Patricide (4 page)

This wasn't so. My father couldn't tolerate TV
advertisements. I would have to find a movie for us, on one of the few cable
channels without interruptions.

“What about
A
Stolen
Life
—Bette Davis and Glenn Ford.
The
Bridge
on
the
River
Kwai
—William Holden.
The
Entertainer
—Laurence Olivier.”

“The
Entertainer.”

“You've seen this, I think?”

“Yes, I've seen
The
Entertainer
—‘I think.' When you're seventy-four
you've seen everything. But not recently. And Olivier is brilliant.”

I brought in our heated-up Thai food from the
kitchen, on trays. I used attractive earthenware plates and paper napkins of a
high quality that almost resembled cloth napkins. I would have opened a bottle
of wine for us but Dad avoided alcohol in the evenings because it made him
sleepy. I tried not to notice the anger in his face, and the sorrow beneath. I
fussed over him as I always did, tried to chide and joke with him, for he
expected it of Lou-Lou, no matter what mood he was in.

The love-affair of a daughter with her father
encompasses her entire life. There has never been a time when she has not been
her father's daughter.

I thought
None
of
them
can
take
my
place.
None
of
them
can
know
him
as
I
do.

It was so, Laurence Olivier was brilliant in a role
in which he, one of the great actors of the twentieth century, plays a
second-rate vaudeville entertainer in a dreary English resort
town—Brighton?—who, from time to time, onstage, in the spotlight, amid burlesque
routines of stultifying banality and vulgarity, reveals flashes of genius.

Olivier was so compelling in the role of Archie
Rice, so utterly convincing, both my father and I sat in silence, enthralled.
Roland Marks could not think of any clever remark to underscore what we were
seeing—the saga of an aging, hypocritical, hollow-hearted vaudeville comedian
who connives to make a comeback by exploiting his elderly father, and finally
killing him. Yet Olivier's character is so very human, my eyes filled with tears
of sympathy. He's a fraud, but “charming”—women continue to adore him! He's a
heel, and a cad, and a drinker, yet it was love I felt for the man, impersonal
as sunshine.

There is a particularly poignant scene midway in
the film in which the young Joan Plowright, in the role of Archie Rice's
daughter, tells the “entertainer” that he can't possibly be serious about
marrying a naïve young woman who has been seduced by his charisma—“She's my age!
The age of your daughter!”

Archie Rice is chastened, embarrassed. But his
daughter's scandalized plea makes no difference: he's determined to marry the
second-place beauty-contest winner just the same, in order to borrow money from
her father.

Dad began to laugh. Dad had been picking at his
Thai food, that was too spicy for him though he'd insisted on ordering
hot
. And now something pleased him mightily.

“Here's a fact, Lou-Lou: Olivier married that very
actress, Joan Plowright, within a year. He divorced Vivien Leigh and married
Plowright who was young enough to be his daughter.” It was a curiosity, how
Roland Marks seemed to know so much of popular culture, which in his books and
lectures he disdained as
drek
. Now Dad laughed his
loud Rabelaisian laugh, that made me shudder.

Though he hadn't had any wine, Dad was very sleepy
by the time the movie ended. (The final scene of
The
Entertainer
, when Archie Rice is disintegrating
onstage before a sadly diminished audience, had made him laugh, initially; then
cast him into a bleak mood I thought it most prudent not to notice.) I helped
him up the stairs, said good night to him and cleaned up downstairs; it gave me
pleasure to darken the rooms of the house, preparatory to leaving, and returning
to my condominium in Skaatskill.

Except: before I left, in Dad's study I looked for
a note-sized piece of paper. I knew it was there somewhere, and finally I found
it in plain sight beside Dad's shut-up computer:
Cameron
S.,
212
448
1439,
[email protected].

Crumpled it and took it away in my pocket.

Thinking
This
will
do
no
good,
probably.
But
I
will
have
tried.

*

It was my vocation: to spare my father
from rapacious females.

I hadn't done a very good job of it, you might say.
And you'd be correct.

I tried to protect Dad from harm. At least when he
wasn't traveling abroad and far off my radar. I was the
constant
in his life, I wished to think.

Swarms of women, of all ages, tried to attach
themselves to Roland Marks in one guise or another. Some were wealthy socialites
eager for celebrity-writers to perform—“For zero bucks,” as Dad said dryly—for
their charity fund-raisers; some were young like Cameron Slatsky, relatively
poor, unattached and, who knows?—desperate, if not deranged. No one is so alert
to the dangers that beset a famous man than a daughter.

It's true, Dad might have been seeing quite
reasonable women, divorcées or widows just slightly younger than himself, yet
not embarrassingly
young
—except that Dad wouldn't
have been seen in public with any woman within two decades of his age.

In Washington, D.C., a few years ago, where Dad had
been honored by the president at the National Medals ceremony in the White
House, he'd been accompanied by a chic skinny girl who might've been a model,
very gorgeous, and so young that the president's wife had said, utterly without
irony: “It's so nice of you to bring your granddaughter to our ceremony, Mr.
Marks!”

It's well into the twenty-first century. The era of
Women's Liberation was the 1970s, or should have been. Yet, women are still
bound to men. The majority of women, regardless of age. And a famous man
attracts women as a flame attracts moths—irresistibly, fatally. Some of the most
beautiful moths want nothing more than to fling themselves into the flame which
destroys them.

“Go away. Steer clear of him. Don't you know who he
is?”—often I wanted to cry at the foolish women.

My own mother, in fact. Poor Mom had been
clinically depressed, frankly suicidal, for years after their divorce, though
she'd seen a succession of therapists and “healers” and had been prescribed a
virtual buffet of tranquillizers, anti-depressants, organic and “whole” foods.
(She'd been a rising young editor at Random House when Roland Marks had met her
but she'd quit her job, at Dad's insistence, shortly after they were married.)
As a mother she'd often been distracted and hadn't been able to focus, as she'd
said, on her children, as she'd have liked; for Roland Marks was her most
demanding child.

Belatedly, Sarah has tried to be a “devoted”
mother—too late for my sister and brothers, I think.

In a divorce, a child invariably chooses one or the
other parent to side with. It was never any secret, though he'd moved out of our
house and out of our lives, I'd sided with my father.

Though my mother was the one who'd loved
me
, and cared for
me.

My father never knew that I'd spared him the
embarrassment of an
ex-wife-suicide.

I'd been twelve at the time. Mom had been still
fairly young—not yet forty-five. Dad had been living elsewhere for several
months as details of the “separation” were being worked out. (In fact, there was
to be no “separation” everyone but my mother and I seemed to know.) She'd told
me in a matter-of-fact voice, as if she were discussing the weather: “I don't
think that I can go on, Lou-Lou. I feel so tired. Life doesn't seem worth the
effort . . .”

“Please don't talk that way, Mom. You know you
don't mean it.”

I was frightened because in fact I didn't know that
my mother didn't mean it. In the slow, then rapid decline of her sixteen-year
marriage with Roland Marks, she'd lapsed into a chronic melancholy. When I'd
been a little girl it was said that she'd suffered from postpartum depression
but in fact, as people close to our family knew, it was my father's infidelities
that wore her down.

She might've divorced
him
—so one might think.

My sister Karin, my brothers Harry and Saul were
impatient with my mother. Her weakness was a terror to us all. She frightened
them as she frightened me but, cannily self-absorbed adolescents as they were at
this time, they reacted by ignoring, rebuffing, or fleeing her, as I did
not.

One afternoon when I returned home from school I
couldn't find Mom, though I knew she was home. And then I did find her, locked
into an upstairs bathroom.

I could hear her inside, beneath the noise of the
fan. She was talking to herself, or sobbing; when I knocked on the door, she
told me please go away.

But I didn't go away. I continued knocking on the
door until at last she opened it.

I don't think that I will describe what I saw.

I will spare my mother this indignation, out of
numerous others.

I called 911. I may have screamed, and I may have
wept, but I only remember calling 911. For already at the age of twelve I was
Lou-Lou
the
brave,
the
stout,
and
the
reliable.

It was for the best, Mom was saying. Her eyes were
dilated, her voice was faint and cracked. He'd all but told her—told her what to
do . . . He'd shown her how, in his new novel. How to clear the
way for an impatient husband who has fallen in love (guiltily, ecstatically)
with a younger woman . . .

Mom was referring to Roland Marks's newest novel
Jealousy
in which an unloved wife kills herself
in these circumstances and is much mourned, much regretted, even admired by
survivors for her
sensitivity,
generosity.

I held my mother, waiting for the emergency medical
workers.

I thought
If
I
weren't
here
she
would
die
now.
He
would
have
killed
her.

Dad came to see my mother in the hospital,
repentant, remorseful, very quiet. He brought her flowers. He brought her new
books in bright paper covers, conspicuously women's fiction of the kind Roland
Marks scorned. He took certain of her relatives, visiting the hospital, out to
dinner at a good restaurant. He spent time with my sister, my brothers and me.
And after Mom was discharged from the hospital, he filed for divorce.

Except at court dates and incidental meetings at
family events, Roland Marks would never speak to my mother again.

A
ND YET,
I loved him best. Can't help it.

*

“My God, what's that? A tooth?”

He was astonished. He was aghast. Yet you could see
that already he was formulating the terms in which he would relate the story to
his friends: how his teenaged athlete-daughter Lou-Lou was struck in the mouth
with an opponent's hockey stick, tripped and fell on the field entangled in
opponents' feet, yet nonetheless managed to scramble erect and grip her stick
hoping to continue in the frantic game until—at last—though it could not have
been more than a few seconds—the referee pulled her out of the game.

“Hell, Dad. I'm OK.”

The athlete-daughter was me. Panting, dribbling
blood down her chin, staining her lime-green hockey-team uniform. Cursing but
laughing. The referee hadn't seen how badly I'd been hit.

“Jesus, Lou-Lou! Is that a
tooth
?”

It was. A front, lower tooth, with a bloody root,
in the palm of my shaky hand.

“I've got plenty more, Dad. It doesn't hurt one
bit.”

This was true. In the adrenaline-charge of the
moment, my bloodied mouth didn't hurt. Spitting blood to keep from choking
didn't hurt.

Worth it, to see the aghast-admiring look in my
father's eyes.

Before the sheer
physicality
of life, Roland Marks seemed at times mesmerized,
paralyzed. His large intelligent eyes blinked and shimmered like an infant's
eyes yearning to understand, yet overwhelmed by understanding.

“Dad, hey—don't look at me like that. It's not
like, you know—I'm some kind of fashion model, and now my career is ruined.” And
I laughed again, and spat out blood.

I was scared, but high. No sensation like being
high on adrenaline!

I was Roland Marks's exemplary daughter, his
favorite daughter, but I was no beauty. Gamely my father liked to compare me to
certain classic paintings—female portraits—by Ingres, Renoir, even Whistler—but
my broad Eskimo-face, my small eyes given to irony, my fleshy sardonic mouth
resisted mythologizing. Hulking and needy, but disguising my need in robust good
spirits and a laugh that, as Dad noted, sounded like fingernails scraped upward
on a blackboard, I resisted idealization.