My Father's Footprints (29 page)

“Your grandfather was a darlin’ man,” says my father’s cousin Peggy, “but your father couldn’t see that. He had a hard time
liking him.”

“He could have been a lot nicer to his father,” says my mother. “Everybody else loved Eddie.”

My father stayed mad at his father until Eddie McEnroe died, two years after my birth. The two men tried to spend time together,
but my father’s anger was like a hungry animal looking in from the darkness. He had lost too much, and Aunty had carefully
nursed in him the idea that McEnroe sloth and squalor had authored all his troubles. Aunty kept him away from the McEnroes
for as long as she could, and even when he had grown up, she would tell the McEnroes they were not to distract or embarrass
him by making themselves visible at important moments.

“He had a play trying out at Westport, and a group of us decided to go down there for the opening,” his cousin Peggy tells
me. “We wanted to see Bob after the show and maybe go out with him, meet the cast. Somehow she [Aunty] got wind of this and
told me absolutely not. This was an important night for Bob, and we shouldn’t bother him or go up to him at all. So we didn’t.
And later I wondered if maybe it hurt him that his own family wasn’t standing around him supporting him.”

Is there a pinch of pie powder to be spared for Aunty? She has seen the Irish and their drink and their excesses ruin too
many things. Here is a boy, a young man, in whom she sees much promise. He might outlive the curse that seems to hang over
his family. But he must be saved. Maybe we can forgive Aunty for being ruthless.

But my father’s writing reveals a longing for a lost world of friendship and laughter and music and magic. In script after
script, that paradise lost was the bar, the Irish bar. In
Mulligan’s Snug,
the bar is where the little people live.

In the plays we meet men like my dad’s father Eddie, sweet and foolish and eloquent. Martin Burke of
The Exorcism
is Eddie, and when we meet him in the play, he has dallied in a tavern rather than come home.

SADIE

You managed to find your way to a barroom.

MARTIN BURKE

There were other men there who didn’t want to go home. The world is full of men who don’t want to go home. The sober men slip
quietly into their houses, then tiptoe down to their cellar workshops. They hide in their own basements, these sober men…
It’s sad to think of these men hiding alone in their basements——aimlessly sawing a piece of wood or hammering a nail into
something that needs no nail.

The barrooms of my father’s plays are, of course, idealized and far more interesting and less sad than real-life gin mills,
but in an old newspaper essay he claimed that even his great success,
The Silver Whistle,
and its vagabond hero were inspired by a series of characters he met in an actual Hartford barroom: “While they did not have
the same philosophy of living… they were just as windy and unprincipled, and used high-flown language in recounting their
travels. The old people [in the play] came out of my meeting a little old lady with shoe-button eyes who smelled of magnolias
and a trace of gin, and a little old man who was very serious, wore his hat squarely on his head, and with great punctilio
presented me with a white mouse.”

In his plays, my father uncovered his own yearning for a life he thought was unfairly snatched away from him when his mother
forced his father to sell the bars. In
Mulligan’s Snug,
the crisis is a plan by Mulligan to sell the bar. The little people think it’s a bad idea, and so does the reader.

In his plays, my father told himself what he could not tell his own father: that he wished Eddie had never sold his bars,
never left the world of gentleness and laughter for the cruel world of real estate.

Memorial Day. My mother and my father’s cousin Peggy and I are standing in St. Mary’s Cemetery in New Britain, the final resting
place of many McEnroes.

Clouds swirl in the sky, threatening thunderstorms, offering blasts of sun, pulling the offer off the table. We are unable
to communicate, the three of us, without screaming at one another. It’s some kind of weird, triangular disease. Peggy is my
father’s age, which makes her eighty-five today. She is a woman of cheerful features, whose smiling face somehow makes room
for the unfortunate Mountnugent nose. Peggy is a legendary talker, as famous for her speech as Miles the Slasher was for his
sword. Family members describe her phone calls as though they were alien abductions: “And I looked at the clock… and two hours
had passed… and I had no idea how this could have happened.” A doctor, after examining Peggy, looked at her soberly, and said,
“You talk too much,” as if that were a diagnosis. She stopped going to him.

“Where is my grandfather?” I say. We have been looking at a lot of dead McEnroes. I’m hoping my grandfather’s stone may at
least make some small mention of my invisible grandmother.

“He’s here,” says Peggy. “I went to the funeral. I remember my friend Mary Sheehan took the bus. I don’t remember what line
it was, but there was a bus line… It must have gone from Hartford to…”

“Peggy!” Already I’m screaming. “The bus is of no consequence. Where have you put my grandfather?”

“I think it was in that section.”

“Let’s go find the headstone,” I say.

“There is no headstone,” my mother pipes up.

“No marker?”

“Bob always said he’d handle it.”

“My grandfather died in 1956. When did you start to get an inkling that Dad wasn’t going to handle it?”

“I told you about this.”

“You never.”

“I did! You knew there was no marker.”

“You lost my grandfather.”

“I didn’t lose him.”

“Well, then, you, somebody, misplaced him. Where is he?”

“The people in the office will know. They have to keep records.”

“No one has asked about this man since the day he went in the ground forty-five years ago, and you assume it’s on a virus-protected
hard drive? I suppose it’s pointless to ask where my grandmother is buried.”

“We would have no idea.”

It’s the final bad real estate joke on Eddie McEnroe, played by the son who never forgave him anywhere but in the pages of
his writing. Eddie’s last lot was never developed.

Real estate, my father observed, is not for the tender of heart.

Here is part of a letter he wrote to a younger friend, a man my father suspected of having tender-heartedness. The younger
man is thinking of doing some investing in real estate:

I don’t want to sound like an evil bastard, but one doesn’t buy from fat cats… one buys from someone who is hurting—a man
who wants out—a man who has holes in his soles.

In order to make money, one must buy at the right price. This means torturing the aged, and grinding widows with small children.
A seller must have real motivation to sell or one can’t drive the price down… Lots of money has been made inesting in real
estate—lots of money has been lost.

Sincerely, Bob

p.s. The missing letter in the last line is “v.”

p.p.s. One doesn’t use the children to grind the widows.

The letter is written ten years before his own death and thirty years after his own father died. Has he figured out yet what
he’s really saying? Eddie McEnroe—the man who failed him and deprived him and his mother of a livable life—was too gentle,
too tender, for real estate. He could not have evicted the widows and children of Tonagh or taken advantage of the man with
holes in his soles. Eddie so deeply blamed himself for the misfortunes of people who took his advice that it broke his nerves
and put him in the asylum. Snarled and glowered at by
himself and his son for decades, Eddie is innocent of letting the world and his family down.

In
The Nemo Paradox,
Henry Nemo awakens from a fugue state. His frontal lobe has been sliced like Thuringer. He has no way of knowing whether
he committed the murder of which he stands accused. He announces to his diary that he is going to study the case, break out
of the mental hospital, and go on a quest, if that’s what it takes.

“If I get the idea that Henry Nemo did it, Henry Nemo’s going to pay,” writes Henry Nemo. “If I come up with a reasonable
doubt, Henry Nemo is not going to pay—no matter what.”

It’s such a McEnroe idea—that forgiveness and blame lie out there somewhere, beyond the gates and walls and bars of ourselves,
sealed in a Thermos and buried in the sand of a beach at the end of a long road.

Everything we need is inside us. It took me a trip to Ireland and back to figure this out. And most days, I’ve forgotten it
by 10:00
A.M.
You heal from the inside out. Everything we need is inside us. I should write it on the bathroom mirror.

And Bob McEnroe? Did he figure it out?

I keep coming back to that musty script of
The Exorcism,
which seems so obviously an allegory for his family. He writes it before his suicide attempt. He writes it during the latter
part of my childhood, when the trips to the zoo and the days in the sunshine were trailing off a little. When you grow up,
it suddenly occurs to you that the guy tossing the ball to you when you were eight, the guy who lay on the floor putting together
the erector set with you, the guy who helped you with the “new math,” whatever that was—that guy spent his other hours wrestling
with mortality, sexuality, the snakebites of the past, and the poisons of the present. Maybe playing with you was the only
break he got all day, some days, the only moment when he didn’t feel as though he were going mad. But he was also keeping
secrets, sparing you the details of adult manhood. And the way you know
all this, when you finally grow up, is that you catch yourself doing it, too: playing “pig” or messing with the Nintendo football
game or reviewing the facts of the French and Indian Wars and hoping the whole time that your kid can’t hear the shrieks and
lamentations echoing inside you.

I’m on the floor, still, reading
The Exorcism,
hoping for an explanation, a more complete account of Bob McEnroe’s childhood. I see he has drawn Martin, a character resembling
his own father, Eddie, with obvious affection and maybe a twinge of condescension.

Bessie, the character symbolizing Catherine, is cold, judgmental, controlling, pitiless. She is the last person we see on
stage. When I come to the end, a sickening chill sweeps across me.

After a botched attempt to lead an exorcism, Bessie is revealed as an apparent fraud with no real supernatural powers. The
other players, rushing off on errands of love or folly, leave her sitting alone in semi-darkness. The play concludes:

[
BESSIE takes out a cigarette. As SHE raises it to her lips, a flame appears before her. SHE lights cigarette.
] [
CURTAIN
]

That’s how far he got, rethinking Mommy. Either the devil herself or the devil’s apprentice.

The last Sarah Whitman Hooker Pie

Rip Van Winkle’s 20-year-old stale, moldy, dusty, rusty Humble Pie, with a tiny keg of potion to wash it down