My Father's Footprints (21 page)

The following day, October 7, 1954, a car rolls down Chestnut Hill in Glastonbury. It’s late afternoon, and the people in
the car enjoy the reddening light as it falls on the trees and fields that line the steeply sloping road.

The car turns right on Main Street and drives briskly toward the center of town. Glastonbury is mainly, in ’54, a sleepy town
of woods, meadows, brooks, and farms. Dairy farmers grow tons of silage down along the Connecticut River and truck it to their
herds, a little ways upland.

The car pulls into the small business district. The people get out and do some errands. Then, ready to leave, they back their
enormous Oldsmobile out and begin to drive away. There comes a squeal of tires, the splintering smash of metal and glass.
Another car has hit the Olds, and the two cars now sit pinned to each other, their shapes distorted into Louise Nevelson abstractions.
The clap of metal brings people running from all directions. The driver of the other car gets out. He watches as the two people
climb out of the Olds, and then he begins to quake. The
people rushing to the scene see the same thing and shout excitedly.

The woman getting out of the passenger’s side is nine months pregnant.

The woman is thirty-two, New England pretty, brunette, soft cheeks, delicate nose.

This is 1954, and a white, well-dressed pregnant woman is a cultural divinity, the perfect symbol for America’s postwar self-exaltation.
A pregnant woman climbing out of a smoking heap of battered aluminum is a shard snapped off a poisonous national nightmare.

The man who hit the Olds is apologizing frantically, and the people on the scene are offering help of all kinds and battering
her with questions. All of the sound compresses to a thin wire of wordless anxiety strung across her mind. She runs her hand
across her ridiculous ball of a stomach. What has happened?

The woman is my mother. My father is driving the Olds.

That’s me in there.

We’re fine.

Nobody knows that, not even the doctor.

“The birth may come tonight,” he says. “We’ll be prepared for your call.”

There is no call. I am not born. After a few days, everybody calms down and waits through the final week.

My mother feels the first twinge of real contractions on a morning in October. Clouds and winds are swirling in from the ocean,
and the radio bleats out suggestions of a hurricane. All through the day the storm builds, and my parents feel their own pulses
joined to its surges. In the early afternoon, they leave the house on Chestnut Hill and drive to the hospital through a curtain
of whirling leaves as tree limbs snap and saplings topple.

They wait there for ten hours, and then I am born in the night, at 11:29
P.M
. My mother is thirty-two, and my father is thirty-eight. I am their first child, the only one they will have.
They are old to be first-time parents in the Eisenhower Era. They have lived for short spells on Fifth Avenue and in Beverly
Hills. Nowhere feels right to my father, and now the money is running a little lower. They are living in a rented house out
in the country, and that doesn’t feel right either.

He doesn’t want a child. He doesn’t think of families in a very happy way. He says no, again and again. It will be horrible.
It will disrupt his life. My mother begins to think she might leave him.

When I am born, he walks down to the hospital nursery to observe me.

He goes back to my mother’s room.

“Well?” asks my mother.

“What?”

“How does he look?”

“He doesn’t look so good,” my father says.

“What?”

“He doesn’t look so good.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s a baby. You know how babies look.”

“How do they look?”

“Babies never look so good.”

“Go and look again.”

He departs. He returns.

“He looks like a tiger.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“You know how tigers look.”

He calls me “Tiger” for the rest of my childhood. I don’t hear him say “Colin” until my voice changes.

Happy? He goes nuts.

He is up for the 3
A.M
. feeding. He’s at the side of my crib the second I wake up, eager to start the day with me. What’s the big deal
with elves when you have a real live little person all your own? This, too, lasts for most of my childhood. He never turns
me down. Play catch? Board game? Read the funnies? Go for a ride? Pick up hamburgers and bring them home, dripping juice into
their wax paper? Throw a football? Go to the zoo? The answer is almost never no.

Because of
Mulligan’s Snug,
he is hired in 1959 to write the book for a Broadway musical version of
The Quiet Man,
a Maurice Walsh short story that has also been turned into a 1952 movie starring John Wayne. It is the story of an American
prize-fighter who tries to retire to Ireland after accidentally killing a man in the ring. Having vowed to himself never to
fight again, he falls in love with a woman who, for complicated reasons, will not be released into wedlock until he fights
her brother.

For a couple of years my dad is gone a lot, first on trips to New York and then for the out-of-town runs in Philadelphia and
Washington, D.C. And then back to New York for the Broadway opening. The play is called
Donnybrook!
Its stars include Art Lund and Susan Johnson, both formerly of
Most Happy Fella.

I am in first grade.

Broadway is a tough thing for me to grasp. He goes away. I miss him. He comes back, usually with a great toy. Small plastic
men are my favorite things, and once he brings a box of knights with moveable limbs and swords and lances that can be fitted
into their hands. For all of my childhood tiny plastic men will be my toys of choice, men who can be set up and assigned identities,
who can be walked and flown through various conflicts and dramas. Hours and hours on the floor with men. They are the toys,
I suppose, of a slightly lonely boy, but also of a boy who feels the invisible presence of tiny people.

My mother and I drive to New York City to watch a dress rehearsal. It is the practice in those days to hold dress rehearsals
in the Bowery, which is a very bad place in 1961, populated by bums, in the parlance of the times. A child of the Connecticut
suburbs, I have never seen bums.

Once inside the theater, I watch very carefully and comprehend maybe one-tenth of the plot. I am aware that one of the men
onstage is very funny, and my eyes are drawn to him. He wears a derby and a ratty suit. Every twitch of his face, every bowing
of his small, rubbery body seems to get a laugh. I can’t stop watching him. He is Eddie Foy Jr., a vaudevillean since the
age of seven who has starred in other Broadway hits, notably
The Pajama Game.

I don’t know anything about that.

I just want to be that man, get those laughs.

After the show, we go back out to the car. The bums are standing around it. One of them is urinating on the car. We go back
into the theater for help. I’m a little scared.

“Who are those men?”

“They’re bums,” my mother says. “They don’t have any money. They don’t have any jobs.”

“How does that happen?”

“It could happen to you if you don’t watch out.”

Wrong thing to say to me.

For weeks I worry about becoming a bum. I lie in bed and close my eyes, and there I am, in my rags, stinking and stumbling
through the Bowery.

I am too young to be included on Broadway opening night, but even back home in West Hartford I am a minor celebrity. The reviews
are mixed, mostly good, even some raves. Our first grade class is ordered by the teacher to write letters of congratulation
to the playwright.

From Christine Laski:

Dear Mr. McEnroe

you are Writing a good play. your work in a Room. I bet your work
is heard is it. I bet colin likes you very much! Are your fimly HaPPy. They are very HaPPy. Who are the people in the play?

I go back to New York to see the play staged at the 46th Street Theater. I hang around for the weekend, seeing the show twice,
finding myself ushered into Eddie Foy’s dressing room for several audiences. He likes me.

“Get him in the front row, stage left,” he instructs my father. “Then when I fall down at the end of ‘Wisha-Wurra,’ I’ll take
off my hat and put it on his head.”

Oh, please? I’m going to get one of Eddie Foy’s laughs.

I am sent back home before this can happen.

Back in Miss Barasso’s first grade class, it is show-and-tell.

I have now seen
Donnybrook!
three times. Would anyone like to hear a song from the show?

Why, yes!

What I have in mind is one of Foy’s big numbers, a duet with Susan Johnson called “I Wouldn’t Bet One Penny.” I’m going to
get some of Eddie Foy’s applause if it kills me.

It begins innocently enough,

You could never tempt me with insinuatin’ queries

Asking me to come have tea,

But suppose you picked a rainy afternoon,

Well, ma’am

Strong as I am,

I wouldn’t bet one penny on the way I’d be.

So far, so good.

But it has not occurred to me that the standards and practices of the Broadway stage might be slightly more adventurous than
those of Miss Barasso’s first grade class in 1961.

So that when I sing

I support my standards with a will that never wearies

Think of what you tried on me

But if you saved one trick that made the others swoon

Oh, well…

Damn it to hell.

I wouldn’t bet one penny on the…

I am startled to see Miss Barasso leap out of her seat and order me down to the principal’s office.

Dr. Martin, a woman, has a dark and quiet office. She herself is a small, dark, and quiet woman. She peers at me through the
gloom.

“Now. I understand you’ve caused a stir.”

“I was just singing a song! It’s in my father’s play.”

“Tell me about this play.”

I sketch out the opening scene and sing a few bars of “Sez I,” the first number.

“More.”

I sing the second number, “The Day the Snow Is Melting.”

“What happens next?”

I am gone from my classroom for more than an hour. By the time I return, most of the students assume I have been expelled
and, possibly, beheaded. Even Miss Barasso has a wondering stare.

Dr. Martin calls my mother.

“You have a remarkable boy.”

“We think so, too.”

“He has just been in my office.”

“Oh, dear.”

“He performed every song in
Donnybrook!
And quite a lot of the dialogue.”

“Oh, my.”

“You have a remarkable boy.”

My father is still in New York. My mother calls him with the
story. He passes it along to Eddie Foy, complete with the “Damn it to hell” in class.

“Bring him back to New York,” Foy exclaims. “I’ll take him out on the town. I’ll buy him any toy he wants in FAO Schwarz.”

Somehow, this never happens either. But every night for weeks, I fall asleep nursing a vision more sugary than my life as
a bum. Eddie Foy and I are in FAO Schwarz. I am pointing to a stuffed animal, a rabbit as big as a horse.