The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (47 page)

As I was checking the program to see my prescribed order in the ceremony, I saw my name as eulogist, with Carol Ann next in line with her poem written for the repose of Dad’s soul. Whoever was sitting to my right—I believe my brother Tim—handed me a note written by Carol Ann from her watch-post at the end of the pew. I had never received a note from a sister at my father’s funeral, but I’d never
attended my father’s funeral before, so my surprise turned to curiosity as I unfolded the note and began to read.

“Pat, I have glasses of water on the ledge beneath the podium. Also Kleenex, and lip balm, and some moisturizers if you need them. Also, I think you should know … I don’t plan to read my poem until the priests are finished with their mumbo jumbo bullshit. Only then will I read the sacred poem I’ve written for our father’s memory. Love, Carol.”

I moaned out loud, but not enough to draw much attention to myself. Looking up to the ceiling, I thought of all the repercussions her supercilious and untimely note could cause. The scene played out in my head in all its nightmarish clarity. After I finished my eulogy, Father Cellini would announce to the audience that Carol Ann Conroy would now read a poem to honor her father. He would then take his seat as the chief celebrant. All eyes of the church would look to the first row, expecting to see Carol Ann rising out of the pew with paper in her hand and a love song for her father in her heart. Carol Ann had now changed the choreography of the whole service, and no one or nothing would move toward the altar from our contingent. At this moment, there were exactly two people in the church who knew Carol Ann’s plans—the two of us. I was fully aware that Carol Ann had an infinite capacity for the reptilian stillness required by such an unconventional move. In my mind’s eye, I could hear the audience stir with impatience, the undertakers checking their watches, and Carol Ann’s rowdy family start to hoot and hurl abuse at her for her inappropriate showmanship. This was a problem I didn’t know how to control or avert. Finally I leaned forward in the pew, shaking with fury, and pointed my finger at Carol Ann. I whispered in a rage, “Hey, Carol Ann, you’re doing your poem as scheduled. Give me a goddamn break. Just one goddamn break.”

Wheeling around and sitting with my back turned away from Carol Ann, I missed what I’m assured by many was the high point of the passion play we were all caught up in—a whirlwind no one could escape.

Ready for my assault, Carol Ann launched an immediate counterattack. She went down on one knee and started pumping the air with two-handed salutes of middle fingers directed at me and me alone. There were also sound effects as she accompanied every middle finger with a rapid-fire growling of “fuck you,” while the funeral mass for our
father moved toward the reading of the Epistle. Some of the church heard Carol Ann’s intemperate tirade against me. Later, my brothers estimated that at least half of the mourners heard the chant of “fuck you” echoing through the church. If I had heard or seen her, there would’ve been a fistfight in pew one. But the town of Beaufort received a legitimate Conroy thrill of combat. Mike later told me Carol Ann had shot me forty birds, but Tim insisted it was nearer sixty, and Jim claimed more than one hundred. Cassandra, who had been a Methodist minister’s wife for nearly twenty years in her previous life, thought she had seen everything when it came to family feuds erupting at funerals. She told me that the Conroy family was in a league of its own.

But I learned all this later. My task rose before me: to calm down before I read what I’d written about Dad only hours before. I was so distraught that I tried to bring my breathing back to normal, my blood pressure to a survivable level, until my temper folded like linen in some storehouse deep inside of me. The important thing was Dad and his legacy. I closed my eyes and thought of my father’s life. It was time for the eulogy and I heard my name called. I moved down the aisle toward Carol Ann and whispered to her, “Please read your poem when your name is called.” And I walked to the podium and delivered my eulogy.

When I returned to my seat, I passed Carol Ann and leaned down to whisper, “Do you need help getting to the podium, Carol?”

She did not, but walked to the microphone with a stiffness and formality that surprised me. As if in some ritual trance, she poured a glass of water and drank it slowly. She moistened her lips with an aromatic balm, and she took a lozenge to clear her throat.

Then she began to speak in her poet’s voice. Her first sentence began, “Our father, who art in the air.” It was a very moving and short poem, and she had promised to send us all a copy after her return to New York. Not one person, that I know of, has ever seen a copy of that poem, which remains precious to me because it was our family poet’s farewell to Dad.

They stopped traffic on all of Beaufort’s streets that intersected with the slow caravan that drove my father’s body to its grave site at the national cemetery. The town held my father in the highest honor. The Marines were perfect, as I fully expected them to be, as they fired their volley of rifles into the air and a handsome senior officer handed me
the crisp, folded flag that had covered his casket, which I accepted for the children of the Great Santini. The beauty of things military takes nearly all of its children prisoner in its primal love of order, its ceremonies that are timeless and changeless—they buried Dad with honors in the same cemetery where my mother was laid to rest.

Mom and Dad, I leave you now. I’ll have no reason to return to the dresser where my mother prepared herself for her gowned balls at the homes of ambassadors. Dad, I release you to command your squadrons. I’ve been hard on you. But that’s what literature requires, what the South requires, and what the corps always insists upon. For years, I made a study of Javanese shadow play, which I stumbled upon while looking for another book. In it, I thought I discovered a perfect metaphor for our family life. In Java the play is called Wayang, and it tells of terrible, bloody battles where the slaughter is indescribable. These are made-up stories between gods and kings, good and evil. The common people have to watch breathlessly, helpless in their meaningless and powerless awe. The play was acted on an immense stage as a mythical encounter, fortified by tradition, as a vehicle for the trembling villagers to view the events in a terrifying way. The dalang was a puppet master disguised in grotesque masks. This puppet master whose power was limitless controlled the destinies of everyone in the world.

I was born to the house of a puppet master, the dalang under the guise of Don Conroy. His wife and children were servants to the terrible dreamscape of his most bizarre qualities. He came at us like a lord of the underground, his rule disfigured. His family grew up around him, and we made our own judgments and told our own stories. By writing my novels, I tore the mask of the dalang out of your hands, Dad, and I decided to wear it myself. I’ve written about my family more than any writer in American history, and I take great pride in that. But your spirits deserve a rest, and I’m going to grant you a long one, one that lasts forever.

Mom and Dad, though I won’t come this way again, I hope that your strong souls rest in peace. Though I will not write about you again, I would like you to take note that I still find both of you amazing, my portals into the light, and a myth and a narrative told in the rich mysteries of art.

Cassandra King and I were married the week following my father’s death. It was my first step of a long repair job on the shape and architecture of a troubled soul. But I needed sweetness in my life and an infinite source of understanding. Cassandra and I had become inseparable as we cared for Dad in the final year of his life. I had fallen in love with a woman who’d fallen in love with the Great Santini. I could do no better in this life, and Cassandra has brought me a portion of love I never thought I’d find on this earth.

Now, fifteen years later, I count my days by the number of warplanes I hear from jets returning to the home field in Beaufort. Cassandra and I bought a house on Battery Creek, and we sometimes hear the distant roar of Marine sharpshooters practicing on Parris Island’s rifle range. At sunset we watch the saltwater tides rising with perfect congruence to the rising moon. No matter the time of day, the creek spreads out in the thrown coinage of sunset, bright as a centerpiece in the transcendental green of the great salt marsh. Everything we notice is a timepiece calling out the muffled drumroll of our own mortal days.

I’ve come home to the place I was always writing about. Fishermen wave as they come in with their catches of sheepshead or triggerfish. Battery Creek returns to the sea, passing Parris Island, where Marines on the rifle range are practicing their accuracy skills. The Beaufort River sweetens the flow as it moves through the town where the mansions look like the summer homes of the creatures of a misused tarot deck. Born homeless, I’ve tried to make Beaufort, South Carolina, my own. To me, these islands didn’t exist until I found them. I invented the marshes, the oyster banks, and the ink-dark creeks that divide the marshes until salt water runs up against solid land. This year, the shrimp have already made their migration, and the Canada geese are returning to the pond on a road that leads into Beaufort. In the distance, the air fills with warplanes. The sound is soothing to me, the chamber music of my boyhood. I embrace it as something that belongs to me. I know a lot about circles now.

Colonel Don Conroy, USMC

The children of fighter pilots tell different stories than other kids do. None of our fathers can write a will or sell a life insurance policy or fill out a prescription or administer a flu shot or explain what a poet meant. We tell of fathers who land on aircraft carriers at pitch-black night with the wind howling out of the South China Sea.

Our fathers wiped out aircraft batteries in the Philippines and set Japanese soldiers on fire when they made the mistake of trying to overwhelm our troops on the ground.

Your dads ran the barbershops and worked at the post office and delivered the packages on time and sold the cars, while our dads were blowing up fuel depots near Seoul, were providing extraordinarily courageous close air support to the beleaguered Marines at the Chosin Reservoir, and once turned the Naktong River red with the blood of a retreating North Korean battalion.

We tell of men who made widows of the wives of our nation’s enemies and who made orphans out of all their children.

You don’t like war or violence? Or napalm? Or rockets? Or cannons or death rained down from the sky?

Then let’s talk about your fathers, not ours. When we talk about the aviators who raised us and the Marines who loved us, we can look
you in the eye and say, “You would not like to have been America’s enemies when our fathers passed overhead.”

We were raised by the men who made the United States of America the safest country on earth in the bloodiest century in all recorded history.

Our fathers made sacred those strange, singing names of battlefields across the Pacific: Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh, and a thousand more. We grew up attending the funerals of Marines slain in these battles.

Your fathers made communities like Beaufort decent and prosperous and functional; our fathers made the world safe for democracy.

We have gathered here today to celebrate the amazing and storied life of Col. Donald Conroy, who modestly called himself by his nom de guerre, the Great Santini.

There should be no sorrow at this funeral, because the Great Santini lived life at full throttle, moved always in the fast lanes, gunned every engine, teetered on every edge, seized every moment and shook it like a terrier shaking a rat.

He did not know what moderation was or where you’d go to look for it. Donald Conroy is the only person I have ever known whose self-esteem was absolutely unassailable. There was not one thing about himself that my father did not like; nor was there one thing about himself that he would change. He simply adored the man he was and walked with perfect confidence through every encounter in his life. Dad wished everyone could be just like him.

His stubbornness was an art form. The Great Santini did what he did, when he wanted to do it, and woe to the man who got in his way. Once, I introduced my father before he gave a speech to an Atlanta audience. I said at the end of the introduction, “My father decided to go into the Marine Corps on the day he discovered his IQ was the temperature of this room.”

My father rose to the podium, stared down at the audience, and said without skipping a beat, “My God, it’s hot in here. It must be at least a hundred and eighty degrees.”

Here is how my father appeared to me as a boy. He came from a
race of giants and demigods from a mythical land known as Chicago. He married the most beautiful girl ever to come crawling out of the poor and lowborn South, and there were times when I thought we were being raised by Zeus and Athena.

After happy hour my father would drive his car home at a hundred miles an hour to see his wife and seven children. He would get out of his car, a strapping flight-jacketed matinee idol, and walk toward his house, his knuckles dragging along the ground, his shoes stepping on and killing small animals in his slouching amble toward the home place.