My Father's Footprints

by Colin McEnroe

  He looks at me, as if he is trying to guess what has been wrong with me for two years. I still have not told anyone the suicide story.

  “You’re going to be fine,” he says, finally.

  Four

  MOST HaPPy FIMLY

  Sarah Whitman Hooker Pies recommended with this chapter

  Uncle John’s Gentle Fig Apricot Fluff

  Wolfpack Jack Tarpaper Crust over Nutcracker Peach Pit Pie

  Mango Mango Bang

  On October 6, 1954, my father answers a letter from a man compiling an encyclopedia of the theater:

  I learned playwriting by writing plays in my spare time while working at a factory in East Hartford, Connecticut. I wrote eleven plays before having one optioned. The eleventh play, Mulligan’s Snug, was optioned by eight producers and rewritten twenty-three times, but never produced. The twelfth play, The Silver Whistle, was produced by the Theatre Guild. The thirteenth play, Summer Motley, was optioned once. The fourteenth play, The Distaff Paradox, was optioned twice. I am working on the fifteenth.

  I was born in New Britain, Connecticut, July 1, 1916, and attended the University of Chicago. I have no degrees, never studied dramatics, and know little or nothing about the theater. I have forgotten why I started writing plays. In spite of the fact that I have had a play on Broadway, I am convinced that I would be better off today had I invested my time more wisely. I have taken three different batteries of vocational tests which showed that I have no talent as a writer. In other words, being a playwright doesn’t make sense, but I have too much time invested to back out now.

  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.

  In second grade, there is no play. Donnybrook! closes after sixty-five performances. I have to find another way to be remarkable.

  “You’re a midget.” This is my mother talking.

  “What’s a midget?”

  “Somebody who never gets tall.”

  “I’m never going to get tall?”

  “No. You’ll always be this size. You’re fifteen years old.”

  “We held you out of school for a while,” my father chimes in absentmindedly.

  I fall silent, playing with my tiny plastic men.

  And then, “I’m really fifteen?”

  “Yes.”

  I spend the weekend as a midget.

  On Monday, at school, I tell my friends. It seems to me I’m entitled to a certain respect.

  “I’m fifteen.”

  “You are not.”

  “I’m a midget.”

  “What’s that?”

  I explain.

  “Miss Clarke! Colin says he’s fifteen. He says he’s a midget.”

  “I’m sure he’s not.”

  “I am! My parents said so!”

  “I’m sure you misunderstood.”

  It takes a week or two to get this straightened out. I suffer a tremendous loss of face when it comes out that I am normal. I get mad at my parents, not for convincing me I was a midget but for subsequently breaking cover. It seems to me we all should have stuck to our story.

  The first time anybody in our household ever dies, it is me

  “Crawford? Sam?”

  I know what I am doing on the eastern edge of Mooney’s Woods on a winter afternoon in West Hartford, 1963. I am looking for two friends I think might be there.

  “Crawford? Sam?”

  I am eight years old.

  What I don’t know is why I walk out on the ice of the pond that lies down the hill, out of sight, behind the Simmons house on Staples Place. The ice is perfect for skateless sliding—one, two, three, glide. I have been told to stay off the ice. One, two, three, glide. “Crawford? Sam?”

  The ice abruptly gives way beneath my feet and I drop straight down into the cold water of the pond. No one can see me. No one can possibly hear my cry for help.

  My boots fill with water. They are those black boots of yore, with the agreeable buckles whose little hinged tongues slipped through little metal grillworks. They battened so nicely onto your leg that you could not possibly kick them off.

  I sit here now watching my young self sink and kick, and it strikes me that every requisite of sudden, untimely death is in place. I am alone, sinking through icy water in a secluded pond. I am the only person who can save me, and I am not strong or athletic.

  I survive mainly because the bulky, ungainly coat I am wearing spreads out over the water in a way that traps a big bubble of air. If I were an angel worshipper, I suppose I could make this into an angel, but it is more like a big bubble of air. It keeps me high in the water and upright while I clamber up on the ice—only to have more of it break away.

  How do I get myself out? I can’t remember. I just do.

  My next decision almost k
ills me. For some reason, I walk home, a distance of several blocks. I pass at least one other person on the trip and sob out to him what has happened to me, but it doesn’t occur to me to go to a warm house right away.

  My father hears an odd noise coming from outdoors and concludes it is an animal in distress. It is my wail of misery, fright, danger, and near-death.

  By the time I barge through the door of our apartment, ice has formed all over me. It hangs off my coat in jagged formations. I present myself to my father who, years later, will admit to being completely terrified. At this moment, he seems merely businesslike about getting me into a bath and gradually warming the water. That a person from Miami Beach knows to do this is one of life’s little blessings.

  That night my parents stay up late. It will seem to them, years later, that the news that night carries other stories of boys who fell through the ice, and that those boys died. I doubt it. I think that for days and weeks and maybe even years, every story of a boy who falls through the ice and dies becomes another inflection of me, an alternative form of their son whose luck, this time, runs out.

  My father’s memory will be that, after his ministerings that day, my vitality is restored. In his story, he is Christ, and I am Lazarus. In truth, I am not so easily fixed.

  Within days, I have pneumonia. I recover. The pneumonia comes back. I recover again. At least, I think so. The act of writing this has made me feel cold, has turned an awl of pain loose in my chest. I can see the bony fingers of the trees and a gray-white sky of that day.

  My father, well into my adult life, will give me a series of winter coats as Christmas presents. They are invariably the gray-beige colorless color of the coat that saved me. Coat after coat, never with any particular comment.

  Life renders us. This is no secret. It boils away layers each day. Every so often, I am convinced, life conspires to kill off characters inside us. The unremarkable boy of that day, not especially good at being himself, dies in the pond, and someone a little bit different grows into his skin.

  In third grade, there is a career pageant.

  We are instructed to compose a couplet describing our future job. We must go up on stage with a prop or two and recite the couplet.