My Father's Footprints (16 page)

Here is a scene in which Willie’s psychiatrist visits the house to learn more about the family history.

MARTIN BURKE

Insanity? There’s been no insanity in my family. The Burkes have always been a sound people… and dependable. The Burkes have
always been a dependable people.

CUTLER

No insanity?

MARTIN

None at all. The nearest thing there was to it was an uncle of mine, Snowy Dougherty, who acted a little odd. In fact, they
put him away from time to time… just to keep him from hurting himself.

CUTLER

He was suicidal?

MARTIN

No, indeed. Snowy liked life too much for that. He had spells come over him where he’d do things to himself with pins and
needles and razor blades. He was harmless, but when he got that way he’d talk about beheading women and it used to make the
women nervous. That’s why when he got that way the women would insist that he be
locked up. He didn’t mind very much. He was an amiable man who kept his emotions under control. If he’d been quiet about beheading
people, he’d never have been locked up at all.

CUTLER

He sounds like an unusual man.

MARTIN

[
Indignant
]

Snowy Dougherty was as fine a man as ever walked the earth.

CUTLER

Was there anybody else who acted odd?

MARTIN

My grandmother killed herself but there was nothing odd about that except the way that she did it.

CUTLER

How did she do it?

MARTIN

[
Shakes his head
]

I’d rather not say how she did it.

CUTLER

You can tell me. I’m a psychiatrist.

MARTIN

That’s no reason for telling you, and I won’t.

CUTLER

But…

MARTIN

The woman did herself in in her own way. If it was unique, it was because she was an unusual woman. If it was a little weird
and gruesome, it was because the woman was upset at the time.

CUTLER

It’s rather important that I know how she did it.

MARTIN

It’s not important at all. If I thought it was important, I’d tell you.

[
Snorts
]

If it’s the queer ones you’re after, they’re all on the wife’s side of the family.

Insanity, suicide, the fierce comedy of self-delusion among the Irish. This play should have been distributed to our congregation
of three. By 1970, it would be our book of common prayer, our liturgy, our order of worship.

Outside Werner’s house, America is going crazy, but very little of 1968 penetrates our world. We could be in one of Edith
Wharton’s novels. Or one of Ray Bradbury’s. I don’t have Tommy Smith and John Carlos posters on my bedroom wall and I have
only the vaguest sense of Abbie Hoffman.

At school there is a sense of the unfolding moment, but it is cushioned by all the energy a private school expends on making
1968 look as much as possible like 1948 and 1928. We wear jackets and ties every day, assemble in a chapel each morning, and
regard girls as speculative, like purely theoretical astrophysical entities. There is revolution in the air, but it is filtered
to a thin mist by the time it reaches us.

A new teacher arrives in 1968. His name is Tyler C. Tingley, and he had attended the school himself. Now he is fresh out of
Harvard and brimming with idealism. He teaches my ninth grade English class, where he is alternately worshipped and tortured,
depending on which sensibility prevails in the ranks that day. On torture days the class responds to his candor and thoughtfulness
with fusillades of cynical, hostile remarks. They research his personal life and history as a student and cunningly weave
the new information into their hurtful taunts. Of particular interest is his wife, Marcia, who is beautiful in a luminous
and detached way that reminds me of Yoko Ono. How does this earnest nerd of a teacher merit the desirable Marcia? my classmates
wonder.

I don’t join in the torment, or at least I’m not comfortable carrying it beyond the gentle teasing Tyler seems to enjoy. I
need him. He is the first teacher to applaud my writing, to push me beyond mere workman-like schoolboy prose. He singles out
a short story I have written from the perspective of a lizard and makes sure it is published in the school literary magazine,
which is called
The Wyvern.
Wyverns are English dragons, and everything at Kingswood is a Wyvern, including the teams. It doesn’t occur to me until later
to wonder what my father, so radicalized an Irishman, thought of this school drenched in faux English heraldry.

What does he think, for that matter, when four young Englishmen become my new gods? One day Tyler Tingley arrives in class
with, of all things, Beatles albums. Did we know, he asks, that Beatles lyrics often contain hidden messages, disguised references
to all sorts of things? We do not. I certainly don’t. I haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to the Beatles, and
the idea, in general, that pop music is about anything grander or deeper than cars, girls, and sunshine is contrary to my
understanding.

We begin to study
Revolver
and
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band,
with Tyler prodding us along. What is the Albert Hall and why would you try to fill it with holes? Who is kicking Edgar Allen
Poe and why? The more we dig, the more we find.

“Sometimes,” Tyler tells us, “John Lennon seems to stick images in there more for his own amusement than because they convey
something important. Another writer who did this was James Joyce. Some of the excitement in interpreting work like this is
solving all the little mysteries. Which are the important ones and which are just a writer being playful?”

Boom. It is as if someone has tossed a hand grenade into our midst. We become mavens for literary exegesis, detectives of
symbolism and—especially in my case—maniacal Beatles scholars.

Almost every boy in the class is, in some sense or another, converted, but a few of the meaner cynics find it difficult to
admit to themselves that this nerd, this weenie, has swept such powerful ideas into our heads. They step up their taunts and,
following an earnest explanation by Tyler of what is meant by the term “lay reader,” one of them—the angriest boy among us—
waits until Tyler is out of the room and scribbles, on the board, “Is Marcia a lay reader?”

This has, at long last, the sought-after effect of making Tyler C. Tingley lose his composure.

“I come in here and I try to treat you like grown-up human beings, and what I get is the chance to find filthy things written
about my wife,” he shouts.

The tirade continues from there. I am ashamed for all of us, and a little bit fearful that somehow the covenant between him
and us has been broken. I can see that Tyler is, more than anything, hurt, and coming from a family where emotions are battened
down and stowed in watertight holds, I have no idea how serious an eruption like this might be. Perhaps he is so wounded
that he won’t be taking us on any more journeys into unimagined mental realms.

No, a few days pass and everything is just fine. Better, in fact. The bullying stops, and the magical mystery tours resume.
Here in the world outside my family, it is possible to clear the air.

The next fall, the world is suddenly seized by the notion that Paul McCartney has died. Partakers of this fallacy turn to
Beatles lyrics with an exegetical scrutiny that would have put tenured Joyce scholars to shame. I am seized by the mania.
It is my first exposure to the delightful shade of paranoia that attaches itself to a possible conspiracy loaded with clues
and virtually empty of consequence for oneself.

The headmaster, Robert A. Lazear, occasionally summons me to his side at lunch for a briefing. He is amused by the whole thing,
and I have a kind of feverish, anal-retentive earnestness that makes it, I’m sure, even funnier.

Paul is, of course, not dead, but, lacking any common sense, I have no way of knowing that. Or maybe I sense Death’s bony
hand reaching into the center of my world and feel a little safer projecting the subject onto a risk-free canvas. So I scour
the earth for motes of Thanatos and ignore the beam under the beams of my own roof.

The real walrus picks me up in the afternoons, roaring up the long driveway at Kingswood in his maroon Impala station wagon
as if the Furies were chasing him. It is a standing quip among the students. Watch out—here comes McEnroe’s old man.

His drinking intensifies. There’s a joke I’ve heard Jews tell about themselves: Why don’t Jews drink? Because it dulls the
pain. That’s exactly why and how my father does drink. When he drinks martinis, he bolts them in one gulp and sits back, waiting
for the anesthetic. I never see him savor a drink, never see him
use liquor much differently than a soldier in a Civil War field hospital would use it, although my dad’s wounds are all emotional.
But he rarely drinks a lot in public, at least not during my lifetime.

The exception is this period. Suddenly, he is out in the evening, drinking. He hits cars and other stationary objects with
his car. There is an arrest, a night in jail.

He invites me into the Impala after that one and apologizes.

“You should never have to go through anything like that,” he says abjectly.

It seems to me that I hadn’t gone through anything. He is the one who had gone through something. I hadn’t even gone to the
police station to retrieve him. And something that happened off premises is, by definition, a break from his saturnine, snappish
brooding. I don’t say any of this.

But a few months’ time brings the Great Pizza Incident, and then it doesn’t matter what I said.

More from
The Exorcism
:

MARTIN BURKE

[
Stands and raises his glass as one who is making a toast
]

To all the poor bastards who slip quietly down into their basements to get away from nagging women, I bring hope. Martin Burke
has put on his spurs and picked up his whip. Whittle on your wood, men, bang with your hammers, cut with your saws, make little
holes with your drills. The birds need the birdhouses. But have courage, take heart. Burke is going to ride——for himself and
for all of you. Don’t cringe when the cellar
door opens. Don’t panic at the sound of light footsteps on the cellar stairs. When the old lady confronts you, pick up a hatchet
and tell her that Burke is riding and a hundred thousand bloomers will feel the crop. Tell her that you’re a man and that
you deserve respect. Do that for Martin Burke, and he’ll do the rest for you.

[
Bows
]

God bless you all.

[
Crosses to stairs
]

I must rejoin my regiment.

[
Goes off stairs
]

BESSIE BURKE

[
To Sadie
]

Please go up and see that he doesn’t go to bed with his shoes on.

SADIE

He’s wearing spurs tonight, and they’ll rip the hell out of the sheets.

Pizza is a wonderful thing, but it has become terrifying in our house because of the way the pies are cut in the Hartford
suburbs.