Patricide Read Online Free Page A

knew my work. My oeuvre as she called it.”
    With a wounded air Dad spoke. He might have been
lamenting My penis.
    Of course, Dad was disgruntled. Not just the
beautiful blond girl had left, trailing a sweet-smelling sort of mist in her
wake, but he had to content himself for the evening with me .
    His favorite daughter. Poor plain hulking
Lou-Lou.
    Not that Dad didn’t like me. Even love me. (So far
as he was capable of love.) But it was clear that he didn’t regard me as
attractive, or particularly feminine; he didn’t admire me. This had always been evident, even as a young girl I’d
seen it in his eyes, as I’d seen his pleasure in female beauty, female grace, femaleness , in the presence of one or another of
his wives, or my older sisters who were both quite attractive as girls. “Beauty
is skin deep: we perceive it immediately. What’s beneath, if it’s ugly, will
require more time”—so Roland Marks had observed more than once, with an air of
vengeful melancholy.
    All that day, Dad said, until the interviewer had
come at 3:00 P.M. to “interrupt and distract
him,” he’d been working in his study. It is expected of Nobel Prize winners that
they begin to slacken their pace after receiving the award but this wasn’t the
way of Roland Marks who was as committed to, or as obsessed with, his work as
he’d been as an aggressive young man out of the Midwest fifty years before. It
had been his aim to combine the “many voices of our time”—the elevated, the
intellectual and the poetic, and the debased, vernacular, and the crudely
prosaic. It was an ambitious aim—it was a Whitmanesque aim—which struck a nerve
in the literary community as well as in the vast unchartable American community
that responds to some—a very few—works of “art” with genuine enthusiasm and
pleasure. Yet, Roland Marks had detractors. After reviewers celebrate a
“brilliantly promising” young writer, they are not so easily placated with his
more mature work. The many awards bestowed upon my father didn’t soften the hurt
of the barbs and stabs he’d received as well, some from old friends whose
admiration had turned to resentment as Roland Marks’s reputation grew.
    The cruelest blow had been a lengthy,
quasi-sympathetic but finally condescending review of a novel by an old
writer-friend of his, a literary rival, who ought never to have written such a
veiled attack on another writer of Roland Marks’s stature and age—in The New Yorker.
    Roland Marks never wrote reviews. But if he had, he
would not have retaliated—such “low-down, down-dirty” behavior was beneath him,
he said.
    Never again would he speak to that writer, whom he
felt had betrayed him. If the man’s name came up, Dad was likely to walk away,
wounded.
    Through all this, Dad’s work had continued. It was
a joke to suggest that the man was a womanizer when the deeper truth was, he was
wed to work .
    Dad had recently finished a project—a lengthy novel
set in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, the era of World War II, post-War
and Cold War America. Gleefully he’d been telling interviewers that he’d “named
names and burnt bridges”—even as he insisted that Patricide was purely fiction. There was anticipation in publishing
circles, for a novel by Roland Marks invariably managed to excite controversy.
Feminists loved to hate him; haters of feminism loved to praise him; every
Jewish literary figure had a strong, even vehement opinion about him; and there
were the ex-wives, one of them the moderately famous Broadway actress of a
certain age who’d said some very damning—and funny—things about Roland Marks in
uncensored TV interviews. In any case he’d put the manuscript in a drawer, and
would not look at it for another six months. He was anxious about his work, and
superstitious. If he waited too