The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (40 page)

When Dad picked me up from the airport, I was still emotional and exhausted from the trip. We did not speak until Dad turned on Highway 17 to Beaufort.

“Well?” Dad finally said.

I had brought back melancholy and an inspirited sense of hope from the journey, and I said, “Ireland, Dad, poor Ireland.”

“Fuck you,” Dad said.

I laughed out loud and said, “Dad, those two words might make you the greatest philosopher in the history of Ireland.”

“The only thing I regret is that I never got to kill an Ulsterman,” Dad said, his lips a tight line, like a disrupted border.

“I think there’s a chance of peace,” I said. “There’re still a lot of assholes like you on both sides, but there’s a chance.”

“Fuck you. Could you keep up with the ball scores when you were gone?” he asked.

“Yeah, I did, Dad.”

“That’s all that counts,” he said. “I think the Bears’ll be loaded this year.”

“Ireland,” I said to Dad. “It’s an amazing place. You should have let me know, Dad.”

And thus it went between father and son during the last years of his life, when I finally made my own baffled and steadfast peace with Ireland.

When my father retired from the Marine Corps, he took up a hobby that most of his children thought odd, but I found both eerie and uncomfortable. He started collecting photographs and newspaper clippings in large albums he called “the Archives,” or, as it was later referred to in the family, “the Arcs.” Before he died my father had assembled more than two hundred of these overstuffed, chockablock volumes full of history and memorabilia. One thing that caused me deep embarrassment was that because of my own public life, “the Arcs” were heavily weighted toward the record keeping of my career. Though he included everything that he could muster up about my siblings, including class pictures and report cards, my presence in these spilling-out albums of record seemed oceanic and nearly pornographic to me.

“Dad, you’ve got to cut out this monkey business. Eventually it’s going to hurt the kids’ feelings,” I said when he handed his laborintensive handiwork to me.

“The kids love the Arcs as much as I do,” Dad said. “We all like seeing Conroys kicking ass in the world around them.”

“Eventually it’s going to drive Carol nuts,” I argued. “And she’s borne me nothing but ill will since the day I started writing.”

“It’ll encourage her to write more poetry and get her name in the froufrou magazines. That stuff’ll be great for the Arcs.”

“It’s unbalanced,” I protested.

“It’s history,” Dad said.

One reason that Dad’s fixation on the presentation of every interview or article written about me went against my grain was an incident in my senior year at Beaufort High School. Coming back from his squadron, Dad caught me red-handed as I was cutting out an article celebrating the game I’d played against the heavily favored Chicora High School out of Charleston. I’d scored thirty-six points, and an attendance record was set that majestic night. The article was so wonderful that I wanted it as a keepsake. I could look at it forever. Then my father made his surprise entry and caught me in an act of self-worship. He told me never to get the “big head” again or he’d slap it plumb out of me, so I never saved another article. It came as an utter shock that my father was doing it for me. In one of the earlier Arcs I discovered that article of my play against Chicora High, and realized that my father must have cut it out and saved it over many years. This act was not only a surprise; it forced me to look at my father in a far different way.

The Arcs were ambitious in their completion and wholeness of vision. If Mike and Jim came to visit Dad and attend a Braves game, the tickets were recorded with a sardonic commentary from the colonel. Whenever
The New York Times
presented me with bad reviews, my father would remark, “The
New York Times
sure doesn’t like my boy.” When Carol Ann asked for five thousand dollars for a dental emergency, Dad noted that she endured such emergencies each year, then wrote, “That girl has more teeth than a crocodile.” Although my dad was the recording angel of the Arcs, they also emphasized a strange flaw in my father’s character. As I have browsed through the Arcs in researching this book, I discovered that Dad had stolen much of what was in them from my mailbox. He pocketed the letters from big names—a handwritten note from Barbra Streisand, a letter from President Jimmy Carter and two from his wife, Rosalynn. He cadged a letter from Martin Scorsese asking whether I was interested in writing a film for him. At the time I’d have given up the last knuckle on my pinkie finger to work with Mr. Scorsese, but Dad got to the mailbox before I did, and I didn’t see the letter until ten years later. There were letters from agents, editors, and publishers, and one from Alfred A. Knopf telling me that
he and his wife considered
The Prince of Tides
to be a masterpiece. I mention that letter because it could have helped cure the insecurities and incapacitating doubt that every writer brings to the writing table. Many writers think we’re nothing but poseurs and self-aggrandizing impostors, and those thoughts can drive us to destruction and madness. And any writer who claims otherwise is a liar and a bullshit artist whose work should be avoided at all costs.

When work was being done on my house at Fripp in the mid-nineties, I moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and took a place at Longchamps Apartment House with a superb view of the city below. The ghosts of Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald still lingered in the mountain-circled town that was in the rapid process of becoming one of the most enchanting cities in the country. Even in the time I lived there, it was Birkenstock-happy and heading toward a gluten-free paradise. Dad was with me when I laid a rose on Thomas Wolfe’s grave, as I tried to do every time I visited the town on my own.

“I love this man for making me want to be a writer,” I said.

“You’ll never be in his league, son,” Dad said. “As far as I can tell, you’re eating his jock.”

“I don’t care. He brought me to the dance, Dad,” I said, happy that I had led him to this sacred ground to see the fountainhead of my career.

“I bet nobody builds a museum in a house you lived in,” Dad said.

“You’re right, Dad. I lived in twenty houses before I got to Beaufort.”

In the spring of 1996, I received a phone call from my sister Kathy informing me that Dad was in the naval hospital in Beaufort in danger of dying from heart congestion. Though I was dating a wonderful woman in Asheville, Irene Jurzyk, whom I’d known as a writer in Atlanta, my life was moving me south and homeward. Several days before, I’d received a phone call from the son of the late, nonpareil poet James Dickey, who had once taught me in a poetry workshop at the University of South Carolina. I had read Mr. Dickey’s obituary with obsessive interest. I realized that his death was going to establish a backlash against his life and work. His machismo was of an in-your-face variety mostly found in sumo wrestlers or inside linebackers. He made no adjustments for the rise of feminism or even the civil rights
movement. There was something Southern as well as a tricky refusal to adjust his beliefs to fit the fashions of his day. He was a natural conservative who fought a lifelong rearguard battle against that most imposing foe—the future. He was more like my father than any man I’ve ever met, and, like Dad, I’d come to view him as part of my destiny in my love-hate relationship with the fraught, hardscrabble world of men.

“Pat, my dad’s family and I would love you to do the eulogy for my father,” Chris Dickey said when he called.

Though it caused me some pain, I said, “I’ve got to be honest with you, Chris. I didn’t like your father very much. I avoided him like the plague after I left his classes.”

“That doesn’t necessarily rule you out, Pat,” Chris said. I was not expecting such honesty in such a situation. “But from what I hear, you loved his writing,” he added.

“I revered his writing. I always will,” I said.

“Then we’ve got a deal,” Chris said. “I’ve had my own problems with Dad.”

So I found myself on the exquisite horseshoe-shaped arena that is the pride of the University of South Carolina, with a bright pool of writers in attendance and a decent crowd for the best Southern poet who ever lived—hell, let me be not shy; in my opinion James Dickey is the greatest American poet who ever lived, and that poetry sprang from a bloodstream made by God, and his language changed the way I thought about art itself. I tried to give him a rip-roaring farewell and honor the man with a missing plane formation of fighter planes, like I’d done for my father at the end of
The Great Santini
.

When I reached the podium above the manicured grass, the sun was shining so bright I could not read the eulogy I had prepared for my great teacher. I tried to adjust the yellow legal sheets and shift them out of the sunlight when I looked up and heard a building call out to me. I was looking at the shadow of the Cornell Arms for the first time in my life, the building my brother had plunged off on the night he died. One of my first acts after hearing about Tom was to read Dickey’s poem “The Leap,” which is written in perfect pitch and wonder at the suicide of a girl Dickey knew in elementary school who leaped to her death from a skyscraper after her life had proved impossible to live. Though
I’ve many flaws as a writer, some egregious, I’ve no trouble with the language of praise. I thanked the poet for all the things he told the hurt heart of a young man who came to his class for enlightenment. As I told Chris and Kevin and Bronwen Dickey, I considered delivering James Dickey’s eulogy one of the highest honors of my lifetime. I got to fall in love with his children as an unasked-for bonus of the ceremony.

Two hours later, I was sitting in front of my bloated father, who lay on a hospital bed with his feet and legs swollen beyond all recognition. His heart was endangered by a rising tide inside him. In the workup for his treatment of the congestive heart failure, they had also performed a colonoscopy, though Dad had fought the doctors at the very idea of such an invasion of privacy.

“They took a Roto-Rooter up the sacred wazoo,” Dad said. “I’d have fought them with my fists, but I didn’t have the strength.”

“What did they find?” I asked.

“Colon cancer,” Dad stated. “Seems like I’ve had it for a long time. They’re trying to set up some chemotherapy as soon as I’m strong enough to survive it.”

“Survive it!” I yelled. “Has the goddamn military ever given you a colonoscopy before?”

“Negative. It’s not required on the annual physical, and I sure didn’t want to bring the subject up.”

Putting my head in my hands, I said, “Dad, because military medicine is such a joke and a ripoff, you may die because your doctors were idiots.”

“Your job is to pep me up, lift my spirit, sports fans. Hell, you’re making me feel a little boo-hoo about my situation. I’m going to tell Kath on you.”

“Tell Kathy anything you like,” I said. “They can cure colon cancer, Dad, you goddamn idiot, if they get it in time. Yours sounds like it’s spread all over the place.”

“Hey, I need some happy time,” Dad said. “You aren’t making me happy. I’m going to tell Kath.”

For the next several days, I stayed with Dad at the naval hospital and watched as his gargantuan feet and legs began to respond to the medication, and the swelling began to subside all through his body.
What gave me great hope was that the cancer was attacking one of the strongest men I’ve ever known, who brought an indomitable spirit to the gruff task of survival. In the next two years, the fires of life itself lit up his eyes, the eyes of a night fighter. It was an honor to watch such a man die and to know that I was that man’s oldest son. Both of my parents died with exemplary courage and resolve, and in so doing, they proffered their children the finest of gifts—they taught us how to die.

When my father left the hospital, we took off on the first of many road trips we made during the last two years of his life. First, we went through Florida to see the Harper boys. We decided to keep off the interstates and take only the back roads down Highway 301 and through an almost deserted road along the eastern rim of the Okefenokee swamp and across the Florida state line. We never passed by an orange juice stand without picking up bags of oranges from the Indian River; nor did we ever pass an alligator farm where we didn’t feed fish to the leaping gators. At Alexander Springs, we stopped for a long, delicious swim and dog-paddled over and above the gloomy caverns that served as a fountainhead for the creek that headed out into the forest toward the St. Johns River. The springs were too cold for the alligators, which Dad and I took as a sign from a loving God. As we drove into the pretty town of Ashton, Florida, we headed down an unpaved road toward Bobby Harper’s house on the St. Johns River.

“What’s unique about the St. Johns River?” Dad asked, as he used to when I was a boy and we’d get near the magical river.

“It flows north,” I said.

“Good boy,” Dad said. “I taught you kids about geography if nothing else.”

Yes, he did, and I can still tell you all of the capital cities in the United States.

“What’s the only other major river to flow north?” he asked.

“The Nile.”

“Hey, talk about advantages. You bellyache all the time about what a horseshit life a military brat is forced to live. But show me a civilian kid who knows about the Nile. You ain’t gonna find it. The military brat knows the world.”

“It was worth it all because the Nile flows north,” I said.

When we pulled up in front of cousin Bobby’s house, the four Harper boys—Bobby, John, Mike, Russ—were waiting for us with their families, and they engulfed Dad with their country-boy love that always flowed north when it came to honoring my Chicago-born father. Though I never quite understood the grand relationship my father enjoyed with the Harper boys, it always moved me and caused me some slight agitation when I witnessed any gathering of the Harper tribe with my father at its dead center. They acted like some outlawed circus had arrived in town, with my Dad well rehearsed in his role as flashy, whip-happy ringmaster. For the next twenty-four hours, Dad would spin elaborate tales, and the Harper boys would answer him with applause and appreciation and a powerful surge of family solidarity that I found difficult to believe.