My Father's Footprints (30 page)

T
here 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.

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.