Patricide (13 page)

I tried to explain to Cameron, as to others,
whoever would listen among the many mourners who came to the memorial ceremony
in New York City and to our house in Nyack, that my father's death was my
responsibility—“My father had depended upon me to keep the house in good repair.
You know what he was like—he never
saw
things for
himself. The way he'd drive a car with the gas gauge at empty, or a tire losing
air—somehow, it worked out. Even Avril shielded him. And Sylvia! When they'd
loved their genius-husband, they'd insisted upon taking care of him. We'd all
provided a buffer for him, to protect him. He'd had faith in me, his daughter.
Those steps should have been repaired. I'd told him, he knew, but—he'd never
done anything about it. Like the flagstone terrace, that needs repair. The house
is beautiful but a century old. I see him in every room, I hear his voice. I
hear him calling—
Lou-Lou!
Where
the
hell
are
you?
I let him down. I am to blame for his
death.”

They held me, those who'd loved Roland Marks. Even
the litigious ex-wives came to grieve with me, to hold me and absolve me of
patricide.

Or, if they'd halfway believed that I might be
halfway responsible, they couldn't agree that my father's actual
death
was my fault. Roland Marks had cheated death a
number of times, like a wily cat. He'd run out of lives, that was all.

“Roland almost died in that car crash on Long
Island—Montauk. That was before his career had even begun. Imagine, he'd only
published his first novel. And that crazy girl who tried to shoot him on the
Vineyard. And the spoiled sushi in Tokyo . . .”

They would spin legends of Roland Marks. They would
mythologize him. His enemies and detractors as well as his friends.

They would agree: Roland Marks would have wanted to
depart this earth in the way he had, suddenly, and without time for reflection;
without a debilitating or humiliating illness, or a crushing decline like poor
Mordecai Kaplan. In some versions of the story of Roland Marks's death in April
2011, when he'd been seventy-four years old, it was said that he'd been hiking
in the Catskills with his young fiancée, or wife; he'd insisted upon climbing in
a dangerous area, and had fallen to his death. He'd defied the young woman who'd
been with him who had begged him to come back to even, safer
ground . . .

We drove back to the house in Upper Nyack together.
It was my house now, or would be when my father's will was fully probated.
Cameron wept softly. Cameron wept almost without pause. I felt a thrill of deep
imperturbable grief that was the most exquisite sensation I'd ever known. As we
entered the darkened house Cameron groped for my hand: “We have each other
now.”

*

It is true, to a degree: the
fiancée
and the
daughter
have each other.

As executrix of my father's estate, I have hired
Cameron as my assistant. Quite simply, Cameron Slatsky is the most qualified
person for the job. Jointly we work on my father's massive archive which will
soon be sold to a prominent American institution; at the last minute, the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale is making an unexpected bid.
Dad would be pleased!

There is much more to Roland Marks's literary
estate than anyone might have imagined. I had no idea of the numerous
uncompleted, unpublished manuscripts and drafts he'd kept in cardboard boxes, in
storage, dating back to his high school days at Stuyvesant High School in the
1940s; in all, thousands of priceless pages.

In the evening we sit in the sunroom, or on the
terrace. Few people visit us here, for we've invited virtually no one; not my
sister and brothers, who'd avoided my father when he was living, and have no
right to mourn him now, at least in my company; not the “younger children” whom
I scarcely know, and who I believe have not even read their father's books. And
none of the ex-wives except my mother, Sarah, who isn't likely to make the trip,
with her ailing husband in Fort Lauderdale, in any case.

Now the weather has changed to a cool summer, the
air is mild and daylight prevails until nearly 9:00
P.M.
Cameron has suffered more visibly from grief than I have, I
think—(though I have lost eighteen pounds, and am not quite such a husky fleshy
healthy-looking gal as my father had seemed to cherish); her skin is sallow, her
eyes are ringed with fatigue, and her beauty has corroded, somewhat. Like Lou
Andreas-Salomé and like me, she has a slightly overlong nose, a too-intense look
about the eyes, a clenched mouth.

She commutes to Columbia University two or three
times a week and returns home exhausted. The dissertation
on
site
has stalled, though as my assistant she's an
able and diligent worker, far more patient than I. Sometimes I hear her crying
in “her” room. I enter, and approach her quietly. I slip my arms around her and
she turns to me and presses her face against my thigh. She says, “Without you,
Lou-Lou, I couldn't make it.”

She'd told me more about her father who'd died of a
stroke two years ago. And about her mother who had died of a quick-acting
pancreatic cancer three years before that, in the last semester of her senior
year at Barnard. She said, “Mom told me—‘Don't give up! I'm counting on you.'
She'd tried to hide the fact that she was
dying.
I
think I was furious at her. All I could do was put on my armor. It felt like
actual armor—my makeup, my clothes. Deflecting people's questions by looking
funny, girly. There's a character in
Jealousy
who
behaves just that way—it's prescient. Roland got her down perfectly! I needed
something to protect me, like a steel vest. So bullets or rocks might be thrown
at me and I would feel the shock but not be killed.”

She said, “I know that people, like you, Lou-Lou,
thought that Roland and I scarcely knew each other. But I knew
him
. Long before I'd met Roland Marks's I'd fallen in
love with him, reading his books. I'd memorized passages. He really knew women
well—you could say, the masochistic inner selves of women. All that was Roland
Marks is contained in his books, really. His ‘voice . . .' ”

Tenderly she said, “I will take care of you,
Lou-Lou. Anything you want from me, I will provide.”

Since my father's death, I am often short of
breath. I find it difficult to sleep on my back. Of course I'm frightened to see
a doctor and have an EKG—(I'm a physical coward like Dad)— but Cameron insists
that she will drive me to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which would have been
Dad's choice, if I made an appointment.

I never had a daughter. I'd never had the
experience of being pregnant.

Though Dad would have laughed at me in scornful
pity, I'd never had the experience of sex with a man, or a woman. Never the
experience about which Roland Marks wrote with such corrosive humor and such
unabashed delight.

If Roland had married Cameron, she would be my
step-mother.

How strange it would have been, perhaps how
wonderful, to have a step-mother young enough to be a sister.

Strange, and wonderful. Though I would not have
thought so at the time of our first meeting.

O
UR NEWS
is, we will be attending the Los Angeles Book Fair together, to represent
Roland Marks whose first several novels are being republished in classy trade
paperbacks. Then, we are going to Book Expo America, in New York City; then,
later in the summer, London and Stockholm for similar publications. We will be
interviewed at literary festivals, and on TV.

Onstage, we wear black, side by side: we are not
likely to be mistaken for sisters, but we may be mistaken as kin.

By slow degrees Cameron is becoming beautiful
again, something of the luster in her eyes returning. Though she's still pale,
and wears her shimmering blond hair pulled back and tied at the nape of her
neck, in a way I think too prim and
widow-like.
I am
not so pale, rather more putty-colored, which Cameron tries to correct by
“making up” my face—with startling results, I have to concede. (How Dad would
laugh at me—“I can see through your fancy makeup, kid.”) For these occasions
Cameron wears tasteful black dresses that fall to her ankles, often with a shawl
or a scarf around her shoulders; I have urged her to stand up straighter, to
resist the impulse to make herself shorter, now that there is no reason for her
to make herself shorter. I wear dark trouser-suits, that fit my less hulking
body flatteringly; my graying hair is trimmed short as a man's, in fact shorter
than my father's hair had been. Audiences gaze at us with fascination. They know
something of Cameron's story, and something of mine. As if spontaneously we
clasp hands onstage. We do not rehearse such scenes. Tears spring from our eyes
like shining jewels. The audience draws in its collective breath.

Women
who
love
each
other.
Women
who
will
stand
by
each
other.

How
unexpected,
this
is
Roland
Marks's
legacy.

W
HO WOULD
have thought, this posthumous life of Roland Marks is so—celebratory! For
his admirers, his survivors, are many; and his literary reputation, buoyed by
rumors that
Patricide
, scheduled for fall
publication, will be the author's strongest novel, a masterpiece to set beside
the major works of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Bellow, has
never been higher. Requests for reprints of all kinds, republications of titles
long out of print and seemingly forgotten, come to us continually. The Library
of America will be issuing a large volume titled
Roland
Marks,
and Cameron and I will be co-editors. Dad's
longtime publisher has commissioned a biography and Cameron and I will be
interviewing prospective biographers including the distinguished Nelson A.
Gregorson whose biography of Melville Dad had so admired.

Of course, we will be editing the
Selected
Letters
. A volume of at least seven hundred pages, a
treasure trove of brilliant prose, flippant prose, gossip, scandal, candid
snapshots of the writer's secret life, “visionary” insight.

There is even movie interest, from Miramax Films,
in
Intimacy:
A
Tragedy.

Though Roland Marks had haughtily refused to sign
over any of his titles to be “mongrelized” by Hollywood, Cameron and I are
willing to negotiate with the filmmakers. We joke about our “cameo”
roles . . .

When we miss him terribly, we seek each other out.
We clasp hands. Cameron says, swiping at her eyes, “Oh God, he was so
funny
. I loved his humor, his laughter.” I said, “I
can hear him laughing, sometimes.” And we listened.

Trying not to hear instead the final desperate
scream that might have been my name.

The other night after Cameron returned late,
exhausted, from New York City, I was awakened hearing her walking in the house,
as the floorboards creaked; I went to her, where she was lying on the settee in
the sunroom, that was flooded with moonlight. I brought her an afghan, because
the night was cold; and Cameron is very thin, and becomes chilled easily. And I
held her hands, to warm them. And I thought
We
both
loved
him.
And
now
we
have
each
other.

This is not the ending that I had envisioned, just
months ago. It is no kind of an ending anyone might have envisioned, especially
my father, and yet—here it is.

This night, when I can't sleep, I curve beside
Cameron on the settee, and pull part of the afghan over myself. If Cameron is
covered, including her bare feet, and I'm part-uncovered, that's fine with me:
of the two of us, I'm the stoic. I've brought a bottle of red wine, and we drink
from the same cloudy glass, by moonlight. A rich red sensation begins in my
throat and spreads through my chest, my belly and my loins. I feel the stirring
of sexual desire, but it is not a desire for paroxysmal pleasure; I think it is
a desire like the opening of a flower, petals spreading to the sun. It is the
purity of desire, that requires another person to coax it into blooming.

“I love you, Cameron. I am so grateful that you've
come into my life.”

“I love you, Lou-Lou. If Roland could see us, he'd
be—well, he'd laugh, wouldn't he? He'd be jealous, maybe.”

High overhead the moon is moving through the night
sky. Venus, the brightest star. And Jupiter. We are planning an exhibit of
Roland Marks's photography, taken in the last three years of his remarkable
life; some of the photographs are of the night sky shot with moonlight above the
Hudson River. Dad would have been embarrassed, and abashed: he'd been an
“amateur”—he hadn't been competing with “professionals.” Already we've shown a
portfolio of the Hudson River photographs to the gallery here in Nyack, and the
proprietor is eager to mount the exhibit; yet we're thinking perhaps this is
premature, and we should show the portfolio to some galleries in Chelsea or
TriBeCa as well. Tell me a story about your father, Cameron says in a voice
husky with sleep, and so I tell her about the incident at the Rye Academy. “I
was playing field hockey and Dad was in the bleachers—he came to a surprising
number of my games that year—and a girl struck me in the mouth with her stick,
and one of my teeth—this one, here—was knocked out. And Dad said, ‘What's that
in your hand, Lou-Lou?' and I said, ‘What's it look like, Dad?' and he said, not
missing a beat, ‘It looks like about five thousand dollars, Lou-Lou. But you're
worth it.' ”