The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (26 page)

But now the society ladies passed my mother and none of them spoke to her. She was sobbing by the time I got her out of the parking lot, and made a right turn on the road to Fripp Island. Language failed me, and I couldn’t think of a single word to assuage my mother’s complete social humiliation. Her sobs cut through me like slivers of glass. For five miles they continued and grew even louder and more despairing, until I finally broke and said, “Hey, Mama, do you want me to turn around, drive back to that restaurant, and throw every one of those women through a plate-glass window?”

My mother tried to gain some control of herself, because she knew that she’d unleashed a fury inside of me. In the weakest, most timid voice, she said, “You’re just like your father. A beast. Nothing but a beast of the field.”

“That may be so, Mama. And by the way, I never got to thank you for mixing my gene pool with that guy. But since you did, this is what you get. Hey, Mom, do you know that those women back there are all in my new book,
The Prince of Tides
?”

I felt a reawakening in my mother, a return to vibrant, ecstatic life as she asked, “Did you get ’em, son?”

“I got the living shit out of them.” And my mother giggled.

“Will they know who they are?”

“Tour guide operators moving their horses down Bay Street will be able to point them out to tourists as they come out of stores.”

Again my mother giggled, but more of a cackle this time, and said, “Son, you’re just like me.”

•   •   •

My mother’s two-year battle with cancer provided a new entryway into the lunatic center of the Conroy family. Furthermore, it provided a wick of time where we could measure her diminishment as she went in and out of remission during several harrowing years when the grotesque gnome “leukemia” came to rule all of our hours. I got to the
point where I couldn’t mention either the word “cancer” or “leukemia” to anyone—and would say only that my mother was a very sick woman. The language itself seemed to have turned on us.

The rules of engagement became very clear to all of us. Since moving back to Atlanta from Italy, I had been a full participant in Mom’s recovery from the devastating results of her chemotherapy, when her body would react as if the doctors were overdosing her on arsenic. My duties were clear and my siblings gave me my marching orders.

Mike said to me during my first week back, “Pat, you’ve got to come and stay with Mom at the hospital whenever she goes out of remission. That may take a week or even two weeks. The rest of us will come down on the weekends to help you.”

My first call to arms came six months after I returned to Atlanta. Dr. Egan called me from his and Mom’s new house on Fripp Island, and he sounded distraught and confused on the phone. “Doesn’t look good, Pat. Though I’ve been a medical doctor my whole career, I can’t stand to see Peg suffer like this.”

“Just get Mom up to Eisenhower, John. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Yet again I arrived in Augusta to find Mom already hooked up to the poisons that eventually would kill her. Dr. Steve Madden had given her a sedative that would put her to sleep through the following day. I found Dr. Egan in the waiting room that now contained just the two of us. I noticed his hands were trembling.

He said, “Peg was doing so well. She was jogging a mile on the beach every day, walking another four miles, eating the right stuff. Your mother thinks she is going to beat this thing. She really thinks this cancer won’t kill her … that it can’t kill her. She is terrified, though.”

“So am I,” I said. “Look, John, this has been very tough on you. Why don’t you go back to Fripp Island and rest for the next ten days? You know that Mom’s going to be out of it for the next week, and it’ll give you some time off from being her caretaker. I’ll be up here every day. I’ll stay on a cot beside her bed. I’ll make sure she’s comfortable and well taken care of.”

“But she’ll need me,” he said.

“She’s going to need you to be strong and fresh, Doc,” I said. “Not
like this. You’re exhausted. Let me walk you to the parking lot. When she wakes up and starts speaking coherently, I’ll call you back up for duty.”

“Will you promise to do that?” he asked. “She was so frightened last night. Just terrified.”

“Mom’s a warrior, John. That’s the first thing you need to know about her. She’ll have some setbacks, but she’ll come out of it, and you’ll know you married Athena before she dies.”

“Peg and I are already sick of this trip from our house on Fripp Island to Augusta.”

“You’ll be a lot sicker of it before all this is over, Doc.”

I sent Dr. Egan down the road toward Fripp Island; then I went down to fetch my overnight bag and the six paperbacks I had brought up to read to Mom on those occasions when she could tolerate the sound of another voice. The chemotherapy devastated her, as though a plague had entered her bloodstream. I learned there was nothing more painful for a worshipful son than watching his mother lie in her bed of anguish and being unable to do a single thing for her. Before Dr. Madden left for home that night, he made a correction in Mom’s medicine that brought her fever down and let her sleep through the night, at least.

When we looked back at my mother’s futile rearguard battle against her cancer, she and I both agreed that the first rounds of her treatment were halcyon compared to the last fierce and killing encounters. This time, she had two days of grievous symptoms, until her compact, agile body enabled her to gather reinforcements for a counterattack. Her body was hard and game for battle. The leukemia was not a worthy opponent in those early days of siege, but it would grow into unseen power as though it were a tsunami, gaining monstrous strengths undetectable to the human eye.

She would often ask me to read to her, and I would always start out with
Dunkirk
, by Robert Nathan, a poem I had taught in a sophomore class at Beaufort High School and that I had loved with a passion I brought to all things British. The entire history of England seemed contained in that remarkable poem. Then I would switch over to Dylan Thomas, and James Dickey, and Carol Ann’s book of poetry
The Jewish Furrier
. When she was ready for bed, I’d read the books I had brought
up for her pleasure. I read her
The Greengage Summer
, by Rumer Godden, and
The Lords of Discipline
, because she insisted I read it to her aloud. As I was reading through it, Mom would pepper me with questions.

“Did that really happen?” she would ask.

“Not to me, but to a boy I knew,” I’d answer.

“That couldn’t’ve happened, could it?”

“That did happen,” I’d say.

“It sounds preposterous.”

“It is preposterous. Welcome to The Citadel.”

She would go into a sweet, purring repose when she got too tired to stay awake for another moment. I would mark the book and go to sleep on my cot beside her. I felt lucky I could do this for my mother. I could feel the old resentments between us melting like wax, like altar candles reducing themselves in the name of light and heat. My resistance to Mom disappeared as her dependence on me increased disproportionately every day she woke up.

Each day Mom would lose more and more of her hair, and it alarmed her to see her visage in the mirror as her hair was calving off in huge chunks. On Friday before the kids began their arrivals, I went down to Augusta’s lovely but neglected main street to shop for some wigs or a turban for Mom. It tickled me that Augusta had the tallest Confederate memorial I’ve ever seen anywhere. The lone soldier atop the monument is invisible to the citizenry who pass it each day; one would have to check it out as a skydiver even to catch a glimpse of this lonely soul.

The wig shops were all owned and operated by black women who showed a great flair for commerce. They were earthy, funny women who hovered about me as they shouted back and forth.

“We got any wigs for white girls?” a large woman shouted to a colleague in the back.

“Why would we? A white girl’s never walked into this store,” the woman in the back said.

“I got just the thing for you. Follow me, gentleman.” She opened up a large drawer and began drawing out such beautiful turbans that some of them sucked the breath out of me.

“They come from Istanbul. That’s in Turkey—I went there early this year with my business partner and lo’, hon, what a city! Those Turk women wear these things with style and class.”

I chose two of them and took them to the cash register.

“Those are my two most expensive turbans,” she said. “Well over a hundred dollars apiece.”

“A bargain,” I said. “Wrap them up. My mom’s going bald, but no one’s going to witness her humiliation now. I’m going to turn Mama into a Turk.”

In her two new turbans, my mother looked like a million dollars. The colors rainbowed over her paleness. She took an hour to apply makeup. The nurses made a fuss over her, Dr. Madden praised her beauty, and when I saw her I bowed deeply, like a servant in waiting. My pretty girl was back.

“Pat, I love you for the turbans. I wouldn’t have ever thought of that. It gives me a confidence I thought I’d never recover, but look at me now. Just look at me. And I promise you something, son: I’m going to beat this cancer. I’m going to beat it like a dead snake!”

When the weekend came, Mom found her room besieged by children and relatives who came to pay her homage. There was a general feeling that the cancer had dissolved the tissues of Mom’s insecurities and turned loose a much finer woman. Though she could exhaust herself quickly with the incoming wave of visitation that would surge into Augusta each weekend, she adored the attention her family flooded her with.

On the other hand, Mom had been controversial enough as a mother to make many of the encounters with her children into force fields. My mother had never been affectionate with her children; she was the kind of woman you had to learn to love through interpretation, osmosis, or guesswork. As far as I know, none of us ever sat in our mother’s lap or watched TV with her arm around our shoulders. She had not been able to breast-feed any of us, and she would kiss us in the most gossamer fashion, as likely to stir the air around our cheeks as to actually touch us with her lips to our faces.

Until John Egan arrived, I served guard duty at the entrance to her room, directing people in and out, watching Mom for signs of exhaustion,
hustling people down the hall when she put a finger on the tip of her nose, indicating it was time for a nap. Dad arrived on Saturday, and it amazed me how much spirit he brought to the room. He always entered the waiting room saying, “Stand by for a fighter pilot!”

Dad’s visitations became my mother’s favorite part of the weekend ceremonial. He brought laughter, a chatterbox sensibility, and a complete denial that his ex-wife was dying twenty yards down the hall.

The confrontation I feared the most was my mother’s devastating phone calls from my sister, Carol Ann. Carol Ann had a precise genius for calling my mother when I was out of Mom’s room or when I was watching a baseball game with Dr. Egan. Always I took a seat by the doorway so I could see down the hall clear to my mother’s room and keep one eye on the Braves game. I saw a pretty blond nurse with horn-rimmed glasses running full speed toward me, and that gave me my signal that Carol Ann’s timing had been perfect again.

I entered the room on the fly and took in the scene immediately. Mom was crying as hard as a woman could cry. When I grabbed the phone from her hand, she offered no resistance.

“Hello, Carol Ann, you may not remember, but I’m your brother Pat, the firstborn, the favorite by far,” I said into the phone.

“Oh, humor boy. The Conroy male spirit rises up to mock the only serious writer this family will ever produce. Go ahead, trickster. I’ll find a way of talking to my mother. Don’t think I won’t. We need to get some things straightened out between us before she dies.”

“Yeah, that’ll really lift her spirits. Especially in the condition she now finds herself. Why don’t you write her long letters full of gossip and makeup tips, and the new fashions you see on the streets of New York?”

“I live in serious New York, among serious literary people,” Carol Ann said. “I decided not to bury myself in the racist, unintellectual South, which has empty space where its greatest minds should be producing serious poems and novels. You’ve thrown your life away in the South, Pat. You know that, but don’t have the guts to admit it. Put my mother back on the phone or I’m going to file a federal complaint.”

“My heart will dance like a tequila worm when I hang up this phone.”

“Mom and Dad have got to let me explain the crimes against humanity I endured through them,” she said. “Only then can they understand why my life’s been such a disaster.”

“Why don’t you write a book about this?” I suggested, hanging up the phone.

•   •   •

When Mom was released from Eisenhower after two short weeks and I drove her to her house on Fripp Island, John was waiting for her, and their reunion was tender. I unloaded the car and brought her luggage upstairs to her bedroom. Then I went downstairs and joined John and Mom in their recitation of the rosary in gratitude for Mom’s safe return.

I then heated up a magnificent meal for me, Mom, and Dr. John. In the middle of the meal, I looked up and saw my brother Tom, in his twenties now, try to sneak into his bedroom without anyone noticing his passage—he had a hunched, disconnected walk and a face as troubled as a fallen angel.

“Tom, come get something to eat,” I called out.

He said, “I hate that foreign shit you fix.”

“Try it, Tom,” I suggested.

“I’ve always hated you!” he screamed. “You act like you’re such a big-shot son of a bitch, when all you are is a fucking asshole just like the rest of us.”

As he left the field of battle, he slammed his bedroom door.

I was as shaken as I had been for a long while. Mom and John had not uttered a word. Finally, I said, “Tom, Mom?”

My mother looked up and nodded her head. “Tom—it’s not going to be pretty.”