My Father's Footprints (12 page)

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 meet 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.