Patricide

  But Dad was no misogynist. Dad loved me.

  I laughed. I was feeling excited, exalted. This was a key moment in my young life—I was fifteen years old. I had not always been so very happy and I had not always been so very proud of myself despite my exemplary status in my father’s eyes. I believed now that my teammates were concerned about me—and that they knew who my father was—who Roland Marks was. I’d seen the curiosity and admiration in their eyes, a hint of envy. The Rye Academy was an academically prestigious school (it was ranked with Lawrenceville, Exeter, Andover) but it was not Miss Porter’s, St. Mark’s, or Groton— there were not nearly enough celebrity-daughters enrolled. So Roland Marks—a much-awarded, much-acclaimed and frequently bestselling literary author whose picture had once been on a Time cover—a name particularly known to English instructors and headmasters—carried some weight. As Dad complained to his friends It’s a come-down to discover you’re the celebrity yourself. You know what Groucho Marx said.

  (Did I know what Groucho Marx had said? I wasn’t sure. As a young child, I’d assumed the name my father meant was Groucho Marks.)

  Dad had given me one of his handkerchiefs to press against my bleeding mouth. Not a tissue—a handkerchief. White, fine-spun cotton, neatly ironed and folded. My mother would have grabbed me tight not minding if I got blood on her clothing.

  “Lou-Lou darling, we’ll—sue! Someone is liable here! This is worse than Roman gladiatorial combat, you don’t even get a decent crowd.”

  Dad’s lame attempt at humor. The more nervous he was, the more he tried to be “funny.”

  As soon as he’d arrived at school, as soon as he’d seen the number of spectators in the bleachers before our game with St. Ann’s, he’d been vehement, disapproving. Where was “school spirit”? Why weren’t the field hockey team’s friends and classmates supporting them in greater numbers? And where were their teachers, for Christ’s sake? (This was unfair: there were teachers amid the spectators. No choice for them, our fancy private school decreed that instructors attend as many sports events as they could, as well as concerts, plays, poetry slams. Our teachers were substitute-parents, of a kind. You could see the strain in their faces, before their cheery-instructor smiles broke out.) Dad’s quick alert eye had moved about my teammates’ faces—and figures—seeking out those images of female beauty, utterly irresistible female beauty, that made life worth living—or so you’d think, from Roland Marks’s novels; and during the game, even as I ran my heart out to impress him, stomping up and down the field like a deranged buffalo and wielding my hockey stick with bruised hands, even then I saw how he was distracted by certain of my teammates, and one or two of the St. Ann’s girls, whose field-hockey ferocity didn’t detract from their young sexy bodies.

  My father didn’t know what to make of me, beyond marveling at my “pluck”—“physical courage”—“recklessness.” He should have held me, hugged me—but of course, he’d have risked soiling his J. Press sport coat and tattersall shirt if he had. Easy intimacy wasn’t one of Dad’s notable traits.

  At five foot ten I loomed over Dad who habitually described himself as “just-under six-feet”—I didn’t want to think that I intimidated him, as sometimes I intimidated my smaller classmates. Roland Marks was an elegant figure—slender, narrow in the torso, straight-backed and always impeccably dressed. In literary circles he could be depended upon to wear what is called, with jaw-dropping pretension, bespoken suits. The tattersall was his “country gentleman” shirt—he had others, dressier and more expensive. His neckties were always Italian silk, very expensive. Though this afternoon at the girls’ school in Rye, Connecticut, he was wearing a beige-checked shirt with no tie beneath a camel’s hair coat; neatly pressed brown trousers and dark brown “country” shoes with a high luster. If you hadn’t known that my father was a famous man, something of his prominence, his specialness, exuded from his manner: he expected attention, and he expected a certain degree of excitement, even melodrama, to stave off the essential boredom of his life. (This, too, is taken from Roland Marks’s memoirist fiction.) In his youth he’d been strikingly handsome—as handsome as a film star of the era—(Robert Taylor, Glenn Ford, Joseph Cotton?)—and now in late middle age he exuded an air still of such entitlement, women turned their heads in his wake, yes and young women as well, even adolescent girls—(I’d seen certain of my classmates stare openly at my father before dismissing him as old).

  In my mother’s absence, Dad had driven to Rye, Connecticut. Mom was now his ex-ex-wife and his feelings for her, once a toxic commingling of pity, impatience, and repugnance, were now mellowing, as his feelings for his more recent ex-wife, the notorious litigant Avril Gatti, were sharp as porcupine quills. In the accumulation of former wives, my mother Sarah Detticott was not the most vivid; her predecessor, and her glamorous successors, had figured in my father’s fiction more prominently, pitiless portraits of harshly stereotyped bitch-goddesses that were nonetheless entertaining, rendered in Roland Marks’s beguiling prose. Even feminists conceded In spite of yourself you have to laugh—Marks is so over-the-top sexist.

  The fact was, Dad had missed several visits with me that fall. He’d had to cancel—“unavoidably, if unforgivably.” He’d insisted that I attend the Rye Academy since it wouldn’t be “too arduous” a drive for him from New York City—(compared to the smaller Camden School in Maine which I’d preferred)—and so it was a particular disappointment when he called, sometimes just the night before a scheduled visit, to cancel. Especially if we’d arranged it so that Mom wouldn’t be coming that weekend.

  Like the Swiss weather cuckoo-clock, in which the appearance of one quaintly carved little figure meant the absence of the other, my two so very different parents could not be in my company at the same time.

  He was looking at me now with dazed wounded eyes. I thought He really does love me. But he doesn’t know what that means.

  By this time Tina Rodriguez, our phys. ed. teacher and our hockey coach, who’d been refereeing the game, was headed in my direction. “Lou-Lou! What’s this about a tooth?”—she would have pried open my hand if I hadn’t opened it for her.

  “It doesn’t really hurt, T.R. It’s just bleeding a lot, but—it isn’t any kind of actual injury.”

  “A knocked-out tooth is an injury, Lou-Lou. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  In his anxiety Dad began to berate the referee for allowing “all hell to break loose” on the hockey field, and his daughter’s tooth knocked out in a “brutal scuffle.”

  T.R. was startled by my father’s vehemence. Possibly, she knew who he was. (I’d intended to introduce them after the game.) Yet she didn’t apologize profusely, she didn’t defer to an angry parent so much as try to placate him, and assure him that his daughter would get the very best medical treatment available in Rye.

  So, despite my protests, an ambulance was called. An emergency medical crew took me to a local ER for a dozen stitches in my gums and lower lip, a tetanus shot, painkillers. I was furious and crying—the last thing I’d wanted was to be expelled from the hockey game. I’d hoped only to be praised by my father, and a few others; my teammates, for sure; and our coach T.R. Naively I’d seemed to think that I might have been allowed to continue, for what was a silly lost tooth compared to the exhilaration of the game? (Win or lose didn’t matter to me, it was the game,
the girl-team, that mattered.)

  In my ER bed surrounded by tacky curtains I shut my eyes to suppress tears seeing my teammates rushing down the field oblivious of Lou-Lou Marks’s absence, having forgotten their valiant teammate already, wielding hockey sticks with fierce pleasure and rushing away into the gathering dusk.

  Wait, wait for me! Come back! I am one of you.

  But they ignore me. They are gone.

  Long I would recall—more than thirty years later I am still recalling—how quickly my fortunes had changed on that November afternoon in Rye, Connecticut. A single misstep! Not ducking to avoid a wildly swung hockey stick! And a knocked-out tooth! Dad would pay for fancy orthodontic surgery as he’d promised, and the new, synthetic tooth was—is—indistinguishable from my other lower front teeth: that isn’t the point. What I was struck by was the swift and unanticipated change of fortune: one minute you’re in the game rushing down the field wielding your hockey stick—(a light rain beginning to fall, threaded with snowflakes that melted on my fevered cheeks)—exhilarated, thrilled—yes, frankly showing off to Roland Marks in a way that was desperate and reckless if not adroit and skilled like the better field-hockey players that afternoon whom I so badly wanted to emulate, but could not: for they were agile on their feet even if their feet were large as mine—one minute in the game and the next, out.

  It was a revelation worthy of Roland Marks’s fiction. One minute in the game and the next, out.

  For intense periods of time—years, months, weeks—he loved his women. Then, by degrees or with stunning swiftness, he did not.

  In the hospital my father paced about my bedside excited and distracted.

  “Oh, Lou-Lou. Poor Lou-Lou! This is so, so . . .”

  So unexpected, probably Dad meant. When you considered that he’d done his daughter a favor by driving to Rye, Connecticut, from New York City—when (as the daughter had to know, even in her adolescent myopia) there were so many more far more interesting people craving Roland Marks’s attention in New York City than she. But this generous gesture had turned out badly, and who was to blame?

  Also, being stuck in the ER with me, groggy with codeine and awaiting the results of X-ray tests, and the game continuing without us, or, by this time, having ended—so boring.

  Partly I’d dreaded being taken to the ER for this reason. I worried that my father would become impatient and annoyed with me—his instinct was to blame the victim. He wasn’t one to “coddle” weakness in others, though weakness in himself was an occasion for lyric self-pity of a Rilkean quality.

  “. . . . we could sue, possibly. You girls should be wearing mouth-guards—masks—like ice-hockey goalees . . . Jesus, the puck could have gone in your eye.”

  “It wasn’t the puck, Dad. It was a stick.”

  “Puck, stick—fucking monosyllable. Comes to the same thing, in a ‘negligence’ suit.”

  “Please tell me you’re not serious about suing my school, Dad.” Everyone would hate me, then. Now, they mostly just pitied me, or felt sorry for me, or half-admired me, or tolerated me. I had more than a year and a half to endure at the Rye Academy, before I graduated, if I graduated. Just let me get through, Dad. Then—I’m on my own.

  So I wanted to think. My sister and two brothers had fled Roland Marks’s gravitational pull. He liked to say, dryly—The older kids are on their own. If that’s how they want it—fine.

  “We’ll get the tooth replaced, Lou-Lou—I promise. We’ll fix you up fine. Better than new.”

  For years I’d had to suffer orthodontic braces. Now that my teeth were reasonably straight, I’d lost a crucial front tooth. Dad didn’t appreciate the irony. Or, Dad had other, more pressing things to think about.

  I couldn’t know, or wouldn’t have wished to know, how what was preoccupying my father was nowhere near: not even in Manhattan.

  An individual whose name I didn’t (yet) know, who would become Roland Marks’s next wife; at the present time living in Berkeley; the object of his current concern, or obsession. Yet it had seemed slightly odd to me, a quizzical matter, how Dad chattered about West Coast residents: “They seem younger somehow, more naïve and innocent, on the West Coast. Here it’s six P.M.—they’re still at three P.M. We’re the future they’re headed for.”

  In my codeine daze I tried to object: “Dad, if the world ended, it would end for them at exactly the same time it ends for us. Don’t be silly.”

  “ ‘Silly’! I guess I am, sweetie.”

  And Dad gazed at me, or rather toward me, not-seeing me, with a fond, faint smile of such heartbreak, I knew that I would love him, and forgive him, forever.

  WEEKS LATER—(you will not believe this!)—over Christmas break in Manhattan, at Dad’s apartment on West Seventy-eighth Street, I would overhear a call between my father and—could it be Tina Rodriguez?

  For it seemed, they’d already met at least once in the “city”—that is, New York City. Evidently they’d had drinks together. They’d talked over an “issue”—exactly what, wasn’t clear.

  T.R.! And Roland Marks!

  I don’t think that anything much came of it. I’m sure that nothing came of it. Roland Marks was always “having drinks” with women—friends, editors, agents, journalists, admirers. To his credit, not all were glamorous young women; some were his age at least. You might hear that he was seeing X, but you might not ever hear of X again. Instead you’d be hearing of Y, and of Z.

  I was shocked, and felt betrayed. Not by my father but by Tina Rodriguez.

  Why would she want to see my much-older father in the city? What had she thought that a meeting with Roland Marks might lead to?

  I hoped T.R. wasn’t disappointed. As I was disappointed in her.

  We’d wanted to think that our wiry-limbed phys. ed. instructor with the snapping-dark eyes was a lesbian, at least. Not susceptible to men.

  I would never tell my teammates. I would never play field hockey again.

  *

  “Hello, Miss Marks! So good to see you again.”

  “Hello . . .”

  In my discomfort I couldn’t recall her name—the skinny blond ponytail girl of the previous week with the insipid ingratiating smile.

  Except today she wasn’t wearing her hair in a ponytail jutting out of the side of her head but brushed straight, to her shoulders. Shimmering and lustrous as a model’s hair, not at all straw-colored or paintbrush-like but dazzling-pale-blond like Catherine Deneuve.

  And she was wearing a trim little designer-looking mauve wool jacket, with a matching pleated skirt. And stockings, and high-heeled shoes.

  The eyebrow piercing had vanished. Quite proper gold studs in her creamy ears.

  “ ‘Cameron’—remember me? Your father is out in the sunroom, Miss Marks. We’re almost finished for the day, come right in.”

  I’d been unlocking the front door of my father’s house on Cliff Street, the following Thursday, when the door was flung open for me by the smiling blond stranger—the Ph.D. student/interviewer from Columbia. Vaguely I’d assumed that, since my father hadn’t mentioned her, she’d been expelled from his life.

  And what an insult, an arrogant blond stranger daring to invite me inside my father’s house that
was practically my own house as well.

  Like a pasha Dad was sprawled on a bamboo settee in the sunroom sipping a muddy-looking cup of coffee which I had to suppose smiling Cameron had prepared for him. To be Roland Marks’s assistant was to be his personal servant, as well.

  Just barely, my father managed a smile for me.

  “Lou-Lou. You’re a little early, are you? No ‘accident’ on the bridge today?”

  I’d wanted to lean over my father and brush his cheek with my lips in a tender-daughter greeting, to impress Cameron Slatsky; but I knew that my father would recoil, maybe laughingly—we rarely indulged in such sentimental female gestures.

  “I’m not early. I’m exactly ‘on time.’ But I can go away again if you’d like, and come back later.”

  I spoke in a voice heavy with adolescent sarcasm. A few seconds in a parent’s presence can provoke such regression.

  I didn’t like the bemused and condescending tone of my father to me, his favorite child, as it might be interpreted by the shining blond stranger.

  On a glass-topped table in front of my father were many sheets of paper, some of them photocopies of pages from Roland Marks’s books, as well as a laptop and a small tape recorder. And a can of Diet Coke which the intrepid interviewer must have brought for herself since it represented the sort of “toxic chemical cocktail” my father had always banned from his households.

  I could see that the interviewer was systematically questioning my father about his career, making her way through his book titles chronologically. Her questions, numbered for each title, appeared to be elaborate.

  For the first time, I wondered, is the girl was serious? About Roland Marks’s oeuvre? Her interest had to be a calculated campaign—didn’t it?