My Father's Footprints (31 page)

A helpful look crosses his face.

“You know who you ought to talk to? You know who would know all about that?”

“Who?” I am rendered a little breathless. Maybe I’m about to hear the name of the Virgil who can lead me through my underworld.

“Talk to a fellow named Bob McEnroe.”

A pause.

“You mean my father?”

Billy seems untroubled. “No. Bob McEnroe. Fellow about my age. Maybe a little younger.”

“Playwright?”

“That’s the guy.”

He touches my knee.

“And if he gives you any trouble, you tell him I said it was okay to talk to you.”

This is starting to feel familiar. I resist the urge to ask him who wrote
David Copperfield.

I steer us back to the Depression and we talk about his own experiences, the ruin of his own father, their flight from New
Britain.

“He lost everything. And then he still owed. He went down to Florida, too, for a while, my father, but that turned out to
be the worst thing he could do, because his money was in all the wrong places when the crash came.”

“I’ll bet you my grandfather Eddie was the one who talked him into it.”

Poor Eddie. Wouldn’t it just be the case that he pulled his older brother down with him?

“It was a sad time, wasn’t it?” I say.

“It was a very sad time for the McEnroes. One fellow jumped out of a building.”

“Who was that?”

He ponders for a moment and then, “Bob McEnroe.”

“Bob McEnroe jumped out of a building?”

Billy smiles, as if a sudden hilarity has struck him.

“Yeah! He was okay, though. He walked away from it.” He smiles even wider, as if the whole thing has gotten funnier. His square
sodblock face lights up. “He dove, you see. That’s it. He dove out the window.”

I’m smiling, too. Almost laughing. This is some kind of great joke, but neither of us is quite sure how it goes.

We’re coming to the end here. Possibly you have located your hat already and are shuffling your feet below your seat, to see
if you’ve left anything there.

I feel the need to remind you about pie powder. It’s unwise to talk to fairies and pointless to drink yourself right up to
the edge of their woods every night. That doesn’t mean life is without magic, even redemptive magic, but most of it is stored
within you. Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Drop the charges. The Court of Pie Powder is a place where that can happen.

Close your eyes.

Not while you’re reading this book, mind you, but in a separate, quiet moment.

Close your eyes.

He had the impression I did not like him.

Dear Bob,

I love you

If you read this.

Pie powder is drifting down, settling softly across the Tonagh lands, quieting Lough Sheelin, filling in the wounds and the
cracks in the crust of life. Like the year’s first snow soothing the ravages of November, pie powder is coating the scars
of history.

Pie powder twinkles like pixie dust in the twilight, and I see people emerge from the tree line of time to hold out their
palms or catch it on their tongues, like fairy communion. There are the Coyles of Tonagh, who took soup and kept their house.
Forgive them, forgive them. And Norman Cristina, who set fires and saved my father’s life. See how the pie powder sprinkles
onto their cheeks as they look up. There are Joey and Thona and the woman with the baby on the street in El Paso. There is
my mother, twirling slowly, arms outstretched in the warm blizzard. And who is that older man with the ruddy cheeks and the
smiling eyes? Eddie? Is that you? Have you come out to let the pie powder waft down and collect in those soft gray eyebrows?
Far off toward the horizon, through the haze of white, I see the dull, dark shape of another woman moving slowly through the
powder, her hand held up to touch her chin. Catherine. Grandmother. I could follow her tracks in the white dust, but she would
only recede from me.

Forgiveness and healing. Pie powder can fix everything. Can’t it?

Pie powder is drifting down. I am having a vision.

In the middle of a meadow sits a judge’s bench. A man walks toward it through the swirling, scattering storm of flour. He
is a figure from one of my father’s dreams. His gray hair falls to his shoulders from a middle part. His beard is full and
arrow shaped. He wears a linen suit and high black boots. He carries bagpipes under his arm, for theatrical effect. He climbs
up, sits down, and bids me approach. He stares at me for a long while.

“It’s millennia of flaw and failing that bind the human race together as much as anything else,” he says, finally.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you can’t duck soup. That’s a joke. But it’s true: We’re all soup-takers at our worst and weakest moments. You weren’t
a perfect son. So? He was an easy person to hurt because he walked around with all those tipsy little cups of poison balanced
inside him. One little jostle and he was down for the count. He
built rooms and rooms of illusion because he couldn’t stand to live in the real world. You’ll never find him in those rooms
now. You can’t heal him, and you can’t slay him. He’s gone, and it’s time for you to let up on yourself a little bit.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what Gödel’s ‘incompleteness theorem’ says?”

“Not really.”

“It says that within any system of mathematics, there will always be some propositions that cannot be proved either true or
false using the rules of that system.” His manner softens. “I’m dismissing all charges against you. You’re free to go.”

Pie powder is drifting down across field and farm and in the park where they’ve taken Joey to feed the ducks.

Down by the pond, I can see my mother and my son, talking and laughing. Grandmother and little boy, helping each other. We’re
all doing assisted living.

Closer to me, standing off to the side, through the haze, I see a man, ruddy faced, a little stooped, with hair as white as
a polar bear’s.

That’s the guy I should talk to. Bob McEnroe. He knows the whole story.

But he has never told it, and now he is gone, and he was awfully good, it turns out, at covering his tracks. Like a master
spy, he had a network of drop-boxes and false addresses so vast and complicated that he was able to slip out behind it. He
made up a universe of fairies and giants and ghosts, among whom he could live more comfortably.

Pie powder is falling down. The inscrutable man with the polar-bear hair is breaking off pieces of bread and tossing them
forward into the warm air of a spring morning. His eyes are crinkling, and his mouth is drawn in a tight half-smile. He will
never tell the whole story. He is looking far away and very close and nowhere. He tosses more bread in the air, and it’s gone.

It may be a trick of the landscape, but I don’t see any ducks.

He was doing long division, one of those onerous tasks made even worse by its name.

“Long division.” All of the punishing monotony is right there, implied in the words. It’s like root canal. They should call
it something else.

I remember long division as a dark night of the soul in my own childhood. Something about the dwindling, narrowing quality
of the computation made it especially depressing. Subtract, pull down another digit, subtract, until you are left with… nothing.
Long division is a series of partings. My father helped me with my math. I help Joey with his.

“Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection,” said Schopenhauer,
who was forced to do excessive amounts of long division in the late eighteenth century and concluded that man’s natural state
is a constant striving without satisfaction.

When Joey’s long division was done, he looked out the window and saw the snow, fine as sugar and driven by a night wind.

“Let’s go out. Let’s take the dogs somewhere,” he said.

It was 9:15. A school night. Why not?

We drove to a fairly secluded school. There was one lonely van in the parking lot, the day’s snow heaping up on its top.

“Who would be here?” he demanded.

“A hardworking teacher?”

“Must be nuts. I would leave the minute I could.”

In the snow, his spirit swelled and puffed, like a sail catching wind. I envied him. He is twelve. I am forty-seven. Lately,
life has been looking very sick and sad to me. Subtract, subtract, subtract. Long division. The best I could do, it seemed
to me, on this night, was to hand the baton of enthusiasm off to him, let him marvel at the world, maybe pretend to join in.

“Look at this!” He pointed to an enormous maple, its hundred arms crooked out, striped with muscles of new snow. Behind the
maple, the winter sky was red. “Why doesn’t somebody paint a picture of this?”

In my mind was the title of Ram Dass’s book, culled from the advice he got—when his name was still Richard Alpert— from an
ex-surfer going by the name Baghwan Das. “Don’t think about the past. Be here now. Don’t think about the future. Be here now.”

So there I was, watching the finely grained snow drift through the halos of parking lot lights, bearing my sorrowful secret—that
life winds down and we die. And there he was, oblivious, exuberant, being here now.

As we pulled out of the lot, his expansiveness had spilled over onto the van and the person working late.

“We
need
hardworking teachers, right?” he demanded. “It might be a custodian, too. Kids don’t appreciate custodians enough.”

He reminisced. At his old elementary school, there had been a special day on which the custodians were honored in the cafeteria,
and once, on Veterans Day, one of them, Rocco, had worn his army uniform. Middle school seemed a little brisker, busier, maybe
too busy for this kind of observance. Was there
any chance, he suddenly worried, that Rocco had been called up to active duty? His former fifth grade teacher, a marine, is
in Afghanistan. “‘Rocco’ is a great name, isn’t it?” he chattered.

It was something about the snow, he acknowledged, that made him feel so alive and happy. The year’s first snow is not a fiction,
like pie powder. It is real. You can rub it between your fingers. He is real, too. The only son of an only son of an only
son. He is our line.

Back home, he put on his pajamas inside out, because studies in the Berne supercollider indicate that wearing one’s pajamas
inside out can cause school to be canceled. It has something to do with the behavior of quantum particles.

He was still sort of a Diamond Jim Brady of goodwill, lighting his cigars with five-dollar bills of agape.

“Where is Mrs. Farrow now?” he wanted to know, peering out his bedroom window. Her house, across the street, had been sold.
She’s in assisted living.

“I should go and visit her. You should set that up.”

He was quiet for a while.

“I miss Charlie,” he said. This is Mrs. Farrow’s husband, who died some time ago. He had out, on his bed, an old book Charlie
had given him. It’s called
I Remember Distinctly.

“I miss Bob.” This is his grandfather. “I miss all the people who have died.”

None of this was said piteously, but matter-of-factly, as if he had glimpsed his place in the cavalcade, the tribe of gypsies
living and dead, rumbling through the dark, and singing across the marches of time and space.

Precious little of this enlightenment would survive the night, not when the pajamas and the snow failed to do their jobs,
not when school opened without even—o, perfidious dawn!—a ninety-minute delay.

But for a while, in the hours before bed, in the year’s first snow, he saw what my father could never see and what I long
to
see—the connections, the abundance, the multiplication and joining of things.

The resurrection.

^*
Life often seems to loop back on itself in strange ways. Think of Norman Cristina, who entered our story as a firebug and
departed as my father’s rescuer. The next time I see Joy, twenty-seven years have passed. She is head of the hospice program
caring for my father in the last weeks of his life.