The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (30 page)

“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 into 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.

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.

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.

Except for Mike and Tim, we had done little for Tom alive, but his death was a stake through all of our hearts. Instead of making us forget our past, it made us remember it in clear detail. We punished ourselves for not knowing Tom better. Whatever wars he fought within himself, he provided us with no access, no way of easing his torment in a world that was hostile to people like him. We beat ourselves up for not providing a safer hermitage for Tom, but all of us were uncomfortable trying to find answers for one another.