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Authors: Pat Conroy

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Literary, #Military

The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (31 page)

BOOK: The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son
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The wick of the fire burned fast and hot as we tried to coordinate the arrival of family and friends into Beaufort. Kathy and Dad bought a coffin and a grave site at Copeland Funeral Home. It was a natural part of small-town life that we went to the funeral director whose wife Judy had been in Gene Norris’s English class with me. Mr. Norris, who had been my favorite teacher at Beaufort High School, came over often during the short but incandescent hours it took to get Tom’s body into the ground. Some of the Chicago relatives came, but the only one I remember was Father Jim, who would serve as chief celebrant of the mass for the dead and deliver the eulogy in praise of Tom’s life. Dad’s kids almost revolted when we heard that news. Father Jim was not just a mediocre speaker; he could put a colony of hummingbirds to sleep. Not only had Father Jim beaten me up when I was a ten-year-old kid, he had also slapped around some of the other brothers. He was not a popular choice.

But Jim was Dad’s brother, and Dad got to make all the calls when it came to the burial of Tom. None of us had ever witnessed our dad so undone and pathetic as he whimpered his way through the long hours before Tom’s funeral. The rest of the family had slipped into our own collective state of shock, with Mike and Tim too disturbed to do anything but suffer with open-faced grief.

Tim and his wife, Terrye, came down the semicircular drive beneath the palmetto forest I adored at the Fripp house. After we had hugged one another and cried into one another’s arms, Tim said one word: “Liquor.”

Pointing the way, I said, “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

“I can’t think of any other way to get through this,” said Tim through tears.

“Drugs,” said Terrye, and we all laughed.

Then the ladies of Fripp Island began to show up with hams and fried chicken, shrimp gumbo, pies, cakes, and congealed salads. They brought enough food to feed the entire family for a week, and I came close to weeping each time one of these splendid women brought something to feed my hurt family. Because I’d been so prone to breakdown for so long, I had kept a low profile on Fripp and didn’t know whether people even knew I lived there. They did. They turned out in droves to bring food as we tried to deal with the terrible death of our brother whose body had exploded on a Columbia street. Among those ladies who brought food, I watched Kathy leading my grief-stricken sister Carol Ann across Remora Drive. “Something horrible this way comes,” I said.

Behind me Tim said, “More liquor. Less food.”

I had not seen Carol Ann for ten years, not since she issued me my walking papers out of her life after Mom’s death. Periodically, she would write me a letter extorting money out of me. My friend Bernie Schein remembers one that I handed him while I was on the phone calling Carol Ann at her apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. It stunned Bernie that Carol Ann threatened to cut her own throat if I didn’t send her five thousand dollars. On the phone, I told Carol Ann that I’d send the check through FedEx when I got off the phone. Bernie
was screaming at me, “You can’t put up with that kind of blackmail! That’s awful for Carol and awful for you!”

“But I know she won’t slit her throat for a while,” I said.

“How many letters do you get like that?” Bernie asked.

“It’s down to two or three a year,” I said. “Usually she hits up Dad.”

“Does he give in to her demands, too?” Bernie asked.

“The power of suicide is enormous and Carol knows it,” I replied. “She understands how to manipulate all the airways of guilt. She uses her childhood as a weapon against us.”

“Would Peg have fallen for her bullshit?” Bernie asked.

“From Mom, Carol wouldn’t have gotten one nickel with an Indian butt-fucking a buffalo on it. Peg would’ve laughed her ass off and told Carol never to call her again with that line of bullshit.”

“Be like Peg,” Bernie suggested. “You’re setting a terrible precedent for Carol. You and your dad are both turning her into an asshole.”

“She’s crazy, Bernie, and she’s mean,” I explained. “She’s learned to be an asshole all by herself.”

There lives a ferocious narcissist in the heart of the psychotic that unravels the family circle. By taking on the role of madness after Tom proved that his own had the capacity to create the empty space that would torment us all for the rest of our lives, Carol Ann assumed Tom’s mantle of suffering for herself. With unbecoming zeal, Carol Ann took her rightful place as the one most hurt in the family sweepstakes. From that day on, she could manipulate all of us, because we lived in the immortal shadow of the Cornell Arms Apartments, where Tom had leaped into the black Carolina night. Carol Ann could wield her madness like a sword that could find our arterial blood in thin air. Tom became an undone prince in the tarot deck she invented out of her own troubled soul and used to keen effect against us. Because Carol Ann had no use for redemption, she brought her glittering powers of malice to Tom’s funeral. Not only did we have to deal with the aftershocks of Tom’s death, we had to listen to Carol Ann’s skewed reasons why it happened. It would turn out to be worse than we could imagine.

When I opened the door to greet Carol Ann, I saw that she had assumed the role of chief mourner, the only one in the shallow Conroy family who could understand the vastness of Tom’s despair. She would
show us every pathway and lane that crisscrossed the country of the psychotic. She wore her trouble like a series of merit badges that she displayed on a sleeve of heraldry. Carol Ann had come south to drive us all nuts, and she did a commendable job of it.

In the decade of the nineties, I was having breakdowns at regular intervals and was suicidal much of the time. My divorce from Lenore had nearly broken me, and I was just beginning to realize that I would most probably never see my beloved daughter Susannah again. With the direction and help of Dr. Marion O’Neill, I was managing to keep myself alive. When Carol Ann learned about my war against depression, she pooh-poohed it as some amateur version of the real thing. She and Tom held monopoly on the psychic pain produced by the far-flung craziness of our family.

Even as I write these words criticizing Carol Ann, I find myself filling up with apprehension and dread. Her talismanic powers over me extended into the deepest realms of self. The Family Crazy has complete control of any family’s hard-earned serenity. Carol Ann had threatened suicide so many times it became as rote to me as a weather report in South Carolina calling for high temperatures in the summer. But I write this with pure certainty that Carol Ann will turn these words into the bituminous fire of her anger. When she reads this, will I get a call that Carol Ann has leaped from a building in New York, set herself on fire, hanged herself in a closet, or cut her wrists until her body is bloodless and accusatory and something I have to live with the rest of my life?

Since I remain the primary eyewitness to the hallucinatory epic of her childhood, I know that my parents left her on the shores as part of the wreckages of their own past. Both of them hated Carol Ann’s originality, her otherness, the poet who threw fistfuls of words like a bright bird of paradise. Her mind was a traveling circus of marvels and magic-making, and my parents never saw it. Carol Ann had arrived at a house full of grief, but hers was the only one that counted.

I opened the door to Carol Ann, and her face was like a mirror that could only receive images of Tom. His death now lived in her face and her swollen eyes. Tom belonged to her now. She would become the self-appointed keeper of the flame. But her expression was a mass
of inconsolable anguish. We hugged on the porch, bonding for a lot of different reasons. I walked her from the door in tears. For a while we just cried together over Tom and for all of us.

When Carol Ann got control of herself, she looked at me and said, “God, Tom hated your guts. He always called you his kidnapper, his abductor. He never forgave you for forcing him to go to Bull Street.”

“It wasn’t my finest hour,” I said.

She shook her head. “Tom said you were worse than Dad, and that’s the worst thing someone can say about another person.”

“Tom scared me,” I said. “I thought he might do something terrible to himself—like jump off a building.”

“Tom had nothing to do with jumping off that building,” she said. “Everyone in the family conspired to throw him to his death. It was a long time in coming, but all of us are responsible for his being there.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Tom and I were very close. We talked to each other by phone all the time. He hated you the worst, then Dad, and he was starting to really hate Mike’s guts.”

“Mike took care of Tom on a daily basis, Carol. Don’t say a word to Mike,” I pleaded. “He may never get over this.”

“I’ll suffer for this more than anyone in the Conroy family, but I’ll keep Tom’s memory alive with my art, with my poems to honor him.”

“If you can, Carol, try to be easy on us. The next couple of days are going to be tough on everybody,” I said.

“I’ll go easy on one condition,” she said. “Nobody can imply that Tom was crazy. He was the sanest of all Conroys. He was the only sane person this family has produced. I’ll claw the eyes out of anyone who even suggests that our brother was insane. He was heroic and carried the weight of this whole nutty clan on his shoulders. But he was the only normal child Peg and Don produced. The rest of us are either nuts, or assholes like you and my other brothers.”

“There is the small fact that Tom killed himself,” I said. “That he jumped from the roof of a building. Some people might draw a conclusion from that.”

“He was the only sane one. It’s the world that’s crazy. I’ve written a poem for Tom. I’ll read it at his funeral if you don’t do a eulogy. I
won’t stand for you to write a eulogy for a man who hated your guts,” she announced.

“I’ll leave it to you,” I said.

“And I don’t want to talk to anyone,” she said. “My grief is so much greater than everyone else’s I’ll want to be left alone.”

“I think that’ll be easy to arrange.”

“Is that one of your swaggering, chauvinist jokes?” she demanded to know.

“Yeah, I think I was trying to lighten things up,” I admitted.

“You ought to hear what my feminist friends in New York say about you. I can’t begin to describe the hatred,” she said.

“They don’t know me, Carol. They’ve never met me.”

“Men like you repulse them.”

“I think they’d find I’m a much nicer person than you,” I responded.

“Do you have to try to win every single argument? Do you know you’ve always used your wit and sarcasm to silence me? You’re my greatest censor. You want to tape my mouth shut. You run from the truth. The sisterhood has set me free, and nothing you ever say can hurt me again.”

“When are you getting back to the sisterhood?” I asked. My patience had worn thin and I was thinking that ten years without Carol Ann just wasn’t long enough.

My sister Kathy came to relieve me of guard duty with Carol Ann. Seeing her was a relief, because after Mom died, Kathy, a registered nurse, had come into her own as a woman. She performed gallant service as a peacemaker and courier, delivering messages from both sides during the border skirmishes that broke out around her. Because there was no one else who fit the job description, Kathy could bring the warring sides to the peace table to get us through our most perilous times. As she was the middle child of our family, both the older and the younger kids listened to her counsel. Dad was putty in her hands, and even Carol Ann could be swayed by Kathy’s soft-spoken reasonableness. Kathy brought a simplicity and kindness to my own overrun house, but she looked drained by the runaway emotions of the last twelve hours. I was dizzy with the fast-moving events that didn’t seem to leave any time for reflection, or even prayer. People were coming into
Beaufort from everywhere. As I dressed for Tom’s funeral, my fury at Carol Ann drenched me with sweat, and I had to take a second shower. I discovered that you could cry as hard as you wished in a shower and no one would know.

When I drove to the funeral home, I heard from the front door the beginning of the recitation of the rosary. I knew that some of the Conroy relatives from Chicago had shown up for Dad. It was the ancient Irish way, and it seemed appropriate to me.

Because of Dad and his gathering of the Chicago clan, the ceremony turned into a commemoration of Tom’s life. There was not a thing Southern about it, but there were touches of Roscommon here and hints of Galway there. Father Jim passed out holy cards with Tom’s name and the date of his death on them. My brothers Mike and Jim noticed a mistake on the card that was both morbid and droll. In near hysteria, Mike and Jim pulled me into a side room while the rosary continued its monotonous cycle as the grievers dedicated their prayers toward Tom’s casket. Jim showed me the offending card, but I failed to see what errors Father Jim had made in his first act as the celebrant of Tom’s funeral mass. Then it came to me with a shining clarity. The mass for the dead was in honor of Timothy Patrick Conroy, not Thomas Patrick Conroy. Breaking away from the rosary sayers, Tim found us as he was studying the offending card.

“Can you guys believe this shit?” Tim said in disbelief. “Even for this pain-in-the-ass family, this is too nutso. Don’t you guys agree?”

“Sorry you’re dead, Tim,” Jim said. “But it had to happen someday.”

Mike said, “It’s kind of a relief. We thought it was Tom who jumped to his death. Thank God it was you.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Tom’s death was rough going, but losing Tim is much easier on everybody.”

“Basically, no one gives a shit if it was Tim,” said Jim. “It’d be a happy ending to this whole affair.”

“I’ve got the worst brothers in the worst family that ever lived in South Carolina,” Tim said, then addressed me. “Carol’s on the warpath again, Pat. She hates you in a way the rest of us never thought about.”

“Have you watched her eyes when Pat comes into a room?” Mike said. “It must be hard to be hated that much.”

“No, I hate all you guys that much,” Tim said.

“Shut up, Tim. You’re dead,” said Jim.

BOOK: The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son
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