Lovely, Dark, Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates

  This had been going on for years. This was a disgruntlement that felt easy and comfortable, like worn bedroom slippers.

  I laughed thinking This is what a family is. This.

  And later that afternoon, when, it seemed to have developed, I would be staying for dinner, and Cameron and I were to prepare together one of Dad’s favorite meals, chicken tagine with prunes, dried apricots, almonds, and couscous, another incident occurred that gave me, if not hope exactly, a sense that things might not be so hopeless as I’d been thinking: by chance, I overheard my father speaking in a low, sarcastic voice to Cameron, in an adjacent room.

  Poor Cameron! I felt a thrill of sympathy.

  Recalling how many times I’d heard Roland Marks speak in this way, within my hearing or not-quite, to one or another of his wives—my mother, Phyllis, Avril, Sylvia. Inevitably, Roland Marks would find fault with a woman, or rather, the woman’s imperfection would be revealed. In this case, so far as I could gather—(for truly I didn’t want to eavesdrop, and especially I didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping)—the zealous and well-intentioned assistant had filed away some of my father’s papers on her own accord, without his having instructed her; or possibly, something was “lost” in my father’s office, that had been the assistant’s responsibility. And so Dad spoke harshly to Cameron, who didn’t seem to be defending herself; only perhaps murmuring Yes yes I’m sorry in the way that, if a whipped dog could speak, a whipped dog would speak in such a circumstance.

  Not all of Roland Marks’s women had been so meekly apologetic, so subservient. Even my mother had tried to defend herself, sometimes. And others had quarreled with him, quite fiercely, even hatefully, at a time in their relationship when it was clear that Roland no longer much loved or respected them. But Cameron Slatsky—so young, inexperienced—so in awe of the great man—seemed to have been struck dumb.

  The scolding went on and on, and on. I felt sorry for the blundering assistant and at the same time gratified for it was the first time I’d heard my father address Cameron in such a way; and I understood it would not be the last.

  Later, Cameron was upstairs in “her” room. She’d hidden herself away in tears, or shame. She’d been embarrassed to have been scolded when I was in the house, perhaps; but I wouldn’t let on, when we prepared dinner, that I’d heard anything at all. I would talk of other things, perhaps as if casually I would bring up the exhibit at the gallery in town, Hilma Matthews’s paintings; or, I would ask how her dissertation was developing on site.

  At dinner, I would entertain Dad and Cameron with a humorous recounting of the luncheon with the president of my college—“I told her, as graciously as I could, ‘Of course I’m honored but I couldn’t possibly take your place. I have more than enough to do taking care of my famous father.’” And we would laugh together.

  Dad was wonderfully tease-able, if the teasing was in reference to his reputation, his popularity, his “women.”

  So happy: the happiest I could remember myself being, in many years.

  Maybe when Dad had looked at me with eyes of unabashed and helpless father-love, as I’d stood with the silly little tooth in the palm of my hand. That long ago?

  Except, stiff and sulky, Dad came downstairs from his study, and seeing me said, “You’re still here?” and I said, “Dad, you and Cameron invited me to stay for dinner, don’t you remember?” and Dad said, with a shrug, “Fine. You can go check on her, see how she is, you know how emotions upset me,” and I said, “You mean, other people’s emotions, Dad—your own are sacrosanct.” And he said, on his way outside, “Wise guy.”

  The last words my father said to me, which he hadn’t said to me in probably thirty years—Wise guy.

  He’d had his camera. He must have intended to take photographs. I watched him outside on the terrace and at the same time I was thinking about Cameron upstairs and how he’d told me to check on her, and what this meant to me, how much it meant to me; and so, when Dad headed for the steps, I wasn’t observing very clearly, or lucidly—just stood there in the sunroom smiling to myself, a big husky not-young overgrown girl in her father’s house.

  It did not strike me—He is in danger. Those damned steps!

  It did not strike me—If I’d wanted someone to fall, I might have sabotaged the steps. I might have loosened nails, supports.

  Though I was drawn to run upstairs to Cameron, yet I found myself following my father outside. A chilly wind from the river, and sun splotches in the heaving water.

  The Hudson River is a living thing, so close by. The massive breadth of water wind-rippled and agitated, never at rest, mesmerizing to watch as liquid flames, and this afternoon a curious slate-blue-gray color, the hue of molten rock.

  “Dad? Be careful . . .”

  He didn’t hear. He wouldn’t have heard. Too many times I’d warned him, he had no awareness of any real danger. And there was a swagger to his walk, a stiff sort of bravado, as if he believed that someone—it would have to be Cameron, she was the only “woman” in residence—was watching him, and admiring him; he took care not to lessen the weight of his right leg, his arthritic knee.

  High overhead several hawks flew. I felt a premonition—but then, I often felt such premonitions here on the terrace above the river. My father laughed at “premonitions”—though he took his own seriously, for he was a superstitious man. I was smiling still, foolishly. I tasted something metallic, cold. I did not want my father to fall and injure himself on the rocks below, all that was the most ridiculous fantasy. I squinted upward at the sky—They are vultures. They sense an imminent death.

  Then, as in a dream, or a nightmare, I heard the cracking wood-plank steps, an abrupt and angry-sounding noise, like a rebuttal. It was a sound somehow familiar to me as if I’d heard it—rehearsed it—many times already.

  Before I saw, I heard: a portion of the steps was collapsing, beneath my father’s weight.

  Dad had gained weight this past winter: though he would not have acknowledged it, in his masculine vanity, he must have gained at least twelve pounds. He’d blamed the bathroom scales for giving erratic and unreliable readings of his weight. But no longer was Roland Marks what one would call slender, very fit-looking.

  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.

  I think this is so. I think he was calling for me.

  Or maybe—he’d only been screaming for help.

  Or maybe—only just screaming.

  What happened was in slow-motion yet also quickly.

  More quickly than I could comprehend in my haze of foolish-daughter happiness.

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

  If I were to be tried for the death of my father Roland Marks, 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.

  NO NO NO no no!

  Cameron was crying hysterically. Cameron was shocking to me—her young face contorted, shining with tears. Her young body broken-seeming, defeated and without strength, so that I had to hold her.

  In the crisis and confusion, my dean-self prevailed: I made the call to 911, an ambulance came, but too late: my father had died.

  His skull had been badly fractured, it would be discovered. He had hemorrhaged into his brain.

  It would be a long time before I could grasp the irremediable fact—Roland Marks was dead.

  Which is to say, my father was dead.

  Is dead.

  (For death is a state that is perpetual: all who’d ever lived and who had died are dead.)

  My memory of the collapsing steps, the scream, the fall—my memory of rushing to the edge of the terrace, to stare at my father fallen and twisted in the broken lumber below—is very vague.

  Li
ke the windshield of my car, grimy and scummy. Sunspots further obscure vision.

  She’d been upstairs, in hiding. She’d heard the sound of the collapsing steps, and my father’s scream.

  No no no no no.

  It was foolish of us, it was risky, dangerous, yet we never thought of not doing it—climbing down, slip-sliding and falling, whimpering in fear, making our way down the near-vertical slope to where my father lay fallen amid rocks. And once there, seeing that he was unconscious—(but still breathing?)—we understood that we must call an ambulance; one of us would have to climb up to the terrace, or to the side of the house.

  Precious time was lost. Minutes . . .

  It would have made no difference, we were told. My father’s skull had been so severely fractured.

  The camera, fallen a few feet away, broken on rocks.

  And the river, only a few yards away, rushing past, noisy, jubilant, with a smell of early-spring, elevated muddy water—indifferent.

  It was Dean Marks who climbed up, who made the sobbing/panting call.

  It was the young blond assistant who was too stunned, too stricken, to move from my father’s body.

  His body had never looked so slight. So inconsequential. His head, turned at a painful angle.

  His handsome face streaked with blood.

  “MY FATHER DIED, two years ago. And my mother—she’d died five years ago. My father hadn’t ever recovered from losing her, I think. I tried and tried with him. To make him think of something else—to make him happy. To keep him company. All the family did. But it made no difference, I guess—he just stopped wanting to live, and he died.”

  Cameron wept in my arms. A tall gawky young girl trembling in my arms.

  It was stunning to me, that my father was gone.

  Yet also stunning to me, that this stranger seemed to have loved him so much.

  For Cameron Slatsky was devastated, clearly. We were sisters in grief, despite the disparity in our ages. Certainly I could not resent her. I could not wish, as in my lurid fantasies I might have wished, that my father’s assistant had fallen in those crashing steps and died with him.

  FOR SOME WEEKS then I was sick.

  Sick with grief, and also remorse. And shame.

  Cameron too was sick, with the shock of loss. But Cameron was younger and stronger than I was, and would be more resilient. She came to me where I was lying on the settee as the strength had drained from my body. I was thinking But now I am his executrix. That is what I wanted.

  “Lou-Lou! My God. Where is he?”

  It did not seem possible that my father was gone. That, if we searched the house, he wouldn’t have been here—somewhere.

  Laughing at us, maybe. But touched by our grief too.

  He’d have known that we loved him. He would not have felt that our love was smothering, or a burden; boring-dull, like so much female love.

  Roland Marks’s obituary was prominent on the front page of the New York Times, on the left side of the page below the fold.

  The photograph showed Roland Marks lean-cheeked, dreamy-hooded-eyed, handsome and smiling. He would have liked it, I think.

  Cameron Slatsky and I commiserated together. There was a luxury of pain, a rush of pain neither of us could have borne alone.

  I took the remainder of the semester off from Riverdale College. In any case, I was finished there.

  In his will, he’d left her nothing. He hadn’t had time to update his will and so in Roland Marks’s will, Cameron Slatsky did not exist.

  This was proper, he’d left the house to me. I felt sick with guilt, yet gratitude, to have been treated with justice for once.

  Very few of the mourners who came to Roland Marks’s memorial service had heard of Cameron Slatsky, let alone knew her. I introduced the silent ravaged-looking girl as my father’s fiancée, and added that she’d been, initially, my father’s assistant. No one quite knew how to speak to her, especially Dad’s older friends, for whom she would have appeared to be the age of their grandchildren. Tall, slump-shouldered, very pale and very blond Cameron wore black clothing, a black jersey dress that fell to her ankles. The diamond ring she’d unobtrusively turned inward, toward her palm, so that the sparkling stone wasn’t visible. Apart from my introducing her to a few people, at the memorial service she stood just slightly apart, ignored as if invisible.

  I felt the injustice, and the irony, of her situation. Her elderly fiancé had died too soon, before she was firmly—legally—attached to his name.

  Dad had loved her so much! How good that the last months of his life had been happy, entering upon his final folly.

  I tried to explain to Cameron, as to others, whoever would listen among the many mourners who came to the memorial ceremony in New York City and to our house in Nyack, that my father’s death was my responsibility—“My father had depended upon me to keep the house in good repair. You know what he was like—he never saw things for himself. The way he’d drive a car with the gas gauge at empty, or a tire losing air—somehow, it worked out. Even Avril shielded him. And Sylvia! When they’d loved their genius-husband, they’d insisted upon taking care of him. We’d all provided a buffer for him, to protect him. He’d had faith in me, his daughter. Those steps should have been repaired. I’d told him, he knew, but—he’d never done anything about it. Like the flagstone terrace, that needs repair. The house is beautiful but a century old. I see him in every room, I hear his voice. I hear him calling—Lou-Lou! Where the hell are you? I let him down. I am to blame for his death.”

  They held me, those who’d loved Roland Marks. Even the litigious ex-wives came to grieve with me, to hold me and absolve me of patricide.

  Or, if they’d halfway believed that I might be halfway responsible, they couldn’t agree that my father’s actual death was my fault. Roland Marks had cheated death a number of times, like a wily cat. He’d run out of lives, that was all.

  “Roland almost died in that car crash on Long Island—Montauk. That was before his career had even begun. Imagine, he’d only published his first novel. And that crazy girl who tried to shoot him on the Vineyard. And the spoiled sushi in Tokyo . . .”

  They would spin legends of Roland Marks. They would mythologize him. His enemies and detractors as well as his friends.

  They would agree: Roland Marks would have wanted to depart this earth in the way he had, suddenly, and without time for reflection; without a debilitating or humiliating illness, or a crushing decline like poor Mordecai Kaplan. In some versions of the story of Roland Marks’s death in April 2011, when he’d been seventy-four years old, it was said that he’d been hiking in the Catskills with his young fiancée, or wife; he’d insisted upon climbing in a dangerous area, and had fallen to his death. He’d defied the young woman who’d been with him who had begged him to come back to even, safer ground . . .

  We drove back to the house in Upper Nyack together. It was my house now, or would be when my father’s will was fully probated. Cameron wept softly. Cameron wept almost without pause. I felt a thrill of deep imperturbable grief that was the most exquisite sensation I’d ever known. As we entered the darkened house Cameron groped for my hand: “We have each other now.”

  IT IS TRUE, TO A DEGREE: THE FIANCÉE AND THE DAUGHTER HAVE each other.

  As executrix of my father’s estate, I have hired Cameron as my assistant. Quite simply, Cameron Slatsky is the most qualified person for the job. Jointly we work on my father’s massive archive which will soon be sold to a prominent American institution; at the last minute, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale is making an unexpected bid. Dad would be pleased!

  There is much more to Roland Marks’s literary estate than anyone might have imagined. I had no idea of the numerous uncompleted, unpublished manuscripts and drafts he’d kept in cardboard boxes, in storage, dating back to his high school days at Stuyvesant High School in the 1940s; in all, thousands of priceless pages.

  In the evening we sit in the sunroom, or on the t
errace. Few people visit us here, for we’ve invited virtually no one; not my sister and brothers, who’d avoided my father when he was living, and have no right to mourn him now, at least in my company; not the “younger children” whom I scarcely know, and who I believe have not even read their father’s books. And none of the ex-wives except my mother, Sarah, who isn’t likely to make the trip, with her ailing husband in Fort Lauderdale, in any case.

  Now the weather has changed to a cool summer, the air is mild and daylight prevails until nearly 9:00 P.M. Cameron has suffered more visibly from grief than I have, I think—(though I have lost eighteen pounds, and am not quite such a husky fleshy healthy-looking gal as my father had seemed to cherish); her skin is sallow, her eyes are ringed with fatigue, and her beauty has corroded, somewhat. Like Lou Andreas-Salomé and like me, she has a slightly overlong nose, a too-intense look about the eyes, a clenched mouth.

  She commutes to Columbia University two or three times a week and returns home exhausted. The dissertation on site has stalled, though as my assistant she’s an able and diligent worker, far more patient than I. Sometimes I hear her crying in “her” room. I enter, and approach her quietly. I slip my arms around her and she turns to me and presses her face against my thigh. She says, “Without you, Lou-Lou, I couldn’t make it.”

  She’d told me more about her father who’d died of a stroke two years ago. And about her mother who had died of a quick-acting pancreatic cancer three years before that, in the last semester of her senior year at Barnard. She said, “Mom told me—‘Don’t give up! I’m counting on you.’ She’d tried to hide the fact that she was dying. I think I was furious at her. All I could do was put on my armor. It felt like actual armor—my makeup, my clothes. Deflecting people’s questions by looking funny, girly. There’s a character in Jealousy who behaves just that way—it’s prescient. Roland got her down perfectly! I needed something to protect me, like a steel vest. So bullets or rocks might be thrown at me and I would feel the shock but not be killed.”

  She said, “I know that people, like you, Lou-Lou, thought that Roland and I scarcely knew each other. But I knew him. Long before I’d met Roland Marks I’d fallen in love with him, reading his books. I’d memorized passages. He really knew women well—you could say, the masochistic inner selves of women. All that was Roland Marks is contained in his books, really. His ‘voice . . .’”