The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (36 page)

Yet the centerpiece of the entire photograph will be Chris Cinque, with her slight Mona Lisa smile as she sits separated by a resilient sea of Conroys from her lover, Carol Ann. Though they broke up more than thirty years ago, I still love the moment when a distant cousin or an old friend tries to match the fresh faces in the photograph with the older faces we now carry around with us. Most of them can identify every one of them with a little bit of help, but they’re flummoxed by the mysterious stranger who anchors the left flank of the photo.

Though I’ve told this story hundreds of times over the years, I never cracked the case about what Stanny meant by saying that Carol Ann had “never even been to Beirut.” Years later, when I took Stanny to lunch at Morrison’s Cafeteria in Atlanta, she and I were talking about the family when she brought up the subject of Carol Ann and her love life.

“She don’t still insist on calling her own self a lesbian, does she now?” Stanny asked.

“She sure does,” I said. “And it’s still a sensitive subject with her.”

“Does she now? Well, she’s making a fool of herself if you happen to ask me.” Stanny ate her food as slowly as a manatee. Then she said again, “Carol’s never been to Beirut.”

“What do you mean by that, Stanny?” I said. “Who cares if you’ve been to Beirut or not?”

“Pat, it only makes sense if you look at it literally. Only people who’re from Lebanon can be real lesbians.”

I hollered with laughter and drew some unwanted attention to our table. “I get it, Stanny. I finally get it. Growing up in Piedmont, they taught you that people from Lebanon were called lesbians.”

“That’s what they’re called everywhere,” Stanny said, not giving an inch. “It’s not just Piedmont. Carol’s people are Scotch-Irish on my side of the family and pure Irish on your daddy’s side. She needs to learn these things, needs to study a little geography.”

•   •   •

Following Chris northward, Carol Ann audited courses at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where Chris majored in the theater arts. Moving to Minneapolis afterward, both established themselves in the arts community of that good-hearted city. Carol Ann’s drift out of our family circle became almost complete, even though I took my young daughters to vacation with my sister and Chris at the north shore of Lake Superior for three summers in a row. During our last summer there, Carol Ann informed me that she would no longer call herself Carol Ann, that no one in the cutthroat world of poetry would take a double-named Southern woman seriously.

Eventually, Carol Ann and Chris drifted apart, and all the Conroys mourned the loss of Chris. Carol Ann moved to start a new life in the New York poetry world, and has befriended poets as distinguished as Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell. Her family sees her now at funerals and weddings, but she mostly spends her time in the East Village, where the smells of curry and tandoori chicken spice the air leading to the East River. Though Carol Ann was born with a greater verbal gift than I possess, her poems form as slowly as Ming vases in her cunning hands. Her light-infused poems are webs of silk and gossamer. She condenses the Conroy freight down to a cell of light and a pearl of black sorrow.

Basically, Carol Ann has not talked to me since the death of our mother in 1984, and our brother ten years later. Though I don’t like the silence that has sprung up between us, I know it’s all part of living a high-strung and troubled life. It’s also a part of being the brother of a poet.

When I grew up, I found the word “father” to be an obscenity. Dad’s cruelty was a mass of the catechumens for me, a religious protocol that became confused in my mind with the unimaginable suffering of the Catholic martyrs. I confused God the father with the terrible reign of suffering that the Great Santini brought to the art of fathering. He bewildered his children by failing to know a single one of us. Then, after Tom’s suicide, he seemed to understand in a sudden rush of prescience and light how desperately he needed us.

My mother’s divorcing him had torn my father apart. None of us quite knew how crazy in love he was with Peg. The completeness and integrity of that devotion came to us only in the shock of her leavetaking. His face was dark with her abandonment for the rest of his life. Though he expressed great puzzlement over her dereliction of duty, I tried to make her reasons clear to him when he arrived for his daily coffee at my apartment on Maddox Drive in Atlanta from 1976 to 1980, when we lived near each other.

“Why’d you beat her up?” I’d ask him in the privacy of my living room.

“I never touched your mother in her life,” he said. “That’s bullshit you made up to sell your books.”

“I remember lots of times you slapped her around,” I said. “So does she.”

“When people invent lies about you,” Dad said, “what’re you supposed to do? How do you go about protecting yourself?”

“Admit you did it,” I said. “Come clean, Dad. Confession is good for the soul. That’s what our silly-ass church preaches.”

“Kathy doesn’t think I ever touched your mother,” he said. “She thinks you made it all up.”

“Why did she testify under oath that you beat Mom up, then?” I asked. “She was the only one of your kids to testify against you in the divorce case. I’m still ashamed of myself for not telling the court what a prick you’d been.”

“I could’ve sued you for character assassination for that shitty book you wrote about me,” he said.

“I get the night sweats when you make threats like that, Dad.”

He laughed and said, “The only reason I hold off on litigation, jocko, is my love for the magnificent seven, my great bunch of kids. Remember, high culture came out of my joint. Two writers out of seven kids—it ain’t bad. And remember, too, I fathered a poet. I’m betting that Carol kicks your ass when all is said and done. She thinks you write for the poor idiot who reads just to pass the time away. She and her friends have much higher aspirations. To tell you the truth, I think your sister’s really onto something. I like her poetry a hundred times better than your prose, which I personally think is horseshit.”

“Dad, I’m impressed you’re so enamored with her poetry. May I ask you to name your favorite poem she’s written?”

“I’ve got to think,” Dad said. “I love all her shit.”

“Just name one, proud father of poets,” I said.

Dad began to laugh. He had a wonderful laugh when he was caught in the open, after carrying a conversation to a height he couldn’t come down from. He delighted in speaking about his passion for literature, but loved even more when he found himself exposed as a preening, empty vessel.

For the rest of his life, I would listen to Dad give his saturnine view of books he’d never read and poetry he never knew existed. By then,
Dad thought of himself as a literary figure, a surprise ranking that no one enjoyed more than he did.

In those years, I said terrible things to my father. When I think about the things I said to Don Conroy, I understand that I shamed myself with my own immense capacity for a murderous litany of the crimes he committed against his family. To his credit, Dad absorbed these daily attacks with patience and alacrity. Some days I was pouring it on with such violence that I found myself standing over him, screaming. Though I was trying to unleash the dark secrets he carried inside him, I was letting myself display a bloodletting portrait of the scar tissue covering my own soul. By holding my father accountable, I was offering irrefutable proof that I was his most violent son. By confronting Dad, I exposed myself and my flawed, incorrect view of myself as a softer, more sensitive version of my father.

My rage would engulf me and I’d lose my temper so many times, I failed to bring any relief to the existential suffering that overwhelmed me. So many times, I exhausted myself. I found hatred leaching me of both energy and hope. When I finished and collapsed back again in my chair, my anger was spent for the day. Dad waited for my seizures of spirit to run their course; then he would break his own code of silence and say, “Is the morning lecture over, sports fans? Surely you can drum up one more a-trocity that your poor old dad used to torture his poor family with. Surely there’s something you’ve left out. Maybe I popped you on the fanny after you practiced for First Communion. There must be something you left out.”

“I’ll think of it tomorrow,” I said.

“You make me out to be some o-gree. The other kids think you’re full of crap. Though it goes against my better nature, I’ve got to believe my other kids are onto something. Carol says you’ve got a bad case of writer’s angst,” Dad said.

“What do you mean by ‘angst’?” I asked him.

“Ha, thought you had me on that one,” Dad said, roostering with pleasure. “Angst is what a writer feels when he can’t write worth a shit.”

Always Dad could bring an end to these morning matinees by making me laugh. He had an instinct for deflating a pretentious quality I
brought to my complaints. Though I thought I was calling on my father to defend and explain himself, Dad outlasted me by the stubbornness he brought to denial. Never once did he admit to abusing us. Nor do I think I ever lit a fire on his shallow trench of emotions. He would listen to my grievances with a disinterested look in his cornflower-blue eyes—those extraordinary eyes that brought nightmares to the daydreams of North Korean infantry trying to establish bridgeheads on rivers whose names meant nothing to Americans. There was something staunch and heroic about his reaction to my version of the story of our life. I thought during these overcaffeinated sessions that I’d uncover every flaw in his line of defense. Instead, faced with his steadfastness, I exposed every single thing I hated about myself. On leaving, Dad would say, “Same time tomorrow. Try to work up some new material, jocko.”

It was during those years that I discovered parts of our life I could tell Dad that would delight him. To my absolute dismay, I seemed to be one of the only members of my family who recalled anything of our history together. What the Conroys brought to memory was all erasure and blank slates. But I remembered some happy or funny times that pleased Dad.

“Do you remember the time you were in the bathroom and our box turtle moved out to crawl on your shoe? You screamed like a python had wrapped around your leg.”

“Give a guy a break. Your mother and you were village weirdos about bringing beasts into the old domicile,” Dad said. “I was a city boy, and I thought your mother was nuts about snakes and shit like that.”

My mother had a fixation on snakes that I remember from a very young age. Because I was close to Grandpa Peek, I knew a lot about my mother’s upbringing in the primitive Baptist Church. She never mentioned the Baptist Church when she raised her seven children, and it remained an area of obscurity in our spiritual makeup.

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.