My Father's Footprints (20 page)

Despite the fact that I am insufferably competent and never attempt to return anyone’s friendship, some girls try to be kind.
One of them, a girl named Sue, simply insists that I talk to her. I have found a place where I can be alone between periods.
It is the lobby looking out on Highland Street, with a view of the nursing home where, twenty-seven years later, my father
will die.

I like to sit in a Windsor chair, tilting it back so it rocks and bumps gently against the wall while I
bump-bump
mentally palpate, say, the legacy
bump-bump
of James K. Polk. Sometimes the teacher on the other side of the wall, Mrs. Gettier, emerges and, in exasperation, implores
me to stop. One last, soothing pleasure halted, I think. Sue comes to the lobby each day, sits down in another chair, and
makes conversation until, falteringly, I join in. There is nothing romantic in her overtures. She has a nice boyfriend, I
know. She is just being decent to me.

And I am wildly in love with her for it. Like the Beast, like Quasimodo, like the Phantom, I am hideous but I can be reached.

I love them all, actually. In their dreadful gray uniforms, every single one of them is pretty to me, in various ways. And
I yearn for them and dream of romances and, by remaining pathologically aloof, make absolutely certain that none of them suspects
that one as ugly and wretched as I entertain such dreams.

“Women, children, and dogs over seven pounds know all about love, but men only experience it in their teens and twenties
when the temperature is over sixty-five,” Henry Nemo observes as my father pours him out onto yellow pads at our dining room
table. I have moved down from Colinworld and now we work together most nights, with me advising him on the novel.

I am uniquely connected to the Nemo material because at school I continue to feel like a loveless, isolated freak.

One day, while I work in the library, a Swedish exchange student, a pretty girl from my history class, comes to me to ask
about a word, in English, whose meaning she cannot divine. She writes it on my notebook.

“Bliss.”

She looks at me inquiringly.

“Happiness. Great joy,” I whisper hoarsely.

Bliss. I’m a real expert.

Another day, in the spring, two mischievous girls plunk themselves down in my lobby and discuss, a little too audibly, their
menstrual cycles.

The lobby is never quite the same after that.

There is also a smell, sweet and rank, I encounter when entering a classroom that has been closed for a while. It’s a dense
smell of perfume inexpertly applied and experimental hair products and something else, something pent up and hormonal. I believe
it is the smell of fresh, excited, wonderful girls cooped up all day without boys.

It makes me think I am not alone in my yearnings.

In mythology, Aeneas founds Rome. Before he does that, he visits the underworld, where the shades of the dead dwell. In
The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
the scholar Joseph Campbell says those two things are closely related. He writes that in all sorts of legends “the really
creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world.” The hero disappears and then returns,
licked and seared by infernal flames,
filled with new energy. Think of Luke Skywalker when he comes to retrieve Han Solo at the start of
Return of the Jedi.
His hand has been chopped off, and Mark Hamill, the actor who plays him, has almost obligingly damaged his real face in a
motorcycle accident. Our first look into his eyes tells us the boyish Luke has died away. This new person is someone who has
marched back from the world of the dead and is one hell of a lot more powerful and dangerous.

To grow, to become formidable, one must die.

This is the lesson of 1970.

The school year passes. Pius Aeneas gets in and out of scrapes. Manifest Destiny comes and goes. I am frequently out sick
for long stretches thanks to my rigorous nutrition program. The effort of looking serious and unapproachable all day gives
my face an additionally sour cast. I am increasingly nobody’s prize.

The word “bliss,” etched on my notebook in Swedish ballpoint, mocks my progress through life.

And then spring comes. The temperature is over sixty-five.

Spring has always been good to me. I thaw, in various ways. In this case, my pimple count decreases. I am named editor of
the school newspaper. It seems possible, maybe permissible, to return the occasional smile at Oxford. At home, I am Aeneas,
carrying my father on my shoulders out of the burning ruins of our recent past. Or so I imagine.

I do not see that he is Aeneas. He is the one who has visited the eerie underworld of the dead, perhaps even communed with
the shade of his own father. His psychiatrist is telling him he is at last free, filled with creative power. There will be
a new empire of plays and novels, streaming from his fingers like light from the godhead. This is not, alas, an accurate prophecy,
but it is true that his time in the Bardo, the waiting room between death and rebirth, has made him wiser and stronger.

I remember one of the last days of that year. It is bright and
sunny. I put down my book in the lobby, walk outside, and lie down on a low wall, letting the sun get at my acne.

It feels good.

A girl walks out of the main building. She lies down near me and takes the sun. We say very little, and I don’t see her again
for twenty-seven years.
^*

Her name is Joy.

Great joy.

I spend the summer alone in thought for long stretches of each day, stalled in a Court of Pizza Pie Powder. After a series
of continuances, the Court drops its case against me.

When I return to school, Tyler C. Tingley sits me down.

“Your skin has cleared up,” he says.

“Yes.”

He looks at me, as if he is trying to guess what has been wrong with me for two years. I still have not told anyone the suicide
story.

“You’re going to be fine,” he says, finally.

Sarah Whitman Hooker Pies recommended with this chapter

Uncle John’s Gentle Fig Apricot Fluff

Wolfpack Jack Tarpaper Crust over Nutcracker Peach Pit Pie

Mango Mango Bang

O
n October 6, 1954, my father answers a letter from a man compiling an encyclopedia of the theater:

I learned playwriting by writing plays in my spare time while working at a factory in East Hartford, Connecticut. I wrote
eleven plays before having one optioned. The eleventh play,
Mulligan’s Snug
, was optioned by eight producers and rewritten twenty-three times, but never produced. The
twelfth play,
The Silver Whistle,
was produced by the Theatre Guild. The thirteenth play,
Summer Motley,
was optioned once. The fourteenth play,
The Distaff Paradox,
was optioned twice. I am working on the fifteenth.

I was born in New Britain, Connecticut, July 1, 1916, and attended the University of Chicago. I have no degrees, never studied
dramatics, and know little or nothing about the theater. I have forgotten why I started writing plays. In spite of the fact
that I have had a play on Broadway, I am convinced that I would be better off today had I invested my time more wisely. I
have taken three different batteries of vocational tests which showed that I have no talent as a writer. In other words, being
a playwright doesn’t make sense, but I have too much time invested to back out now.