My Father's Footprints (13 page)

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 market 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.

WILLIE

We are completely protected against ill-health.

SNOWBIRD

The only way you can kill us is with a gun, knife or rope.

EMILY

Neither one of you looks healthy.

WILLIE

You’re looking at the outside. The outside has been struck by ice storms, snow storms, rain, hail, cold wind, hot wind, soaps,
lathers, razors, aftershave lotions and wet kisses. That’s the outside. It’s the inside that we’re talking about. We take
the Patrick Finnegan Holistic Help for Bartenders and Potato Famine Fighters.

[
Takes out pill bottle
]

It’s in capsule form. Patrick Finnegan’s Pills for Men Who Dare.

SNOWBIRD

Turn it on the side and read the label.

[
To Emily
]

Wait until you hear this.

WILLIE

B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B10, B11, B12, B13, B15, PABA, choline, inositol, A, D, E, F, G, H, K, L, M, P, T, plus 14 minerals.

SNOWBIRD

You have to be careful not to use too much or you’ll lose your taste for alcohol.

WILLIE

It’s a delicate balance.

EMILY

What about cirrhosis of the liver?

SNOWBIRD

That’s all taken care of by the B complex group and folic acid.

EMILY

Heavy drinkers have a high mortality rate.

WILLIE

You’re right. One hundred percent of heavy drinkers die. The question is, when do they die and does alcohol shorten life or
prolong it?

SNOWBIRD

Alcohol is hard on filter-passing germs. And if a germ can’t get through the filter, it has no chance at all. Alcohol will
kill it dead.

WILLIE

Every time there’s an epidemic, the teetotalers go belly-up by the thousands, while drinking men carry on the world’s work.

He accumulates thirty-five or forty pocket calculators.

He buys them obsessively and requests them as presents. The slightest new wrinkle in trigonometric function is enough to make
him want the latest model. After his death, pulled from various cubbyholes and tumbling out of cabinets and heaped together,
they look rather demented, as if he had been striving to count something uncountable.

“Hewlett Packard has come out with a pocket calculator that costs $300,” he writes in a letter to me. “I dream about it when
the moon is full.”

That same letter, typical of his correspondences, offers the following insights.

“Remember, for the first 325 years, Christianity was Unitarian.”

And

“When Werner Heisenberg was on his deathbed, he said
that he had two questions to ask God: ‘Why relativity?’ and ‘Why turbulence?’ Werner claimed that God would be able to answer
the first question but not the second. Science doesn’t understand turbulence; neither do engineers, but they have to deal
with it.”

And

“Twenty-nine years from now there will be 10.6 billion people on earth.”

The letter concludes with a paragraph speculating on the case of William Kennedy Smith, whom my father adjudged “a lying bastard.”
I refuse to quote any of the rest of it here, because it’s full of sticky sexual mechanics, the kind of thing a normal seventy-year-old
father would be unlikely to share with his thirty-seven-year-old son.

He isn’t trying to shock or perturb me, I know. He likes to work on publicized criminal cases and considers his judgments
on all of them to be final. There isn’t any way to work on the Smith rape case without getting into such matters as semen
production, apparently.

The thing is, I never
asked
for information on the Smith case. Or turbulence. Or Christianity. These are not part of any dialogue. Just things he thinks
I should know.

Here is a birthday card I have saved. It came to me in the mail about ten years ago, probably when I was turning thirty-seven.

On the outside of the card is a vase of white tulips and a Bible lying open to a page marked with a white ribbon.

“God Bless You on your birthday,” it reads.

The inside begins with a quote from Psalms: “The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.”

Then it reads, “Wishing you a bright and beautiful birthday… a day alive with promise, rich with possibilities, filled with
the wonder of God’s love for you.”

Underneath that, in red ballpoint, my father has scratched:

Just stay out of hell please.

Pere

A most peculiar man. An irresistible man. Our offices are fifteen minutes away from each other. I drop in a lot. He is almost
invariably there, especially in those later years when he is less likely to be showing houses. I find I need him. He is never
going to put his arm around me and offer up one of those “Well, son…” sessions that seem to happen mostly in insurance commercials.
In fact, he is most likely to cut off all conversation by brandishing some kind of horribly difficult quiz he has spent the
morning devising. I need him anyway. He is never boring, and even if he were, it wouldn’t matter. He’s my father. The man
who talks to elves.

The fanciful world of Bob McEnroe starts to rub off on Joey.

When Joey is three, we walk in the woods pretending to be Robin Hood and Little John. I tend to get the sidekick roles.