My Father's Footprints Read Online Free Page B

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 anythingto 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.
    I am drawn to two. One he sent me in an attempt to patch up a very painful stretch of bitterness between us. It is carefully
     worded. Admits no real fault. But it eagerly seeks peace. Another is to his agent, who, perplexingly, became a rabbi late
     in life. The letter brags about me. I am going to give a commencement speech at the private school from which I graduated,
     it says. Who, it wonders, would have dreamed of such a thing?

    With apologies to Thurber, I awaken at 4:00 A.M. to hear, distinctly, a seal barking.
    A hunt turns up no seals, just a sick little boy whose virus has turned into something else.
    “Sounds like it might be croup,” says the doctor on the phone to my wife. “Does he make a sound like a seal barking?”
    My dog and father are already sick. My mother is a survivor of recent cancer surgery. My wife has frequent, incapacitating
     headaches. This, I think in a moment of abject self-pity, is what my life has become. Seal barks and whale songs.
    Joey, who is a trouper and notoriously brave about illness, burns in my arms and weakly wheezes out the question intrinsic
     to every disease.
    “Is this going to go away?”
    The doctor tells my wife we should take him outside.Something about the cold doing something to the inflamed and swollen something.
    I wrap him in blankets and stagger outdoors with him.
    It is January 1998. As an anxious nation holds its breath, Marvin Runyon announces he is quitting as postmaster general to
     return to the private sector. There is also something going on that has to do with the president and a woman named Lewinsky.
     I stand outside with a hot child in my arms and tilt my body back so that I can look at the stars sparkling in the cold, black
     sky. How are we going to get along without Marvin Runyon?
    Gazing at the sky, I have a vision of myself, the last healthy person in the world, running from station to station with a
     bedpan, while the music they used to play for the guy with the plates and the sticks booms out of the clouds. I am in the
     night sky, a constellation, Sandwichomeda.
    When I visit the nursing home, my father is padding around in the halls, moving his wheelchair with waggling shuffles of his
     feet. In this context he is peculiarly downscaled. He was The Big Show when we cared for him at home. Now he seems like one
     of several kinds of persons one sees in the halls of nursing homes. The final