My Father's Footprints (10 page)

Once
The Nemo Paradox
is published, you see, he plans to inform the world that these fragments, these prions of cognition sloshing around in Nemo’s
mind, constitute his refutation of Gödel’s “incompleteness.”

One day at a small family gathering, my father, in a tone of resigned good cheer, tells my future wife, “I have made every
mistake that a man can possibly make.”

Every family nurses, as part of its oral history, the plot twist of the missed opportunity, the fortune squandered, the unseized
chance that would have led to wealth. Everybody has a grandfather who turned down the offer to be fifty-fifty partners with
Henry Ford, or who drank and pissed away an enormous sum, picking up checks for ne’er-do-well friends, or who sold land for
a pittance, only to see it become part of the Atlantic City board-walk.

This is the Universal Fiasco, the Edenic fall of every clan. The only families exempted, I suppose, are Rockefellers and Gateses
and Buffets, people who cannot plausibly claim to have let prosperity slip away. What do they do for rue? I suppose it sprouts
up in other forms.

In my family, the sense of The Fall is more finely grained, worked into every observation like neat’s-foot oil into a baseball
mitt. We are more fallen than not fallen. Everything has gone wrong, except on those rare, treasured occasions when things
have gone right.

My grandfather makes and loses a million dollars in the 1920s. In the fall of 1947, my father does the unthinkable. As an
unknown playwright living in a Hartford, Connecticut, boarding house, he sells two different scripts to two different Broadway
producers on the same day. The New York papers can’t come up with anything to compare it to. My father becomes the hottest
new playwright in New York, and then, after 1948, gets exactly one more play produced in the last fifty years of his life.

He does not stop writing plays, mind you. The scripts are heaped up around me now like the skeletons of the conquered. They’re
sealed up in polythene envelopes and stacked next to the unpublished novels. All of them are invisibly roped together by a
winding skein of bad decisions—writing projects refused and calls unreturned. A stint in Hollywood from which he fled, like
Lot from Sodom. Errors unrelated to writing. He shrewdly buys a lot on what becomes the most desirable road in desirable
Farmington, Connecticut, and later sells it for exactly what he paid.

“We don’t want to make any money on this,” he tells my mother, as if that sort of thing could get them a bad reputation.

But mostly, he is wrestling vapor. Something is wrong with his writing, but he cannot see the flaw to fix it.

And me?

I try to be nothing like him, even though I am exactly like him. Like every protagonist from Oedipus to Sleeping Beauty, I
am in flight from my destiny. I will do something else, be someone else.

And yet, somehow, when the mists part to reveal me in adult life, who am I? I am dreamy, moody, fond of alcohol, uncomfortable
in my own skin, furtive about my emotion. I am a writer. I am Bob McEnroe.

Still, I try to deprive fate of its victory. Where my dad is a grasshopper, I am an ant. He reaped windfalls and threw his
money at cars and dinners and outboard motors. I opt for the weekly paycheck, something he disdained all his life. I write
for a daily newspaper and then slowly build a modest reputation for writing short humor pieces. Doubleday publishes my first
book. It is moderately successful.

I publish another book with Doubleday. One day, a letter arrives from the company. My books are being pulled out of stock.
They will—in the tradition of
Batman
villains and
Terminator
robots—be hurled into vats of acid and turned into pulp.

I can save as many as I want of either title by purchasing them at a special author’s insider price of 66 cents per copy.
I reflect upon this. How much would it cost me to buy a notebook of that many blank pages? More than 66 cents. From a certain
standpoint, my writing has actually depressed the value of paper. It is like water damage. I decide not to buy any copies.

Two days later, a royalty statement arrives from my agent.
My royalty statements usually have parentheses around the number. Although not fiscally savvy, I realize this is not a good
thing. Parentheses mean you have money that belongs to somebody else. From a theoretical standpoint, I may actually owe Stephen
King $7,018.23 for failure to hold up my end of American biblio-commerce.

This statement is different. No parentheses and in their place, chubby numbers betokening financial health! And then I notice
the reason. On the literary agency’s alphabetical list of clients, I am apparently right next to Shirley MacLaine. This is
her royalty statement. I would expect to be dwarfed by Shirley in North America, but this is her statement for Pacific Rim
countries. There are places with no written tradition where she sells more books than I do in my own time zone. People buy
them and make canoes out of them. Shirley MacLaine is selling more books on the island of Komodo than I am in my own hemisphere.
On the other hand, how is Shirley going to feel when she sees all those parentheses in her envelope and realizes she owes
King seven large?

Out of such instructive humiliations, I construct a perspective about myself.

I am careful not to swing for the bleachers. I am not going to burn so brightly that I flame out. I am going to control my
gift so that it does not betray me. I have my father’s wild swings of Irish romanticism, but I keep them in check with my
mother’s steady, incremental New England puritanism. I am going to avoid the curse of the McEnroe line, right? Unlike my grandfather,
unlike my father, I will not be blindsided.

Right? Right?

My wife and I cannot conceive a child.

When I discover this, I have reached the age at which my father felt perhaps the first tickle of his half-century writing
problems. I am roughly the age of my grandfather when he went from millionaire to debtor.

The curse of the McEnroe line descends on me in a rush of black raven wings, and here is the new shape it takes: There will
be no McEnroe line. I am the only son of an only son.

“The purpose of marriage is to bring forth issue,” my father said many times as I was growing up.

Now he says nothing.

My wife and I enter the world of fertility medicine, which is somehow both perched on the leading edge of scientific advancement
and trapped back in an age when a hunched-over person with a lot of split ends would shake gourds and throw pulverized lizard
entrails at you.

For a period of time—our Von Bulow period—I inject my wife with stuff we keep in our refrigerator. It is made from the refined
urine of menopausal women. In the early days of its manufacture, the primary source of the urine was—I’m not making this up—Italian
nuns, but I’m not sure this is still the case. I remember reading that the Vatican told the nuns to knock it off.

Although the burdens of the treatment fall most heavily upon my wife, I have some interesting moments. I am required to produce
specimens of a substance I am not accustomed to sharing with people I haven’t at least been out to dinner with.

Sometimes I am permitted to do this at home, sometimes not. On one occasion I am ushered into a standard gynecological examination
room, stirrups and all. I am handed a cup and shown the location of the light switch. No magazines. No Marvin Gaye. The specimen
I am trying to produce will be combined with the eggs of a hamster, to see whether my sperm have the ability to penetrate
an ovum. If I allow myself to think at all about where I am and what I am doing, I will go crazy. If I allow myself to think
that the sweaty, sticky, earthy, ecstatically human business of procreation has been infiltrated by sterile vials of refrigerated
nun urine, if I allow myself to imagine all those
near-sighted, left-handed, manic-depressive hamsters, I will scream.

I emerge from that little room with a saffron container’s worth of climactic fluids. I feel that there should be one of those
boxes you step up on when you win at the Olympics. There should be martial music of several nations playing.

But infertility is a quieter world than that.

Now it is my turn to wrestle with ghosts. Cancer and compound fractures and cholera are things happening that aren’t supposed
to happen. Infertility is a thing not happening that’s supposed to happen.

Through it all, my father is a sphinx. He says nothing.

He does not say: “The world will be pretty much the same place whether the Edward-Robert-Colin McEnroe line proceeds or not.
Adopt if you like. Do nothing if you like. But don’t think I’m staying up nights mourning our genotype.”

He does not say: “I don’t care what it takes. In-vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, beheading your wife, re-mortgaging
the house. Keep the line going.”

Is he indifferent, terrified, furious, sad, accepting? I have no idea.

But I remember that line of his that came up half a dozen times over the years, usually when we were deep into our philosophical
debates about the meaning of life and the nature of society: “The purpose of marriage is to bring forth issue.”

The universe abhors an imbalance. Even as I whirl through this travesty of trickling out my seed for the delectation of small
tan rodents, my writing career prospers. I get the interest my father wishes he could have from publishers and agents. I become
a contributing editor at
Mirabella
magazine for its first two years, and the publication’s early buzz begets more offers for me. Where my father is infertile—laboring
over manuscripts and
then stuffing manila folders full of rejection letters from agents and publishers—I am ripe.

On the other front, he has conquered, and I am vanquished.

It is his birthday. The four McEnroes—my father and mother, my wife and I—are out to dinner, crimped to the table in our usual
uneasy state. Three of us have roughly the same capacity for sharing our feelings as the neolithic stone heads on Easter Island.
My wife, a psychotherapist, a talker, a prober, a confessor, is the strange new plant growing among us, a poppy shooting up
amid pachysandra.

My parents are not relaxed diners. They track the flow of food and staff visits in a kind of mental Domesday Book. Look at
those people. They arrived ten minutes after we did. Now they’re being served before us. There’s an eternal quest for restaurant
justice. Tonight, my father is especially restless, although the service is not slow. Where is the waitress? Why hasn’t the
order come?

“Just relax,” I tell him, as gently as I can. “There’s no hurry. I mean, do you have somewhere you need to be after this?”

“No, but I want to get there anyway,” he says. He grins and snaps his fingers in a parody of himself as guy-on-the-go. He
is seventy-two. He’ll be going home to stare into the night and watch the little people creep along the edges of the carpet.

There’s wine on the table, maybe just enough to move the four planets out of their usual uneasy orbit.

My wife cranes forward out of her chair. She looks at my father. “How do you feel—” The three of us start, as if a cobra had
abruptly materialized and begun darting its deadly head at us. “How do you feel… ?” What kind of horrible question is this
going to be? A how-do-you-feel question, that’s what kind. We don’t like that kind.