The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (25 page)

But the librarians hit pay dirt when they found my aunt’s high school yearbook and located her photograph in the senior section. There she was, her beauty a form of homage to delicacy itself.

“What a babe, Aunt Helen,” I said.

She pointed to a young man and said, “He used to court me.”

A librarian said, “He still has a law practice in Rome. Let me try to get him at his office.”

In less than five minutes a dapper, well-dressed man walked in the front door of the library and moved toward the crowd of us. Coming to Aunt Helen in a beeline, he shook her hand and said, “You’re as lovely as you were in high school, Helen Peek.”

“I wish that were true,” she said.

I shook hands with this very nice lawyer and promptly forgot his name, as I did the names of all those helpful librarians who were so good-natured about assisting us in our quest. Uncharacteristically, I had left my journals and notebooks back in Augusta, and I recorded none of the facts that we discovered that day.

The lawyer drove his own car out into the country, reminiscing about high school with my aunt Helen beside him. I followed in my car as we passed farmhouses and small run-down churches on the way to my mother’s mythical childhood home. Turning onto a dirt road, we made our way past modest houses and parked in the dirt yard of an exceedingly unprepossessing white farmhouse. A black family poured out of the house, and I got out to introduce myself to the grandmother, who was watching over five of her daughter’s babies. I explained our mission and that my mother had been born here fifty-nine years before. A tall, craggy white man made his way up the road and into the gathering, listening to me asking whether I could be allowed to visit inside the house.

Finally, he said in a friendly voice, “You a Peek, son?”

“Yes, sir, I’m a Peek on my mother’s side,” I said. “This is my mother’s sister Helen Peek.”

“Helen, I grew up down the road in that brick farmhouse. I was a
little fella myself the night your sister was born. I came up to sit in the living room. I heard your mother’s first cry, son.”

“Do you remember the room she was born in?” I asked.

“Sure do. Maggie, you mind if these folks look around your house? I can vouch that they lived here.”

“The boy wants to see where his mama was born,” Maggie said. “Let me get you some iced tea.”

“My mother’s dying,” I said to the black woman, and I realized it was the first time I’d uttered this terrible phrase, even to myself.

“You close to your mama, son?” Maggie asked me.

I found myself wordless, afraid that if I even spoke I would fall apart. Grateful, I heard my aunt behind me: “Pat worships his mother. Always has.”

“That’s the way it’s s’posed to be,” the woman said as she led us through her front doorway. The house was small, but neat and well cared for. The white man put his hand on my shoulder and led me to the front bedroom.

“Your mama was born in this room,” he said, “in a bed that sat exactly where that bed is today.”

So it began here in this bedroom, the woman who would become my mother, born in a rush of blood and fluid. She now lay in a hospital room and would soon be buried in South Carolina earth. The secret of her great irreparable social shame had also found its conception in this same house. I would bet my life that my mother’s embarrassment over her roots had originated in the shades of this dreary house and the inhospitable fields around it. But that girl had done all right. She became an officer’s wife, danced at a ball at the White House, shared a stage and gave a speech beside President Jimmy Carter, was the commanding officer’s wife on a base in Hawaii, had traveled the world, and saw her fictional self played by the magnificent Blythe Danner. My mother had risen from this bed and turned her life into something glamorous as well as something ruined and sad. But she and her children were the only ones to know of that sadness. That baby girl born here so long ago had produced two writers, a novelist and a poet, because of her insatiable love of reading and the majesty of words strung together in a way that tried to make magic in a hard world.

The girl born in this room had gotten up and done some things. After making our farewells, taking a few snapshots of the house, I drove back to Rome. Then I stopped off at a drugstore. I went into the store and looked at a rack of postcards. I chose one of a historical home in Rome, a proper Southern mansion of suitable grandeur.

That night when I went up to the Eisenhower hospital to say good night to my mother and stepfather, I handed the postcard to my mother.

“This is it? My house?” my mother asked. “Are you sure?”

“Five librarians helped me and Helen find this house,” I said. “They found some old records, and the residents of this house were Jasper Catlett Peek and his wife, Margaret. They listed the names of the kids. That’s the place. You were born in the upstairs bedroom. We got a tour of the house today.”

“John, it’s even more beautiful than I remember,” my mother said, handing it to her husband. “Promise me we’ll go there when I beat this thing.”

“A Southern mansion,” John said. “Where else would a woman like you be born? We’ll go there. That’s a promise.”

It was a trip they would never make.

Time caught up with me in the years leading up to my mother’s death, and pulled me to the ground in its merciless grip. The truth is, I couldn’t tell you anything about time and what it did to me that year, except that it manhandled and defeated and horse-collared me. On November 17, 1984, it broke my heart with an ax blow of destiny. Time did not even take notice. Its eyeless immensity passed over me without pause or recognition.

Augusta is now a fearful word to me, and so is Eisenhower. Both city and hospital have retained the power to cause inflammation and distress when I hear those words in a sentence. Although my mother had held her own since her last remission, finally the word came. She had gone out of remission, and was back in the hospital. In the waiting room I embraced John Egan yet again and could tell sadness had overcome him long before I got there. It was the fall of 1982, and I had driven over from my home in Atlanta.

“It’s bad this time, Pat,” he said. “It’s really going to hit Peg hard.”

“Dr. Madden said it would get worse each time the cancer went out of remission,” I reminded him. “So far, he hasn’t been wrong.”

Dr. Madden came into the waiting room shortly after I arrived there. He and I had become friends by that time, and he knew I had implicit trust in his decisions about Mom’s health. But he was not optimistic about my mother’s chances.

“Pat, the leukemia might kill her this time. Or
I
might kill her with the treatment,” he said. “She went out of remission and the leukemia moved in fast. So I put her on the strongest chemotherapy possible, but it’s a balancing act in this stage of her cancer.”

“How’s she taking it?” I asked.

“She’s a fighter, Pat. But tomorrow she’s going to have to use every ounce of that fighting spirit. It’s about to get ugly.”

And ugly it got. On the second night, with me sleeping on a cot beside my mother’s bed, I woke up as she was projectile-vomiting off a far wall. In a flash I was out of bed and brought her a wastebasket she could vomit in, which she practically filled until she stopped long enough for me to rush it to the bathroom to empty and wash it out. When I returned to her bed, the diarrhea had started, and it was far worse than anything I could imagine. I leaned down to pick her up, and during a brief pause in her falling apart, I grasped her and placed her on my shoulder and made another run to the bathroom and deposited her on the toilet seat. I undressed her completely and left her with the wastebasket and listened as her entire body collapsed in on itself. I washed my hands as carefully as I could but realized I was covered in excrement and vomit, and my mother’s room had the feel and smell of an abattoir. As I looked at her sheets and pillowcases, I realized that time had started to kill my mother with a callousness it had not shown before. Into laundry bags I threw all her sheets and towels and defiled clothing and hurled them out into the hallway, where the night workers would pick them up at five the next morning and have them back in her room by five in the evening. I scrubbed down the bed with ammonia and water and cleaned every wall and floor where my mother had spewed those poisons fleeing from her body. I made her bed with sweet-smelling sheets the way they taught me to do it at The Citadel. Going across the hall to an empty bedroom, I stole all the fresh pillowcases on its bed and placed them on her bed. Then I waited outside the bathroom for her.

Since I used all of our towels cleaning the mess around her bed, I went across the hall on another scavenger hunt, where I lifted bars of soap and shampoo and towels. After another fifteen minutes, I heard a weak tapping on the bathroom door, and I opened it to find a bathroom where it looked and smelled like a murder had taken place.

“You okay, Mom?” I asked stupidly, and she answered me with laughter.

“I think I’ve seen better days, Pat,” she said, and we both started giggling.

“I’ve got to bathe us to get us clean again, Mom.”

“I’ll never be clean again,” she said.

“I’ll be damned if that’s so,” I said.

I turned on the shower, then picked Mom up and we stepped into a stall where the water fell in a hot steaming rush of cleansing. I emptied small bottles of shampoo on our heads. Soapy washcloths cut through the dried vomit and diarrhea as I worked up and down Mom’s feverish body. My mother was squeaky clean, but she noticed the nature of our human predicament long before I did. As I washed the soap off her body, she leaned against the shower stall and said, “You shouldn’t be doing this, Pat. It’s not natural.”

“It’s the most natural thing in the world, Mom. You did it for me.”

Somehow I got her out of that shower, dried her off, got her into a clean nightgown, doused her with White Shoulders, and got her back in bed. For the next half hour, I was cleaning up the bathroom, which smelled like an outhouse. Eventually, I would fill two bags with laundry and throw them out into the hallway. With infinite relief, I put myself on my cot, as exhausted as a Channel swimmer. As I turned toward Mom to wish her good night, she surprised me by being awake, and the moonlight was coming in the window, lighting up her face. Her wig was lying on the bedside table, and I went to retrieve it and helped her place it back in position. She spoke to me first. “Are you writing about me in your new book?”

“No, Mama, I’m not,” I answered.

“You’re lying,” she said. “I can always tell when my children are lying.”

“You might not like what I’m writing about you.”

“I’d like you to promise me one thing,” she said.

I went to her bedside and said, “You’re in a great position to bargain, Mama.”

She turned toward me, turned the pretty blue eyes that not even the cancer could touch and said, “Don’t write about me like this. Make me beautiful.”

“Oh, Mama, oh, mother of mine,” I said that night, “you who opened up the universe for me with all the stuff of language, I’ll make you so beautiful. Because you made me a writer and presented me the tongues and a passion for language, I can lift you off that bed, banish the cancer from your cells forever. When they speak of beauty in the South, my mother, they’ll talk about you, mention you by name, praising you to the sky.”

Although I swore to my mother I would not write about her in this condition, I knew I was lying as I tendered the promise, because she had never appeared so beautiful to me as she fought against the forces determined to kill her.

After I made this pretty speech, my mother reached up and squeezed my hand. “I’d like Meryl Streep to play the role.”

When my mother got released from Eisenhower, everyone who loved her knew that we were losing her. She had suffered through the chemotherapy for more than a week, and I took her by wheelchair out to my car, where I started down the long, lush drive that would take us through the pretty towns of Allendale, Fairfax, Varnville, and Hampton before the countryside began to open, revealing the bright green marshes like mile-long prayer rugs along the creeks. Mom was surprisingly talkative on the trip east through the comely railroad towns. She talked a lot about her reconciliation with my father, and how she had once planned never to speak to him after their trashy divorce. Dad had come down for the whole time Mom was in the hospital this time, and a real friendship was forming between John Egan and my father. Mom was proud that her two husbands were in attendance in her time of greatest need. Two such different Irishmen never met on such a desperate stage. Dr. Egan with his great gentlemanly reserve and my barnstorming peasant father were complete opposites, but the love of my mother presented them with the most fragile linkage to a friendship that would last both of their lives.

When we neared Beaufort, my mother stunned me by asking, “Where are we going to lunch today?”

I had not considered lunch because of the delicacy of her condition, and I tried my hardest to talk her out of it. But she refused to be deterred by my lack of enthusiasm.

“It’s a tradition between us. My girlfriends at Fripp love to hear me tell about the expensive meals you order me, even when you know I can’t eat a single thing,” she said.

“Did you tell them I start with a little champagne?” I asked.

“The most expensive bottle they’ve got, and you always ask them to ice it down by the table. They’ve invited me golfing next week. And I plan to play in that golf match,” she said.

“My girl’s a tough girl,” I said.

“Damn right,” she said. “I haven’t given up yet, and you can say that to anyone, Pat.”

“Good to know,” I said. “I’ll spread the word.”

A new restaurant with a good reputation had just opened on Lady’s Island, with splendid views of the Beaufort River and the magical town built on its bluff. Though I heard the food was good, restaurants in Beaufort had always proven to be much more mediocre than the approval of the street indicated. I struggled to get Mom out of the car and into the restaurant, which was large and airy. The menu was nice by Atlanta standards and spectacular by Beaufort ones. I ordered the most expensive things they had, then had them boxed up and ready to carry home. At that point disaster struck. A ladies’ club that my mother had once tried to join, over her son’s strong objections, walked into the restaurant, singly and in groups, and filed in silent review past the table where my mother and I sat. It was a commonplace club in the small towns of the South and, perhaps, small towns everywhere. On a regular basis one member of the club would read a scholarly paper that she had written for that particular meeting. They were formidable wives of powerful men in Beaufort, and all of them had been members of the infamous Great Santini premiere committee. They formed the intellectual underpinning of this small town, and their fingerprints were all over every cultural event that took place in the city limits. The club put out a fragrance of respectability my mother couldn’t resist, and she’d turned in an application for membership. One of the club’s ironclad rules was that its women be college graduates. Naturally, my mother claimed she had graduated, cum laude, from Agnes Scott College, and just as naturally, the club turned down her application. When the club
proved the falsity of the college degree, it stung my mother’s deepest sense of herself.