My Father's Footprints

by Colin McEnroe

  So my father dies one more time.

  Shortly before my book is finished, the McEnroes tell me I must seek out my father’s cousin Billy. In his prime, Billy was the most enchanting of the McEnroes. Bill was the guy in the liquor business, and he looked all his life like some kind of harvesting site for the Irish phenotype. He had style and the smile and the wisecracks and the suits and the whimsy and the cigars. He was Central Casting’s Irish-American liquor salesman, circa 1958. He was my father, without fairies. Without demons, too.

  Go and see him, they say. He’s not particularly well-grounded in the present anymore, but he remembers the past quite vividly.

  Pie powder is streaming in ribbons across the sky as I pull into the parking lot of the place where he lives. “Assisted living” is what they call it. Some kind of counterpoint to “assisted suicide,” I guess. It’s an attractive, slightly formal place, and I find Billy sitting in the sunroom. Chairs, backed up to the wall, form a ring around the perimeter of the room, and every single one of them has a nicely dressed old person in it. It looks as if some kind of afternoon tea dance were taking place but no one had quite mustered the resolve to ask another person out onto the floor.

  Billy is happy to see me and knows exactly who I am.

  But his clarity has been slightly oversold. Like most old people, he has been culling side players and supporting actors from his memory, so that when he “remembers the past” quite lucidly, what he remembers are the details of his own life.

  “You remember my father, Bob McEnroe.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Do you remember him as a boy?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you remember whether, during the Depression, he came to live with your family? I had heard that, when his mother and father went into the hospitals, he came and lived at your house for a while.”

  A slight shake of the head.

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Do you remember anything about my grandmother? Did you ever see her? She was Catherine O’Connell. Eddie’s wife.”

  “I don’t remember her.”

  “Tell me about New Britain. Tell me about Dublin Hill.”

  Ah, well, Billy can remember plenty. He even remembers the address of his childhood, 27 Harrison Street. And his father’s restaurant down on Commercial Street. It was right near a fire station and a police station, which was helpful, because those fellows liked to eat.

  I press a little more for details about my father, the departure of Eddie’s family to Florida, anything.

  A helpful look crosses his face.

  “You know who you ought to talk to? You know who would know all about that?”

  “Who?” I am rendered a little breathless. Maybe I’m about to hear the name of the Virgil who can lead me through my underworld.

  “Talk to a fellow named Bob McEnroe.”

  A pause.

  “You mean my father?”

  Billy seems untroubled. “No. Bob McEnroe. Fellow about my age. Maybe a little younger.”

  “Playwright?”

  “That’s the guy.”

  He touches my knee.

  “And if he gives you any trouble, you tell him I said it was okay to talk to you.”

  This is starting to feel familiar. I resist the urge to ask him who wrote David Copperfield.

  I steer us back to the Depression and we talk about his own experiences, the ruin of his own father, their flight from New Britain.

  “He lost everything. And then he still owed. He went down to Florida, too, for a while, my father, but that turned out to be the worst thing he could do, because his money was in all the wrong places when the crash came.”

  “I’ll bet you my grandfather Eddie was the one who talked him into it.”

  Poor Eddie. Wouldn’t it just be the case that he pulled his older brother down with him?

  “It was a sad time, wasn’t it?” I say.

  “It was a very sad time for the McEnroes. One fellow jumped out of a building.”

  “Who was that?”

  He ponders for a moment and then, “Bob McEnroe.”

  “Bob McEnroe jumped out of a building?”

  Billy smiles, as if a sudden hilarity has struck him.

  “Yeah! He was okay, though. He walked away from it.” He smiles even wider, as if the whole thing has gotten funnier. His square sodblock face lights up. “He dove, you see. That’s it. He dove out the window.”

  I’m smiling, too. Almost laughing. This is some kind of great joke, but neither of us is quite sure how it goes.

  We’re coming to the end here. Possibly you have located your hat already and are shuffling your feet below your seat, to see if you’ve left anything there.

  I feel the need to remind you about pie powder. It’s unwise to talk to fairies and pointless to drink yourself right up to the edge of their woods every night. That doesn’t mean life is without magic, even redemptive magic, but most of it is stored within you. Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Drop the charges. The Court of Pie Powder is a place where that can happen.

  Close your eyes.

  Not while you’re reading this book, mind you, but in a separate, quiet moment.

  Close your eyes.

  He had the impression I did not like him.

  Dear Bob,

  I love you

  If you read this.

  Pie powder is drifting down, settling softly across the Tonagh lands, quieting Lough Sheelin, filling in the wounds and the cracks in the crust of life. Like the year’s first snow soothing the ravages of November, pie powder is coating the scars of history.

  Pie powder twinkles like pixie dust in the twilight, and I see people emerge from the tree line of time to hold out their palms or catch it on their tongues, like fairy communion. There are the Coyles of Tonagh, who took soup and kept their house. Forgive them, forgive them. And Norman Cristina, who set fires and saved my father’s life. See how the pie powder sprinkles onto their cheeks as they look up. There are Joey and Thona and the woman with the baby on the street in El Paso. There is my mother, twirling slowly, arms outstretched in the warm blizzard. And who is that older man with the ruddy cheeks and the smiling eyes? Eddie? Is that you? Have you come out to let the pie powder waft down and collect in those soft gray eyebrows? Far off toward the horizon, through the haze of white, I see the dull, dark shape of another woman moving slowly through the powder, her hand held up to touch her chin. Catherine. Grandmother. I could follow her tracks in the white dust, but she would only recede from me.

  Forgiveness and healing. Pie powder can fix everything. Can’t it?

  Pie powder is drifting down. I am having a vision.

  In the middle of a meadow sits a judge’s bench. A man walks toward it through the swirling, scattering storm of flour. He is a figure from one of my father’s dreams. His gray hair falls to his shoulders from a middle part. His beard is full and arrow shaped. He wears a linen suit and high black boots. He carries bagpipes under his arm, for theatrical effect. He climbs up, sits down, and bids me approach. He stares at me for a long while.

  “It’s millennia of flaw and failing that bind the human race together as much as anything else,” he says, finally.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you can’t duck soup. That’s a joke. But it’s true: We’re all soup-takers at our worst and weakest moments. You weren’t a perfect son. So? He was an easy person to hurt because he walked around with all those tipsy little cups of poison balanced inside him. One little jostle and he was down for the count. He built rooms and rooms of illusion because he couldn’t stand to live in the real world. You’ll never find him in those rooms now. You can’t heal him, and you can’t slay him. He’s gone, and it’s time for you to let up on yourself a little bit.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what Gödel’s ‘incompleteness theorem’ says?”

  “Not really.”

  “It says that within any system of mathemat
ics, there will always be some propositions that cannot be proved either true or false using the rules of that system.” His manner softens. “I’m dismissing all charges against you. You’re free to go.”

  Pie powder is drifting down across field and farm and in the park where they’ve taken Joey to feed the ducks.

  Down by the pond, I can see my mother and my son, talking and laughing. Grandmother and little boy, helping each other. We’re all doing assisted living.

  Closer to me, standing off to the side, through the haze, I see a man, ruddy faced, a little stooped, with hair as white as a polar bear’s.

  That’s the guy I should talk to. Bob McEnroe. He knows the whole story.

  But he has never told it, and now he is gone, and he was awfully good, it turns out, at covering his tracks. Like a master spy, he had a network of drop-boxes and false addresses so vast and complicated that he was able to slip out behind it. He made up a universe of fairies and giants and ghosts, among whom he could live more comfortably.

  Pie powder is falling down. The inscrutable man with the polar-bear hair is breaking off pieces of bread and tossing them forward into the warm air of a spring morning. His eyes are crinkling, and his mouth is drawn in a tight half-smile. He will never tell the whole story. He is looking far away and very close and nowhere. He tosses more bread in the air, and it’s gone.

  It may be a trick of the landscape, but I don’t see any ducks.

  Epilogue

  He was doing long division, one of those onerous tasks made even worse by its name.

  “Long division.” All of the punishing monotony is right there, implied in the words. It’s like root canal. They should call it something else.

  I remember long division as a dark night of the soul in my own childhood. Something about the dwindling, narrowing quality of the computation made it especially depressing. Subtract, pull down another digit, subtract, until you are left with… nothing. Long division is a series of partings. My father helped me with my math. I help Joey with his.

  “Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection,” said Schopenhauer, who was forced to do excessive amounts of long division in the late eighteenth century and concluded that man’s natural state is a constant striving without satisfaction.

  When Joey’s long division was done, he looked out the window and saw the snow, fine as sugar and driven by a night wind.

  “Let’s go out. Let’s take the dogs somewhere,” he said.

  It was 9:15. A school night. Why not?

  We drove to a fairly secluded school. There was one lonely van in the parking lot, the day’s snow heaping up on its top.

  “Who would be here?” he demanded.

  “A hardworking teacher?”

  “Must be nuts. I would leave the minute I could.”

  In the snow, his spirit swelled and puffed, like a sail catching wind. I envied him. He is twelve. I am forty-seven. Lately, life has been looking very sick and sad to me. Subtract, subtract, subtract. Long division. The best I could do, it seemed to me, on this night, was to hand the baton of enthusiasm off to him, let him marvel at the world, maybe pretend to join in.

  “Look at this!” He pointed to an enormous maple, its hundred arms crooked out, striped with muscles of new snow. Behind the maple, the winter sky was red. “Why doesn’t somebody paint a picture of this?”

  In my mind was the title of Ram Dass’s book, culled from the advice he got—when his name was still Richard Alpert— from an ex-surfer going by the name Baghwan Das. “Don’t think about the past. Be here now. Don’t think about the future. Be here now.”

  So there I was, watching the finely grained snow drift through the halos of parking lot lights, bearing my sorrowful secret—that life winds down and we die. And there he was, oblivious, exuberant, being here now.

  As we pulled out of the lot, his expansiveness had spilled over onto the van and the person working late.

  “We need hardworking teachers, right?” he demanded. “It might be a custodian, too. Kids don’t appreciate custodians enough.”

  He reminisced. At his old elementary school, there had been a special day on which the custodians were honored in the cafeteria, and once, on Veterans Day, one of them, Rocco, had worn his army uniform. Middle school seemed a little brisker, busier, maybe too busy for this kind of observance. Was there any chance, he suddenly worried, that Rocco had been called up to active duty? His former fifth grade teacher, a marine, is in Afghanistan. “‘Rocco’ is a great name, isn’t it?” he chattered.

  It was something about the snow, he acknowledged, that made him feel so alive and happy. The year’s first snow is not a fiction, like pie powder. It is real. You can rub it between your fingers. He is real, too. The only son of an only son of an only son. He is our line.

  Back home, he put on his pajamas inside out, because studies in the Berne supercollider indicate that wearing one’s pajamas inside out can cause school to be canceled. It has something to do with the behavior of quantum particles.

  He was still sort of a Diamond Jim Brady of goodwill, lighting his cigars with five-dollar bills of agape.

  “Where is Mrs. Farrow now?” he wanted to know, peering out his bedroom window. Her house, across the street, had been sold. She’s in assisted living.

  “I should go and visit her. You should set that up.”

  He was quiet for a while.

  “I miss Charlie,” he said. This is Mrs. Farrow’s husband, who died some time ago. He had out, on his bed, an old book Charlie had given him. It’s called I Remember Distinctly.

  “I miss Bob.” This is his grandfather. “I miss all the people who have died.”

  None of this was said piteously, but matter-of-factly, as if he had glimpsed his place in the cavalcade, the tribe of gypsies living and dead, rumbling through the dark, and singing across the marches of time and space.

  Precious little of this enlightenment would survive the night, not when the pajamas and the snow failed to do their jobs, not when school opened without even—o, perfidious dawn!—a ninety-minute delay.

  But for a while, in the hours before bed, in the year’s first snow, he saw what my father could never see and what I long to see—the connections, the abundance, the multiplication and joining of things.

  The resurrection.

  * Life often seems to loop back on itself in strange ways. Think of Norman Cristina, who entered our story as a firebug and departed as my father’s rescuer. The next time I see Joy, twenty-seven years have passed. She is head of the hospice program caring for my father in the last weeks of his life.