They have seven children. My grandfather Edward is the seventh. The male McEnroes who do not become circus workers go into business for themselves. They own candy stores, ice-cream companies, restaurants, cigar stores, bars, and pool halls.
Edward owns bars. He falls in love with Catherine O’Connell.
It is the talent of Catherine O’Connell, over the course of eighty-five years, to make herself invisible.
“Did you ever meet her?” I ask my mother.
“I’m not sure.”
“How can you not be sure?”
“I may have met her once.”
“This would have been your mother-in-law. Mothers-in-law have a way of sticking out.”
“I really don’t remember. I think I may have met her just that once.”
I try Catherine’s niece, Peggy, who remembers all kinds of things, who remembers, for example, certain dresses that her friends wore on dates with my father and the type of car my grandfather drove when Peggy was eight. I ask her questions about my grandmother.
“What was her name?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Was it Catherine O’Connell?”
“I don’t remember. That sounds like it might be right.”
“What was she like?”
“I don’t remember much about her.”
The name survives on my father’s birth certificate. There are no photographs or letters. I haven’t the faintest idea of where to look for her grave or even under what name she’d be buried. There is no one left, that I can find, to tell her side of things, if there is a side to tell.
She seems to have lived into the early 1950s, but no one knows where she died or in what year. Or no one is telling.
No one is telling anything, except, of course, the scripts.
Sitting on the floor in my own house, I page nervously through The Exorcism, the one place where Catherine O’Connell still lives and breathes.
MARTIN BURKE
She’s a woman ruled by pride, and pride can ruin a woman as easily as it can ruin a man. She has a hunger to be admired. She has…
WILLIE BURKE
A thirst for recognition.
MARTIN
A thirst for recognition.
WILLIE
An ache to climb over her fellow men and look down on them.
MARTIN
[Scowling]
She’s always trying to pass herself off as lace-curtain Irish but her old man was a meterman on a trolley car.
Thus do Martin and Willie, father and son, discuss Bessie, wife and mother. I think the three Burkes are as close as my father dared come to putting his own parents and himself down on paper. The real story was something he could not bear to discuss for most of his life. A few years before he died, I asked him to tell me something, anything about the past. And this is what came out.
Edward McEnroe fell in love with a woman who was lace-curtain Irish. He was shanty Irish. These terms do not come from Ireland. They are, from what I can tell, inventions of the New England Irish diaspora and almost entirely matters of attitude (with a dash of socioeconomics thrown in). The shanty Irish were, well, Irish. They kept some of the old ways, stayed clannish, hid nothing of their roots. The lace-curtain Irish affected Yankee middle-class mores, tried to assimilate.
Eddie owned bars and maybe a pool hall. This was very shanty Irish stuff. Catherine told him there would be no marriage unless he became respectable. Eddie sold what he had and got into the real estate business. My father claimed Eddie learned real estate from a man named Smiley Tatum, which might account for what happened later.
When Robert E. McEnroe was born, my grandmother was distressed. She didn’t want a baby. She was an older-than-usual mother for those times. She sent the baby back to the hospital. There was nothing wrong with him. She just didn’t want him there. She was tired, overwhelmed, one of the last American neurasthenics.
McEnroe men are named Thomas, Patrick, Richard, William, Edward, Charles, and Henry. Over and over again, like a polypeptide sequence. It makes record-searching a nightmare. Robert is not a McEnroe family name. My father’s name is a sore thumb in the McEnroe records. It’s more of an inside-the-pale Norman name, the kind that might be worn by someone with unwholesome ties to the king. It is, quite specifically, the first name of the Nugent to whom the Crown granted the right to have a Court of Pie Powder in Mountnugent. My father claimed, unhappily, that he was named after a collie.
After a few days, his mother let the baby come back.
Eddie took his stuck-up wife and his collie son to Miami Beach, where the real estate game could be played at higher stakes. These were the Roaring Twenties, and my grandfather made a bundle, using whatever the Smiley Tatum Method was. By the middle of the decade, he was a millionaire. My father grew up shooting alligators at night. In the summers, Eddie drove his family up to Connecticut in a shiny new Marmon. My father had what was then called a “mammy,” a black woman who cared for white children. Inasmuch as his mother did not warm to motherhood, I think it’s a fair guess that this African American woman—alas, her name has not survived our pathetic oral tradition—loomed unusually large in his upbringing. In the final year of his life, the home health aides were often black women, and he seemed to find this comforting.
The last complete sentence my father ever wrote was an unsolicited letter of reference for one of them. I found it, undelivered, tucked in a book about Dante. The handwriting quivers, and the feel of the note is effortful, as if it might have taken all afternoon to eke out, a great, final heave on the oars of writing to produce this tiny thing. “To whom it may concern: Jean is the best shower girl I have ever had.”
But for Bob, the boy, there is damage done in the first twenty-four hours on earth. There is a stain splashed on him— “unwanted,” “unwelcome”—like the dye spurting onto the bank robber’s loot. Like the loot, he is not fit for use afterward. Or so it feels to him.
Here is my father, in a letter to me, explaining Sylvia Plath: “It is probable that Sylvia’s trouble was caused by her relationship with her mother… This may or may not be true, but what is true is that Sylvia was once a little child who thought that she did not belong in the world.”
Fairies steal children at birth. It’s in the old legends. Sometimes, in a child’s place, they leave a thousand-year-old fairy or a log, which has been enchanted so that it looks to our eyes like a human child. But in some of the stories, the fairies steal a child, bewitch him, and then return him to his parents. And he lives his life with a foot in each world, as a go-between, truly at home in neither place.
Yes, that does sound familiar.
GOD IS OMNISCIENT—Don’t try to change his mind.
GOD IS OMNIPOTENT—Don’t try to tell him what to do.
GOD IS GOOD—Don’t try to blame evil on him.
GOD IS SECURE—He does not require the reassurance of adoration.
GOD IS JUST—Every creature gets either plants or other creatures to eat.
The Nemo Paradox
Now. A few things happen in tight sequence. My father’s chronology is, the more I analyze it, probably a little unreliable. But here is his story according to him.
My father speaks up in church. His outburst probably resembles that of Henry Nemo, reported above. Of particular interest to my father, who is perhaps thirteen, is the question of why God would require or benefit from any worship, if he is all-powerful and over-stretching. The nuns are displeased. They summon a priest. He is displeased. In my father’s version, the boy Robert is branded a dangerous heretic, Thomas More with a cowlick, Abelard with no girlfriend. Too dangerous to roam free, spreading his doctrine. My father’s version carefully includes him in the romantic procession of Irishmen martyred for their fervent beliefs. In 1916, the year of his birth, the British shot three Irish Catholic poets in a firing squad outside Dublin Castle. One of them was Joseph Mary Plunkett, probably one of Noeleen McEnroe’s distant in-laws. It is in this tradition that my dad squarel
y places himself.
In Florida, the penalties for dangerous thinking are slightly less severe. Young Bobby is shipped out to military school. There he breaks rules and is ordered, as punishment, to push some kind of tennis court on wheels. An actual, full-sized, rolling tennis court. Pushing the court from place to place somehow entitles him to play on it, too, and he becomes adept. By all accounts, he was a magnificent tennis player as a young man, another mercurial, left-handed, shot-making McEnroe. And what better Sisyphean torment for a McEnroe and his hubris than to push a tennis court from place to place? God is just.
The 1929 stock-market crash comes. Eddie is on the margin, on the bubble, a rickety rope bridge across an abyss of financial risk. The Smiley Tatum Method. Back door not included. He loses everything. He owes even more. He is ruined.
Catherine O’Connell McEnroe departs. Abandons the faux-respectable husband and the collie boy. Catches a northbound train. I’d love to write the scene but I haven’t a wisp of anybody’s recollection to work with. Note on the table? Wailing, demented, operatic episode? The cold strike of a snake?
Eddie and Bobby set out in hot pursuit. They catch up with Catherine, somehow, in our nation’s capital, but the Flight from Eden continues north to the fatherland, Connecticut. My dad winds up, in some foggy fashion, with his mother and his Aunt Sadie.
In one sense, it almost doesn’t matter which details of my father’s version are wrong. Each of us constructs a true story of our lives, and it gathers strength as it rolls down the slope with us. My father’s story had more force, made more sense to him, explained things better for him than the considerably muddier truth.
In another sense, the errors and omissions are the hard, grinning skeleton holding up the soft tissue of the story-as-told.
Here is my guess about what really happened, based on slim reports from other sources, and my detection of inconsistencies in even the meager set of facts he doled out about himself:
Although the nuns in his church school are probably not overly fond of doubters, I don’t buy my father’s (ever so Christlike) portrait of himself as dangerous heretic. He is sent to military school, I believe, because he has become a spoiled pain in the neck (a condition confirmed by his cousin) and because his parents want him out of the way while their fortune and their lives are coming unraveled.
And unraveled they do come. Eddie’s sorrows run deeper than the loss of his own fortune and the estrangement of his wife. He has persuaded others, friends and acquaintances, to take similar risks, to hyperextend on the sure thing of Florida real estate. His guilt over what happens to them is more than Eddie can bear. (I have no idea how bad things got for the people who followed Eddie McEnroe’s counsel, but this was the Crash and the Depression. It is not unrealistic to suppose that Eddie saw irredeemable ruin of whole families, perhaps even a suicide that he believed was his fault.)
Oh, but here. What’s this?
“My father was smart at table games. He could beat anybody at cards, etc. When he got out of the loony house we roomed together for a while. I taught him to play chess.” Two sheets of that lined yellow paper, covered with whittled black writing, slip out of a folder. My father is dead, and, writing this book, I am spidering around in his files. I have found something. The first draft of a letter to his cousin Peggy.
He is writing about his father.
“Loony house.”
“Was my grandfather in a mental institution?” I ask my mother.
Small clearing of the throat. “Yes, that’s true. I believe that’s true.”
“So Dad lived with his mother after they all left Florida?”
“No. I don’t think so. He didn’t talk about this very much, but I get the feeling she was in hospitals, too.”
I’m forty-six. This is all news to me.
“Mental hospitals.”
“I think so, yes. I don’t know what they called it at the time.”
“Let me make sure I’m getting this right. Dad was maybe thirteen or fourteen. His parents were in his-and-hers insane asylums? For years?”
“I think so.”
I feel strangely unmoved by all this, which sounds like something Mr. Spock would say. From a certain standpoint, the news that one’s grandfather, grandmother, and father have all been in loony houses is not good. Probably the only thing separating me from them is managed care. I don’t feel a whole lot less crazy than they probably did, but these days only Mariah Carey gets to be institutionalized for breakdowns. Anyway, as Willie says in The Exorcism, there are worse things than being crazy. “I want to be crazy,” he tells his father. “If I’m crazy, it means I’m not possessed. And I don’t want to be possessed.”
But now I have to construct a third version of Bobby’s reality.
Catherine ditches her family, but she takes leave of this world in some other way, too. By the time she gets back to New Britain, she is in no shape to manage her own affairs, much less bring up her son.
Bobby sees it all happening. The mother freezing up, her heart and soul locked deep inside some crystalline structure. The father sinking deeper under the weight of darkness. And one day someone—one of the uncles on Dublin Hill?—sits Bobby down and says, “Boy, you’ll be coming to live with us now. Until your parents are better.”
The Great Depression settles in. Eddie’s other prosperous brothers, the restaurateur and the confectioner, are in the process of losing every cent they have. Grinding misery and woe abound on Dublin Hill. Bobby bounces from family to family, living with whomever will have him. Like a Dickens hero, the spoiled boy is the poorer relation now.
He finds a semi-permanent home east of the Connecticut River—far from the earthy Irish color of Dublin Hill—with his aunt, whose lace-curtain tendencies make Catherine look like a populist. Her name is Sarah Penfield. Mr. Penfield (LeRoy, I have discovered) is not on the premises. Catherine is, sometimes, during intervals of sanity. Sarah Penfield—“Aunty”— becomes my father’s rock. She will give him succor, stability, sound advice, and something resembling love. She will be Aunt Betsy Trotwood to his David Copperfield on one condition, and this condition, rather than being spelled out, is simply bred into every particle of life with Aunty.
He must reject the McEnroes.
He must repudiate the McEnroes and their Irish ways, their loud laughter and coarse songs, their red faces and flat feet. Their blarney.
It’s the old story from Mountnugent. If you want to eat, you’ve got to renounce.
And so young Bobby takes soup. He takes Aunty’s soup and has as little to do with his own kind as he can possibly manage. No McEnroes.
But he begins to construct the foundations of his secret world. He cracks the door and lets in the first few elves. His childhood has been cut abruptly short. He is bitter, betrayed, frightened, rejected. But he has built a trapdoor out of this unforgiving world.
Here is the voice of Willie, the alter ego my father created in his plays:
WILLIE BURKE
Children believe in little people. They believe in them because they haven’t any reason not to believe in them. It takes time to learn to doubt. It takes the years of growing up. Each year that passes means believing in less and less of the things that dreams are made of and in more and more of the things that you can kick and pull and push and tickle, bite, taste, scratch, and hit with a rubber ball. When you’re all through growing up, you’ve stopped believing in a great many things.
MCGILLEY
But isn’t that natural?
WILLIE
All the things you don’t believe in are still there to be believed. They’re the charming things that make childhood enchanting. They’re not less charming or enchanted because children grow up. They stay the same. Children change.
Let us come back to that draft of a letter to Peggy, slipping from a folder and fluttering to the floor on yellow-paper wings. The bit about Eddie and the loony house is, of course, a thunderbolt, but almost as startling, in its own way, is the little story
that follows. It is the first inkling I have had that my father ever saw his father in the tender, amused light that suffused the rest of his world. It won’t seem like much when I share it with you, but to me, it reads like a wondrous beginning, a squirt of the milk of human kindness eased out from an udder that had been blocked for sixty-five years.
He discusses some issues of genealogy, history, and Irish geography. Then he writes of Eddie’s generation, including Eddie’s brother Harry, who ran off to join the circus.
My hat is off to them—all the brothers. Don’t forget that it was a circus worker who knocked up Roe of Roe v. Wade. Since she made history, one can’t ignore the rest.
My father was smart at table games. He could beat anybody at cards, etc. When he got out of the loony house, we roomed together for a while. I taught him to play chess. We must have played a thousand games together. I won every one of them. Based on his earlier experience at games, he decided I was a chess genius. He went to the Hartford Chess Club and told them about his son. They invited both of us in for a match. It was bad, Peg, real bad—and then some.
I managed to write this letter so that I worked it up so that I ended talking about me. Let it never be said that the McEnroes lacked egos.
He didn’t send it to Peggy. He wrote it late at night, I’m sure, woke up sober, read it again, and decided it was more rapprochement than he really wanted with his long-dead father.
He typed up something more cut-and-dried and mailed it off to his cousin. He died two years later.
He tucked this version, scratched like cave writing on lined yellow paper, in a file and put it away.
For me to find.
My Father's Footprints Page 16
