“Your grandfather was a darlin’ man,” says my father’s cousin Peggy, “but your father couldn’t see that. He had a hard time liking him.”
“He could have been a lot nicer to his father,” says my mother. “Everybody else loved Eddie.”
My father stayed mad at his father until Eddie McEnroe died, two years after my birth. The two men tried to spend time together, but my father’s anger was like a hungry animal looking in from the darkness. He had lost too much, and Aunty had carefully nursed in him the idea that McEnroe sloth and squalor had authored all his troubles. Aunty kept him away from the McEnroes for as long as she could, and even when he had grown up, she would tell the McEnroes they were not to distract or embarrass him by making themselves visible at important moments.
“He had a play trying out at Westport, and a group of us decided to go down there for the opening,” his cousin Peggy tells me. “We wanted to see Bob after the show and maybe go out with him, meet the cast. Somehow she [Aunty] got wind of this and told me absolutely not. This was an important night for Bob, and we shouldn’t bother him or go up to him at all. So we didn’t. And later I wondered if maybe it hurt him that his own family wasn’t standing around him supporting him.”
Is there a pinch of pie powder to be spared for Aunty? She has seen the Irish and their drink and their excesses ruin too many things. Here is a boy, a young man, in whom she sees much promise. He might outlive the curse that seems to hang over his family. But he must be saved. Maybe we can forgive Aunty for being ruthless.
But my father’s writing reveals a longing for a lost world of friendship and laughter and music and magic. In script after script, that paradise lost was the bar, the Irish bar. In Mulligan’s Snug, the bar is where the little people live.
In the plays we meet men like my dad’s father Eddie, sweet and foolish and eloquent. Martin Burke of The Exorcism is Eddie, and when we meet him in the play, he has dallied in a tavern rather than come home.
SADIE
You managed to find your way to a barroom.
MARTIN BURKE
There were other men there who didn’t want to go home. The world is full of men who don’t want to go home. The sober men slip quietly into their houses, then tiptoe down to their cellar workshops. They hide in their own basements, these sober men… It’s sad to think of these men hiding alone in their basements——aimlessly sawing a piece of wood or hammering a nail into something that needs no nail.
The barrooms of my father’s plays are, of course, idealized and far more interesting and less sad than real-life gin mills, but in an old newspaper essay he claimed that even his great success, The Silver Whistle, and its vagabond hero were inspired by a series of characters he met in an actual Hartford barroom: “While they did not have the same philosophy of living… they were just as windy and unprincipled, and used high-flown language in recounting their travels. The old people [in the play] came out of my meeting a little old lady with shoe-button eyes who smelled of magnolias and a trace of gin, and a little old man who was very serious, wore his hat squarely on his head, and with great punctilio presented me with a white mouse.”
In his plays, my father uncovered his own yearning for a life he thought was unfairly snatched away from him when his mother forced his father to sell the bars. In Mulligan’s Snug, the crisis is a plan by Mulligan to sell the bar. The little people think it’s a bad idea, and so does the reader.
In his plays, my father told himself what he could not tell his own father: that he wished Eddie had never sold his bars, never left the world of gentleness and laughter for the cruel world of real estate.
Memorial Day. My mother and my father’s cousin Peggy and I are standing in St. Mary’s Cemetery in New Britain, the final resting place of many McEnroes.
Clouds swirl in the sky, threatening thunderstorms, offering blasts of sun, pulling the offer off the table. We are unable to communicate, the three of us, without screaming at one another. It’s some kind of weird, triangular disease. Peggy is my father’s age, which makes her eighty-five today. She is a woman of cheerful features, whose smiling face somehow makes room for the unfortunate Mountnugent nose. Peggy is a legendary talker, as famous for her speech as Miles the Slasher was for his sword. Family members describe her phone calls as though they were alien abductions: “And I looked at the clock… and two hours had passed… and I had no idea how this could have happened.” A doctor, after examining Peggy, looked at her soberly, and said, “You talk too much,” as if that were a diagnosis. She stopped going to him.
“Where is my grandfather?” I say. We have been looking at a lot of dead McEnroes. I’m hoping my grandfather’s stone may at least make some small mention of my invisible grandmother.
“He’s here,” says Peggy. “I went to the funeral. I remember my friend Mary Sheehan took the bus. I don’t remember what line it was, but there was a bus line… It must have gone from Hartford to…”
“Peggy!” Already I’m screaming. “The bus is of no consequence. Where have you put my grandfather?”
“I think it was in that section.”
“Let’s go find the headstone,” I say.
“There is no headstone,” my mother pipes up.
“No marker?”
“Bob always said he’d handle it.”
“My grandfather died in 1956. When did you start to get an inkling that Dad wasn’t going to handle it?”
“I told you about this.”
“You never.”
“I did! You knew there was no marker.”
“You lost my grandfather.”
“I didn’t lose him.”
“Well, then, you, somebody, misplaced him. Where is he?”
“The people in the office will know. They have to keep records.”
“No one has asked about this man since the day he went in the ground forty-five years ago, and you assume it’s on a virus-protected hard drive? I suppose it’s pointless to ask where my grandmother is buried.”
“We would have no idea.”
It’s the final bad real estate joke on Eddie McEnroe, played by the son who never forgave him anywhere but in the pages of his writing. Eddie’s last lot was never developed.
Real estate, my father observed, is not for the tender of heart.
Here is part of a letter he wrote to a younger friend, a man my father suspected of having tender-heartedness. The younger man is thinking of doing some investing in real estate:
I don’t want to sound like an evil bastard, but one doesn’t buy from fat cats… one buys from someone who is hurting—a man who wants out—a man who has holes in his soles.
In order to make money, one must buy at the right price. This means torturing the aged, and grinding widows with small children. A seller must have real motivation to sell or one can’t drive the price down… Lots of money has been made inesting in real estate—lots of money has been lost.
Sincerely, Bob
p.s. The missing letter in the last line is “v.”
p.p.s. One doesn’t use the children to grind the widows.
The letter is written ten years before his own death and thirty years after his own father died. Has he figured out yet what he’s really saying? Eddie McEnroe—the man who failed him and deprived him and his mother of a livable life—was too gentle, too tender, for real estate. He could not have evicted the widows and children of Tonagh or taken advantage of the man with holes in his soles. Eddie so deeply blamed himself for the misfortunes of people who took his advice that it broke his nerves and put him in the asylum. Snarled and glowered at by himself and his son for decades, Eddie is innocent of letting the world and his family down.
In The Nemo Paradox, Henry Nemo awakens from a fugue state. His frontal lobe has been sliced like Thuringer. He has no way of knowing whether he committed the murder of which he stands accused. He announces to his diary that he is going to study the case, break out of the mental hospital, and go on a quest, if that’s what it takes.
/> “If I get the idea that Henry Nemo did it, Henry Nemo’s going to pay,” writes Henry Nemo. “If I come up with a reasonable doubt, Henry Nemo is not going to pay—no matter what.”
It’s such a McEnroe idea—that forgiveness and blame lie out there somewhere, beyond the gates and walls and bars of ourselves, sealed in a Thermos and buried in the sand of a beach at the end of a long road.
Everything we need is inside us. It took me a trip to Ireland and back to figure this out. And most days, I’ve forgotten it by 10:00 A.M. You heal from the inside out. Everything we need is inside us. I should write it on the bathroom mirror.
And Bob McEnroe? Did he figure it out?
I keep coming back to that musty script of The Exorcism, which seems so obviously an allegory for his family. He writes it before his suicide attempt. He writes it during the latter part of my childhood, when the trips to the zoo and the days in the sunshine were trailing off a little. When you grow up, it suddenly occurs to you that the guy tossing the ball to you when you were eight, the guy who lay on the floor putting together the erector set with you, the guy who helped you with the “new math,” whatever that was—that guy spent his other hours wrestling with mortality, sexuality, the snakebites of the past, and the poisons of the present. Maybe playing with you was the only break he got all day, some days, the only moment when he didn’t feel as though he were going mad. But he was also keeping secrets, sparing you the details of adult manhood. And the way you know all this, when you finally grow up, is that you catch yourself doing it, too: playing “pig” or messing with the Nintendo football game or reviewing the facts of the French and Indian Wars and hoping the whole time that your kid can’t hear the shrieks and lamentations echoing inside you.
I’m on the floor, still, reading The Exorcism, hoping for an explanation, a more complete account of Bob McEnroe’s childhood. I see he has drawn Martin, a character resembling his own father, Eddie, with obvious affection and maybe a twinge of condescension.
Bessie, the character symbolizing Catherine, is cold, judgmental, controlling, pitiless. She is the last person we see on stage. When I come to the end, a sickening chill sweeps across me.
After a botched attempt to lead an exorcism, Bessie is revealed as an apparent fraud with no real supernatural powers. The other players, rushing off on errands of love or folly, leave her sitting alone in semi-darkness. The play concludes:
[BESSIE takes out a cigarette. As SHE raises it to her lips, a flame appears before her. SHE lights cigarette.] [CURTAIN]
That’s how far he got, rethinking Mommy. Either the devil herself or the devil’s apprentice.
Six
In Which the Court Adjourns
The last Sarah Whitman Hooker Pie
Rip Van Winkle’s 20-year-old stale, moldy, dusty, rusty Humble Pie, with a tiny keg of potion to wash it down
There comes a time when Aunty can’t hold him anymore. Bob makes his way out to the University of Chicago but then runs out of either money or patience. He will have, as an adult, not one single story or remembrance to share about the University of Chicago, which makes me think it is another hard time.
But while there he sees the movie Winterset. It’s an epiphany.
“That is what made me realize what I wanted to do. I wanted to write things kind of like that,” he says later.
Winterset stars Burgess Meredith. It was released in 1936, when my father was twenty. It’s based on a Maxwell Anderson play, which is based loosely on the Sacco and Vanzetti case.
The play is about, not incidentally, a young man’s quest to vindicate his father.
Bob comes back to Hartford and goes to work for United Aircraft. He learns about the engines of airplanes. He likes it there. Parts fit together and make a whole. There hasn’t been a lot of that in his life.
He lives in a boarding house in an area known as Asylum Hill. He gets back together with the McEnroes. Aunty is still consulted on all major matters, but he and his cousin Peggy grow close, almost like brother and sister.
“He wasn’t like the rest of us,” she says. “He had already decided he was going to be somebody different, somebody important. He was going to write plays.”
When the war looms, he tries to enlist, but the army doesn’t take him. He never tells anyone why. His demons and dragons are out on his surface in those days, and it seems possible he is judged psychologically unfit.
There are lots of young women around, and he is very handsome.
“The girls loved Bobby,” says Peggy. “I mean, they really loved him. I had a friend who bought a new dress any time he asked her out on a date. But I think he only fell in love once.”
She is a pretty brunette, an ex-bobby-soxer who once tailed Sinatra around Hartford and got into a snowball fight with him. She and her roommate give great parties. He is at some of them, and they catch each other’s eye.
When they marry, Aunty does not attend and refuses to speak to her, ever.
“There was a time when they would go and visit her, at whatever facility she was in at the time,” my mother says.
“What? Who would go visit whom?”
“Bob and his father. Would go visit Bob’s mother.”
“Really? This is something they kept doing all those years?”
“I think it’s more like something they started then. This was in the early 1950s.”
“How did it go?”
“I don’t know. They would never say anything when they got back. I don’t remember how many times they did it. It was something they tried, I think.”
I can see them now in their long coats, in their hats, smooth, taupe felt with black bands.
It’s a day in November, with the lightest of rains falling as they stand outside the house on Chestnut Hill in Glastonbury. They’ve made their visit. A little small talk in a dayroom and then all three dropping into silence as they watch the rain bead up on a window.
Now it’s over. The men have driven back, and they stand outside Bob’s house, Eddie wondering if he should just get in his car, Bob wondering if he should ask Eddie in. The rain lets up into mist and mixes with wood smoke as the two men stand, afraid of catching each other’s eye.
Leave them there. Or leave them in the dayroom, all three of them, each stranded on a different rock, separated by stormy seas. But for a moment, the waves quell and the winds gentle, enough so that they can look across the waters and see one another. “I’m here.” “You’re there.”
I’m back to scouring his dreaded appointment books, hoping to reassemble him in the air in front of me.
In 1995, I find myself sitting on a line.
“I have the impression that Colin does not like me,” he has written.
My heart crumples like a paper lantern in a drill press. Even at that late date, do we still not get it? Just three years to go in his life, and we haven’t figured out anything. I have loved him, strained against him, worried about him, worried even more about me. Have I forgotten to do what most people do with Robert E. McEnroe? Enjoy him. Watch his slow, strange dance with the fairies and relish his peculiar reports from that world.
“I have the impression that Colin does not like me.”
My friend the writer Anne Batterson was once staying in Sligo in the home of a Mrs. Rafferty.
“Do you believe in fairies?” Anne asked her.
“No, but they’re there,” said Mrs. R.
She had sealed up the fireplaces because fairies like to sneak into your house that way.
It does no good, of course.
The fairies get in anyway, everywhere.
MULLIGAN
Willie, are they there? Can you see them?
WILLIE BURKE
[Looking slowly around the room]
Why, they’re everywhere.
MULLIGAN
[Smiling]
Are they now.
WILLIE
They’re on the tables, on the backs of chairs, on picture frames——everywhere you could think
of.
DOUGHERTY
[Skeptical, mocking]
And how tall are they?
WILLIE
[Measuring with thumb and forefinger]
No bigger than that.
GALLAGHER
[Also mocking]
And they wear little coats and pants and little shoes with silver buckles.
WILLIE
[Nodding]
Some have brown coats and orange britches; some wear blue and red; some have green and yellow——all different colors. They make the room glow with color. You can’t imagine how beautiful it is.
GALLAGHER
And they wear little colored hats and caps?
WILLIE
[Nodding]
They whirl and whistle and sing. Sometimes they all whirl at once. Then all the colors dance in the air. It’s the loveliest thing you ever saw.
Those are Bob McEnroe’s words, not mine. It’s lovely to see those fairies, but they’re not here to help us.
That’s why, even after we bury him, my father has to die one more time.
He has to die in me.
For the private, evening drinker, the era of recycling provides a kind of upbraiding. Once a week, you grab the handles of a sturdy blue bin and haul a week’s worth of brain and liver damage down the curb. The wine bottles all look familiar. You stopped and got that one on the way home from work on Tuesday night because you knew it would go so well with the marinara sauce, and you bought those two at the wine tasting Saturday and that one… Lying on their sides, jumbled up with the olive oil bottles and roasted pepper jars they seem… numerous.
In the late spring of 2002, I put down the bottle. I was never a drunk, just a damaged soul who drew alcohol around him like a soft blanket as each day darkened. And I liked the taste of the stuff. Maybe that’s what my father told himself, too.
I miss it, but I miss it like an old friend who died, not like a lover whose arms I can’t stay out of. We heal from the inside out. Fairies, alcohol, love, sex, Jesus… you sort of have to shut them out for a while and let the world inside you knit itself together. As I write this, I’m still in that altered state that comes when you stop drinking. The recovery people call this the time of “kindling,” because you crackle with a bright, watchful, sudden brightness. I’m kindling these days, feeding a bigger fire that burns bits of my father and his fairies away. They’re flying skyward and out of my life, like sparks in an updraft.
My Father's Footprints Page 17
