Patricide (10 page)

On the third finger of her left hand, Cameron wore
an engagement ring. A large diamond—ridiculous! Roland Marks had often commented
disparagingly on the absurdity of engagement rings, wedding rings; he'd never
worn a wedding ring, himself.

When
are
you
planning
to
be
married?—
I did not ask.

Cameron was kind to me, at least. Kinder than my
father who often seemed irritable at the sight of me as if it might be guilt he
truly felt, but couldn't acknowledge.

Though Dad surprised me one day by asking if I kept
in contact with my mother and when I said yes, asking me how she was.

The truth was, my mother had survived. She'd long
ago remarried and was living in Fort Lauderdale with her (aging, ailing) second
husband, and was on reasonably good terms with her adult children, whose
children she adored. And she never asked after Roland Marks as one might never
speak of a virulent illness she'd narrowly survived.

I said, “Mom is doing great, Dad. Thank you for
asking.”

“Why ‘thank you'?—that's a strange thing to say.”
Dad lowered his voice, so that Cameron in the other room wouldn't hear. “I was
married to your mother once, for almost twenty years! Of course I would want to
know how she is.”

Years ago, as a girl, I'd have felt a clutch of
hope in my heart, hearing these words from my father.
Maybe
he
will
return.
Maybe
he
will
love
us
again.
But now I knew better. I knew the words were
only words.

O
NCE,
I
followed Cameron Slatsky in Nyack.
By accident I'd seen her on the street, a tall leggy blond girl in jeans and a
pullover sweater looking, from a distance, like a teenager.

Heads turned as she passed. She seemed not to
notice.

Why, she was
preoccupied
. Somber-seeming. Her hair tied back in an ordinary
ponytail. And her shoulders slouched. By the time she was forty, she'd be
round-shouldered.

But Roland Marks wouldn't be alive to see her
then.

At a discreet distance I followed her. It wasn't so
very unlikely that I might have been in Nyack that day—if Cameron saw me, I
could explain convincingly.

She stopped by the Cheese Board. Buying my father's
special cheeses, and his special (pumpernickel) bread. She stopped by the Nyack
Pharmacy. Picking up my father's prescription medications. She stopped by the
Riverview Gallery where there was an exhibit of new paintings by a local
artist.

The gallery had a side entrance. Through the
doorway I observed the young blond woman moving slowly from canvas to canvas,
with the sobriety of a schoolgirl. No one else appeared to be in the gallery
except a female clerk.

The painter whose work was being exhibited was
Hilma Matthews, a woman in her late seventies with a respectful reputation as an
abstract artist; she'd once had a Madison Avenue gallery but had been exiled to
Nyack, where she lived about a mile from my father. They were old friends: not
lovers, I don't think. Once Hilma had said bitterly to my father, “Some of us
don't make the cut. It isn't evident why.” And my father had blushed, guessing
that this remark was meant to be an insult to him, who'd clearly made the cut;
at the same time, it was enough of an oblique insult that he didn't have to
acknowledge it. Gallantly he said, with a squeeze of the woman's hand,
“Posterity judges, not us. Be happy in your work, Hilma. It's beautiful
work—enough of us know. That's the main thing.”

As Cameron moved about the gallery, very seriously
considering Hilma Matthews's art, I continued to observe her. I wondered at her
motive—was she planning to talk about the exhibit, to impress my father? Had she
been invited with my father to a local event, where she might meet the artist? I
couldn't believe that she was acting without motive, out of a genuine interest
in these large abstract canvases by Hilma Matthews, in the style of a more
hard-edged Helen Frankenthaler.

Cameron and the woman at the front desk fell into a
conversation. It seemed that they were talking about the exhibit, though I
couldn't hear most of their words.

I did manage to hear the woman ask Cameron if she
lived here and Cameron said yes—“For the present time.”

I waited to overhear her boast of
Roland
Marks
. But Cameron said nothing further.

I had an impulse to come forward and say hello to
Cameron. She couldn't have known that I'd followed her here—my greeting could
have been spontaneous, innocent.

I thought, if I hadn't known her, I might have
introduced myself to her in the gallery. I might have thought
A
sensitive,
intelligent
person.
And
beautiful.
I might have asked
Are
you
new
to
Nyack?

T
HAT
SPRING.

That final spring of my father's life.

It was my work at Riverdale College from which I
was becoming increasingly distracted. Initially I'd thrown myself into it with
renewed energy as a way of quite consciously
not
thinking
about
my
father's
fiancée;
then, I discovered myself daydreaming in my
office, rehearsing scenes with my father and Cameron Slatsky. Sometimes it
seemed urgent to me that I
act
quickly
, before they were married; at other times, I
was gripped with lethargy as if in the coils of a great boa constrictor.

I should have spoken with Cameron in the gallery, I
thought. Or met up with her on the street.

Just the two of us: the women in Roland Marks's
present life.

I'd tried to make discreet inquiries about Cameron
Slatsky at Columbia, but had been reluctant to provide my name; if it were
revealed that I'd been prying, I would have been humiliated; my father would
have been furious at me, and might not have wanted to see me again. He was
famous for
breaking
off
with people he'd known well, and had loved, if
he believed he'd been disrespected.

What I'd been able to learn about Cameron Slatsky
online was not exceptional, nor did it conflict with what she'd told us. She had
graduated from Barnard with a B.A. in English and linguistics; she'd been a
summer intern for a New York publishing house, and for
The New Yorker;
she'd traveled briefly in Europe, with
friends; she'd enrolled in the Ph.D. English program at Columbia. She'd grown up
in Katonah, Westchester County. Her parents must have had money, for someone was
paying her tuition at Columbia.

Since moving into my father's house, with an
upstairs room designated as her study, Cameron continued to work on her
dissertation, as she said,
on
site
. Living with the subject of a doctoral
dissertation! Quite a
coup
for one so young.

Obsessively I rehearsed my conversation with
Cameron.

Pointing out to her that any relationship with my
father was doomed to be impermanent; that, even if he claimed to adore her he
didn't adore
her
; he adored the person who adored
him.

And then I thought, she knows this. Of course.

She knows, and doesn't care.

If he adores her as his muse, or just wants to have
sex with someone so young—why would she care? She'd spent enough time perusing
the more sensational literary biographies and collected letters to come to a
realization that, in a sequence of wives, it's only the final wife—the widow—who
inherits the estate.

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?”

“
N
OT 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.”