Read Patricide for Free Online Page A

didn’t
detract from their young sexy bodies.
    My father didn’t know what to make of me, beyond
marveling at my “pluck”—“physical courage”—“recklessness.” He should have held
me, hugged me—but of course, he’d have risked soiling his J. Press sport coat
and tattersall shirt if he had. Easy intimacy wasn’t one of Dad’s notable
traits.
    At five foot ten I loomed over Dad who habitually
described himself as “just-under six-feet”—I didn’t want to think that I
intimidated him, as sometimes I intimidated my smaller classmates. Roland Marks
was an elegant figure—slender, narrow in the torso, straight-backed and always
impeccably dressed. In literary circles he could be depended upon to wear what
is called, with jaw-dropping pretension, bespoken suits . The tattersall was his “country gentleman”
shirt—he had others, dressier and more expensive. His neckties were always
Italian silk, very expensive. Though this afternoon at the girls’ school in Rye,
Connecticut, he was wearing a beige-checked shirt with no tie beneath a camel’s
hair coat; neatly pressed brown trousers and dark brown “country” shoes with a
high luster. If you hadn’t known that my father was a famous man, something of
his prominence, his specialness , exuded from his
manner: he expected attention, and he expected a certain degree of excitement,
even melodrama, to stave off the essential boredom of his life. (This, too, is
taken from Roland Marks’s memoirist fiction.) In his youth he’d been strikingly
handsome—as handsome as a film star of the era—(Robert Taylor, Glenn Ford,
Joseph Cotton?)—and now in late middle age he exuded an air still of such
entitlement, women turned their heads in his wake, yes and young women as well,
even adolescent girls—(I’d seen certain of my classmates stare openly at my
father before dismissing him as old ).
    In my mother’s absence, Dad had driven to Rye,
Connecticut. Mom was now his ex-ex-wife and his feelings for her, once a toxic
commingling of pity, impatience, and repugnance, were now mellowing, as his
feelings for his more recent ex-wife, the notorious litigant Avril Gatti, were
sharp as porcupine quills. In the accumulation of former wives, my mother Sarah
Detticott was not the most vivid; her predecessor, and her glamorous successors,
had figured in my father’s fiction more prominently, pitiless portraits of
harshly stereotyped bitch-goddesses that were
nonetheless entertaining, rendered in Roland Marks’s beguiling prose. Even
feminists conceded In spite of yourself you have to laugh—Marks is so over-the-top sexist.
    The fact was, Dad had missed several visits with me
that fall. He’d had to cancel—“unavoidably, if unforgivably.” He’d insisted that
I attend the Rye Academy since it wouldn’t be “too arduous” a drive for him from
New York City—(compared to the smaller Camden School in Maine which I’d
preferred)—and so it was a particular disappointment when he called, sometimes
just the night before a scheduled visit, to cancel. Especially if we’d arranged
it so that Mom wouldn’t be coming that weekend.
    Like the Swiss weather cuckoo-clock, in which the
appearance of one quaintly carved little figure meant the absence of the other,
my two so very different parents could not be in my company at the same
time.
    He was looking at me now with dazed wounded eyes. I
thought He really does love me. But he doesn’t know what that means.
    By this time Tina Rodriguez, our phys. ed. teacher
and our hockey coach, who’d been refereeing the game, was headed in my
direction. “Lou-Lou! What’s this about a tooth?”—she would have pried open my
hand if I hadn’t opened it for her.
    â€œIt doesn’t really hurt, T.R. It’s just bleeding a
lot, but—it isn’t