My Father's Footprints Read online

  “Bye, Bob,” he says quickly and runs to the car.

  I have to go back to the nursing home to gather my father’s personal effects.

  The people there are, I’ve decided, strangely beautiful. They drift slowly through the halls like ships, broken-masted or hull-pierced, never to sail again, but bobbing and eddying in the last harbor, sad and lovely fragments of their old selves.

  I pick up a little thread of my father, too. To find a missing thing, you go to the last place you had it.

  The New York Times runs a generous obituary, written by Rick Lyman:

  Robert E. McEnroe, who wrote The Silver Whistle, a frequently revived 1948 Broadway comedy about a garrulous tramp who spreads good cheer through a home for the aged, died on Feb. 6 at the Hughes Convalescent Home in West Hartford, Conn. He was 82.

  Mr. McEnroe had written a dozen plays in his spare time while working in the research department at United Aircraft in Hartford before he drew attention in 1947 by selling two in one day to different Broadway producers, an unusual feat for an unproduced playwright.

  The obit tracks the history of The Silver Whistle as play, television play, and movie. It notes the actors who have played the lead role (Jose Ferrer, John Carradine, Lloyd Nolan, Eddie Albert, and, in the movie adaptation, Clifton Webb), and touches upon the fact that the other play, Mulligan’s Snug, was never produced “though it passed through a succession of producers who more than once announced plans to open it on Broadway.”

  The obituary mentions Donnybrook!, Dad’s short-lived Broadway musical of 1961 that starred Eddie Foy Jr., Susan Johnson, and Art Lund.

  It concludes, “Of the years he tried to teach himself playwriting in his spare time, Mr. McEnroe once said: ‘I wrote twelve plays in ten years without earning a penny more than my factory wages. The only thing this proves is that it’s nice to have a job, no matter what.’”

  Edward, Joey’s guinea pig, is sick. Joey and I race with Edward to a small animal hospital in Kensington.

  In the car Joey says, “Well, if Edward dies, he’ll get to see Bob.”

  Jeez.

  The woman at the desk doesn’t want us to be there at all. She has a stern manner, and I get the feeling that somewhere not far from where I stand there is a pipeline backed up with wheezing ferrets, rheumy parakeets, tortoises with hacking coughs. A staggering parade of zoological bit players for whom God’s Great Plan did not, originally, include healthcare.

  Shamelessly, I play my big card.

  “Look, my father died a week ago. This is my son’s guinea pig. And he was close to his grandfather. My son, I mean, not the guinea pig. And, you know? I just can’t do another funeral.”

  She takes Edward and promises the doctor will see him “after hours.”

  There’s an Italian saying, “Green winter, full graveyard.” Edward, a fellow of infinite jest, of excellent fancy, has died. Death plays encores.

  Even though Edward was, in Darwinian terms, capicola, I find his death saddens me—monumentally.

  I remember another February day, when Joey was six, when he and I went together for the first time to the Bronx Zoo. It was a Wednesday, silver-bright sky and spring-warm air. Somewhere among the Ten Great Days of My Life lives that afternoon, walking my little boy around the zoo in that merciful warmth, doing something my father liked to do with me. What I remember also was that he would not leave until we had found some cousin of Edward. We did eventually locate the cavy—actually what a guinea pig is—in the rodent house, and it struck me as odd that Joey insisted on seeing, in such an exotic place, something he could see every day. But it was important, I finally grasped, for Joey to establish that there, in the firmament of lions and apes and zebras and cobras, Edward had a place.

  So Edward’s death is not the kind of news I can deliver on the phone. Feeling like a Shakespeare walk-on [Enter MESSENGER], I drive to my mother’s house, where my son is spending the day.

  [MESSENGER delivers sad tidings. Business.]

  “Well, we knew he was sick. And they don’t live that long anyway. If he were in the wild, he’d be dead.”

  This is Joey talking, not me. He’s stealing all my lines. He is often analytical when he doesn’t trust himself to be sad. He never cries over Edward or Bob. I wonder whether it is because he is strong and secure or because he has a secret, darkened architecture, a labyrinth of baffles through which he bounces his sorrows. I honestly can’t tell, and it seems to me that both could somehow be true.

  We are Sims again. Empty and yet so vulnerable that a sick guinea pig could polish us off.

  HAMLET

  Has this fellow no feeling for his business, that he sings at grave-making?

  HORATIO

  Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.

  HAMLET

  ’Tis e’en so: the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.

  Thonk. Thonk. “Gwine see Miss Liza!” I try a bit of singing at grave-making, but the dirt will not budge. “Gwine go to Mississippi!” It has been a green winter, but beneath the green, the earth is hard and resentful.

  Edward will lie in state (in the garage) until I can figure out how to dig a hole.

  I look up from all my troubles and see that Joey has been, in a funny way, neglected. He has the pasty, sunken-eyed look of a boy who has spent too much time alone with Nintendo.

  So we take a hike up Rattlesnake Mountain in Farmington, Connecticut, on a cold day. It’s a good place for us to go and drop our burdens and get more connected to rock and sky. We have used the mountain in this way all our lives together.

  Joey likes to dramatize a hike by falling deliberately from time to time. He is on the ground from one of these falls when Roy, our old, old dog either fails to see him in time or simply cannot, because of arthritis, manage to miss him. Roy steps on Joey’s face, leaving a muddy pawprint on his cheek.

  Joey finds this interesting.

  “Now,” he says, “I know how the ground feels.”

  Maybe that’s my next job. Get myself oriented. Know how the ground feels.

  After Bob dies, I discover that I have joined, willy-nilly, the Dead Fathers Society, the multitudes of other men who have been clobbered in their forties when their fathers died.

  What you see, in guy after guy, is a sense of wounded surprise. They didn’t know. They didn’t anticipate the lists of unspoken truths and unanswered questions that would sprout, fast as June radishes, in the space where their fathers once stood.

  I get letters from men who say they are still, after twelve years, in some kind of dialogue with the shades of the departed dad. The acceptable obsolescence of fathers is deceptive advertising. “He’s big. He’s tough. He’s stoic. You won’t mind when he croaks.” Humbug.

  The guys in the DFS soften their voices when they tell you their stories. It’s our secret handshake, this bruised little voice.

  It hurts and goes numb, hurts and goes numb. There are days when I want him around, for a dose of his odd politics, let’s say. And there are harder days when I want to confess the secrets of my life to him and ask him how I should live from now on.

  But it’s never really bad, because Dad and I had all that time. I don’t regret a walk or a song or a diaper or a quiz question. I could have done a lot more, but I did enough. Enough to show him love and give me peace. That’s all you can ask for.

  If you’re lucky, now and then, you get more. You get something that feels like grace. Maybe you get a spot on the up end.

  He is dead, and there are one million unspoken words. We were estranged for a lot of those years—not exactly enemies but wary men, brushing past each other, as empty as Sims, as guarded as ghosts. I sit down again with his old scripts, turn the pages. Absurdly, he starts talking to me again—this time about the afterlife.

  [Two knocks]

  SNOWBIRD TOOMEY

  It’s him.

  WILLIE BURKE

  Is that you, Dennis?

  [Two knocks]

 
; Does two knocks mean yes?

  [Two knocks]

  SNOWBIRD

  Wait a minute. Two knocks could mean no. In that case, when you asked him if two knocks meant yes, he could have knocked twice for no.

  WILLIE

  [Annoyed]

  Dennis, what’s no?

  [One knock]

  What’s yes?

  [Two knocks]

  [To Toomey]

  I hope you’re satisfied.

  SNOWBIRD

  Are you in hell, Dennis?

  [Two knocks]

  Do you feel miserable?

  [One knock]

  Do you feel bereft and forlorn?

  [One knock]

  Do you feel repentant?

  [One knock]

  Is your spirit in deep despair?

  [One knock]

  Do you yearn for alcohol and women?

  [Two knocks]

  Do you yearn for poker and racehorses?

  [Two knocks]

  Is there any point in our praying for you?

  [One knock]

  WILLIE

  [Beams]

  He’s fine. He’s fine.

  Two

  Why Nobody Understands Turbulence

  “When they asked you to write this book, I have a feeling they were picturing a more normal family.”

  —THONA MCENROE

  Sarah Whitman Hooker Pies recommended with this chapter

  Captain Jim’s Live Pigeon Pie with shotgun

  Mary Beth’s No-Filling Pie for People Who Don’t Trust Anybody

  Mabel’s Date Nut Marshmallow Goo

  The Green Bastard

  We scroll back twenty-two years. In July 1976, my father goes walking in the hot breath of the Connecticut summer and dies.

  I get a call at the newspaper where I work. Something is wrong, my mother says. Come home now.

  The air has the texture of hot Vaseline. His doctor had told him he ought to take walks for his high blood pressure. His doctor had not thought it necessary to add, “Discontinue walking when the atmosphere around here resembles the inside of a vaporizer.”

  So he sets out at a nice, brisk clip through the heat and humidity and ambles along until his faculties begin to veer out of whack.

  He stumbles into the house and collapses. He may have fainted. His body simply decides that his brain cannot be trusted and temporarily relieves it of command. Ensign Unconsciousness, the bridge is yours. When I arrive on the scene, he has improved, reaching the state of cognitive bleariness that passes, among adult male McEnroes, for normal.

  I am twenty-two and need, at that exact moment, to jump into my car and drive without stopping to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to see a woman. This is not a good time for me to preside over the death of my father.

  “He looks fine,” I tell my mother.

  “I am fine,” my father calls out from a nearby dimension.

  “He’s not fine,” my mother says.

  I look around the room. As usual, I am not 100 percent sure whom we are worried about. I will be making my trip in a very unsafe car. I own a Capri 2000. Things keep breaking off from it. Not the usual things, either, like side mirrors, although one of those has broken off, too. I mean things like seats. The driver’s side bucket seat, for no reason at all, breaks off from the floor one day. On a rainy afternoon, as I drive down the road with my wipers slashing furiously back and forth, one whole wiper arm suddenly breaks off and flies out into the downpour. It is as if a person had waved so excitedly that his arm snapped off. The key breaks off in the lock, and for a time I start the car by putting the fat end into the hole so that it meets up with the thin part trapped inside. After about four months, I decide this is unnatural and have a locksmith pull the thin key sliver out. But during its time of living inside there, it strikes some new bargain with the tumblers. My back-up key will no longer start the car. So I take the entire ignition housing off and let the switch dangle down. I start the car with a screwdriver. I leave it parked in crime-infested neighborhoods, but nobody will steal it, either due to or in spite of the fact that the hard work has been done already.

  My father, meanwhile, has somehow injured his right arm, so that the one thing he really cannot do is turn a key in an ignition. For the next twenty years, he reaches awkwardly over the steering wheel and starts the car left-handed every time. As the song says, When the world is running down, you make the best of what’s still around.

  This is during a time when some of us name our cars. I know a woman named Louisa whose decrepit Chevy Nova is named Flattery. Because Flattery will get you nowhere. She stomps the gas pedal and bellows, “Goddamn it, Flattery!”

  My car is named Angst.

  Anyway, I myself am mildly scared of driving to Virginia in Angst, but then, I am twenty-two and there is this woman. I catch myself wondering if that—combined with what I am hoping to do once I get there—has anything to do with my mother’s hysteria.

  “He looks fine,” I try again.

  “He’s not well.”

  “Go,” my father says from his mists. “I’m fine.”

  He doesn’t seem worried about my driving Angst all that distance.

  “You weren’t fine before,” says my mother.

  “I was influenced… by elves.” This notion seems to cheer him.

  “How bad can this be?” I try.

  “Don’t be fooled!” my mother answers shrilly. “He’s making jokes now, but half an hour ago, he didn’t even know his own name.”

  My father gazes off into the middle distance, as if weighing the merits of that statement. Then he smiles beatifically.

  “My name is Claude Rains,” he says. “And I am a movie actor.”

  I laugh. My mother blows up. Angst and I go to Virginia and, implausibly, come back alive. I’m tempted to say that I don’t remember anything else from that twenty-six-year-old trip but I would be lying. The young woman and I have missed each other terribly. Her parents are there in the house. We slip out into the Blue Ridge night to embrace on the cool, wet grass. And her brother’s border collie finds us immediately. Circles, worries, whines, sniffs. Fusses if we try to shut her back up in the house. We see the black-and-white snout and concerned eyes emerging from the darkness, darting in to meddle with whatever we are doing.

  For years, I miss the point of the entire episode, which is not—it turns out—about Claude Rains or heatstroke or any of the forces tugging me toward Virginia or collius interruptus once I get there. Of more lasting importance is the chance remark about elves.

  The little people are back.

  He’s talking to me again.

  His old plays swarm with spirits and fairies. I’ve placed the scripts in a sort of Rubbermaid crypt. It’s a big plastic box with a hinged lid and curved top, like a treasure chest, and the plays are restless inside there. All the characters and apparitions and oddities from those musty pages leap against the sides of the crate like eels in a stewpot. Down, wantons!

  MS. EMILY BOGGS

  Have you seen anything odd in this house?

  WILLIE BURKE

  Snowbird saw a gnome.

  EMILY

  What kind of a gnome?

  SNOWBIRD TOOMEY

  There aren’t kinds of them. A gnome’s a gnome.

  EMILY

  Where was the gnome?

  SNOWBIRD

  In my room.

  EMILY

  Did it look evil?

  SNOWBIRD

  There was no reason at all for it to look evil.

  EMILY

  How did it look?

  SNOWBIRD

  [Thinks for a moment]

  It looked inscrutable.

  EMILY

  Do you see gnomes all the time?

  SNOWBIRD

  I do not.

  EMILY

  Frequently?

  SNOWBIRD

  No more than anybody else.

  EMILY

  Everybody sees gnomes?

  S
NOWBIRD

  When they’re there to see. You can’t see a nonexistent gnome.

  EMILY

  Have you been seeing gnomes for a long time?

  SNOWBIRD

  You’re twisting things around. I don’t see gnomes. That means you see them where they’re not there. The only time I see gnomes is when they’re actually there to see.

  WILLIE

  Snowbird is very down to earth. You’ll never catch him seeing things that aren’t there.

  In 1946, my father wrote Mulligan’s Snug, a play about a New York City barroom infested with fairies. Mulligan’s Snug was optioned eleven times for Broadway but never staged. One of those eleven optioners showed the script to the eminent British actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who wanted nothing to do with it because “it’s about fairies, and Englishmen don’t believe in fairies.”

  Irishmen do.

  A gentle acquaintance with fairies can make certain troubles—including Englishmen—a lighter burden.

  Not that troubles ever become so light as to fly away for good. And not that fairies can be trusted to act in anyone’s behalf but their own.

  “You’ll never get them little ones to do what you want. They’ll do what they like. Minds of their own,” says Mulligan, the bar owner.

  “Witness the nature of the creatures,” writes Yeats himself, “their caprice, their way of being good to the good and evil to the evil, having every charm but conscience.… Beings so quickly offended that you must not speak much about them at all, and never call them anything but the ‘gentry,’ or else daoine maithe, which in English means good people, yet so easily pleased, they will do their best to keep misfortune away from you, if you leave a little milk for them on the window-sill over night.”

  I grew up around fairies, the way some people grow up around horses or Jack Russell terriers or guns or surfboards.

  My father’s fairies poured back and forth in his life, swept in and sucked out by sloshing tides of alcohol.

  The little people. Their promise to my father, in their whirlings, their caperings, was of a magic that would turn his sorrow—the tragedy that began on the day of his birth—into something so cloudy and fey that it would not hurt anymore. They promised pie powder to sprinkle over his bruises.