The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (6 page)

Because my wife, Barbara, would not consider raising her two young daughters on an isolated South Carolina island that housed witch doctors but no licensed MDs, and lacked paved roads, telephones, or a store of any kind, we had to buy a house in Beaufort.

I owned a house before my parents did. Barbara and I purchased a two-story, many-columned, slightly run-down house on the “Point,”
what Beaufort’s historic district is called. Because of the Marine Corps, I had grown up in house trailers and Quonset huts and Capehart housing from El Toro to Camp Lejeune. No one ever wanted to own a house more than I did. To me, our house was a mansion, even though it was built around the turn of the century and lacked the panache of the antebellum homes that flanked both sides of 403 Hancock Street. On the day we moved in, Barbara and I lifted wineglasses to each other as we sat on the second-story balcony hidden from the street by the feathery stutter of palmetto fronds shaken by a salt wind off the river. I felt like I had bought a palace for my wife, my children, and for me, and I still think that over forty years later.

The following summer, my entire family came to Beaufort to stay with Barbara and me at our new house while waiting for their own house to be ready, not too far from mine. Dad had received orders for his second tour of Vietnam, and they were returning to the States after being stationed in Hawaii. My mother had rented a house on East Street, only three blocks away, but repairs on it would not be completed for three weeks. I could not wait for everyone to see the extraordinary house we had bought and begun to fix up. Famous among my friends for lacking the skills of a handyman, I had become somewhat sufficient in minor repair work and was astonished to realize my favorite store in town had become Fordham’s Hardware. My brothers and sisters had never seen me hold a tool in my hand, and I could not wait to hammer a nail for them. That my family was going to be staying with me pleased me beyond all reckoning. By buying this house, I had discovered that I had a gift for hospitality. Barbara and I loved inviting people to our home for rest and conversation, for good food and drink and safe harbor. When they arrived, my family was stunned by the house’s size and grandeur. I kissed my mother, and she whispered, “Careful, Pat. Your father’s on the warpath.” And of course, she was right.

My father was leaving that July for his second tour of duty in South Vietnam, and he never had a meaner summer in his violent, disgraceful life. From the moment he entered my house, I thought Don Conroy and I would come to blows every time we passed each other in that spacious, wonderful home.

“My, my, you must think you’re quite the Southern gentleman,” he said, the only time he referred to the house.

He was on the prowl and dangerous, and my mother’s hatred of him was now an open wound between them. They could barely utter a civil word to each other except when Barbara was around. Then they would playact as though the Conroys were an upstanding family and not the American tragedy we insiders knew us to be. My mother’s beautiful face had a haunted, frantic look, and my father’s eyes were withering and cruel. In the family lore, the Conroy children will often try to select my father’s worst and most out-of-control years, and 1970 always rears its violent head and captures a couple of votes. My contempt of him was now a wordless, unsigned agreement between us. I looked at him with loathing and he returned it with equal and passionate measure.

All this the Conroy family had managed to hide from everybody. Barbara became the latest victim of the elaborate opera of evasion. She thought my family was hilarious and rambunctious and fun to be around. But that would come apart on the night known in the annals of my brothers and sisters as movie night with the Conroy family. Mom and Dad had taken the four kids—Kathy, Jim, Tim, and Tom (Carol Ann and Mike had gone off to college by then)—to the movies over at Parris Island. I felt the tension in the house subside when my father went out the front door and pulled his car down the street, his family silent around him. He looked mean enough to carry claymore mines in his cheeks, and I was happy to see him gone. In a week, he would leave for Vietnam, which made me like the war, because it took him off to Asia every couple of years, and I knew my mother and the kids were safe from his fists.

I was asleep at eleven thirty when I heard the ancient, ordained noises below. Like an aroused lion, I awoke to the sound of my mother’s sobbing and of a hand slapping her face. Then I heard my brothers and sisters trying to suppress their own weeping while my father whispered for them to shut up. Here I came, a deadly young man of twenty-five, and a game one, too. I slipped into my jeans and Docksiders, and I came down the steps noiseless as a serpent. I witnessed the next slap to my mother, and something snapped in me, became unglued, and I drove my shoulder into my drunken father like a linebacker taking on a
fullback in a dive play. I drove him out of the foyer, through the screen door, and laid him out on the floorboards of the first-floor veranda. Rising fast, I kicked my drunken father down the steps and across the front yard. Then I lifted him up, punched his ugly face, placed him behind the wheel of his car, and said, “You ever touch my mother again and I’ll kill you. You ever touch my brothers and sisters again and I’ll beat you with a tire iron until your heart stops and my arm gets tired. You get it, you worthless son of a bitch? That’s the last time, pal. The last time in this lifetime. Got it? Now, you get your drunken, worthless ass out of my yard, and never darken the door of my house again.”

“Kiss my ass,” my father said, slurring his words.

I punched him in the face and said, “Get out of here, Colonel.”

When I returned to the house, my mother, three brothers, and sister did everything but throw me a ticker-tape parade. I walked through the front door and whispered to them, “Family life. Don’t you love it?” They surrounded me and hugged me and held on to me as a gladfulness and keen elation filled me up. I knew the things David knew when he brought Goliath crashing to the ground. Then all of us were frozen when we heard Barbara screaming from where she stood, alone on the upstairs banister: “What is going on down there? Something terrible is going on!”

I went to the stairs and said in a hearty voice, “It’s nothing, dear. Nothing at all. One of the kids tripped and got hurt. But it’s fine now. Go back to bed.”

“You’re lying to me! Something awful is going on in my house, and I demand to know what it is.”

“It sounded a lot worse than it was, Barbara,” I said. “It’s all been taken care of.”

“Peg, are you there?” Barbara called out. “Your son’s a goddamn liar, Peg, but not a very good one. Please tell me!”

It was at this moment that the Conroy family sense of humor betrayed me. My brother Jim started to laugh, and he set off Kathy, then Tim, and finally Tom. When Tom began giggling, my mother lost it. She began laughing, though she still had blood on her lips. Barbara came down the stairs in her robe and slippers, and by then we were all laughing uncontrollably in the vestibule beneath the stairs.

“Is this family completely nuts?” Barbara asked me, and my siblings began to sink to the floor, doubled up in laughter.

When we returned to bed, I told Barbara the whole story of my father’s long, debilitating war against his family. I had never revealed to another soul that he had been beating my mother since I was conscious of being alive, and that I remember hating him when I was in a high chair, my face burning with shame and humiliation that I could do nothing to protect my mother. My father could sense my hatred of him, and he began to beat me with some regularity when I was still in diapers. He always went for the face. Don Conroy was not the “pop you on the fanny” kind of dad. My brother Jim once told me that his first memory as a child was my father having me by the throat, beating my head against the wall. When my father laughed and denied it, I informed him that I could show him the wall.

For hours, I talked to my wife and told her of savage beatings that I had received over a lifetime. “But you’re such a nice boy, Pat,” Barbara said.

“Yes, I was,” I answered in the darkness.

“Do you think it will ever stop?” she asked.

“I think it stopped tonight.”

After Barbara drifted off to sleep, I began to worry about my father. In my last glimpse of him, he was driving down Hancock Street, weaving and out of control. He was far drunker than I had imagined.

Again, I lifted myself out of bed and dressed in the darkness. Lightly, I skipped down the stairs and went out to the front yard, where I looked down Hancock Street for any sign of Dad. I began to jog down the street, now badly shaken by my violent encounter, and guilt-ridden that I was the source of that violence. I regretted kicking him, and wished I had fought him straight up, but I had kicked him across the yard, and that’s what I had to live with the rest of my life.

Dad had not gotten far. I found his car on the Green, a park-like acre in the middle of the Point surrounded by stately antebellum homes. He’d passed out on the grass and was lying on his back six feet away from the car, its motor still running. I switched off the engine and walked over to sit down beside my father. I thought, as I studied his face, what a horrible thing it is for a boy to hate his father, how it
harms that boy and damages him, how it makes him afraid and cowering every waking moment, how it debases and haunts his nightmares, and how the fighter pilot dives for his son even in his sleep. There is nowhere a boy can run to, no one who can help him. As I studied my father’s face in the moonlight, I realized I would always be serving a life sentence without parole because of the unpardonable cruelty of this one man. Now, on this night, my father had proffered his final gift to me—because I had kicked him across the lawn and beat him with my fists, I sat studying him at my leisure, deep in thought on the first night I ever thought of myself earning my natural birthright as a violent man. I was devastated. All during my childhood, I had sworn that I would never be a thing like him, and here before me, drunken and beaten, was living proof that I was the spitting image of Don Conroy.

But, in telling Barbara my story, I had felt a great lifting of the spirit, a cleansing and scouring and airy rising of the soul toward light. I felt what truth tasted like, and it rolled like honey off my tongue. I could change my life as a man if I could just quit pretending I came from a normal American family, if I could grant myself permission to hate my father with every ounce of loathing I could bring to the surface. If I was going to be truthful as a writer, I had to let the hate out into the sunshine. I owed it to myself to let my father know how much I hated every cell of the body that had brought mine to life.

I reached over and shook him. Turning over slowly, he tried to rise to his knees, and I helped him get to his feet. I put his left arm around my shoulder and we staggered toward the car together. I was going to tell him what I thought about him, but the words got confused in the passage, jumbled in the inexact translation as often happens in the strange world inhabited by fathers and sons. As I groped for the proper words, they formed by themselves—truth-telling words that could not be censored or slowed down, life-changing words for a bruised soul. In utter shock, I heard myself say out loud to the fighter pilot, “I love you, Dad.”

My father looked startled, as though I held a hand grenade up to his eyes with its pin dangling between my lips. He took off running, but drunks don’t run well, and I was beside him in a flash. I whispered in his ear, “I love you, Dad.” He lunged in the opposite direction, where
I pursued and caught up with him and turned him like a steer with the taunting yet magical four words that the Great Santini, a disgraceful father, could not bear to hear. Every time I said the words, he would stagger away from them as though I were pouring acid into his eardrum.

When I wrote
The Great Santini
, I wrote about the drama on the Green exactly as it happened, and my father hated that scene more than anything I ever wrote. He told every journalist who would listen to him that I had made the whole thing up. “My son has a bit of an overactive imagination, as the critics have pointed out,” he said.

When they filmed the movie in Beaufort, the actors Robert Duvall and Michael O’Keefe performed the scene with such brilliance and accuracy that I would have sworn they had been eyewitnesses to the event itself. Of course, Hollywood filmed it on the Green, at the exact spot of its provenance.

But that was all in the future. That night, after exhausting my father by chasing him around the Green, I helped him into the car and drove him back to my house and put him to bed on the living room couch. I went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. When the sun came up I was drinking a cup of coffee on the front steps of my house, every cell of my body ablaze with astonishment and wonder and the full knowledge that I had just lived through the most amazing night of my life.

•   •   •

When I took Dad to the Marine Corps Air Station to begin his second tour of duty in Vietnam, it was only a few days after the night I would always think of as movie night with the Conroys. Dad and I did not speak a word to each other on the way to the base, but he grabbed my arm and squeezed it until it hurt and said, “Hey, asshole, never get yourself killed in a politician’s war.”

As I drove home that morning I realized that I would have to turn myself into a cunning translator of my father’s indirect, sclerotic use of the language. In his own rough way, I thought Dad had just taken baby
steps toward some future day in the sun when he could actually say he loved his children.

So my father went off to war for the last time in his life, and a month later, Walter Trammell, the superintendent of schools, fired me from my job on Daufuskie Island, after a scant nine months on the job. He fired me for gross neglect of duty, insubordination, being AWOL, and conduct unbecoming to a professional educator. After a recommendation like that, I would never teach again. The following day, I received my notice that I’d been drafted and was to report to Fort Jackson in ten days. I had reaped the whirlwind at last and placed my family in the most perilous situation imaginable.