of our little college had been trying to inveigle—that is, to invite—my father to visit the college, and to accept an honorary degree at commencement, for years; even before my arrival, the college had issued invitations to the distinguished writer who lived “just over the George Washington Bridge” from the college. But Roland Marks, who hated the pomp and circumstance of commencements, accepted such invitations only from the top Ivy League universities, or smaller institutions that paid. (Dad could command somewhere in the vicinity of ten thousand dollars for a commencement speech which he’d adroitly tailor to fit the situation. A single commencement address had served him for decades like one-size-fits-all sweatpants and had yielded somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred thousand dollars.) The problem was, Riverdale College had a small, eroding endowment and so hoped to acquire my celebrity-writer father for no fee, and I’d been the awkward go-between for several seasons. Dad said, chuckling, “What a sap I’d be, Lou-Lou, to sit through your commencement ceremony, give an ‘inspiring talk,’ have lunch with the trustees, for zero bucks. Bad enough to get zero bucks at Harvard, but hell—that’s Harvard.”

  Each time, I was embarrassed to return to the college to make excuses for my father who was to be traveling in Europe at commencement time, or committed to another commencement. Each time, the zealous president promised to invite my father for the following year.

  “. . . have seemed distracted, Lou-Lou. For the past several months. And so I’ve been thinking, maybe it’s time for you to consider stepping down—that is, returning to teaching . . .”

  These words out of the president’s mouth I did not entirely fathom.

  Was the woman asking me, in this roundabout way, to take her place as president? Was she asking me to step down from the deanship, that I might step up as president?

  “I—I’m sorry—I don’t quite understand?”

  “ . . . your performance as dean has been, I’m afraid, increasingly erratic. Your staff has become demoralized, and faculty have complained . . .”

  In a haze of incomprehension I sat at the president’s cherrywood dining room table, as the woman spoke on, on and on; for there was no way to stop her, and no end to all that she had to say in her kindly-yet-unhesitating manner.

  “ . . . finish up the term of course, we hope. . . . I’ve asked Esther Conrad to assist you . . . move her office into the room adjacent to yours. A complete physical exam might not be a bad idea . . . our insurance will pay . . . And at faculty meetings, if . . .”

  The haze like cotton batting had invaded my ears. Pushing into my brain that had gone numb. Blindly I reached for my water glass—and knocked it over. Water and ice cubes went spilling. The president veered back but couldn’t escape an ice cube or two in her lap. Nervously laughing I recalled, as a girl, overturning my water glass during meals at home, and my father, for whom domestic occasions were something of a strain, an interruption from his far more urgent writerly life upstairs in his study, saying wittily, if sarcastically—Well if there’s a fire on the table now it’s out. Thank you, Lou-Lou!

  How young he’d been then. Wickedly handsome with a bristling dark goatee.

  I rose to my feet. I was shaky but undefeated. I would report to my father this outrage. Yet calmly I said, “I will think over your proposal, President Lacey. I will think it over and get back to you, soon.”

  A dignified exit. No looking back.

  DRIVING HOME that evening confounded Did she really mean to demote me, or—promote me? Was it code for—would I want to become president?

  “ ‘Thank you, but no. My life with my father has to take precedence right now.’ ”

  *

  April 14, 2012. Not a day I’d planned to spend in Upper Nyack.

  It was a sun-warmed fragrant Saturday, and—who knew?—possibly my father and Cameron were away for the weekend, or in New York City; frequently they spent evenings in the city, or stayed overnight as guests in one or another of my father’s (usually wealthy, Upper West Side) admirers’ apartments. It was Cameron who told me about such evenings, casually—“They said to say hello to you, Lou-Lou. The Steinglasses.”

  “Who?”

  “Edythe and Steve? Steinglass?”

  No idea who this was but I smiled as if in gratitude at being remembered, by someone.

  “Well—thanks! Is their place still s
o great?”

  “Yes. It is fantastic.”

  “Overlooking the park?”

  “At Seventy-third Street. Yes.”

  Each weekend they were away, or mysteriously unaccounted-for, I dreaded to hear, belatedly—Lou-Lou guess what! Your dad and I are married.

  Or, more somberly, though with a helpless baby-smile, from Dad—Lou-Lou, sorry! We wanted a private ceremony, no fuss.

  What relief then, that day, to so casually drop by the house on Cliff Street, and there was Cameron in jeans and short-sleeved T-shirt raking the neglected front lawn in which, in jagged clusters, daffodils and jonquils were brightly blooming; ponytailed Cameron who waved at me, and smiled—“Hi, Lou-Lou! We’ve been missing you.”

  This had to be a lie. But it was a gracious sort of lie.

  Very different from Dad’s grumbling greeting, as I knocked very lightly on the (opened) door of his study—“Lou-Lou! Good! I need to talk to you about these God-damned bills.”

  Dad frequently confused those bills he asked me to pay for him, out of his checking account, with bills he’d paid, or intended to pay, himself; inevitably, there were mistakes. Sometimes we both paid the same bill, sometimes no one paid. When I told Dad that it would be easier for us both if I paid his bills via computer, he refused to listen—“And what if the damned computer ‘crashes’? What then? Paper checks are at least something you can feel.”

  This had been going on for years. This was a disgruntlement that felt easy and comfortable, like worn bedroom slippers.

  I laughed thinking This is what a family is. This.

  And later that afternoon, when, it seemed to have developed, I would be staying for dinner, and Cameron and I were to prepare together one of Dad’s favorite meals, chicken tangine with prunes, dried apricots, almonds, and couscous, another incident occurred that gave me, if not hope exactly, a sense that things might not be so hopeless as I’d been thinking: by chance, I overheard my father speaking in a low, sarcastic voice to Cameron, in an adjacent room.