Patricide Read online

  Patricide

  A NOVELLA

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Contents

  Patricide

  Excerpt from Mudwoman

  About Joyce Carol Oates

  Novels by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Patricide

  Before I saw, I heard: the cracking wood-plank steps leading down to the riverbank behind our house in Upper Nyack, New York.

  Before I saw my father’s desperate hand on the railing, that collapsed with the steps, in what seemed at first like cruel slow-motion, I heard: my father’s terrified voice calling for—me.

  And so on the stone terrace above I stood very still, and watched in silence.

  If I were to be tried for the murder of my father, if I were to be judged, it is this silence that would find me guilty.

  Yet, I could not draw breath to scream.

  Even now, I can’t draw breath to scream.

  *

  O God I knew: he would be angry.

  He would be furious. He would not even look at me.

  And it wasn’t my fault! I would plead with him Please understand it wasn’t my fault. An accident on the George Washington Bridge. . .

  “Please, officer! How long will it be—?”

  It was an evening in November 2011, five months before my father Roland Marks’s death.

  In desperation I’d lowered my window to speak with one of the police officers directing traffic, who barely acknowledged my pleas. For more than thirty minutes traffic had been slowed to virtually a stop in gusts of sleet on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge; ahead was a vortex of lights, red lights mingling with bright blinding lights, for there’d been an accident involving at least two vehicles, a skidding-accident on the slick wet pavement. In a tight space a tow truck was maneuvering with maddening slowness and a high-pitched beep-beep-beeping that made my heart race.

  Police officers were signaling to drivers to stay where they were, and to remain inside our vehicles. As if we had any choice!

  “God damn. Bad luck.”

  It was an old habit of mine, speaking to myself when I was alone. And I was often alone. And the tone of my speaking-voice was not likely to be friendly or indulgent.

  I calculated that I was about two-thirds of the way across the bridge. In such weather the George Washington Bridge seemed longer than usual. Even when traffic began moving forward at a slightly faster pace it was still frustratingly slow, and sleet struck the windshield of my car like driven nails.

  Once I crossed the bridge it was a twelve-minute drive to my father’s house in Rockland County, Upper Nyack. If nothing else went wrong.

  It was 7:50 P.M. I had awakened that morning at about 5:30 A.M. and had been feeling both excited and exhausted through the long day. And already I was late by at least twenty minutes and when I tried to call my father on my cell phone, the call didn’t go through.

  Telling myself This is not a crisis. Don’t be ridiculous! He won’t stop loving you for this.

  To be the daughter of Roland Marks was to feel your nerves strung so very tight, the slightest pressure might snap them.

  You will laugh to be told that I was forty-six years old and the dean of the faculty at a small, highly regarded liberal arts college in Riverdale, New York. I was not a child-daughter but a middle-aged daughter. I was well educated, with excellent professional credentials and an impressive résumé. Before the liberal arts college in Riverdale where (it was hinted) I would very likely be named the next president, I’d been a professor of classics and department chair at Wesleyan. A move to Riverdale College was a kind of demotion but I’d gladly taken the position when it was offered to me, since living in Skaatskill, New York, allowed me to visit my father in Upper Nyack more readily.

  Don’t take the job in Riverdale on my account, my father had said irritably. I’m not going to be living in Nyack year-round and certainly not forever.

  I was willing to risk this, to be nearer my father.

  I was willing to take a professional demotion, to be nearer my father.

  In my professional life I had a reputation for being confident, strong-willed, decisive, yet fair-minded—I’d shaped myself into the quintessence of the professional woman, who is a quasi-male, yet the very best kind of male. In my public life I was not accustomed to being of the weaker party, dependent upon others.

  Yet, in my private life, my private family-life, I was utterly weak and defenseless as one born without a protective outer skin. I was the daughter of Roland Marks and my fate was, Roland Marks had always loved me best of all his children.

  This is the story of how a best-loved daughter repays her father.

  This is a story of revenge and murder, I think.

  *

  “You’re late.”

  It wasn’t a statement but an accusation. In another’s voice the implication would be Why are you late? Where were you? The implication would be—Darling, I was worried about you.

  “I can’t depend upon you, Lou-Lou. I’ve had to make a decision without you.”

  “A decision? What do you mean?”

  He is moving away. He is getting remarried. He is writing me out of his will.

  “I’ve decided to hire an assistant. A professional, who’s trained in literary theory.”

  This wasn’t so remarkable, for my father had had numerous “assistants” and “interns” over the years. Each had disappointed him or failed him in some way, and had soon disappeared from our lives. Most had been young women, a particularly vulnerable category for assistant, intern.

  Except now, since the breakup of my father’s fifth marriage, and since my move to Riverdale, I’d been my father’s assistant, to a degree—and we’d been planning a massive project, sorting and labeling the thousands of letters Roland Marks had received over the course of five decades, as well as carbons and copies of letters he’d sent. The letters were to be a part of Roland Marks’s massive archive, which he and his agent were negotiating to sell to an appropriate institution: the New York Public Library, the Special Collections of the University of Texas at Austin, the Special Collections at Harvard, Yale, Columbia. (In fact the archive would be sold, Dad hoped for several million dollars, to the highest bidder—though Roland Marks wouldn’t have wanted to describe the negotiations in so crass a way.)

  It was unfair on Dad’s part to suggest that he’d actually been waiting for me. Not in normal usage, as one individual might be “waiting” for another. With one part of his mind he’d probably been aware that someone was expected, after 7:00 P.M. and no later than 7:30 P.M., for this was our usual Thursday evening schedule. He would have been working in his study overlooking the slate-gray choppy Hudson River, from the second floor of the sprawling old Victorian house on Cliff Street; he might be writing, or going through a copyedited manuscript, or proofreading g
alleys—(for a writer who claimed to find writing difficult and who spent most of his time revising, Roland Marks managed to publish a good deal); he would have been listening to music—for instance, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which was so familiar to him, like notes encoded in his brain, he could no longer be distracted by it. Certainly my father wouldn’t be waiting for me but his sensitive nerves were attuned to a waiting-for-someone, waiting-for-something, and until this unease was resolved he would feel incomplete, edgy, irritable and vaguely offended.

  Yet if I’d arrived early, Dad wouldn’t have liked that, either. “So soon, Lou-Lou? What time did you say you were coming? And what time is it now?”

  My impossible father! Yet I loved Dad so much, I could not love anyone else including my clumsy well-intentioned quasi-male self.

  “And why exactly are you late?”

  “An accident on the George Washington Bridge . . .”

  “An accident! You should factor in slow-downs on that damned bridge, and leave early. I’d have thought you knew that by now.”

  “But this was a serious accident, Dad. The entire upper level was shut down for at least forty minutes . . .”

  “You’re always having accidents, Lou-Lou. Or, accidents are always occurring around you. Why is this?”

  Dad was being playful, funny. But Dad was being cruel, too.

  In fact it was rare that things went wrong in my life, and virtually never as a consequence of anything I’d done personally. A delayed plane, or a canceled flight—how was that my fault?—or an emergency at the college, which it would have been professionally irresponsible for me to ignore; or the plea of an old friend, calling at an inopportune time and badly needing me to speak to her, which had been the case several weeks before.

  I’d tried to explain to my father that a friend from graduate school at Harvard had called me sounding distraught, suicidal. I’d had to spend time with Denise on the phone and had sent a barrage of e-mails to follow—“I couldn’t just abandon her, Dad.”

  “How do you know that I’m not ‘suicidal,’ too? Waiting for you to arrive and wondering where the hell you are?”

  This was so preposterous a claim, I decided that my father had to be joking. Does an egomaniac kill himself?

  Dad persisted: “Do you think that, if you were in this person’s place, she might not ‘abandon’ you?”

  Though the subtext here was simply that Dad resented another person in my life, and felt threatened by the least disturbance of his schedule, it was like him to ask such questions, to make one squirm. His boldly serio-comic novels were laced with paradoxes of a moral nature, to make the reader squirm even as the reader was laughing.

  I’d said that I liked Denise very much. I hadn’t wanted to avoid her. (Though it was true, we’d grown apart in recent years; Denise had been the one to cease writing and calling.) “I’ve invited her to come visit me, if she wants to. If I can help her, somehow . . .”

  “Lou-Lou, for Christ’s sake! That’s what I mean: you draw accidents to yourself. You’re accident-prone.” There was a pause, and Dad couldn’t resist adding, “And losers.”

  This was particularly cruel. Since I knew that Dad considered me a “loser”—at any rate, not a success.

  But now Dad was being funny, and not angry—at least, he’d been smiling. (For “losers” were the very material of Roland Marks’s fiction, some of them loveable and others not so.)

  His humor was the lightest stroke of a whip against my bare skin and not intended to hurt: if Roland Marks intended to inflict hurt, you would know it.

  Only at my father’s summons did I come, Thursday nights, to have dinner with him. This had been our schedule for some months since Dad had returned to the house in Upper Nyack—(he’d been writer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome, and then a visiting fellow at the American Academy in Berlin)—but I couldn’t take our evenings for granted, because my father disliked being “constrained.”

  That is, I had to leave Thursday evenings open for my father; but my father might make other, more interesting plans for Thursday without notifying me.

  On weekends, Dad dined with other people in their homes or in restaurants. (I was rarely included.) Often, Dad was being “honored”—these events would often take place in New York City, forty minutes away by (hired) car. It wasn’t unusual for my father to be invited to give talks, readings, onstage interviews every week in one or another city: in recent months Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston, Seattle, Toronto and Vancouver. If such events didn’t conflict with my work-schedule, and if Dad wanted me, I would accompany him to these gigs, as he called them; his sponsors would pay for two business-class air tickets as well as two hotel rooms in luxury hotels. Since Dad’s last divorce, he had not acquired a new female companion, and so I was grateful to be his companion when he wanted me.

  Sometimes, I would be interviewed, too. Tell us what it was like growing up with Roland Marks as your father!

  I’d rehearsed answers that were plausible but interesting—at least, I hoped they were interesting. What I said of Roland Marks was unfailingly upbeat and optimistic; my daughterly praise was warm and sincere; never would I hint at anything less “positive”—that remained for my sister Karin and my brothers Harry and Saul, who imagined that their opinions of Roland Marks really mattered to anyone.

  Domestic routines, like our Thursday dinners, were sacrosanct with Roland Marks, as with most writers and artists. It’s the “nervous” sensibility, as Dad said, that craves routine and stability. Of course, if Dad himself altered these routines, that was different.

  Twelve years ago Roland Marks had been awarded a Nobel Prize for literature and in the wake of that cataclysmic award much in his domestic life had been overturned. His fifth marriage had ended in divorce, and a tremendous financial settlement to his embittered wife had depleted much of his award money. (Though even friends persisted in thinking that Roland Marks was wealthy.) Vulnerable to women, particularly young women, Dad was always “seeing” someone and always being “disappointed”—yet I dreaded the day when my seventy-four-year-old father might announce that he was “remarrying”—again!—and that our Thursday evening routine, the very core of my emotional life, was coming to an end.

  Something was different about tonight. I realized—Don Giovanni wasn’t playing. And a vehicle was parked at the curb in front of the house, which I was sure I’d never seen before.

  My father had come to meet me in the front corridor of the sprawling old Victorian house, where a single wall-light feebly glowed. Roland Marks’s habits of frugality contrasted sharply with his habits of overspending and overindulgence. Since my most recent stepmother’s departure from his life, the Victorian house on Cliff Street was but partly furnished; the living room, with a beautiful dark-marble fireplace, was missing a leather sofa, a set of chairs, a Chinese carpet, and had the look of a minimalist art gallery in which the so-called art is a coiled rope, a bucket, a stepladder leaning against a bare wall. In my father’s words the departing wife had “ransacked” the house while he was in Europe; I’d offered to help him refurnish but he’d dismissed my offer with an airy wave of his hand—“I’m a bachelor from now on. I don’t use these damned rooms anyway.”

  At the rear of the house, not visible from the front hall, was a remodeled sunroom, where Dad spent much of his time when he wasn’t working upstairs in his s
tudy. Beyond the sunroom, through a rear door, was a flagstone terrace in what one might describe as a comfortably worn state of repair, and descending from the terrace a flight of wooden steps that led to the riverbank thirty feet below, through a scrubby jungle of overgrown shrubs and trees. There had once been a small dock there, swept away by a ravaging river during the first winter of my father’s occupancy.

  Dad had joked that his marriage to Sylvia Sachs had been very like the dock—“Gone with the river!”

  Gradually it had happened that, though I lived in a (modest) condominium of my own in the village of Skaatskill, just north of Riverdale, my father expected me to keep his house in reasonably good repair; it had fallen to me to pay my father’s household bills with his checkbook, and help him prepare his financial records for his accountant’s yearly visit; if my father had trouble opening a bottle or a jar, for instance, he would keep it for me to open—“Your fingers are strong and canny. Lou-Lou. You have peasant genes, you’ll live a long time.” It fell to me to hire cleaning women, handymen, a lawn crew, though my father invariably found fault with them.

  Tonight my father was wearing not his usual at-home jeans and shapeless cardigan but neatly pressed trousers, one of his English “country-gentleman” shirts, and a green Argyll vest; his cheeks were smooth-shaven, and his silvery-brown hair, thinning at the crown but abundant elsewhere, falling to his shoulders, looked as if it had been recently brushed. Clearly, Roland Marks had not so groomed himself for me.

  There was a sound upstairs. A murmurous voice, as on a cell phone.

  “Is—someone here? Upstairs?”

  My father’s study was upstairs, as well as several bedrooms. My father’s study was his particular place of refuge, his sanctuary, with a wall of windows overlooking the river, a large antique desk, built-in mahogany bookshelves. It was not often that anyone was invited into my father’s study, even me.