My Father's Footprints (15 page)

My childhood now lay in the murky depths alongside hers. I had been tugged loose from it, like a berry from a bramble.
Somebody should have stopped this from happening. Somebody should have made sure I told my friends I was moving or, failing
that, helped me patch things up with them afterward. No one seems to have even thought about it. My mother was far too wrapped
up in her housing battle, and my father… The obvious candidate was my father, but I have almost no memory of him from the
time of the West Hartford exodus. He was, it turned out, drifting down through his own murky depths, although it would be
several years before we discovered how deep and dark his abyss was and what kinds of monsters lived there.

There are no photographs of us from this period. The Leica and Roloflex cameras with which my parents documented my early
childhood were packed away now. There were no pictures taken of us as a family—or even of any two of us—for about nine years.
Some kind of enormous vanishing act was underway.

We move to an apartment in an enormous house on Main Street, in the adjacent town of Newington. If one of Freud’s patients
had dragged this house out of the haze of a dream and onto the analysis couch, Freud would have said it was a metaphor for
fragmentation, for dissociative states. The house is chopped up into five apartments. There is an older couple, Holocaust
survivors; a middle-aged woman living with her “nephew,” who later turns out to have been, instead, her lover; an apartment
full of stewardesses; and the Cristinas, a young couple with a baby.

Our landlord is a pale, thin, dark-haired man named Werner. He is a Christian and extraordinarily fond of blowtorches. These
two facts are probably unrelated, but I get them entwined in my head from the very start. As we move in, he is still tuning
up the apartment, and from time to time I find him lying on the floor, immersed in a project. He might murmur something half-heartedly
evangelistic about his church just as I notice that the
hissing near my calf is not the serpent from Eden but acetylene. Sometimes I find several blowtorches going, in different
rooms. It makes me wonder about the nature of services at Werner’s tabernacle.

Our apartment is very nice, with a fireplaced living room, a big, airy kitchen, a downstairs master bedroom and, upstairs,
two bedrooms. I live by myself in this upstairs space. There is a door I can close at the foot of the stairs if I want even
more isolation. And isolation is the leitmotif of these years. I know nobody in Newington and am not about to meet anyone,
because by now I am enrolled at the Kingswood School, a West Hartford private day school where I will be from the seventh
to twelfth grades. I am the Guy Burgess of my old neighborhood—living out my exile in a cold foreign capital—and even my new
friends from Kingswood are discouraged from coming to see me by my parents, who dislike visitors.

We live in Werner’s house for five or six years, and during that time no friend from my age group ever visits those two upstairs
rooms. In fact, almost nobody ever goes up there except me. It is the kind of setup that might make you worry that your kid
is up there dropping acid or addicting himself to snuff pornography. I am not. I am not even masturbating or listening to
the Mothers of Invention. I am just getting kind of nonspecifically weird.

One winter, I send away for one of those massively complex games—Strat-O-Matic used to lead this field—that allow the player
to simulate professional sports contests using dice and elaborate paperwork and charts rating the strengths and weaknesses
of the real athletes. I assume that Nintendo and its cousins have now obliterated this entire genre, but it enjoyed a heyday
among reclusive sports fans. Mine is based on the NBA, but I quickly see that it is not idiosyncratic enough for the kind
of crackpot I am becoming. I adapt it and invent my own imaginary professional basketball league, populated by fictional characters,
a sprinkling of real pros, and even some college players who aren’t going to make it to the pros. I actually—the Hinckleyesque
quality of this alarms me in retrospect—take to writing to the coaches of obscure college basketball programs at places like
Murray State in beautiful Murray, Kentucky, and asking for the annual guide issued by each team, with write-ups on all the
players, some of whom I absorb into my game.

Persons familiar with Robert Coover’s novel
The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor
will imagine the jolt of unhappy recognition I get when I read it years later and see myself in Coover’s drab, lonely, vaguely
hallucinatory protagonist.

For company upstairs, I have the Cristinas. Werner did his own remodeling, and when it came time to close up old doorways
that had connected sections of the house, he simply fitted a piece of plywood into the space and painted it the color of the
passageway. About a half-inch of cheap wood separates part of my upstairs Colinworld from the young Cristina family.

The Cristinas fight a lot, which is kind of interesting, but they eventually grow more conscious of the nearness of me because
they move their quarrels to another room. Norman Cristina, who looks like a more compact version of Tommy Smothers with just
a hint of swagger, is an avid volunteer fireman and becomes a minor celebrity in Newington because, on two occasions, he happens
upon fires and brings them under control single-handedly.

This was bound to appeal to my father, who is utterly insane on the subject of fires and fire equipment—so much so that he
is incapable of watching fire trucks pass his car without following them, no matter who else is in the car or where we thought
we were headed. Many a drive is disrupted with a U-turn and the high-speed pursuit of a hook and ladder while my mother shouts
“Bob!”

So he and Norman hit it off a little, and he is quite disappointed
—but also, I think, darkly amused—when Norman is arrested for setting the fires he had discovered and extinguished. More fights
and then the Cristinas move out.

There are fights in our house, too.

I never join them but I hear them. My father’s anger—as black as boiling pitch—is oozing across his heart, claiming larger
hunks of him, extinguishing the gentle fairy-light of his humor as surely as Norman Cristina would put out those fake fires.
It has been six or seven years since he’s had anything produced. He spends most of his days at a real estate agency, and his
nights writing after my mother and I go to sleep. From time to time, he gets a call from someone in his misty past, someone
who wants him to write, oh, patter for a Barbra Streisand one-woman revue, and he dismisses that person with a snarl and a
withering remark.

Is he really even writing, by this time?

I have a letter, written by him in 1976, to the William Morris agent named Ramona Fallows. It announces a sort of comeback,
in the form of
The Nemo Paradox
, the dark novel that emerges from this period. “I quit writing in 1967,” it says. “This is the only thing I’ve written since.”

Can this be true? My memories of life at home with my parents are of an unbroken blur of yellow pads etched with the sharp
black lightning of my father’s handwriting. Coming downstairs in the morning, you would find two or three of these pads scattered
around, the work of nocturnal spirits. It seems impossible that at any point this stops, but perhaps it does.

Certainly the unsuccessful scripts are piling up around the edges of our life like snowdrifts against a door.
The Ears of the Wolf, The Exorcism, The Rettinger Case,
the much-rewritten
Mulligan’s Snug.
Producers option them, and sometimes bring them close to production. Directors are hired and casting begins.
And then, poof, something happens, and my father is back home, his head drooping a bit.

“What’s your father doing? How’s his writing going?”

I get so I dread the questions. I feel tired and compromised from having to lay out all these elaborate stories of “not quite.”
“Not quite” is the one that got away, and that’s the world’s favorite example of a wheedling narrative, one that seeks glory
with nothing material to shore it up.

And then something worse happens. The questions stop coming. Six, seven, eight years go by with nothing by Bob McEnroe in
production. Nobody thinks of him as a writer anymore. He is an eccentric real estate agent who, at one time, had written.

So my job changes. I become the last true believer, the person who brings up the very subject I had once dreaded. My father,
he’s a writer!

A few people remember. Among them are the Mark Twain Masquers, a Hartford amateur company whose members lionize him. Their
chief patroness, a wealthy woman named Sunny Roberts, arranges to fund a scholarship for me at Kingswood, mainly out of admiration
for him. And during this period, they decide to resurrect and stage
The Silver Whistle,
his undisputed masterpiece.

For a different sort of person, this could be the proverbial shot in the arm, a little pep rally to remind him of who he is.
For him, it merely deepens the sense that his writing is ill-starred, is now remanded into the custody of unpaid hacks.

They lure him to a few rehearsals, and he comes home each time in a mild dudgeon, telling me, “They’re going to butcher it.”

On opening night, he goes to the theater, makes his way backstage, speaks encouragingly to the cast.

And then goes home.

“What are you doing here?” I say when he appears in the living room.

“I’m not going to watch that.”

“What if they announce during the curtain call that the playwright is here in the audience and asked to stand up?”

“They’ll be mistaken.”

If in fact he stopped writing around 1967, then his last play from that period is
The Exorcism,
a dark comedy he researched and wrote before William Peter Blatty’s
The Exorcist
was published.

It is the story of Willie Burke, a man in his twenties who believes he is possessed.

Willie’s father is Martin, charming, funny, drunk, prone to failure, self-important, foolish. We first see Martin entering
the house after a night of tippling in a bar. Sadie, a spinster relation who lives in the house, catches him.

MARTIN BURKE

[
Bowing
]

Martin Burke at your service; friend to man and beast; kind to trees, flowers, rock and common clay.

This is the play that most strongly feels as though my father is speaking to me from some distant reach of time. It’s the
instruction manual for Robert E. McEnroe. I’m a little late in realizing that.

Martin is the play’s comic relief. He is married to Bessie Burke, “a bony, horse-faced woman who wears a pince-nez pinned
to her dress” and who conducts séances in her parlor. She is stern. She is commanding. She is cold. She is, except for the
séances, every inch the woman my father rarely mentioned and never discussed, the woman so invisible in my life (and yet so
much the author of it) that when I began this book, I realized I
did not know her name. She is his mother. My grandmother. Or so I believe.

The play is a slow burn at this woman, Bessie Burke. The anger is papered over by Martin’s fey humor, some of the best comic
writing my father ever did, and rather close to the bone for the McEnroes.