Patricide (5 page)

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.

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.