The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (17 page)

“The class comes with the whole package. I thought you knew that, son,” she said.

“But I also know the killer Peg who comes in that same package. Keep the killer Peg under wraps,” I said.

“I’d like to strangle every member of that committee and run them down on the street.”

“Tell me that, Mom. Don’t tell them,” I said.

During the week of the premiere, Mom received her final tally from Colonel Sigmund. She called me with complete exhilaration and cried out, “Paul said I could have all the tickets I wanted. Every one of them. I told Paul that I’d try my best to get you and Don down here for the big night.”

“Sorry, Mom; that’s why this worked. It wasn’t a threat—it was a promise. Who’re you inviting?”

“Everybody I’m related to. You’ve got cousins coming whom you’ve
never even heard of. I’d like to empty the jailhouse and invite all the inmates,” she said.

“Easy, Mom. You won. No victory laps, please,” I suggested.

“Pat, I can’t thank you enough. What other son would do this for his mother? And please thank Don for me. It’s going to be hard for your egomaniac father to miss his own show.”

But my father did not miss his own show. Unbeknownst to me, he had been plotting with the producer Charles Pratt to have an early showing of
The Great Santini
at the Omni theater in Atlanta. Dad and I called everyone we knew and loved in Atlanta. The whole Atlanta writing community showed up—Anne Rivers Siddons in her luscious, sexiest prime came with her dapper husband, Heyward, at her side. Terry and Tommie Kay arrived, followed by Marshal and Gudrun Frady, Larry and Dee Woods, Joe and Emily Cummings, Vern Smith, Paul and Susan Hemphill—my college girlfriend Terry Leite, armed with her radiant beauty, walked in with Cliff Graubart and Bernie and Martha Schein. It was a sweet gathering on an auspicious evening.

Dad had another great surprise as the theater filled to capacity. A bagpiper team with fife and drums entered from the lobby. The men were a Marine contingent who were sharp as the wings of falcons as they stopped and played “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the whole theater rose in an unrehearsed corps de ballet. Then the bagpipers marched in fine order as they played the Marine Corps hymn and the crowd let out an exultant roar of approval. For five minutes they put on a marching display that was mesmerizing. The ovation they received as they marched back into the lobby was immense.

Then the theater darkened and the movie began. Before the movie started, my father reached over and squeezed my wrist.

“Semper Fi, Pat,” he said.

“Semper Fi, Santini,” I answered.

The movie was superb, as perfect as anything I could imagine. Robert Duvall, Blythe Danner, Michael O’Keefe, and Lisa Jane Persky taught me what it was like to be brought home to the tabernacle where art is turned into an essential thing that a human soul can feast on. Each of these actors exuded a power that seemed otherworldly, far beyond the realms of anything I thought possible. They fit together as
a wounded family with both a naturalness and grandeur. Lewis John Carlino’s direction was seamless to me, and I was moved to see the town of Beaufort filmed with such a loving eye of a camera crew that had taken in the comeliness of my river-shaped town. They filmed a French class in Gene Norris’s English classroom I attended at Beaufort High School. They filmed a basketball game in a gym on the air station where I used to play against Marines who served under my father. They filmed the grueling scene of the father and son’s two-step dance on the Green exactly where it happened in real life.

But my favorite scene by far took place at the end of the movie, when they’re burying the Great Santini and the “missing man” formation soars over the cemetery in a salute to a lost aviator.

I glanced over, and to my delight my father had tears running down his cheeks as the colonel watched the burial of his fictitious self.

“Oh, Dad, give me a break,” I said. “Santini crying at his own funeral. Over the top, Colonel.”

“Fuck you,” Dad said lovingly.

My book did much to tear my family apart, but more than anything, the harrowing story of the Conroy family found a form of mysterious healing when the movie
The Great Santini
was loosed to the world.

In the bar in the Atlanta Omni we drank with our great friends in rowdy boisterousness and the knowledge that all of us had just experienced a signatory time in our lives.

At the real premiere the following evening in Beaufort, my mother took to her queenship of the night with graciousness and flair. She held center stage like a consort in Balmoral Castle as she accepted compliments and bouquets from a town that had neared a point of no return with her. During the first showing of the film, all the Conroy family sat in the front row in a place of high honor. The town watched in fascination as the film began to spread out the breakdown of a single military family embattled with one another while the Cold War played out around them. In a visceral scene, Robert Duvall comes home drunk from happy hour and becomes engaged in a pitched battle with his family that leaves his tribe lying all over the kitchen. Beaufort was shocked by the ruthlessness of the encounter, and the audience held its breath as the Conroy family watched from the front row.

Finally my brother Jim, who sat in the last seat of the aisle, went down on one knee and whispered to his mother and siblings: “Bambi. Duvall is like Bambi beating up on his family. Dad should’ve shown him how to take a family apart. This guy’s Bambi.”

The Conroy family, as odd and imbalanced as any group who had ever entered the Beaufort city limits, fell apart laughing. The town watched us with a noncommittal gaze, and much pity.

Every family produces one unconventional, breakout member whose sheer willfulness and obstinacy will change the course of that family’s history. When my grandmother Margaret Nolen Peek deserted her four children and husband in the middle of the Depression and hitchhiked a ride on a mule wagon heading for Atlanta, where she got a job in the notions department at Rich’s department store, then married a Greek salesman of adding machines who also ran the numbers racket in the city, she transformed everything about how her children looked at themselves in the world. My mother’s family pulled out of impoverished but honorable bondage to subsistence farming in the mountains of Alabama. In her flight, my grandmother proved she was not a big fan of starvation, country living, or a future that seemed desperate and hopeless to her. By marrying Jack Stanton, she shifted her social status overnight. When I was learning to talk as an infant, I gave her the nickname “Stanny” because I could not handle the “Mama Stanton” she wanted me to call her. Her pridefulness was a clear spring inside her, so no grandchild ever dared call her “Grandma.” She reveled in her flamboyance, earthy beauty, acquired sophistication, stylish attraction to expensive clothes, and her passion for traveling to exotic nations. She once told me that she had a third-grade education and married my grandfather Jasper Catlett Peek when she was eleven. “Before I was even a woman,” she whispered in her gravelly voice. I was
horrified even though I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. If you want to find yourself completely lost in the mysteries of either God or sex, have a Roman Catholic education even though you were raised in a family who came out of the primitive Baptist tradition of the mountain South. I sometimes feel that my faith issued forth from a mustachioed nun who spoke in tongues. Stanny never belonged to a church that I’m aware of, but my grandfather spoke to Jesus of Nazareth, out loud, every day of his life. After Stanny deserted him and her children during the Depression, Jasper Peek never dated or looked at another woman. Stanny was married six or seven times, maybe more. In her house on Rosedale Road, I once walked into her living room and encountered a complete stranger lying on the couch listening to an Atlanta Crackers baseball game on the radio. Openmouthed, I stared at the man, who seemed very much at home. When Stanny rounded the corner and sensed my discomfort, she said in a cheery voice, “Pat, aren’t you going to kiss your new granddad?” I walked up and kissed the man on the cheek. I never saw the man again or learned his name. But my mother later corroborated that I had met one of Stanny’s many husbands. Mom dismissed Stanny’s collection of husbands as a bad habit, but it was a habit she continued until her late seventies. Stanny considered her addictions to bourbon, high-rolling men, and matrimony as venial sins and “nothing to write home about.” In her simple, lucid theology, she claimed that she had never committed a crime serious enough for any loving god to burn her in the lake of fire for all eternity. There was much wrong about my childhood, but Stanny will always remain one of its shining glories.

On March 10, 1947, my mother went into labor in Manassas, Virginia. My father drove her to Annapolis, Maryland, where he was a member of the Navy Olympic basketball team. Stanny had ridden up on a train to take care of me during my mother’s two weeks of convalescence in the hospital. (I always have to explain this anomaly to my own daughters, whose nurses forced them to do wind sprints up and down the hall about fifteen minutes after they gave birth to my grandchildren. Or so it seemed to me.) With great gentleness Stanny tried to prepare me for the surprise entry of a sister and rival into my one-child
kingdom. She later reported the news to me and I seemed less than thrilled. Though I was two years old, I seemed satisfied with a single-child household. For the rest of my life, Stanny would file reports about my inconsolable jealousy over the new arrival in my family. On day three I struck back: When Stanny went out to pick some flowers in the yard, I locked the front door behind her. I was blond when I was a little boy, and I was looking out the window standing on the couch when she realized the trick played on her by a mischievous grandchild. At first, she tried sweet talk and flattery to coo me into unlocking the door. Laughing, I shook my head, a defiant no. For an hour, Stanny remained good-natured about it. Then she grew irritated and began to threaten me with a spanking. She tore a switch off a bush and stripped it of leaves and small branches. If I didn’t unlock the door, she would switch my bottom till the cows came home. When she changed tactics, so did I, and now I refused to unlock the door because she was going to spank me.

More time passed, and Stanny finally blew up and screamed, “Now I’m not going to just switch you, Pat—now I’m gonna kill you.”

I stuck out my tongue at her. She would swear, many years later, that she almost picked up a brick and threw it through the window. Instead, she walked to a horse stable across the highway and bought two Popsicles, the orange ones I preferred. Back at her window, she began to lick her Popsicle and, moaning with pleasure, said, “It’s so good, Pat. So sweet. It’s the best Popsicle I’ve ever had. I’d sure like to give you yours, but I can’t with the door locked. I guess I’ll have to give it to that nice little girl Susie, next door.”

I opened the door and Stanny charged in waving that switch like a wand of battle. I sprinted into my parents’ bedroom and hid under their bed. Later, she’d swear I was the fastest toddler she’d ever laid eyes on. Stanny began laughing hysterically as she lured me out from under the bed by dangling the Popsicle before my eyes. She hugged me and tickled me and told me stories for the rest of the night. She had made a friend for life.

Stanny grew up in a lowborn, remorseless South that is nearly impossible to exaggerate. My mother’s mordant shame about her Alabama mountain family produced a sense of impermeable social inferiority that would mark all her waking hours and disfigure the edges of her own mother’s life—a girl from Piedmont, Alabama, dropping out of school in the third grade with a future dominated by despair and by the prospect of nothingness. Stanny spent her whole life sprinting away from those Alabama hills. My mother ran even faster.

There was great hurt in Stanny’s unannounced departure from her children’s lives in the middle of the Depression. At the time of Stanny’s leaving, my grandfather owned and operated his own barbershop in downtown Rome, Georgia. But Grandpa Peek had an extraordinary and intimate relationship with the son of God, and he received a summons from Jesus himself to renounce all worldly goods and take to a soapbox to preach the news of the apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ. He shuttered the barbershop and took to the streets of Rome, to announce the harsh prophecy of the living God. His family began to starve, and my aunt Helen answered a call from the principal’s office after my mother fainted from hunger in her first-grade class. My mother carried the dark wound of this alarming event for the rest of her life. A few days later, Stanny stuck out her thumb and caught a ride on a mule wagon going to Atlanta. She revealed her secret flight to no one, and her children woke up motherless in a desperate home where their father had gone insane over his love of God. None of Stanny’s four children ever recovered from her sudden abandonment of them for the uncertainties and the bright excesses of Atlanta. But the story had power, and room for growth. My youngest cousins grew up hearing that a rich man picked Stanny up in a white Cadillac.