by Pat Conroy
She said, in a detached, observatory tone, “You’re lucky you can cry. It’ll be years before I can shed a single tear for her. She destroyed my whole life and was my worst enemy. Even so, I forgave her long ago. I forgave her for all the crimes she committed against her daughter, which were too many to count. I told her I forgave her everything as she died in my arms. Also, I’ve found it in my heart to forgive Dad, who was a monster when I was growing up. But he was stupid, macho, and unevolved. So I’ve let him off the hook, too. I’ve forgiven both our parents even though they were unspeakable to me. Now I only have one mortal enemy left in my life, one that I can never forgive his crimes against me, one whom I hate more than Mom and Dad. But I’ve got my eyes on him and I’ll never take my gaze away from him. Pat, that enemy is you.”
She emphasized the “you” so that its fury echoed around the room. But I was on the move now and swift in my shock, so I flew out of that room like a fox hearing the approach of hounds behind him. I bolted out of that hospital and into the Augusta night. Something had broken in me that had once been good, and I had the rest of my life to figure out what it was.
• • •
My mother’s funeral was a rather uneventful, sober one by Conroy family standards. The family seemed so grief-stricken by her death that we were in no shape to help John Egan prepare for the funeral. I should have written Mom a rip-roaring eulogy, and Carol Ann should have sent her out with a poem, but all we did was cry. One time, I looked over at my brothers and at my brother-in-law, and all six of us had our heads down, crying openly and without shame. I thought that tableau would have touched Mom to the core. I heard crying all over the church. At some point, she had become a beloved figure in Beaufort.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 15 •
Tom’s Leap, Carol Ann’s Ball of Tears
My brother Tom was the prettiest child our parents produced. His features lent all the handsomeness that symmetry and structure could add to a face. His hair was a brown that seemed stolen from the pelts of otters; his eyes were blue lapis lazuli and as haunted as those of a wounded songbird. Tom was born to hurt. All the family craziness was thrown into the awful country behind his eyes. The rest of us could teach one another what there was to know about sadness, but Tom would teach us all we needed to know about tragedy. He tore our hearts out and left an indissoluble emptiness in his place. From Tom, we accepted the black scar that would carry us through the rest of our lives. In the middle of one of the hottest days in August of 1994, something set off one of Tom’s convulsive rages. Tom walked to a fourteen-story building in Columbia, took the elevator to the roof, and hurled himself into the summertime air until his body exploded against the pavement below. Among his brothers and sisters, we still barely mention Tom’s name, even though he killed himself almost two decades ago. He was only thirty-four years old.
There is a business side to a sudden death that none of us could imagine. At five in the morning at my home on Fripp Island where I now lived, I received a phone call from my brother Mike. Mike was weeping as he told me the devastating news. He had been Tom’s caretaker in Columbia who watched over him with heroic forbearance, often bailing Tom out of jail or taking him to the mental hospital when Tom refused to take his medicine. Mike made sure Tom had all the food he needed, stocking the apartment Dad had bought for Tom. He shepherded Tom and looked out for his needs. Tom’s suicide devastated my brother Mike; his crying was earned, and deeply so.
“Tom’s dead,” Mike said the early morning when he called me; then he wept for several minutes. “He leaped off a building in Columbia. Dead when he hit the ground. You know that Jean’s cousin runs a funeral home in Lexington? Because it’s so hot and the body was so mangled, he declared it ‘a disaster body.’ ”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “We’ve got to make sure all the kids get here. Have you called Carol?”
“Yeah. That was fun. Let me warn you, Pat: After she went out of her mind, she kept repeating that she was the only one who truly loved Tom.”
“I know the drill,” I said. Then Mike and I cried together, both of us breaking down at the thought of Tom’s last minute on earth … for his helplessness, his agony that we could never touch or share with him—our carelessness in how we loved him, because we discovered ourselves raised in a family where no one showed us how to love. For us, love was a circle and a labyrinth; all its passages and cul-de-sacs found themselves guarded by monsters of our own creation. Within us, love grew as slowly as stalactites in a cave, formed by calcite drips of water, one drop at a time. We had lost Tom, and I believe every one of us felt that his loss came from a failure of our family’s capacity to rally anyone into a safe harbor where one could rest a disabled self. I believe that Mike and I wept because we could not love Tom enough. Mike was wrong about that, however. He did everything for my youngest brother. I had not done a thing for the kid my whole life except to step on his face.
When I composed myself enough to speak, I asked Mike, “What about Dad? My God, he’s gonna take this hard. He had a real soft spot for Tom.”
“It was awful telling Dad,” Mike said. “He’s driving down from Atlanta. Wait a minute, Pat. He’s pulling into my yard right now. It’ll take him a while to get inside. He’s slowing down bad.”
Dad needed both hips replaced, but carried a mortal fear of the surgeon’s knife and the loss of control under anesthesia. He would die limping, as all his sons will do in their time. When he finally reached Mike’s phone, Dad was crying. I let Dad’s tears come until he composed himself enough to speak.
“I’m so sorry about Tom,” I said, and then I broke again.
Dad waited for me to finish, then said, “Tom was my baby. My baby boy, Pat. He never had a chance, not a fighting chance at doing anything. Tom always got the short end of the stick.”
“What are we going to do about the funeral?” I asked. “It sounds like we have to work fast.”
“I’ve got a call in to my brother Jim,” Dad said. “I want him to conduct the funeral service. He’ll be assisted by the local parish priest. We’re burying him in Beaufort so that he’ll be near his mother.”
“Dad, the Catholic Church used to teach that suicides went to hell,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any of that shit, or we’re going to be burying some priests alongside Tom.”
“The church changed on that,” Dad told me. “They understand mental illness now.”
“I’m happy to hear it,” I said.
“I’m coming down to Beaufort as soon as I leave Mike’s,” he said. “I’ll stay with Kathy and Bobby Joe. Can you put up the other kids and their families at Fripp?”
“Send all of them out here,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of room. If you think of anything else I can do, please let me know.”
“Can you cook for everybody?” Dad asked, then added, “I’d like to order shrimp and grits, Frogmore stew, and maybe some of your crab cakes.”
“Consider it done,” I said. “Do you need me to pick anyone up at the airport?”
“I’ll let you know. This all happened so fast, I’ve had trouble getting my old bearings. It’s a decision-making time, and I find myself unable to make any kind of decision.”
“Rely on your kids,” I said.
“I’m going to rely on Kathy when I get to Beaufort,” Dad said. “You’ve always been a hothead, and no one can depend on you in these kinds of situations.”
“Try not to do that until after the funeral,” I suggested.
“Do what?” he demanded.
“Divide your children. Set up wedges between us. There’s going to be enough pressure on everyone, Dad. Try to forget you’re an asshole for the next forty-eight hours, okay?”
Again, Dad burst into tears, and I wished I hadn’t said those nasty words to him. But I said them and regretted them as soon as they came out of my mouth. But the family was on its way now, bursting with grief and powerlessness as we gathered to bury the most delicate among us.
The wick of the fire burned fast and hot as we tried to coordinate the arrival of family and friends into Beaufort. Kathy and Dad bought a coffin and a grave site at Copeland Funeral Home. It was a natural part of small-town life that we went to the funeral director whose wife Judy had been in Gene Norris’s English class with me. Mr. Norris, who had been my favorite teacher at Beaufort High School, came over often during the short but incandescent hours it took to get Tom’s body into the ground. Some of the Chicago relatives came, but the only one I remember was Father Jim, who would serve as chief celebrant of the mass for the dead and deliver the eulogy in praise of Tom’s life. Dad’s kids almost revolted when we heard that news. Father Jim was not just a mediocre speaker; he could put a colony of hummingbirds to sleep. Not only had Father Jim beaten me up when I was a ten-year-old kid, he had also slapped around some of the other brothers. He was not a popular choice.
But Jim was Dad’s brother, and Dad got to make all the calls when it came to the burial of Tom. None of us had ever witnessed our dad so undone and pathetic as he whimpered his way through the long hours before Tom’s funeral. The rest of the family had slipped into our own collective state of shock, with Mike and Tim too disturbed to do anything but suffer with open-faced grief.
Tim and his wife, Terrye, came down the semicircular drive beneath the palmetto forest I adored at the Fripp house. After we had hugged one another and cried into one another’s arms, Tim said one word: “Liquor.”
Pointing the way, I said, “There’s plenty more where that came from.”
“I can’t think of any other way to get through this,” said Tim through tears.
“Drugs,” said Terrye, and we all laughed.
Then the ladies of Fripp Island began to show up with hams and fried chicken, shrimp gumbo, pies, cakes, and congealed salads. They brought enough food to feed the entire family for a week, and I came close to weeping each time one of these splendid women brought something to feed my hurt family. Because I’d been so prone to breakdown for so long, I had kept a low profile on Fripp and didn’t know whether people even knew I lived there. They did. They turned out in droves to bring food as we tried to deal with the terrible death of our brother whose body had exploded on a Columbia street. Among those ladies who brought food, I watched Kathy leading my grief-stricken sister Carol Ann across Remora Drive. “Something horrible this way comes,” I said.
Behind me Tim said, “More liquor. Less food.”
I had not seen Carol Ann for ten years, not since she issued me my walking papers out of her life after Mom’s death. Periodically, she would write me a letter extorting money out of me. My friend Bernie Schein remembers one that I handed him while I was on the phone calling Carol Ann at her apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. It stunned Bernie that Carol Ann threatened to cut her own throat if I didn’t send her five thousand dollars. On the phone, I told Carol Ann that I’d send the check through FedEx when I got off the phone. Bernie was screaming at me, “You can’t put up with that kind of blackmail! That’s awful for Carol and awful for you!”
“But I know she won’t slit her throat for a while,” I said.
“How many letters do you get like that?” Bernie asked.
“It’s down to two or three a year,” I said. “Usually she hits up Dad.”
“Does he give in to her demands, too?” Bernie asked.
“The power of suicide is enormous and Carol knows it,” I replied. “She understands how to manipulate all the airways of guilt. She uses her childhood as a weapon against us.”
“Would Peg have fallen for her bullshit?” Bernie asked.
“From Mom, Carol wouldn’t have gotten one nickel with an Indian butt-fucking a buffalo on it. Peg would’ve laughed her ass off and told Carol never to call her again with that line of bullshit.”
“Be like Peg,” Bernie suggested. “You’re setting a terrible precedent for Carol. You and your dad are both turning her into an asshole.”
“She’s crazy, Bernie, and she’s mean,” I explained. “She’s learned to be an asshole all by herself.”
There lives a ferocious narcissist in the heart of the psychotic that unravels the family circle. By taking on the role of madness after Tom proved that his own had the capacity to create the empty space that would torment us all for the rest of our lives, Carol Ann assumed Tom’s mantle of suffering for herself. With unbecoming zeal, Carol Ann took her rightful place as the one most hurt in the family sweepstakes. From that day on, she could manipulate all of us, because we lived in the immortal shadow of the Cornell Arms Apartments, where Tom had leaped into the black Carolina night. Carol Ann could wield her madness like a sword that could find our arterial blood in thin air. Tom became an undone prince in the tarot deck she invented out of her own troubled soul and used to keen effect against us. Because Carol Ann had no use for redemption, she brought her glittering powers of malice to Tom’s funeral. Not only did we have to deal with the aftershocks of Tom’s death, we had to listen to Carol Ann’s skewed reasons why it happened. It would turn out to be worse than we could imagine.
When I opened the door to greet Carol Ann, I saw that she had assumed the role of chief mourner, the only one in the shallow Conroy family who could understand the vastness of Tom’s despair. She would show us every pathway and lane that crisscrossed the country of the psychotic. She wore her trouble like a series of merit badges that she displayed on a sleeve of heraldry. Carol Ann had come south to drive us all nuts, and she did a commendable job of it.
In the decade of the nineties, I was having breakdowns at regular intervals and was suicidal much of the time. My divorce from Lenore had nearly broken me, and I was just beginning to realize that I would most probably never see my beloved daughter Susannah again. With the direction and help of Dr. Marion O’Neill, I was managing to keep myself alive. When Carol Ann learned about my war against depression, she pooh-poohed it as some amateur version of the real thing. She and Tom held monopoly on the psychic pain produced by the far-flung craziness of our family.
Even as I write these words criticizing Carol Ann, I find myself filling up with apprehension and dread. Her talismanic powers over me extended into the deepest realms of self. The Family Crazy has complete control of any family’s hard-earned serenity. Carol Ann had threatened suicide so many times it became as rote to me as a weather report in South Carolina calling for high temperatures in the summer. But I write this with pure certainty that Carol Ann will turn these words into the bituminous fire of her anger. When she reads this, will I get a call that Carol Ann has leaped from a building in New York, set herself on fire, hanged herself in a closet, or cut her wrists until her body is bloodless and accusatory and something I have to live with the rest of my life?
Since I remain the primary eyewitness to the hallucinatory epic of her childhood, I know that my parents left her on the shores as part of the wreckages of their own past. Both of them hated Carol Ann’s originality, her otherness, the poet who threw fistfuls of words like a bright bird of paradise. Her mind was a traveling circus of marvels and magic-making, and my parents never saw it. Carol Ann had arrived at a house full of grief, but hers was the only one that counted.
I opened the door to Carol Ann, and her face was like a mirror that could only receive images of Tom. His death now lived in her face and her swollen eyes. Tom belonged to her now. She would become the self-appointed keeper of the flame. But her expression was a mass of inconsolable anguish. We hugged on the porch, bonding for a lot of diffe
rent reasons. I walked her from the door in tears. For a while we just cried together over Tom and for all of us.
When Carol Ann got control of herself, she looked at me and said, “God, Tom hated your guts. He always called you his kidnapper, his abductor. He never forgave you for forcing him to go to Bull Street.”
“It wasn’t my finest hour,” I said.
She shook her head. “Tom said you were worse than Dad, and that’s the worst thing someone can say about another person.”
“Tom scared me,” I said. “I thought he might do something terrible to himself—like jump off a building.”
“Tom had nothing to do with jumping off that building,” she said. “Everyone in the family conspired to throw him to his death. It was a long time in coming, but all of us are responsible for his being there.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Tom and I were very close. We talked to each other by phone all the time. He hated you the worst, then Dad, and he was starting to really hate Mike’s guts.”
“Mike took care of Tom on a daily basis, Carol. Don’t say a word to Mike,” I pleaded. “He may never get over this.”
“I’ll suffer for this more than anyone in the Conroy family, but I’ll keep Tom’s memory alive with my art, with my poems to honor him.”
“If you can, Carol, try to be easy on us. The next couple of days are going to be tough on everybody,” I said.
“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.”