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

by Pat Conroy

  Each day Mom would lose more and more of her hair, and it alarmed her to see her visage in the mirror as her hair was calving off in huge chunks. On Friday before the kids began their arrivals, I went down to Augusta’s lovely but neglected main street to shop for some wigs or a turban for Mom. It tickled me that Augusta had the tallest Confederate memorial I’ve ever seen anywhere. The lone soldier atop the monument is invisible to the citizenry who pass it each day; one would have to check it out as a skydiver even to catch a glimpse of this lonely soul.

  The wig shops were all owned and operated by black women who showed a great flair for commerce. They were earthy, funny women who hovered about me as they shouted back and forth.

  “We got any wigs for white girls?” a large woman shouted to a colleague in the back.

  “Why would we? A white girl’s never walked into this store,” the woman in the back said.

  “I got just the thing for you. Follow me, gentleman.” She opened up a large drawer and began drawing out such beautiful turbans that some of them sucked the breath out of me.

  “They come from Istanbul. That’s in Turkey—I went there early this year with my business partner and lo’, hon, what a city! Those Turk women wear these things with style and class.”

  I chose two of them and took them to the cash register.

  “Those are my two most expensive turbans,” she said. “Well over a hundred dollars apiece.”

  “A bargain,” I said. “Wrap them up. My mom’s going bald, but no one’s going to witness her humiliation now. I’m going to turn Mama into a Turk.”

  In her two new turbans, my mother looked like a million dollars. The colors rainbowed over her paleness. She took an hour to apply makeup. The nurses made a fuss over her, Dr. Madden praised her beauty, and when I saw her I bowed deeply, like a servant in waiting. My pretty girl was back.

  “Pat, I love you for the turbans. I wouldn’t have ever thought of that. It gives me a confidence I thought I’d never recover, but look at me now. Just look at me. And I promise you something, son: I’m going to beat this cancer. I’m going to beat it like a dead snake!”

  When the weekend came, Mom found her room besieged by children and relatives who came to pay her homage. There was a general feeling that the cancer had dissolved the tissues of Mom’s insecurities and turned loose a much finer woman. Though she could exhaust herself quickly with the incoming wave of visitation that would surge into Augusta each weekend, she adored the attention her family flooded her with.

  On the other hand, Mom had been controversial enough as a mother to make many of the encounters with her children into force fields. My mother had never been affectionate with her children; she was the kind of woman you had to learn to love through interpretation, osmosis, or guesswork. As far as I know, none of us ever sat in our mother’s lap or watched TV with her arm around our shoulders. She had not been able to breast-feed any of us, and she would kiss us in the most gossamer fashion, as likely to stir the air around our cheeks as to actually touch us with her lips to our faces.

  Until John Egan arrived, I served guard duty at the entrance to her room, directing people in and out, watching Mom for signs of exhaustion, hustling people down the hall when she put a finger on the tip of her nose, indicating it was time for a nap. Dad arrived on Saturday, and it amazed me how much spirit he brought to the room. He always entered the waiting room saying, “Stand by for a fighter pilot!”

  Dad’s visitations became my mother’s favorite part of the weekend ceremonial. He brought laughter, a chatterbox sensibility, and a complete denial that his ex-wife was dying twenty yards down the hall.

  The confrontation I feared the most was my mother’s devastating phone calls from my sister, Carol Ann. Carol Ann had a precise genius for calling my mother when I was out of Mom’s room or when I was watching a baseball game with Dr. Egan. Always I took a seat by the doorway so I could see down the hall clear to my mother’s room and keep one eye on the Braves game. I saw a pretty blond nurse with horn-rimmed glasses running full speed toward me, and that gave me my signal that Carol Ann’s timing had been perfect again.

  I entered the room on the fly and took in the scene immediately. Mom was crying as hard as a woman could cry. When I grabbed the phone from her hand, she offered no resistance.

  “Hello, Carol Ann, you may not remember, but I’m your brother Pat, the firstborn, the favorite by far,” I said into the phone.

  “Oh, humor boy. The Conroy male spirit rises up to mock the only serious writer this family will ever produce. Go ahead, trickster. I’ll find a way of talking to my mother. Don’t think I won’t. We need to get some things straightened out between us before she dies.”

  “Yeah, that’ll really lift her spirits. Especially in the condition she now finds herself. Why don’t you write her long letters full of gossip and makeup tips, and the new fashions you see on the streets of New York?”

  “I live in serious New York, among serious literary people,” Carol Ann said. “I decided not to bury myself in the racist, unintellectual South, which has empty space where its greatest minds should be producing serious poems and novels. You’ve thrown your life away in the South, Pat. You know that, but don’t have the guts to admit it. Put my mother back on the phone or I’m going to file a federal complaint.”

  “My heart will dance like a tequila worm when I hang up this phone.”

  “Mom and Dad have got to let me explain the crimes against humanity I endured through them,” she said. “Only then can they understand why my life’s been such a disaster.”

  “Why don’t you write a book about this?” I suggested, hanging up the phone.

  • • •

  When Mom was released from Eisenhower after two short weeks and I drove her to her house on Fripp Island, John was waiting for her, and their reunion was tender. I unloaded the car and brought her luggage upstairs to her bedroom. Then I went downstairs and joined John and Mom in their recitation of the rosary in gratitude for Mom’s safe return.

  I then heated up a magnificent meal for me, Mom, and Dr. John. In the middle of the meal, I looked up and saw my brother Tom, in his twenties now, try to sneak into his bedroom without anyone noticing his passage—he had a hunched, disconnected walk and a face as troubled as a fallen angel.

  “Tom, come get something to eat,” I called out.

  He said, “I hate that foreign shit you fix.”

  “Try it, Tom,” I suggested.

  “I’ve always hated you!” he screamed. “You act like you’re such a big-shot son of a bitch, when all you are is a fucking asshole just like the rest of us.”

  As he left the field of battle, he slammed his bedroom door.

  I was as shaken as I had been for a long while. Mom and John had not uttered a word. Finally, I said, “Tom, Mom?”

  My mother looked up and nodded her head. “Tom—it’s not going to be pretty.”

  CHAPTER 13 •

  Tom’s Breakdown

  I never got to know my brother Tom. I was fifteen when he was born while Dad was stationed at Quantico. My father woke me in the middle of the night, brought me downstairs to sleep with my two-year-old brother, Tim, who could not sleep unless he held on to someone’s ear. Unless he had access to an ear, Tim would stay awake all night long, crying inconsolably. I eased into my parents’ bed and Tim latched onto my ear with a naturalness that surprised me. I blew Mom a kiss and wished her all the luck in the world. It was Mom’s twelfth and final pregnancy, and Tom would become the Conroy family’s last “baby.”

  Tom was the best-looking of the Conroys, by far, but his handsomeness never seemed to grant him much pleasure or confidence. When I’d come home from college, he seemed to avoid me, would not even try to make eye contact with me or engage me in conversation. His face contained a quiver full of brimming emotions, but he was quiet as a whelk. Anything I asked him, he would respond with a monosyllabic answer without a molecule of substance to back it up.

  Now, I look
back and see I could’ve done a lot more to shore up my relationship with my youngest brother, but I failed to do so. I found him tedious to be around and his diffidence bored me. On the other hand, I had felt close to my baby brother Tim the moment he took up residence in our house, even though he was only two years older than Tom. Because birth order and the gap in our ages betrayed us, Tom and I could never recover what time had stolen from us. We were strangers to each other our entire lives.

  The movie The Great Santini bestowed many acute gifts upon the Conroy family. The film itself did much to restore the hazardous equilibrium of a family badly shattered by our parents’ divorce. Though the movie held up a mirror for the world to glimpse a family in extreme breakdown, by God, it was a family where great love and loyalty could grow even in such a disastrous garden of souls.

  But there is a gift the Hollywood people gave us that seemed happenstance at the time. When I finally got a tape of the movie many years after its release, I went straight to a scene where Ben Meecham is hurt during a basketball game, with his parents watching from the stands. Directly behind Blythe Danner, Lewis John Carlino has generously seated my real mother, who looks as happy as I’ve ever seen her, and as pretty as a boy could ever want his mother to be. She follows the game as it races up and down the court; my brother Tom, the boy wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, is playing on the same team with Michael O’Keefe. The camera goes from court to Robert Duvall and Blythe Danner, back to action on the court, where Tom is running a play with Michael O’Keefe, back to Mom, back to Tom, back to the court, then my mother again. Then my brother once more. Then I turned the movie off because I couldn’t bear to watch another frame.

  The Conroys were never a picture-taking family, and when the Marine Corps movers of 1954 lost both of my mother’s two huge albums that bulged with photographs telling the history of her family, she splintered into a grief that had no restorative or cure. As she wept, she kept saying in what sounded to be true bitterness, “They lost our history. All of it. We don’t have a history now, no record for the future. Everything’s lost.”

  Before this incident, I remember Mom constantly taking pictures with a cheap Kodak. After the loss of the albums, we took photos in a haphazard and unserious way. As a family we were spectacular failures as photographers. There are pictures of Conroys without legs, Conroys with their eyes closed, Conroys in too much shade or obliterated by sunlight. We seem to have been born with a low-grade incompetence whenever a camera is in our hands. Our scrapbooks and archives are frightful in their ineptness. But Mom always claimed that those lost picture books were storehouses of irreplaceable treasures to her, brilliantly done and professionally preserved.

  It was 1995 when I first found the strength to watch The Great Santini again. I had returned to Fripp Island and my isolated life on a sea island to heal myself in silence. The nineties had turned into a ghastly decade for me, and I’d suffered some grievous setbacks on the way. But I’d survived the greatest suicidal episodes of my life with the help of the superb therapist Marion O’Neill, and was putting my shattered psyche back together again. Part of her therapy was to have me watch the movie The Great Santini once more.

  I put in the cassette and watched Robert Duvall and his Marine pilots outfly the navy pilots. In the life I was raised in, the Marines never let the navy beat them at anything, and I knew all the steps in that military dance. Soon there was a scene of Blythe Danner and her children waiting at a deserted airport for the arrival of the plane bringing the Great Santini home from a cruise. I had waited for at least twenty of these arriving planes in the span of my childhood. All the excitement and the anxiety of the soldier’s return hums through the family as Blythe Danner straightens up and checks the appearance of her children before the actual inspection begins. The father walks off the plane and the booming cry goes up: “Stand by for a fighter pilot!”

  Realizing I was approaching the emotional wreckage I’d barely dealt with in more than ten years, I continued to watch the movie, admiring its perfection, its low-budget daringness, the exceptional quality of the performances. I watched as David Keith made his powerful entry onto the Hollywood stage, playing Red Petus (David Keith would later play the part of Will McLean in The Lords of Discipline). Stan Shaw brought a perfect touch to the role of a black flower salesman named Toomer. The film has a sense of solidity and it gains in confidence as it moves along at a well-timed pace. But then there are basketballs beating a familiar tattoo on a wooden court, and I returned as an eighteen-year-old boy to the most joyous part of my unhappy childhood.

  Then I lost it completely when I saw my poor, unlucky mother smiling and enjoying herself behind Blythe Danner. My sloppy sentimentality went into wilder, more hysterical territory when I saw my brother Tom throwing a pass to Michael O’Keefe. This is the only place where I can come and see my mother and brother, alive and breathing and moving through the certain motions of their foreclosed days. Mom, the mother I failed. Tom, the brother I never stood up for as a brother, the brother I failed, and possibly even the brother I helped kill.

  It all began for me when I observed Tom on the set of The Great Santini, and he seemed exempted from the action going on around him. He looked aloof, unreachable, and always slightly confused. He did not fraternize with the boys who’d been hired to play on his basketball team. He was wordless whenever he was with either his mother or father. A teenage golden girl played the role of my sister Kathy, a delightful, beautiful girl who took to hanging around me when she wasn’t on the set. Once, she asked me if my brother Tom was dating anyone and I told her I didn’t think so. She seemed pleased by that answer and asked if I would get Tom to call her for a date. She had developed a crush on him during her time on the set.

  That night I informed Tom that a young movie star wanted to go out on a date with him and that I thought it was a swell idea.

  “You’ve got no right to interfere with my life,” Tom said, his anger immediate and obvious. “I don’t try to interfere with your big-shit life.”

  I turned to my mother. “Mom, what’s going on with your youngest kid? He seems detached from the whole world,” I said. “He barely says a word to me.”

  “He’s shy, just like you used to be,” Mom said. “Only he’s much shyer than you were. Especially around girls.”

  “I’m setting him up on a date with a goddamn movie star. This girl’s a dreamboat,” I said.

  “I don’t have to do what you say,” Tom told me. “And I don’t have to talk to you if I don’t want to.”

  “Who the hell do you talk to?” I asked.

  “He’s got lots of friends at school,” Mom insisted. “They refer to him as a real chatterbox.”

  I said, “Chatterbox? This whole town’s gone nuts and killed Sigmund Freud.”

  “You think you’re so funny,” Tom said.

  “Sometimes I do, chatterbox,” I said meanly. “Sometimes I don’t.”

  “Pat, you’re upsetting Tom,” Mom said.

  “I’m trying to talk to you, Tom. Brother to brother. So we could get to know each other just a little bit. I was in college and then out teaching when you and Tim were growing up. You’re an adult now. We could get to like each other.”

  “You’re not the Mr. Popular you think you are,” Tom said. “Carol Ann doesn’t like you worth a damn either. Everybody in my school thinks you’re nothing but a nigger lover.”

  I made a hostile move toward Tom, but Mom was quicker and inserted herself between her two angry sons.

  “I am a nigger lover,” I told Tom. “And I’m proud to be one and proud to have put this worthless, racist South far behind me. And congrats, Tom, you’re the first Conroy child I’ve ever heard use that soul-killing word.”

  “I know my rights and I can use any word I want to use,” Tom said.

  “Then get ready to have a fistfight with me,” I said, sputtering. “And, Mom, this is what you get for sending Tom to a segregated academy. Have a talk with Tom. Something’s going o
n,” I said, preparing to leave the house.

  “Tom is by far the most normal and nicest of my children,” Mom said. “You’ve always been my favorite, haven’t you, Tom?”

  She hugged Tom, and he pulled away because no one in the family is comfortable with even the most modest rituals of affection. Generally, affection is as difficult as the mating of sea urchins to us, and only my brother Tim seems to have emerged from our childhood with much talent for the tender harmonies provided by human touch. The rest of us recoil from any emotional displays as if someone had thrown a fer-de-lance into our laps. Touch was electrified and painful to us. My father disfigured touch with his powerful fists—my mother brought a mountain coldness to even the simplest gestures of human affection. My rebellion lay in the fact that I’d hug anything that moved, but I knew the origins of that fakery of emotion. Today, I’ll hug a fire hydrant because no one hugged me as a child.

  In the summer of 1982, when Tom was in his early twenties, I brought my whole family to Fripp knowing it was the last summer I would likely see Mom alive. We rented a duplex on a tidal creek and I set a crab pot every day, which provided my mother with a constant supply of she-crab soup, crab cakes, and crab salad. My second wife, Lenore, and my mom got along well, and Mom had fallen in love with her Italian-born granddaughter, Susannah. My small daughter was at her most fetching that summer, spending long hours walking the beach and collecting seashells with my mother. Since my brothers and sisters came around on weekends, the summer often took on the feel of some corrupted homecoming. Dad even came down to visit several times; Mom and John were cordial and gentle with him, much to the relief of the Conroy children.

  In the hottest days of August, Mom and I would rise early for a swim in the Atlantic and repeat the process in the late afternoon. Often I would watch Mom jog a mile down the beach, then jog back to the place I was swimming. She looked coltish and buoyant, and she would return to the ocean, panting. “I’m going to beat this thing. I can listen to my body telling me the secret things, and I can beat this thing at its own game.”