Patricide

 

Patricide

A NOVELLA

Joyce Carol Oates

Contents

 

Patricide

B
efore I
saw, I heard: the cracking wood-plank steps leading down to the riverbank behind
our house in Upper Nyack, New York.

Before I saw my father's desperate hand on the
railing, that collapsed with the steps, in what seemed at first like cruel
slow-motion, I heard: my father's terrified voice calling for—
me.

And so on the stone terrace above I stood very
still, and watched in silence.

If I were to be tried for the murder of my father,
if I were to be judged, it is this silence that would find me guilty.

Yet, I could not draw breath to scream.

Even now, I can't draw breath to scream.

*

O God I knew: he would be angry.

He would be furious. He would not even look at
me.

And it wasn't my fault! I would plead with him
Please
understand
it
wasn't
my
fault.
An
accident
on
the
George
Washington
Bridge. . .

“Please, officer! How long will it be—?”

It was an evening in November 2011, five months
before my father Roland Marks's death.

In desperation I'd lowered my window to speak with
one of the police officers directing traffic, who barely acknowledged my pleas.
For more than thirty minutes traffic had been slowed to virtually a stop in
gusts of sleet on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge; ahead was a
vortex of lights, red lights mingling with bright blinding lights, for there'd
been an accident involving at least two vehicles, a skidding-accident on the
slick wet pavement. In a tight space a tow truck was maneuvering with maddening
slowness and a high-pitched beep-beep-beeping that made my heart race.

Police officers were signaling to drivers to stay
where they were, and to remain inside our vehicles. As if we had any choice!

“God damn. Bad luck.”

It was an old habit of mine, speaking to myself
when I was alone. And I was often alone. And the tone of my speaking-voice was
not likely to be friendly or indulgent.

I calculated that I was about two-thirds of the way
across the bridge. In such weather the George Washington Bridge seemed longer
than usual. Even when traffic began moving forward at a slightly faster pace it
was still frustratingly slow, and sleet struck the windshield of my car like
driven nails.

Once I crossed the bridge it was a twelve-minute
drive to my father's house in Rockland County, Upper Nyack. If nothing else went
wrong.

It was 7:50
P.M.
I
had awakened that morning at about 5:30
A.M.
and
had been feeling both excited and exhausted through the long day. And already I
was late by at least twenty minutes and when I tried to call my father on my
cell phone, the call didn't go through.

Telling myself
This
is
not
a
crisis.
Don't
be
ridiculous!
He
won't
stop
loving
you
for
this.

To be the daughter of Roland Marks was to feel your
nerves strung so very tight, the slightest pressure might snap them.

You will laugh to be told that I was forty-six
years old and the dean of the faculty at a small, highly regarded liberal arts
college in Riverdale, New York. I was not a child-daughter but a middle-aged
daughter. I was well educated, with excellent professional credentials and an
impressive résumé. Before the liberal arts college in Riverdale where (it was
hinted) I would very likely be named the next president, I'd been a professor of
classics and department chair at Wesleyan. A move to Riverdale College was a
kind of demotion but I'd gladly taken the position when it was offered to me,
since living in Skaatskill, New York, allowed me to visit my father in Upper
Nyack more readily.

Don't
take
the
job
in
Riverdale
on
my
account
, my father had said irritably.
I'm
not
going
to
be
living
in
Nyack
year-round
and
certainly
not
forever.

I was willing to risk this, to be nearer my
father.

I was willing to take a professional demotion, to
be nearer my father.

In my professional life I had a reputation for
being confident, strong-willed, decisive, yet fair-minded—I'd shaped myself into
the quintessence of the
professional
woman
, who is a quasi-male, yet the very best kind
of male. In my public life I was not accustomed to being of the weaker party,
dependent upon others.

Yet, in my private life, my private family-life, I
was utterly weak and defenseless as one born without a protective outer skin. I
was the daughter of Roland Marks and my fate was, Roland Marks had always loved
me best of all his children.

This is the story of how a best-loved daughter
repays her father.

This is a story of revenge and murder, I think.

*

“You're late.”

It wasn't a statement but an accusation. In
another's voice the implication would be
Why
are
you
late?
Where
were
you?
The implication would be—
Darling,
I
was
worried
about
you.

“I can't depend upon you, Lou-Lou. I've had to make
a decision without you.”

“A decision? What do you mean?”

He
is
moving
away.
He
is
getting
remarried.
He
is
writing
me
out
of
his
will.

“I've decided to hire an assistant. A professional,
who's trained in literary theory.”

This wasn't so remarkable, for my father had had
numerous “assistants” and “interns” over the years. Each had disappointed him or
failed him in some way, and had soon disappeared from our lives. Most had been
young women, a particularly vulnerable category for
assistant,
intern.

Except now, since the breakup of my father's fifth
marriage, and since my move to Riverdale, I'd been my father's assistant, to a
degree—and we'd been planning a massive project, sorting and labeling the
thousands of letters Roland Marks had received over the course of five decades,
as well as carbons and copies of letters he'd sent. The letters were to be a
part of Roland Marks's massive archive, which he and his agent were negotiating
to sell to an appropriate institution: the New York Public Library, the Special
Collections of the University of Texas at Austin, the Special Collections at
Harvard, Yale, Columbia. (In fact the archive would be sold, Dad hoped for
several million dollars, to the highest bidder—though Roland Marks wouldn't have
wanted to describe the negotiations in so crass a way.)

It was unfair on Dad's part to suggest that he'd
actually been waiting for me. Not in normal usage, as one individual might be
“waiting” for another. With one part of his mind he'd probably been aware that
someone was expected, after 7:00
P.M.
and no
later than 7:30
P.M
., for this was our usual
Thursday evening schedule. He would have been working in his study overlooking
the slate-gray choppy Hudson River, from the second floor of the sprawling old
Victorian house on Cliff Street; he might be writing, or going through a
copyedited manuscript, or proofreading galleys—(for a writer who claimed to find
writing difficult and who spent most of his time revising, Roland Marks managed
to publish a good deal); he would have been listening to music—for instance,
Mozart's
Don
Giovanni,
which was so familiar to him, like notes
encoded in his brain, he could no longer be distracted by it. Certainly my
father wouldn't be waiting for
me
but his sensitive
nerves were attuned to a waiting-for-someone, waiting-for-something, and until
this unease was resolved he would feel incomplete, edgy, irritable and vaguely
offended.

Yet if I'd arrived early, Dad wouldn't have liked
that, either. “So soon, Lou-Lou? What time did you say you were coming? And what
time is it now?”

My impossible father! Yet I loved Dad so much, I
could not love anyone else including my clumsy well-intentioned quasi-male
self.

“And why exactly are you late?”

“An accident on the George Washington
Bridge . . .”

“An accident! You should factor in slow-downs on
that damned bridge, and leave early. I'd have thought you knew that by now.”

“But this was a serious accident, Dad. The entire
upper level was shut down for at least forty minutes . . .”

“You're always having accidents, Lou-Lou. Or,
accidents are always occurring around you. Why is this?”

Dad was being playful, funny. But Dad was being
cruel, too.

In fact it was rare that things went wrong in my
life, and virtually never as a consequence of anything I'd done personally. A
delayed plane, or a canceled flight—how was that my fault?—or an emergency at
the college, which it would have been professionally irresponsible for me to
ignore; or the plea of an old friend, calling at an inopportune time and badly
needing me to speak to her, which had been the case several weeks before.

I'd tried to explain to my father that a friend
from graduate school at Harvard had called me sounding distraught, suicidal. I'd
had to spend time with Denise on the phone and had sent a barrage of e-mails to
follow—“I couldn't just abandon her, Dad.”

“How do you know that I'm not ‘suicidal,' too?
Waiting for you to arrive and wondering where the hell you are?”

This was so preposterous a claim, I decided that my
father had to be joking.
Does
an
egomaniac
kill
himself?

Dad persisted: “Do you think that, if you were in
this person's place, she might not ‘abandon' you?”

Though the subtext here was simply that Dad
resented another person in my life, and felt threatened by the least disturbance
of his schedule, it was like him to ask such questions, to make one squirm. His
boldly serio-comic novels were laced with paradoxes of a moral nature, to make
the reader squirm even as the reader was laughing.

I'd said that I liked Denise very much. I hadn't
wanted
to avoid her. (Though it was true, we'd
grown apart in recent years; Denise had been the one to cease writing and
calling.) “I've invited her to come visit me, if she wants to. If I can help
her, somehow . . .”

“Lou-Lou, for Christ's sake! That's what I mean:
you draw accidents to yourself. You're accident-prone.” There was a pause, and
Dad couldn't resist adding, “And losers.”

This was particularly cruel. Since I knew that Dad
considered me a “loser”—at any rate, not a success.

But now Dad was being funny, and not angry—at
least, he'd been smiling. (For “losers” were the very material of Roland Marks's
fiction, some of them loveable and others not so.)

His humor was the lightest stroke of a whip against
my bare skin and not intended to hurt: if Roland Marks intended to inflict hurt,
you would know it.

Only at my father's summons did I come, Thursday
nights, to have dinner with him. This had been our schedule for some months
since Dad had returned to the house in Upper Nyack—(he'd been
writer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome, and then a visiting fellow
at the American Academy in Berlin)—but I couldn't take our evenings for granted,
because my father disliked being “constrained.”

That is, I had to leave Thursday evenings open for
my father; but my father might make other, more interesting plans for Thursday
without notifying me.

On weekends, Dad dined with other people in their
homes or in restaurants. (I was rarely included.) Often, Dad was being
“honored”—these events would often take place in New York City, forty minutes
away by (hired) car. It wasn't unusual for my father to be invited to give
talks, readings, onstage interviews every week in one or another city: in recent
months Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston, Seattle, Toronto and
Vancouver. If such events didn't conflict with my work-schedule, and if Dad
wanted me, I would accompany him to these gigs, as he called them; his sponsors
would pay for two business-class air tickets as well as two hotel rooms in
luxury hotels. Since Dad's last divorce, he had not acquired a new female
companion, and so I was grateful to be his companion when he wanted me.

Sometimes, I would be interviewed, too.
Tell
us
what
it
was
like
growing
up
with
Roland
Marks
as
your
father!