My Father's Footprints

by Colin McEnroe

  WILLIE

  We are completely protected against ill-health.

  SNOWBIRD

  The only way you can kill us is with a gun, knife or rope.

  EMILY

  Neither one of you looks healthy.

  WILLIE

  You’re looking at the outside. The outside has been struck by ice storms, snow storms, rain, hail, cold wind, hot wind, soaps, lathers, razors, aftershave lotions and wet kisses. That’s the outside. It’s the inside that we’re talking about. We take the Patrick Finnegan Holistic Help for Bartenders and Potato Famine Fighters.

  [Takes out pill bottle]

  It’s in capsule form. Patrick Finnegan’s Pills for Men Who Dare.

  SNOWBIRD

  Turn it on the side and read the label.

  [To Emily]

  Wait until you hear this.

  WILLIE

  B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B10, B11, B12, B13, B15, PABA, choline, inositol, A, D, E, F, G, H, K, L, M, P, T, plus 14 minerals.

  SNOWBIRD

  You have to be careful not to use too much or you’ll lose your taste for alcohol.

  WILLIE

  It’s a delicate balance.

  EMILY

  What about cirrhosis of the liver?

  SNOWBIRD

  That’s all taken care of by the B complex group and folic acid.

  EMILY

  Heavy drinkers have a high mortality rate.

  WILLIE

  You’re right. One hundred percent of heavy drinkers die. The question is, when do they die and does alcohol shorten life or prolong it?

  SNOWBIRD

  Alcohol is hard on filter-passing germs. And if a germ can’t get through the filter, it has no chance at all. Alcohol will kill it dead.

  WILLIE

  Every time there’s an epidemic, the teetotalers go belly-up by the thousands, while drinking men carry on the world’s work.

  He accumulates thirty-five or forty pocket calculators.

  He buys them obsessively and requests them as presents. The slightest new wrinkle in trigonometric function is enough to make him want the latest model. After his death, pulled from various cubbyholes and tumbling out of cabinets and heaped together, they look rather demented, as if he had been striving to count something uncountable.

  “Hewlett Packard has come out with a pocket calculator that costs $300,” he writes in a letter to me. “I dream about it when the moon is full.”

  That same letter, typical of his correspondences, offers the following insights.

  “Remember, for the first 325 years, Christianity was Unitarian.”

  And

  “When Werner Heisenberg was on his deathbed, he said that he had two questions to ask God: ‘Why relativity?’ and ‘Why turbulence?’ Werner claimed that God would be able to answer the first question but not the second. Science doesn’t understand turbulence; neither do engineers, but they have to deal with it.”

  And

  “Twenty-nine years from now there will be 10.6 billion people on earth.”

  The letter concludes with a paragraph speculating on the case of William Kennedy Smith, whom my father adjudged “a lying bastard.” I refuse to quote any of the rest of it here, because it’s full of sticky sexual mechanics, the kind of thing a normal seventy-year-old father would be unlikely to share with his thirty-seven-year-old son.

  He isn’t trying to shock or perturb me, I know. He likes to work on publicized criminal cases and considers his judgments on all of them to be final. There isn’t any way to work on the Smith rape case without getting into such matters as semen production, apparently.

  The thing is, I never asked for information on the Smith case. Or turbulence. Or Christianity. These are not part of any dialogue. Just things he thinks I should know.

  Here is a birthday card I have saved. It came to me in the mail about ten years ago, probably when I was turning thirty-seven.

  On the outside of the card is a vase of white tulips and a Bible lying open to a page marked with a white ribbon.

  “God Bless You on your birthday,” it reads.

  The inside begins with a quote from Psalms: “The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.”

  Then it reads, “Wishing you a bright and beautiful birthday… a day alive with promise, rich with possibilities, filled with the wonder of God’s love for you.”

  Underneath that, in red ballpoint, my father has scratched:

  Just stay out of hell please.

  Pere

  A most peculiar man. An irresistible man. Our offices are fifteen minutes away from each other. I drop in a lot. He is almost invariably there, especially in those later years when he is less likely to be showing houses. I find I need him. He is never going to put his arm around me and offer up one of those “Well, son…” sessions that seem to happen mostly in insurance commercials. In fact, he is most likely to cut off all conversation by brandishing some kind of horribly difficult quiz he has spent the morning devising. I need him anyway. He is never boring, and even if he were, it wouldn’t matter. He’s my father. The man who talks to elves.

  The fanciful world of Bob McEnroe starts to rub off on Joey.

  When Joey is three, we walk in the woods pretending to be Robin Hood and Little John. I tend to get the sidekick roles.

  “I am somewhat afraid,” I say as dusk steals over the forest. “What if the Sheriff of Nottingham and his men come upon us?”

  “I have my sword,” he informs me soberly, “and you have your humble staff.”

  When he is four, Robin Hood gives way to Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans. So now I am Uncas, the brother. We are scrambling over some rocks in coastal Maine, role-playing. But the rocks are a little perilous and the fall to the water is sheer and long. I become nervous and ask him to move away from the edge. He points to a breathtakingly dangerous series of outcroppings twenty-five feet over a place where waves crash up against the bottom of a cliff.

  “We must go there.”

  I put my moccasin down. No. We absolutely cannot go there. It is an unnecessary risk, and even brave Indians did not take unnecessary risks, because they were in it for the long haul and understood that Nature deserves a healthy respect, etc., etc.

  He lets me finish and then says, slowly, evenly, “Hawkeye would take a chance. To save a life.”

  Next it is Batman.

  “Let’s walk the dogs in the spooky woods in the dark,” I suggest, one crisp autumn night.

  “Only if we wear costumes,” he counters.

  “What kind?”

  “Batman and Robin.”

  “Fair enough.”

  We extract costumes from his slightly disturbing collection.

  There’s a pretty good Batman ensemble—cowl and cape— that fits me. He gets some Robin stuff. We drive over to the creepy woods and walk down into them, but even with the costumes and even with the dark, protective bulk of Roy, we don’t feel very safe or stay very long.

  Back in the car, he notices that I do not appear to be driving us home.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Gotta return some videos.”

  “We’re dressed up as Batman and Robin.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “I’m taking my stuff off.”

  “That’s your business.”

  “Are you going in the store with your Batman stuff on?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “I’m staying in the car while you go in.”

  “You can’t. It’s not safe. What if something saw us in the woods and followed us? What if it’s waiting for you to be alone in the car?”

  We enter the store and he veers sharply away from me, hugging the outer walls.

  In cape and cowl, I saunter over to the counter and return the videos.

  “Everything quiet tonight?” I ask the crew in blue and gold.

  “Yes, Batman.”

  “No unusual behavior or disturbances?”

  “No, Batman.”


  “Very well. You know where to find me if anything crops up.”

  “Yes, Batman. Thank you.”

  I leave, followed at a reasonable distance by a small scurrying form.

  “I kind of like being Batman,” I tell him, back in the car.

  “Where’s your Batmobile? Batman doesn’t drive around in a dumb Honda.”

  Little boys grow up hopping from hero to hero, like rocks at a river crossing. Next are the X-Men, Luke Skywalker, and after that, Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies. Now it’s Harry Potter and Frodo and Legolas.

  Champion follows champion until one day I find myself at the reservoir, with my father, watching Joey ride his bike.

  Jesus, they don’t give us much time here, do they?

  The clouds are wolf-gray and roiling with overdue rain.

  “It’s going to rain this afternoon,” I tell Joey. “Maybe we should go see a movie.”

  Joey is six. This will be our first trip ever up Rattlesnake Mountain. In the years to come we will climb it hundreds of times, sometimes with friends, sometimes with Thona, but often alone, just the two of us, trying to get close enough to the sky to work something out. On summer days, he and his friends will walk around the upper ridges, wearing fuzzy caterpillars on their chests, like a fruit salad of military decoration. On one ill-advised winter ascent, I will tie dog leashes to his waist and lower him down icy ledges. On gusty March days we will crouch in the lee of boulders hearing the wind blast around us and puzzling silently over our own problems.

  On our first climb, it is November 1. It looks to me like rain.

  “It won’t rain,” he says simply. “We can climb.”

  He is never wrong about the weather, so up we go to search for the cave of Will Warren, “a sheep-stealer and Sabbath-breaker” from the early 1800s, according to the local histories. I stuff some Halloween candy and water into a knapsack, and we clamber up through brush and bittersweet and dried milkweed, past radio towers and into eerie, dense woods.

  When we come to a stretch of dubious handholds and precipitous toeholds, Joe lights up. Uncas’s spidery ascent, his vain, heroic quest to save the hapless Alice, is alive in his mind.

  “You are Uncas, and I am Hawkeye,” he tells me once or twice. He has said it so many times, on so many hikes, that it is almost an incantation. Today, I search his voice for a new, sour taste, but I don’t find one. This is good. We have been struggling over his behavior, and there have been some nasty scenes that left cracks in the perfect egg of our love for each other. He had been watching a videotape of The Last of the Mohicans, the Daniel Day-Lewis version, which is probably too violent for cultural anthropologists in their twenties, let alone small boys. So I’d hide it. He’d find it. I’d hide it better, and Thona would help him find it. (She liked it, too.) Finally I smashed it with a hammer, which was a brutish and silly way to solve the problem.

  “I don’t mind,” he said calmly when I did it.

  I don’t mind. It’s what you say to the Hurons to show them you are strong.

  Afterward, he fished the tape from the wastebasket and inspected it carefully, as if its guts held some clue to the magic. I felt like a stupid, awkward father, and I wondered if he would ever forgive me. I come from a land, as you will see, where things can go deeply, irreparably wrong.

  We come to a deep gray rock formation and haul ourselves up and down ledges, real Uncas stuff. We eat Kit Kats on a flat expanse bumping up against gray, burgeoning clouds.

  We feel the cave before we see it. I do, anyway. The outer rock is no different from the rest of the mountainside, but all through the woods around it there’s a low hum, fraught, ominous.

  The entrance is a cervical gash at ground level. We crawl on our bellies to get in. The sheep-stealer and Sabbath-breaker spent his days reliving and reversing his own birth, apparently.

  We linger for minutes only, running a flashlight beam around the walls. But we’re both jittery, and happy enough to get out.

  On the hike back, there are some places where he asks that I take his hand as we work down a steep grade. Most of the time, he resists help.

  “Dad,” he says, apropos of nothing, everything, “you are my partner forever.”

  Benediction.

  Three

  Bliss

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  We do not recommend pizza pie

  This is the first time my father died. It is 1967. The demons and dark places are getting the upper hand, and my family has drifted from being a charmingly quirky folie à trois to a rogue unit capable of some truly disturbing backcountry operations.

  The first hint I get of the strange days to come is a sudden move out of the West Hartford neighborhood where I have grown up, where I have lived for twelve of my thirteen years. My parents have fallen into a dispute with the management of our apartment complex. It is never clear to me what the cause is or who is truly in the wrong, but there is a rather ominous visit from a Hartford county sheriff, serving papers.

  My mother sits me down one day.

  “We’re moving to Newington. It’s just one town away. You can’t tell anyone about this. Nobody. None of your friends,” she says.

  These are dire circumstances, she explains, and we face terrible calamity if our plans are revealed. From the look on her ashen face and the stricken tone of her voice, you might conclude that we are fleeing Nazi Germany with minutes to spare before the Gestapo raps at our door.

  She convinces me. I have a circle of about a dozen close friends in the neighborhood, boys with whom I have shared all the adventures of childhood for more than a decade. I tell none of them. The moving van arrives during the day. The next time they come to look for me, I no longer live there.

  I never spoke a word to any of them ever again. I don’t even know, to this day, who came to knock on my door or how the news of my disappearance spread. I was too ashamed to attempt any explanation or to contact them at all later, and, as the years passed, I developed a quiet, perverse pride in having pulled such a gigantic stunt.

  It strikes me now that my mother succeeded, unintentionally, in re-creating a peculiar quirk of her own childhood. She grew up in Dana, Massachusetts, one of four towns flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Her entire childhood lies underwater now. My grandmother told me of taking a canoe out on the lake and looking down to see foundations and even the occasional hitching post. It was sort of like life imitating Freud, who understood water, in dreams, to symbolize the unconscious.

  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,” wh
o 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.