My Father's Footprints Read online

  “What good will that do if he falls on top of you, and you both get hurt?”

  We have to apply just enough pressure so that she can resist, resist, and then cry and give in. She has to be able to blame us for the smashing of the Tablets of Commitment without really having been so mercilessly bullied that there is lasting damage.

  When the deed is done, the nurse leaves, and my mother and I are alone with our decision and our patient, who has become endearingly childlike in recent days. No, not childlike, infantile. The realization gives me a little jolt, and I can identify the sense of regret and nostalgia draped over me. It’s the ultimate Oedipal joke. My mother and I have a baby. For the last few days we’ve been feeding and diapering him and trying to discern from his sometimes incoherent pleas what it is he wants or needs. We’ve been up at all hours. And we’re going to miss him when I take him to Hughes Convalescent Home tomorrow.

  Hughes is within walking distance from my parents’ apartment, so I bundle up my dad, blanket, parka, hood, and wheel him over. The whole thing feels like an afterthought following the Breaking of the Covenant. The people at Hughes greet him as though his arrival were ordained at the hour of his birth. “Oh, there you are!” Big smiles.

  They take off the hooded parka and lay him down on a bed.

  “I’m Anna,” says a beaming nurse.

  “I’m Santa,” says my father. “But they took away my suit.”

  “Is he joking or disoriented?” she asks me.

  “That’s sort of the basic question I’ve been asking myself for thirty-five years,” I tell her.

  Every few months, people call up with ideas about what to do with his best play, The Silver Whistle. A movie. A TV series. A musical version. It was a Broadway hit for Jose Ferrer about fifty years ago. Then it was a Mr. Belvedere movie. Then it was a Playhouse 90 episode. But producers and agents call all the time to fiddle with new proposals.

  I am lost. All of the people strongly connected to the play are now dead or non compos mentis.

  I am hunting through my father’s files, looking for clues. Here’s a folder marked “Theater Correspondences.” I am unsurprised to find that only 60 percent of what’s in there has anything to do with theater. There are letters of all kinds. All of them are from him. He has saved carbons. I am unsurprised to find that in many, many cases he has not saved the other person’s letter back. These would not have interested him as much as his own letter. The letters are funny, troubling, problematic. A person seeking his advice about buying a house or staging a musical was just as likely to get a snootful about William of Orange or the flaws in Trinitarian theology or whatever was on his mind. “There will be a test on Friday,” one of these letters concludes.

  I am drawn to two. One he sent me in an attempt to patch up a very painful stretch of bitterness between us. It is carefully worded. Admits no real fault. But it eagerly seeks peace. Another is to his agent, who, perplexingly, became a rabbi late in life. The letter brags about me. I am going to give a commencement speech at the private school from which I graduated, it says. Who, it wonders, would have dreamed of such a thing?

  With apologies to Thurber, I awaken at 4:00 A.M. to hear, distinctly, a seal barking.

  A hunt turns up no seals, just a sick little boy whose virus has turned into something else.

  “Sounds like it might be croup,” says the doctor on the phone to my wife. “Does he make a sound like a seal barking?”

  My dog and father are already sick. My mother is a survivor of recent cancer surgery. My wife has frequent, incapacitating headaches. This, I think in a moment of abject self-pity, is what my life has become. Seal barks and whale songs.

  Joey, who is a trouper and notoriously brave about illness, burns in my arms and weakly wheezes out the question intrinsic to every disease.

  “Is this going to go away?”

  The doctor tells my wife we should take him outside. Something about the cold doing something to the inflamed and swollen something.

  I wrap him in blankets and stagger outdoors with him.

  It is January 1998. As an anxious nation holds its breath, Marvin Runyon announces he is quitting as postmaster general to return to the private sector. There is also something going on that has to do with the president and a woman named Lewinsky. I stand outside with a hot child in my arms and tilt my body back so that I can look at the stars sparkling in the cold, black sky. How are we going to get along without Marvin Runyon?

  Gazing at the sky, I have a vision of myself, the last healthy person in the world, running from station to station with a bedpan, while the music they used to play for the guy with the plates and the sticks booms out of the clouds. I am in the night sky, a constellation, Sandwichomeda.

  When I visit the nursing home, my father is padding around in the halls, moving his wheelchair with waggling shuffles of his feet. In this context he is peculiarly downscaled. He was The Big Show when we cared for him at home. Now he seems like one of several kinds of persons one sees in the halls of nursing homes. The final trick of age and disease has been to make him pretty much like everybody else.

  “Can you get me out of here?” he asks.

  “No. It doesn’t make sense for you to be anywhere else.”

  He tells me he has been assured I can get him out of there. He also tells me I am, to the best of his knowledge, his father.

  My wife succumbs to the Venusian croup-flu. I am now officially the plate-and-stick guy.

  Everybody is sick. On a Saturday night I’m leaving alone, to go see Washington Square, mainly because I love Jennifer Jason Leigh and never miss her movies.

  I’m heading out the door to watch two hours of Henry James making sure nobody gets anything they really want. Joey asks if I’m coming straight home.

  “Where else would I go?” I ask.

  “Go out. Get drunk,” he suggests.

  “And then what?”

  “Buy a gun,” he adds helpfully.

  “Sounds like a great Saturday night. I’m on my way.”

  “Who wrote the plays Macbeth and Hamlet?”

  My father thinks a bit. He is sitting in his wheelchair at the nursing home, a place I am starting to like, with its goofy faux-everything, cheery retro-fifties decor. We are in the Bamboo Room, my favorite of the several public spaces, with its poseur Asian motif but no actual bamboo that I can see.

  “I don’t know,” he finally admits. I don’t think the whole Francis Bacon controversy is what’s slowing him down here.

  Maybe multiple choice would be better.

  “Who wrote The Glass Menagerie? Was it

  a. William Shakespeare

  b. Tennessee Williams

  c. Arthur Miller?”

  “The Glass Menagerie would be Tennessee Williams,” he says very slowly.

  I am pleased, and begin again.

  “A closed system will nonetheless gradually lose energy. I am describing entropy, which is the second law of

  a. Thermodynamics

  b. Quantum mechanics

  c. Motion.”

  “That would be motion.”

  I am sad. He was the one who taught me about the second law of thermodynamics.

  “Do you want to keep doing this? I mean, are you enjoying it?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Which of the following Revolutionary War generals tried to betray West Point to the British?

  a. Israel Putnam

  b. Benedict Arnold

  c. Horatio Gates?”

  A pause.

  And then, from somewhere behind me:

  “Benedict Arnold!”

  Another guy in a wheelchair. He wants to play, too. So we let him. He’s pretty clueless about the math stuff.

  We move into one of the other public rooms. My mother shows up.

  “Who danced with Ginger Rogers?” I ask.

  “That guy,” my dad says.

  “I know ‘that guy.’ What is his name?” I sing a few bars of “Let’s Face the Mus
ic and Dance.”

  Now a whole bunch of people in wheelchairs are beaming at me. They like this game. “That guy!” I could get used to this. Magister Ludi of the demented.

  I sing some more. Everybody beams. Everybody is happy. How can we not be? There may be trouble ahead, but how can we not be happy while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance? Life, in this frozen moment, is paralyzed with goodness.

  “Who wrote David Copperfield?”

  “David Copperfield.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that David Copperfield wrote David Copperfield.”

  “That is incorrect. I’ll give you three choices.

  a. Victor Hugo.

  b. Charles Dickens

  c. James Polk.”

  “Why don’t we make it Charles Polk?”

  “Why don’t we?”

  My father has a fever.

  I start getting calls in the afternoon during my daily radio show. He’s bad, he’s worse. Should I come now? Not yet, but maybe soon.

  Suddenly, the producer gets on the studio monitor and says, “They think you should come now.”

  I rip the headphones off my head, run to the garage, kick the tires, and light the fires. I’m there in minutes. And he’s slipping.

  If you’ve read this, you know I’m involved. You know I’ve been a good son, pushing the wheelchair, taking care. But I suddenly realize I never said the basic, rock-bottom stuff. My mom leaves the room for a few minutes and I hunch forward and chatter. He is rolling in the sleep of near-death.

  “You were a great dad. I was always proud to be your son.” Can I really be saying these things for the first time? “You taught me so much, about how to be kind and funny and how to write. I love you. You’re a great dad.”

  He rolls and turns. I think he’s hearing. Oh, God, let him be hearing.

  My mom comes back in. I sing a few songs, just to have my voice in his ears. We tell him that rest and peace are coming. I tell him he can let go. And when it comes, it comes as a mere slowing down into nothing. No rattle. No spirit flying out.

  If he were here, he would know what to say. He would say something funny.

  “Death is overrated.” Maybe that.

  We walk outside. It’s night, and the sky is full of stars and a slivered moon. Is this where I’m supposed to look for him now?

  The Silver Whistle is about a con man who restores youth to people in a nursing home.

  “When you were a child you responded to the wind. To the flight of a scarlet bird at sundown. To the first rays of light across a sea at dawn,” the con man tells a woman. “Look up at the stars. Look up at the night. Let the feel of the earth go through you.”

  At night, I suddenly want somebody in the God business to come to my house and say something wise to me. I almost don’t care what. But no one does. If you don’t go to the practices, you can’t suit up for the games, apparently.

  Alone in my car, I sing the Johnny Mercer song I wanted to sing to him as he died. But I couldn’t. My voice would never have held, just as it doesn’t hold now. It’s the one about the two drifters, off to see the world. Suddenly I’m a little kid in the car with my dad, two drifters, off to the zoo or the railroad tracks to watch trains, or to find out what’s waiting ’round the bend. Suddenly I’m a middle-aged man crying very hard in a ’95 Honda, stopped at a red light on a Friday night in the winter.

  He starts to talk to me.

  So much is unsaid. So many questions linger. I dig through his old scripts, as if they were instruction manuals for a suddenly comatose machine.

  WILLIE BURKE

  [Smiling as he pours beer]

  It was a grand funeral.

  SNOWBIRD TOOMEY

  It had dignity, and that’s what a funeral needs more than anything else.

  WILLIE

  I thought the casket would be heavier.

  SNOWBIRD

  We were on the end that was up when we carried it down the church stairs. Then there was the grade down to the grave. We were on the up end there too. One of the secrets of living an easy life is to always be on the up end.

  I see that, like any good Irishman, Dad had been preparing the world for his death for about fifty-three years. He was the funniest person I ever knew. I miss him, shopping for his casket. He would have been hilarious. The guy at Taylor & Modeen is incredibly nice, never pressures us, leaves us alone in the showroom so I can help my mom spend the right amount. Tight with a dollar when it comes to the comforts of life, she displays an unexpected high-roller streak when it comes to the casket. I’m trying to picture my father in this discussion of wood vs. metal and of various “interiors.” There’s nobody home in a dead body, and you might as well be piling books and bingo games and bicycle pumps on those expensive satin sheets in there. But casket-shopping touches our inner Egyptian.

  When my time comes, burn me up and scatter me in the woods. I’ve always known that. But I get a little sucked into the comfort angle. We find a box that, even I admit, looks pretty cozy. Something about the sky blue interior is deeply inviting and beckons to me, just a little.

  “Now, you had brought a dark suit for him to wear, right?” the guy asks.

  “Yup.”

  “See, that’s all going to pull together once he’s in there.”

  Oh, Dad. We should have gone casket-shopping ages ago. You would have been a riot.

  Burial will be private, but my mother wants to see him one more time, all made up and in the box.

  So does Joey.

  “I couldn’t go see him in the nursing home because I was so sick. Now I want to say goodbye,” he tells me.

  He wants to give him a toy or something else to keep in the casket, too.

  In my mother’s kitchen, he spots a type of chocolate cookie my father loved. Dad and my mother fought about them, because his diabetes made them a hazard, the way he went at them.

  “You could put some of those cookies in the casket,” he tells her. “Bob loved them.”

  “Oh, no,” says my mother, who risked her health and maybe her life to keep him at home until the final ten days, who ministered to him with a tenderness that touched and surprised me. “He’s not getting any cookies.”

  Passing through the kitchen during the day, I come upon a doodle by Joey. He has drawn two Saint-Exupéry stars with arrows reaching up to them. The arrows stretch out from the words

  Bob

  Oh Bob

  Shall we gather at the casket?

  Apparently so. I thought nobody would want a “viewing,” but apparently everybody does. My mother, wife, and son are at the funeral home looking at the body. So is my dad’s cousin Peggy, the closest thing he ever had to a sibling. The mortician, trying to be helpful, has put so much terra-cotta makeup on my dad that he looks like a clay model of himself. All of the hawklike comical ferocity is gone from his features.

  Joey has chosen two toys—a stuffed sheep and a plastic fairy—to put in the casket with his grandfather. He has also written a note.

  Dear Bob

  I love you

  If you read this.

  Love, Joey.

  We’re a family of notes, apparently.

  When my grandmother died, she left instructions requesting a pair of warm socks and a certain robe she had been saving for the journey to the next life. When somebody went looking in her closet, they found a likely robe. In the pocket was a note. It read, “This is it.”

  She was my mother’s mother, Alma Cotton, daughter of a widowed farm laborer. Standing at my father’s casket, I’m dimly aware that I don’t even know the name of his mother, whom he could not bring himself to discuss. I know nothing, save one or two tiny details, about her life. I couldn’t even guess where she’s buried.

  On my way to the graveside ceremony, in the brief stretch of road from my mother’s apartment to the cemetery, I am seized by an impulse. I want balloons.

  I stop at a store, race in, get five blue helium balloons y
oked together with metallic ribbons. Why five, why blue, I couldn’t say.

  And thence to the cemetery, where a tiny knot of “immediate family” has gathered for a ceremony presided over by Sean Kennelly.

  “Joey, do you know Grampa’s not in there?” Sean asks, nodding at the box before he begins. (“No,” I think giggily, “but hum a few bars and we’ll fake it.”)

  Joey nods yes, and Sean says a bit more about that in his Dublin brogue. He reads a few things, including a bit from a Jewish service, and leads us in the Lord’s Prayer. (Who can it hurt?)

  And then Joey and I go up on a rise of earth, and he turns loose the balloons. Still tethered together, the blue globes circle one another, weaving, passing through, bobbing, changing places like dancers in some very complex gavotte. Whirl, loop, circle back in the chaotic breezes of noon.

  Bob.

  Oh Bob.

  All of the elements of the man, I think, are drifting into heaven’s vault. His love, his humor, his sorrow, his anger, and his fifth element—that remarkable knack for leaving the world and entering magical realms. We can see, too, the silver lightning flashes of ribbon snaking among the balloons.

  “Bye, Dad,” I hear myself say.

  The others keep watching, but I turn away, because my eyes aren’t good. And because I’m done. I saw him go up.

  Joey, however, is glancing over at the grave, where the casket is still seated in its frame, above ground.

  “When do they put it in?” he whispers.

  “Not until we leave, I guess.”

  “Ask them!”

  I ask the funeral-home guy.

  “Most people like us to wait until they’ve gone,” he says.

  “I don’t believe this,” Joey says.

  “Mom?” I ask.

  “I don’t want to see that,” she says.

  “Maybe you better get in the car,” I tell her.

  Joey and my wife, Thona, and I go back to the grave, and the guy lets Joey turn the handle that lowers the whole rig. We watch it go all the way down. Then Joey pulls two flowers, white and red, from the floral piece and tosses them in on top of the box.