The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (11 page)

“Why do you hate me, son?” he asked. “Just why do you hate me so goddamn much?”

“Keep reading, Dad; please keep reading. You’ve got to get to the last line. It’s all in the last line.”

“It’s the shittiest book I’ve ever read,” Dad said. “You ain’t worth a crap as a writer. That’s my humble opinion.”

“Thanks, Dad. Just keep reading the book. Finish it.”

Two hours later Dad called again. This time he was sobbing so badly I couldn’t understand a word he was trying to say. He began hiccuping, then blubbering again, and finally broke into a high-pitched wail of indiscriminate anguish. The hardest, toughest man I had met in the Marine Corps roared out in unarticulated pain because of words I had hurled against him. Finally, he gained control over himself and whimpered, “What’s my mother gonna think?”

“I don’t know what your mama’s going to think. I don’t know the
woman. I’ve seen her two or three times in my life. She’s never written me, called me, asked me a question, or sent me a gift. She wouldn’t know me if she passed me in the streets of Chicago. And that goes for your daddy, too. I don’t know a single thing about any of your Chicago relatives. But I imagine I’ll start hearing from all of them soon.”

And hear from them I did.

I believe the first to check in was Father Jim Conroy, who was furious from the first word out of his mouth to the last. He called me a Southern sack of shit, and a perverted ingrate who had eaten one too many bowls of grits in my morose, father-hating life. He was going to send his copy of the book to my mother’s people in Piedmont so they could use it in their outhouses. He wished my father had beaten me up a lot more, because I deserved it.

After his rant, I said, “Father Jim, remember that wonderful summer fishing trip you took me on when I was ten? You beat me more that summer than my dad did. I ain’t ten anymore, Father Jim. Come beat me up now, big fella, and I’ll send you back north in a body bag.”

My grandmother called and bawled me out, followed by my grandfather, who told me if I really wanted to learn how to write to read James Fenimore Cooper. “It’s all there, Pat. It’s all there.”

Sister Marge checked in, as did Aunt Mary, Uncle Willie, Uncle Jack—everyone but Uncle Ed, Dad’s youngest brother.

To my complete astonishment, my mother and her family started checking in with their own barrage of literary criticism. My mother’s reaction was the most devastating.

“Nice going, Pat. You managed to destroy your entire family’s good reputation. Your father will walk like a leper in whatever town he is in. I won’t be able to show my face in Beaufort for the rest of my life. Your brothers and sisters will have to move out of state and change their names. We’re ruined, son. You stabbed your own family right through the heart.”

“Mom,” I said, “do you remember when we read Thomas Wolfe’s biography, and what you said to me after his family and town went nuts about
Look Homeward, Angel
? You said you’d be proud if one of your children ever wrote about your family.”

“You know I didn’t mean it,” she said. “I hate your portrait of me.”

“If the book has one great flaw, it’s that your character is flawless, way too good to be true.”

“To me, Lillian Meecham was a sappy, tacky, spineless creature, not the fighter you know me to be. Lillian set my teeth on edge every time she opened her mouth.”

“Listen to me,” I pleaded. “I wrote about you the way I saw you as a boy. To me you were the most beautiful, loving woman on earth. That image of you got me through our god-awful family. I had to make Lillian perfect, because that’s how I looked up to you as a boy.”

“Then you’re just a lousy writer. A shallow one, too,” she said.

“My God, Mom,” I said, flabbergasted by her blindside hit on everything that was most significant to me. Because my mother was so well read, she knew exactly how to wound the heart of a young, insecure writer, and her appraisal was uncompromising.

Finally, she ended her critique with a summing-up. “Here’s why you really stink as a writer, Pat. You gave that book to
him
. You gave
him
center stage, the starring role. You had
him
rule that house. Let me tell you a secret, son—I ruled that house and everything that went on in it. I could make him dance like a puppet whenever I wanted. I was the power in that house. I was the boss and the chief of police in every town we entered. You just weren’t a good enough writer to see who was really in charge.”

“I know what you’re saying. Since I grew up, I can see you as a much more complicated woman than I ever realized. I know that now. But for this book, I had to paint a flawless portrait of you. For me, just for me. I know about the enigmatic you, the dangerous you. I know all about that, Mom, and I promise that I’ll deal with that darker woman sometime down the road.”

Mom’s mother, Stanny, checked in the next evening with her own dismissal of my novel. She began by telling me, “Pat, your father was the most wonderful husband and father I’ve ever met, and I’ve been on five world cruises. I’ve circumnavigated the globe five times.”

“Not you, too, Stanny,” I said, furious.

“Now, don’t you forget it was me who bought you
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
when you graduated from high school. Also
Ulysses
,
by Mr. James Joyce,” she defended herself. “I got me some credibility in the old literary game.”

“Tell me the truth. Did Dad call and whine to you?” I asked.

“You hurt him terribly,” Stanny said. “He’ll never get over it. What do your brothers and sisters say?”

“They haven’t checked in yet. Thank God,” I said.

“I loved one part of the book,” she said.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard these words. Tell me what pleased you.”

“I loved every bit about Alice Sole, the sixty-three-year-old mother of Lillian Meecham, except her part is far too short. I think you should concentrate on her completely when you write the next book. I’d make a great novel.”

“You’re an egomaniac, Stanny. So you loved the part about you, but you join forces with my enemy family to torment me.”

“Your mother called me too. I think she’s angrier than Don. She thinks the whole book should’ve been all about her,” Stanny said.

“My whole family is a bunch of narcissists,” I said with a sigh.

Then my father disappeared from Atlanta, and it began to be a major concern for all his family as his self-imposed exile stretched to three days and counting. I called Jim Townsend, the founder of
Atlanta
magazine, and he put in calls to the police chief and the mayor. At night, I would drive around Dad’s old haunts, and even ate breakfast with his running buddies at the Darlington to see if I could coax any stray information from them. But they were as deeply concerned as I was. Lou Lipsitz said, “You might as well face it, Pat: Your book probably made your dad go kamikaze. I bet he rented a Piper Cub and flew it into a mountain in North Georgia.”

“Shut up, Lou,” I said, and resumed my search, but that afternoon my uncle Willie called a second time. “Nice going, Pat. We think Don went off somewhere to kill himself.”

My sister Carol Ann had read an earlier version of
The Great Santini
that I had brought her the previous summer that she had spent fighting off the madness that the family had bequeathed to both of us. When she finished it, she told me I had restored her childhood to her, that her own survival depended on repressing those same memories
that I recorded in the novel. I had given her back a childhood voice that she had lost somewhere when we followed Dad from base to base. She thought I had captured exactly the way that terrible family felt as she was growing up in it—in the discordance and bristling tension of living an impossible life.

My brothers have always remained the solid citizens of my realm when it came to my defense of my portrait of Dad. I could not ask for more valiant safekeepers of my point of view. They were quick to the fight and articulate from the start. Mike, Jim, and Tim have faced a squad of doubters and naysayers about the accuracy of my memories. From the first, my brothers leaped to the front line of defense and backed me up a hundred percent from the day of publication until the present day. There may have been a lot wrong with my childhood, but I was born into a round table of knightlike brothers. It took my sister Kathy many years to make her own complex peace with the novel. Carol Ann’s long rearguard war against me had not commenced, but she was already sharpening her arrows in secret and concealing weaponry in false drawers and hidden cupboards of her troubled soul. Carol Ann had developed a hazardous talent for searching out the most scrofulous shrinks on earth, who in their breathtaking banality would convince her of their superiority and genius. She let them cut her out of the family like the removal of a malignancy that could not be named. But that secret war was yet to begin, and there was still no sign of Dad.

The reaction of the Chicago Irish part of the family held no surprises for me, except it startled me that all of them seemed to have read the book. Chicago was uncharted territory for me. In some interior way, I knew this tempest was tribal in nature, but I had barely met the tribe and knew nothing about their customs and ceremonies. But their phone calls infuriated me, and that was when I was beginning to learn that I could plead ignorant to all things Irish, but Ireland lived deeply inside of me, a fierce and intransigent resident in my bloodstream. Ireland has always ridden coach to the South in my fog-bound family history. But I was learning all the anger and hurt of the Irish immigration as they banded up against me in defense of one of their own. Though I lashed back in fury, their loyalty impressed the hell out of me.

That my Southern family felt much the same affection for Dad
and that no one but my brothers believed in my caustic portrait of him astonished me. Surely they had witnessed attacks on my mother and his kids over the years. But when I thought hard about it, I could come up with no instances when I could remember Mom getting slapped at Aunt Helen’s dinner table or Dad knocking his sons around when we were visiting Aunt Evelyn’s house in Jacksonville. Stanny or Grandpa Peek would visit for months at a time during my childhood, but I could come up with no centering image of violence when they were resident in our many different houses. I now believe that my mother invited Stanny and her father for extended visits because it provided a measure of safety for her and her kids.

Before my father returned from his long sulk, the calls in his defense came rolling in from all my Southern kin—Uncle Russ issued a complaint, as did Uncle Joe and my beloved Aunt Helen. It occurred to me that there was some uncanny genius at work in my father’s perfection of child and spousal abuse. He did it in the dark, like a roach crossing the kitchen floor at night. He slapped Mom in towns where they knew barely a soul. I would most often get slapped when he picked me up from football, basketball, and baseball practices, but strangers rarely saw that, and a kid was the last person believed in the American society of the fifties. My father had kept his abuse secret by mostly confining it to the fortresses of family routine. But as the days wore on, the calls got harsher and harsher. It was my uncle Willie who first called me a liar, and I blasted him with a surge of vitriol that proved my own Irishness to him once and for all. But he’d hit the central nervous system with the phrase that would send me spinning out of control. I was a liar who had invented a series of lies to wound this good and tender man—some perversity inside me made me invent tales of wife beating and tantrums that never happened except in the imagination of a most ungrateful son. I’d made it all up and sold out my father for the price of a book.

My father returned to Atlanta a week after he left town. He had heard his family had turned on me hard, and he handed me a letter when I opened the front door to him at my house on Briarcliff Road.

“Read any good books lately?” I asked as we shook hands.

“A piece of worthless shit that I stomped on and threw across the room,” he said. “Read my letter.”

The letter was an open one sent out to all the members of his family and my mother’s as well: