My Father's Footprints Read online

  The Sarah Whitman Hooker Pie Company—“Try a Hooker for a Change!”—suffered a little bit from a Playboy’s Party Jokessensibility, but some of the pies were memorable. The pies that I mention at the start of each chapter are his ideas.

  Col. Ellwood’s Sensible Peach for Young Christian Women

  Glutton’s Pie with Oscillating Bottom and Crispy Handles

  Hamlet Pie with Egglet and Toastlet

  Mango Mango Bang

  There were dozens more. I used to look at the lists of imaginary pies and half-wonder whether he shouldn’t be spending a little more time trying to earn a living.

  The Court of Pie Powder would be a place for dismissing exactly that kind of a charge in a milky, dreamy, Sendak Night Kitchen setting. When I catch myself feeling bitter or resentful of my dad these days, I picture us both in the floury haze of the Court of Pie Powder, acquitting ourselves.

  We acquit ourselves pretty well.

  Through the comforting white fog of pie powder, I look back to that time of infertility and his devastating hatchet remark and see Bob McEnroe in a different light.

  He is frightened. He is sad. “I have made every mistake that a man can possibly make.” He cannot persuade the spark of his writing to jump its gap. With each new day, he is more memorable as a peculiar man—full of intellectual quirks—who works in a real estate office, and less persuasive as a young lion of Broadway, the man who went out to Hollywood and fended off stars who hoped he would write a play for them. He doesn’t even tell those stories. Patricia Neal, Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor rapping on his door, asking to meet with him. Who would believe it?

  And now his son has a problem. He can’t help. And he’s not exactly untouched by all this. Here in his early seventies, he is thinking about what remains behind and what goes forward, after he dies. The McEnroe DNA double helix isn’t whirring like an eggbeater, burrowing into the future. It’s bunched in a knot, tumbling across the floor, getting kicked around with the dust bunnies. In fear and frustration, he lashes out with a weird remark whose meaning he himself barely grasps.

  Case dismissed.

  For the last forty years of his life, he sits in a series of real estate offices, dreaming of pies, often selling very little real estate but engaging in other, feverish activities. He wears a jacket and tie every day and looks, alternatingly, down at the floor and off into the ether. This habit of not looking at people is one I have, alas, inherited. He cannot remember anybody’s name, ever. I can remember names with almost archival precision but have no idea whom they belong to—I cannot recognize faces. There is even a name for this: prosopagnosia or “face-blindness.” (Imagine the size of the name tags at the Prosopagnosia National Convention.)

  He requires “personal space” at least as big as a Major League on-deck circle, and the women who work with him make a little game of backing him in skittering arcs around the room simply by taking one step closer every time he steps back.

  The older he gets, the more his feverish mental activities interfere with the selling of real estate. He is almost incapable of dealing with customers whose interests are, in his view, limited—that is, people who seem mainly interested in either buying or selling a house.

  If people are willing to discourse with him about the Hundred Years’ War or the fact that hippo jaws can easily crush a boat or how many of the twelve billion neurons in the human brain are firing at any given moment—if they are any fun to talk to during those long stretches of driving around in his car—he might be able to help them buy or sell a house.

  Mostly, though, he is doing a different kind of work—assembling some kind of Grand McEnroe Unified Theory of Everything.

  When he dies I inherit a series of late-in-life appointment books, in which startlingly few appointments are recorded but whose every page is crammed to the margins with observations and musings. They are like the notebooks of some modern-day Lucretius, if Lucretius had recorded, with equal faithfulness, (a) insights into the nature of things, (b) work he did on his Ford Escort, and (c) what he had for lunch and dinner (especially if Lucretius had chicken croquettes quite often).

  There are passages and pictures clipped from magazines and pasted to blot out whole afternoons and evenings, and bits of rumination: “God created the universe. He set a hundred billion balls spinning in space that may be infinite. Most balls had no life or points of interest. A few balls delighted God, and he kept track of them. Our ball grew lizards and God liked to watch the big lizards eat.”

  The appointment books sometimes seem intended for consumption by some outside party. There are even instructions. “Unfold,” it reads on the outside of a folded-up clipping about Tennessee Williams that is pasted into a page. Whom is he instructing? Me?

  These and other items in the Robert E. McEnroe Archives have a way of hitting me, from time to time, with bolts of unpleasant lightning. Some of the entries are about me—I am seen as stinting, unforthcoming, bordering on unkind—and some are painful in other, unexpected ways. I have learned to peer into all this clutter the way one watches the last reel of The Silence of the Lambs, peeking through parted fingers with one’s hands in front of one’s eyes.

  Here is his appointment book for 1989. I am playing posthumous detective, snooping around for some clue to his mood about adoption. I am scanning the weeks surrounding October 1. He has meticulously recorded problems with my mother’s car and the fact that he had chipped beef for dinner and, on one occasion, something called “reinforced soup.” He has carefully written that Reno, Nevada, is west of Los Angeles and has noted a few facts about Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark birth control decision. He has filled many blank lines with names. Names of people he once knew. Names of characters who appear in his scripts and names he intends to give future characters. Songs he remembers and shreds of ideas. Actors he worked with. “Gaffer Doyle.” “Grilled Cheese.” “Eddie Foy.” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” “Father Finucane.” “Rubber Ducks.” “Glazed Chicken.” “Kitty O’Shea Craemer.” “Colin.” “Georgia O’Keefe.” “Welsh rarebit.”

  Where is Joey’s birth?

  He has noted that an owl is “a flat-faced bastard.” Or maybe that is something you would call an owl if you wanted to hurt its feelings. He has written, “Eddie has the piles.” There is no one in his life named Eddie, except his father, who is forty years dead. Maybe he likes the sound of it.

  On October 10, he has written, “M. I. L. died 12:25 this day. She was a good woman.”

  I stare at these initials for weeks before I realize that they stand for mother-in-law. My grandmother, Alma Cotton, who did not speak to her own daughter all those years.

  She was the one who wrote the note about the robe, when death was far away but near enough. My grandmother could see it striding toward her, like a Sunday afternoon visitor, walking from a great distance down flat farm roads. “Just take me to Windsorville,” began the note. There was a little cemetery there and a place next to her husband, who had died about fifty years ahead of her. She wanted a robe and heavy wool socks.

  “I intend to be comfortable if there is such a thing in the next world,” she wrote.

  On October 5, I find, “Foster grandson born. Will be picked up in Texas late in October.” He hasn’t, as you can see, figured out the difference between “foster” and “adoptive.” He hasn’t, as of this date, offered even a whisper of support or promised me he will love this child or told me that, whatever I need, he’ll be there for me. Because he has no idea whether that’s true or not.

  And then, on October 23, at the bottom of a long column that starts with “Unicorn Couple” (don’t ask me) and continues through “Pork Chops, Louise Gabyson” and “Randy Kolodney,” I find “Joe McEnroe.”

  In October 1989, Thona and I fly out of Hartford in a thunderstorm.

  We land in El Paso, and roughly forty-seven seconds later—or so it seems—someone hands us a baby. We must spend part of a week in the city, waiting for various approvals. We me
et with the baby’s birth mother, who is tiny and beautiful. She is from Juarez, Mexico. She asks us only one thing: “Teach him to love himself.”

  One evening, we begin to run out of formula and diapers. I leave the hotel and walk through the city to find some. El Paso is a place where possibility and fate mingle in the air and lie on the skin. It’s the borderland, a place where, as Gloria Anzaldúa once wrote, “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”

  It is October 21, 1989. At a stoplight where the traffic backs up, I see a Mexican woman moving slowly from car to car. Slung over her shoulder is a baby, about the size of Joey. In her hand is a paper cup from a fast-food place. She is collecting money, wordlessly. I give her a little. A soft “gracias” floats back over the traffic.

  I am seized by the way tiny shards of chance erupt into cathedrals of destiny, the way flecks of happenstance adhere and accrete into the crystalline structures of life. Where is that other baby going? To what life am I taking Joey? And how does the difference happen?

  “Teach him to love himself.” I’m not exactly the expert on this subject. If she knew the family history, she’d grab the baby back. I can’t even promise that his new grandparents will acknowledge him. Why couldn’t she have said something easy, like, “Teach him quantum mechanics”?

  Much later, when Joey is eleven and feeling awkward and miserable, Thona tells him the story again, the story of his birth mother saying, “Teach him to love himself.”

  “That’s working out great,” he says dryly.

  Walking back through El Paso with the diapers and formula, I struggle to remember a Pablo Neruda poem that describes all these portentous feelings, but I’m no good with poems. Me trying to come up with an apt poem is like Spinal Tap trying to harmonize at Elvis’s grave.

  I look it up when I get back. It’s called “Let’s Wait.”

  Other days to come

  are rising like bread

  or waiting like chairs or a

  pharmacopeia, or merchandise:

  a factory of days in the making:

  artisans of the soul

  are building and weighing and

  preparing

  days bitter or precious

  that will knock on your door in due time

  to award you an orange

  or murder you in cold blood where you stand

  This is how life feels all of a sudden. My grandmother dies. My son is born. Fate is whacking me with a croquet mallet.

  When Thona and I return from Texas with the baby, my parents come to our house and sit on our creaking, sagging redwood deck. It is a warm day for mid-autumn. We have a big yard, loaded with oaks and maples. The leaves are yellow. The baby’s skin is the color of coffee with milk. My mother holds the baby, and my father holds back.

  The baby’s eyes flash with brown intensity.

  What the hell is going on here? the baby wonders.

  A few weeks later, we leave Joey alone with his grandparents and go out for the night. They play with the baby for a little while, and then it is time to put him to bed in his port-a-crib.

  My mother retires to a separate room to let the baby settle into sleep.

  My father tries, but he can’t.

  Because… what if…

  He goes back in the room and sits down on the floor, next to the port-a-crib.

  And he stays there for maybe a couple of hours, watching the shadows of sleep steal over the tiny form in the terrycloth pajamas, watching the little head turn in slumber.

  Because… what if…

  He’s hooked. He will spend the remaining years of his life as Joey’s shaman, the high priest of a religion for two, an alternative world of cassette players, compasses, calculators, goggles, hammers, pulleys, socket wrenches, wristwatches with peculiar features, binoculars.

  The appointment books make space on their orderly lines for a new presence. Joey’s arrivals and departures, naps, tantrums, and exclamations are charted along with everything else.

  I enter my parents’ apartment one afternoon. Joey is three. My father’s nineteen calculators and eleven wristwatches are competing for space with Joey’s action figures, which may or may not include Spiderman, Captain Hook, the Little Mermaid, Recession Man, Mr. Suppository Head, McNeil and Lehrer, Bobo the Penguin Boy, and Jack Kemp. Two insane collections are at war.

  My father is staring fixedly at Joey and holding up a cassette case.

  “Mr. Dwarf,” he says very seriously, “do you remember where you put what goes inside this?”

  In time, stranger devices will emerge from his Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet.

  “Do you think he is old enough to have his own knife?” my father asks me.

  “His own what? He’s five years old!”

  “Just a very small knife.”

  “No!”

  When Joey is eight, I enter the apartment one day to find my mother panicking, my father flummoxed, Joey laughing and yelling, “It wasn’t me!” My father has somehow obtained a version of the device used to foil bank robbers by squirting indelible dye all over their ill-gotten gains. He has, in the course of showing it to Joey, accidentally triggered it, and green oobleck is spurting into the room.

  “Dad!” I yell.

  “Bob!” my mother yells.

  “It wasn’t me!”

  “Because… what if…” I am my father in that way, too. In those early days, I, too, cannot keep myself away from Joey as he sleeps. I develop a manic obsession with whether or not he’s breathing. He often breathes so quietly in his sleep that I need dead silence to hear him. I need to hold my own breath, to get rid of that competing sound. I need to bend low, close to his little head, with my own breath forming an anvil in my lungs and my blood turning into steel bands around my temples… just one more second… can’t breathe yet… haven’t heard baby breathe… And then I have to dive out into the hallway and pluuhhhhhh exhale noisily, take another breath, and go back in because… what if…

  One night, when Joey is four, I am putting him to bed.

  What I do not know at this moment is that, earlier in the day, my wife, while dropping off Joey with my parents, noticed a plastic toy gorilla and launched into an impromptu explanation of evolution.

  She then departed, giving my parents a chance to add their own thoughts.

  I know none of this, so I am startled when Joey says, “You know Barbara [my mother] doesn’t come from monkeys.”

  “She doesn’t?”

  “No. I come from monkeys. And Bob comes from monkeys, but Barbara doesn’t.” He is quite serious about this.

  “What,” I ask, already dreading the answer, “does Barbara come from?”

  “Pilgrims.”

  “I see.”

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  It might be the ultimate sign of acceptance (and price of admission) into their world. They start telling you preposterous lies. They’re going to make him a crazy person, too, like the rest of us.

  Joey makes Bob happy. He says quite openly that the idea of living a long time holds a new allure. He’s got a grandson. The idea of an Irish line abruptly turning Mexican has begun to amuse him. He’s got little people. He’s starting to write about them again. He doesn’t feel especially good. He’s drinking a lot, mostly secretly. He refuses to make a connection between those two things.

  He writes:

  Dear Colin and Thona,

  The partial script I am turning over to you does not require any of Colin’s time. This is good because he doesn’t seem to have any time. This raises the question: Why submit a script? For what?

  For some time, Barbara has been loading me down with major diseases. The number of diseases run from one to five, depending on her mindset. Her chief concern is liver disease because the patient dies in agony. She perks right up when she gets to the agony part. One goes out screaming and thrashing at the pillows. People at the bedside put cotton in their ears and do their beads. I am in the mar
ket for a motorized wheelchair with a claxon horn and a place to hide a gin bottle.

  Fogarty’s Folly is a rewrite of Mulligan’s Snug, which was optioned by eleven Broadway producers but never got on a stage…

  If I die tomorrow look for Fogarty material in my yellow pads. If I don’t write it all, Colin can put his name on the script along with mine. This presumes that he doesn’t hire another writer to finish the script.

  Now let me give you the nasty part. I have no intention of dying until I am 125. That means Colin will be eighty-six years old when he gets the script.

  Pere

  He dies five years later of cirrhosis.

  The letter is not exactly brimming with trust in me, is it?

  What kind of son does not even know of his father’s deadly drinking? I did not. I lived in the same town. I saw him once a week, at least.

  Both he and my mom are adept at masking symptoms and behaviors.

  My mother knows all the basic neurological field tests— reciting the presidents in reverse order, counting backward by sevens—and she practices them. So she’ll pass. Because if she passes, there won’t be anything wrong with her.

  “Barbara’s goal is to have Alzheimer’s and to have nobody know it,” my father says.

  His goal is to drink himself to death before anyone can intervene. If you see elves in your sober hours, how will anyone know when you’re lit?

  He talks to me now.

  On the pages of the old scripts, there’s a kind of Tippler’s Creed. Here is what he wrote, even as his liver was dying from drink. Denial gets a bad rap, but in the hands of a master… well, read on.

  MS. EMILY BOGGS

  God help you both. Your minds are rum-soaked, gin-soaked, whiskey-soaked, wine-soaked and beer-soaked. Your livers would frighten first-year medical students.

  WILLIE BURKE

  We’ve got the best livers in town.

  SNOWBIRD TOOMEY

  Everything inside us is under control: hearts, lungs, kidneys, small intestines, large intestines, white corpuscles, red corpuscles.