The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (43 page)

By then, the lovely Cassandra King had come into my life and joined me in the daily care and feeding of Santini. Always embarrassed about talking about the rivers of emotions his children carried with them, Dad never spoke directly of his affection for Cassandra. Cassandra, whom I usually call Sandra, had been living with me for a while, and I’d finally found the woman I wanted by my side at my own deathbed. Dad had no desire to study these deeper currents within himself, but he noticed and approved of Sandra’s composure as the Conroy thunderhead formed on the horizon ahead. Dad spoke of her by indirection.

“Your friend. What’s her name? You know the one. She seems to be camping out here. You invite her, kid?”

“No, Dad,” I said. “She put a shotgun to my left ear and promised to blow my brains out if I didn’t let her live here. And her name’s Sandra King.”

“I read her book,” he said. “Not bad. I especially liked her portrait of Tim and Kim.”

In Cassandra’s first novel,
Making Waves
, two high school boys conduct an unconsummated homosexual affair. I was stunned that Dad had read her novel, and told Sandra that was “high praise indeed.”

“I figured Don would love great literature,” she said. “I wasn’t worried.”

Dad would speak about Sandra in the third person. “Did she get my birthday present?”

“You mean that cheap piece of shit—the ugliest jacket in the world with the purple pants that glow in the dark?” I asked.

“That outfit set me back quite a few pesos, son,” he said.

“It’s the ugliest piece of clothing she’s ever seen,” I said.

“She’s from Alabama. I’m sure she’s not accustomed to owning the top of the line. I scooped this up from the latest couture of the month.”

“Please, Dad,” I said, “leave it alone.”

“Next time I’ll buy your little friend some jewelry of note.”

“Please don’t,” I asked.

“Your little friend deserves the best. Nothing else is good enough for her,” he said.

On Thanksgiving Day, my good friend from Atlanta, the journalist Larry Woods, brought down a television crew from CNN to do a family special on the great healing that had taken place since Don Conroy announced that he had a fatal case of cancer. Somehow, Larry had talked to the antisocial and uncommunicative Carol Ann and convinced her that this would be a celebration of the strength and inviolability of family. How he convinced my sister to partake in such an un–Carol Ann–like event, I have no idea. Still furious with Carol Ann’s ruinous pullback from her family, I took little interest in anything resembling a television-induced reconciliation. But Larry convinced me that I was doing my father a huge favor, because it upset Dad that such divisions and fault lines had cracked through the solidarity he hoped we could achieve by his death.

My father made his own pitch one day when I took him to the Shrimp Shack for lunch. “This thing about Thanksgiving, Pat,” Dad said, eating his shrimp burger while gazing at one of the loveliest salt
marshes on the planet. He applied the ketchup and horseradish on his burger and then said, “I know you said no to Larry when he called, but I’d like a reconsideration filed at my desk at oh eight hundred tomorrow.”

“I already said no, Dad. I’ve been eating Carol’s shit for twenty years, and I’m getting not to like the taste.”

“It’d make it easier on everyone else if you’d change your mind,” he said.

In anger I said, “What are the ground rules, Dad? Carol doesn’t do anything without a list of things she won’t tolerate.”

“Piece of cake,” Dad said. “She doesn’t want to be seen on-screen with you unless it’s at Thanksgiving dinner, with you sitting at one end of the table and her at the far end. She doesn’t want any of your work read aloud, but she’ll allow herself to read one poem of her own choosing.” Larry was also not allowed to film Carol Ann and me together in conversation, and he could refer to our long separation only fleetingly.

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

“I think you’re supposed to look kind of worshipful when Carol’s mug appears on the tube,” he said.

“I’d like to take a tire tool and hammer her head against the brick fireplace,” I said.

“You always had a violent streak,” Dad said. “It used to worry me when you were only a wee little lad.”

The weekend before Thanksgiving there was another gathering of the troops to man the campfire as Dad grew weaker and weaker before our eyes. Larry did long interviews with Dad, Carol Ann, and me, and when I saw the results, I could see death forming like low-lying clouds in Dad’s pale blue eyes. Though Carol Ann refused to exchange a single civil word with me, Larry conducted his interviews with her far away from my house. Larry had lost his wife, Dee Woods, to cancer the previous year, and he was still reeling from the aftermath of that terrible grief. Since Larry had lost his own father when he was a boy, he always followed my explosive relationship with Dad with a troubled but exhilarated eye. Larry, a handsome but careworn man, was trying to repair some head-on collisions in his own life by putting my family together. He wanted the characters of his chess set to form lines of communication as we dealt with the empty spaces on our board, even
as we prepared to enter our last battle together. Larry was shooting the piece for the sake of his own troublesome past. But that’s what artists do, and I had no problem with the urgency that he brought to his task.

When the film appeared on Thanksgiving Day my family watched with both moans and silence. All of us were amazed to hear that Carol Ann had a job selling organic herbs at a farmer’s market in the East Village.

Mike asked, “Did anyone know Carol had a job?”

Jim answered, “Where the hell is the East Village?”

“She lives there in New York,” Tim said.

“Jim’s out of the loop,” Dad said.

“Did you know she had a job, Dad?” Jim asked him.

“Naw. She kept us all out of the loop,” Dad said. “She’s closer to Kathy than any of her brothers.”

“I’ve never heard the mention of a farmer’s market,” Kathy said.

“It’s all bullshit. Complete bullshit,” Tim said.

“I love it. I gotta get Larry on the phone and thank him,” Dad said. “I mean, that’s a heavy theme there. How a father helps bring his whole family together after his son writes a lying piece-of-shit book about him. There’s greatness in that story.”

Tim’s wife, Terrye, poked two fingers down her throat as though to induce vomiting. “God, what a horseshit family.” But she winked at me in conspiracy and smiled.

Jim said, “Tell me once again, Dad, whose writing do you prefer, Pat’s or Carol’s?”

Dad, playing to his audience, paraphrased what he had said on national TV: “I far prefer Carol’s poetry to Pat’s cruddy prose. I taught all of my children that poetry was a much higher art form than prose ever could be.”

The whole family jeered at Dad, who bellowed with laughter, pleased with himself beyond all comprehension.

Then cold weather came to the low country. The shrimp and crabs disappeared from the rivers, and oystermen came back from the dark flanges of mud banks in search of the swollen oyster or to interrupt the commerce of quahogs. The marsh that had darkened with the deepest green, then ripened into a tawny, palomino gold as the winter surged
into our sounds and rivers, turned brown in its seasonal death. It was a year my father’s illness became congruent with the cold season’s passage. The palmettos rattled in northwesterly winds, and the birdsong had forsaken the woods beside our house. Now the chemotherapy that once seemed like it was saving Dad had reached the point where the returns were limited, and the cancer began to assert its hegemony over my father’s entire life. He awoke each morning, turned the day into a feast of joy as Christmas came and went, and Dad, Cassandra, and I stayed up to watch the coming in of 1998.

“This may be the last one I’ll ever see,” my father said, and we approached the realm of deepest philosophy in his one-celled life.

“That’s the spirit, Dad,” I said.

“No, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “I was born an Irish dope. Grew up starving. Was happy my whole life. Then the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, and it turns out to be the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I enlisted in the Marine Corps and they made me a fighter pilot and sent me to Atlanta for further training. I see your mother crossing the street. She and I had never seen nothin’ and they send us moving all over this country, pay us good money, put a roof over our heads, and we get seven wonderful kids in the process. I fight in three wars. I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning. My daughter writes a book of great poetry and my oldest son writes a few horseshit novels. When I die, I’ll know I’m a literary figure for the rest of time.”

“Please, Dad. I puke easily,” I said.

“A literary figure, how you like them bananas, son?” he said.

“I trust literature to be more selective,” I said.

“No, you made me too powerful to ignore,” Dad said. “Who wants to read about those bellyaching pussies when you’re diving toward a battleship with the Great Santini leading your ass?”

As March approached, Dad made elaborate plans to attend the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Savannah. Though I did not know it, Savannah had an annual parade that was the second-largest in this country after New York City. More surprisingly, we learned that my father had marched in this parade for the last twenty years of his life.

“Who in the hell do you march with, Dad?” I asked in astonishment.

“I march by myself. I represent the great family of Conroy out of Galway, and I do a damn good job of it.”

Dad pulled out a faded photograph taken by the
Savannah Morning News
of him marching alone down the streets of Savannah. It was a marvelous, definitive photograph of my shamrock-covered father’s wearing of the green from his spiritual homeland.

“I won’t be marching this year,” he said, a plain statement of fact.

“Good decision,” I said, and made some calls to my friends in Savannah.

On March 17, we gathered on the balcony of Jack Leigh and his wife, which was on Oglethorpe Street and directly over the parade route. Jack had been a photographer of great note when his life received a lightning bolt that made him one of the most famous photographers in America for a while. The photograph he shot will set him down with the immortals. A young journalist named John Berendt had come south to write an extraordinary book about Savannah entitled
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
. John had hired Jack Leigh to take a photograph for the book jacket, and Jack went down to one of Savannah’s celebrated cemeteries to take a haunting image of a slim young woman holding two bowls in perfect equipoise. Overnight, the photograph made Jack Leigh famous.

Once I took my father to an opening of a Jack Leigh exhibition, and it was one of the rare moments when I could study my father’s seduction by the silent world of the contemplative arts. He even asked me whether he could buy one of Jack’s photographs for himself.

“Sure. All the photographs are for sale,” I said. “That’s why he’s having an exhibition of his work.”

“I’ll give him a buck for that one,” Dad said, checking his wallet.

“Keep your money, Dad,” I advised.

“My money ain’t no good in this joint?” he asked in surprise.

“He has this bad habit,” I said. “He likes to feed his family.”

On the way back to Fripp, I could still tell Dad was musing over his response to Jack Leigh’s work. “That stuff,” Dad said, “I liked it. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of trees and a lot of rivers. But not like that. What was it I was seeing?”

“Art, Dad,” I said. “You were feeling the art.”

“So, that’s the deal for you guys,” said Dad. “For you and Carol, too.”

“That’s what we try for, Dad,” I said.

But his disease was taking dominion as Cassandra, Don, and I sat on a crowded balcony, watching and applauding as the nation of Ireland passed in sweet review. The Irish families of Savannah, their ranks swollen to the thousands, threw trinkets and candy to the onlookers. The horses of the Savannah police kept order along the lines of crowd-heavy boulevards, and seventy bands barked out the anthems of a country with a ruthless, indomitable history. As I watched the parade, I said to myself that I came from a fighting people who could not be appeased or made to bow to an enemy’s flag, and that was the blood the Conroy family brought out of Galway and into the steerage of what America held for us. Please attack me, English lord, and one of my grandsons will take up my cudgel and meet you at the edge of the Irish Sea. There is plenty wrong about the Irish, but forgetfulness is not one of those things.

That marvelous day when my father stood up for Ireland one last time, he also remembered and honored the country that had taken in his clan and given them the great brave keys of their redemption in a new land. Each time an American flag would pass, my father would struggle to his feet and salute that flag smartly, the way it’s done by a Marine officer. Most times I had to rise and help him to his feet, lifting him out of the chair until he could control his balance. He saluted every flag that passed us that day, and a hundred must have passed in front of the colonel. When he almost fell with one of his last salutes, a young woman who was watching him came over.

“You don’t have to stand for every flag, Colonel,” she said. “You’re the Great Santini.”

Dad nodded to her, then said to me and Cassandra as he rose to salute once again, “You know why I stand every time it passes by? I fought for that flag.”

Later that night, the Great Santini began to die in earnest.

It was a lovely April morning in 1998 when a cry of distress woke me. I reached over in bed to find Cassandra gone. I threw on my khaki pants, striped shirt, and Docksiders, then found her cleaning my father’s blood from the bathroom to a trail he left as he fled, trying to escape the summons of his own destiny. As I raced for my Buick, Cassandra yelled out the back door, “He’s heading for the naval hospital emergency room. Kathy just called.”

Down Highway 21, I drove faster than I’d ever driven before, roaring through St. Helena Island and what had begun to be called the Gullah-Geechee Corridor and the dead center of black culture as it developed through the years before and after the Civil War. I was driving toward my father’s last days, and doing it at unsafe speeds.