The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son

by Pat Conroy

  “Uh-oh. The land of your pissed-off mother. I smell trouble,” he said. “Who’s playing your mother?”

  “Blythe Danner. A living doll and a great actress,” I said.

  “I bet your mother wet her britches when she heard the news,” he said.

  “She was pretty happy.”

  “Who’s playing you?”

  “A young actor named Michael O’Keefe. It’s his first film. A young actress named Lisa Jane Persky is going to play Carol Ann,” I said.

  “What a family I produced,” he said. “Who said a dumb-ass Irishman from Chicago could make a family like this? We’re going to be in a fucking movie. It’s a shame John Wayne is dead. Only he could’ve brought my virility and toughness to the silver screen.”

  “The silver screen?” I asked.

  “That’s what they call it, sports fans,” he said. “A young Humphrey Bogart to play me—a nobody to play you. Kind of ironic, isn’t it, son?”

  • • •

  A month before the film crew would arrive, I made an exploratory trip to Beaufort to gauge my mother’s reaction to the gathering excitement that had elated the town with the arrival of the filmmakers. Mom had already spoken to Blythe Danner on the phone, and Mom was sure a deep friendship was in the making. Late one afternoon Mom and I walked down to the dock belonging to Billy Kennedy, a friend I’d made playing football in high school. It had a nice view of the bridge to Lady’s Island and was across the street from Tidalholm, which the filmmakers had rented out as the Meecham family’s Beaufort house—it was the purest fantasy of my military brat heart that I put my fictional family in the most impressive mansion in town. I had lived out a childhood in trailers and Quonset huts, while my younger siblings lived in much fancier quarters as my father accrued higher rank.

  The pride was a powerful, nourishing one as my mother regaled me with the town’s pleasure awaiting the coming of the film crew.

  “You’ve made some people in this town mighty happy, son,” she said.

  “That’s good to hear, after Conrack,” I said.

  “They’ve gotten over that,” she told me, “at least most of them. Some people’ll always be mad about that. But they’re racist and we’ll never care what they think, will we?”

  “Mom? Dad wants to come down to watch a little of the movie being made.”

  “He can’t come,” she said.

  “Yes, he can. Because I invited him,” I said. “And Robert Duvall wants to meet him.”

  “I’ll go to Florida if that happens,” she said.

  “Say hi to Aunt Helen for me,” I answered, then added, “I’ll keep him away from you. That’s a promise.”

  It was a promise I was determined to keep, since my parents’ divorce proceedings had an inescapable linkup with the publication of The Great Santini. Based on their reaction to the book, the whole family refused to believe that Mom and Dad could pull off a simple act of legal dissociation without all the excesses of grand opera spilling out, and they had been right.

  In the month leading up to their divorce trial, Dad and I had met for lunch at the Varsity, a legendary hot-dog joint near the Georgia Tech campus. As we sat eating our chili-cheese dogs, I said, “You’ve got to hire a lawyer to represent you in your divorce trial, Dad.”

  “I’ve got rights,” he said. “I’m defending myself. I’m telling the judge that I’m a Roman Catholic and my church doesn’t believe in divorce. Your mother’s got nothing to back her up, and I’ve got Thomas Aquinas on my side.”

  Putting my head in my hands, I said, “Dad, promise me you won’t mention Aquinas in court.”

  “Yeah, that’s just the start of it. There’s Saint Francis of Assisi, you know—the bird guy. Saint Peter, who’s the rock upon which my church was built. Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. I might even recite the confiteor to let the judge know who he’s dealing with.”

  “What would you have done without the Baltimore Catechism, Dad?”

  “It’s still my favorite novel, son.”

  “It’s not a novel.”

  “Hey, it’s a book. It looks like a novel to me. I still read it for pleasure,” he said.

  “You need a lawyer,” I insisted.

  “Negative.”

  I said, in slight despair, “You’re going into court without one?”

  “Affirmative.” His jaw was set in defiance.

  “I hired you one, Dad.”

  “I don’t need one,” Dad repeated, then, “Who is he?”

  “Buster Murdaugh’s son.”

  “Buster? I hate that Southern-ass name,” Dad said. “I’m a Chicago boy. I like my lawyers to be called Mickey the Blade, Sharkey, or Opie the Jew Boy.”

  “Your lawyer’s name is Randy Murdaugh. He’s Buster’s son.”

  “Tell me about Buster Murdaugh.”

  I remembered the time I met Buster quite well, and repeated it to my father. “At Hampton, during my trial to get my teaching job back, this older man sat in the jury box and laughed his ass off at several things I said. When the trial was over, Buster called me over and introduced himself. Smoking a cigar, he said, ‘I’m the cock of the walk in this part of South Carolina, and, boy, you really know how to put on a show. You scared the living hell out of those bastards. But you’re going to lose your ass.’ ‘What if I’d had you as a lawyer?’ I asked. Buster took a puff of his cigar and blew a pillow of smoke in my direction before saying, ‘You’d be teaching in that little school of yours tomorrow morning. But you ain’t going to be teaching ever again. Let me send you to law school; then you come back and work for me. I’ll make you the goddamnedest lawyer you’ve ever seen.’ ”

  “I’ll take Buster,” Dad said.

  I answered, “He’s retired. You’ll take his son Randy.”

  When my father walked into the Beaufort courthouse, his face registered shock when he saw my sister Kathy sitting at the same table as Mom. Prodded by her lawyer, both Mom and Kathy whispered and drew back in horror when they watched Dad’s arrival. Their trembling and shaking in terror caused Mom’s lawyer to approach the bench of Judge Donald Fanning to ask for a private conference in the judge’s quarters. The judge asked Dad to join them. Mom’s lawyer confided to the judge that my mother and sister feared Dad’s uncontrollable temper and capacity for violence, and demanded that he be hand-searched for weapons. My father responded by bursting into tears.

  The judge waited for Dad to calm himself, then asked him to swear Marine to Marine that he was not carrying a firearm or any other kind of weapon. Dad swore, and the two Marines shook hands.

  In the courtroom, Mom took the stand and testified about every act of violence I described in The Great Santini, even though I’d made up most of those particular scenes, culling bits and fragments from a lifetime of mistreatment to fuel the fires. Mom used the book as her template and her proof of transit through her unlivable marriage. Kathy later said she told the judge she’d seen Dad hit Mom only once, and that was when she was in the fifth grade. Kathy’s witness in all this has always been subject to interrogation and great doubt. Of all the children, Kathy reigns supreme as our most unreliable witness. Her only child, Willie, grew up telling his playmates: “Uncle Pat writes lies about my granddaddy.”

  The divorce was granted, and I called Dad that night. He was sobbing so hard he couldn’t speak. When I called Mom, the same keening and wailing was going on at her house, but for a different reason. Mom did not receive a dime for alimony, and only a scant five hundred dollars a month for Tim and Tom, who were still in high school. When they left for college, she wouldn’t receive another cent. Peg Conroy could not touch the generous retirement pay of my father’s long career and was bitter about it for the rest of her life. A good military wife is a thing of treasured harmony on a base, and my mother was as good at it as any woman of her era. When she married Capt. John Egan a short time later, I’ll always believe she did it as much out of financial necessity as love. The Marine Corps considered her life�
�s work without recompense or worth.

  When I pass in review and make astringent judgments about the life I’ve led, I’m still mortified that I didn’t testify on my mother’s behalf, despite her having begged me to do so. I find it weak-kneed, pusillanimous to my mother’s time of greatest need. Even though I was going through a difficult phase of my own breakdown at the time, nothing should’ve kept me out of that court to testify for the woman who had pulled that son of a bitch off me since I was an infant. I earned the words my mother screamed at me when I refused to testify on her behalf. “Iscariot!” then again, “Iscariot!”

  • • •

  As the actors and screenwriters arrived in Beaufort to film The Great Santini, Peg Conroy became my eyes and ears, reporting everything that transpired. It was a time of enchantment for her. I had never seen her caught up so magically with her own life. Each night, she would call to tell me what happened on the set: that she taught Blythe Danner how to say the rosary, that Robert Duvall had winked at her, that she had talked to Michael O’Keefe about what I was like in high school, and that she told Charles Pratt the complications of moving a large family through the South. She would pass me delicious glimmers of gossip she had heard from Beaufortonians and the movie people.

  The making of The Great Santini began a showy, extravagant season in my mother’s life in Beaufort. When she walked the streets with a queenly hauteur, people would come out of shops on Bay Street to make a fuss over her. Later, she would tell me that it was one of the happiest times in her whole life. She felt like she was walking on clouds when she strutted out of her house each morning—whenever she could, she drove to the set to watch scenes being filmed, but I found out she mostly showed up when the elegant and lovely Blythe Danner was playing the seminal role of Peg Conroy in the same town the Conroy family had latched onto after leaving our nomadic, tumultuous life. Beaufort had soothed something in all of our souls and remains as much a symbol as it does a hometown heritage in the Conroy family story. I still walk its streets in wonder and gratitude, more than forty-five years after my arrival here. Its streets are distillations of roselike beauty, and the air shimmers with an elixir too lovely by half. The town of Beaufort did the most wondrous thing for me and my family—it brought repose to our nest of damaged souls.

  Every night, my mother would call me in Atlanta to tell me about the gossip on the set or what she was hearing in her wanderings about Beaufort.

  “Making a movie here, Pat, is the talk of the town. I saw Gene Norris today and he almost popped with pride when a tourist found out he was your English teacher. Walt Gnann was with Gene and told them that he was your chemistry teacher and that you were one of the worst chemistry students he ever taught.”

  Among my friends and family I’m famous for always being able to spot thunderclouds lurking on the brightest spring day. I distrust happiness, joy, or self-satisfaction because I’ve suffered the reprisals of wallowing in those enchanting emotions.

  “Be careful, Mom,” I said to her. “You’re enjoying this far too much. Remember it’s still Beaufort. It’s still the South.”

  “Don’t worry about your mama, Pat,” she said. “I’m just enjoying the ride.”

  “We’re newcomers to Beaufort, Mom, and we always will be,” I warned.

  “These people sure seem glad these newcomers came to town,” she replied.

  Beaufort struck back hard and fast. I was writing the middle section of The Lords of Discipline, called “The Family,” and was about to break for the day when my phone rang. When I answered it, I couldn’t have been more surprised when I heard the voice of John Trask Jr. The Trask family was one of the most respected, and certainly the wealthiest, families in Beaufort. I knew John and his pretty wife, Caroline, only because John’s youngest brother, Freddie, and I had become close friends when we both taught during my second year as a teacher at Beaufort High School. Like me, Freddie was well read and he shared my ambition of becoming a writer. I think Freddie had the talent to become a very good writer if he had not been born a rich boy.

  John Jr. told me he was throwing a party that weekend for the cast and crew at Orange Grove, their plantation on St. Helena Island, and inviting some people from town. Since I’d known and gotten to love Freddie, I’d spent a great deal of time out there, and it was as pretty as any plantation in the low country.

  “Pat, the guests of honor are going to be Robert Duvall, Blythe Danner, and you, if you’ll be so kind as to come. Blythe and Bobby are dying to meet you,” he said.

  “Bobby?” I repeated.

  “Robert Duvall. That’s what people call him,” John Jr. explained.

  “Got it. Well, John, I’m very touched and I can’t thank you and Caroline enough. I’ll see you this weekend, then.”

  “It’ll be an honor to have you at Orange Grove,” John said.

  Though John Jr. and Caroline didn’t really know me, they had been unfailingly kind to me from the time I was a young man until the present day. John carried himself like the well-educated gentleman he was, and Caroline was an exemplary representative of that fragrant-voiced, free-floating subspecies known as the Southern belle. Because I inherited my mother’s hair-trigger sense of social insecurity, I thought of almost all the ways this invitation could go wrong, but I could come up with nothing to prevent me from attending. Going against my better self—which is my darker self—I decided to just go to the party and enjoy playing the big shot.

  • • •

  Awaking early, I drove the five hours to my mother’s house on Carteret Street in Beaufort. When I arrived, I found her sitting at her kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. She was not looking happy when I walked over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “Can I ride with you and Dr. Egan over to the party at the Trask plantation?” I asked her.

  My mother put her head down on the table and began her quiet weeping. I pulled up a chair beside her and waited for her to compose herself. When she sat up and began drying her tears with a napkin, I said, “Mom, what could it possibly be? You love parties. You always have. I hate them and always will. I only came down because I wanted to see you having a blast. People will make a big fuss over you.”

  “I wasn’t invited,” my mother sobbed. “Everyone else in town was, but I wasn’t?”

  “I’m sure it was an oversight,” I said. “I’ll call John Jr. and Caroline, and clear the matter up.”

  “I wouldn’t go now if they sent that invitation in an armored car. It wasn’t an oversight; it was an insult,” she said, setting her jaw in that stubborn angle I knew so well.

  “Instead of calling John Jr., I’ll run over to Freddie Trask’s house and see if I can solve this—or at least salvage it.”

  “You didn’t hear me, son. The United States Marine Corps couldn’t make me go to that party now.”

  “Don’t make up your mind just yet,” I urged. “Please.”

  Sprinting over to Freddie’s house, I tried to form a logical plan that could bring some détente to this prickly social dilemma. I burst into Freddie’s house, kissed his pretty wife, Louise, and went up to Freddie and said, out of breath, “Freddie, could you tell me why your goddamn brother didn’t invite my mother to his party at the plantation tonight?”

  Freddie looked at me as though I were teasing him in some mean-spirited way, his eyes going paranoid on me. “Party? What party?”

  “Jesus Christ, Freddie! Doesn’t your brother know we’ve been friends for years? I only know him because you and I are such good friends. He’s having a party ten miles from here and he doesn’t even invite his own brother? What kind of fucked-up family did you come from, Freddie? Louise, are you sure you didn’t get an invitation?”

  “Positive. It doesn’t surprise me, however,” Louise said.

  “My family isn’t as bad as yours, Conroy,” Freddie insisted.

  “I’ve always made it abundantly clear that mine is the most fucked-up family on earth. You’ve been far less forthcoming about y
ours,” I said. “There’s only one way to make this work. I’m not going to the goddamn party, either.”

  Freddie said, “I don’t care what you do. I didn’t even know there was a party.”

  I was born with a delusion in my soul that I’ve fought a rearguard battle with my entire life. Though I’m very much my mother’s boy, it has pained me to admit the blood of Santini rushes hard and fast in my bloodstream. My mother gave me a poet’s sensibility; my father’s DNA assured me that I was always ready for a fight, and that I could ride into any fray as a field-tested lord of battle.

  When I was a boy, I attuned myself to my mother’s innumerable anxieties about her background. I remember visiting the house of a senior military officer, General Moore, where I saw my mother surveying the artwork on the walls. I knew that she was comparing it to the wretched artwork on our own walls. When General Moore’s wife asked my mom where she had gone to college, I saw my mother’s face burn with shame as she admitted she had not gone. My mother passed this incurable social mortification on to all her children. She went home from General Moore’s house and went to an art supply store the very next day. When she returned, she got out her paints and her by-the-numbers canvases and took a girlish delight in painting ghastly paintings of Bozo the clown, the Virgin Mary, and others I don’t remember. When my father got home from flying that day and saw the new paintings on the wall, he burst into mocking laughter and told Mom it was the ugliest shit he’d ever seen. Mom retreated into her bedroom upset, and I thought he was the cruelest person in the world.

  My father was made of all the wrong stuff, but because I’m his son, so am I. In any social setting Dad found himself in, my father was comfortable in his own sense of presence and command. I never saw him intimidated by any socialite or celebrity he met. I don’t think the thought crossed his mind. There was a fierce pridefulness in the Chicago Irish that fortified my dad’s own image of himself. Unlike the poor whites of Appalachia, where my mother came from, the large family of Irishmen in Chicago were on their way up and they all knew it and all were proud of it. Though Dad’s parents did not attend college, they sired nine children and eight of them got college degrees. Dad was part of a generation with grand ambitions and he always strutted in self-satisfied vanity down whatever street he walked. My mother’s lust to be accepted at the highest levels of society contrasted with my dad’s sheer indifference to it. Dad passed this indifference on to all his seven children. Mom seared us with her fear of being abandoned and valueless, but Dad taught us not to give a shit.