My Father's Footprints Read online

  “We don’t want to make any money on this,” he tells my mother, as if that sort of thing could get them a bad reputation.

  But mostly, he is wrestling vapor. Something is wrong with his writing, but he cannot see the flaw to fix it.

  And me?

  I try to be nothing like him, even though I am exactly like him. Like every protagonist from Oedipus to Sleeping Beauty, I am in flight from my destiny. I will do something else, be someone else.

  And yet, somehow, when the mists part to reveal me in adult life, who am I? I am dreamy, moody, fond of alcohol, uncomfortable in my own skin, furtive about my emotion. I am a writer. I am Bob McEnroe.

  Still, I try to deprive fate of its victory. Where my dad is a grasshopper, I am an ant. He reaped windfalls and threw his money at cars and dinners and outboard motors. I opt for the weekly paycheck, something he disdained all his life. I write for a daily newspaper and then slowly build a modest reputation for writing short humor pieces. Doubleday publishes my first book. It is moderately successful.

  I publish another book with Doubleday. One day, a letter arrives from the company. My books are being pulled out of stock. They will—in the tradition of Batman villains and Terminator robots—be hurled into vats of acid and turned into pulp.

  I can save as many as I want of either title by purchasing them at a special author’s insider price of 66 cents per copy. I reflect upon this. How much would it cost me to buy a notebook of that many blank pages? More than 66 cents. From a certain standpoint, my writing has actually depressed the value of paper. It is like water damage. I decide not to buy any copies.

  Two days later, a royalty statement arrives from my agent. My royalty statements usually have parentheses around the number. Although not fiscally savvy, I realize this is not a good thing. Parentheses mean you have money that belongs to somebody else. From a theoretical standpoint, I may actually owe Stephen King $7,018.23 for failure to hold up my end of American biblio-commerce.

  This statement is different. No parentheses and in their place, chubby numbers betokening financial health! And then I notice the reason. On the literary agency’s alphabetical list of clients, I am apparently right next to Shirley MacLaine. This is her royalty statement. I would expect to be dwarfed by Shirley in North America, but this is her statement for Pacific Rim countries. There are places with no written tradition where she sells more books than I do in my own time zone. People buy them and make canoes out of them. Shirley MacLaine is selling more books on the island of Komodo than I am in my own hemisphere. On the other hand, how is Shirley going to feel when she sees all those parentheses in her envelope and realizes she owes King seven large?

  Out of such instructive humiliations, I construct a perspective about myself.

  I am careful not to swing for the bleachers. I am not going to burn so brightly that I flame out. I am going to control my gift so that it does not betray me. I have my father’s wild swings of Irish romanticism, but I keep them in check with my mother’s steady, incremental New England puritanism. I am going to avoid the curse of the McEnroe line, right? Unlike my grandfather, unlike my father, I will not be blindsided.

  Right? Right?

  My wife and I cannot conceive a child.

  When I discover this, I have reached the age at which my father felt perhaps the first tickle of his half-century writing problems. I am roughly the age of my grandfather when he went from millionaire to debtor.

  The curse of the McEnroe line descends on me in a rush of black raven wings, and here is the new shape it takes: There will be no McEnroe line. I am the only son of an only son.

  “The purpose of marriage is to bring forth issue,” my father said many times as I was growing up.

  Now he says nothing.

  My wife and I enter the world of fertility medicine, which is somehow both perched on the leading edge of scientific advancement and trapped back in an age when a hunched-over person with a lot of split ends would shake gourds and throw pulverized lizard entrails at you.

  For a period of time—our Von Bulow period—I inject my wife with stuff we keep in our refrigerator. It is made from the refined urine of menopausal women. In the early days of its manufacture, the primary source of the urine was—I’m not making this up—Italian nuns, but I’m not sure this is still the case. I remember reading that the Vatican told the nuns to knock it off.

  Although the burdens of the treatment fall most heavily upon my wife, I have some interesting moments. I am required to produce specimens of a substance I am not accustomed to sharing with people I haven’t at least been out to dinner with.

  Sometimes I am permitted to do this at home, sometimes not. On one occasion I am ushered into a standard gynecological examination room, stirrups and all. I am handed a cup and shown the location of the light switch. No magazines. No Marvin Gaye. The specimen I am trying to produce will be combined with the eggs of a hamster, to see whether my sperm have the ability to penetrate an ovum. If I allow myself to think at all about where I am and what I am doing, I will go crazy. If I allow myself to think that the sweaty, sticky, earthy, ecstatically human business of procreation has been infiltrated by sterile vials of refrigerated nun urine, if I allow myself to imagine all those near-sighted, left-handed, manic-depressive hamsters, I will scream.

  I emerge from that little room with a saffron container’s worth of climactic fluids. I feel that there should be one of those boxes you step up on when you win at the Olympics. There should be martial music of several nations playing.

  But infertility is a quieter world than that.

  Now it is my turn to wrestle with ghosts. Cancer and compound fractures and cholera are things happening that aren’t supposed to happen. Infertility is a thing not happening that’s supposed to happen.

  Through it all, my father is a sphinx. He says nothing.

  He does not say: “The world will be pretty much the same place whether the Edward-Robert-Colin McEnroe line proceeds or not. Adopt if you like. Do nothing if you like. But don’t think I’m staying up nights mourning our genotype.”

  He does not say: “I don’t care what it takes. In-vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, beheading your wife, re-mortgaging the house. Keep the line going.”

  Is he indifferent, terrified, furious, sad, accepting? I have no idea.

  But I remember that line of his that came up half a dozen times over the years, usually when we were deep into our philosophical debates about the meaning of life and the nature of society: “The purpose of marriage is to bring forth issue.”

  The universe abhors an imbalance. Even as I whirl through this travesty of trickling out my seed for the delectation of small tan rodents, my writing career prospers. I get the interest my father wishes he could have from publishers and agents. I become a contributing editor at Mirabella magazine for its first two years, and the publication’s early buzz begets more offers for me. Where my father is infertile—laboring over manuscripts and then stuffing manila folders full of rejection letters from agents and publishers—I am ripe.

  On the other front, he has conquered, and I am vanquished.

  It is his birthday. The four McEnroes—my father and mother, my wife and I—are out to dinner, crimped to the table in our usual uneasy state. Three of us have roughly the same capacity for sharing our feelings as the neolithic stone heads on Easter Island. My wife, a psychotherapist, a talker, a prober, a confessor, is the strange new plant growing among us, a poppy shooting up amid pachysandra.

  My parents are not relaxed diners. They track the flow of food and staff visits in a kind of mental Domesday Book. Look at those people. They arrived ten minutes after we did. Now they’re being served before us. There’s an eternal quest for restaurant justice. Tonight, my father is especially restless, although the service is not slow. Where is the waitress? Why hasn’t the order come?

  “Just relax,” I tell him, as gently as I can. “There’s no hurry. I mean, do you have somewhere you need to be after this?”<
br />
  “No, but I want to get there anyway,” he says. He grins and snaps his fingers in a parody of himself as guy-on-the-go. He is seventy-two. He’ll be going home to stare into the night and watch the little people creep along the edges of the carpet.

  There’s wine on the table, maybe just enough to move the four planets out of their usual uneasy orbit.

  My wife cranes forward out of her chair. She looks at my father. “How do you feel—” The three of us start, as if a cobra had abruptly materialized and begun darting its deadly head at us. “How do you feel… ?” What kind of horrible question is this going to be? A how-do-you-feel question, that’s what kind. We don’t like that kind.

  “…about the fact that we can’t have a baby?”

  Oh, Jesus.

  My father is talking, but, in the custom of our family, not to anyone that we can see. He is looking at a point in the air above the table.

  “I think that Thona should get an ax. And a wheel on which to sharpen the ax. And when Colin comes home each evening, she should be sitting at the wheel, sharpening the ax.”

  “What does that mean?” my wife asks.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” he says.

  She stares at him. I glance at him uneasily. My mother looks at her plate.

  That’ll teach her to ask how anyone feels.

  In the car going home, Thona says, “Did you understand what your father said?”

  “It seemed as though he was saying that I needed to be threatened with a sharp ax so that you and I would have sex,” I tell her.

  “That’s what I thought,” she says.

  Of course, the one thing you do, when you’re infertile, is have sex. Not when you feel like it. Not when you’re horny or feeling affectionate. But when the cycles and pills and shots demand it. You have sex when you’re exhausted or sad or emotionally flatlining. You have it in the missionary position to maximize your chances. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to do it when it’s fun. But the one thing you don’t do is skip it, because that would make all the incisions and scopings, the injections and minor surgeries, the humiliating tests and expensive medicines completely pointless.

  Here is my father, a man who sits home and plows through Descartes and nuclear physics. Races through Stephen Hawking’s book like it’s Dick and Jane. Devours history and theology after the rest of the world has turned in for the night. His is the supremely wakeful mind. And this is what he has surmised about his son and daughter-in-law.

  He has watched the whole high-tech medical melodrama unfold, and this is what he extracts from it: an Iron Age Jiggs and Maggie scenario, involving sharp blades and sexual coercion.

  I am hurt. I am outraged.

  A few months later, in the midst of a deep funk about the state of my marriage, my infertility, my weird father, I find myself on the phone to my mother, and to my surprise, in defiance of the McEnroe tribal law, I am talking about it.

  “How could he say that to us?”

  “I thought it was a strange comment. I don’t know what he meant,” my mother says.

  I tell her what he meant.

  “Oh, dear. I’m sure he didn’t mean that.”

  “Well,” I say, “he did mean it. What’s more, he meant it to hurt me. What’s more, he’s angry and envious because I have a book deal, and he doesn’t. Don’t tell him I said that.”

  So she hangs up and tells him.

  A day or so later, a letter arrives from him.

  Of course he is proud of me and my book. Yes, it hurts a bit that I seem able to get published so easily. Any writer would envy my current path of ease. Perhaps, he suggests, my current psychiatrist is stirring up things inside me. Psychiatrists have a way of doing that. He himself has spent long stretches on the couch, he reminds me, and knows how seductive the vision of the “new self” is, with its bold new ways of truth-telling and blasts of fresh air blowing out the cobwebs of dormant falsehoods. The difficulty is, he observes, that the people around you are still living their old lives, and they’re not necessarily eager to meet the bright new person you are becoming.

  Message: We are doing just fine with denial. Don’t rock the boat.

  Oh, and the hatchet thing?

  “Your mother told me about your reaction to a statement I made. I was shocked. I never had any thoughts like those and— if I had had them—I would have kept them to myself.”

  I put the letter in my desk drawer. The thing is, he has a point. This is not the kind of family where one person can independently decide to start telling the truth. At the time of this letter, I have been his only son for thirty-three years. He has never told me even one story about either one of his parents. I don’t even know my grandmother’s name or how she died or when. What I know of my grandfather comes only from my mother. My father’s paranoia about any probing into his childhood would be appropriate for one of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s kids. Once, when I asked him what each of his parents died from, he huffily asked me, “Do you have any formal training in psychiatry?”

  “No, but…”

  “Maybe you should leave these kinds of questions to professionals who know how to handle them.”

  “I was just asking what my grandparents died of. It’s the kind of thing that comes up on medical forms.”

  He was silent for the rest of the night.

  On the other side of the family, my mother and her mother did not speak to each other for seven and a half years during the 1970s. I was their go-between. On holidays, I would arrive laden with gifts from my mother to her mother, with instructions to pretend they were from me. Boxes and boxes, which my grandmother would open slowly, as if her own daughter might leap out of one of them, like a spring snake from a gag candy jar.

  “Barbara shouldn’t buy me so many things,” she would say wistfully.

  The fight had been about me, about a speeding ticket I’d gotten, but not really. It was truly a long, wordless wail, a lonely wolf call about change and loss. What these New England women do is harden, like the rocky, frozen soil they grew up on. Their hearts, their arteries, their positions, their resolve, even their visages. The proper response to every scarcity, every injury of time, is to harden. That’s why they call it hardship. My mother ended the drought by simply showing up at her mother’s door unannounced (and dragging me along, of course). The two began chatting as if no bitter, silent interval had ever occurred.

  “Do you have any idea how weird that was?” I asked my mother in the car on the way home.

  “We’re Yankee women. That’s how we do things,” she said, as if the manual for this had been written in 1681 and handed down from Increase Mather.

  No, denial is not something our family can give up the way you give up butter and switch to margarine.

  Maybe this is a good time to talk about the Court of Pie Powder. To say nothing of the lists of pies that begin each chapter.

  My father never knew it, but his McEnroe forebears came from the tiny Irish village of Mountnugent, in the south of County Cavan, northwest of Dublin. I didn’t know it either until after his death, when I started work on this book. I began to wonder how I got into this messy business of being who I am, and eventually it seemed as if the only thing to do was go back to Ireland and ask people. I found our people in Mountnugent. You’ll meet them later in the book.

  Wondering how Mountnugent—it doesn’t sound very Irish—came to be, I drove up north to the city of Cavan and clawed around in some research materials. I discovered the granting, in 1762, of letters patent to one Robert Nugent. This meant that the British were willing to let Nugent treat his area as a village, with two yearly fairs and a weekly market and “a Court of Pie Powder and all customs and tolls.”

  A Court of Pie Powder, it turns out, is not as nice as it sounds. I suppose you could say the same about a lot of places. The term is a corruption of the Norman “Pie Poudreur” or “dusty foot.” The Court of Pie Powder meted out rough justice, especially to peddlers and vagrants.

&nbs
p; We could make it into something nice, you and I. There aren’t any Courts of Pie Powder anymore, so we could make it mean what we like.

  It struck me, anyway, that a Court of Pie Powder could be something I’ve been searching for all my life. We are, most of us, jammed with grievances and guilt. We are filled with suspicions of ourselves and others. I suppose some people are not, but you just want to strangle them. Who couldn’t use a Court of Pie Powder, where one’s life is gently kneaded into a pliable mass and then rolled out into a fragrant oval, pressed with skillful, floured fingers against the bottom and sides of a pan? It’s nice to be kneaded.

  The proceedings of a Court of Pie Powder would be less concerned with guilt or innocence or liability or malfeasance and more concerned with sweetness and mouthfeel. Life is messy and so are pies. The best you can hope for is to set the whole overheated shebang to cool on the sill for a few decades. The court would be more about tortes and less about torts. It would be a chance to sift, to mix, to trim the excess and flute the edges of a troubling existence. It would be a way of having desserts that are better than our just deserts.

  The Court of Pie Powder is a fine place in which to treat my father, who once idly invented a pie company as a way of distracting himself from the long afternoons he spent in real estate offices, not selling enough houses. His was called the Sarah Whitman Hooker Pie Company, and the name was based on an actual Revolutionary War heroine who had lived near where we lived. She housed imprisoned British officers at her home and somehow managed to charge them money for it, I think. That was her heroic feat. It’s the kind of upper(pie)crust Yankee moneygrubbing that still plays very well among your New England higher orders.