Free My Father's Footprints by Colin McEnroe

father, a man who sits home and plows through Descartes and nuclear physics. Races through Stephen Hawking’s book
     like it’s
Dick and Jane.
Devours history and theology after the rest of the world has turned in for the night. His is the supremely wakeful mind.
     And this is what he has surmised about his son and daughter-in-law.
    He has watched the whole high-tech medical melodramaunfold, and this is what he extracts from it: an Iron Age
Jiggs and Maggie
scenario, involving sharp blades and sexual coercion.
    I am hurt. I am outraged.
    A few months later, in the midst of a deep funk about the state of my marriage, my infertility, my weird father, I find myself
     on the phone to my mother, and to my surprise, in defiance of the McEnroe tribal law, I am talking about it.
    “How could he say that to us?”
    “I thought it was a strange comment. I don’t know what he meant,” my mother says.
    I tell her what he meant.
    “Oh, dear. I’m sure he didn’t mean that.”
    “Well,” I say, “he did mean it. What’s more, he meant it to hurt me. What’s more, he’s angry and envious because I have a
     book deal, and he doesn’t. Don’t tell him I said that.”
    So she hangs up and tells him.
    A day or so later, a letter arrives from him.
    Of course he is proud of me and my book. Yes, it hurts a bit that I seem able to get published so easily. Any writer would
     envy my current path of ease. Perhaps, he suggests, my current psychiatrist is stirring up things inside me. Psychiatrists
     have a way of doing that. He himself has spent long stretches on the couch, he reminds me, and knows how seductive the vision
     of the “new self” is, with its bold new ways of truth-telling and blasts of fresh air blowing out the cobwebs of dormant falsehoods.
     The difficulty is, he observes, that the people around you are still living their old lives, and they’re not necessarily eager
     to meet the bright new person you are becoming.
    Message: We are doing just fine with denial. Don’t rock the boat.
    Oh, and the hatchet thing?
    “Your mother told me about your reaction to a statement I made. I was shocked. I never had any thoughts like those and— if
     I had had them—I would have kept them to myself.”
    I put the letter in my desk drawer. The thing is, he has a point. This is not the kind of family where one person can independently
     decide to start telling the truth. At the time of this letter, I have been his only son for thirty-three years. He has never
     told me even one story about either one of his parents. I don’t even know my grandmother’s name or how she died or when. What
     I know of my grandfather comes only from my mother. My father’s paranoia about any probing into his childhood would be appropriate
     for one of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s kids. Once, when I asked him what each of his parents died from, he huffily asked
     me, “Do you have any formal training in psychiatry?”
    “No, but…”
    “Maybe you should leave these kinds of questions to professionals who know how to handle them.”
    “I was just asking what my grandparents died of. It’s the kind of thing that comes up on medical forms.”
    He was silent for the rest of the night.
    On the other side of the family, my mother and her mother did not speak to each other for seven and a half years during the
     1970s. I was their go-between. On holidays, I would arrive laden with gifts from my mother to her mother, with instructions
     to pretend they were from me. Boxes and boxes, which my grandmother would open slowly, as if her own daughter might leap out
     of one of them, like a spring snake from a gag candy jar.
    “Barbara shouldn’t buy me so many things,” she would say wistfully.
    The fight had been about me, about a speeding ticket I’d gotten, but not really. It was truly a long, wordless wail, a lonely
     wolf call about change and loss. What these New England women do is harden, like the rocky, frozen soil they grew up on. Their