My Father's Footprints (18 page)

I walk in the house with the gun in my hand, thus provoking
a startled response from the adults. And in my mother, when the significance of what I hold registers, I sense something else,
almost hear her stolid Yankee fortitude snap, crumple, sag for the first time. She doesn’t cry or lose her composure, but,
the way a dog can sniff out your emotive states, all of us in the room sense that somehow the hull of her toughness has been
breached. She is taking on water.

I climbed up on the end of my bunk and looked out the window. The sky is very blue, and the trees and grass are deep, rich
green. I am like Lazarus. I see the world again. It is alive and extremely beautiful.

The Nemo Paradox

We get a call from the hospital. My father is conscious. When we arrive he is actually sitting up a little bit. He is, he
reports, glad to be alive.

“When I woke up, I looked out the window, and the first thing I could see was that parking garage. And it was so beautiful.
What a beautiful parking garage,” he says.

Had he tried to kill himself?

“Oh, yes.”

But he is happy he failed, he assures us again. He wants his hands untied. I don’t trust him.

“It’s medieval,” he says, nodding his head at the restraints. Twenty-eight years later, he will use those exact words to complain
about the hospital bed that hospice puts in his apartment.

We spoon-feed him some broth and Jell-O.

“How is it?” my mother asked.

“Abominable.”

This is said with a trace of a smirk. He is back in his old habit of choosing words to amuse himself. It strikes me right
then that he is probably telling the truth about not wanting to be dead.

Over the course of that day, he tells us a little bit more but not much. He tells us why there had been no note.

“I was trying to do a Dorothy Kilgallen,” he says.

I have no idea what this means, but my mother seems to know. Dorothy Kilgallen had apparently overdosed while so inebriated
that nobody could really prove it wasn’t an accident. Most life insurance policies cover accidental death but not suicide,
the idea being that insurance companies are offended by people having control over their own destinies. My father had hoped
to leave us in a position to receive his death benefit. We don’t know it then, but this is a pressing concern because he has
racked up ruinous personal debts during his downward spiral.

We are broke and then some.

How about the gun?

“I had no idea what this would be like. If it were unbearably painful, I thought I would finish myself off,” he says.

Jesus.

SADIE

What did the psychiatrist find out about your mind?

WILLIE BURKE

Nothing yet. I’ve only been to him seven or eight times.

SADIE

Then it’s foolish. You either need an enema, a chorus girl or a ride on a roller coaster. Try all three and you’ll still save
money.

The Exorcism

My father is assigned to a psychiatrist who confirms that he no longer needs physical restraints. He is transferred to CCU-2,
the psychiatric ward of Hartford Hospital. And there he stays for weeks. I visit every day, often taking the bus from Kingswood.
My mother meets me there, and we eat dinner in the hospital cafeteria most nights. I wouldn’t describe it as an idyllic time,
but the sheer bulk of the hospital, populated day and night by competent, purposeful people, is comforting. We feel safe.

My father decides to tell most of his secrets to the psychiatrist and very few to us. That leaves, for him and me, a sort
of Madman’s Biathlon consisting of uncountable hours of ping-pong and pool in the day room. We get especially good at ping-pong
with lots of lightning rallies, tickety tickety tickety, punctuated by satisfying smashes. Probably something wordless and
primitive is being worked out between us in those games. As the weeks progress I begin to notice a small knot of men standing
off to the side, watching, waiting for the games to be over.

These turned out to be members of a sort of cult or gang, of which my dad is the leader. They trail around after him as he
agitates for various reforms, conducts his own explorations of life’s mysteries, and hatches plots to confound the authorities.
What are the real issues of existence, not the dopey ones they make us talk about in group? Why are we stringing beads in
occupational therapy? What has that got to do with man’s search for meaning? Who the hell wants ham and scalloped potatoes,
mushed together in a casserole, once a week? Follow me, men. Socially awkward in most other settings, he is, in the psych
ward, a kind of charismatic mountebank.

My parents decide, in their usual forthcoming fashion, to tell no one about what has happened. I am instructed not to share
this story with any friends. My mother warns me—in a style now familiar to the reader—of the dire consequences should this
story be widely disseminated. My father would be
unemployable; we would be uninsurable; we would all die in the streets.

It would be necessary to say something to the world.

“I have been thinking about that,” my father says on the first or second day after his awakening, “and it struck me that ‘nervous
breakdown’ might be the best we could do.” My mother vetoes it. She isn’t having any truck with nervous breakdowns. The official
explanation is that my father accidentally took “a toxic combination of medications.” I say the words “toxic combination of
medications” so many times in so many situations that it acquires the numbing meter of a litany. Another goddamned secret.

My mother has a high-pressure, low-paying job as an office manager in an industry-lobbying firm. Every day, she holds that
together without cracking, but at night, the anxieties overwhelm her. She cannot fall asleep unless I lie in my father’s twin
bed. Welcome to Thebes-on-the-Connecticut. It’s sort of Oedipus Lite. I have almost killed Dad and am almost sleeping with
Mom.

And then one day he comes home. My mother and I are uneasy. We have come to find the whole nuthouse sky rather sheltering.
Everything is so secure and professional over there in the hospital. Werner’s house seems, by contrast, infested with land
mines and staffed by amateurs.

But my father really is better. This is not a course of therapy I would recommend to most people, but in his unique circumstances,
a self-induced near-death experience was just the ticket. He is happier than I’ve ever seen him, and his old gentleness, familiar
from my childhood, has returned. It is nearly impossible to talk about my father without resorting to polytheistic imagery,
with his gnomes and fairies and incubi and little people. So let me say that all that booze and Seconal appears to have flushed
the demons out of him.

“It sounds crazy,” he writes to me, years and years later, “but the act of suicide is a positive act and not a negative one.
The suicider revs himself up and does the deed he feels must be done… Suicide is not a passive act. The man who puts his head
in an oven or points a gun at his head may appear to be gently giving up the ghost. This is not true. It takes a great deal
of emotional effort—misguided or not—to take one’s life.”

What is alarming is how much of this is predicted in his play
The Exorcism.

Here is Willie, discussing his possession with the priest, Father Reagan:

FATHER REAGAN

Your soul is in danger. Your soul is in grave danger.

WILLIE BURKE

Will there be prayers and incantations?

REAGAN

Yes.

WILLIE

Will there be admonitions to the devil?

REAGAN

Yes.

WILLIE

Will there be a struggle between the forces of good and evil?

REAGAN

Yes.

WILLIE

A mighty struggle?

REAGAN

Enough of a struggle to get the job done.

WILLIE

Will legions of angels be employed?

REAGAN

Unfortunately, the chancery can’t command such forces——or perhaps it can——who knows? Who knows what forms help from heaven
takes?

WILLIE

Then there will be a battle and I will have an observation post on the front lines.

REAGAN

You will be the front lines.

WILLIE

I will be an Agincourt, a Hastings, a Verdun, a Bastogne, a field of white lilies for demons to bleed upon. I shall know the
sound of heaven’s fury. I shall smell the burning brimstone and hear the screams of creatures hell cannot torment. Then the
forces of evil will fall back in disorder, snarling, belching fire and sulphur. It will become a rout, with angels in hot
pursuit of screaming imps. At the last there will be calm. There will be peace. There will be flowers everywhere and the soft
vibrations of a million violins. Into this calm, beauty and serenity will come a voice——a soft voice, a soothing voice. The
voice will say, “You’re better now, Willie.” And I will nod without speaking, for it is the fate of battlefields to offer
mute testimony of the futility of war.

It is difficult to tell whether Willie is gravely serious or amusing himself at the priest’s expense. And of course, it is
a mistake, in treating of Irishmen, to assume there is any distinction. What is clear to me is that my father describes, with
pre-science and precision, the experience he will have three years later.

The play is also quite clear about who the enemy is, about whom Willie truly must vanquish. (We’ll come to that. I promise.)

He tried writing the story of his demons.

That didn’t work.

He had to do it. He had to make himself the battlefield.

“The person prone to suicide carries a rage within—a rage to kill,” he writes to me in that letter, years later. “He wants
to kill because he cannot endure himself… He hates himself. Because he hates himself, he cannot relate to others. Nothing
is gained by showing him somebody who is worse off than he. He can’t relate to the difference.”

They send me back upstairs to Colinworld, with instructions to do my homework. I have been keeping up and make high honors
at the end of the semester. My father sits me down after and thanks me in a “You are to be commended for maintaining your
sterling academic performance even during a period when I tried to kill myself” speech that I bet not a lot of parents give.