The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (21 page)

“Does Jesus ever talk about me, James?” Stanny asked.

“All the time, Mother. Hey, he’s right here. Jesus, would you say hello to my mother? They call her Stanny.”

“Jesus?” my grandmother said.

“Hey, Stanny. How you getting along, cupcake? You sure got a great set of jugs for an older woman, if you know what I mean, hon.” Bernie, whose perversity was limitless as far as I knew, realized he had gone a bit far in his sacrilegious imitation of Christ, and said, “No, Stanny, James and I pray for you every night. He can’t wait for you to get up here so we can get to know each other better. You know, go out for a few drinks, tell a few lies, relax and kick back.”

“So I’m going to heaven, Jesus?” she asked.

“You’re going to be in my lap the second you die. And I’m not just whistling ‘Dixie,’ sweetheart. All your friends and relatives are coming up to live with me in heaven. Especially that fabulous guy that I love more than any other creature on earth, that king of personality, that pure delight—who else but Bernie Schein. Of course, his friend Pat’s gonna burn forever in hellfire. I’m going to smite his sorry ass for all eternity. His screaming, moaning, and wailing gonna be music to my ears.”

From the front window of my house on Briarcliff Road, I watched as Bernie and Stanny drove up the driveway. It was seven in the evening when they arrived home, and they’d been gone for more than five hours. Bent double, Bernie staggered out of his car and, with movements resembling a hurt beetle, he went and retrieved Stanny, letting out an audible cry of distress when he lifted her onto his back and walked her up the stairs leading to the front door. When I lifted Stanny off his back, Bernie crumpled to his knees, his whines both pitiful and aggrieved. Though Bernie had never suffered from back problems in his life, Stanny presented him the gift of sciatica for his generous offer to take her to visit Uncle James at Greenlawn Cemetery. When I helped Bernie inside, he told in profane detail what had occurred on his
field trip with Stanny. When he finished, Stanny told her own fanciful, sanitized version of the day’s events. As they talked, the story began to build and change, as all great stories do.

•   •   •

After my separation from Barbara, I moved to an apartment in Ansley Park, where I had yet another breakdown following the publication of
The Great Santini
. I loved Barbara’s explanation to our families about the failure of our marriage: “When I said my wedding vows, I said ‘richer or poorer.’ I didn’t say a damn thing about crazy.” It was the third breakdown I’d suffered, and there would be three more before I finished with them or they finished with me. Though I had written my novel as a way of trying to save myself, the screams of the hurt boy I had been still echoed in the deep well he fell in when I became a man. The stories I hadn’t told or was afraid to tell were the ones that were killing me. My course and my history as a writer were now set in granite—my work would be father-haunted and emotional enough to ward off these exhausting bouts of madness.

But there was much more to my divorce from Barbara than I ever admitted to either Barbara or myself. It had never occurred to me that when I started writing books it would make me more attractive to smart and pretty women, or that they would want to sleep with me. That I would cheerfully agree to do so came as one of the great surprises of my young manhood. I thought I’d be a much finer man than I turned out to be. But I brought a real sense of endangerment to these affairs and couldn’t sleep with a woman unless I fell somewhat in love with her. Though I tried discretion and restraint, in the end my marriage with Barbara failed because I was an asshole. I hurt a fine woman and cast an intricate web of grief over the lives of my three daughters. The marriage came apart because I fell in love with a flashy, dark-eyed woman from the Dominican Republic named Maria Margarita Jimenez-Grullon. She was intellectual, hilarious, and politically situated somewhere between Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot. Conversation was a runaway train in her presence, so much so that she would stamp her foot to make a point. Barbara overheard a conversation I had with Maria Margarita
and wisely declared the end of our marriage. By then, I had gone to the dark place that more and more seemed like home to me. I lost Barbara and I lost Maria Margarita; and on a devastating, inexplicable rebound, I married Lenore Fleischer, who would teach me everything about life and love that I did not want to know.

When I told Stanny that Barbara and I were getting a divorce, she surprised me by saying, “I just don’t believe in divorce. Never have.”

“You?” I said. “Stanny, I thought you invented divorce.”

“I admit I did it a few times,” she said. “But I never believed in it.”

Stanny’s second life in Atlanta proved to be stormy and short-lived. My aunts Helen and Evelyn disapproved of the sinful, Bohemian life I was subjecting Stanny to as I tried to entertain her in the increasing solitude of her old age. But events began to conspire against my old girl and she was kicked out of two more boardinghouses for drinking. By 1980, my aunts had managed to move Stanny back to Jacksonville, Florida, where she lived out most of the rest of her life with Uncle Joe and Aunt Evelyn. When she could no longer care for herself, they exiled her to a nursing home in Orlando, where Aunt Helen visited her every day. When I stopped by to see her on a book tour, she screamed at me, “If you love me enough, Pat, you’ll get me out of this goddamn hellhole!”

I didn’t love her enough. It is a final, unbearable judgment I pass against myself. I should have moved Stanny into my house and taken care of her forever. Because of my intemperate youth, my selfish spirit, my wildness and years of breakdown, I failed to do the right thing. Stanny’s long-ago flight to Atlanta amidst the suffering of the Depression was the great blow of her liberation from my mother’s entire family. There was boldness and madness in her escape from a poverty she found ruthless to her children and humiliating to her. Heedlessly, she abandoned her children at the most desperate moment of their lives and tore out for the big city to find a radiant life, full of possibility and hope and danger, for all the rest of us.

Hey, Stanny—you’ll always be my girl.

I don’t believe in happy families. A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground. If a family gathers in harmony for a reunion, everyone in attendance will know the entry-ways and exits have been mined with improvised explosive devices. The crimes of a father or the carelessness of a mother can defile the taste of oyster dressing and giblet gravy on the brightest Thanksgiving Day. Birthday parties are an abomination. I hated them even when I was a child, especially mine. Long ago, I decided I liked funerals far more than I did weddings. The pretense of being festive at these events is both crushing and debilitating to me. Feigned happiness and forced bonhomie take a toll on my spirit that deflates me for a week. My parents taught me many things, but they never taught me a thing about faking joy.

Since the melancholy of families has remained a constant theme of my books, I often encounter readers and friends who strive at great lengths to convince me that they emerged from homes of stalwart happiness and unbreakable harmony. Taking care, I always congratulate them on their great good fortune and tell them how lucky and how rare they are in this troublesome world.

The happy family is one of the treasured romances of the American epic, something akin to the opening of the West. All who reveal this
truth about their family do so with a conviction and resolution that are always touching to me. Many of my readers have moved me by their recollections and myths of their childhoods, making it seem to me that their families tried as hard as they could to be well rounded and not fragmented, happy and not bereft. Their families always did as well as they could, and that seemed like quite enough for me. I admired these families and their messengers for carrying on the necessary work of making these impossible unions less a curse and more a virtue. A good country springs from these families.

In 1986, I was signing copies of
The Prince of Tides
in the book section of Rich’s department store on Lenox Road in Atlanta. A large contingent of Peeks and Nolens had driven down from Piedmont for the signing, delighting me with their presence. It was one of the last times I would see any of my mother’s people until Stanny’s funeral. In the middle of the signing, I spotted Dad and invited him to join me as he’d done on other occasions.

Soon after my father took his place beside me, a charming young couple approached the table, a young woman with palomino hair and an opaline complexion, her husband with a face that looked more designed than born into. Their beauty was a celebration of each other, and they bore the look of a young governor and his first lady. We began to talk as Dad took his avuncular time oversigning each book as his own line began to gather.

The couple had graduated from the University of Georgia more than a decade before, and yes, he had been president of his fraternity and she had been president of her sorority. Both looked poised to lift off in the launch zone of their pure potential. The young man leaned down and said, “We both read your new book and loved it. But I’ve got to tell you, Pat, your family is really fucked-up.”

“Yes, they are,” I said. “There’s the main reason over there.” And I introduced them both to my father.

“I can’t believe he’s still talking to you after
The Great Santini
,” the man said.

“It was touch-and-go for a while,” I admitted.

“Was your family really that fucked-up, or did you make a lot of it up?” he whispered.

“They were very screwed up,” I said. “What about your family, pal? How do they stack up?”

“Oh, my family,” he replied, “they’re just wonderful. I’d say almost perfect.”

“Then let’s go deeper. How far do I have to go in your family before I hit the first crazy? Dad. Mom. Brother. Sister. Aunt. Uncle?”

His pretty wife broke under the pressure and spit out the words, “His mother’s nuts!”

Not a single family finds itself exempt from that one haunted casualty who suffered irreparable damage in the crucible they entered at birth. Where some children can emerge from conditions of soul-killing abuse and manage to make their lives into something of worth and value, others can’t limp away from the hurts and gleanings time decanted for them in flawed beakers of memory. They carry the family cross up the hill toward Calvary and don’t mind letting every other member of their aggrieved tribe in on the source of their suffering. There is one crazy that belongs to each of us: the brother who kills the spirit of any room he enters; the sister who’s a drug addict in her teens and marries a series of psychopaths, always making sure she bears their children, who carry their genes of madness to the grave. There’s the neurotic mother who’s so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters. The variations are endless and fascinating. I’ve never attended a family reunion where I was not warned of a Venus flytrap holding court among the older women, or a pitcher plant glistening with drops of sweet poison trying to sell his version of the family maelstrom to his young male cousins. When the stories begin rolling out, as they always do, one learns of feuds that seem unbrokerable, or sexual abuse that darkens each tale with its intimation of ruin. That uncle hates that aunt and that cousin hates your mother and your sister won’t talk to your brother because of something he said to a date she later married and then divorced. In every room I enter I can sniff out unhappiness and rancor like a snake smelling the nest of a wren with its tongue. Without even realizing it, I pick up associations of distemper and aggravation. As far as I can tell, every family produces its solitary misfit, its psychotic mirror image of all the ghosts summoned out of the small or large hells of childhood,
the spiller of the apple cart, the jack of spades, the black-hearted knight, the shit stirrer, the sibling with the uncontrollable tongue, the father brutal by habit, the uncle who tried to feel up his nieces, the aunt too neurotic ever to leave home. Talk to me all you want about happy families, but let me loose at a wedding or a funeral and I’ll bring you back the family crazy. They’re that easy to find.

In my novels, I’ve often written about the immense and mysterious powers I associate with the perfect shape of a circle. When my past circles back on me and completes itself in my present life, it often seems both covert and ominous, acting as both a herald and a sign. In the first years of my marriage to Barbara, I bolted up in bed one night when I realized I had married the wife of a Marine Corps fighter pilot. The circle almost always takes me by surprise, leaving me breathless and in awe.

In 1984, I was living in Rome, Italy, with my second wife when I received a phone call from my brother Mike. I stood overlooking the two fountains of the incomparable Piazza Farnese and a changing of the guard at the gates of the French embassy.

“Pat, you’ve got to get on the next plane out of Rome,” Mike said. “Mom’s in a coma. She may not even last the night.”

“Mom’s dying,” I said to Lenore and the kids as they hovered near the phone.

“What’s she dying of?” I asked Mike.

“Cancer. She looks terrible, Pat. Just come.”

“What kind of cancer?” I asked.

“I’m not going to tell you. Just get your fat ass here,” Mike demanded.

“I can’t fly a thousand miles without knowing what’s wrong,” I said. “Be reasonable, Mike.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you. Mom’s dying of leukemia.” And as he spoke the words, I laughed loudly and explosively. I had to sit down on a chair; I was roaring with such amusement that it took me a minute to regain control of my voice. My family was staring at me as though I were the most heartless son imaginable.

“Even God doesn’t have that good a sense of humor,” I said, and then heard something. “Mike, Mike—is that you? Are you crying?”

“Yeah, I’m crying. So what? My mother’s dying. Yet every one of
the kids reacted the same way you did, Pat. Exactly the same way. What a fucked-up family we come from.”