The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (15 page)

Then, in the yard of Tidalholm, in Beaufort, my father and I found ourselves seated in director’s chairs in a place of high honor as we watched the actors perform their wizardry and magic. Robert Duvall and Michael O’Keefe came out as though they knew they were about to live through one of the best days of their lives. All the suppressed anger a father and a son could hide from each other in every excruciating moment of the basketball game with the taunting that was good-natured at first, but turned savage as the game built. The kids on the sideline tried to shout support for their brother, but they could feel the resentment of the father building up like steam in a kettle.

It was Blythe Danner who saw the danger waters about to break. When the game was over and she hugged her son after his first victory over Santini, it was she who spotted the incurable wreckage that had built up on the foundations of her family. She declared her son the winner and got a basketball in her face for her troubles. But the father refused to accept his loss. For his courage, his father bounced a basketball off his son’s head in a long march from the court to his bedroom. In that courageous march Ben Meecham earned his wings in his father’s squadron and began to prove himself a worthy son of his warriorlike elder.

I sat there breathless in that yard when that seminal scene was filmed. My father hadn’t moved since the actors had gone to work. Everyone who had witnessed the coming apart of the Meecham family
sat there drained and exhausted. Even the wisteria seemed capable of collapse. What was it? I kept asking. What was it I had just seen with my own eyes play out in a town that I had taken for a home?

Then I had it, and my soul filled with gratitude. It was art. I had watched art being created and made and honored. It was a dazzling thing to behold.

It was so powerful in its purity and its sheer honesty that it shook me, terrified me. But it changed me. That is what art always does. It always changes you and that change stays with you for a lifetime. The magnificent cast caught with rare perfection how quickly the Conroy family dynamic could explode, grow in anarchy and acuity, until all of us were lost in our own lunatic roles of trying to defuse the chaos that had swallowed us up in an abyss we couldn’t avoid. These actors had captured the madness of our family and had done it by blending the powerful magic they carried with them in their belief in the genius of their own art. My father and I never spoke of watching that scene, but it did much to change our relationship as father and son.

My mother’s humiliation at not being invited to the Trask party turned out to be nothing compared with what was to come, when the premiere of
The Great Santini
came to Beaufort.

Peg Conroy’s most ardent desire was to have complete access to the crème de la crème of whatever society she found herself in, in whatever part of the country we were passing through. Her model for both imitation and inspiration was that cunning, treacherous beauty from the plantation South, Scarlett O’Hara. I think my mother saw her entire life as her becoming an amorous survivalist in a world dominated by men, a crucible of mysteriousness the only weapon at the disposal of a woman who was both desirable and unreadable at the same time. Miss Scarlett gave Mom the white-throated image of the ivory-skinned woman who lived in immaculate cameos throughout the South. My mother willed herself to be one of those pampered women of the cameos.

She also dressed for the part with chicness and finesse. Her embittered daughters still talk with envy about my mother’s lavish wardrobe and they both insist my mother was the only woman on base who had her own personal dressmaker. All I know for sure is that Mom looked scrumptious whenever she went out of the house and that she made Dad a handsomer man than he actually was. She dressed her children
as though we were foundlings—with the girls, it was particularly cruel, and she seemed to go out of her way to make my two pretty sisters as unattractive as possible. They were given eyeglasses that looked like they were made from fins of Chryslers. The boys didn’t count when it came to what we wore, and the siblings still get together and howl with laughter when we look at albums of our growing-up years. In some photographs, I see Tim and Tom wearing shirts I wore ten years before they were even born. But our mother was always ready to step out onto the veranda at Tara toward her fateful deliverance at the party at Twelve Oaks. Through an act of homage and will, she lived the life of Scarlett O’Hara. Everyone we met referred to her as a Southern belle and she did nothing to disabuse them of that notion. Beauty was her letter of transit out of the mean Appalachia.

Though my mother’s imitation of the Southern belle was well rehearsed, it lacked authenticity. She lacked the quiet confidence that comes from the leisure and gracefulness of coming up right. Social ease issues out from the accumulated weight of generations of high achievers. Fashion and style were not tests you could study for—they were endowments passed down by families with the weight of culture behind them and the emotional dowries to back them up. Mom would wear the hills of Piedmont into whatever ballroom she entered, and her children would wear these same hills plus the wounds of slipshod, madcap Ireland wherever we roamed. Your birthplace is your destiny and it hunts you down in whatever cotillion you’ve run to hide in—it is a bad tattoo that is defining, accurate, and irremovable. My poor mother thought she had fooled everyone, but in the end, she barely fooled anyone, and especially not her children.

It began to come apart for my mother after her divorce from Dad. Overnight, my mother became a desperate, nearly hopeless woman. Though Mom had never drunk in her life, I heard rumors that she was now drinking heavily and even sleeping around. The kids were worried about her, and I think my brother Jim was simply disgusted with her. Then I heard a story that truly alarmed me and set me on the road to Beaufort at full speed.

When I got to Mom’s house, we drove out to the beach on Hunting
Island and we walked to the south end of the beach talking about everything. Mom told me, “I think I’m going crazy, Pat. I really do. I’ve lost all status and respect in this town. I used to be asked to serve on boards and was invited to the biggest parties. That’s over for me. Some of these bitches won’t even talk to me now.”

“Have you been smoking dope with their kids, Mom? That’s what I’d heard in Atlanta.”

“Of course not! I’ve never even seen marijuana. I don’t know what it looks like,” she said. “How dare you believe those lies they’re talking about me?”

“I was just asking. That seems like a big response from an innocent woman.”

“Beaufort is making me paranoid. I can feel the people talking about me. Watching me from behind their window shades. Everyone’s waiting for me to make a mistake. When I first came here I was the most popular woman in town. Now they act like I should be put out with the morning trash.”

“I’ve got a suggestion, Mom. Let me send you to college.”

“That offends the very core of my being,” she said. “So even my son doesn’t think I’m smart enough. Even you’ve betrayed me while I’ve lost my way temporarily. Son, I was like a prisoner in your father’s house for thirty years, saddled with all those kids and no life of my own. I’m having some fun, Pat, just a little fun. Maybe I’m sowing a few wild oats. Kicking my heels up before I have to get married again. Besides, I graduated from Agnes Scott with honors.”

“Just be careful, Mom. Beaufort can turn mean in a heartbeat.”

“I think my redneck roots are showing through, and the mountain girl is finally up in arms. I come from bootleggers and murderers and they don’t want to mess with pistol-packing Mountain Peg.”

“Oh? When did Miss Scarlett die?” I asked, and my mother ran into the ocean laughing.

On one of my visits to Beaufort during the filming of the movie, I went to a bar above Harry’s Restaurant to meet with Mom and Dr. John Egan. Mom had gotten together a cordial group of ten to twelve neighbors from Beaufort. Many were pals of Dr. Egan’s, and had spent
their lives on bases around the world. They were sophisticated and comfortable with themselves, and told great stories.

Toward the end of the evening my mother struck a wineglass with a teaspoon to get everybody in the restaurant’s attention. She took well to the limelight and glowed with a peculiar shine of pleasure surrounded by her friends and her oldest son. I remember being proud of the fact that she was so pretty and liked to be around old boys who appreciated that beauty.

“I’ve got an announcement to make and I wanted Pat to be here when I made it. Last night, I got a phone call from Charles Pratt, who is the producer of
The Great Santini
. Mr. Pratt said he and the studio had thought about the opening of the film being in Hollywood. Some wanted it to open in Toronto, others in New York. ‘But then it hit us all,’ he said. ‘Let’s open the movie in Beaufort, where Pat lived the life and wrote the book that brought us all to that beautiful part of the world.’ ”

A cheer went up from the patrons in the restaurant, and the rumor hit the streets.

“Charles Pratt promised me that this premiere is going to be one of the biggest blowouts this town has ever seen. He said it would be the hottest ticket in town. I want to invite all of you to come to help me celebrate what I know will be one of the most joyous nights of my life,” my mother said as friends came up to hug and congratulate us.

When I left the next morning for the long drive back to Atlanta, I gave my mother a cautionary warning: “Mom, I would tone down your triumphalism about the premiere coming to town. Ease up on the pedal when you start bragging about me.”

“I’ll brag about you all I want. Don’t think those women who have a lawyer or a doctor in their family don’t run their mouths every time they see me. One of the pleasures of being a mother is bragging about your kids.”

“Then brag about the other ones. I’m afraid this will get back to the kids and hurt their feelings.”

“No, no, this is your negativity again. You’re trying to squelch my fun when I’m just starting to have some, and I won’t let you do it. You
never enjoy any of the good things that’ve happened to you. Not one thing. You see the dark side of everything.”

“I don’t trust the world. I’m cautious about it. I don’t know how it will come, but there’s always trouble lying ahead.”

“You watch for the trouble all you want,” she said. “I plan to enjoy the ride.”

I went back to writing and editing
The Lords of Discipline
and I realized that I could finally make a sentence sound exactly how I wanted it to sound. Under my editor Jonathan Galassi’s watchful eye, I wrote scenes and tightened others and have rarely enjoyed working on a book with such passion and ardor—I looked at what I did for a living and adored making the English language sing and strut on a sheet of yellow legal paper where I wrote it down in my own handwriting. The book would be published by Houghton Mifflin on the fall list, about the same time the
Santini
movie was being released around the country.

But there were storms passing through in my own life that I could not ignore. I had fallen in love with a fetching woman named Lenore Fleischer, who in the next ten years would ruin my life and lead me into a suicidal spiral that I thought I could never recover from. She failed to tell me she had gone off birth control three months before our wedding, then surprised me by getting immediately pregnant, maybe even on our wedding night. Her rodentlike, morally repugnant ex-husband was suing me so often in the Atlanta courts that I would end up taking the whole family off to live in Rome, Italy, for three years in the eighties, mostly to get away from him. In Rome, I finalized two hundred and fifty pages of
The Prince of Tides
, but Jonathan Galassi had stunned me by taking a job with Random House and wanted me to make the move with him. When I visited the new office of Jonathan at Random House, it soon became apparent that the editors and publishers at that august publishing house had no interest in my writing career and almost none in Jonathan’s either. We were insulted in every office to which he took me. I never felt like more of a Southern hick, toothless and feckless with holes in my shoes, than I did for those two shameful hours wandering the halls of that gutless company. Jason Epstein has no idea how close I was to breaking his bigmouthed jaw when he
mortified a crestfallen Jonathan in front of me and refused to raise his eyes to meet mine, nor his hand to shake mine in friendship. He was a braying, overbearing man, not a lonesome dove among his discourteous colleagues. I sprinted out of Jonathan Galassi’s life and Random House went on to fire him in 1986. He went to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and succeeded in becoming one of the most successful and distinguished publishers in New York history. I ran back to the warm embrace of Houghton Mifflin and fell under the sway of the glorious Nan Talese. Nan would later receive the first Maxwell E. Perkins Award for lifetime achievement in editing. Two years later Jonathan Galassi won the third Maxwell E. Perkins Award. My life as a writer has been a well-cobbled one; I was lucky to work with editors of supernatural gifts. At times, I made a ham-fisted unruly guest in their stable of writers, but we did some good things together that I’ll always be proud of.

Then
The Great Santini
premiere made a full-fledged charge at my mother’s poor artless heart. The strategy caught the whole family by surprise, but it was admirable in its cunning and its blitzkrieg swiftness.

Every morning, Dad would join me for coffee in my living room in Atlanta, where we’d dissect the
Atlanta Constitution
and talk about the news of the day. At the beginning of the summer, I could tell that Dad’s excitement about the premiere was rising as he began talking about how many of his brothers and sisters he could sneak in the back door. He talked about the Conroy kids and their families all sitting in a group and then said, “In the best seats in the house, of course.”

“Dad,” I warned, “I don’t know where the premiere’s going to be. The theaters in Beaufort are the size of kayaks.”