The Death of Santini

by Pat Conroy

  Without making a sound, Tom got into Dad’s car at five in the morning. Neither said a word as Dad took him back to his top-floor suite in the Darlington apartments.

  Though I woke up late, I called my father to see whether there had been any developments.

  “Developments? I’d say yes, there’s been a slight development. I found Tom at oh five hundred hours, picked him up, and he’s in great spirits. Mary’s over here cooking him pancakes and he’s eating them like he’s a horse—never seen a boy with a better appetite. We’ve been laughing about you and your pitiful attempt to put him in a mental hospital. Tom’s more together than you’ve been on your best day. We’ve been laughing about what an asshole you can be when you try to make the whole family see the world as you see it. Tom thinks you’re just a bully who never got over the prestige of being the firstborn.”

  “Oh, to be the firstborn Conroy child,” I mocked. “There was a high honor I could never live down. Listen to me now, Dad. I’m not calling you again until six tonight. When I call you then, you’ll know everything, big shot. You’ll know all you need to know. Welcome to a crash course in madness.”

  At that moment, I could’ve hammered Dad to the floor with a tire iron. Yet my anger was now playing busboy to my anxiety about what was happening. I was highly prone to breakdowns, as I had proven to everyone’s satisfaction many times in my life, and could feel the disintegration and unraveling taking place all around me. But if I failed my family at this critical avenue of fates colliding under the signs of chaos, I could not figure who could rise up and take my place. At this moment, I could not afford the luxury of one of the crackups I was famous for.

  At six, I called my father’s apartment and Mary answered, one of my father’s great women friends he’d met at the Darlington over the years. I could hear two men screaming in the background. Dad grabbed the phone and he was sobbing hysterically. He could not utter a communicable word to me, but just blubbered in his misery.

  “Dad, I’m truly sorry. I waited too long and it was unbearably mean of me. But I’m coming over now and I’ll take care of it,” I told him.

  When I exited the elevator on the fifteenth floor, the purest pandemonium had broken loose, and I walked in on a scene I found troubling to the core. My brother Tom was screaming, talking a meaningless blather and cursing as he crawled toward me and the elevators. He kept reaching back to punch Dad’s face as Dad held on to his legs and tried to slow his progress. Ten terrified women were peeking out their doors. I heard one of them say, “Should I call the police, Colonel?” Dad screamed, “No!” Another said, “I have a gun, Colonel. Do you want to use it on your son?”

  “No!” Dad wailed in despair.

  Then the oldest brother moved into position. I stopped Tom’s forward progress by putting my Docksider against his face, pinning his head to the floor.

  “Hey, baby Tom. The games are over. Your oldest brother has arrived. And you know what we big brothers do best? We love to kick the asses of our baby brothers because they’re weak and pathetic and can’t defend themselves.”

  “You’re hurting me. Get your foot off my face,” Tom cried.

  “Dad, you let go of Tom and get back to your room. You ladies can return to your own lives, because this show is over,” I said.

  “Don’t hurt my boy,” Dad pleaded with me.

  “Shut up, Dad,” I said. “Get back to your room.”

  “Now, Tom,” I continued, “since you seem to like crawling better than walking, I want you to turn around and crawl back to Dad’s. If you try to get up, I’m going to think you’ll want to fight me. If you fight me, I’ll kill you. If I kill you, I’ll be sad for a day or two, but that’s all it’ll be. So let’s get this show on the road.”

  Tom began crawling on all fours toward Dad’s in a passage that must have been humiliating to him. When he entered Dad’s apartment again, I pointed out a chair for him to sit in. Earlier that day a doctor friend had given me a bunch of Valium and sedatives to calm Tom.

  “Open your mouth,” I said. “I got some pills for you.”

  “I don’t have to do one fucking thing you say. Fuck you. I’m not opening my mouth!” Tom shouted.

  “Then I’m going to break your jaw,” I said, measuring it with my right fist.

  His mouth popped open and I threw three tablets down his throat and made sure he swallowed them when I poured a glass of water down him.

  Tom was furious and still rowdy when he looked at me with withering contempt and said to Dad, “You know, there’s something about that guy I never liked.”

  This phrase would later become one of the catchphrases of Conroy family life. Even then, it got Tom the first laugh of the evening from Mary, Dad, and me. For the next five years, anytime my personality irritated one of my siblings, I would hear them say, often in unison, “You know, there’s something about that guy I never liked.”

  Going home later that evening, after the pills had calmed Tom down, I felt the partial wreckage of myself as I made my way down a dark Peachtree Street. The confrontation with Tom had sickened me and filled me with a fully earned self-loathing. I called my brother Mike to see whether we could still get Tom into Bull Street the next day, since Dad had decided Peachford was too expensive.

  “I was an asshole to Tom tonight, Mike,” I confessed. “He terrified me more than I can tell you. So what did I do? I turned into Dad.”

  “Pat, I’ve worked with crazy people my whole life. Sometimes they’re nice, and sometimes they’re scary as hell.”

  Using an abbreviated version, I recounted most of the violent, fragmented incidents of that nightmarish scene on the fifteenth floor of the Darlington apartments.

  “You stepped on his face?” Mike asked.

  “Yes, I stepped on his face. He was dragging Dad along the floor, trying to get to the elevator. He was hitting Dad with his fists, trying to knock him off him.”

  “Why do I like this scene?” Mike said, chuckling.

  “Because no one deserved it more than Dad,” I said.

  “Here’s what’s great about Bull Street, Pat. It’s free. And I can check on Tom two or three times a day. Everybody up here knows about the Conroy family. We’ll take real good care of him, and the whole place will take an interest in protecting Tom and getting him better.”

  “That’s what I needed to hear,” I said. “I’ll see you as soon as I can tomorrow. Anything else I need to know?”

  Mike said, “One more thing.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “There’s something about that guy I never liked.” Mike was laughing when he hung up the phone. And so was I.

  • • •

  We left Atlanta at nine the next morning, and Tom’s craziness had taken a catatonic turn during the night. We found him sluggish as I belted him up in the backseat of my car. Whenever he talked, it came out as gibberish, and untranslatable, even though Dad tried to engage him in conversation for the entire high-strung, jittery trip. In those four hours, I learned how psychotic my brother really was. The thought first hit me that he was most likely a paranoid schizophrenic, and would be for his entire lifetime. Despair filled me to the brim, as it would every day for the rest of Tom’s life.

  My three brothers were waiting when we drove up on the grounds of the South Carolina State Hospital. Mike took immediate charge, leading Tom into the building, where papers awaiting his signature were waiting. Dad and I would not see Tom again that day or for many to follow. We ate lunch at Yesterdays, where all my brothers had worked during college, including Tom. They had a bar stool with a Great Santini plaque where Dad always sat when he came in for a drink. The owners, who cherished my father and brothers, treated us as royalty. When Dad and I walked back to the car for the journey home, he got in and began weeping over the fate of his youngest son. I too burst into tears and cried as hard as I ever had, the first time I’d ever done so with my father. It would not be our last, nor the last time we would do it for Tom. Dad rec
overed faster than I did and started to compose himself as my head leaned against the steering wheel.

  Finally, I lifted my head up, dried my eyes, and turned the ignition on. As I eased the car into the traffic of Five Points, my father said to me, “What a fucking pussy you turned out to be.” He said it with affection this time, not malice.

  I was thirty-nine years old then, a tired veteran of the weird-ass ruffled strangeness of the Conroy family dilemma. For years I had studied it, judged it, renounced and ridiculed it, scoffed at it and held it up to the light. I was sorry I’d been born to such strange, volcanic people. I would never forgive the Conroy family for making me a stranger and an illegal alien in my own life. Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family, but love it was.

  When we stopped for gas, we both headed for the men’s room to wash our tearstained faces, the Great Santini and me. It was another good day for us as father and son. But the residue of that bipolar day would haunt me for the rest of my life. Now I knew for sure that when I was pressed hard and with my back against the wall, something would always snap inside me, and I would face a perilous world in the full-voiced, savage fury of the man I was born to be. During crisis or breakdown, I would put on my father’s flight jacket, grab the throttle of his warplane, and turn the gaze of the Great Santini toward every squadron maneuvering the night skies in pursuit of me. Despite all my protestations and refusals, I was, at last, revealed to be Santini’s, and by a boy who had no defenses to stop my utter renunciation of him.

  My brother Tom never spoke to me again.

  CHAPTER 14 •

  The End to It All

  It was a bleak, windswept day when I entered Eisenhower Army Medical Center for the last time. Dr. Egan had called all of Peg’s children, and most sat around the waiting room looking like death-row criminals. My brothers and I hugged one another more solidly than we normally did. With this embrace, we were acknowledging the end of it all, the final extinction of that pilot light of love our mother protected during the gale-force slipstreams of our lives.

  “It’s over,” Jim said.

  “She’ll leave here in a casket,” Tim agreed.

  “Hey, she’s beaten this before,” I said.

  “You haven’t seen her today,” Mike said.

  “Can I visit her now?” I asked. “Is anyone with her?”

  “Your worst nightmare is in there with her,” Jim said. “Carol flew into town.”

  “Jesus of Nazareth,” I muttered, and started down the hall.

  Halfway to my mother’s room, I heard what seemed to me the most horrible noise to pass through a human throat. I could hear my mother’s strangled, desperate breath hurtling out of her body in thunderclaps. Steadying myself on the far wall, I regained feeling in my legs as I tried to accustom myself to this wet, devouring sound. My mother would have killed herself if she knew what her final aria of death would be. The noise was undignified, unladylike, and un-Peggy-ish. I later learned my mother had lost her cough reflex and the air kept forcing itself through streams of mucus it couldn’t expel.

  Turning the corner, I slammed into the wall of Mom’s horrible breathing. I watched the rise and fall of her breasts as her lungs struggled valiantly to remain alive. A numbness seized my entire body, and tears streamed down my face as I absorbed the stunning news that my mother would never leave this room alive. Though the warnings had shaken me, I still came to that hospital with an optimism that my mother’s reservoirs of pure strength would pull her through again. I banished that hope forever as I tried to acclimate myself to the gruesome sound track of her dying.

  Then I spotted a pair of eyes watching me with utter malice. Carol Ann was lying beside Mom with her left arm propped under Mom’s neck and her right arm wrapped around her shoulder. Carol Ann looked like a novice wrestler on amateur night. From my point of view, it appeared that Carol Ann was trying to strangle Peg.

  “Why’re you in bed with Mom?” I asked.

  “I made a vow that she would die in my arms,” she said.

  “She seems to be having a bit of trouble breathing. You’ve got her in a headlock.”

  “My love for Mom is deep and mysterious and eternal. As a poet, I see things that are denied to ordinary people. It’s beyond language or comprehension. Though she ruined my childhood with her bitterness that I was not the Southern belle of her dreams, I have come to the deep and literary comprehension of our relationship. We were goddesses of war locked in mortal combat.”

  I was considering the happy option of beating up my sister to test how a goddess of war did in a fistfight, when Dr. Steve Madden and John Egan walked through the door. Dr. Madden had fallen in love with my mother when she became his patient, joining a long line of handsome men in her life. He immediately saw the problem in Carol Ann’s awkward embrace of Mom and said, “Carol, we need to let your mother’s head rest on the pillow, because you might obstruct the flow of air she’s getting.”

  “I plan for her to die in my arms,” Carol Ann said.

  “There’ll be plenty of time for all of that,” Dr. Madden said. “Now we need to provide her with as much comfort as possible. There’s a chance that people in comas can still hear what’s going on around them. No arguments, no noise, no drama.”

  “Ah, Doctor, I see you’ve become wise in the ways of the Conroy family,” I said.

  “I’ve had experience with many families,” Steve Madden replied.

  For three harrowing days, Carol Ann, John Egan, and I lingered over Mom in a deathwatch as ancient as time. When I heard that Mom might be able to hear us speaking in the room, I ran down to my car and found a book of poetry that Jonathan Galassi had edited and sent to me the previous week. Because Jonathan, who had exquisite taste in poetry, had selected the poems, I knew the book would be a perfect accompaniment to my mother’s dying hours. I began at the first poem and read slowly, at first in pain, and then in great pleasure as these poems began to work their strange magic on me, Carol Ann, and, I hoped, my mother. A languor hung in the room as some of the most beautiful words in the English language poured over us in both harsh and silken folds. Since my mother had read so much poetry to Carol Ann and me when we were children, it calmed the warring beasts that flared up between the two of us. Because Mom had made the language such a happy voyage for both of us, it seemed fitting to fill her last days with the honeycomb and vinegar cruets of poems that spoke of love, eternity, earthly beauty, and even nothingness. The world is poetry’s most dauntless calling—its most urgent business. It pleased me that this woman born to the cruelest poverty could rise out of those murderous origins and lie dying with a poet and a novelist in loving attendance of her. When sister Carol Ann’s book of poetry The Beauty Wars was published by Norton in 1991, it pained me that my mother was not alive to celebrate the happy occasion.

  For three days I read to my mother, and on the third day I finished the book. When I went out on a hamburger run, I discovered, by accident, that Augusta had wonderful Chinese restaurants run by the offspring of the Chinese laborers who built the Augusta canal earlier in the century. A routine set in, which we operated with admirable efficiency. In the morning, John would go in with his wife for a couple of hours and I would run errands. I had suggested to Carol Ann that she let John have some time with Mom alone, but Carol Ann nixed that idea immediately, because she might miss that moment of final extinguishment.

  I believe it was a Saturday when I noticed that the Augusta paper said it was November 17. I also remember watching a football game with John in the afternoon. In the waiting room, I chose a chair with a view of the long hallway leading to my mother’s room. Some team scored a touchdown; then I checked the hall and I saw two nurses leading a stricken Carol Ann toward us. Carol Ann’s face told of my mom’s death with a purified articulateness. It had happened, and I would spend the rest of my life motherless. Grabbing John’s wrist, I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Brace yourself, John. Mom just died.” John went slack-jawed and int
o immediate shock. I helped him rise to his feet as tears streamed down his face.

  Now, I had planned this scenario for the moment of Mom’s death—I saw myself as the stoical, heroic man of courageous forbearance who would comfort the elderly, the women, and the children. I was a Marine brat and a Citadel man who knew about the confinement of emotions and feelings. I knew how a man should react in such a situation—I was thinking Humphrey Bogart, Cool Hand Luke, and Han Solo—guys like that.

  Carol Ann was pure wreckage when I hugged her in the hall. Her face looked hammered and misshapen, as if some great internal scream was forming inside her.

  “Mom died in my arms,” she told me. “I was holding her, telling her how much I loved her and how I would honor her passing with poems of exquisite beauty and style.”

  “You tell her that your brothers and sisters are going to miss her, too?” I asked, sorry for the words as soon as they came out of my mouth.

  “You did not earn the privilege of farewell,” she retorted. “I never left her side. You guys didn’t put in the time. She died in my arms.”

  Gathering John on my left arm and Carol Ann on my right, I led a sad procession down this hallway for the last time. In the days I had been there, I had grown accustomed to my mother’s ghastly death rattle, but I had not prepared for a sound that was the most chilling of all. I had not prepared myself for silence. Despite my John Wayne fantasies, when I made the turn into her room and found it noiseless, I fell apart. I heard someone screaming, “No, no, no!” and was surprised to trace the source back to myself. My eyes flooded with tears, and I covered my mother’s face with kisses and tried to pull her to me. I had nurses sprinting from their stations to see the source of the mayhem. That despairing sound came out of me. I was screaming and shouting and making a complete horse’s ass of myself when I heard Carol Ann’s voice behind me.