Persons familiar with Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor will imagine the jolt of unhappy recognition I get when I read it years later and see myself in Coover’s drab, lonely, vaguely hallucinatory protagonist.
For company upstairs, I have the Cristinas. Werner did his own remodeling, and when it came time to close up old doorways that had connected sections of the house, he simply fitted a piece of plywood into the space and painted it the color of the passageway. About a half-inch of cheap wood separates part of my upstairs Colinworld from the young Cristina family.
The Cristinas fight a lot, which is kind of interesting, but they eventually grow more conscious of the nearness of me because they move their quarrels to another room. Norman Cristina, who looks like a more compact version of Tommy Smothers with just a hint of swagger, is an avid volunteer fireman and becomes a minor celebrity in Newington because, on two occasions, he happens upon fires and brings them under control single-handedly.
This was bound to appeal to my father, who is utterly insane on the subject of fires and fire equipment—so much so that he is incapable of watching fire trucks pass his car without following them, no matter who else is in the car or where we thought we were headed. Many a drive is disrupted with a U-turn and the high-speed pursuit of a hook and ladder while my mother shouts “Bob!”
So he and Norman hit it off a little, and he is quite disappointed —but also, I think, darkly amused—when Norman is arrested for setting the fires he had discovered and extinguished. More fights and then the Cristinas move out.
There are fights in our house, too.
I never join them but I hear them. My father’s anger—as black as boiling pitch—is oozing across his heart, claiming larger hunks of him, extinguishing the gentle fairy-light of his humor as surely as Norman Cristina would put out those fake fires. It has been six or seven years since he’s had anything produced. He spends most of his days at a real estate agency, and his nights writing after my mother and I go to sleep. From time to time, he gets a call from someone in his misty past, someone who wants him to write, oh, patter for a Barbra Streisand one-woman revue, and he dismisses that person with a snarl and a withering remark.
Is he really even writing, by this time?
I have a letter, written by him in 1976, to the William Morris agent named Ramona Fallows. It announces a sort of comeback, in the form of The Nemo Paradox, the dark novel that emerges from this period. “I quit writing in 1967,” it says. “This is the only thing I’ve written since.”
Can this be true? My memories of life at home with my parents are of an unbroken blur of yellow pads etched with the sharp black lightning of my father’s handwriting. Coming downstairs in the morning, you would find two or three of these pads scattered around, the work of nocturnal spirits. It seems impossible that at any point this stops, but perhaps it does.
Certainly the unsuccessful scripts are piling up around the edges of our life like snowdrifts against a door. The Ears of the Wolf, The Exorcism, The Rettinger Case, the much-rewritten Mulligan’s Snug. Producers option them, and sometimes bring them close to production. Directors are hired and casting begins. And then, poof, something happens, and my father is back home, his head drooping a bit.
“What’s your father doing? How’s his writing going?”
I get so I dread the questions. I feel tired and compromised from having to lay out all these elaborate stories of “not quite.” “Not quite” is the one that got away, and that’s the world’s favorite example of a wheedling narrative, one that seeks glory with nothing material to shore it up.
And then something worse happens. The questions stop coming. Six, seven, eight years go by with nothing by Bob McEnroe in production. Nobody thinks of him as a writer anymore. He is an eccentric real estate agent who, at one time, had written.
So my job changes. I become the last true believer, the person who brings up the very subject I had once dreaded. My father, he’s a writer!
A few people remember. Among them are the Mark Twain Masquers, a Hartford amateur company whose members lionize him. Their chief patroness, a wealthy woman named Sunny Roberts, arranges to fund a scholarship for me at Kingswood, mainly out of admiration for him. And during this period, they decide to resurrect and stage The Silver Whistle, his undisputed masterpiece.
For a different sort of person, this could be the proverbial shot in the arm, a little pep rally to remind him of who he is. For him, it merely deepens the sense that his writing is ill-starred, is now remanded into the custody of unpaid hacks.
They lure him to a few rehearsals, and he comes home each time in a mild dudgeon, telling me, “They’re going to butcher it.”
On opening night, he goes to the theater, makes his way backstage, speaks encouragingly to the cast.
And then goes home.
“What are you doing here?” I say when he appears in the living room.
“I’m not going to watch that.”
“What if they announce during the curtain call that the playwright is here in the audience and asked to stand up?”
“They’ll be mistaken.”
If in fact he stopped writing around 1967, then his last play from that period is The Exorcism, a dark comedy he researched and wrote before William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist was published.
It is the story of Willie Burke, a man in his twenties who believes he is possessed.
Willie’s father is Martin, charming, funny, drunk, prone to failure, self-important, foolish. We first see Martin entering the house after a night of tippling in a bar. Sadie, a spinster relation who lives in the house, catches him.
MARTIN BURKE
[Bowing]
Martin Burke at your service; friend to man and beast; kind to trees, flowers, rock and common clay.
This is the play that most strongly feels as though my father is speaking to me from some distant reach of time. It’s the instruction manual for Robert E. McEnroe. I’m a little late in realizing that.
Martin is the play’s comic relief. He is married to Bessie Burke, “a bony, horse-faced woman who wears a pince-nez pinned to her dress” and who conducts séances in her parlor. She is stern. She is commanding. She is cold. She is, except for the séances, every inch the woman my father rarely mentioned and never discussed, the woman so invisible in my life (and yet so much the author of it) that when I began this book, I realized I did not know her name. She is his mother. My grandmother. Or so I believe.
The play is a slow burn at this woman, Bessie Burke. The anger is papered over by Martin’s fey humor, some of the best comic writing my father ever did, and rather close to the bone for the McEnroes.
Here is a scene in which Willie’s psychiatrist visits the house to learn more about the family history.
MARTIN BURKE
Insanity? There’s been no insanity in my family. The Burkes have always been a sound people… and dependable. The Burkes have always been a dependable people.
CUTLER
No insanity?
MARTIN
None at all. The nearest thing there was to it was an uncle of mine, Snowy Dougherty, who acted a little odd. In fact, they put him away from time to time… just to keep him from hurting himself.
CUTLER
He was suicidal?
MARTIN
No, indeed. Snowy liked life too much for that. He had spells come over him where he’d do things to himself with pins and needles and razor blades. He was harmless, but when he got that way he’d talk about beheading women and it used to make the women nervous. That’s why when he got that way the women would insist that he be locked up. He didn’t mind very much. He was an amiable man who kept his emotions under control. If he’d been quiet about beheading people, he’d never have been locked up at all.
CUTLER
He sounds like an unusual man.
MARTIN
[Indignant]
Snowy Dougherty was as fine a man as ever walked t
he earth.
CUTLER
Was there anybody else who acted odd?
MARTIN
My grandmother killed herself but there was nothing odd about that except the way that she did it.
CUTLER
How did she do it?
MARTIN
[Shakes his head]
I’d rather not say how she did it.
CUTLER
You can tell me. I’m a psychiatrist.
MARTIN
That’s no reason for telling you, and I won’t.
CUTLER
But…
MARTIN
The woman did herself in in her own way. If it was unique, it was because she was an unusual woman. If it was a little weird and gruesome, it was because the woman was upset at the time.
CUTLER
It’s rather important that I know how she did it.
MARTIN
It’s not important at all. If I thought it was important, I’d tell you.
[Snorts]
If it’s the queer ones you’re after, they’re all on the wife’s side of the family.
Insanity, suicide, the fierce comedy of self-delusion among the Irish. This play should have been distributed to our congregation of three. By 1970, it would be our book of common prayer, our liturgy, our order of worship.
Outside Werner’s house, America is going crazy, but very little of 1968 penetrates our world. We could be in one of Edith Wharton’s novels. Or one of Ray Bradbury’s. I don’t have Tommy Smith and John Carlos posters on my bedroom wall and I have only the vaguest sense of Abbie Hoffman.
At school there is a sense of the unfolding moment, but it is cushioned by all the energy a private school expends on making 1968 look as much as possible like 1948 and 1928. We wear jackets and ties every day, assemble in a chapel each morning, and regard girls as speculative, like purely theoretical astrophysical entities. There is revolution in the air, but it is filtered to a thin mist by the time it reaches us.
A new teacher arrives in 1968. His name is Tyler C. Tingley, and he had attended the school himself. Now he is fresh out of Harvard and brimming with idealism. He teaches my ninth grade English class, where he is alternately worshipped and tortured, depending on which sensibility prevails in the ranks that day. On torture days the class responds to his candor and thoughtfulness with fusillades of cynical, hostile remarks. They research his personal life and history as a student and cunningly weave the new information into their hurtful taunts. Of particular interest is his wife, Marcia, who is beautiful in a luminous and detached way that reminds me of Yoko Ono. How does this earnest nerd of a teacher merit the desirable Marcia? my classmates wonder.
I don’t join in the torment, or at least I’m not comfortable carrying it beyond the gentle teasing Tyler seems to enjoy. I need him. He is the first teacher to applaud my writing, to push me beyond mere workman-like schoolboy prose. He singles out a short story I have written from the perspective of a lizard and makes sure it is published in the school literary magazine, which is called The Wyvern. Wyverns are English dragons, and everything at Kingswood is a Wyvern, including the teams. It doesn’t occur to me until later to wonder what my father, so radicalized an Irishman, thought of this school drenched in faux English heraldry.
What does he think, for that matter, when four young Englishmen become my new gods? One day Tyler Tingley arrives in class with, of all things, Beatles albums. Did we know, he asks, that Beatles lyrics often contain hidden messages, disguised references to all sorts of things? We do not. I certainly don’t. I haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to the Beatles, and the idea, in general, that pop music is about anything grander or deeper than cars, girls, and sunshine is contrary to my understanding.
We begin to study Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with Tyler prodding us along. What is the Albert Hall and why would you try to fill it with holes? Who is kicking Edgar Allen Poe and why? The more we dig, the more we find.
“Sometimes,” Tyler tells us, “John Lennon seems to stick images in there more for his own amusement than because they convey something important. Another writer who did this was James Joyce. Some of the excitement in interpreting work like this is solving all the little mysteries. Which are the important ones and which are just a writer being playful?”
Boom. It is as if someone has tossed a hand grenade into our midst. We become mavens for literary exegesis, detectives of symbolism and—especially in my case—maniacal Beatles scholars.
Almost every boy in the class is, in some sense or another, converted, but a few of the meaner cynics find it difficult to admit to themselves that this nerd, this weenie, has swept such powerful ideas into our heads. They step up their taunts and, following an earnest explanation by Tyler of what is meant by the term “lay reader,” one of them—the angriest boy among us— waits until Tyler is out of the room and scribbles, on the board, “Is Marcia a lay reader?”
This has, at long last, the sought-after effect of making Tyler C. Tingley lose his composure.
“I come in here and I try to treat you like grown-up human beings, and what I get is the chance to find filthy things written about my wife,” he shouts.
The tirade continues from there. I am ashamed for all of us, and a little bit fearful that somehow the covenant between him and us has been broken. I can see that Tyler is, more than anything, hurt, and coming from a family where emotions are battened down and stowed in watertight holds, I have no idea how serious an eruption like this might be. Perhaps he is so wounded that he won’t be taking us on any more journeys into unimagined mental realms.
No, a few days pass and everything is just fine. Better, in fact. The bullying stops, and the magical mystery tours resume. Here in the world outside my family, it is possible to clear the air.
The next fall, the world is suddenly seized by the notion that Paul McCartney has died. Partakers of this fallacy turn to Beatles lyrics with an exegetical scrutiny that would have put tenured Joyce scholars to shame. I am seized by the mania. It is my first exposure to the delightful shade of paranoia that attaches itself to a possible conspiracy loaded with clues and virtually empty of consequence for oneself.
The headmaster, Robert A. Lazear, occasionally summons me to his side at lunch for a briefing. He is amused by the whole thing, and I have a kind of feverish, anal-retentive earnestness that makes it, I’m sure, even funnier.
Paul is, of course, not dead, but, lacking any common sense, I have no way of knowing that. Or maybe I sense Death’s bony hand reaching into the center of my world and feel a little safer projecting the subject onto a risk-free canvas. So I scour the earth for motes of Thanatos and ignore the beam under the beams of my own roof.
The real walrus picks me up in the afternoons, roaring up the long driveway at Kingswood in his maroon Impala station wagon as if the Furies were chasing him. It is a standing quip among the students. Watch out—here comes McEnroe’s old man.
His drinking intensifies. There’s a joke I’ve heard Jews tell about themselves: Why don’t Jews drink? Because it dulls the pain. That’s exactly why and how my father does drink. When he drinks martinis, he bolts them in one gulp and sits back, waiting for the anesthetic. I never see him savor a drink, never see him use liquor much differently than a soldier in a Civil War field hospital would use it, although my dad’s wounds are all emotional. But he rarely drinks a lot in public, at least not during my lifetime.
The exception is this period. Suddenly, he is out in the evening, drinking. He hits cars and other stationary objects with his car. There is an arrest, a night in jail.
He invites me into the Impala after that one and apologizes.
“You should never have to go through anything like that,” he says abjectly.
It seems to me that I hadn’t gone through anything. He is the one who had gone through something. I hadn’t even gone to the police station to retrieve him. And something that happened off premises is, by definition, a break
from his saturnine, snappish brooding. I don’t say any of this.
But a few months’ time brings the Great Pizza Incident, and then it doesn’t matter what I said.
More from The Exorcism:
MARTIN BURKE
[Stands and raises his glass as one who is making a toast]
To all the poor bastards who slip quietly down into their basements to get away from nagging women, I bring hope. Martin Burke has put on his spurs and picked up his whip. Whittle on your wood, men, bang with your hammers, cut with your saws, make little holes with your drills. The birds need the birdhouses. But have courage, take heart. Burke is going to ride——for himself and for all of you. Don’t cringe when the cellar door opens. Don’t panic at the sound of light footsteps on the cellar stairs. When the old lady confronts you, pick up a hatchet and tell her that Burke is riding and a hundred thousand bloomers will feel the crop. Tell her that you’re a man and that you deserve respect. Do that for Martin Burke, and he’ll do the rest for you.
[Bows]
God bless you all.
[Crosses to stairs]
I must rejoin my regiment.
[Goes off stairs]
BESSIE BURKE
[To Sadie]
Please go up and see that he doesn’t go to bed with his shoes on.
SADIE
He’s wearing spurs tonight, and they’ll rip the hell out of the sheets.
My Father's Footprints Page 9
