The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (10 page)

One morning I finally asked him, “Do I have to spend the rest of my life having coffee with your sorry ass?”

“Affirmative,” Dad said. “Those are the orders of the day.”

“I’d rather stick a wet finger in a wall socket,” I said, then, “Don’t you remember our first night in Atlanta? What I told you? Let’s refresh. I hate you. I loathe you. I want to vomit when I hear you knock on my door each morning. That do the trick for you?”

“I told the kids you were trying to make me out to be some kind of ogre,” he said, pronouncing the word as “o-gree.” “Did you see where Hank Aaron hit two homers last night?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I got it, Dad. I got it all.”

Yet the manuscript for
The Great Santini
was growing day by day. I suffered writing it as I tried to explain to myself the bottomless terror I felt as a boy. Because we moved on an almost yearly basis, my childhood loneliness would stay with me until I got to Beaufort High School. Though I did not perceive it at that time, the book was taking me at a rapid speed toward another great breakdown of my life. The question that troubled me most was what my father got out of putting my mom and their children on the floor of every house we entered. In full Technicolor, I remember every beating that my father administered and I could take you to the exact spot where it happened in each of those small houses of his early Marine Corps career. I would grow heartsick when he walked in the den every afternoon after happy hour. I was afraid of him and it showed in my eyes. He had supreme contempt for my cowardice and sometimes he would backhand me because I dared to show fear.

Driving in his car, me riding shotgun, was the most dangerous place in the universe for me. After a Little League game, a backhand if I’d made an error; after a football game, a slap to the face for missing a tackle; after a basketball game, a bloody nose for playing on the losing team. A boy played a game at his own peril when the Marine was in the stands. We all played scared when the colonel was in the field house. Dad had an odd, unsettling habit of yelling out to the opposing team to put Conroy on the deck, or “Cut Conroy’s legs out from under him!” When Mom would protest, Dad would say he was just trying to toughen me up. He wanted a street fighter and not the mama’s boy he had on his hands.

But the story kept rolling, and I could not stop or impede its toll. I thought I was telling a story that had never been told in the history of American literature. There had been innumerable novels about soldiers and their wives and wartime, but I had never heard a word about their children. I was a proud member of an invisible tribe called “military brats,” voiceless and unpraised as both children and adults. Because
I grew up encountering the restlessness of warriors during peacetime training, I had watched my father’s visible disappointment when the Russian ships turned back during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Carol Ann said, “Can you believe Dad’s pissed off because we didn’t have a nuclear war?” My father laughed when he heard that our high school had a fallout drill and said, “Skip those drills. Because of Parris Island and the air station, Beaufort is ground zero. Drill all you want. You sports fans are going to be dust in five seconds.”

Because of such insider information, when my father scrambled his squadron 331 off the runway in Beaufort and turned south toward Puerto Rico, he had horrified his children about the fate of his family if the flag went up. Being miles from the air station, we would be atomized in an instant. The whole East Coast as we knew it would disappear from the face of the earth. When Gene Norris announced that the Russian ships had turned back, an exultant cheer went up in the class—more relief than joy. Several kids in that class, including me, had men ready to take to the air against the Russian MiGs, and they feared for their fathers’ lives. I was still praying for my father to die in his warplane, a disfiguring element I brought into my novel.

Yet there were many scenes that I was writing about a military family’s life that seemed mystical to me. Originally, I began the novel with the Meecham family waiting for the arrival of their Marine Corps fighter pilot from a year spent on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea. The scene was always emotional because my fear of the return outweighed the pleasure of seeing my father again. It had become clear to me that when Dad was gone, I was a happy young boy. When he was home, I became a melancholic, despairing one. Still, the return of the warrior was a rite of passage for every military brat on earth.

The night following his return, Bull Meecham drives his family from the house on Rosedale Road to their new quarters in Beaufort. My father always left at night with his kids sprawled uncomfortably on a mattress laid out in the back of our Ford station wagon. The move to a new town and a new base was always hard; Carol Ann and I were filled with a clanging anxiety at having to reinvent ourselves one more time. In the middle of the night, we moved with the virtuosity of bedouins as our father rotated through bases all across America.

Also I could write for the first time of the pride I felt in being the son of a Marine, proud of being connected to the corps, which represented excellence, fearlessness, a relentless drive for perfection; the corps trained to be the most fierce fighting force in the world. I was intoxicated by the love of country and the corps whenever I made a boyish salute on the fields of Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point. I grew up believing that the army, navy, and air force were pale imitations of the real thing. I learned the way of the warrior from the Marines. From a boyhood spent watching maneuvers, I learned that no one wanted to be on a beach when those guys showed up. It was the easiest way in the world to get dead.

The writing of
The Great Santini
began to feel like a case of battle fatigue. In my head, I was falling apart as I excavated one buried memory at a time. Since no one in my family knew what I was up to—and I include myself in that calculation—I issued no storm warnings or small-craft advisories. I was going at it alone, entering into strange and dangerous waters every time I wrote a page. Still, I wrote and wrote, fighting through those times when I found myself assaulted by the unforgivable crime of full disclosure. Guilt. Every time I found myself censoring the writer in me, I would write it anyway. Finally, it became a credo for my entire writing life—if I feared putting something on paper, it was a voice screaming from the interior for me to start writing it down, to leave out nothing.

So, I came to this illustrious moment I had dreamed about since I was a ten-year-old boy—I had arrived at the last chapter of the only first novel I’d ever write. Its doors were flying open and I knew where it was going and what was going to happen. I wanted that last chapter to put the readers on the floor with its power. There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalist effects, but I don’t travel with that tribe. I like to make people look up and see me walking the high wire without a net. That’s what I was born to do, and I almost ran to my writing desk every day, anxious and willing to have at it.

In the single most creative burst of my career, I completed that last chapter by writing almost nonstop for twenty-four hours. Every word seemed summoned and anointed with a limitless power over which I had no control. It delighted me, the ease with which the words
appeared, with me as some involuntary instrument taking dictation from the stars. In that chapter, I put the Great Santini into his warplane, where he flew from Key West back to his home base in South Carolina. In the middle of the flight, his fire warning lights flickered on, and Bull Meecham fought to get his plane safely back in its hangar. He aborted his first landing when he saw the lights of family homes beneath him. He changed direction and his A-6 disappeared from the radar screen forever. They found the remains the next day. No one has ever loved writing his father’s funeral scene more than I did. I relished every word of it.

Then, in the last two hours of this epiphanic night, I began an almost hallucinatory scene involving the God that eighteen-year-old Ben would pray to about his guilt-ridden relief over the death of his own father. I began creating that God from the spirits of different characters I had made up during the course of writing the novel. This part surprised me, because I’d not planned for this. I had wanted the novel to end with a trip, the way military families always rotate through bases. I needed the Meechams to set off on the highway toward Atlanta—the son now driving the family away from the town, just as the father drove the family into town at the beginning of the book. What in the hell was God doing there? But it felt right, so I went with it. Then I felt the surge, the rush of adrenaline, when I’m coming onto something larger than myself. I had Ben Meecham pray to this God he had just created out of his own imagination:

When I finished this last line, I fell apart and wept for a long time. For several months, I believe that Barbara—acting on behalf of our children—could have had me committed to a mental institution, because I had traveled too far into the great wound that is my family. Instead of granting me a portion of strength and satisfaction, the novel felt like a bloodletting, an auto-da-fé, or a crown of thorns. Inchoately, I could feel it killing me from the inside out, making me desperate, suicidal, emptied out. Though I thought I had written a good book, I had pulled the pin of a hand grenade, then thrown my entire body over it, knowing it would kill me without harming anyone else. For six months I walked around Atlanta, bedbug crazy and tortured by anxiety and nightmares. At the end of the six months, I found a therapist, Dr. Marion O’Neill, who came in to save me. By this time, the book was in full production and would come out in the spring of 1976. Still, I had warned no one about its content or subject matter. The days passed slowly, but inexorably, like a firing squad assembling at dawn. I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred-page novel just because I needed to love my father. It never occurred to me that I was born with a need to love my dad. It seemed like a madman’s fantasy that my father could ever bring himself to love me. Then the book was published, and my problems really began.

When the postman delivered the first ten copies of
The Great Santini
to my house on Briarcliff Road, I knew that there was no escape in secrecy or vagueness or distortion. Houghton Mifflin was shipping my book to stores all across the country, and I’d soon be facing the judgment of family and critics. When the verdict was in, I far preferred the critics.

My father raced over from his aerie in the Darlington apartments. I had rarely seen him so animated. He shouted with joy when I handed him the book and he saw the title of my first novel.

“My God, son, you’ve named the book after me. What an honor.”

“Dad, you might want to read the book before you start talking about it,” I said, horrified that I had even kept the name of the book from my father. He opened the book and started thumbing his way through its pages, excitable and happy-faced as a King Charles pup.

“So, you dedicated this book to me and your mother.” Suddenly moved, he added, “This might be the best day of my life.”

At first, I had dedicated it to my mother alone, phrasing it, “This book is dedicated to Frances ‘Peggy’ Conroy, the grandest of mothers and teachers.” When I wrote the dedication, I went to Ellen Harper’s dress shop and asked Ellen to type it for me. She put on her reading glasses and started typing. I could feel her irritation at me. She was the mother of my best friend in high school and she’d been like a mother
to me since I first walked into her house. She had exercised an editorial privilege that I had not authorized, but she was giving me a lesson I would long remember. Ellen had added the following words: “And to Colonel Donald Conroy, U.S.M.C. Ret., the grandest of fathers and Marine aviators.”

“I thought I raised you right,” Ellen said. “Wipe that frown off your face. I taught you to do the right thing, boy, to take the high road. Now get! Mrs. Aimar has come in to shop for a hat.”

I left the words in and will be grateful to Sarah Ellen Harper until I draw my last breath. It was the only armor I took going into the wars that would soon erupt on both sides of the family. But the center of conflict was standing in my living room holding a novel I had written describing my withering contempt of him. It was an awful and existential moment in a young writer’s life. My coming-of-age novel was taking on the grotesque trappings of a public beheading. My father danced down the driveway to his yellow ’68 Volkswagen convertible I had given him as a retirement gift. He was buoyant while I was worried. When he drove off, I knew trouble lay ahead.

In two hours, the phone rang and I picked it up, knowing it would be my father.