The Death of Santini

by Pat Conroy

  The couple had graduated from the University of Georgia more than a decade before, and yes, he had been president of his fraternity and she had been president of her sorority. Both looked poised to lift off in the launch zone of their pure potential. The young man leaned down and said, “We both read your new book and loved it. But I’ve got to tell you, Pat, your family is really fucked-up.”

  “Yes, they are,” I said. “There’s the main reason over there.” And I introduced them both to my father.

  “I can’t believe he’s still talking to you after The Great Santini,” the man said.

  “It was touch-and-go for a while,” I admitted.

  “Was your family really that fucked-up, or did you make a lot of it up?” he whispered.

  “They were very screwed up,” I said. “What about your family, pal? How do they stack up?”

  “Oh, my family,” he replied, “they’re just wonderful. I’d say almost perfect.”

  “Then let’s go deeper. How far do I have to go in your family before I hit the first crazy? Dad. Mom. Brother. Sister. Aunt. Uncle?”

  His pretty wife broke under the pressure and spit out the words, “His mother’s nuts!”

  Not a single family finds itself exempt from that one haunted casualty who suffered irreparable damage in the crucible they entered at birth. Where some children can emerge from conditions of soul-killing abuse and manage to make their lives into something of worth and value, others can’t limp away from the hurts and gleanings time decanted for them in flawed beakers of memory. They carry the family cross up the hill toward Calvary and don’t mind letting every other member of their aggrieved tribe in on the source of their suffering. There is one crazy that belongs to each of us: the brother who kills the spirit of any room he enters; the sister who’s a drug addict in her teens and marries a series of psychopaths, always making sure she bears their children, who carry their genes of madness to the grave. There’s the neurotic mother who’s so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters. The variations are endless and fascinating. I’ve never attended a family reunion where I was not warned of a Venus flytrap holding court among the older women, or a pitcher plant glistening with drops of sweet poison trying to sell his version of the family maelstrom to his young male cousins. When the stories begin rolling out, as they always do, one learns of feuds that seem unbrokerable, or sexual abuse that darkens each tale with its intimation of ruin. That uncle hates that aunt and that cousin hates your mother and your sister won’t talk to your brother because of something he said to a date she later married and then divorced. In every room I enter I can sniff out unhappiness and rancor like a snake smelling the nest of a wren with its tongue. Without even realizing it, I pick up associations of distemper and aggravation. As far as I can tell, every family produces its solitary misfit, its psychotic mirror image of all the ghosts summoned out of the small or large hells of childhood, the spiller of the apple cart, the jack of spades, the black-hearted knight, the shit stirrer, the sibling with the uncontrollable tongue, the father brutal by habit, the uncle who tried to feel up his nieces, the aunt too neurotic ever to leave home. Talk to me all you want about happy families, but let me loose at a wedding or a funeral and I’ll bring you back the family crazy. They’re that easy to find.

  In my novels, I’ve often written about the immense and mysterious powers I associate with the perfect shape of a circle. When my past circles back on me and completes itself in my present life, it often seems both covert and ominous, acting as both a herald and a sign. In the first years of my marriage to Barbara, I bolted up in bed one night when I realized I had married the wife of a Marine Corps fighter pilot. The circle almost always takes me by surprise, leaving me breathless and in awe.

  In 1984, I was living in Rome, Italy, with my second wife when I received a phone call from my brother Mike. I stood overlooking the two fountains of the incomparable Piazza Farnese and a changing of the guard at the gates of the French embassy.

  “Pat, you’ve got to get on the next plane out of Rome,” Mike said. “Mom’s in a coma. She may not even last the night.”

  “Mom’s dying,” I said to Lenore and the kids as they hovered near the phone.

  “What’s she dying of?” I asked Mike.

  “Cancer. She looks terrible, Pat. Just come.”

  “What kind of cancer?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to tell you. Just get your fat ass here,” Mike demanded.

  “I can’t fly a thousand miles without knowing what’s wrong,” I said. “Be reasonable, Mike.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell you. Mom’s dying of leukemia.” And as he spoke the words, I laughed loudly and explosively. I had to sit down on a chair; I was roaring with such amusement that it took me a minute to regain control of my voice. My family was staring at me as though I were the most heartless son imaginable.

  “Even God doesn’t have that good a sense of humor,” I said, and then heard something. “Mike, Mike—is that you? Are you crying?”

  “Yeah, I’m crying. So what? My mother’s dying. Yet every one of the kids reacted the same way you did, Pat. Exactly the same way. What a fucked-up family we come from.”

  “I’ll be at the Savannah airport tomorrow afternoon,” I said to Mike.

  On the way over the Atlantic the next evening, I thought that my mother had just learned of the immensity of a circle’s power. The reason all my siblings and I had started laughing at the terrible news of my mother’s leukemia was because of a priest named Father Dave, who had befriended my parents when Dad was CO of the Marine Air Division in Pensacola, Florida.

  Mom and Dad had always taken great pleasure in the company of Roman Catholic priests and loved nothing better than to treat those priests to dinner at the officers’ club. Whenever these men visited our house, my parents were fawning and unctuous, with Dad laughing too loud at the priests’ jokes and Mom cooing with pleasure when these interchangeable priests would spout some thought she took in as wisdom brightly dispensed. Mom saw genius and a depthless spirituality whenever she spotted a man in a white collar. I think my mountain mother, with her upbringing in the primitive Baptist church, believed that converting to Roman Catholicism was a step upward in the social order. Of course she was wrong; when I grew up in the South, a Roman Catholic was the weirdest thing you could be. There was no second place until the Hare Krishnas showed up with their tambourines and saffron robes in the Atlanta airport. The only thing my mother understood about the Catholic Church was its teaching on birth control.

  Father Dave was a handsome but forbidding man, one of those taciturn priests who treated children as though they were houseplants. I had met him one Christmas when I was still a cadet, on a visit to the family in Pensacola. Father Dave’s personality was unglittering and severe. His Christmas sermon could have put an insomniac to sleep, but he would end up playing a larger part in my family’s sad history than I could ever have dreamed.

  My mother had taken up golf as a hobby and played almost every day with Father Dave, who had bought her an expensive set of clubs. Something about that made me worry. All during my visit, my family seemed like a vessel of pure madness to me, with hopelessness our daily bread. I became concerned my mother was having an affair with Father Dave, whom I had come to hate in a very short time. One day Mom had asked me to meet her at the golf course to watch her on the driving range. She wanted me to witness firsthand the joy the sport of golf had brought into her life. It was a pleasure standing by my car to watch my mother select a three wood and drive a golf ball a hundred yards with a swing that was surprisingly fluid. Also, I noticed from a distance the raw power of my mother’s physical beauty, her full-breasted figure, and the coquettish pleasure she took in just being pretty.

  Then I saw a man move toward her, talking to her with great intimacy, and recognized Father Dave, who began giving her tips to correct her swing. He moved behind her and folded his arms around her. Through five pract
ice swings, Father Dave kept his arms around my mother. I could have been watching a golfer taking the time to correct the imperfections of an amateur’s swing, but there was a carnality and intimacy in the embrace that disturbed me in the extreme. I drove back home conflicted about how I was supposed to react to such a scene, which could be explained away in a dozen innocent scenarios. Returning to my parents’ house, I was met by my sister Carol Ann, who asked me if I’d been out to the golf course. I told her Mom had given me bad directions and I couldn’t find it.

  “She golfs with Father Dave almost every day,” Carol Ann said in a conspiratorial voice. “There is something sicko-sexual in their relationship. Mom’s always been weird about these misfit priests.”

  “I think she feels safe with them,” I said.

  A few years later, after my father’s departure for Vietnam in 1970, the creepy and reptilian Father Dave arrived at my mother’s house in Beaufort for a two-week stay. His presence alarmed my brothers and sisters so much that the house was seething with anxiety every time I came over for a visit. My mother had sent my sister Kathy out of her downstairs bedroom and up to the guest room on the top floor. Father Dave took possession of Kathy’s bedroom, which had a door connected to my mother’s room. My mother kept that door locked when Kathy was staying in the room, but Carol Ann found it unlocked the day of the priest’s arrival.

  Every morning, they would golf on the course on Parris Island and often go out for drinks and dinner at the air station officers’ club. Mom would dress as though she were going to a party after the Oscars, and Father Dave would wear his dapper navy uniform. It was the first time I noticed that my mother had simply stopped raising her children, and already, I thought, she had caused irreparable harm to my youngest brothers, Tim and Tom.

  I confronted Mom about her children’s unanimous disapproval of the presence of Father Dave. It was one of the most disagreeable conversations we ever had. Though I knew she would be defensive, I didn’t have the slightest notion that I would be caught out in the open field trying to bell a tigress.

  “Father Dave, Mom?” I said to her as she was gardening in the late afternoon.

  “What about him?” Mom said, her hackles aroused.

  “The kids don’t like him.”

  “Which ones?”

  “All seven of us.”

  “What don’t you like?”

  “We think he’s an asshole,” I said. “And the whole thing feels odd. Him living in your home.”

  “Are you brats accusing me of having an affair with a Catholic priest, a man as good and holy as Father Dave?” she asked, her voice biting.

  “That’s a pretty good summarization of how we feel,” I said, growing more uncomfortable in my role of her inquisitor.

  “I’ll not dignify that with an answer. So all of my children have turned on me? Et tu, Brute?” Her eyes flashed with rage and mortification. Mom adored peppering her speech with literary allusions that long before had become clichés.

  “Yeah, ol’ Brute feels pretty strong about this one.”

  “It’s none of your goddamn business!” she shouted.

  “That’s true, Mom. So why don’t you just deny it and I’ll get the word back to the kids.”

  “That my own children would turn on me. I rue the day I brought any of you bastards into the world.”

  “You can rue the day all you want. But you got seven kids who love you, Mom, and every one of us is worried as hell about you.”

  “Get the hell out of my yard,” she said. “You’re on private property.”

  I laughed and said, “Ditch the creep, Mom. Good advice from a son who adores you.”

  I bided my time and finally caught Father Dave off guard when I found him reading Golf magazine on the back porch of my mother’s house. He looked up, nodded to me, then went back to reading his magazine—we had noticed before that he never spoke to the Conroy kids, so his silence was rude, but not unexpected. Finally, he put the magazine down and said in an aggravated tone, “Do you want something from me?”

  “Hey, priest,” I said, “are you fucking my mom?”

  “No, of course not,” he said, outraged.

  “My brothers and sisters think you are.”

  “They’re wrong, and you’re a horse’s ass to even ask the question,” said the bristling Father Dave.

  “I ever find out they’re right, then you’ll have a very bad day.”

  “I’m a priest. The church will excommunicate you if you lay a hand on a priest.”

  “Be still, my heart,” I said.

  “Your mother and I are very good friends. I’m her spiritual counselor.” His voice was chilling.

  “The spirit’s fine. The body ain’t,” I said, walking out of the house.

  After the priest described this inelegant encounter to my mother, she entered my house suffused with an ungoverned fury. Her rage spread in crimson blotches across her face in a way I had once seen, when she stabbed my father.

  “How dare you insult a guest in my house,” she spit.

  “We had a discussion,” I said.

  “He said you threatened to beat him up.”

  “I implied it, with great delicacy.”

  “We’re not sleeping together,” she said, and then, in her frustration, burst into tears. I was rendered helpless when my mother’s tears entered the playing field.

  “Fine, Mom. I’ll tell the kids,” I said.

  “None of you believe me.”

  “I’ll tell them anyway,” I said.

  The off-duty priest began to bedevil our lives as he moved through the rooms of my mother’s house with a slither rather than a pace. The whole house felt unholy, haunted by some unclean spirit who answered only to the archfiend. Though he was a handsome man, his demeanor appeared scorched by an unclean spirit rather than an angel of light. The house on East Street, which had seemed like a hermitage of great serenity when my family first moved there, suddenly seemed in dire need of an exorcism.

  At night, Father Dave and Mom dressed up with great style and went out to one of the base clubs to dinner. They would come in after midnight and often even later. The reason I knew this was because the family spymaster, Carol Ann, was in residence that summer. From the time she was a little girl, Carol Ann displayed a prodigious talent for espionage. When I was seven and Carol Ann five, she showed me the hiding place for all our Christmas presents and said that belief in Santa Claus was bull. I cried in the attic because I still believed in Santa Claus. Mom and Dad’s bedroom was an area of supreme interest to Carol Ann, and she would make periodic sweeps through their room, searching out incriminating evidence that our parents were having sex.

  In her clandestine surveillance of every nook of our mother’s house in Beaufort, my sister finally hit pay dirt. With her spy-in-training sister, Kathy, Carol Ann had discovered something so shocking and disgusting that it would transform the history of our family. Even though Carol Ann had always been a drama queen of prodigious skills, she sounded more a harlequin and fool with this announcement than she did a leading lady. Her joy was at her discovery of some undisclosable documents she had found while reconnoitering my mother’s dressing table. She phoned me, with Kathy, usually scrupulous in her anonymity, backing her sister up this time.

  “It is irrefutable proof of our mother’s perfidy,” Carol Ann said. “You must come over here quickly, Pat; I’ve called a family council to confront Mom.”

  “Hold your horses,” I cautioned. “Remember Tim and Tom are still little boys.”

  “They’re old enough to learn about perfidy,” she said.

  When I arrived at the East Street house, the tension was almost unbearable. Mom sat in her chair looking murderous as Carol Ann and Kathy formed a witch’s tribunal, with the Conroy kids as the only witnesses. Carol Ann stood up to assume her role as lead prosecutor as I sat on the couch with Tim and Tom. Carol Ann began her inquiry with her remarkable gift for subtlety. “I have conclusive proof that you are having a s
ordid affair with Father Dave. Do you admit it, Mother?”

  I put my hands over my face and groaned and heard my mother spit the words, “I most certainly do not.”

  “Kathy and I were conducting surreptitious operations in your bedroom. We discovered a secret compartment in your jewelry box that we’d never known was there. Naturally, we inspected it.”

  “You sneaky little bitches!” my mother cried.

  “We discovered two plane tickets to Washington, D.C. One was in your name and one was in Father Dave’s name. You’ll be staying in a little love nest for a week before you come back to Beaufort.”

  The announcement stunned me into a withdrawn silence. My jaw felt like a dentist had just anesthetized it with Novocain. My mother’s eyes had turned into hornets’ nests as she stared my sisters down with an unconcealed hatred. Then Peg Conroy took a deep breath, brought herself under perfect control, and delivered a soliloquy that—in its shocking content—would hand back her two daughters’ heads on a plate.

  “I didn’t want to upset my children. Your father was horrible this summer. You kids had to put up with a lot. I certainly wanted to protect you from bad news about my health.”

  “What does Father Dave have to do with your health?” Carol Ann demanded.

  “I asked Father Dave up here and he came as a personal favor to me. He’s taken me several times to the Naval Hospital in Charleston and once to the Eisenhower Medical Center in Augusta. Next week we are flying to Washington so I can check into Bethesda Naval Hospital to be treated for my disease.”

  “What disease?” We screamed it in one voice.

  My mother paused with chilling effect, then said, “I’ve come down with the deadliest form of leukemia. I’ll probably be dead in two weeks.”

  Each of us burst into tears, which streamed down our faces as we ran toward our mother, begging her forgiveness for our puritanical doubts against her. Carol Ann and Kathy were on their knees with their arms around her legs, trying to find ways to correct their apostasy concerning her moral character. They recanted their tainted evidence, and as they did, Mom said with a steel-edged voice, “Give me my goddamn tickets back.”