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

by Pat Conroy

  “I’ll go easy on one condition,” she said. “Nobody can imply that Tom was crazy. He was the sanest of all Conroys. He was the only sane person this family has produced. I’ll claw the eyes out of anyone who even suggests that our brother was insane. He was heroic and carried the weight of this whole nutty clan on his shoulders. But he was the only normal child Peg and Don produced. The rest of us are either nuts, or assholes like you and my other brothers.”

  “There is the small fact that Tom killed himself,” I said. “That he jumped from the roof of a building. Some people might draw a conclusion from that.”

  “He was the only sane one. It’s the world that’s crazy. I’ve written a poem for Tom. I’ll read it at his funeral if you don’t do a eulogy. I won’t stand for you to write a eulogy for a man who hated your guts,” she announced.

  “I’ll leave it to you,” I said.

  “And I don’t want to talk to anyone,” she said. “My grief is so much greater than everyone else’s I’ll want to be left alone.”

  “I think that’ll be easy to arrange.”

  “Is that one of your swaggering, chauvinist jokes?” she demanded to know.

  “Yeah, I think I was trying to lighten things up,” I admitted.

  “You ought to hear what my feminist friends in New York say about you. I can’t begin to describe the hatred,” she said.

  “They don’t know me, Carol. They’ve never met me.”

  “Men like you repulse them.”

  “I think they’d find I’m a much nicer person than you,” I responded.

  “Do you have to try to win every single argument? Do you know you’ve always used your wit and sarcasm to silence me? You’re my greatest censor. You want to tape my mouth shut. You run from the truth. The sisterhood has set me free, and nothing you ever say can hurt me again.”

  “When are you getting back to the sisterhood?” I asked. My patience had worn thin and I was thinking that ten years without Carol Ann just wasn’t long enough.

  My sister Kathy came to relieve me of guard duty with Carol Ann. Seeing her was a relief, because after Mom died, Kathy, a registered nurse, had come into her own as a woman. She performed gallant service as a peacemaker and courier, delivering messages from both sides during the border skirmishes that broke out around her. Because there was no one else who fit the job description, Kathy could bring the warring sides to the peace table to get us through our most perilous times. As she was the middle child of our family, both the older and the younger kids listened to her counsel. Dad was putty in her hands, and even Carol Ann could be swayed by Kathy’s soft-spoken reasonableness. Kathy brought a simplicity and kindness to my own overrun house, but she looked drained by the runaway emotions of the last twelve hours. I was dizzy with the fast-moving events that didn’t seem to leave any time for reflection, or even prayer. People were coming into Beaufort from everywhere. As I dressed for Tom’s funeral, my fury at Carol Ann drenched me with sweat, and I had to take a second shower. I discovered that you could cry as hard as you wished in a shower and no one would know.

  When I drove to the funeral home, I heard from the front door the beginning of the recitation of the rosary. I knew that some of the Conroy relatives from Chicago had shown up for Dad. It was the ancient Irish way, and it seemed appropriate to me.

  Because of Dad and his gathering of the Chicago clan, the ceremony turned into a commemoration of Tom’s life. There was not a thing Southern about it, but there were touches of Roscommon here and hints of Galway there. Father Jim passed out holy cards with Tom’s name and the date of his death on them. My brothers Mike and Jim noticed a mistake on the card that was both morbid and droll. In near hysteria, Mike and Jim pulled me into a side room while the rosary continued its monotonous cycle as the grievers dedicated their prayers toward Tom’s casket. Jim showed me the offending card, but I failed to see what errors Father Jim had made in his first act as the celebrant of Tom’s funeral mass. Then it came to me with a shining clarity. The mass for the dead was in honor of Timothy Patrick Conroy, not Thomas Patrick Conroy. Breaking away from the rosary sayers, Tim found us as he was studying the offending card.

  “Can you guys believe this shit?” Tim said in disbelief. “Even for this pain-in-the-ass family, this is too nutso. Don’t you guys agree?”

  “Sorry you’re dead, Tim,” Jim said. “But it had to happen someday.”

  Mike said, “It’s kind of a relief. We thought it was Tom who jumped to his death. Thank God it was you.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Tom’s death was rough going, but losing Tim is much easier on everybody.”

  “Basically, no one gives a shit if it was Tim,” said Jim. “It’d be a happy ending to this whole affair.”

  “I’ve got the worst brothers in the worst family that ever lived in South Carolina,” Tim said, then addressed me. “Carol’s on the warpath again, Pat. She hates you in a way the rest of us never thought about.”

  “Have you watched her eyes when Pat comes into a room?” Mike said. “It must be hard to be hated that much.”

  “No, I hate all you guys that much,” Tim said.

  “Shut up, Tim. You’re dead,” said Jim.

  Mike said, “I need to go out and collect those cards.”

  As Mike turned back to the drone of the rosary, Tim warned me, “Be careful about Carol, Pat. She’s sitting off in one corner, all by herself. She’s crying harder than anyone. She cries and blows her nose, then does the strangest thing—she doesn’t throw any of the tissues away. She rolls them up into a ball, like she needs some proof that her grief is more real than all the rest of ours.”

  “That’s because Tom was the sanest of all of us,” Jim said. “In fact, he was the only sane one among us. Tom wasn’t mentally ill, but all the rest of us are bat-shit crazy.”

  “Carol may have a point,” I said.

  “Hell, she sounds like a prophet to me,” Tim said, as he headed back for the final Hail Marys on the rosary. Jim and I lingered behind, sorrowing over our lost brother.

  Returning to the main room, I stood with Dad and Kathy and the brothers as we thanked the Beaufortonians for coming to be with the Conroy family on this alarming night. Beaufort was always good to the family in our suffering. A contingent of Tom’s friends had driven down from Columbia, and we welcomed them for their appreciation of a brother who did not seem to want it from us. His best friends from high school came around, and so did Tom’s teachers at the Beaufort Academy, where Tom had graduated. Gene Norris did not let me out of his sight, but I saw him laying hands of comfort on my brothers and sisters. In all the strange twists of life, my father and Gene Norris had managed to become fast friends, and there existed an affection between them that only deepened as they grew older. Gene understood that Dad’s job description was to kill our nation’s enemies, and nothing in his job hinted at any obligation to be a good father or husband. Over the years, Gene had taught hundreds of the children of Marines. Often Gene became the translator of our roughneck fathers and tried to explain the great pressures that drove them to cruelty, impassiveness, and drink. Gene taught me my first baby steps in how to go about not hating my father, and I’ve been grateful to him since. Though it took years to accomplish, Gene had performed quiet miracles while teaching the children of violent men. Beside him was my high school principal, Bill Dufford, who was also trying to bring comfort to my dad and brothers. It amazed me how lucky the Conroy family was to have Beaufort and the teachers who would love us the rest of our lives.

  In her own corner of solitude, Carol Ann’s multidimensional grief seemed volatile, and somewhat self-aggrandizing to me. She stared at me with a baleful grimace, and she meant me no good. But I thought I could stand anything for a single day, and that included Carol Ann’s observation that I was more responsible for Tom’s death than anyone. When the service began, Carol Ann had managed to stockpile her moistened tissues into a glob the size of a tennis ball. By the time we walked out into the torrid night, it
had grown to the size of a baseball, and Carol Ann was treating it as some kind of totem or omen of despoiled ruin. At last, Tom had brought the Conroy family to its collective knees. The whole architecture our house was built on was in danger of collapse. As the rest of us composed ourselves, Carol Ann’s sadness grew uncontrollable and threatened to spill over into violence.

  “Whatever she does is okay,” Mike said to the rest of us. “This thing’s killing all of us, so let’s just let her act it out. It’s not like crazy is new to us.”

  After the wake, over a nightcap, my brothers and I talked about all the things that could go wrong with the funeral.

  “Everything,” the four of us said in unison, and we laughed as soon as we said it.

  “Pat,” Mike said, “you sit by Dad and take care of him. I’ve never seen him broken up like this. This killed something in him.”

  “What happened on Tom’s last night, Mike?” Jim asked. “Were there signs that he was so nuts?”

  Mike left the room and went to bed and wanted no part of the discussion of the events of the night before. He wanted no talk about Tom’s suicide, and as far as I know, has never had one since the night Tom leaped off the top story of the Cornell Arms. Because Mike had been responsible for Tom’s care on a daily basis, he could never forgive himself for this nightmare that took place on his watch. On one occasion, a mentally ill drug addict beat Tom half to death when Tom brought the dangerous loser back to his house to spend the night. In every crisis, and there were lots of them, Mike was there to clean up the blood and tears and throw out the homeless and the drug addicts who would steal everything Tom owned. His other brothers and sister Kathy were grateful to him without measure. Rarely do we even broach the subject with Mike, thinking that he has suffered enough.

  Going over to replenish Tim’s drink, I said, “Tell us what you know, Tim. You were closest to Tom. He loved you the best.”

  “That’s because Tom and I agreed that this family fucked us up more than any of the other kids. Mom quit raising us. Dad didn’t show any interest in us until after we were raised.”

  “You can’t blame poor Dad for that,” Jim said. “With you, there was nothing to work with.”

  “Control yourself, Jimbo,” I suggested.

  Then Tim moved us into the morning hours of the same day we lost a brother forever. It was a night of complete dissolution and breakdown, one we’d all grow accustomed to over the years. If Tom took his meds, his schizophrenia was controllable and he was able to live his Columbia life as a drifter and an alcoholic who had a home to return to that provided safety when he got off the streets. But there were times when he rebelled from the tyranny of the antipsychotic drugs that emptied him out and loosened the control he felt he required to live a normal, self-actualized life. Tom longed for wholeness, for a complete immersion into the natural world, where he would not be branded by his strangeness.

  Tim was telling the story well, relaxing into a flow of well-chosen words that riveted Jim and me to our seats in a sleeping house. When he looked straight at me, Tim asked whether I remembered that night of pure lunacy when Tom went nuts on the top floor of the Darlington apartments in Atlanta.

  “Remember it?” I said. “It changed my whole life. I don’t think I was ever so afraid of anything. I was hoping to get out of the hallway without Tom killing me and Dad both. We committed him to Bull Street the very next day.”

  “You bastard,” Jim said. “No wonder Tom killed himself.”

  Tim explained that Jim had never seen Tom’s psychotic seizures, which were uncontrollable. When Tom went crazy, you thought everyone he encountered was in mortal danger. He carried such an aura of menace that he turned everyone around him into nervous, creeping things who had lost their humanity for Tom and acquired a meaningfulness only in the obstacles they provided for him. Tom had a capacity for hatred that was breathtaking in its heat-seeking destructiveness. That was the way it was in his first phone call early that morning, Tim told Jim and I.

  “Why didn’t Mike just run over there and throw a Valium down his throat?” I asked.

  “Oh, there’s a pharmacist in the building?” Tim said. “It doesn’t work that way, bro.”

  “Somebody could’ve done something,” Jim said.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore, bro. Mike and I both fucked up with Tom. And I wish I’d done things differently, but I didn’t,” Tim said.

  Tim told us that it started out to be a dismal night, but it got out of control fast. Tom would find himself so removed from reality he would create a freakish world that only he could decipher. In the few times he called me in his most psychotic state, I could barely register the fact that he was speaking English. Another time, Tom had spent over a month in jail when he spelled his name in such gibberish that Dad didn’t recognize it when he traveled from jail to jail searching for his son.

  Always, these states seemed beyond anything we’d seen Carol Ann endure. Her illness seemed manageable, crystalline in her acceptance of the augers of our family’s destructiveness. While Carol Ann could pinpoint the source of her great troubles, Tom’s mind deteriorated into a volcanic upheaval where limits did not exist.

  On the night Tom died, he called Mike and woke him up, demanding that Mike bring him over some money right that minute. Mike told him he would bring money the next morning, and suggested that Tom try to get some sleep.

  Instead, Tom went wild on the phone. No one would listen to him, he claimed; no one would help him in his time of greatest need, but it was his money and a part of the inheritance of his family he had earned by being the ultimate victim of the fucked-up Conroy family. Mike would hang up and Tom would call screaming again. After the next hang up, Mike turned off his phone. Tim guessed that this had all taken place at three in the morning. Then Tom began to call Tim.

  “Jim, you never heard Tom when he got like this. He was so irrational that nothing he said made any sense. He was so violent that you thought he might kill you or himself at any moment. Jean used to ask Mike if she could go over to help Tom. Mike never let her go because he knew Tom might break every bone in her body before Mike could reach them. This family owes Mike a great debt. He took care of Tom for the last fifteen years, and Tom made Mike’s life a nightmare.”

  “What did Tom say to you when he called you?” Jim asked Tim.

  “Cuckoo’s-nest time. Remember how I loved Ken Kesey’s novel and the Jack Nicholson movie? After I saw that movie, I was always hoping I would find me an Indian. One who could free me from all pain. Tom called me begging for help. But I’d seen him this way before, saying that Dad butt-fucked him. Pat did the same thing. All the brothers butt-fucked him for his entire life.” Then Tim added, “I promised Tom I’d come up to Columbia when I woke up. Then I got Mike’s hysterical phone call. Jean told me that she heard Mike screaming when the cops came to tell him about Tom. He just screamed over and over again and began hyperventilating to the point that she thought her husband might die of the shock.”

  “Great family to be born in,” Jim said.

  “The only family we got,” Tim replied.

  I said, “Boys, we need to sleep as much as we can. Tomorrow looks like it’s going to be a long, long day.”

  And a long day it became.

  When Dad rolled in at seven in the morning, I made coffee and breakfast, or hope I did. Over the years, the siblings have tried to cobble together the skin and tangles of that disjointed day. Although we knew we were not up to the task, we were being gentle with one another and let each know that any way we handled Tom’s funeral was all right with the rest of us. Because of Carol Ann, we knew there was going to be a cold immersion into melodrama in a way we could not anticipate.

  Carol Ann entered the house, her eyes still misting with a grief too brutal to endure. The rings beneath her swollen eyes were purple with a rage that had nowhere to go. Still, she was weeping violently and without hope or comfort. Her moistened ball of tear-soaked tissue had passed the size of a big-
league baseball and was fast heading toward the diameter of a softball. I brought her a trash basket to relieve her of the sodden mess she carried in her hands, but she was quick to snap at me, “My tears are the only thing I’ve got left of Tom. The only way he’ll know of the real love I felt for him. I’ve written a poem for his funeral and I don’t want to hear any of your prose shit.”

  “None of my prose shit,” I said. “That’s a promise.”

  “I’ll write poems about him that will make sure he lives forever, but I forbid you ever to write about him,” she said.

  “I’ve told you before, Carol,” I said. “I don’t ask your permission to write anything—or anyone else’s, for that matter.”

  “Are you writing about him in your new book?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am,” I said. “And I was going to have his character, John Hardin McCall, kill himself. But no longer. The book is too sad by half. It couldn’t endure the weight of my brother’s breakdown and suicide.”

  “If you ever say Tom had a breakdown again, I’ll sock you in the face,” she said.

  “You sock me in the face and I’ll beat the living shit out of you and toss your body in the casket with Tom,” I said, enraged, but sorry the words had flown out of me and regretting them immediately.

  “I hang around writers in New York who are respected around the world. They think you write trash for the mob,” she said.

  “Tell it to someone who gives a shit, Carol.”

  Turning from her, I went over to join Kathy and the brothers in a semicircle around Dad, who sat enclosed in a sorrow as tightly built as an A-6 cockpit. Dad worried about the details of the funeral, obsessing that things be done right and proper for Tom.

  “Kath?” he said. “Do you think anyone will come to the funeral?”

  “We don’t know, Dad,” she said. “The obituary came out this morning, so a lot of people won’t even know about it.”

  “Maybe we should put it off for a day,” he said, fretting.

  “Have to get Tom into the ground, Dad,” Mike explained again.