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

by Pat Conroy

  “Yes, you have, and now I’d like to present you with my own commands and wishes.”

  “You’re not in a place to issue commands,” Colonel Sigmund said. “Didn’t you learn anything about the chain of command at The Citadel?”

  “I learned everything about the chain of command at The Citadel,” I said. “And here is what you didn’t learn about the chain of command in the Marine Corps.”

  “And what is that?” he asked.

  “You ain’t in command. And if you don’t do something about making my mother happy before this premiere, I promise my father and I will not show up.”

  At that point, Colonel Sigmund made one of those mistakes that people who don’t know me always do when he said, “I bet wild horses couldn’t keep you and your father away.”

  “You’re going to learn about me and my dad before this is over. And because you made that snotty remark, neither of us will be at the Great Santini premiere.”

  “I have my doubts,” he said. “Your dad’s got quite an ego, and I’m betting that you do, too.”

  Colonel Sigmund and I shook hands and said farewell to each other forever.

  I was no stranger to the city-states of colonels, and I knew a great deal more about Paul Sigmund when I walked into his office than he would ever learn about me. First, he possessed an elegance and sophistication that I found a rarity in the Marine officers I’d grown up with. His polish and sense of self-possession made me surprised he’d never made general, and in his smoothness of manner and pleasantness of speech he exposed my father for the happy vulgarian he always was proud to be. Yet I liked Colonel Sigmund a lot and I thought we could’ve become good friends if circumstances had been different between us. But by becoming an agent in my mother’s humiliation, he made me draw up the most explosive card I carried in my deck and flip it at him to give him ample time to think over what the committee had done.

  When I returned to the house on Carteret Street, Mom was still in bed and still weeping. When I tried to lift her head to change her pillowcase, she wouldn’t allow me to touch it. Though she did not say it, it appeared that she wanted some accurate measurement of how much grief the town had caused her.

  “How did the meeting go with Colonel Sigmund?” she asked me.

  “Exactly like you said it would,” I reported.

  “He gave you nothing. Not a single ticket,” she said.

  “Not a one,” I said. “But don’t worry; that’s all about to change.”

  “How can you be so sure?” she asked.

  “Because I told him the Great Santini and I were not going to the premiere.”

  “But it’s your big night. And Don’s,” she said.

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “How will you talk your father into this?”

  “I’ll tell him what the committee did to you. I know Dad. He won’t come near the joint.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “It’ll work. But don’t you jump at the first offer. Let it play out, Mom. Have fun with it,” I said. “Make ’em squirm.”

  “That’s a promise, Pat,” she said.

  The next night I took my father to Petite Auberge, a nice French restaurant in the Toco Hills Shopping Center. Though he rarely let me take him to restaurants where the food cost more than three dollars a pound, I told him I needed to have a serious talk with him in a muted, convivial atmosphere.

  As Dad looked over the menu, I watched the old sneer cross his eyes as he said, “Frog food. This place doesn’t have anything but frog food.”

  I said, “It’s called a French restaurant. French restaurants kind of specialize in frog food. Shall I order for you?”

  “Yeah, you’ve lived in France,” he said.

  With great mischievous intent, I ordered him a meal of escargot, frog legs, a salad, and a crème brûlée. With his Chicago obstinacy, he ordered himself a Budweiser, scoffing when I offered to buy a bottle of wine.

  “I’m a beer drinker—wine is for pussies.”

  When his escargot came, Dad stared at it as if I’d ordered him a plate full of roaches. The escargot was not served in snail shells, but in those indented metal plates that held the escargot swimming in that ineluctable butter and garlic and parsley sauce.

  Dad stared hard at the first snail he held at the end of his fork. “Now, what in the hell might this thing be?”

  “It’s from a very rare French cow, bred near the Alps. They cut precious bits from near the tenderloin and a master butcher makes sure the cuts all look the same. Put some sauce on it, Dad. Then sit back and enjoy.”

  Dad ate the first one and said, “That’s the shittiest beef I’ve ever eaten, but damn, that sauce is terrific.”

  When the frog legs came, I informed Dad that these were the legs of Bresse chickens, the most prized hens in a French kitchen. The salad he approved of, and he moaned with happiness over his crème brûlée. Then we came to the business of the evening.

  Starting from the beginning, I told about Mom’s first meeting with Paul Sigmund.

  “Hey, I flew with Paul. He’s a great guy. I’ll give him a call and straighten this out.”

  “Listen to the rest of the story,” I said. I told of finding Mom in bed, where she had been lying for several days crying with a sense of morbid disgrace she could neither hide nor deny. When I told him about the three tickets they promised the entire Conroy family, my father’s face darkened with fury.

  “Three fucking tickets!” my father exploded. “That’s an outrage.”

  “To get Mom the tickets, I cut a deal with Colonel Sigmund,” I said.

  “But you said you walked out of his office with only three tickets.”

  “I told him that if he didn’t make Mom happy, then the Great Santini and I would not attend the premiere. Colonel Sigmund went too far with me by saying, ‘I bet wild horses couldn’t keep you away from that premiere.’ ”

  “God, he doesn’t know your oversensitive ass, son,” Dad said.

  “And he doesn’t know about your loyal one.”

  “We won’t go, son. We’ll do it for Peg,” he said.

  “I knew you’d say that,” I said.

  “How’d you know that?” Dad asked.

  “Because you’re an Irish Catholic from Chicago. I think your people are the biggest pains in the ass in the world, but they’re also the most loyal. I remember your family coming after me after The Great Santini came out. I didn’t like it much, but I sure could admire it.”

  “How do you know your little trick’s going to work?” Dad asked me.

  “I don’t. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “You could be making a damn fool of yourself, Pat.”

  “There’s always that possibility—in everything we do,” I agreed.

  It was a luminous, green summer in the section of Ansley Park where I was living in Atlanta. I was still jogging during that time of my life, and there was not a more beautiful place in the city to run. It was a cutoff enclosed hermitage with shapely, eccentric houses shoulder to shoulder with one another, streets that harbored well-tended gardens, and the smell of jasmine always hovering in the air. The oak trees lorded over the lesser species in the park and offered the entire neighborhood the cool silages of darkness and the peacefulness of shade.

  My mother heard nothing back from the Great Santini premiere committee until late September. Colonel Sigmund was charming and conciliatory this time, and invited Mom up to his office again. This time, John Egan accompanied my mother so that she would not be bullied or overwhelmed once more.

  “Colonel Sigmund upped the ante, Pat,” my mother said. “The Conroy family now gets five tickets—five big ones. But it comes with a catch. You and Dad have to attend.”

  “None of the kids can go,” I said. “Not interested.”

  “I think Hollywood found out that you and Don were boycotting the event. There’s a lot of pressure to see this problem settled.”

  The next week Mom had
ten tickets, and the following week she scored fifteen. As time for the premiere to occur loomed as a large lunar force on the political and social forces of Beaufort, the complimentary tickets began taking to the airwaves over Mother’s place like homing pigeons.

  “Fifty tickets,” my mother said one night, her voice flushed with victory that I found unfortunate.

  “Mom, drop that tone out of your voice. You don’t want your neighbors to see you gloating over their embarrassment.”

  “I don’t mind gloating and I certainly don’t care if they see it.”

  “Mom, be gracious, be thankful, and be classy. You’ve always gotten through your worst times by showing great class,” I advised.

  “The class comes with the whole package. I thought you knew that, son,” she said.

  “But I also know the killer Peg who comes in that same package. Keep the killer Peg under wraps,” I said.

  “I’d like to strangle every member of that committee and run them down on the street.”

  “Tell me that, Mom. Don’t tell them,” I said.

  During the week of the premiere, Mom received her final tally from Colonel Sigmund. She called me with complete exhilaration and cried out, “Paul said I could have all the tickets I wanted. Every one of them. I told Paul that I’d try my best to get you and Don down here for the big night.”

  “Sorry, Mom; that’s why this worked. It wasn’t a threat—it was a promise. Who’re you inviting?”

  “Everybody I’m related to. You’ve got cousins coming whom you’ve never even heard of. I’d like to empty the jailhouse and invite all the inmates,” she said.

  “Easy, Mom. You won. No victory laps, please,” I suggested.

  “Pat, I can’t thank you enough. What other son would do this for his mother? And please thank Don for me. It’s going to be hard for your egomaniac father to miss his own show.”

  But my father did not miss his own show. Unbeknownst to me, he had been plotting with the producer Charles Pratt to have an early showing of The Great Santini at the Omni theater in Atlanta. Dad and I called everyone we knew and loved in Atlanta. The whole Atlanta writing community showed up—Anne Rivers Siddons in her luscious, sexiest prime came with her dapper husband, Heyward, at her side. Terry and Tommie Kay arrived, followed by Marshal and Gudrun Frady, Larry and Dee Woods, Joe and Emily Cummings, Vern Smith, Paul and Susan Hemphill—my college girlfriend Terry Leite, armed with her radiant beauty, walked in with Cliff Graubart and Bernie and Martha Schein. It was a sweet gathering on an auspicious evening.

  Dad had another great surprise as the theater filled to capacity. A bagpiper team with fife and drums entered from the lobby. The men were a Marine contingent who were sharp as the wings of falcons as they stopped and played “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the whole theater rose in an unrehearsed corps de ballet. Then the bagpipers marched in fine order as they played the Marine Corps hymn and the crowd let out an exultant roar of approval. For five minutes they put on a marching display that was mesmerizing. The ovation they received as they marched back into the lobby was immense.

  Then the theater darkened and the movie began. Before the movie started, my father reached over and squeezed my wrist.

  “Semper Fi, Pat,” he said.

  “Semper Fi, Santini,” I answered.

  The movie was superb, as perfect as anything I could imagine. Robert Duvall, Blythe Danner, Michael O’Keefe, and Lisa Jane Persky taught me what it was like to be brought home to the tabernacle where art is turned into an essential thing that a human soul can feast on. Each of these actors exuded a power that seemed otherworldly, far beyond the realms of anything I thought possible. They fit together as a wounded family with both a naturalness and grandeur. Lewis John Carlino’s direction was seamless to me, and I was moved to see the town of Beaufort filmed with such a loving eye of a camera crew that had taken in the comeliness of my river-shaped town. They filmed a French class in Gene Norris’s English classroom I attended at Beaufort High School. They filmed a basketball game in a gym on the air station where I used to play against Marines who served under my father. They filmed the grueling scene of the father and son’s two-step dance on the Green exactly where it happened in real life.

  But my favorite scene by far took place at the end of the movie, when they’re burying the Great Santini and the “missing man” formation soars over the cemetery in a salute to a lost aviator.

  I glanced over, and to my delight my father had tears running down his cheeks as the colonel watched the burial of his fictitious self.

  “Oh, Dad, give me a break,” I said. “Santini crying at his own funeral. Over the top, Colonel.”

  “Fuck you,” Dad said lovingly.

  My book did much to tear my family apart, but more than anything, the harrowing story of the Conroy family found a form of mysterious healing when the movie The Great Santini was loosed to the world.

  In the bar in the Atlanta Omni we drank with our great friends in rowdy boisterousness and the knowledge that all of us had just experienced a signatory time in our lives.

  At the real premiere the following evening in Beaufort, my mother took to her queenship of the night with graciousness and flair. She held center stage like a consort in Balmoral Castle as she accepted compliments and bouquets from a town that had neared a point of no return with her. During the first showing of the film, all the Conroy family sat in the front row in a place of high honor. The town watched in fascination as the film began to spread out the breakdown of a single military family embattled with one another while the Cold War played out around them. In a visceral scene, Robert Duvall comes home drunk from happy hour and becomes engaged in a pitched battle with his family that leaves his tribe lying all over the kitchen. Beaufort was shocked by the ruthlessness of the encounter, and the audience held its breath as the Conroy family watched from the front row.

  Finally my brother Jim, who sat in the last seat of the aisle, went down on one knee and whispered to his mother and siblings: “Bambi. Duvall is like Bambi beating up on his family. Dad should’ve shown him how to take a family apart. This guy’s Bambi.”

  The Conroy family, as odd and imbalanced as any group who had ever entered the Beaufort city limits, fell apart laughing. The town watched us with a noncommittal gaze, and much pity.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 8 •

  Stanny

  Every family produces one unconventional, breakout member whose sheer willfulness and obstinacy will change the course of that family’s history. When my grandmother Margaret Nolen Peek deserted her four children and husband in the middle of the Depression and hitchhiked a ride on a mule wagon heading for Atlanta, where she got a job in the notions department at Rich’s department store, then married a Greek salesman of adding machines who also ran the numbers racket in the city, she transformed everything about how her children looked at themselves in the world. My mother’s family pulled out of impoverished but honorable bondage to subsistence farming in the mountains of Alabama. In her flight, my grandmother proved she was not a big fan of starvation, country living, or a future that seemed desperate and hopeless to her. By marrying Jack Stanton, she shifted her social status overnight. When I was learning to talk as an infant, I gave her the nickname “Stanny” because I could not handle the “Mama Stanton” she wanted me to call her. Her pridefulness was a clear spring inside her, so no grandchild ever dared call her “Grandma.” She reveled in her flamboyance, earthy beauty, acquired sophistication, stylish attraction to expensive clothes, and her passion for traveling to exotic nations. She once told me that she had a third-grade education and married my grandfather Jasper Catlett Peek when she was eleven. “Before I was even a woman,” she whispered in her gravelly voice. I was horrified even though I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. If you want to find yourself completely lost in the mysteries of either God or sex, have a Roman Catholic education even though you were raised in a family who came out of the primitive Baptist tradition of
the mountain South. I sometimes feel that my faith issued forth from a mustachioed nun who spoke in tongues. Stanny never belonged to a church that I’m aware of, but my grandfather spoke to Jesus of Nazareth, out loud, every day of his life. After Stanny deserted him and her children during the Depression, Jasper Peek never dated or looked at another woman. Stanny was married six or seven times, maybe more. In her house on Rosedale Road, I once walked into her living room and encountered a complete stranger lying on the couch listening to an Atlanta Crackers baseball game on the radio. Openmouthed, I stared at the man, who seemed very much at home. When Stanny rounded the corner and sensed my discomfort, she said in a cheery voice, “Pat, aren’t you going to kiss your new granddad?” I walked up and kissed the man on the cheek. I never saw the man again or learned his name. But my mother later corroborated that I had met one of Stanny’s many husbands. Mom dismissed Stanny’s collection of husbands as a bad habit, but it was a habit she continued until her late seventies. Stanny considered her addictions to bourbon, high-rolling men, and matrimony as venial sins and “nothing to write home about.” In her simple, lucid theology, she claimed that she had never committed a crime serious enough for any loving god to burn her in the lake of fire for all eternity. There was much wrong about my childhood, but Stanny will always remain one of its shining glories.

  On March 10, 1947, my mother went into labor in Manassas, Virginia. My father drove her to Annapolis, Maryland, where he was a member of the Navy Olympic basketball team. Stanny had ridden up on a train to take care of me during my mother’s two weeks of convalescence in the hospital. (I always have to explain this anomaly to my own daughters, whose nurses forced them to do wind sprints up and down the hall about fifteen minutes after they gave birth to my grandchildren. Or so it seemed to me.) With great gentleness Stanny tried to prepare me for the surprise entry of a sister and rival into my one-child kingdom. She later reported the news to me and I seemed less than thrilled. Though I was two years old, I seemed satisfied with a single-child household. For the rest of my life, Stanny would file reports about my inconsolable jealousy over the new arrival in my family. On day three I struck back: When Stanny went out to pick some flowers in the yard, I locked the front door behind her. I was blond when I was a little boy, and I was looking out the window standing on the couch when she realized the trick played on her by a mischievous grandchild. At first, she tried sweet talk and flattery to coo me into unlocking the door. Laughing, I shook my head, a defiant no. For an hour, Stanny remained good-natured about it. Then she grew irritated and began to threaten me with a spanking. She tore a switch off a bush and stripped it of leaves and small branches. If I didn’t unlock the door, she would switch my bottom till the cows came home. When she changed tactics, so did I, and now I refused to unlock the door because she was going to spank me.