My Father's Footprints (22 page)

In second grade, there is no play.
Donnybrook!
closes after sixty-five performances. I have to find another way to be remarkable.

“You’re a midget.” This is my mother talking.

“What’s a midget?”

“Somebody who never gets tall.”

“I’m never going to get tall?”

“No. You’ll always be this size. You’re fifteen years old.”

“We held you out of school for a while,” my father chimes in absentmindedly.

I fall silent, playing with my tiny plastic men.

And then, “I’m really fifteen?”

“Yes.”

I spend the weekend as a midget.

On Monday, at school, I tell my friends. It seems to me I’m entitled to a certain respect.

“I’m fifteen.”

“You are not.”

“I’m a midget.”

“What’s that?”

I explain.

“Miss Clarke! Colin says he’s fifteen. He says he’s a midget.”

“I’m sure he’s not.”

“I am! My parents said so!”

“I’m sure you misunderstood.”

It takes a week or two to get this straightened out. I suffer a tremendous loss of face when it comes out that I am normal.
I get mad at my parents, not for convincing me I was a midget but for subsequently breaking cover. It seems to me we all should
have stuck to our story.

The first time anybody in our household ever dies, it is me

“Crawford? Sam?”

I know what I am doing on the eastern edge of Mooney’s Woods on a winter afternoon in West Hartford, 1963. I am looking for
two friends I think might be there.

“Crawford? Sam?”

I am eight years old.

What I don’t know is why I walk out on the ice of the pond that lies down the hill, out of sight, behind the Simmons house
on Staples Place. The ice is perfect for skateless sliding—one, two, three, glide. I have been told to stay off the ice. One,
two, three, glide. “Crawford? Sam?”

The ice abruptly gives way beneath my feet and I drop straight down into the cold water of the pond. No one can see me. No
one can possibly hear my cry for help.

My boots fill with water. They are those black boots of yore, with the agreeable buckles whose little hinged tongues slipped
through little metal grillworks. They battened so nicely onto your leg that you could not possibly kick them off.

I sit here now watching my young self sink and kick, and it strikes me that every requisite of sudden, untimely death is in
place. I am alone, sinking through icy water in a secluded pond. I am the only person who can save me, and I am not strong
or athletic.

I survive mainly because the bulky, ungainly coat I am wearing spreads out over the water in a way that traps a big bubble
of air. If I were an angel worshipper, I suppose I could make this into an angel, but it is more like a big bubble of air.
It keeps me high in the water and upright while I clamber up on the ice—only to have more of it break away.

How do I get myself out? I can’t remember. I just do.

My next decision almost kills me. For some reason, I walk home, a distance of several blocks. I pass at least one other person
on the trip and sob out to him what has happened to me, but it doesn’t occur to me to go to a warm house right away.

My father hears an odd noise coming from outdoors and concludes it is an animal in distress. It is my wail of misery, fright,
danger, and near-death.

By the time I barge through the door of our apartment, ice has formed all over me. It hangs off my coat in jagged formations.
I present myself to my father who, years later, will admit to being completely terrified. At this moment, he seems merely
businesslike about getting me into a bath and gradually warming the water. That a person from Miami Beach knows to do this
is one of life’s little blessings.

That night my parents stay up late. It will seem to them, years later, that the news that night carries other stories of boys
who fell through the ice, and that those boys died. I doubt it. I think that for days and weeks and maybe even years, every
story of a boy who falls through the ice and dies becomes another inflection of me, an alternative form of their son whose
luck, this time, runs out.

My father’s memory will be that, after his ministerings that day, my vitality is restored. In his story, he is Christ, and
I am Lazarus. In truth, I am not so easily fixed.

Within days, I have pneumonia. I recover. The pneumonia comes back. I recover again. At least, I think so. The act of writing
this has made me feel cold, has turned an awl of pain loose in my chest. I can see the bony fingers of the trees and a gray-white
sky of that day.

My father, well into my adult life, will give me a series of winter coats as Christmas presents. They are invariably the gray-beige
colorless color of the coat that saved me. Coat after coat, never with any particular comment.

Life renders us. This is no secret. It boils away layers each day. Every so often, I am convinced, life conspires to kill
off characters inside us. The unremarkable boy of that day, not especially good at being himself, dies in the pond, and someone
a little bit different grows into his skin.

In third grade, there is a career pageant.

We are instructed to compose a couplet describing our future job. We must go up on stage with a prop or two and recite the
couplet.

God help me, I am up there with a toy typewriter.

Some folks would rather be a wrestler or a fighter, but I would like to be a writer.

When my father is not writing he shows houses. It takes him away from me on weekends a lot, because that’s when people like
to look at houses. Sometimes I tag along, and my childhood memories are splashed with the rattle of “For Sale” signs in the
backs of station wagons and the aroma of freshly hewn wood in the brand-new houses and the echoing clap of men’s shoes on
bare wood floors.

“I have to show three houses today.” Even then it sounds like an odd phrasing. I have to show you a place in the woods where
diamond-shaped orange mushrooms grow. I have to show you how to throw a curve ball. I have to show you the place where I was
born. But houses are so big and obvious. They need to be shown?

Missing is any mention of the people. My father always has
to “show houses” but rarely to anyone. He doesn’t mention clients or customers because he is so hilariously a parody of the
paradigmatic American Salesman circa 1962: good with eye contact, with names, with light chatter. My father is an introvert’s
introvert. He prefers looking down or off into fairyland. He can’t remember the names, even, of his co-workers or our household
pets. A cat of ours, Mackenzie, is still, after ten years, “the gray-and-white cat.”

When he pictures “people” in his mind, he pictures two-legged beings who bray out perfectly human—and therefore grotesquely
irrational—responses to houses. They fixate on some quirk of a house’s appearance. The carpet, the kitchen floor, the wallpaper
throw them for a loop. They cannot be lured down into the basement.

“The basement of a house tells its story,” my father explains. Water, strange fuse boxes, makeshift reinforcements to ancient
joists, termites. These are the things you must behold. Once, he and I see a septic system out-pipe with a high-tech warning
device on it, suggesting some imminent Chernobyl of poop.

“People don’t want to look at things like that in the basement,” he grumbles. “They want to look at the goddamned mullioned
windows.”

For the right client, though, he is a godsend.

“We’d be pulling up to a house, and as we were slowing down, before the car even came to rest at the curb, I would say, ‘No,’
and he’d just put his foot back on the gas and begin pulling away, not a word from him,” says a woman who bought two houses
from him. She cackles at the memory. “Any other agent would have tried to make me go in, see all the great features that weren’t
apparent on the outside, all that crap. He just drove us away. I
loved that!
”

“How come you never take me to church?”

“We don’t go to church.”

“Other kids, their parents take them to church.”

“You want us to take you to church?”

“Yeah!”

So they do. It turns out that they mean “take you to church” rather literally. They drive up to the church. The car disgorges
me. They drive home to smoke Fatimas and read the papers. They come back and retrieve me when it’s over.

They pick my denominations, although I am never sure on what basis. For starters, I am a Presbyterian, but later I will transfer
to Universalism, get traded to the Episcopalians, and finish out my career, like Willie Mays on the Mets, as a Congregationalist.

They attend none of these churches. I am a latchkey Protestant.

This arrangement has enormous appeal to Bob McEnroe. Having enthusiastically repudiated his native Catholicism, he now has
new worlds to conquer. He can be a heretic, an apostate, in several other sects. Each time I move to a new church, he reads
up on its denominational theology. Then he shows up a couple of times a year and argues with the minister. Universalism, for
some reason, is his favorite. The Universalist books pile up around his chair. He takes copious notes. William Ellery Channing
should know so much about Universalism. The minister, a sweet-tempered old guy named Fiske, poor bastard, learns to fear the
sight of my father coming up over the horizon at coffee hour, flying the Jolly Roger, ready to engage him on hairsplitting
points of antitrinitarianism.

In seventh grade, there is an Easter pageant at the Universalist church, and I am Jesus. It is a speaking role. Cosmologically,
nothing could be more second rate than to be a Universalist Jesus. It’s like being Nepal’s greatest basketball star.
No one cares. You’re not divine. You don’t get the girls that the Methodist Jesuses get.

I believe my main job that day is to handle the “woman at the well” situation. I show up with my game face on. I am fully
backgrounded. I spend the preceding Saturday night memorizing Jesus’ lines. I tell everybody what is what, as only Jesus can.

My father, sitting in an audience of fifty, is, by all evidence, enthralled. My later acting stints, in front of much larger
high school audiences and working with slightly more challenging material and benefiting from better production values, will
fail to impress him at all.