The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (34 page)

Five years later, I was shopping in Publix when a stranger approached to ask me who was hurling the softball toward the rafters during my brother Tom’s funeral. Though I could not answer the man’s question, my laughter carried me through the arugula and the Belgian endive. In the way of my world, there are some things that don’t lend themselves to explanation.

My sister Carol Ann lived a valiant, unpraised childhood, but one of almost unbearable solitude. She was a prize for any family to engender, but she passed much of her time unnoticed. By any measure, she was a pretty girl who didn’t measure up to her mother’s lofty standards. Despite herself, Peg Conroy had a careless gift for making her two daughters feel unattractive.

But my mother carried a dream of poets and novelists inside of her that her fixation on physical beauty could not touch. Mom drenched our childhood with poems and children’s books, then let fly with
Gone with the Wind
when Carol Ann and I were both closer to infancy than to adolescence. Slowly Mom began to read us the books she wanted to read, and this habit lasted until I got to high school, when Carol Ann and I could fill out our own flight plans at the library desk.

But there was one story of our reading life that our mother made perfect—and no novelist or poet could add a word to improve it. The year we moved to the pretty coastal town of New Bern, North Carolina, my second-grade year, was when my mother read
The Diary of Anne Frank
to her children.

As a young boy, I was caught up in the immediacy and brightness of Anne Frank’s unmistakable voice. I studied photographs of Anne Frank and noted how pretty she was, and how she looked exactly as I expected her to look: fresh and knowing and—this was important to
me—smarter than the adults around her. I fell in love with Anne Frank and have never fallen out of love with her.

But my mother did not prepare her children for the abruptness of the diary’s ending. Anne’s voice went silent after the Nazis invaded her family’s attic hideaway, a place I visit every time I find myself in the watery, cross-stitched city of Amsterdam.

“What happened to Anne, Mama?” I asked.

“Why’d she stop writing?” Carol Ann asked.

And my Georgia-born mother began telling us about the coming of the Nazi beast, the cattle cars, the gas chambers, and the murder of six million Jews, including babies and children and the lovely Anne Frank. I will always honor my mother when I think of the words she spoke next. “Carol Ann and Pat, listen to me. I want to raise a family that will hide Jews.”

And I will always adore the spirit of my sister Carol Ann, who asked me to walk next door to Mrs. Orringer’s house. Mrs. Orringer came to the door, dressed in grand flamboyance.

“Yes, children? What is it?”

My sister Carol Ann looked up into Mrs. Orringer’s eyes and said with a child’s simplicity and ardor, “Mrs. Orringer, don’t worry about anything.”

“What are you talking about, child?”

“We will hide you,” Carol Ann said.

“What?” Mrs. Orringer asked.

“We will hide you,” Carol Ann repeated.

•   •   •

Another memory comes to mind, when Carol Ann was five years old, and the last of the Nolen family came to pay their respects to Stanny for the loss of her husband. The visit took on a nightmarish aspect when one of Stanny’s second or third cousins started telling stories, mostly about himself. When displeased, Stanny’s eyes could assume a hooded, cobra look, while my mother’s eyes could turn a biting blue.

The cousin was a vintage Southern boy of that era, strong and willowy, sporting a blond crew cut so sharp that it looked like it could cut your finger. He fascinated me because I’d never seen a man so young
take over the conversation from his elders. Then he told a story that is fabled in our family mythology, yet firmly and resolutely denied. He told about going to a Klan meeting outside of Jacksonville, Alabama, when the group he was riding with spotted a five-year-old “nigger boy” playing alongside the road. As a joke, they picked the boy up to give him a joyride, but the little boy screamed in terror. Some of the men wanted to drop him off. Instead, the driver accelerated his car to a hundred miles an hour and threw the boy off a high bluff located somewhere between the two towns.

“We felt like we’d done a pretty good night’s work for the Klan,” he said, his smugness filling the room.

Then we heard it, the keening, the primitive call of inconsolable women, and turned to see it coming from Carol Ann. It began low-pitched, then rose in fury and register until finally she approached the unstrung cousin with her finger pointing straight at him: “Evil. You are evil—get out of this house. Get out right now.”

I didn’t know what the word “evil” meant until I heard it raw and nasty coming from my sister’s lips.

The cousin said, “Ain’t anybody gonna whup her? She deserves to be whupped. I’ll be glad to do it.”

“You touch my daughter and I’ll cut your heart out,” my mother said coldly. “Now, you leave and go back to what brought you.”

“Never come calling at my door again,” Stanny said. “I don’t know a damn one of you, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna correct that. Git. Go on down the driveway.”

“Make them leave our house,” Carol Ann moaned, the ancestral moan still putting her fury in parentheses.

“We heard you were strange, Margaret,” a girl cousin said.

“Not strange enough for that part of the South,” Stanny answered, and that accursed branch of the cousinry slouched down the driveway.

I thought my sister Carol Ann was the bravest, most admirable person on earth. But how did she know all of this when she was so young? The story of Carol Ann facing down a family Klansman burned like a brand into my brain. Even then, I marked the moment when she packed a wallop of social courage I always lacked. Wordless, I’d watched the exchange with knee-knocking terror.

Afterward, I was so shaken up that Mom and Stanny explained to us that the boy was just a bigmouthed braggart and that was how some white boys in the rural South got their kicks—boasting about the killing of colored people. Even Stanny wouldn’t explain how she was related to the crew-cut guy, and we never heard him mentioned again.

“Call the cops,” Carol Ann demanded.

Stanny took time to explain: “Even if that boy did what he said, no white jury would convict him for killing a colored person.”

“We’re raising you in an evil land,” my mother said. “But we’re not raising you to be like him.” And she never again took us to Piedmont, Alabama, during our childhood.

Later, however, Carol Ann would enter dangerous waters with my mother every time she opened her mouth. Now I know what Mom was expecting in a Southern daughter: a darling girl with an adorable laugh and a love for jewelry and girlie clothes. She wanted a conventional, presentable girl who would one day attend cotillions and debutante balls with a retinue of young men begging for a place on her dance card.

My sister was nothing like the daughter my mother dreamed of when she appeared on March 10, 1947. Mom raised Carol Ann and me to be writers, failing to take in the strangeness of poets and the long gestation period required of novelists. Every time my sister spoke her mind, she generated a savage reaction in my mother. At an early age, I got the distinct impression that there was something about Carol Ann that both my parents hated. With odd skills of articulation, she spoke truths her parents were not interested in hearing.

But the enmity between my mother and sister was growing malignant as I entered eighth grade at Blessed Sacrament School in Alexandria, Virginia. After we returned home from school, Mom would begin picking away at Carol Ann on everything from her appearance to her posture. Instead of just letting those criticisms go, my sister would fire back wounding volleys of her own, and a no-holds-barred mother-daughter catfight would break out. Prisoners were never taken and wounds were never cauterized. The words flashed like razors and the fight would move upstairs, where Carol Ann and I had pine-paneled bedrooms of our own. Retreating to my bedroom, I would close the door, but the waterworks of their personal fury battered against my
walls like waves. They brought the ferocity of leopards to their howling encounters.

“Young lady,” Mom said, “what does it feel like to know everything in the world?”

“Better than being you—knowing nothing,” Carol Ann said. “You didn’t even go to college.”

Wham!
I heard a broom whistle through the air, a new weapon my mother brought to the art of warfare against her voluble daughter.

“I hope that made you feel good, Mother. Hitting a ten-year-old in the face with a broom.”

“Just shut up. You always have to have the last word. I promise you this, young lady: You won’t have the last word today.”

“If that makes you feel better, Mother,” Carol Ann said, raising the ante.

The broom whistled again and hit my sister. Carol Ann was not one to suffer in silence. She screamed as though she’d had a breast removed by a cutlass, a signal that I should enter the fray. All three of us had memorized all the steps of the macabre dance many years ago.

“Oh, the golden boy has arrived. Hello, Mr. Sunshine. I was so hoping you would make your heroic entrance before Mom beat me to death with her broom,” Carol Ann mocked.

Bam!
Mom swung the broom again and caught Carol Ann hard on the chin, eliciting the same animal cry of hurt as before. I grabbed the broom and twisted it out of Mom’s hands.

“No broom, Mom,” I pleaded. “Please just ignore her.”

“I won’t let her get the last word in!” Mom screamed. “So help me God, I’ll beat her to death with my fists if I have to.”

“I think that’s a very fair thing to ask, Mother,” Carol Ann said.

Mom lunged for Carol Ann with her fists flying, but I grabbed her from behind. “Carol, just shut the hell up and I’ll take Mom downstairs.”

“Gosh, Mother, it must be so nice for you to have the normal son, the adored one. It’s a shame he’s as stupid as you are. Hell, you’re reading Edna Ferber and acting like she’s Jane Austen.”

Again, Mom charged and caught a hunk of Carol Ann’s brown hair. She would’ve pulled it out if I’d not been there to loosen her grip.
“Now, I want you to shut up and let Mom get downstairs before you can say a word,” I cried.

“Have you ever noticed that you’re not king of the world?” my sister declared.

My mother returned armed with the broom and almost brought Carol Ann to the floor with a well-aimed sock to the back of the head. Again, I fought the broom away from Mom, this time throwing it down the stairway. When I returned to the field of battle, Mom had Carol Ann in a stranglehold and had fought her to the floor.

“You seem to love being cruel, Mother,” my sister said, “just like the beast you married.”

“Shut up! Shut up! You’ll not have the last word today, even if I have to knock every single tooth out of your head!”

I picked my sister off the floor, then covered her mouth with my hand. Limber and strong, she fought me and spit on my hand as I yelled for Mom to make her escape.

“Ha! I got the last word,” Mom said in triumph as she ran downstairs. Carol Ann would’ve tried to take my fingers off if I had not released her fast and pushed her toward the window. Quickly, she spun and challenged me, spitting in my face and trying to claw my eyes out of their sockets. Finally, exhausted, we both sank to the linoleum, breathing hard.

Finally I said, “Who the hell is Jane Austen?”

“Poor idiot golden boy. You’ve got nothing written all over you. You try to make these idiots like you, but they never will. I’ll hate you forever for holding my mouth shut. Can you spell ‘forever,’ golden one? Altar boy asshole.”

Though the change was a slow one, it had an inevitability about it. My parents were drawing me slowly into their enemy camp, where I became Carol Ann’s chief interpreter and the vilest traitor she would ever invite beside her council fires.

So I grew up with this unripened mind, a sister who sounded like a teenager trapped in a child’s body. In a chrysalis of words, a poet was growing up beside me; because of her infinite curiosity I walked through the ruby mine of her consciousness as she made jewelry from the language she and I shared.

I had once thought Carol Ann and I were as close as any siblings could get. Her mind delighted me in all its trailblazing discoveries. When Dad served his first tour in Vietnam, I was a sophomore at The Citadel and came home that Easter to a continuing civil war between Carol Ann and my mother. Again, the broom was the weapon of choice.

Early in the evening hours, I awoke to a screaming physical fight that I had come to expect at The Citadel when two men clashed over a girl.

I rushed into the TV room, where I saw the broom bash against the side of Carol Ann’s head.

“You might beat me to death, Mother,” Carol Ann said, “but it’ll only make me much more famous among female writers who know about the martyrs in their midst.”

“I’d like to make you a goddamn martyr tonight, you little bitch!” Mom screamed.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“Oh, go back upstairs and clean a sword or something,” Carol Ann sneered. “You do know they sent you to the worst college on earth. It doesn’t have a literary reputation because it doesn’t have a reputation at all. You’ll go to Vietnam and die in the paddies with boys with the lowest IQs.”

“Let me beat her to death, Pat. You’re just wasting time.”

“What’s this fight about?” I asked.

“I’m watching a British play to the end. I’ve become an actor this year,” Carol Ann said.

“She’s got a nothing part in Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
—nothing to write home about,” Mom said.

“Then you need your sleep, Carol Ann,” I said, walking over to turn off the TV.

“You ever turn that TV off again while I’m watching it, I’ll turn you into fish food for the next day,” Carol Ann said.

I intercepted Mom’s next baseball-bat swing of her broom.

“Carol Ann, I don’t want to have to kill you,” I said, “But it would actually feel good, the way you’re acting.”