My Father's Footprints (28 page)

The last complete sentence my father ever wrote was an
unsolicited letter of reference for one of them. I found it, undelivered, tucked in a book about Dante. The handwriting quivers,
and the feel of the note is effortful, as if it might have taken all afternoon to eke out, a great, final heave on the oars
of writing to produce this tiny thing. “To whom it may concern: Jean is the best shower girl I have ever had.”

But for Bob, the boy, there is damage done in the first twenty-four hours on earth. There is a stain splashed on him— “unwanted,”
“unwelcome”—like the dye spurting onto the bank robber’s loot. Like the loot, he is not fit for use afterward. Or so it feels
to him.

Here is my father, in a letter to me, explaining Sylvia Plath: “It is probable that Sylvia’s trouble was caused by her relationship
with her mother… This may or may not be true, but what is true is that Sylvia was once a little child who thought that she
did not belong in the world.”

Fairies steal children at birth. It’s in the old legends. Sometimes, in a child’s place, they leave a thousand-year-old fairy
or a log, which has been enchanted so that it looks to our eyes like a human child. But in some of the stories, the fairies
steal a child, bewitch him, and then return him to his parents. And he lives his life with a foot in each world, as a go-between,
truly at home in neither place.

Yes, that does sound familiar.

GOD IS OMNISCIENT—Don’t try to change his mind.

GOD IS OMNIPOTENT—Don’t try to tell him what to do.

GOD IS GOOD—Don’t try to blame evil on him.

GOD IS SECURE—He does not require the reassurance of adoration.

GOD IS JUST—Every creature gets either plants or other creatures to eat.

The Nemo Paradox

Now. A few things happen in tight sequence. My father’s chronology is, the more I analyze it, probably a little unreliable.
But here is his story according to him.

1. My father speaks up in church. His outburst probably resembles that of Henry Nemo, reported above. Of particular interest
   to my father, who is perhaps thirteen, is the question of why God would require or benefit from any worship, if he is all-powerful
   and over-stretching. The nuns are displeased. They summon a priest. He is displeased. In my father’s version, the boy Robert
   is branded a dangerous heretic, Thomas More with a cowlick, Abelard with no girlfriend. Too dangerous to roam free, spreading
   his doctrine.
   

   My father’s version carefully includes him in the romantic procession of Irishmen martyred for their fervent beliefs. In 1916,
   the year of his birth, the British shot three Irish Catholic poets in a firing squad outside Dublin Castle. One of them was
   Joseph Mary Plunkett, probably one of Noeleen McEnroe’s distant in-laws. It is in this tradition that my dad squarely places
   himself.
   

2. In Florida, the penalties for dangerous thinking are slightly less severe. Young Bobby is shipped out to military school.
   There he breaks rules and is ordered, as punishment, to push some kind of tennis court on wheels. An actual, full-sized, rolling
   tennis court. Pushing the court from place to place somehow entitles him to play on it, too, and he becomes adept. By all
   accounts, he was a magnificent tennis player as a young man, another mercurial, left-handed, shot-making McEnroe. And what
   better Sisyphean torment for a McEnroe and his hubris than to push a tennis court from place to place? God is just.
   
3. The 1929 stock-market crash comes. Eddie is on the margin, on the bubble, a rickety rope bridge across an abyss of financial
   risk. The Smiley Tatum Method. Back door not included. He loses everything. He owes even more. He is ruined.
   
4. Catherine O’Connell McEnroe departs. Abandons the faux-respectable husband and the collie boy. Catches a northbound train.
   I’d love to write the scene but I haven’t a wisp of anybody’s recollection to work with. Note on the table? Wailing, demented,
   operatic episode? The cold strike of a snake?
   
5. Eddie and Bobby set out in hot pursuit. They catch up with Catherine, somehow, in our nation’s capital, but the Flight from
   Eden continues north to the fatherland, Connecticut. My dad winds up, in some foggy fashion, with his mother and his Aunt
   Sadie.
   

In one sense, it almost doesn’t matter which details of my father’s version are wrong. Each of us constructs a true story
of our lives, and it gathers strength as it rolls down the slope with us. My father’s story had more force, made more sense
to him, explained things better for him than the considerably muddier truth.

In another sense, the errors and omissions are the hard, grinning skeleton holding up the soft tissue of the story-as-told.

Here is my guess about what really happened, based on slim reports from other sources, and my detection of inconsistencies
in even the meager set of facts he doled out about himself:

Although the nuns in his church school are probably not overly fond of doubters, I don’t buy my father’s (ever so Christlike)
portrait of himself as dangerous heretic. He is sent to military school, I believe, because he has become a spoiled pain in
the neck (a condition confirmed by his cousin) and because
his parents want him out of the way while their fortune and their lives are coming unraveled.

And unraveled they do come. Eddie’s sorrows run deeper than the loss of his own fortune and the estrangement of his wife.
He has persuaded others, friends and acquaintances, to take similar risks, to hyperextend on the sure thing of Florida real
estate. His guilt over what happens to them is more than Eddie can bear. (I have no idea how bad things got for the people
who followed Eddie McEnroe’s counsel, but this was the Crash and the Depression. It is not unrealistic to suppose that Eddie
saw irredeemable ruin of whole families, perhaps even a suicide that he believed was his fault.)

Oh, but here. What’s this?

“My father was smart at table games. He could beat anybody at cards, etc. When he got out of the loony house we roomed together
for a while. I taught him to play chess.” Two sheets of that lined yellow paper, covered with whittled black writing, slip
out of a folder. My father is dead, and, writing this book, I am spidering around in his files. I have found something. The
first draft of a letter to his cousin Peggy.

He is writing about his father.

“Loony house.”

“Was my grandfather in a mental institution?” I ask my mother.

Small clearing of the throat. “Yes, that’s true. I believe that’s true.”

“So Dad lived with his mother after they all left Florida?”

“No. I don’t think so. He didn’t talk about this very much, but I get the feeling she was in hospitals, too.”

I’m forty-six. This is all news to me.

“Mental hospitals.”

“I think so, yes. I don’t know what they called it at the time.”

“Let me make sure I’m getting this right. Dad was maybe
thirteen or fourteen. His parents were in his-and-hers insane asylums? For years?”

“I think so.”

I feel strangely unmoved by all this, which sounds like something Mr. Spock would say. From a certain standpoint, the news
that one’s grandfather, grandmother, and father have all been in loony houses is not good. Probably the only thing separating
me from them is managed care. I don’t feel a whole lot less crazy than they probably did, but these days only Mariah Carey
gets to be institutionalized for breakdowns. Anyway, as Willie says in
The Exorcism,
there are worse things than being crazy. “I want to be crazy,” he tells his father. “If I’m crazy, it means I’m not possessed.
And I don’t want to be possessed.”

But now I have to construct a third version of Bobby’s reality.

Catherine ditches her family, but she takes leave of this world in some other way, too. By the time she gets back to New Britain,
she is in no shape to manage her own affairs, much less bring up her son.

Bobby sees it all happening. The mother freezing up, her heart and soul locked deep inside some crystalline structure. The
father sinking deeper under the weight of darkness. And one day someone—one of the uncles on Dublin Hill?—sits Bobby down
and says, “Boy, you’ll be coming to live with us now. Until your parents are better.”

The Great Depression settles in. Eddie’s other prosperous brothers, the restaurateur and the confectioner, are in the process
of losing every cent they have. Grinding misery and woe abound on Dublin Hill. Bobby bounces from family to family, living
with whomever will have him. Like a Dickens hero, the spoiled boy is the poorer relation now.

He finds a semi-permanent home east of the Connecticut River—far from the earthy Irish color of Dublin Hill—with his aunt,
whose lace-curtain tendencies make Catherine look like a populist. Her name is Sarah Penfield. Mr. Penfield (LeRoy, I
have discovered) is not on the premises. Catherine is, sometimes, during intervals of sanity. Sarah Penfield—“Aunty”— becomes
my father’s rock. She will give him succor, stability, sound advice, and something resembling love. She will be Aunt Betsy
Trotwood to his David Copperfield on one condition, and this condition, rather than being spelled out, is simply bred into
every particle of life with Aunty.

He must reject the McEnroes.

He must repudiate the McEnroes and their Irish ways, their loud laughter and coarse songs, their red faces and flat feet.
Their blarney.

It’s the old story from Mountnugent. If you want to eat, you’ve got to renounce.

And so young Bobby takes soup. He takes Aunty’s soup and has as little to do with his own kind as he can possibly manage.
No McEnroes.

But he begins to construct the foundations of his secret world. He cracks the door and lets in the first few elves. His childhood
has been cut abruptly short. He is bitter, betrayed, frightened, rejected. But he has built a trapdoor out of this unforgiving
world.

Here is the voice of Willie, the alter ego my father created in his plays:

WILLIE BURKE

Children believe in little people. They believe in them because they haven’t any reason not to believe in them. It takes time
to learn to doubt. It takes the years of growing up. Each year that passes means believing in less and less of the things
that dreams are made of and in more and more of the things that you can kick and pull and push and tickle, bite, taste, scratch,
and hit with a rubber ball. When you’re
all through growing up, you’ve stopped believing in a great many things.

MCGILLEY

But isn’t that natural?

WILLIE

All the things you don’t believe in are still there to be believed. They’re the charming things that make childhood enchanting.
They’re not less charming or enchanted because children grow up. They stay the same. Children change.

Let us come back to that draft of a letter to Peggy, slipping from a folder and fluttering to the floor on yellow-paper wings.
The bit about Eddie and the loony house is, of course, a thunderbolt, but almost as startling, in its own way, is the little
story that follows. It is the first inkling I have had that my father ever saw his father in the tender, amused light that
suffused the rest of his world. It won’t seem like much when I share it with you, but to me, it reads like a wondrous beginning,
a squirt of the milk of human kindness eased out from an udder that had been blocked for sixty-five years.

He discusses some issues of genealogy, history, and Irish geography. Then he writes of Eddie’s generation, including Eddie’s
brother Harry, who ran off to join the circus.

My hat is off to them—all the brothers. Don’t forget that it was a circus worker who knocked up Roe of
Roe v. Wade.
Since she made history, one can’t ignore the rest.

My father was smart at table games. He could beat anybody at cards, etc. When he got out of the loony house, we roomed together
for a while. I taught him to play chess. We must have played a thousand games together. I won every one of them. Based on
his earlier experience at games, he decided I was a chess genius. He went to the Hartford
Chess Club and told them about his son. They invited both of us in for a match. It was bad, Peg, real bad—and then some.

I managed to write this letter so that I worked it up so that I ended talking about me. Let it never be said that the McEnroes
lacked egos.

He didn’t send it to Peggy. He wrote it late at night, I’m sure, woke up sober, read it again, and decided it was more rapprochement
than he really wanted with his long-dead father.

He typed up something more cut-and-dried and mailed it off to his cousin. He died two years later.

He tucked this version, scratched like cave writing on lined yellow paper, in a file and put it away.

For me to find.