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

by Pat Conroy

  I caught Carol Ann in midair going for my father’s throat. I’m sure she meant to kill him as he lay helplessly on his bed. Wrestling her out the front door and onto the lawn, I watched Carol Ann break into a run and disappear into her loaned house across the street. Bobby Joe came up behind me and said, “I don’t know what I did, bro. I didn’t mean to upset Carol so much.”

  “You were perfect, Bobby Joe,” I said. “Remember that Carol is a wounded bird and always will be.”

  “I think the whole family is fucked-up,” he said. “So does everyone else in Beaufort.”

  “That could serve as a one-sentence history of the Conroy family,” I said. Bobby Joe put his arm around me, and we went back inside to be with Dad. All the commotion had exhausted him, and he was sound asleep when I returned to my post.

  My father’s entire world sprang into amazing life as each of his children took over some role in his slippage into unconsciousness. Checking with one another on an hourly basis, we compared notes on how much Dad was running down after the cancer had begun to wreak havoc on his brain. Though he still had lucid moments, the end was clearly visible, and we filed our reports with the far-flung array of friends and relatives who awaited our notes from the field.

  On our first full shift together the following day, Cassandra and I interrupted a strange, improvised rite that Carol Ann had made up in her long march through the mythologies of the world. There was some kind of incense burning that struck me as Roman Catholic in origin. As we entered the room, Carol Ann was pouring oil onto Dad’s head, and it was streaming down his face, causing him great discomfort and, I believe, embarrassment.

  “What in the living hell are you doing, Carol?” I said, trying to control my temper as I touched a drop of oil coming like a tear from my father’s face.

  “This is an ancient Indian ceremony,” she said, “that I took from a Pueblo Indian ceremony, but also borrowed from the Sioux and the Apache.”

  “Funny, Carol,” I said after tasting the oil on my fingertip, “I never knew that Apache Indians used extra virgin olive oil in their sacred rites.”

  “That’s a chrism of mystery that our woman-hating Catholic Church uses for their worthless last rites of extreme unction. It’s a bow toward Dad’s own nonsensical religion.”

  “Dad’s a lot of things, Carol,” I said through thin, trembling lips, “but quit using him as a tossed salad.”

  “This incense may effect a cure,” she said.

  “It’s our watch, Carol,” I said. “If your oil works, I’ll have Dad sprint over to your house across the street.”

  “Always the funny man,” she snarled.

  Cassandra went into the bathroom and came out with a towel rinsed with warm water, and one dry towel. She cleaned off and dried Dad’s head and face.

  “Tell your little friend thanks,” Dad said about Cassandra. “Doesn’t she remind you of your mother?”

  “Yep, Dad,” I said. “She sure does.”

  Two days before his death, Cassandra and I appeared for our shift, with my brother Tim coming straight down after school to relieve us for the late-afternoon shift. Kathy seemed to be a member of every shift, since Dad was in her house. But we were having trouble with our hospice group, who was often late showing up and slow on the trigger finger about getting an ample supply of morphine to relieve the agony Dad was now going through. As I entered the house, I heard Dad desperately gagging. Sprinting around the corner, I saw Carol Ann holding Dad’s head on her shoulder, popping in morphine pills that he kept spitting out. Undeterred, Carol Ann would throw another pill down Dad’s throat, and he would strangle it out in a blue foam.

  I pulled Dad away from Carol Ann, and did it roughly. I turned his head toward the floor and a discolored wave of saliva came flooding out; then he gasped in a desperate convulsion and started to breathe again. His eyes held pure terror. Cassandra ran to the sink for a glass of water, and as I was wiping his foaming blue mouth, he swallowed for the last time in his life.

  “Carol, you’re killing Dad. You’re drowning him. He can’t swallow anymore. He’s losing the ability to,” I said.

  “How the hell was I supposed to know that?” she said, furious.

  “Look,” I said; then I turned toward Dad. “This hospice shit didn’t work out, Dad. Your kids don’t know what we’re doing. But I know what to do, okay? I’m going to take charge of this right now.”

  I picked up the phone and called 911 and got an immediate response.

  “Hello, ma’am. This is Pat Conroy on Azalea Drive. My father has colon cancer and needs immediate help. Please send an ambulance here as soon as possible.” Thirty seconds later, I heard the cry of an ambulance being sent out from the hospital.

  When Carol Ann heard the sound, she roused herself from some form of trance and began screaming in my face. “Did you hear that, Cassandra? Did you hear the sound of the slave master in Pat’s voice? That’s what I had to endure all my childhood—the horrible sound of the patriarchy making demands. The chauvinist’s crumbs are all I was thrown. A woman’s opinion was worth less than dirt in Santini’s house. We weren’t given human status at all. We were chattel and nothing else.”

  “Hey, Carol,” I said, “shut the fuck up.”

  I then went outside to meet the ambulance, which was coming down the street. Cassandra stayed behind and tried to minister to Carol Ann, who was caught in the tight netting of an agony that was a lifelong affliction to her. My sister Kathy followed the ambulance, then got Dad set up in a room in the oncology ward, where a morphine drip was started right away. He was breathing hard and overwhelmed by the scene his kids had just caused him to live through. When the morphine began to cut into his suffering, he looked up at Kathy and said, “I love morphine, sissy.”

  And those were the last words my father spoke.

  CHAPTER 21 •

  The God of Last Things

  My brothers Tim and Mike sat with my father during the first night shift at his deathwatch, the first week in May. Dad had not spoken to them since they assumed their duties as watchmen. Flying in from Dallas, my brother Jim was already airborne, and he’d been scheduled to take over the second night shift. Carol Ann was so distraught in her lostness and her inability to balance her precarious hold on reality that we all feared to leave her alone with Dad.

  My brothers Mike and Tim have never seemed related by blood. Certainly Mike could pass as part of a cousinry tenth removed from Tim, but there have always been canyons of difference pulling them apart by centrifugal, invisible forces. Mike gives off an aura of repose and self-containment that hides the fact that he is the most tightly wound of the Conroy siblings, his leg tapping away like a runaway motor as he sits on a couch, or appraises a situation, or renders an opinion about politics. He is the most trustworthy Conroy and has served as the executor of Mom, Dad, and Tom’s affairs. He throws himself into these deadly dull conundrums with resignation and follows each of them through to its final conclusion. Though cheapness is his most egregious flaw, he considers it a great virtue and wishes the rest of us could develop similar tendencies. Mike was reading the sports section when my father drew his last breath.

  My brother Tim is overemotional, excitable, and passionate. From his birth, the Bermuda Triangle—the family name for the three middle children—has picked on Tim and worried him to the point of hysteria. Mike, Kathy, and Jim could find something to criticize in every breath Tim drew. He would react with a cloistered rage, since he found our family as maddening and dangerous as I did. When Dad’s labored breathing came to an abrupt stop, Tim began leaping about, hopping up and down, feeling Dad’s pulse, checking his temperature, listening to his chest, but jumping in tiny three-step hops as the reality of the moment overcame him.

  “Mike, Mike, Mike!” Tim cried out. “What happened? What just went wrong? What’s going on with Dad?”

  Then Tim leaped to the other side of the bed to see whether the situation looked any better from that angle. Motionless, Mike
continued to check the baseball scores until Tim yelled at him, “Hey, Mike, let’s talk about the important things. Did the Yankees beat the goddamn Red Sox last night? I couldn’t sleep, I was so worried about that game.”

  Mike, not looking up, said, “The Red Sox won.”

  “What’s happened to Dad?” Tim yelled. “You cold son of a bitch.”

  “It looks like Dad just died, monkey boy,” Mike said. “Why do you keep jumping up and down like a little monkey boy?”

  “What a cold, loathsome monster you are, Mike,” Tim said.

  “Keep jumping around, monkey boy,” Mike said, finally putting the paper down and approaching Dad’s bed, eyeing his motionless form carefully. “Better tell the nurses that Dad died,” he ordered.

  The nurses confirmed that Dad was dead and, after preparing the body for removal, left Mike and Tim in the room to say good-bye to him. That’s when it caught up with them. They both fell apart and wept in the penned-in closures of their own silence. Mike and Tim were the first to realize in the thunderclaps of pure grief how much the children of the Great Santini had come to love him.

  Tim said, “We’d better intercept Pat before he gets up here. He’d go nuts if he walked in now.”

  “You’re right,” Mike agreed. “Pat won’t do well with this. I might even have a second monkey boy on my hands.”

  My brothers took the elevator down to the front of the hospital, then assumed positions to intercept me when I turned off Ribaut Road into the hospital parking lot. They saw me as I was driving north on Ribaut, but I surprised both of them by gliding right past them and not even glancing at the hospital where my father had just died. According to Tim, I nearly ran over Mike, who tried to step in front of my car to inform me about Dad.

  “Pat doesn’t give a shit about his own father,” Tim said, in both surprise and disgust.

  “Pat’s going somewhere,” Mike said. “He’s probably buying new panty hose at Walmart.”

  “He didn’t even glance over here,” Tim said.

  Though I’d departed from Fripp early to go see Dad, it hit me that I’d forgotten to bring Julia Randel my annual Mother’s Day gift, and Mother’s Day was the next day. When I visited Anne Rivers Siddons and her husband, Heyward, in Maine for three straight summers, I’d discovered that Morgan and Julia Randel were crazy about boiled lobsters. Since then, I brought Mrs. Randel live lobsters each Mother’s Day, yet this year the day had crept up on me. Mrs. Randel had taken over the job of mothering me after the death of my own mother. Few people have ever loved me with such a soft laying on of hands, or asking for so little in return. My father died while I was lifting forlorn lobsters from a tank at Publix.

  By the time I drove the five blocks to the Randel house, Cassandra had arrived at the hospital with my sister Kathy, and heard from my puzzled brothers about my strange dereliction of duty. Cassandra explained about Mrs. Randel and Mother’s Day. When I arrived at Mrs. Randel’s house, she was waiting for me in her driveway, having gotten the call from my brothers. The Randels were leading a youth group in a prayer meeting inside their house, and Mrs. Randel took me by the hand and walked me into their overgrown front yard, which was lush and azalea-covered. On her seldom-used front porch, she told me my father died and that it would probably do me good if I cried. She had often brought me to cry at this site, and she was an easy woman for me to shed tears in front of. When her son Randy died, I wrote my first poem in honor of his death. When her thirty-four-year-old son Darrell died of neurofibromatosis, a form of Elephant Man’s disease, I flew in from San Francisco to deliver his eulogy. As the years passed, I composed eulogies for both Morgan and Julia Randel. When I die, their only surviving child, Julie, has to read a prayer at my funeral. As the tears made their way down my face, slowly at first, then at flood levels, Mrs. Randel soothed me. I lost control, and Mrs. Randel whispered prayers for me and my father. Something inside me realized that my faith had come from an ancient source, and I let myself be comforted and reconciled by it.

  Then the business of Dad’s death held us all by the throats as we tried to organize the events surrounding the funeral. Our Beaufort closed ranks around us once again. We lived in a house full of cut flowers and home-delivered meals and notes of both condolence and appreciation. The Marine Corps information department at both the air station and Parris Island called to tell us they would help the family in any way they could. Marine Corps headquarters checked in to note the passing of a legendary Marine aviator.

  Though Dad’s death was not a surprise to any of us, it still had the power to shock us into stupefaction. None of us performed at the top of his or her game during the stressful times leading up to his funeral, but we all forgave ourselves for doing so. The New York Times did a semisweet but disapproving obituary of Dad the next day, and Carol Ann had her first meltdown over the Times’s reference to Dad being an abusive father.

  “That’s not the man who raised me,” she said in a histrionic voice. “I was raised by a gentle, kind man who never raised a hand to any member of his family.”

  Jim said, “You must’ve been raised by a different father.”

  “Give us a break, Carol,” Tim added.

  Carol Ann fought back. “To me, Dad was the perfect father. We loved each other in a way the males of this family will never understand. I’ve lost my closest friend, and God knows he loved me best of all.”

  The rest of us prepared ourselves and our children to accept any way Carol Ann reacted to her grief as her natural right. That night as the family fixed dinner, there was a shout from the den of my house, where the TV was on CNN. We ran in there to see a wonderful photo of Dad in his dress uniform, and a voice on the TV letting the world know that the Great Santini had died. His children fell silent, but a feeling of pride was let loose in the room, the unnameable sense of belonging that comes to a family that has always suffered from the stigmata of being the new strangers in town. It was a lovely moment for all of us.

  Meanwhile, the world of Santini began to move south, as a large contingent of the Irish Conroys were heading toward Beaufort. My publishing world was sending its representatives too, and it was a thrill for me to show my editor, Nan Talese; my longtime agent, Julian Bach; and Marly Rusoff, who would one day become my agent, the small town I’d been writing about for thirty years. During my tour of Beaufort, Nan looked around and said, “What on earth do you do here, Pat?” And Julian echoed her question several times. Because Marly had visited Beaufort on a number of occasions, I did not have to make my sales pitch on the illimitable, river-braceleted charms of Beaufort to her. Long ago I had pitched my tent in the marsh-possessed town enclosed by tidal creeks that smelled like some eau de cologne of oyster beds and salt. It was here we were going to bury my father, and I couldn’t have been happier that this would be his final resting place.

  The next night was the viewing, and the saying of the rosary. The rosary was the idée fixe of the Chicago Irish, whose muscular Catholicism overpowered the weak-kneed, tepid religion of the Southern branch. Father James P. Conroy came in his priestly collar yet again, and took over the call for prayer, with Sister Marge Conroy in loud-voiced attendance. Looking at Dad’s open casket, I stared at his ghastly, mummified face and thought of a story Jim and Tim had told me the night before.

  Jim began, “It was at Dad’s birthday party last month.…”

  “And Aunt Marge and Father Jim were in the living room with Dad,” Tim picked up. “Someone told Dad that he looked a little yellowish.”

  Jim finished the story. “Dad asked if anyone else thought he looked yellow. Sister Marge looked at her brother and said, ‘Like a fucking banana, Don.’ ”

  My eyes traveled upward, where I saw for the first time a cartoon my great friend Doug Marlette had drawn for my dad’s funeral. It had been placed near the casket. It depicted a jet plane crashing through the pearly gates of heaven, with Saint Peter and several terrified angels running low to avoid the flight plan of the jet. Below the cartoon w
ere the words “Stand by for a fighter pilot.” On the cockpit of the plane, Doug had stenciled, “The Great Santini.” Doug’s gift cartoon was all the prayer we needed. Its quiet elegance eased our way through a fire-eating week of leavetaking.

  The night before the funeral, Carol Ann came to my room looking troubled and mad-dog at the same time. Thus far, Carol Ann had behaved splendidly, with only a couple of outbreaks to remind us of past detonations of her jumpy spirit. But she and I found ourselves alone in my writing room off the master bedroom, where she had come with a stonewall agenda on her mind.

  “Are you going to write a eulogy for Dad tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking about it, Carol. I haven’t written a word yet,” I said.

  “Oh, you’ll write one,” she said. “Your ego is much too big to let such a golden opportunity pass by.”

  “Well, thanks. Guess I’ll write one for sure now,” I said.

  “I’ve written a poem. A very great one, I think. But I’ll not read my poem until you’re finished with your prose. Dad always agreed with me that poetry was a much higher art form than prose.”

  “He even shared that sentiment with me. Dad, that aficionado of refined taste. I’ll be glad to read a eulogy if I can think of anything to say.”

  “You’re an egomaniac,” she said. “You’ll come up with something.”

  For a long time after the lights went out, Cassandra and I talked about all the enervating events that had led up to this ceremony. In the darkness I confessed to her that I wasn’t sure I could write a single word praising Dad’s life—that I was still caught up in the unhealable rancor I brought from my memory of my childhood. She said it didn’t matter. I’d written the novel The Great Santini, and that would always stand me in good stead as my valediction to my father. We went to sleep holding hands.