My Father's Footprints (4 page)

“I want to watch the Super Bowl tonight,” I tell my mother. “I want to put in my hours this morning and this afternoon. By
nightfall, I want to be replaced by paid health aides, hospice volunteers, or those guards in
The Wizard of Oz
who march wearing busbies and appear to be singing ‘Oreo.’ I am determined to watch the Super Bowl in an undisturbed setting
where I can concentrate, yell, whoop, weep. Where I can be in the presence of similarly dedicated NFL fans and not people
who are checking
their watches and demanding to know why anybody cares about all this organized savagery.”

Even as I speak these words, I am dimly aware that I am tempting the gods to gainsay me. I work with hospice to line up extra
coverage and try to batten down every hatch that might fly open during the game.

And what happens? My father suddenly takes a turn for the worse, so much so that he cannot be left alone with my mother anymore.
All of the coverage vanishes into the Mists of Healthcare.

Joey and I find ourselves waiting for kick-off in my parents’ apartment, very possibly the worst place I can be, because (a)
I may have to attend to my dad or take him to the bathroom at any moment; and (b) My mother disapproves of football and, during
my childhood, would not allow us to watch it in the house because it led to excited yelling, which she also did not allow.

So Joey and I are watching, hunching down, and trying to be very quiet and dignified, although I am wearing a foam rubber
Cheesehead.

From a spot somewhere behind us I hear my mother say, flatly, emphatically, to no one, “I hate Super Bowl.”

Jeez.

He always claimed to be an atheist, but he was way too engaged for that. He secretly wanted to be a heretic.

But it’s time-consuming. And you have to go to meetings and listen to doctrine. I think my father wanted to be a heretic,
not in some church, but right in God’s face. I think he wanted to hang around God’s office and argue with God about important
stuff and get on God’s nerves.

Sean Kennelly, a former Catholic priest, late of Ireland, one parish over from Donnybrook, shows up at my parents’ apartment.

He has been phoning. He’s a hospice pastoral counselor. He had to give up the priest thing so he could get married. He is
a holy man but also full of the devil, in a nice way. My mother won’t let him anywhere near Dad, but I can’t make out whom
she’s protecting: Kennelly from my father’s blasphemies or my father from any sense that this is last rites. Now Sean has
decided to beard the lion in its den.

“Mrs. McEnroe, will you not let me up?” he says on the intercom.

“No, I’m afraid now is not a good time.”

“That’s what you always say. I’ll only stay just a minute and say hello.”

Such is Sean’s charm that it works even on a squawk box. He gets in somehow. He and my father have a few talks, which they
both seem to enjoy.

“I’ve seen the type before. ‘I’m an atheist, praise be to God,’” Sean confides to me in his brogue.

My father’s moments of clarity come less often.

I bring over a videotape to watch with him.
Primal Fear
with Richard Gere. We watch three minutes; he nods off. I stop the tape. He wakes up. We watch ten minutes. He dozes. I stop
the tape. He perks. We watch. Snooze. Stop. Wake. Watch. Now he is deeply, deeply asleep. I stop the tape and grab something
to read. It seems wrong to watch without him.

Suddenly he stirs, shakes his head.

“What happened to Bang Bang Fuck You?” he demands.

“What?” I must be hearing things.

“Bang Bang Fuck You.”

I stare at him.

“
The movie!
” he says, exasperated.

I start it up again, but now I can’t stop giggling. Now I’m laughing so hard my eyes are watering.

I’m picturing the Oscars. “Accepting the Best Picture award for
Bang Bang Fuck You
is its producer, Leonard T. Salink.”

Or the video store. “Do you have
Bang Bang Fuck You
?”

“All our copies of
Bang Bang Fuck You
are out right now. Try again tomorrow.”

The Good News: You are a better person than you probably think, particularly if you think you could never deal with, say,
your parents’ senescence if said senescence led you into the world of Depends Undergarments and other unpleasant facts of
late life. You can.

Look, I’m a chicken. I speak as one who, going into every squeamish turn, said, “I can’t do this,” and then did it. I gave
showers. I changed adult diapers. If I did it, anybody can. A tip: Buy some medicated VapoRub-type stuff and smear some under
your nose when you run into really icky situations. It’s the Sandwich Generation’s magic mushroom, a Castanedan mind-altering
substance.

The Bad News: Even as the physically gross stuff turns out to be less paralyzing than you had feared, the emotional stuff
is far trickier, and there is no VapoRub for the soul, unless you count alcohol.

Today, for instance, a hospice nurse and I have to “break” my mother on the subject of nursing homes. First we convene everybody
in the living room: Mom, Dad, me, and a few hospice people. We discuss the way the apartment is becoming more and more dangerous.
My father wakes in the night and wants to leave the hospital bed we’ve had trucked in. The only person there is my mother,
who cannot support his tottering weight.

We go around the room, soliciting comments about other options, gently steering my parents toward the nursing home.
Each time my father has the floor, he discusses his distaste for the confinement of the hospital bed with its high sides.

“When I want to go to the john, I have to get Barbara to help me, and the whole thing is a nuisance,” he complains.

“We don’t want you to get out of bed on your own,” says a nurse.

Around the room we go, discussing future care options, the likely course of the disease, the advisability of lining up a nursing
home placement right now. Back to Dad. Anything else to say?

“Perhaps a ladder could be attached, so that I could climb in and out more easily,” he suggests.

“No,” I say, “the purpose of the bed is to keep you from getting out and hurting yourself.”

He shrugs.

The next time we come back to him, five minutes later, he brings up the bed again, as if it were a fresh topic.

“Bob?” asks the hospice nurse.

“I’d like to say a few words against that bed in there. It’s medieval!”

Later, the nurse and I talk quietly with my mother, while Dad sleeps.

“It’s the only way. He’s not even safe here anymore.”

“I can’t. I made a Commitment to keep him at home.”

“What good will that do if he falls on top of you, and you both get hurt?”

We have to apply just enough pressure so that she can resist, resist, and then cry and give in. She has to be able to blame
us for the smashing of the Tablets of Commitment without really having been so mercilessly bullied that there is lasting damage.

When the deed is done, the nurse leaves, and my mother and I are alone with our decision and our patient, who has become endearingly
childlike in recent days. No, not childlike,
infantile. The realization gives me a little jolt, and I can identify the sense of regret and nostalgia draped over me. It’s
the ultimate Oedipal joke. My mother and I have a baby. For the last few days we’ve been feeding and diapering him and trying
to discern from his sometimes incoherent pleas what it is he wants or needs. We’ve been up at all hours. And we’re going to
miss him when I take him to Hughes Convalescent Home tomorrow.

Hughes is within walking distance from my parents’ apartment, so I bundle up my dad, blanket, parka, hood, and wheel him over.
The whole thing feels like an afterthought following the Breaking of the Covenant. The people at Hughes greet him as though
his arrival were ordained at the hour of his birth. “Oh, there you are!” Big smiles.

They take off the hooded parka and lay him down on a bed.

“I’m Anna,” says a beaming nurse.

“I’m Santa,” says my father. “But they took away my suit.”

“Is he joking or disoriented?” she asks me.

“That’s sort of the basic question I’ve been asking myself for thirty-five years,” I tell her.

Every few months, people call up with ideas about what to do with his best play,
The Silver Whistle.
A movie. A TV series. A musical version. It was a Broadway hit for Jose Ferrer about fifty years ago. Then it was a
Mr. Belvedere
movie. Then it was a
Playhouse 90
episode. But producers and agents call all the time to fiddle with new proposals.

I am lost. All of the people strongly connected to the play are now dead or non compos mentis.

I am hunting through my father’s files, looking for clues. Here’s a folder marked “Theater Correspondences.” I am unsurprised
to find that only 60 percent of what’s in there has anything
to do with theater. There are letters of all kinds. All of them are from him. He has saved carbons. I am unsurprised to find
that in many, many cases he has not saved the other person’s letter back. These would not have interested him as much as his
own letter. The letters are funny, troubling, problematic. A person seeking his advice about buying a house or staging a musical
was just as likely to get a snootful about William of Orange or the flaws in Trinitarian theology or whatever was on his mind.
“There will be a test on Friday,” one of these letters concludes.