My Father's Footprints (8 page)

“I
am
fine,” my father calls out from a nearby dimension.

“He’s not fine,” my mother says.

I look around the room. As usual, I am not 100 percent sure whom we are worried about. I will be making my trip in a very
unsafe car. I own a Capri 2000. Things keep breaking off from it. Not the usual things, either, like side mirrors, although
one of those has broken off, too. I mean things like seats. The driver’s side bucket seat, for no reason at all, breaks off
from the floor one day. On a rainy afternoon, as I drive down the road with my wipers slashing furiously back and forth, one
whole wiper arm suddenly breaks off and flies out into the downpour. It is as if a
person had waved so excitedly that his arm snapped off. The key breaks off in the lock, and for a time I start the car by
putting the fat end into the hole so that it meets up with the thin part trapped inside. After about four months, I decide
this is unnatural and have a locksmith pull the thin key sliver out. But during its time of living inside there, it strikes
some new bargain with the tumblers. My back-up key will no longer start the car. So I take the entire ignition housing off
and let the switch dangle down. I start the car with a screwdriver. I leave it parked in crime-infested neighborhoods, but
nobody will steal it, either due to or in spite of the fact that the hard work has been done already.

My father, meanwhile, has somehow injured his right arm, so that the one thing he really cannot do is turn a key in an ignition.
For the next twenty years, he reaches awkwardly over the steering wheel and starts the car left-handed every time. As the
song says, When the world is running down, you make the best of what’s still around.

This is during a time when some of us name our cars. I know a woman named Louisa whose decrepit Chevy Nova is named Flattery.
Because Flattery will get you nowhere. She stomps the gas pedal and bellows, “Goddamn it, Flattery!”

My car is named Angst.

Anyway, I myself am mildly scared of driving to Virginia in Angst, but then, I am twenty-two and there is this woman. I catch
myself wondering if that—combined with what I am hoping to do once I get there—has anything to do with my mother’s hysteria.

“He looks fine,” I try again.

“He’s not well.”

“Go,” my father says from his mists. “I’m fine.”

He doesn’t seem worried about my driving Angst all that distance.

“You weren’t fine before,” says my mother.

“I was influenced… by elves.” This notion seems to cheer him.

“How bad can this be?” I try.

“Don’t be fooled!” my mother answers shrilly. “He’s making jokes now, but half an hour ago, he didn’t even know his own name.”

My father gazes off into the middle distance, as if weighing the merits of that statement. Then he smiles beatifically.

“My name is Claude Rains,” he says. “And I am a movie actor.”

I laugh. My mother blows up. Angst and I go to Virginia and, implausibly, come back alive. I’m tempted to say that I don’t
remember anything else from that twenty-six-year-old trip but I would be lying. The young woman and I have missed each other
terribly. Her parents are there in the house. We slip out into the Blue Ridge night to embrace on the cool, wet grass. And
her brother’s border collie finds us immediately. Circles, worries, whines, sniffs. Fusses if we try to shut her back up
in the house. We see the black-and-white snout and concerned eyes emerging from the darkness, darting in to meddle with whatever
we are doing.

For years, I miss the point of the entire episode, which is not—it turns out—about Claude Rains or heatstroke or any of the
forces tugging me toward Virginia or collius interruptus once I get there. Of more lasting importance is the chance remark
about elves.

The little people are back.

He’s talking to me again.

His old plays swarm with spirits and fairies. I’ve placed the scripts in a sort of Rubbermaid crypt. It’s a big plastic box
with a hinged lid and curved top, like a treasure chest, and the plays are restless inside there. All the characters and apparitions
and oddities
from those musty pages leap against the sides of the crate like eels in a stewpot. Down, wantons!

MS. EMILY BOGGS

Have you seen anything odd in this house?

WILLIE BURKE

Snowbird saw a gnome.

EMILY

What kind of a gnome?

SNOWBIRD TOOMEY

There aren’t kinds of them. A gnome’s a gnome.

EMILY

Where was the gnome?

SNOWBIRD

In my room.

EMILY

Did it look evil?

SNOWBIRD

There was no reason at all for it to look evil.

EMILY

How did it look?

SNOWBIRD

[
Thinks for a moment
]

It looked inscrutable.

EMILY

Do you see gnomes all the time?

SNOWBIRD

I do not.

EMILY

Frequently?

SNOWBIRD

No more than anybody else.

EMILY

Everybody sees gnomes?

SNOWBIRD

When they’re there to see. You can’t see a nonexistent gnome.

EMILY

Have you been seeing gnomes for a long time?

SNOWBIRD

You’re twisting things around. I don’t see gnomes. That means you see them where they’re not there. The only time I see gnomes
is when they’re actually there to see.

WILLIE

Snowbird is very down to earth. You’ll never catch him seeing things that aren’t there.

In 1946, my father wrote
Mulligan’s Snug,
a play about a New York City barroom infested with fairies.
Mulligan’s Snug
was optioned eleven times for Broadway but never staged. One of those eleven optioners showed the script to the eminent British
actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who wanted nothing to do with it because “it’s about fairies, and Englishmen don’t believe in
fairies.”

Irishmen do.

A gentle acquaintance with fairies can make certain troubles—including Englishmen—a lighter burden.

Not that troubles ever become so light as to fly away for
good. And not that fairies can be trusted to act in anyone’s behalf but their own.

“You’ll never get them little ones to do what you want. They’ll do what they like. Minds of their own,” says Mulligan, the
bar owner.

“Witness the nature of the creatures,” writes Yeats himself, “their caprice, their way of being good to the good and evil
to the evil, having every charm but conscience.… Beings so quickly offended that you must not speak much about them at all,
and never call them anything but the ‘gentry,’ or else
daoine maithe,
which in English means good people, yet so easily pleased, they will do their best to keep misfortune away from you, if you
leave a little milk for them on the window-sill over night.”

I grew up around fairies, the way some people grow up around horses or Jack Russell terriers or guns or surfboards.

My father’s fairies poured back and forth in his life, swept in and sucked out by sloshing tides of alcohol.

The little people. Their promise to my father, in their whirlings, their caperings, was of a magic that would turn his sorrow—the
tragedy that began on the day of his birth—into something so cloudy and fey that it would not hurt anymore. They promised
pie powder to sprinkle over his bruises.

You can’t believe the little bastards.

Fairies are capricious and flighty. In the middle part of his life, they walked out and left him with nothing, no enchanted
sword, no book of spells, nothing but the dull ether of the bottle. And in 1970, fairyless and despairing, he played a very
dangerous game and almost took the bunch of us down with him. In 1970, he died in a much more serious and frightening manner
than this little brush with the heat of July 1976.

But that is a story for later. Or sooner. We’ll come to it eventually, as we work backward through time.

In 1976, Bob McEnroe has played his desperate game. We see him returned from Hades and scorched by a refining fire. His hair,
prematurely gray since his thirties, is now white as duck down. On his face, more often than not, is a mysterious half-smile,
and it takes the ferocity out of those hazel eyes and that raptor’s beak of a nose.

One day, with very little fanfare, he puts down his three-pack-a-day unfiltered Fatima and Pall Mall habit and picks up a
pipe. After a day or two of finding out he cannot smoke a pipe without inhaling, he puts that down, too. And forty years of
constant smoking—an addiction so severe he cannot sit through a movie—end with scarcely a remark from him. When I was in the
sixth grade, he tried to help me improve my athletic performance by running with me around the school ballfields at night,
after homework was done. He ran with a lit cigarette in his hand. I would look out in the darkness and see its tiny orange
light sailing and bobbing eerily through the ink. The fairies watched from the bushes.

Tobacco has no power over him now because almost nothing does.

The old stories are full of men who return, much changed, from a trip to the underworld. And it would probably be more erudite
to mention Aeneas or Orpheus, but my father reminds me most of Gandalf in
The Lord of the Rings,
who falls through fire and water to the “uttermost foundations of stone” while battling a terrible monster. When he returns
from death, he is different.

His hair is “white as snow in the sunshine,” and his eyes are bright and piercing. And Gandalf tells his friends that, indeed,
“none of you has any weapon that could harm me now.”

Robert E. McEnroe battles his dark, fiery beast in 1970 and comes back now in the thrall of a gentler magic. Few weapons can
harm him, including death.

He drafts his living will. I reproduce it here.

To my wife, son, doctor, and any relevant wardens, keepers, or turnkeys:

Death must come to all and mine to me. I do not fear death, but dread the thought of living the seventh age of man as a glob
of protoplasm connected to tubes which are tied to machines, valves, regulators, blinking lights, and shrill whistles, and
where all prognoses are completely negative.

I do not ask those in charge of me to break any laws of God or man, but, if it is possible, I pray that you will pull the
plug, throw the circuit breaker, blow the fuse, or pull the main switch. God bless he/she who disconnects the life support.
I cannot offer him/her a place in heaven, but I’ll fix up something comfortable in hell.

“Do you seriously expect me to go into court with that?” I ask him.

He shrugs. “Put it under your rubber plant,” he suggests.

This is one of his favorite images. He genially accuses agents and editors of having placed his scripts under their rubber
plants. And he hands me various odd and disturbing things to put under mine, not that I have one.

One day—this is before the living will—he approaches me with a folded piece of lined yellow paper.

“You mustn’t show this to anyone,” he says.

“Okay,” I agree.

“This represents my refutation of Gödel’s ‘incompleteness theorem.’”

“Okay.”