The Death of Santini

by Pat Conroy

  By marrying a Catholic, my mother had chosen a surefire way to alienate every member of her Piedmont clan and many of the Southern civilians who worked at the bases where Dad flew his fighter planes. After an apprenticeship in the octopus grip of Catholic nuns, we knew for certain our mother didn’t know a single thing about the church she had joined as a very young woman. It was not until I was at The Citadel that the thought occurred to me that my mother had grown up in a sect of snake handlers.

  We were living in Manassas, Virginia, when I was three and Carol Ann was one. Mom and Dad were walking on the rocks of a pristine river with a hardwood forest growing to the border of the mountain-fed stream. Carol Ann was riding piggyback on my father. With my father I watched as Mom knelt down and lifted a snake from the river. She held it up and displayed it to my father. “Don, be careful. Don’t move. This is a cottonmouth moccasin. It can kill all of us with one bite. Watch out. We must’ve stumbled on a nest of them. Look, they’re all around us.”

  Snake heads appeared close to every rock. I heard my father scream once, then take off over the rocks toward the shore, as nimble as a ballerina. My mother laughed so hard that I thought we’d both fall into the swift-moving stream. As he made his way back to the car, Dad was still screaming, and I watched Carol Ann bobbing up and down, gamely holding on to my father’s ears. It was the same week that a filly turned around and bit my leg in a moment that made me forever afraid of horses. As a teenager, when I asked Mom about the story of the river, we both laughed at the memory. Mom admitted she’d lied about the cottonmouth moccasins. Instead, the snakes were nonvenomous water snakes, but to her constant joy, all snakes to Don were deadly killers whose bites could take even the strongest Marine to the ground.

  Over the years, and especially in the inviolate forest behind our apartment in Cherry Point, I could find my mother an unlimited number of snakes. In a boyhood of overturned logs and hidden nests, I brought my mother a series of snakes she used to terrorize my father with when he returned home from his squadron. Once I scored with a copperhead, another time with a very angry rattlesnake, and finally, in the pièce de résistance of my serpent-hunting career, I brought home a deadly coral snake from the pinelands of Florida when we were visiting Uncle Russ’s house in Pierson.

  In my mom’s favorite story about Dad’s flying career, he crash-landed a Corsair on an abandoned airfield near New Bern, North Carolina. His cockpit was on fire, so Dad leaped out on his left wing to escape the burning plane. He saw two rattlesnakes lying close to where he was about to land. In his fear of snakes, he ran back through the burning cockpit and saved himself by leaping off the right wing and racing through the overgrown runway to the woods. Snakes became Mom’s amulet against my father’s explosiveness. He could slap her and she would run to my closet to pull out my snake-for-the-day that I had to release the next day where I found it. But twice, I remember observing scenes of Mom chasing Dad out of the house as she held a harmless grass snake as though it were a razor-sharp cutlass.

  Later, I began to wonder whether the handling of snakes in the mountain country of Alabama was part of some elemental climax of her Sunday services. It might very well be true. When I was doing family research for this book, I stumbled across a great-grandfather who was pastor of a church on Sand Mountain, Alabama, which is the heart of the legendary mountaineers whose faith is so strong they lift rattlesnakes into the shaking air of faith and know that their passion for the Lord would protect them from the venom of all the diamond-headed snakes brought in to test the borderlines of their belief. I believe now that my mother was raised in such a church, but she left all that behind her when she became a Roman Catholic.

  • • •

  As the years went by, I thought the Santini wars were over for good when they roused themselves for one more showdown. In the early 1990s, I was living in San Francisco when my father fired off the latest retort from the fields of rancor. Barbra Streisand’s movie version of The Prince of Tides was about to hit the multiplexes around the nation. It was a very difficult time in my life. I could feel that phantom ship of madness pull into port to harm me again. My beloved stepdaughter Emily had entered into her own period of breakdown and had tried to kill herself on several occasions. My marriage to Lenore was falling apart, and I didn’t believe my good friend Tim Belk would live for another year. I was in the middle of writing Beach Music, the book that would bring my depression to bright fruition and send my life reeling off balance once again. In September of 1991, my father called me. His tone of buoyancy and gloating told me he had scored what he believed was a major victory in the cultural wars between us.

  “You seen the new Atlanta magazine, pal? You might as well start waving a flag of surrender. I won the race. I won the sweepstakes. Vince Coppola exposes you for the lying asshole you really are. People’ve been calling from everywhere. My fellow Marines are over the top that you’ve finally been given your due, and everyone in Atlanta knows about the sack of shit you’ve become. But I’ve got a big heart, and I’ll humbly accept your apology if you’re on your knees when you give it.”

  “Gosh, Daddikins,” I said from my home office in San Francisco, “you sound like you’re reborn. Now calm down and explain your hysteria to me.”

  “No one’s gonna believe a word you write after they read this shit.”

  Dad had bought so many copies of the magazine to send to friends and relatives, it took him nearly a week to find one to send to me.

  Vince Coppola, a journalist I had met several times in the Newsweek office when I went to lunch with the bureau chief, Vern Smith, had hit upon a lodestone of an idea. I could acknowledge that in the very first reading. Vince Coppola entitled his article “The Great Santini Talks Back.” In the new movie, the father portrayed as an abusive, uneducated shrimper brought back recurrent echoes of the harsh father in The Great Santini. Vince thought it would make a fascinating article that would offer insight into my family’s predicament. As a writer of the family saga, I had become a figure of both enlightenment and betrayal. The brilliance of the article is that Vince gave voice only to Dad, my siblings, and Barbara, my first wife. He had no need for my rebuttal. I’d already had my say and told my story.

  The article begins with the most extraordinary portrait of my father, a stunning photograph by Caroline Joe. If anyone ever doubts my father’s dashing handsomeness, they need to study this photograph, which tells exactly about the bravado of the fighter pilot and his in-your-face aggressiveness as a man. Dad was one good-looking son of a bitch, and he’d dressed up in his tuxedo with his rows of military decorations over his heart. In his left hand he holds a cigar, and in his right, he makes a fist that he theoretically beat my mother with. His smile is a joker’s smile, as though he were laughing at the preposterousness of his son’s work.

  The piece began with the explosive publication of The Great Santini in 1976, and my father’s nuclear response to this event. But soon, my dad was being interviewed on talk shows and panels, “debating his son, arguing the finer points of parenting, and driving a car with a Santini license plate on the front bumper.”

  My sister Kathy said, “He—my father—decided he was going to love being a celebrity. It dawned on him: he could be more famous than Pat.” Then Vince related the story of my writing an introduction to the book by Mary Edward Wertsch called Military Brats, in which I accused Don Conroy by his own name for the first time. “I grew up thinking my father would one day kill me.”

  My father’s retort to this calumny was classic and pure Santini. He was discussing my trouble with writing anything that might resemble the truth of what happened, and said to Vince, “He had an ideal childhood … an ideal childhood. Not even close to being unhappy. He didn’t turn out that bad … one of the best writers in the country.… Pat’s an opportunist. Look at the bottom line. He found out by writing the way he does, he has a captive audience … all the women of America, all the do-gooders, all the bleeding hearts … all the psychiatrists. Th
ey love that kind of crap.”

  When I first read the article in San Francisco, I knew Vince Coppola had given me a priceless gift. Though I had confronted my dad with every single trauma he’d inflicted on his family, I could not get him to admit a thing or to articulate his coward’s mythology of his own history with his family. Gloating and preening for the camera, he strutted his stuff and told his own version of events for the first time. Dad’s mocking disapproval of my book held no surprise for me. Since the publication of The Great Santini, Dad had made a cottage industry out of mocking the book and the unreliable memory of the wanton, father-loathing son who wrote it. In his bottomless naïveté, Dad thought this would be the final word about the whole Santini affair, and that his exoneration from my charges against him would finally happen.

  I got something of real value from the article. I noticed that Vince had not evoked a single response from my brothers, who refused his request for interviews. From the time the book hit town, my brothers had risen up as one to ratify my memories of events that took place in Dad’s fearsome home. Kathy remembered nothing, as I long suspected, and I couldn’t even get a conversation going with Carol Ann, so I knew Vince’s chances were minuscule with her. She didn’t return Vince’s phone call, and I understood that the chief witness to my humiliation would never be called to testify on my behalf. Dad subsidized Carol Ann’s entire writing life, and she had been on his dole since my mother’s death.

  But there was something in the article that shocked me profoundly. My first wife, Barbara, who had always been as articulate as she was pretty, talked about me as a father to our three girls. A frozen piece of tundra calved off and fell into arctic waters as I realized I was going to see my own fathering exposed to the world for the first time. Here are Barbara’s words as they’re recorded for this story:

  “ ‘Don was a wonderful grandfather to my three girls,’ says Barbara Conroy. ‘He never had an angry word for them. He’d come by after school and drive them to dental appointments. He’d take them to Six Flags. He was the only adult I knew who had a season ticket.’ ”

  “What is suggested but left unsaid in the course of the long interview is that Don has proved himself a loving, more involved grandfather than the haunted, overwrought Pat has been a father.”

  “ ‘Pat never laid a hand on them, never yelled,’ Barbara makes clear. ‘He tried to maintain a relationship, but Pat’s very intimidating. He can make you feel like two cents, and if you mess up, he’ll mention it every time for the next 10 years.’ ”

  Barbara’s assessment of me as a husband and a father held up very well to any scrutiny or excuse I could conjure up in defense of my flawed parenting. That I was intimidating is a hard fact and I’d rather not know that about myself. But it stands up strong as the truth of the matter. As the son of Santini and a knife-wielding mountain girl from Alabama, I was born with a fighter’s blood inside me. For my entire life, I tried to control a temper that threatened all the dikes and levees I had set up for the rainy seasons. But my wives and children feared me and trembled at my approach. For me, that was proof that my life had been a failure in all the ways that were important to me. There was a stinging authority in Barbara’s voice, a truthfulness that required no argument or commentary from me. I had wanted to be what I could not become—a good father and husband.

  The article arrived a month before The Prince of Tides had its San Francisco debut. My stepdaughter tried to kill herself twice in that week bedazzled with parties and breakdowns. Once again, I found myself on the outer edge of a crackup of my own; I could feel the engines warming up inside me, and I knew that this one was going to be the worst of all. The task I set for myself was to get through the black voyage of spirit without killing myself. As Emily grew worse and her despair seemed bottomless and untouchable, I tried to ingest her sorrow into myself, thinking I could go to war with the demons that were threatening her life. Instead, my own temporal agony grew worse, and I could feel myself falling into the grave I’d dug for myself. When the festivities were finally over, I fled to Fripp Island and spent the rest of that decade in an act of recovery of spirit that I thought was beyond retrieval.

  That breakdown hunted me down and found paradise in my damaged life as a man.

  I wrote a letter to the editor about Vince Coppola’s article. My father called me as soon as he read my off-the-nose rebuttal of his own story of his family’s life.

  He said, “I can’t figure if you’re more a piece of shit than you are a monkey-assed son of a bitch.”

  “Dad, that hurts my feelings,” I said.

  “You don’t play fair,” he whined. “If you don’t play fair, how does a guy get his two cents in? I mean, this is such high-class bullshit that it leaves me no room to maneuver. I look like an asshole no matter what I say.”

  “You put yourself in a tough position, Dad,” I argued.

  “You’re a sack of shit,” Dad said. “Even my brothers are laughing their asses off at me.”

  “You gave me the opening,” I said. “And aren’t you kind of proud about the way I conducted the fight?”

  “You’re lower than whale dung that sits at the bottom of the sea.”

  My letter to Atlanta magazine:

  I read Vince Coppola’s fascinating piece about my father and was delighted to know I’d been raised, not by the Great Santini, but by St. Francis of Assisi. I thought I was the fiction writer in my family, but even I was breathless when my father described my childhood as though I were the eldest Von Trapp singer in The Sound of Music.

  It hurt when Dad called me “an opportunist” and that I’ve found out by writing the way I do that I have a “captive audience: all the women in America, all the do-gooders, all the bleeding hearts, all the liberals, all the psychiatrists.”

  My self-composure melted like snow when I was confronted by the irrefutable truth of my father’s testimony.

  Don Conroy was nothing like the man I described in The Great Santini. He was much more like Mother Teresa, and I remember him going around the neighborhood repairing the broken wings of songbirds, cooking nutritious meals for shut-ins, coaching wheelchair-bound children for the Special Olympics and cleansing the wounds of lepers with his flight jacket. In his spare time, he also taught Gregorian chant to Down’s syndrome children, ran a softball league for retired Sisters of Mercy, and gathered healthy soul-food recipes for a nursing home full of blind, diabetic black women. He translated these recipes into braille.

  When he first developed the stigmata (the five wounds of Christ appearing on his hands, feet, and side), he could no longer control a flight stick and had to retire from the Marine Corps.

  But I lied about that, too. Dad was never in the Marine Corps. He made his living as a beautician and a manicurist and in his spare time he did Judy Garland impersonations in select clubs around the area. My mother divorced him when he began singing off-key.

  If you believe Dad’s version of my childhood, I thought you might believe anything. But that’s another story.

  Pat Conroy, San Francisco

  Meanwhile, I tried to rush a novel into print. I took inventory of my life and came to the conclusion that I’d been clinically depressed for most if not all of my adult years. I had always wanted to live in San Francisco, but I wanted to love it more after I moved there. My wife, Lenore, got caught up in the whirlpool of high society, a place I had no desire to be a part of, yet I went along with it because Lenore was in the middle of trying to cure something untouchable from the rude childhood she had loathed in Brooklyn. The death of so many friends from AIDS exacted a visible toll on me, and the death of two Southern friends brought me to my knees. On one night, I attended a birthday party for Herb Caen, a journalist I had long revered, at a baronial dance at the Fairmont hotel. And the next day I sat and held the hands of young men who would be dead in a matter of weeks. I went to dozens of fancy-Dan parties in my two years spent on Presidio Avenue. Though I came to that magnificent city for many reasons, I didn�
��t come there to grow shallow.

  Toward the end of my time in that timeless city where the sound of foghorns was as lonely as the cry of gulls, I was struck by a car in the intersection of a four-way stop sign near our house. When I saw that I was going to get hit, I turned my body so my back and buttocks could absorb the blow. I somersaulted over the hood of the car, turned upside down, was cut by the windshield wiper on the cheek, then landed on my feet in some miraculous finish. A woman was driving and her husband started beating her with his fists while screaming that she was a worthless bitch.

  My cue had sounded and I rushed into the breach, banging on the windows and telling the man to stop hitting that woman.

  “I can hit my wife anytime I want to, you nosy bastard,” he yelled back.

  “Get out of here before I start beating you!” I screamed.

  They disappeared and drove toward whatever destiny they were fulfilling. I didn’t get their address or phone number or the make of their car. When I entered the house, I had nothing of proof to memorialize the encounter. But the next two months I spent as an invalid crucified to my bed. The pain immobilized me. When I went to the bathroom, I was in danger of falling every time. Unfortunately for my wife, I learned something deal-breaking about Lenore. Whenever we woke up in the morning, she would ask me whether I felt better. Usually I’d answer, “Worse, I feel much worse.” Without hesitance, Lenore would answer with two words: “Shit,” followed by a quick, explosive, “Fuck.” One of the kids would bring me breakfast, a maid would bring me lunch, and one of the kids would bring me dinner as the sun entered on the soft-gliding slipstream of the fierce Western horizon. For sixty days, I studied the rooftops of San Francisco, which I found as comforting and intricate as latticework. During this drifting, worried time of my life, I continued my vast project of self-improvement and read Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and James Joyce’s unreadable, pretentious novel Finnegans Wake. Both novels stank up the landfill, and I spent the rest of purgatory in the hands of John Fowles and the many pleasures of Daniel Martin, which became one of my favorite books after the forced march in full gear through the impenetrable mangrove swamps of Musil and Joyce.