Patricide Read Online Free PDF

president at the National Medals ceremony in the White
House, he’d been accompanied by a chic skinny girl who might’ve been a model,
very gorgeous, and so young that the president’s wife had said, utterly without
irony: “It’s so nice of you to bring your granddaughter to our ceremony, Mr.
Marks!”
    It’s well into the twenty-first century. The era of
Women’s Liberation was the 1970s, or should have been. Yet, women are still
bound to men. The majority of women, regardless of age. And a famous man
attracts women as a flame attracts moths—irresistibly, fatally. Some of the most
beautiful moths want nothing more than to fling themselves into the flame which
destroys them.
    â€œGo away. Steer clear of him. Don’t you know who he
is?”—often I wanted to cry at the foolish women.
    My own mother, in fact. Poor Mom had been
clinically depressed, frankly suicidal, for years after their divorce, though
she’d seen a succession of therapists and “healers” and had been prescribed a
virtual buffet of tranquillizers, anti-depressants, organic and “whole” foods.
(She’d been a rising young editor at Random House when Roland Marks had met her
but she’d quit her job, at Dad’s insistence, shortly after they were married.)
As a mother she’d often been distracted and hadn’t been able to focus, as she’d
said, on her children, as she’d have liked; for Roland Marks was her most
demanding child.
    Belatedly, Sarah has tried to be a “devoted”
mother—too late for my sister and brothers, I think.
    In a divorce, a child invariably chooses one or the
other parent to side with. It was never any secret, though he’d moved out of our
house and out of our lives, I’d sided with my father.
    Though my mother was the one who’d loved me , and cared for me.
    My father never knew that I’d spared him the
embarrassment of an ex-wife-suicide.
    I’d been twelve at the time. Mom had been still
fairly young—not yet forty-five. Dad had been living elsewhere for several
months as details of the “separation” were being worked out. (In fact, there was
to be no “separation” everyone but my mother and I seemed to know.) She’d told
me in a matter-of-fact voice, as if she were discussing the weather: “I don’t
think that I can go on, Lou-Lou. I feel so tired. Life doesn’t seem worth the
effort . . .”
    â€œPlease don’t talk that way, Mom. You know you
don’t mean it.”
    I was frightened because in fact I didn’t know that
my mother didn’t mean it. In the slow, then rapid decline of her sixteen-year
marriage with Roland Marks, she’d lapsed into a chronic melancholy. When I’d
been a little girl it was said that she’d suffered from postpartum depression
but in fact, as people close to our family knew, it was my father’s infidelities
that wore her down.
    She might’ve divorced him —so one might think.
    My sister Karin, my brothers Harry and Saul were
impatient with my mother. Her weakness was a terror to us all. She frightened
them as she frightened me but, cannily self-absorbed adolescents as they were at
this time, they reacted by ignoring, rebuffing, or fleeing her, as I did
not.
    One afternoon when I returned home from school I
couldn’t find Mom, though I knew she was home. And then I did find her, locked
into an upstairs bathroom.
    I could hear her inside, beneath the noise of the
fan. She was talking to herself, or sobbing; when I knocked on the door, she
told me please go away.
    But I didn’t go away. I continued knocking on the
door until at last she opened it.
    I don’t think that I will describe what I saw.
    I will spare my mother this indignation, out of
numerous others.
    I called 911. I may have screamed, and I may have
wept, but I only remember calling 911. For already at the age of twelve I was