My Father's Footprints (11 page)

“…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.

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.

The Sarah Whitman Hooker Pie Company—“Try a Hooker for a Change!”—suffered a little bit from a
Playboy’s Party Jokes
sensibility, 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.