My Father's Footprints (27 page)

What is even more hortful is the idea that the Coyles, my kin, may not have behaved honorably.

We took soup, you might say.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t talk to Kitty McEnroe,” says Joe, intruding on my reverie. “She was the last of her generation
around here, and she knew some of the old stories.”

“Where is she?” I ask.

“She was buried last week. She was eighty-five,” he says, adding in a chipper tone, “You just missed her.”

A day or two later, my toaster-sized Nissan rumbles down a country lane to the home of Noeleen McEnroe Plunkett, who is probably
my closest relation in Ireland even though—after she gets out her papers and I get out my papers and her husband, what the
hell, gets out his papers—we can’t really figure out how we’re related. Further confusing us is the fact that on two occasions,
roughly fifty years apart, someone named Thomas McEnroe has married someone named Mary Coyle.

“When you called, I was sure there was no connection, but now I think there is,” says Noeleen. She has lived in Mountnugent
every day of her life, and her speech is unusually thick with the local accent, which is vaguely Klingon, lots of noises from
the back of the throat.

She is certain that no McEnroes were evicted at Tonagh. It would have been passed along orally, as it has in her husband Oliver’s
family. He’s a Plunkett, one of the other local clans living for almost two centuries alongside the McEnroes, intermarrying
liberally. The Plunketts were indeed turned out at Tonagh. They also boast an actual saint, the also-named-Oliver Plunkett
who was hanged, drawn, and quartered by the British on trumped up charges involving a completely chimerical Popeish plot to
invade Ireland.

Noeleen knows the McEnroes were not turned out of Tonagh because she knows where they were.

“Right there,” she says. She points out her window at a crumbly nineteenth-century farm cottage, long abandoned.

“That might be your ancestral home,” says Oliver, grinning just a little.

I resist the temptation to dash outside and run my hands
melodramatically down its cool stone walls. Instead I look longer and harder at Noeleen. She doesn’t look much like me, but
she strongly resembles my father and the rest of his family. She has what is unfondly called “the McEnroe nose,” although
it might be fairer to say that they have hers. Probably nobody is going to fight very hard for ownership, because it is at
once slightly bulbous and hawkish.

I don’t know what I expected to find in Ireland.

Well, that’s not quite true. I had a vague mental picture of myself on a hill, under a swirling gray sky, falling to my knees
and digging my fingers into the earth and announcing myself as “a son of Ballyjamesdough” (or Knockgrafton or some other cool-sounding
place). And meaning it. Having some kind of Moment. In this mental picture I seemed to have darker, more tousled hair and
stormy, flashing eyes—the guy on the cover of the novels called
Savage Wicked Ravaging Fire of Love,
with elements of Windy from the Association song of the same name.

Instead I found a nose. The McEnroe nose, attached to this nice, somewhat reticent woman.

“Have you noticed in the McEnroes any particular… consistent personality trait… or any kind of theme running through their
lives or…” I falter. She is looking at me with incomprehension, and I realize that this is kind of a dopey question—something
you might find on your English 223 final exam. What themes unite the protagonists in Arbuthnot’s
McEnroe
novels? How do they compare with those suggested by the House of Atreus in Greek tragedy? Give examples that support your
points.

On the other hand, I’m flying out of Dublin tomorrow. If there’s something here for me to learn, there probably isn’t time
for me to soak it up in some nuanced way.

“It’s just that my father and grandfather had this doomed, anguished quality, and I wondered if…”

Noeleen looks out at the cottage for a moment, then looks back at me and says, “No.”

And my Irish quest is over. Just like that.

Somewhere in the world maybe there’s a packet of letters that tell the story of the passage, how Thomas and Mary find the
money to get themselves and five children onto a boat and across the Atlantic in 1855.

I can’t even picture the trip, but I can at least imagine their new lives in one of the crowded, unsteady-looking houses strewn
around what came to be called Dublin Hill in New Britain, Connecticut.

Thomas takes a job in one of the factories. New Britain is already a center for toolmaking. Ten cents an hour, and days that
stretch on for ten hours. The children are Margaret, Mary, Thomas, Henry, Patrick. Thomas is born the year before their passage.
He doesn’t make it to the age of five. The others, including my great-grandfather Patrick, settle in New Britain and live
long lives. Patrick takes a job in a mill, marries Elizabeth Healey, another immigrant.

They have seven children. My grandfather Edward is the seventh. The male McEnroes who do not become circus workers go into
business for themselves. They own candy stores, ice-cream companies, restaurants, cigar stores, bars, and pool halls.

Edward owns bars. He falls in love with Catherine O’Connell.

It is the talent of Catherine O’Connell, over the course of eighty-five years, to make herself invisible.

“Did you ever meet her?” I ask my mother.

“I’m not sure.”

“How can you not be sure?”

“I may have met her once.”

“This would have been your mother-in-law. Mothers-in-law have a way of sticking out.”

“I really don’t remember. I think I may have met her just that once.”

I try Catherine’s niece, Peggy, who remembers all kinds of things, who remembers, for example, certain dresses that her friends
wore on dates with my father and the type of car my grandfather drove when Peggy was eight. I ask her questions about my grandmother.

“What was her name?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Was it Catherine O’Connell?”

“I don’t remember. That sounds like it might be right.”

“What was she like?”

“I don’t remember much about her.”

The name survives on my father’s birth certificate. There are no photographs or letters. I haven’t the faintest idea of where
to look for her grave or even under what name she’d be buried. There is no one left, that I can find, to tell her side of
things, if there is a side to tell.

She seems to have lived into the early 1950s, but no one knows where she died or in what year. Or no one is telling.

No one is telling anything, except, of course, the scripts.

Sitting on the floor in my own house, I page nervously through
The Exorcism,
the one place where Catherine O’Connell still lives and breathes.

MARTIN BURKE

She’s a woman ruled by pride, and pride can ruin a woman as easily as it can ruin a man. She has a hunger to be admired. She
has…

WILLIE BURKE

A thirst for recognition.

MARTIN

A thirst for recognition.

WILLIE

An ache to climb over her fellow men and look down on them.

MARTIN

[
Scowling
]

She’s always trying to pass herself off as lace-curtain Irish but her old man was a meterman on a trolley car.

Thus do Martin and Willie, father and son, discuss Bessie, wife and mother. I think the three Burkes are as close as my father
dared come to putting his own parents and himself down on paper. The real story was something he could not bear to discuss
for most of his life. A few years before he died, I asked him to tell me something, anything about the past. And this is what
came out.

Edward McEnroe fell in love with a woman who was lace-curtain Irish. He was shanty Irish. These terms do not come from Ireland.
They are, from what I can tell, inventions of the New England Irish diaspora and almost entirely matters of attitude (with
a dash of socioeconomics thrown in). The shanty Irish were, well, Irish. They kept some of the old ways, stayed clannish,
hid nothing of their roots. The lace-curtain Irish affected Yankee middle-class mores, tried to assimilate.

Eddie owned bars and maybe a pool hall. This was very shanty Irish stuff. Catherine told him there would be no marriage unless
he became respectable. Eddie sold what he had and got into the real estate business. My father claimed Eddie
learned real estate from a man named Smiley Tatum, which might account for what happened later.

When Robert E. McEnroe was born, my grandmother was distressed. She didn’t want a baby. She was an older-than-usual mother
for those times. She sent the baby back to the hospital. There was nothing wrong with him. She just didn’t want him there.
She was tired, overwhelmed, one of the last American neurasthenics.

McEnroe men are named Thomas, Patrick, Richard, William, Edward, Charles, and Henry. Over and over again, like a polypeptide
sequence. It makes record-searching a nightmare. Robert is not a McEnroe family name. My father’s name is a sore thumb in
the McEnroe records. It’s more of an inside-the-pale Norman name, the kind that might be worn by someone with unwholesome
ties to the king. It is, quite specifically, the first name of the Nugent to whom the Crown granted the right to have a Court
of Pie Powder in Mountnugent. My father claimed, unhappily, that he was named after a collie.

After a few days, his mother let the baby come back.

Eddie took his stuck-up wife and his collie son to Miami Beach, where the real estate game could be played at higher stakes.
These were the Roaring Twenties, and my grandfather made a bundle, using whatever the Smiley Tatum Method was. By the middle
of the decade, he was a millionaire. My father grew up shooting alligators at night. In the summers, Eddie drove his family
up to Connecticut in a shiny new Marmon. My father had what was then called a “mammy,” a black woman who cared for white children.
Inasmuch as his mother did not warm to motherhood, I think it’s a fair guess that this African American woman—alas, her name
has not survived our pathetic oral tradition—loomed unusually large in his upbringing. In the final year of his life, the
home health aides were often black women, and he seemed to find this comforting.