Patricide Read Free

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.
    â€œIs—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.
    Now a sly expression came into my father’s face. I
thought A woman. He has brought a woman here.
    Despite his age Roland Marks was a handsome man;
he’d been exceptionally handsome in his youth, with dark dreamy brooding eyes, a
fine-sculpted foxy face and a quick and ingratiating smile. He’d dazzled many
women in his time—and many men. Some of this I knew firsthand but much of this I
knew from reading about him.
    When you are related to a person of renown you
can’t shake off the conviction that others, strangers, know him in ways you will
never know him. Your vision of the man is myopic and naïve—the long-distance
vision is the more correct one.
    â€œAn academic. A ‘scholar.’ She’s come to interview
me. You know—the usual.”
    Roland Marks’s genial contempt for academics and scholars did
not preclude his being quite friendly with a number of them. Like most writers,
he was flattered by attention; even the kind of attention that embarrassed him,
annoyed or exasperated him. Each academic and scholar who’d met with Roland Marks, and had written
about him, imagined that he or she was the exception. What a surprise Roland Marks is! Nothing at all like people say but really, really nice   . . . and so funny.
    â€œIs this your new—assistant?”
    â€œWe’ve been exploring the possibility.”
    This person, whoever she was, was unknown to me. I
had the idea, since Dad hadn’t mentioned her until now, that she was relatively
unknown to him, too.
    â€œCome upstairs, Lou-Lou, and meet ‘Cameron.’ We’ve
been having a quite intense interview session.”
    It wasn’t uncommon for people to come to my
father’s Nyack house to interview him. But it was somewhat uncommon for one of
these interviewers to stay so late.
    Though there was the Paris Review interviewer, a literary journalist, who’d
interviewed Roland Marks in 1978, in his apartment at the time on the Upper West
Side, who’d virtually moved in with him and had had to be forcibly evicted after
several weeks.
    Dad led me upstairs with unusual vigor.
    In his study, a tall skinny blond woman—a quite
young, quite striking blond woman—was slipping papers into a tote-bag. On the
table before her was a laptop, a small tape recorder, a cell phone, and a can of
Diet Coke.
    â€œCameron? I’d like you to meet my daughter Lou-Lou
Marks. And Lou-Lou, this is Cameron—from . . . “
    â€œCameron Slatsky. From Columbia University.”
    With a naïve stiffness the young woman spoke, as if
one had to identify Columbia as a university.
    Awkwardly we shook hands. Cameron Slatsky from
Columbia University smiled so glowingly at me, I felt my face shrink like a
prune in too much sunshine.
    Of course, Dad had to