Patricide

by Joyce Carol Oates

  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’s 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 . . .’ ”

  Tenderly she said, “I will take care of you, Lou-Lou. Anything you want from me, I will provide.”

  Since my father’s death, I am often short of breath. I find it difficult to sleep on my back. Of course I’m frightened to see a doctor and have an EKG—(I’m a physical coward like Dad)— but Cameron insists that she will drive me to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which would have been Dad’s choice, if I made an appointment.

  I never had a daughter. I’d never had the experience of being pregnant.

  Though Dad would have laughed at me in scornful pity, I’d never had the experience of sex with a man, or a woman. Never the experience about which Roland Marks wrote with such corrosive humor and such unabashed delight.

  If Roland had married Cameron, she would be my step-mother.

  How strange it would have been, perhaps how wonderful, to have a step-mother young enough to be a sister.

  Strange, and wonderful. Though I would not have thought so at the time of our first meeting.

  OUR NEWS is, we will be attending the Los Angeles Book Fair together, to represent Roland Marks whose first several novels are being republished in classy trade paperbacks. Then, we are going to Book Expo America, in New York City; then, later in the summer, London and Stockholm for similar publications. We will be interviewed at literary festivals, and on TV.

  Onstage, we wear black, side by side: we are not likely to be mistaken for sisters, but we may be mistaken as kin.

  By slow degrees Cameron is becoming beautiful again, something of the luster in her eyes returning. Though she’s still pale, and wears her shimmering blond hair pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck, in a way I think too prim and widow-like. I am not so pale, rather more putty-colored, which Cameron tries to correct by “making up” my face—with startling results, I have to concede. (How Dad would laugh at me—“I can see through your fancy makeup, kid.”) For these occasions Cameron wears tasteful black dresses that fall to her ankles, often with a shawl or a scarf around her shoulders; I have urged her to stand up straighter, to resist the impulse to make herself shorter, now that there is no reason for her to make herself shorter. I wear dark trouser-suits, that fit my less hulking body flatteringly; my graying hair is trimmed short as a man’s, in fact shorter than my father’s hair had been. Audiences gaze at us with fascination. They know something of Cameron’s story, and something of mine. As if spontaneously we clasp hands onstage. We do not rehearse such scenes. Tears spring from our eyes like shining jewels. The audience draws in its collective breath.

  Women who love each other. Women who will stand by each other.

  How unexpected, this is Roland Marks’s legacy.

  WHO WOULD have thought, this posthumous life of Roland Marks is so—celebratory! For his admirers, his survivors, are many; and his literary reputation, buoyed by rumors that Patricide, scheduled for fall publication, will be the author’s strongest novel, a masterpiece to set beside the major works of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Bellow, has never been higher. Requests for reprints of all kinds, republications of titles long out of print and seemingly forgotten, come to us continually. The Library of America will be issuing a large volume titled Roland Marks, and Cameron and I will be co-editors. Dad’s longtime publisher has commissioned a biography and Cameron and I will be interviewing prospective biographers including the distinguished Nelson A. Gregorson whose biography of Melville Dad had so admired.

  Of course, we will be editing the Selected Letters. A volume of at least seven hundred pages, a treasure trove of brilliant prose, flippant prose, gossip, scandal, candid snapshots of the writer’s secret life, “visionary” insight.

  There is even movie interest, from Miramax Films, in Intimacy: A Tragedy.

  Though Roland Marks had haughtily refused to sign over any of his titles to be “mongrelized” by Hollywood, Cameron and I are willing to negotiate with the filmmakers. We joke about our “cameo” roles . . .

  When we miss him terribly, we seek each other out. We clasp hands. Cameron says, swiping at her eyes, “Oh God, he was so funny. I loved his humor, his laughter.” I said, “I can hear him laughing, sometimes.” And we listened.

  Trying not to hear instead the final desperate scream that might have been my name.

  The other night after Cameron returned late, exhausted, from New York City, I was awakened hearing her walking in the house, as the floorboards creaked; I went to her, where she was lying on the settee in the sunroom, that was flooded with moonlight. I brought her an afghan, because the night was cold; and Cameron is very thin, and becomes chilled easily. And I held her hands, to warm them. And I thought We both loved him. And now we have each other.

  This is not the ending that I had envisioned, just months ago. It is no kind of an ending anyone might have envisioned, especially my father, and yet—here it is.

  This night, when I can’t sleep, I curve beside Cameron on the settee, and pull part of the afghan over myself. If Cameron is covered, including her bare feet, and I’m part-uncovered, that’s fine with me: of the two of us, I’m the stoic. I’ve brought a bottle of red wine, and we drink from the same cloudy glass, by moonlight. A rich red sensation begins in my throat and spreads through my chest, my belly and my loins. I feel the stirring of sexual desire, but it is not a desire for paroxysmal pleasure; I think it is a desire like the opening of a flower, petals spreading to the sun. It is the purity of desire, that requires another person to coax it into blooming.

  “I love you, Cameron. I am so grateful that you’ve come into my life.”

  “I love you, Lou-Lou. If Roland could see us, he’d be—well, he’d laugh, wouldn’t he? He’d be jealous, maybe.”

  High overhead the moon is moving through the night sky. Venus, the brightest star. And Jupiter. We are planning an exhibit of Roland Marks’s photography, taken in the last three
years of his remarkable life; some of the photographs are of the night sky shot with moonlight above the Hudson River. Dad would have been embarrassed, and abashed: he’d been an “amateur”—he hadn’t been competing with “professionals.” Already we’ve shown a portfolio of the Hudson River photographs to the gallery here in Nyack, and the proprietor is eager to mount the exhibit; yet we’re thinking perhaps this is premature, and we should show the portfolio to some galleries in Chelsea or TriBeCa as well. Tell me a story about your father, Cameron says in a voice husky with sleep, and so I tell her about the incident at the Rye Academy. “I was playing field hockey and Dad was in the bleachers—he came to a surprising number of my games that year—and a girl struck me in the mouth with her stick, and one of my teeth—this one, here—was knocked out. And Dad said, ‘What’s that in your hand, Lou-Lou?’ and I said, ‘What’s it look like, Dad?’ and he said, not missing a beat, ‘It looks like about five thousand dollars, Lou-Lou. But you’re worth it.’ ”

  Please enjoy this excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Mudwoman, available now from Ecco

  Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate—or destiny. After her rescue, the well-meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their middle-class values, seemingly sealing it off forever. But the bulwark of the present proves surprisingly vulnerable to the agents of the past.

  Meredith “M.R.” Neukirchen is the first woman president of an Ivy League university. Her commitment to her career and moral fervor for her role are all-consuming. Involved with a secret lover whose feelings for her are teasingly undefined, and concerned with the intensifying crisis of the American political climate as the United States edges toward war with Iraq, M.R. is confronted with challenges to her leadership which test her in ways she could not have anticipated. The fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life in her upstate New York hometown now threaten to undo her.

  A reckless trip upstate thrusts M.R. Neukirchen into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind. A powerful exploration of the enduring claims of the past, Mudwoman is at once a psychic ghost story and an intimate portrait of a woman cracking the glass ceiling at enormous personal cost, which explores the tension between childhood and adulthood, the real and the imagined, and the “public” and “private” in the life of a highly complex contemporary woman.

  Excerpt from Mudwoman

  In fact there had been inhabitants along the Mill Run Road, and not too long ago—an abandoned house, set back in a field like a gaunt and etiolated elder; a Sunoco station amid a junked-car lot, that appeared to be closed; and an adjoining café where a faded sign rattled in the wind—BLACK RIVER CAFÉ.

  Both the Sunoco station and the café were boarded up. Just outside the café was a pickup truck shorn of wheels. M.R. might have turned into the parking lot here but—so strangely—found herself continuing forward as if drawn by an irresistible momentum.

  She was smiling—was she? Her brain, ordinarily so active, hyperactive as a hive of shaken hornets, was struck blank in anticipation.

  In hilly countryside, foothills and densely wooded mountains, you can see the sky only in patches—M.R. had glimpses of a vague blurred blue and twists of cloud like soiled bandages. She was driving in odd rushes and jolts pressing her foot on the gas pedal and releasing it—she was hoping not to be surprised by whatever lay ahead and yet, she was surprised—shocked: “Oh God!”

  For there was a child lying at the side of the road—a small figure lying at the side of the road broken, discarded. The Toyota veered, plunged off the road into a ditch.

  Unthinking M.R. turned the wheel to avoid the child. There came a sickening thud, the jolt of the vehicle at a sharp angle in the ditch—the front left wheel and the rear left wheel.

  So quickly it had happened! M.R.’s heart lurched in her chest. She fumbled to open the door, and to extract herself from the seat belt. The car engine was still on—a violent peeping had begun. She’d thought it had been a child at the roadside but of course—she saw now—it was a doll.

  Mill Run Road. Once, there must have been a mill of some sort in this vicinity. Now, all was wilderness. Or had reverted to wilderness. The road was a sort of open landfill used for dumping—in the ditch was a mangled and filthy mattress, a refrigerator with a door agape like a mouth, broken plastic toys, a man’s boot.

  Grunting with effort M.R. managed to climb—to crawl—out of the Toyota. Then she had to lean back inside, to turn off the ignition—a wild thought came to her, the car might explode. Her fingers fumbled the keys—the keys fell onto the car floor.

  She saw—it wasn’t a doll either at the roadside, only just a child’s clothing stiff with filth. A faded-pink sweater and on its front tiny embroidered roses.

  And a child’s sneaker. So small!

  Tangled with the child’s sweater was something white, cotton—underpants?—stiff with mud, stained. And socks, white cotton socks.

  And in the underbrush nearby the remains of a kitchen table with a simulated-maple Formica top. Rural America, filling up with trash.

  An entire household dumped out on the Mill Run Road! Not a happy story.

  M.R. stooped to inspect the refrigerator. Of course it was empty—the shelves were rusted, badly battered. There was a smell. A sensation of such unease—oppression—came over her, she had to turn away.

  [ . . . ]

  This side of the Black Snake River were stretches of marshland, mudflats. She’d been smelling mud. You could see that the river often overran its banks here. There was a harsh brackish smell as of rancid water and rotted things.

  Amid the mudflats was a sort of peninsula, a spit of land raised about three feet, very likely man-made, like a dam; M.R. climbed up onto it. She was a strong woman, her legs and thighs were hard with muscle beneath the soft, just slightly flabby female flesh; she made an effort to swim, hike, run, walk—she “worked out” in the University gym; still, she quickly became breathless, panting. For there was something very oppressive about this place—the acres of mudflats, the smell.

  Even on raised ground she was walking in mud—her nice shoes, mudsplattered.

  Her feet were wet.

  She thought I must turn back. As soon as I can.

  She thought I will know what to do—this can be made right.

  Staring at her watch trying to calculate but her mind wasn’t working with its usual efficiency. And her eyes—was something wrong with her eyes?

  [ . . . ]

  Stress, overwork the doctor had told her. Hours at the computer and when she glanced up her vision was distorted and she had to blink, squint to bring the world into some sort of focus.

  How faraway that world—there could be no direct route to that world, from the Mill Run Road.

  A crouched figure. Bearded face, astonished eyes. Slung over his shoulder a half-dozen animal traps. With a gloved hand prodding at—whatever it was in the mud.

  “Hello? Is someone . . . ?”

  She was making her way along the edge of a makeshift dam. It was a dam comprised of boulders and rocks and it had acquired over the years a sort of mortar of broken and rotted tree limbs and even animal carcasses and skeletons. Everywhere the mudflats stretched, everywhere cattails and rushes grew in profusion. There were trees choked with vines. Dead trees, hollow tree-trunks. The pond was covered in algae bright-green as neon that looked as if it were quivering with microscopic life and where the water was clear the pebble-sky was reflected like darting eyes. She was staring at the farther shore where she’d seen something move—she thought she’d seen something move. A flurry of dragonflies, flash of birds’ wings. Bursts of autumn foliage like strokes of paint and dec
iduous trees looking flat as cutouts. She waited and saw nothing. And in the mudflats stretching on all sides nothing except cattails, rushes stirred by the wind.

  She was thinking of something her (secret) lover had once said—There is no truth except perspective. There are no truths except relations. She had seemed to know what he’d meant at the time—he’d meant something matter-of-fact yet intimate, even sexual; she was quick to agree with whatever her lover said in the hope that someday, sometime she would see how self-evident it was and how crucial for her to have agreed at the time.

  Thinking There is a position, a perspective here. This spit of land upon which I can walk, stand; from which I can see that I am already returned to my other life, I have not been harmed and will have begun to forget.

  Thinking This is all past, in some future time. I will look back, I will have walked right out of it. I will have begun to forget.

  [ . . . ]

  At the end of the peninsula there was—nothing. Mudflats, desiccated trees. In the Adirondacks, acid rain had been falling for years—parts of the vast forest were dying.

  “Hello?”

  Strange to be calling out when clearly no one was there to hear. M.R.’s uplifted hand in a ghost-greeting.

  He’d been a trapper—the bearded man. Hauling cruel-jawed iron traps over his shoulder. Muskrats, rabbits. Squirrels. His prey was small furry creatures. Hideous deaths in the iron traps, you did not want to think about it.

  Hey! Little girl—?

  She turned back. Nothing lay ahead.

  Retracing her steps. Her footprints in the mud. Like a drunken person, unsteady on her feet. She was feeling oddly excited. Despite her tiredness, excited.

  She returned to the littered roadway—there, the child’s clothing she’d mistaken so foolishly for a doll, or a child. There, the Toyota at its sharp tilt in the ditch. Within minutes a tow truck could haul it out, if she could contact a garage—so far as she could see the vehicle hadn’t been seriously damaged.