Patricide (11 page)

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
confined 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.

I
T 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.

D
RIVING 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 so 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.

Poor Cameron! I felt a thrill of sympathy.