My Father's Footprints (6 page)

He starts to talk to me.

So much is unsaid. So many questions linger. I dig through
his old scripts, as if they were instruction manuals for a suddenly comatose machine.

WILLIE BURKE

[
Smiling as he pours beer
]

It was a grand funeral.

SNOWBIRD TOOMEY

It had dignity, and that’s what a funeral needs more than anything else.

WILLIE

I thought the casket would be heavier.

SNOWBIRD

We were on the end that was up when we carried it down the church stairs. Then there was the grade down to the grave. We were
on the up end there too. One of the secrets of living an easy life is to always be on the up end.

I see that, like any good Irishman, Dad had been preparing the world for his death for about fifty-three years. He was the
funniest person I ever knew. I miss him, shopping for his casket. He would have been hilarious. The guy at Taylor & Modeen
is incredibly nice, never pressures us, leaves us alone in the showroom so I can help my mom spend the right amount. Tight
with a dollar when it comes to the comforts of life, she displays an unexpected high-roller streak when it comes to the casket.
I’m trying to picture my father in this discussion of wood vs. metal and of various “interiors.” There’s nobody home in a
dead body, and you might as well be piling books and bingo games and bicycle pumps on those expensive satin sheets in there.
But casket-shopping touches our inner Egyptian.

When my time comes, burn me up and scatter me in the woods. I’ve always known that. But I get a little sucked into the
comfort angle. We find a box that, even I admit, looks pretty cozy. Something about the sky blue interior is deeply inviting
and beckons to me, just a little.

“Now, you had brought a dark suit for him to wear, right?” the guy asks.

“Yup.”

“See, that’s all going to pull together once he’s in there.”

Oh, Dad. We should have gone casket-shopping ages ago. You would have been a riot.

Burial will be private, but my mother wants to see him one more time, all made up and in the box.

So does Joey.

“I couldn’t go see him in the nursing home because I was so sick. Now I want to say goodbye,” he tells me.

He wants to give him a toy or something else to keep in the casket, too.

In my mother’s kitchen, he spots a type of chocolate cookie my father loved. Dad and my mother fought about them, because
his diabetes made them a hazard, the way he went at them.

“You could put some of those cookies in the casket,” he tells her. “Bob loved them.”

“Oh, no,” says my mother, who risked her health and maybe her life to keep him at home until the final ten days, who ministered
to him with a tenderness that touched and surprised me. “He’s not getting any cookies.”

Passing through the kitchen during the day, I come upon a doodle by Joey. He has drawn two Saint-Exupéry stars with arrows
reaching up to them. The arrows stretch out from the words

Bob

Oh Bob

Shall we gather at the casket?

Apparently so. I thought nobody would want a “viewing,” but apparently everybody does. My mother, wife, and son are at the
funeral home looking at the body. So is my dad’s cousin Peggy, the closest thing he ever had to a sibling. The mortician,
trying to be helpful, has put so much terra-cotta makeup on my dad that he looks like a clay model of himself. All of the
hawklike comical ferocity is gone from his features.

Joey has chosen two toys—a stuffed sheep and a plastic fairy—to put in the casket with his grandfather. He has also written
a note.

Dear Bob

I love you

If you read this.

Love, Joey.

We’re a family of notes, apparently.

When my grandmother died, she left instructions requesting a pair of warm socks and a certain robe she had been saving for
the journey to the next life. When somebody went looking in her closet, they found a likely robe. In the pocket was a note.
It read, “This is it.”

She was my mother’s mother, Alma Cotton, daughter of a widowed farm laborer. Standing at my father’s casket, I’m dimly aware
that I don’t even know the name of his mother, whom he could not bring himself to discuss. I know nothing, save one or two
tiny details, about her life. I couldn’t even guess where she’s buried.

On my way to the graveside ceremony, in the brief stretch of road from my mother’s apartment to the cemetery, I am seized
by an impulse. I want balloons.

I stop at a store, race in, get five blue helium balloons
yoked together with metallic ribbons. Why five, why blue, I couldn’t say.

And thence to the cemetery, where a tiny knot of “immediate family” has gathered for a ceremony presided over by Sean Kennelly.

“Joey, do you know Grampa’s not in there?” Sean asks, nodding at the box before he begins. (“No,” I think giggily, “but hum
a few bars and we’ll fake it.”)

Joey nods yes, and Sean says a bit more about that in his Dublin brogue. He reads a few things, including a bit from a Jewish
service, and leads us in the Lord’s Prayer. (Who can it hurt?)

And then Joey and I go up on a rise of earth, and he turns loose the balloons. Still tethered together, the blue globes circle
one another, weaving, passing through, bobbing, changing places like dancers in some very complex gavotte. Whirl, loop, circle
back in the chaotic breezes of noon.

Bob.

Oh Bob.

All of the elements of the man, I think, are drifting into heaven’s vault. His love, his humor, his sorrow, his anger, and
his fifth element—that remarkable knack for leaving the world and entering magical realms. We can see, too, the silver lightning
flashes of ribbon snaking among the balloons.

“Bye, Dad,” I hear myself say.

The others keep watching, but I turn away, because my eyes aren’t good. And because I’m done. I saw him go up.

Joey, however, is glancing over at the grave, where the casket is still seated in its frame, above ground.

“When do they put it in?” he whispers.

“Not until we leave, I guess.”

“Ask them!”

I ask the funeral-home guy.

“Most people like us to wait until they’ve gone,” he says.

“I don’t believe this,” Joey says.

“Mom?” I ask.

“I don’t want to see that,” she says.

“Maybe you better get in the car,” I tell her.

Joey and my wife, Thona, and I go back to the grave, and the guy lets Joey turn the handle that lowers the whole rig. We watch
it go all the way down. Then Joey pulls two flowers, white and red, from the floral piece and tosses them in on top of the
box.

“Bye, Bob,” he says quickly and runs to the car.

I have to go back to the nursing home to gather my father’s personal effects.

The people there are, I’ve decided, strangely beautiful. They drift slowly through the halls like ships, broken-masted or
hull-pierced, never to sail again, but bobbing and eddying in the last harbor, sad and lovely fragments of their old selves.

I pick up a little thread of my father, too. To find a missing thing, you go to the last place you had it.

The
New York Times
runs a generous obituary, written by Rick Lyman:

Robert E. McEnroe, who wrote
The Silver Whistle,
a frequently revived 1948 Broadway comedy about a garrulous tramp who spreads good cheer through a home for the aged, died
on Feb. 6 at the Hughes Convalescent Home in West Hartford, Conn. He was 82.

Mr. McEnroe had written a dozen plays in his spare time while working in the research department at United Aircraft in Hartford
before he drew attention in 1947 by selling two in one day to different Broadway producers, an unusual feat for an unproduced
playwright.

The obit tracks the history of
The Silver Whistle
as play, television play, and movie. It notes the actors who have played the lead role (Jose Ferrer, John Carradine, Lloyd
Nolan, Eddie Albert, and, in the movie adaptation, Clifton Webb), and touches upon the fact that the other play,
Mulligan’s Snug,
was never produced “though it passed through a succession of producers who more than once announced plans to open it on Broadway.”

The obituary mentions
Donnybrook!
, Dad’s short-lived Broadway musical of 1961 that starred Eddie Foy Jr., Susan Johnson, and Art Lund.

It concludes, “Of the years he tried to teach himself playwriting in his spare time, Mr. McEnroe once said: ‘I wrote twelve
plays in ten years without earning a penny more than my factory wages. The only thing this proves is that it’s nice to have
a job, no matter what.’”

Edward, Joey’s guinea pig, is sick. Joey and I race with Edward to a small animal hospital in Kensington.

In the car Joey says, “Well, if Edward dies, he’ll get to see Bob.”

Jeez.

The woman at the desk doesn’t want us to be there at all. She has a stern manner, and I get the feeling that somewhere not
far from where I stand there is a pipeline backed up with wheezing ferrets, rheumy parakeets, tortoises with hacking coughs.
A staggering parade of zoological bit players for whom God’s Great Plan did not, originally, include healthcare.

Shamelessly, I play my big card.

“Look, my father died a week ago. This is my son’s guinea pig. And he was close to his grandfather. My son, I mean, not the
guinea pig. And, you know? I just can’t do another funeral.”

She takes Edward and promises the doctor will see him “after hours.”

There’s an Italian saying, “Green winter, full graveyard.” Edward, a fellow of infinite jest, of excellent fancy, has died.
Death plays encores.

Even though Edward was, in Darwinian terms, capicola, I find his death saddens me—monumentally.

I remember another February day, when Joey was six, when he and I went together for the first time to the Bronx Zoo. It was
a Wednesday, silver-bright sky and spring-warm air. Somewhere among the Ten Great Days of My Life lives that afternoon, walking
my little boy around the zoo in that merciful warmth, doing something my father liked to do with me. What I remember also
was that he would not leave until we had found some cousin of Edward. We did eventually locate the cavy—actually what a guinea
pig is—in the rodent house, and it struck me as odd that Joey insisted on seeing, in such an exotic place, something he could
see every day. But it was important, I finally grasped, for Joey to establish that there, in the firmament of lions and apes
and zebras and cobras, Edward had a place.