My Father's Footprints

by Colin McEnroe

  What is alarming is how much of this is predicted in his play The Exorcism.

  Here is Willie, discussing his possession with the priest, Father Reagan:

  FATHER REAGAN

  Your soul is in danger. Your soul is in grave danger.

  WILLIE BURKE

  Will there be prayers and incantations?

  REAGAN

  Yes.

  WILLIE

  Will there be admonitions to the devil?

  REAGAN

  Yes.

  WILLIE

  Will there be a struggle between the forces of good and evil?

  REAGAN

  Yes.

  WILLIE

  A mighty struggle?

  REAGAN

  Enough of a struggle to get the job done.

  WILLIE

  Will legions of angels be employed?

  REAGAN

  Unfortunately, the chancery can’t command such forces——or perhaps it can——who knows? Who knows what forms help from heaven takes?

  WILLIE

  Then there will be a battle and I will have an observation post on the front lines.

  REAGAN

  You will be the front lines.

  WILLIE

  I will be an Agincourt, a Hastings, a Verdun, a Bastogne, a field of white lilies for demons to bleed upon. I shall know the sound of heaven’s fury. I shall smell the burning brimstone and hear the screams of creatures hell cannot torment. Then the forces of evil will fall back in disorder, snarling, belching fire and sulphur. It will become a rout, with angels in hot pursuit of screaming imps. At the last there will be calm. There will be peace. There will be flowers everywhere and the soft vibrations of a million violins. Into this calm, beauty and serenity will come a voice——a soft voice, a soothing voice. The voice will say, “You’re better now, Willie.” And I will nod without speaking, for it is the fate of battlefields to offer mute testimony of the futility of war.

  It is difficult to tell whether Willie is gravely serious or amusing himself at the priest’s expense. And of course, it is a mistake, in treating of Irishmen, to assume there is any distinction. What is clear to me is that my father describes, with pre-science and precision, the experience he will have three years later.

  The play is also quite clear about who the enemy is, about whom Willie truly must vanquish. (We’ll come to that. I promise.)

  He tried writing the story of his demons.

  That didn’t work.

  He had to do it. He had to make himself the battlefield.

  “The person prone to suicide carries a rage within—a rage to kill,” he writes to me in that letter, years later. “He wants to kill because he cannot endure himself… He hates himself. Because he hates himself, he cannot relate to others. Nothing is gained by showing him somebody who is worse off than he. He can’t relate to the difference.”

  They send me back upstairs to Colinworld, with instructions to do my homework. I have been keeping up and make high honors at the end of the semester. My father sits me down after and thanks me in a “You are to be commended for maintaining your sterling academic performance even during a period when I tried to kill myself” speech that I bet not a lot of parents give.

  It strikes me that I have my parents over a barrel for once. If I want to become a juvenile delinquent now, who is in a position to remonstrate with me? My father tried to kill himself! I can shoot up on public buses, and nobody can really fault me. But I do not avail myself. I take no drugs or chances or liberties.

  One afternoon in late May, my father picks me up at Kingswood. We walk through the gates to where his fateful Impala—you wanna talk about a car named Angst—is parked on Outlook Avenue. There is an ambulance idling by the side of the road, its driver slumped back in the front seat, his elbow hanging out of the open window. He turns his head toward us and calls to my father by name.

  It is Norman Cristina, our ex-neighbor and disgraced fire-fighter, reborn as an ambulance driver—a rather terrifying thought. In fact, a month or two later, he is in the paper again, this time for delivering a baby in his ambulance. “I bet he pulled over and waited for the little bastard to come out,” my father says delightedly when he reads it.

  This time, though, Norman asks if he can have a word with my father in private. I step away and they speak briefly. My father walks back to his car laughing and wagging his head. He tells me what was said.

  “The last time I saw you, you didn’t look so good,” Norman told him.

  In an odds-shattering twist, Norman was the ambulance driver who arrived on the scene of my father’s suicide attempt.

  “When I saw it was you, I really stepped on the gas,” Norman said.

  Considering Norman’s penchant for heroism, my father muses, “I was probably in a hell of a lot more danger from crashing in the goddamned ambulance.”

  And he laughs until his shoulders shake.

  The next fall, I, a lifelong boy, become an Oxford girl. And our household welcomes a new arrival in the person of Henry Nemo. Why does this sound like a sitcom installment?

  Kingswood, a boys’ school, and Oxford, a girls’ school, have done the paperwork necessary to merge the two institutions, but the sticky feat of getting boys and girls to sit side-by-side in classrooms has yet to be accomplished.

  The campuses are about three miles apart. In this, my junior year, the planners begin stirring small amounts of us into one another. A handful of classes are set up as evenly mixed boy-girl blends, and a shuttle bus runs between the two places. The driver is Charlie, a pudgy and lecherous man who entertains us—when only boys are on the bus—with filthy talk. He is our Charon—the figure in Greek mythology who poled the ferryboat across the river Styx to the world of the dead—but our passage is from the safe, arid, monastic world of a boys’ school to the damp, viscous caverns of Oxford.

  In that handful of mixed classes is my fourth-year Latin class with Mr. O’Brien. So few people have stuck with Latin that, in order to have a respectable quorum (“of whom,” genitive plural, right Obie?), it is necessary to combine the boys and girls classes and throw in the one and only guy who is taking third-year Latin.

  We read the Aeneid. If you are already feeling a little protective of your father, the Aeneid is a damn strange thing to read, because it is nearly obsessed with “paternitas,” the Roman ideal of fatherhood. The epic’s most memorable image is probably that of Aeneas bearing his father Anchises on his back from the burning ruins of Troy.

  I am also trying to study French and am required to take American history, and it is all kind of impossible to schedule, unless… unless… Would I be willing to spend most of my day over at Oxford, taking American history and French courses in which I would be the only boy?

  I am weeks shy of sixteen. I have a hard time, in these days, imagining problems for myself. After what I have been through recently, what could be so bad?

  “I’ll do it.”

  Word gets around to my peers. There are raucous expressions of envy. What a deal! Be like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Oh, yes, I say with a weak grin, shooting fish in a barrel.

  Inside, I am already beginning to wonder about those fish, that barrel.

  I am a slightly lonely, awkward person. I have been attending a school where almost everybody else has more money and better clothes. I am commissioner, and, for that matter, Yahweh, of an imaginary basketball league. My father communes with fairies. I am entering my fifth year at a boys’ school. I know more about certain microorganisms than I know about girls.

  Worse still, I look absolutely horrible.

  Hormones have been working me over, jabbing me with a stick.

  I am skinny and pimply. My hair is ill-shorn, and my clothes never seem to fit right. The effort of keeping all my secrets and maintaining the requisite sangfroid and cynical detachment in a school full of would-be Holden Caufields has done something even worse to my face than the ravages of acne. My visage is crimped and tight and unsmiling
.

  In the recipe for romantic success, I seem an unlikely ingredient.

  Stirring in my father’s mind is the character of Henry Nemo, a writer convicted of terrible crimes against women. Emerging from a four-year fugue state into a howling, violent rage, Nemo is given a lobotomy. (“They bored two 1¼-inch holes in my skull so that they could get at the underside of the frontal lobe. The cutting was orbital—whatever that means.”)

  My father is back at the business of staying up late, flashing black lightning down on his yellow pads, but this time it is a novel, his first.

  It is my idea.

  “Why don’t you write something about what it was like to wake up surprised that you were still alive?” I tell him. “Make it a novel. You’re getting nowhere with plays.”

  I am actually beginning to suspect he doesn’t like plays. He hasn’t seen one—written by himself or anybody else—in years.

  I also donate the name, explaining that Nemo is Greek for “nobody.” I touch upon the confusion this causes between Odysseus and the Cyclops.

  Nemo awakens from his lobotomy and cannot recall his own name or any details of his past. He is terrified. A note on his chart reports, “Patient told maintenance man that God didn’t know what he was doing. God very inefficient, confused. Job too big for God.”

  After several days of recovery, locked in a cell, Nemo is allowed to use the washroom.

  In his makeshift journal, he writes, “I couldn’t bring myself to write down what I saw. What I saw was me. I don’t know what the hell I expected—some sort of happy-go-lucky guy with a decent, well-meaning face, friendly and open with a warm smile and twinkling eye. Forget it. Let’s not talk about it. We’ll talk about something else. I’m ugly! I’m the ugliest-looking man on earth! I jumped when I saw myself in the mirror. I wiped the mirror over and over with my towel. I thought it was coated with something. It wasn’t. As I shaved, I kept hoping it would get better. It didn’t. I have a Neanderthal brow. My eyes are hard and mean-looking. My nose has been broken. Somebody or something bit a piece off one of my ears. I seem to have most of my teeth, but when I smile, it’s like a shark biting on an oil drum. From the neck down I’m quite impressive. My thing caused quite a bit of comment in the shower room, but the face is what the world looks at. I don’t want the world staring at my face. What woman would let me come near her?”

  This is—except for the thing part—roughly how I feel about how I look. At a boys’ school, it hasn’t mattered much to me. Suddenly it does. I don’t want to be Henry Nemo at Oxford.

  I have a plan for survival among those Amazons. My plan is to be smart and possibly also funny. I am afraid of women. In my life thus far I have dated one girl, briefly and uneventfully. She ended things, hoping (in vain) to trade up to my friend Mark Fisher, who had spent the entire decade, ever since we met in first grade, being more handsome and popular than me.

  No more heartbreak. These Oxford girls might not like me much, I reason, but I will see to it that they respect me.

  I am a peculiar boy.

  So I study. For my French course, taught by a Miss French, I simply do my homework, pause, and do it all over again. I am flawless every day.

  American history is more problematic. The teacher, Miss Hall, is in her final year before retirement. She regards my arrival in the last gasp of her 137-year boy-free teaching career as some kind of cruel joke. The girls are seniors, a year older than me. It will be necessary, I reason, to read two texts: the one that is assigned and another, more detailed and challenging book I find in my father’s detailed and challenging library. The result is that I am always grotesquely over-prepared for class and eager to undertake issues that do not at all conform to Miss Hall’s understanding of American history.

  To worsen matters, I am shipwrecked at Oxford for most of the day with nothing to do and no mates around. So I re-read everything.

  I am afraid to go to lunch because I think no one will want to eat with me. So I don’t eat lunch. I lose exorbitant amounts of weight.

  In time, I become the world’s foremost six-foot-tall, 128-pound French-speaking American-history expert.

  My aspect is that of a sullen, distempered caged animal. Much later, Oxford girls will tell me they were troubled in those days by the way I kept my head down and never smiled. They wondered why I didn’t eat.

  Despite the fact that I am insufferably competent and never attempt to return anyone’s friendship, some girls try to be kind. One of them, a girl named Sue, simply insists that I talk to her. I have found a place where I can be alone between periods. It is the lobby looking out on Highland Street, with a view of the nursing home where, twenty-seven years later, my father will die.

  I like to sit in a Windsor chair, tilting it back so it rocks and bumps gently against the wall while I bump-bump mentally palpate, say, the legacy bump-bump of James K. Polk. Sometimes the teacher on the other side of the wall, Mrs. Gettier, emerges and, in exasperation, implores me to stop. One last, soothing pleasure halted, I think. Sue comes to the lobby each day, sits down in another chair, and makes conversation until, falteringly, I join in. There is nothing romantic in her overtures. She has a nice boyfriend, I know. She is just being decent to me.

  And I am wildly in love with her for it. Like the Beast, like Quasimodo, like the Phantom, I am hideous but I can be reached.

  I love them all, actually. In their dreadful gray uniforms, every single one of them is pretty to me, in various ways. And I yearn for them and dream of romances and, by remaining pathologically aloof, make absolutely certain that none of them suspects that one as ugly and wretched as I entertain such dreams.

  “Women, children, and dogs over seven pounds know all about love, but men only experience it in their teens and twenties when the temperature is over sixty-five,” Henry Nemo observes as my father pours him out onto yellow pads at our dining room table. I have moved down from Colinworld and now we work together most nights, with me advising him on the novel.

  I am uniquely connected to the Nemo material because at school I continue to feel like a loveless, isolated freak.

  One day, while I work in the library, a Swedish exchange student, a pretty girl from my history class, comes to me to ask about a word, in English, whose meaning she cannot divine. She writes it on my notebook.

  “Bliss.”

  She looks at me inquiringly.

  “Happiness. Great joy,” I whisper hoarsely.

  Bliss. I’m a real expert.

  Another day, in the spring, two mischievous girls plunk themselves down in my lobby and discuss, a little too audibly, their menstrual cycles.

  The lobby is never quite the same after that.

  There is also a smell, sweet and rank, I encounter when entering a classroom that has been closed for a while. It’s a dense smell of perfume inexpertly applied and experimental hair products and something else, something pent up and hormonal. I believe it is the smell of fresh, excited, wonderful girls cooped up all day without boys.

  It makes me think I am not alone in my yearnings.

  In mythology, Aeneas founds Rome. Before he does that, he visits the underworld, where the shades of the dead dwell. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the scholar Joseph Campbell says those two things are closely related. He writes that in all sorts of legends “the really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world.” The hero disappears and then returns, licked and seared by infernal flames, filled with new energy. Think of Luke Skywalker when he comes to retrieve Han Solo at the start of Return of the Jedi. His hand has been chopped off, and Mark Hamill, the actor who plays him, has almost obligingly damaged his real face in a motorcycle accident. Our first look into his eyes tells us the boyish Luke has died away. This new person is someone who has marched back from the world of the dead and is one hell of a lot more powerful and dangerous.

  To grow, to become formidable, one must die.

  This is the lesson of 1970.

  The
school year passes. Pius Aeneas gets in and out of scrapes. Manifest Destiny comes and goes. I am frequently out sick for long stretches thanks to my rigorous nutrition program. The effort of looking serious and unapproachable all day gives my face an additionally sour cast. I am increasingly nobody’s prize.

  The word “bliss,” etched on my notebook in Swedish ballpoint, mocks my progress through life.

  And then spring comes. The temperature is over sixty-five.

  Spring has always been good to me. I thaw, in various ways. In this case, my pimple count decreases. I am named editor of the school newspaper. It seems possible, maybe permissible, to return the occasional smile at Oxford. At home, I am Aeneas, carrying my father on my shoulders out of the burning ruins of our recent past. Or so I imagine.

  I do not see that he is Aeneas. He is the one who has visited the eerie underworld of the dead, perhaps even communed with the shade of his own father. His psychiatrist is telling him he is at last free, filled with creative power. There will be a new empire of plays and novels, streaming from his fingers like light from the godhead. This is not, alas, an accurate prophecy, but it is true that his time in the Bardo, the waiting room between death and rebirth, has made him wiser and stronger.

  I remember one of the last days of that year. It is bright and sunny. I put down my book in the lobby, walk outside, and lie down on a low wall, letting the sun get at my acne.

  It feels good.

  A girl walks out of the main building. She lies down near me and takes the sun. We say very little, and I don’t see her again for twenty-seven years. *

  Her name is Joy.

  Great joy.

  I spend the summer alone in thought for long stretches of each day, stalled in a Court of Pizza Pie Powder. After a series of continuances, the Court drops its case against me.

  When I return to school, Tyler C. Tingley sits me down.

  “Your skin has cleared up,” he says.

  “Yes.”