Patricide by Joyce Carol Oates

reasonable situation.)
    (Yes. It is utterly reasonable—it is pragmatic. She will marry him for his money and his
reputation and not his “virility.”)
    Lying in my bed in Skaatskill, I was helpless in
the grinding maw of such obsessive thoughts.
    â€œHe won’t betray me. Even if he marries
her . . .”
    (Ridiculous! He’d betrayed virtually everyone in
his life, every female . Why not reliable old Lou-Lou
with her pearly false tooth?)
    Dad had asked me to continue to “check” the house,
so of course I did. Bitterly resenting being treated as a servant and
yet—grateful. More than I needed, I visited the house; I brought in Dad’s mail,
which was considerable; sorted it, left it in carefully designated stacks on his
desk—the work of an assistant; but the assistant wasn’t on the premises, I was .
    At Riverdale, I now left my office promptly at 5:00 P.M. most days, where once I’d remained
until much later. And now on Friday afternoons, I sometimes left as early as
3:00 P.M. (“Family matters”—“my father, medical
appointment.”) Or took the entire afternoon off.
    There were academic events I had to attend,
national conventions—these I cut short, to return to Nyack and drive past the
house on Cliff Street which was looking shut-up, unattended. With my key I let
myself in and prowled the rooms like a clumsy ghost. I knew the house so well,
yet stumbled. I collided with things. Seeing my reflection in mirrors—“Oh,
Lou-Lou? What has happened? You were just a girl . . .”
    I was doing my father’s bidding and yet: I was an
intruder.
    Easily, I might become a vandal.
    For there was some secret in this place, that might
be revealed to me if I prevailed. Though Dad would have been furious, I looked
through his desk drawers, and his filing cabinets; there were literally
thousands of papers, documents, manuscripts in his keeping, in his study and in
an adjoining room; his older manuscripts, galleys, page proofs and drafts were
stored temporarily at the New York Public Library, which was negotiating to
purchase the entire Marks archive. It was not true that my father’s papers were
a mess as I’d told Max Keller—but they did require a more systematic
organization, which only I could provide, I believed.
    Only I! The exemplary beloved daughter.
    I lay on the bamboo settee in the sunroom staring
out at the sky and the river below. Soon, my father and Cameron would return—she
was now his “fiancée.”
    The Hudson Valley: such beauty! But it was not
always an evident, obvious beauty—the beauty of a river depends upon weather,
gradations of light. The ceaseless shifting of sunshine, shadow. Cloud
formations, patches of clear sky. An eye-piercing blue. Dull gunmetal-gray. The
river reflecting the sky, and the sky seeming to reflect the river.
    I was thinking of the English explorer Henry Hudson
who’d sailed up the river for the Dutch, in the early seventeenth century,
until, about 150 miles north, the river became too shallow for him to navigate.
How bizarre it seems to us, Hudson had been looking for a route to the Pacific
Ocean, as his predecessor Christopher Columbus had been looking for a route to
the East Indies . . . I thought The routes we think we are taking are not the routes we will take . The routes that take us.
    I must have fallen asleep for I was rudely awakened
by a loud rapping at the front door.
    It was the carpenter I’d tried to engage to repair
the steps. I had not heard from the man in weeks and now, as if on a whim, or
more likely he’d happened to be driving by the house, he’d stopped to speak with
me.
    We went out onto the terrace, to look at the steps.
He’d given me his estimate for the repair but I had no way of knowing how
reasonable it was, for I hadn’t called anyone else. He said, “I could begin next
week, Mrs. Marks.