Lovely, Dark, Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “And what is wrong with pride, Miss Fife!”

  A fierce light shone in the poet’s faded-blue eyes. His breath came audibly and harshly. You could sense the old, enlarged heart beating in his chest like a maddened fist as in the throes of a combative sexual encounter at which the poet in his inviolable maleness did not intend to fail.

  But the interviewer was suffused with a sort of ferocity, too. Squaring her slender shoulders, leaning forward so that her pale-blond hair fell softly about her face, daring to inquire in her throaty, thrilled voice that hardly seemed the voice of a young virginal woman: “Did you not once say, Mr. Frost, imagining that your remark wouldn’t be recorded, that you’d have liked never to see your children again—those who were living at the time, and causing you so much trouble; they were—are—‘accursed’—”

  “I—I did not say that . . . Who has been spreading such lies? I—did not . . .”

  “You’ve written about this—in your sly, coded poems. Your inability to feel another’s pain—your inability to touch another person. You’ve revealed everything in your poems that has been hidden in your heart. Which is why, in public, you deny your very poems—as one might deny paternity to a deformed or disfigured child.”

  “This is false—this is wrong! I have tried to explain”—Mr. Frost drew a deep breath, shut his eyes tight and began to recite through clenched jaws—“‘To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in the pain of his life had faith he’d made . . . graceful.”*

  Primly Frost uttered these words, as if the statement should be sufficient to convince the interviewer; but the statement did not have the desired effect.

  “Mr. Frost, what do those words even mean? That those who see in your poetry something of the terribly flawed and dishonest man who wrote the poems are charged with being ‘ungraceful’?—while the poet, who feeds like a vampire upon the lives of others, is imagined as being ‘graceful’?”

  “But—that’s what poetry is.”

  “Not all poetry! Not all poets. The subject today is you.”

  “I—I—I have no reply to that, Miss”—the flyswatter had fallen from the poet’s fingers onto the ground. His fingers appeared frozen, claw-like as if cramped—“whoever you are, and wherever you are from—Hell . . .”

  “But do you believe in ‘Hell,’ Mr. Frost?”

  “I—I think that I do . . . I must . . . I believe—‘This is Hell, nor am I out of it.’ That grim and beautiful line of Marlowe’s, I do believe.”

  This concession, rare for the poet, failed utterly to placate the interviewer, who pursued her panting quarry like a huntswoman and showed him no mercy.

  “Mr. Frost. Do you remember when your daughter Lesley was six years old? When you were still a young man—a young father—living on that wretched farm in Derry, New Hampshire?—you wakened your daughter with a loaded pistol in your hand and you forced the terrified child to come downstairs in her nightgown, and barefoot, to the kitchen where the child saw her mother seated at the table, her hair in her face, weeping. Your wife had been an attractive woman once but, living with you in that desolate farmhouse, enduring your moods, your rages, your sloth, your fumbling incapacity as a farmer, your sexual bullying and clumsiness, already at the age of thirty-one she’d become a broken, defeated woman. You told the child Lesley that she must choose between her mother and her father—which of you was to live, and which to die. ‘By morning, only one of us will be alive.’”

  “No. That did not—happen. . . . It did not.”

  “Yet Lesley remembers it vividly, and will reproach you with the memory through your life, Mr. Frost. Is she mistaken?”

  “My daughter is—yes, mistaken . . . My eldest daughter hates me without knowing me. She has never understood me . . .”

  “And what of your daughter Irma, committed to a mental hospital? Why did you give up on Irma, when you might have helped her more? Were you exasperated and disgusted by her, as an extreme form of yourself? Your wild talk, your turbulent moods, your ‘dark places’? You gave up on Irma as you’d given up on your sister Jean years before. Mental illness frightens you, like a contagion.”

  Mr. Frost protested, weakly: “I did all that I could for Irma, and for—my sister Jean. I could not be expected to give up my entire life for them, could I? All that I’d done, they felt no gratitude for, but were encouraged in their wildness and blame of me . . .”

  “Why was poor Irma so obsessed with being kidnapped and raped? Forced into prostitution? You were scornful of Irma’s terrors, you’d told her bluntly when she was just a girl that she was so unattractive, she needn’t fear being raped; no man would be interested in her sexually; she wasn’t worth ‘twenty cents a throw.’ Later, to Robert Lowell, you said laughingly that Irma Frost couldn’t have ‘made a whorehouse.’”

  “That is not true. That is—a lie, slander . . . Lowell was a sick, distressed person. I spoke to him in a way to lift his spirits, to entertain him. He’d thought that he was bad, but old Frost was badder. But none of it was meant to be taken literally . . .”

  “And your son. Your only surviving son. He’d said, ‘My father is ashamed of me. My father has no more than glanced at my poetry, and push it aside.’ He’d said, ‘Sometimes I feel tight-strung—like a bow. I feel that I want to—that I must—be shot straight to the heart of . . .’ And your son’s voice would trail off, and he would hide his face in his hands.”

  The interviewer spoke in a soft condemning voice. The poet stared at her, uncomprehending. Small hairs stirred at the nape of his neck. It was very hard for him to draw breath. Barely he managed to stammer, “Who? Who is—‘he’? Who are you speaking of . . .” A sensation of vertigo swept over him, the ground seemed to be opening at his feet. In desperation he’d snatched up the poetry notebook in both hands as if to shield himself with it.

  “Mr. Frost, you know that he burnt his poetry. Fifteen years of poems. You’d thought so little of him, you’d never given him permission to live. He was always your ‘son’—you never relinquished him, though you never loved him. He was thirty-eight when he died of a gunshot wound to the head. He’d seemed much younger, as if he’d never lived. All he wanted was approval from you, a father’s blessing—but you withheld it.”

  “I’ve told you—I don’t know what—who—you are talking about . . .”

  “Your son, Mr. Frost. Your son Carol who killed himself.”

  “My son did not—kill—himself . . . He died of a regrettable accident.”

  “Your son you named with a ridiculous girl’s name, for some whim of yours. He was so unhappy with ‘Carol’ he changed it to ‘Carroll’—to your displeasure. It was too late, the damage had been done, as a young child he’d been marked. In his poetry he wrote of how you’d sucked the marrow out of his bones. You’d left him nothing, you’d taken his manhood from him. He knew your secret—you could never love any of your children, you could love only yourself.”

  Frost shook his massive head from side to side, frowning. Deep rents in his ashy skin.

  “I—I loved Carol. He knew . . .”

  “You never told him you loved him! He didn’t know.”

  “Carol was weak—immature. He was not a man. How then could he write genuine poetry? He was a versifier—his best poems were pale imitations of mine. He was a child who has traced drawings in Crayola. His rimes were stolen from mine—‘though’—‘snow’—‘slow’—‘near’—‘seer.’ Worse were his poems in which he’d attempted vers libre.” Mr. Frost laughed, a ghastly wheezing sound like choking. With the verve of a litigator arguing his case, the poet spoke with a righteous sort of confidence, though laced with regret: “My son thought that ‘no one loved him.’ Pitiful! His mind was one cloud of suspicion . . . his cloud became our cloud. Well, he took his cloud away with him. We never gave him up. He ended it for us—the protracted misery and obstinacy of a failed life.” A brooding moment, and then: �
�It was an error to marry—initiating a sequence of worse errors, the Frost children. Soon it came to me, though I thought I’d kept it a secret, that I didn’t care in the slightest if I ever saw any of them again—at least, after my dear daughter Marjorie died. She, I did love. I loved very much. Yet, what good was my love? I could not save the beautiful girl. She died as the child of anyone might have died—a disappearance. ‘The only sound’s the sweep of easy wind and downy flake’—nothing more in nature than that, of grief. A poet ought not to marry, and procreate. That was the fear of my wife Elinor—she would drag me down into her mortality, and we would make each other miserable, which we did. Poetry is more than enough of ‘procreation.’ Life is the raw material, like dough—but it is only ‘raw,’ and it is only ‘dough.’ No one cares to eat mere dough.”

  The poet’s large, slack-jowled face contorted into a look of sheer disdain, disgust. Astonishingly he reared up onto his legs, that barely held his bulk. The porch swing creaked in protest. The notebook fell from his lap, onto the grass. Like a wounded bull, suffused with an unexpected strength by pain and outrage, the poet swayed and glared at his tormentor. He was stricken to the heart, or to the gut—but he would not succumb. His enemies had assailed him cruelly and shamefully as they had through his beleaguered life but he would not succumb.

  “You—whoever you purport to be—an ‘interviewer’ for a third-rate poetry journal—what do you know of me? You may know scattered facts about my ‘life’—but you don’t know me. You haven’t the intelligence to comprehend my poems any more than a blind child could comprehend anything beyond the Braille she reads with her fingertips—only just the raised words and nothing of the profound and ineffable silence that surrounds the words.”

  Taken by surprise, the young blond interviewer stumbled to her feet also, a deep flush in her face; in dampened undergarments and schoolgirl floral-pink “shirtwaist” she gripped the straw bag, and backed away with a look of surprise and alarm.

  Jabbing at this adversary with his forefinger the enraged poet charged: “You are nothing. People like you don’t exist. You’ve never been called the ‘greatest American poet of the twentieth century’—you’ve never won a single Pulitzer Prize, let alone several Pulitzer prizes—and you never will. You have never roused audiences to tears, to applause, to joy—you’ve never roused audiences to their feet in homage to your genius. Barely, you are qualified to kiss the hem of genius. Or—another part of the poet’s anatomy. All you can do, people like you, contemptible little people, spiritual dwarves, is to scavenge in the detritus of the poet’s life without grasping the fact that the poet’s life is of no consequence to the poet—essentially. You snatch at the dried and outgrown skin of the snake—the husk of a skin the living snake will cast off as he moves with lightning speed out of your grasp. You fail to realize that only the poetry counts—the poetry that will prevail long after the poet has passed on, and you and your ilk are gone and forgotten utterly, as if you’d never existed.”

  The poet stumbled down the porch steps, not quite seeing where he was going. Something glaring was exploding softly—the sun? Blazing, blinding light? Overhead, an agitated soughing in the trees? He had banished her, the demon. His deep-creased face was contorted with rage. The faded-icy-blue eyes were sharpened like ice picks. In the grass, the poet’s legs failed him, he began to fall, he could not break the propulsion of his fall, a fall that brought him heavily to the ground, the stunning hardness of the ground beneath the grass; all his life he’d been eluding the petty demons that picked at his ankles, his legs; the petty demons that whispered curses to him, that he was bad, he was wicked, he was cruel, he was himself; all his life they’d tried to elicit him to injure himself, as his only surviving son Carol had injured himself, and succumb to madness. In the vast reaches of the Dismal Swamp he’d first seen the demons clearly, and retained the vision through the decades; how, in daylight, it is a temptation to forget the terrible wisdom of the Swamp, and of the night; but at great peril. He had blundered this time, but he had escaped in time. He was not going mad—but madness swept through him like a powerful emetic.

  Somehow, he was lying in the grass. Gnats flung themselves against his damp eyes. He’d fallen from a great height, like a toppled statue, too heavy to be righted. His fury was choking him. Like a towel stuffed down his throat. Somewhere close by a clock was ticking loudly, mockingly. He would grab hold of the damned clock and throw it—but the taunting girl-interviewer had vanished.

  His notebook! Precious notebook! It had slipped from his fingers, he strained to reach it, to hold against his chest. Strangely it seemed that he was bare-chested—so suddenly. The shame of his soft, slack torso, the udder-like breasts, was exposed to all the world. He could not call for help, the shame was too deep. The poet was not ever a weakling to call for help. The obstinacy of his aging flesh had been a source of great frustration to him, and shame, but he had not succumbed to it, and he would not.

  Just barely, the poet managed to seize hold of a corner of the notebook. The strain of so reaching caused him to tremble, to quaver—yet, he managed to draw the notebook to him, and to press it against his chest. His loud-thumping heart would be protected from harm, from the assault of his enemies. For here was his shield, as in antiquity—the warrior has fallen, but is shielded from the pain of mortality.

  “Mr. Frost? Oh—Mr. Frost—”

  Already they’d found him, he’d had scarcely time to rest. He was unconscious, yet breathing. The great poet fallen in wild grass in front of the Poet’s Cabin at Bread Loaf, Vermont, in a languorous late-afternoon in August 1951.

  Yet, the poet was breathing. No mistaking this, the poet was breathing.

  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 fath
er’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.