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

by Pat Conroy

  Watching our father die was a tearless, wordless vigil because we had no capacity to coax out the words that would bring peace to his last hours. That evening, we put Dad into his fire-engine-red Ford as a passenger, and Kathy drove him to her house in Beaufort. I watched them leave, knowing that Dad was going out of my life on Fripp Island forever.

  Since the time of Dad’s extinction was upon us, we held family meetings, dividing up time when we could be on call for anything that came up. Again the refrain was heard: “Pat and Carol don’t have jobs. They’re both writers, so they can be with him twenty-four/seven.”

  “Don’t have jobs!” Carol said, jumping at the bait. “I’ll have you know that writing is the hardest work you can do. And unappreciated, unless you write crap, like Pat.”

  “Jim,” I said, “you’ve got a point. Carol and I can be full-time caretakers. The rest of you guys get down here when you can. You’re always welcome at the Fripp house.”

  Tim said, “I feel nothing. Yet I feel something. It’s unbelievable. I feel like I should go talk to Dad, but I’m afraid I’ll upset him.”

  The dark one replied, “He doesn’t give a shit what you have to say, Tim. He doesn’t care what any of us thinks. That’s the way it’s always been and how it’s always going to be.”

  “Gosh, Jimbo, what a happy prospect you’ve added to all of our good-byes to Dad,” I said.

  “You know I’m right. I’m always right,” Jim replied.

  “I’m working on a poem that’ll make Dad as immortal as Achilles,” said Carol Ann.

  Carol Ann lit a cigarette in the front yard of Kathy and Bobby Joe’s house and began smoking it while carrying on an imaginary conversation with an invisible tribe who lived in the secret aurora above her head. After I said good night to Dad that evening, I walked back into Kathy’s living room and saw Bobby Joe and my teenage nephew Willie staring out of a slat in their venetian blinds, a hostile audience to Carol Ann’s animated one-woman parade. There was no amusement in their secret surveillance of Carol Ann’s free fall into the arms of her own roiled forces of demons.

  “She gets crazy when something like this happens,” I tried to explain.

  “Why’s she talking to herself, Uncle Pat?” Willie asked.

  “She can’t help it,” I told him.

  Carol Ann was walking her post in a military manner, just like it said to do in all the military guard manuals. But her gesticulations were wild thrusts into the air, moving her cigarette like a Fourth of July sparkler, and she spoke to me when Kathy and I went outside to join her. “My father will die in my arms just like my mother did. I’ll be by his side every second. The tie that binds a female poet to the sperm that begat her is impossible to sever. I feel closer to Dad at this moment than I ever have. It’ll be an ancient story fulfilled by one of the daughters of Agamemnon,” she said to me.

  “You might want to take your act to the backyard, Carol. You’re freaking Willie and Bobby Joe out,” I suggested.

  “They can’t stop a poet’s work,” she scoffed. “All the battalions on earth are helpless when a poem is being formed.”

  Kathy said, “The house across the street is empty, Carol, and the owner has offered you the run of her home for as long as you need it.”

  “To have both parents die in your arms … how extraordinary,” Carol Ann said.

  “I wouldn’t try it for a while,” I told her. “I’d wait until he goes into a coma. By the way, your watch will begin here at eight tomorrow morning. I’ll take the second shift.”

  So the deathwatch over the Great Santini began the next day. My brothers took vacation days to ease my father’s path toward darkness. I bought a new tape recorder and began to interview Dad about his career in the Marine Corps. It turned out to be a story I’d never heard before. Suspicious about my motives, he concluded that I had already sold the book and movie rights to the tale of how Don Conroy had lived the life, on how to conduct yourself in a manly fashion in a universe being dominated by pussies and women. His powers of fantasy took over, and he imagined that I was working on a textbook of how a man of action lived at the fullest pitch imaginable.

  “God, those Hollywood fruitcakes must be creaming all over themselves thinking about such a role coming up for grabs,” he said. “Tell me again why Hollywood men are such short little squats?”

  “Dad, even God can’t make a face so handsome and put it in a large body,” I said.

  “They’re short as shit,” Dad said, fumbling with the tape recorder, “but they’ve got some good-looking heads.”

  For an entire week, I recorded Dad trying to tell the real stories of his life, the ones that shaped him into the man and father he became. I wanted him to reveal the keystones of his journey that caused the high, watertight esteem he brought to his own assessment of his life. His ego had always seemed like an inverted iceberg to me, three-quarters of it exposed to sunshine. Yet he had emerged with that overinflated ego from an Irish slum during the Depression, and that feat alone astonished me. From knowing Dad for so long, I knew that he was savvy enough not to reveal a thing about his emotions as he grew up in that tumultuous household of his. According to Dad, all was swell in his Chicago family, although no one seemed to have enough to eat. But his parents were flawless vessels of rectitude. His brothers and sisters were in all ways Olympian creatures at play in the moonlight of Bishop Street. There were no revelations of breakdown or drift or even a hint of despair. All was a cause of wonderment and joy in that perfectly coiled nautilus of a home on the South Side of Chicago.

  Since I knew the basic outline of his early life and his accidental meeting with my mother in Atlanta, I asked him mostly about his career as a Marine Corps pilot. He told me about the forty-five missions he flew in the Pacific as Bill Lundin’s wingman. Every time he mentioned Bill Lundin’s name it was with great respect, even reverence. He and Bill later flew with the Black Sheep Squadron, the first of the Marine flyboys to drop bombs in the Korean theater.

  “Korea was my war,” Dad said. “The North Koreans and the Chinese made a bet that they could win the war by the sheer force of numerical superiority. They thought airpower wouldn’t play much of a role. Man, were those people wrong! Bill and I came across a formation of North Korean tanks trying to make their way into Seoul. We blew every one of those tanks off the road. I was hell on tanks, son. Horses, too.”

  “Horses?” I said, surprised.

  “I was on a reconnaissance mission over the north—this was after the Chinese had come into the war—talk about ants! I thought the earth was moving when the Chinese crossed the border. I must’ve killed a thousand of them with napalm, but they just kept coming.”

  “But you mentioned horses?” I said.

  “I always told you I had real good peepers. Guys used to love to fly with me, because I could spot something going on downstairs. One day, we were flying in clear weather, and I see something odd taking place below. So I go down just for curiosity’s sake and see about ten thousand horses in a camouflage city. The Chinese were using them to carry supplies.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I called in for a carrier strike; then I went down and emptied all my ordnance on those horses. The noise they made was pathetic,” he said.

  Though he told me about annihilating a company of North Korean regulars on the Naktong River at the onset of the war, and besieging a battalion of enemy soldiers hiding in ambush as an American squad made their way up a mountain north of Seoul, I thought I was used to my father’s recitals of tongues of napalm scouring the countryside of Korea. But in my nightmares, it’s not the dying men set on fire by my father that disturb my sleep. Instead it’s the wordless death of those conscripted horses that would die a hideous death for reasons not even the combatants could’ve explained to them. Why the killing of horses upset me far more than the wholesale slaughter of men is a question I’ve never come up with any satisfactory answer for.

  For several days, Dad gave me intervi
ews and filled in details of his career previously unknown to me or my family. He told me about my playing for the Old Dominion Kiwanis baseball team, and how he knew several of the fathers on that team who worked for the CIA.

  “You called them Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones when you talked to them on the practice field,” Dad said enigmatically. “I called them Mr. Brown or Mr. Black when I met them at work.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “You’re not supposed to,” Dad said. “A Marine’s got two areas of expertise. I knew some fighter pilots who were experts in transportation or supply. I was assigned to naval intelligence. I was a spook.”

  I was shocked. “But—you always hated spies.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” Dad said. “I had good reason to hate spooks. There’s not one of them you can trust.”

  “When we were at Arlington?”

  “Bingo, pal. I was on duty when Francis Gary Powers’s spy plane was shot down in Russia. I had to give a briefing at the White House early that morning. I was tired for the three years I was a spook.”

  “You were mean as shit for those three years.”

  “Man, talk about pressure. I was involved in trading secrets with the Brits and the Jew boys during the Suez Canal crisis.”

  “So that explains Offutt Air Force Base,” I said, and it pleased my father that I made the connection.

  “I thought you might become a spook,” Dad said. “You always were one step ahead of your peers.”

  A Marine fighter pilot at a celebrated Air Force base in the middle of the Midwest had never made sense to me. I was still at the stage in my life when I was looking to be a career Marine. Each day in our first two weeks there, Dad would drive me to a secluded region near the main runway, where we would watch the thrilling spectacle of a B-52 taking off as another B-52 came in for its ominous and somewhat portentous homecoming.

  “Here’s the drill, sports fans,” Dad explained. “The B-52 that just landed has an Air Force general on it. So does the bird that just took off. If the Russkies wipe out Washington in a nuclear attack, the general in the sky becomes the commander in chief and takes his plane to drop a nuke on Moscow.”

  “Nice world, huh, Dad?” I said, watching a huge plane heading toward the western sky.

  “The real world,” he said.

  As Dad was relating this secret life to me, something deep within him was breaking apart, capillary by capillary, bloody cell by bloody cell, as his voice weakened and his coordination began to fail him. As I was talking to him, I was an eyewitness to his minute-to-minute dying. There were things I needed him to tell me, but knew those words would never pass his lips. I was born to the father I was supposed to be born to, and anything else was commentary of the most frivolous, senseless kind.

  “Here was my job at Offutt, son,” he said in one of his last days of lucidity. “I was sent out there to plot the nuclear destruction of China.”

  “What in the living hell!” I said. Dad could often shock me, but it was rare for him to surprise me in such a way.

  “You heard me right, jocko,” Dad said. “I spent a year working on that plan.”

  “You think it would’ve been effective?” I asked.

  “It’d sure hurt the sale of moo shu pork in that part of the world,” he said in his deadpan way.

  “My God, the Marine Corps is so smart. To send the biggest asshole in the world to plan the destruction of the most populated country on earth!”

  “I got a personal letter from Secretary Robert McNamara for my good work,” he said.

  “Yeah, that guy’ll live for a long time in the history of great military leaders.”

  “Don’t fight a war in Asia,” Dad said. “That’s the Conroy rule.”

  “It ain’t caught on,” I said.

  My cousin John Harper held a morbid curiosity about Don Conroy and his ability to talk about nuclear weapons as though they were only carburetors for his Ford. Like the rest of us, John had read the books about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. John was certain that Dad’s nonchalance about talking about nuclear weapons was uncensored bravado and nothing else. I proceeded to ask Dad the same set of questions that Cousin John had once laid out before his favorite uncle.

  “Okay, Dad,” I said, studying my notes. “If you got a lawful order from the president that you were to drop a nuclear bomb on Atlanta, could you do it? Now, remember, me and my family, Jim and his family, and most of your friends also live there. Could you really execute that order?”

  “Boom,” my father said matter-of-factly. “Next question. That was too easy.”

  “Let’s go to New York. If you drop a bomb in the New York metropolitan area, you’re sure of wiping out up to eight million people, and the greatest cultural center in the world. Your daughter Carol lives there. Could you do it?”

  “Boom,” he said.

  “Okay, let’s go to Chicago, the city where you grew up and that you love more than anyplace on earth. All your relatives live there, and all would be destroyed if you dropped the bomb.”

  “Boom,” said Dad. “Hey, this game is getting boring, son. I’m a Marine, and I do what I’m ordered to do. End of story.”

  That night I called up and told all my brothers, sisters, and daughters that Don was going to be dying soon. They’d better make plans to say their good-byes. The next day he struggled with the recorder, with his quavering voice, the power running out of him as the cancer ate him from the inside out. Though it was awful, it was part of his life’s cycle, as immutable as the tides that ran by Parris Island and the flight paths along the air station. The Conroy tribe began gathering again in Beaufort. We instituted a schedule where one of Don’s children would always be within call.

  Unsurprisingly, my sister Carol Ann was avoiding all encounters with me. She would not come over to Kathy and Bobby Joe’s house unless my car was nowhere in sight. She bristled like a guard dog whenever I passed through her angle of vision. Even when we exchanged pleasantries, hers were barbed and loaded with mistrust. Whenever she looked at me, her contempt filled the distance between us. Finally, we were reduced to being two writers who could not find the language to soften the history we shared from different battle stations.

  But five days before Dad’s death, Carol Ann and I were forced into a conversation that we had not prepared or planned in the elaborate architecture we designed to avoid each other. I came to Kathy’s house to relieve Carol Ann after she had pulled an early morning shift. I’d arrived to assume my duties for the next six hours, when Tim would take over my watch. When I drove into the driveway, pandemonium had broken loose. I heard Carol Ann screaming, with her voice carrying all over the neighborhood.

  “Dad, you’ve got to tell me you love me. I need it so badly, Dad. I need to hear you say it before you die. You’ve never said it to me! You’ve never said you’re proud of me. I have to hear it from your lips. Tell me you love me, Dad. Tell me you’re proud of me! I need it. I have to have it, Dad.”

  I gestured to Carol Ann that I needed to speak to her and gently led her out of Dad’s bedroom to the couch in Kathy’s living room. Dad was disheveled and rattled by Carol Ann’s assault, but like me, he took it in a spirit of recognition of what an impossible life Carol Ann had led, with madness and genius clashing against her spirit. I let her scream and cry for a few minutes more. Then I finally spoke to her in a voice I hoped was conciliatory and loving at the same time.

  “Carol, it’s important for you to know this,” I said. “Dad’s dying. He’s not going deaf. You don’t have to scream at him.”

  “He’s got to do this for me, Pat,” Carol Ann cried, shifting up toward hysteria. “He’s never told me once that he loved me. That he was proud of my work as a poet.”

  “He’s always telling me he far prefers your poems to my work,” I told her.

  “Talk about damning with faint praise,” she said.

  “Carol, just don’t scream at Dad. You
’ve got him very upset.”

  “Has he ever told you he loved you, Pat? Tell me you’ve ever heard him say he’s proud of you.”

  “As a matter of fact, he has,” I said. “Every day of my life Dad calls me and tells me how much he loves me and how proud he is of the career that I’ve made for myself. Then he pauses and says, ‘I wish I felt the same way about Carol, but I just don’t feel shit for her.’ ”

  Carol Ann threw a pillow at my head, and we both began laughing. Finally, I said, “Carol, that’s Don Conroy dying in there, not Bill Cosby. That’s the Great Santini in there, and he’s just not put together like other men. Though he can’t say it, he sends you money every month to support his daughter, the poet. He loves us with action, not with words. He’s done great by you.”

  “I still need him to say it,” Carol Ann said, her jaw set in a cast of pure stubbornness.

  So I took Carol Ann by the arm and led her back to the room so she could say good-bye to Dad. For several minutes, Carol Ann composed herself, looking up only when our brother-in-law, Bobby Joe Harvey, walked in from his huge workplace in the backyard. Bobby Joe was known as the “Conroy family redneck,” because that’s how he identified himself to the rest of Beaufort. He thought a couple more rednecks in the family would improve it immensely. As for our politics, Bobby Joe would scoff and call us pinko liberal communists. Over the years we all had grown fond of Bobby Joe. There was nothing he couldn’t do with his hands, from building a boat’s motor to assembling a wrecked car into a collector’s dream. Though there’d been some fireworks in the initial years of his marriage to Kathy, he was now solidly ensconced as family. He and my father had hit it off big when they first met, and Dad had become the father figure Bobby Joe had needed his whole life.

  Bobby shuffled into the bedroom with his white beard immaculate and his grooming impeccable. He paused by Dad’s bedside to say, “Hey, old man. You feeling any better?”

  And my father, with his voice weak as a fawn’s, looked up at his son-in-law. I spotted that vile, impish laugh go off in my father’s head as he said, “I love you, Bobby Joe. I’m proud of you, Bobby Joe. I’ve always loved and been prouder of you than my loser children.”