Free Patricide by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

much garbage has been written of him—but no one has
plumbed Roland Marks’s essence .
    I wondered what Cameron Slatsky would write about
him, sometime in the future. When my father wasn’t alive to read it, and to
recoil in horror and disgust.
    I had to protect him against her, I thought. Or
better—(since another “Cameron” would appear, probably within a few months)—I
had to protect Roland Marks against himself.
    D AD HAD always been admiring, in his way.
    Grudging, yet admiring.
    For he’d had a habit of saying, even when I was
much too old for such personal remarks, “You’re my big husky gal. You don’t need
any man to protect you. Nothing weak or puling about you .”
    The emphasis— you .
Meaning that I was to be distinguished from the weak, puling, manipulative
females who surrounded my father and other luckless men.
    â€œIn the female, sex is a weapon. Initially a lure,
then—a weapon. But there are those who, like my exemplary daughter, refuse to
play the dirty little game. They transcend , and they excel. ”
    He’d actually said such things in company, in my
presence. As if I were an overgrown child and not a fully mature young
woman.
    Sometimes, he’d been drinking. He’d become
sentimental and maudlin lamenting the “estrangement” of his other children, and
the “bizarre, self-destructive” behavior of their mothers.
    It was painful to me, yet I suppose flattering—how
my father boasted of his “exemplary” daughter. Often, I felt that he didn’t know
me at all; he was creating a caricature, or a cartoon, adorned with my name.
Even when he was looking straight at me his eyes seemed unfocused.
    â€œLou-Lou’s my most astonishing child. There’s
nothing mysterious or subtle about Lou-Lou—she is all heart . She isn’t obscure, and she isn’t devious.
She’s an athlete.” (Though I hadn’t been an athlete for years. Most girls give
up team sports forever after high school.) “Did I ever tell you about how
Lou-Lou played field hockey—really down-dirty, competitive field hockey—at the
Rye Academy? Up there in Connecticut? I’d drive up to watch her play—stay
overnight in the little town—at one of the championship games she was hit in the
mouth with a puck—no, a hockey stick—and just kept charging on—running down the
field bleeding from the mouth—and made a score for her team. And afterward she
came limping over to me where I was standing in front of the bleachers anxious
to see what had happened to her and Lou-Lou says, ‘Hi Dad’—or ‘Hey Dad,
look’—and in the palm of her hand, a little broken white thing. And I said,
‘What’s that, Lou-Lou?’ and she said, ‘What’s it look like, Dad?’ and I looked
more closely and saw it was a tooth, and I said, ‘Oh, sweetie—it looks like
about five thousand bucks. But you’re worth it.’ ”
    This was a wonderful story. One of Roland Marks’s
wonderful family stories. In his fiction most of his family stories were comical
catastrophes but when he was talking to friends, or to a friendly audience, his
family stories were wonderful.
    Even his detractors warmed to Roland Marks at such
times. Even those who knew he was confabulating, in his zeal to tell the ideal,
the perfect, the family story.
    In my father’s absence, I cherished such
memories.
    In my father’s absence that was a betrayal, and a
warning of betrayals to come, I visited my father’s house on Cliff Street, Upper
Nyack, with a pretense of “checking” the house; wandering through the drafty
rooms, standing outside on the terrace and gazing at the broad misty river
below, shivering in the cold I told myself There have been precious memories even if they are laced with lies.
    *
    â€œLou-Lou? What’s this I hear?