The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (39 page)

“Oh, he’s too good to stay here. He’s got to put his shoes under a bed at the Roosevelt,” Uncle Willie mocked.

“I signed a contract with the publishing company,” I said. “I sleep where they tell me to sleep.”

“Part of the job,” said my uncle Ed, the youngest and most successful member of the family.

“I think he’s just got the big head,” Aunt Mary said.

“I’m going out,” I said. “It’s been such a pleasure to get to know Dad’s family better.”

It was the last time I ever saw my grandmother, who died when I was living in Italy. I went to the Vatican to light a candle and have a mass said for the repose of her soul. It brought me into a larger family, denied to me, and I felt like a good little Irish Catholic for the first time in my life. My father and his family believe in the Church as unquestioning believers all set on autopilot. The rosary was the special province of Father Jim, who could utter it without a trace of adoration to cut through its repetitive lines. When Uncle Jim said the mass, there was not an ounce of awe or mystery when he lifted the host into the
air and turned bread into the living, bleeding entity of Christ. Without ecstasy, the mass is a puppet show with human hands. But that’s the promise the Catholic Church always contains, heirlooms of priceless beauty formed from texts of the New Testament. That the church has let itself slide into the bloat and agues of its worst self is utterly repugnant. Among the choices of the world, there are many forms the Catholic Church may take, and for rigidity and suppression, there is none more disgraceful and gaudier than the liturgy debauched by the Irish Catholic Church. If there were no doctrine of hell, there would be no need for such a church at all. It’s one of the heart murmurs that has degraded Ireland for me.

There is a submerged Atlantis that overwhelms the immigrant and brings almost everyone who claims to be Irish to his or her collective, nostalgic knees. Ireland is a scattered nation, and my family is part of a great, damaged tribe obsessed with exile. My father once gave yearly donations to the Irish Republican Army. He and I almost had a fistfight when I found out about it.

“You raised me to avoid killing the innocent,” I said.

“Then I raised you wrong,” he said. “In Ireland, anything goes.”

“Raise an army, uniform them, arm them, and meet the enemy on a common field of battle,” was my argument.

“Study geography. That doesn’t work in Ireland,” he said.

“Study philosophy; the terrorists are the lowest scum on earth,” I said, our voices growing louder.

“Not when they’re Irish,” Dad said. “Then they’re heroes beyond compare.”

“Did everybody stupid leave Ireland during the potato famine?” I asked.

Dad answered, “No, we left a few idiots behind. Guys like you.”

One of the reasons I had moved to San Francisco in 1989 was to be near my friend Tim Belk who was dying of AIDS. It was a time of the uneasy rule of death in San Francisco, where boys died impoverished and alone in squalid hotels in the Tenderloin. Tim and I made it our mission to hunt out Southern boys abandoned by their families, disgusted by their homosexuality, and left to die alone. We had our work cut out for us.

During early work among these suffering boys, I gave an interview to
San Francisco Focus
magazine. Surprising me, the editor, Amy Rennert, interviewed me about a subject I had rarely considered: my Irishness. Her questions sank like depth charges, but it has been part of my nature and my belief system that I’d answer any question I was asked by a legitimate reporter. So I let loose on the Irish for the first time, and it wasn’t pretty.

I admitted that I knew not a single thing about my Irish heritage—from Dingle to a dingle berry. What I knew about St. Patrick’s Day is that Dad would come home drunk and beat me up, so the day took on some of the characteristics of Kristallnacht to me. Without my knowledge, the mooncalf bedlam of Ireland had filled me with an incurable anxiety, an uncontrollable temper, a tendency to abuse alcohol, a stubbornness I found both repellent and incurable, and a tendency to always think I’m right. What a screwed-up legacy this hard-hearted island left to me.

What I didn’t know when I conducted the interview was that San Francisco was a thoroughly Irish city. I thought it was a city of gay guys in the Castro District, vegetarians in the Haight, Italians in North Beach, and Maoists from the universities—but the swarm of Irishmen who attacked me (with perfect justification) did so with an insider knowledge that I lacked. I had guys hopping off bar stools all over the city ready to fistfight me for the honor of the old country. After that article, I could never go into Harringtons Bar and Grill again. The bartender at the Washington Square Bar and Grill, Michael McCourt, told me why the interview was so incendiary: “You said about the Irish what we think of ourselves. But we hate the Irish mick who spills the news to the Brits and everyone else.”

“What can I do to change the perception?” I asked Michael.

“Nothing. You’re dead meat in this town among the Irish,” he replied.

Michael was always telling me that his brother Frank was writing a book about growing up in a poor Irish family in the homeland. “Watch for it. It’s called
Angela’s Ashes
. One thing you forgot to say about the Irish: We can write our asses off.”

This interview followed me wherever I went, even up in the larger
Irish community out of New York. There began a long, intense struggle to bring me back into the fold. But my marriage was falling apart, and yet again, I was beginning the long process of coming undone in the hundred vestibules of my own soul. Breakdowns were common to me by then, and I attributed them to that sour Irish gene, but could cast plenty of blame on my washed-in-the-blood-of-the-lamb Southern roots also. Taken together it looked like a wicked combination of destinies—Irish and Southern, forming a comfortable birthplace for lunatics, nutcases, borderlines, and psychos. I could not blame everything on a bar fight in Galway when I also had the smoldering fires of white-lightning smoking in a copper coil off Sand Mountain, Alabama.

In 1996, I left San Francisco forever, then flew to Dublin when
Beach Music
came out. I went on the Gay Byrne show that night, the only television show I’d ever been on that seemed to be watched by an entire country. On my first appearance, Gay Byrne, a witty and urbane man whom I liked immediately, asked whether I still had any relatives in Ireland. Before my trip began, I asked my father that exact question and he answered, “Nope. Not a single one. They up and left for Chicago.”

“Dad,” I said, “that’s impossible.”

He answered, “There’s not a single Conroy left in Ireland. When our family decides to do something, we do it right. We’re stubborn in that kind of way.”

By the time I left the Gay Byrne show that night, I had a list of more than two hundred phone numbers and addresses of people who claimed to be direct relatives of my father and me and had genealogy charts to prove it. A whole nation of Irish Conroys were ready to receive me. Their notes were more than welcoming.

The next day I signed books at a store not too far from the post office where the 1916 insurrection had begun, and three blocks from where my maternal great-grandfather, James P. Hunt, was born—both of which were unknown facts to my father. As I went in to sign books I could not help but notice that hundreds of Irishmen and -women had assembled at my table. They could not’ve been more cordial to me. They talked easily about the lost generation, the inhuman perfidy of
the English, the devastation of their loss of a million young Irishmen to the American shores, and their infinite pride in Irishmen who kept the suppressed and mythic tongues of the Gaelic tradition alive in our own take on English prose. Though one Dubliner issued me a warning when he said I was lucky to have been part of the immigration and made my way out of mean-spirited Ireland. When I asked him what he was talking about, he said, “If you’d been born in Ireland, we’d have ripped you apart and mocked your talent, and laughed at your presumption to be something you’re clearly not.”

“You do that to your own people?” I asked. “Why would you do that?”

“The Irish are great debunkers of one another,” he said. “No one sticks his head above the tulip fields or we knock him down to size. You’re from off … so we give you a pass.”

“Not in Chicago, they don’t,” I told him. But the man had left my table quickly and brought me back a book entitled
The Art of Irish Debunking
.

It was a good trip for me and helped me understand the artillery fire of put-downs I always received when I traveled unarmed through my father’s relatives.

•   •   •

Yet Ireland stayed inside me, a disapproving moon throwing out a scant light. I began to read the histories and texts that would open Ireland up to me, seeking to find a guidance system that would allow me some compassion for this island I didn’t understand. My own history of being Irish was so brutish that it seemed like a blight on my soul. I found myself soused with a hatred I did not need or want.

In my boyhood, everyone who hit me was Irish, from my father to his brothers and sisters, to the nuns and priests who taught me, so I perceived Ireland as a nation hateful to children and cruel to wives. But as I read, I learned the role of England in one of the most monstrous occupations possible. England turned a dark country into a black-hearted, despairing one. If the tides of history had flowed in a different
pattern, I would have spoken and written in Gaelic. I learned about Pádraic Ó Conaire of Galway, who was a celebrated modern writer in the old language. The translation of his name is Pat Conroy. Deep in me, Ireland lived in some indiscoverable shell of sorcery. Though I could deny it a thousand times, I could feel the surge of Ireland on my tongue and in my bloodstream. I could not place it, nor put it in some tortoiseshell box. But I could not write an English sentence without the Irish Sea splashing it with seawater. For so long I’d looked upon myself as a Southern writer and nothing else that this new supplicant for my attention caught me by surprise. Because my name has such an aggressive Irish finality to it, it caught me unprepared when I discovered the American Irish community had become proud of me. It both pleased and troubled me.

In the year before he died, my father came into my house at Fripp Island and began sorting through my mail. During that last year, he disturbed me in my writing room only one time. He knocked on the door of my office with a cane.

“Get out of here!” I yelled.

“It’s your beloved father, son,” Dad said.

“The guy who beat me half to death when I was a kid?” I said.

“Oh, you’re not back to that old chestnut, are you?”

I said, “I like that old chestnut.”

“I like this letter,” Dad said. “I’d like you to do this, son, and forget for a minute that you’re the biggest pain in the ass in America.”

The formal letter was an invitation from President Bill Clinton to join a group of American citizens, mostly Irishmen and -women, at a rally for a peace settlement that he was organizing and attending in both Northern Ireland and the Republic to the south. As an Irish American writer, I was invited to attend and participate, as was William Kennedy, a writer I revered from Albany, New York. I wrote back that I was pleased to be included and considered it a high honor.

My father drove me to the airport in Charleston and said to me, “The IRA is agreeing to a cease-fire. Try not to be a loudmouth.”

I was not a loudmouth and took great pleasure in meeting some of the most prominent Irish Americans alive. Being in
Air Force Two
seemed more like a meeting in some great hallway of a cruise ship, where the talk was bracing and serious and unhindered. Most on board were veterans of trying to bring peace to the two intractable sides, religious and political leaders who had spent their whole lives working on the subject of the Irish peace movement. These were realists who knew how promising the stakes were and how elusive an actual settlement was going to be. I looked forward to a relaxing and intellectual trip. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

That delegation to Ireland worked from early morning to late night. En masse, we attended meetings so boring that the droning voices could induce comalike states in hamsters. In one meeting near the Belfast harbor, we were listening to a beelike man drone on in a free-fire zone of statistics, when there was a vicious attack on America from an Orangeman who opposed all peace treaties with Irish Catholics. He was voluble and insulting, and I waited for the two politicians leading our stupefied group to answer this upstart with sharp words of their own. One was a former governor of South Carolina, Richard Riley, who was now secretary of education. The other was a black, charismatic man named Ron Williams, who would die in a plane crash in the fog of the Balkans shortly after this trip was done. The problem was that both men were sound asleep, as exhausted and bored as the rest of us. But two aides awoke them and they both came out of their slumber eloquent and adroit, and argued toe-to-toe with the Ulsterman for the next ten minutes.

Ah, I thought, the United States is well represented here—from sleep to fiery replies the men awoke to defend their country’s interests with flair and passion. I thought our country lucky to have them working for us.

After endless meetings and parties and speeches, I began to get some sense of how important the work was here. I tried to talk to many politicians from Northern Ireland who represented the English side, and felt the same quicksilver power of their fierce love of the country above the borderline of Ireland. Their patriotism was very moving to me.

One day I found myself taking a piss by Gerry Adams, the president
of Sinn Féin, who was one of the great movers behind the disarmament of the IRA. “Hey, Gerry?” I said. “Can you guys quit this bullshit? No guns and bombs. Can you help bring this about?”

He looked at me and said, “Yes, I think it’s possible. That’s why we’ve gathered here.”

But most of the trip centered around President Clinton and a series of speeches that he gave outlining what America wanted to accomplish at these talks. He was elegant, precise, and elliptical when it came to the specifics to be worked out. Though I watched him address the parliaments of both the north and south of Ireland, it was when Bill Clinton took to the streets to address the people that I saw the real genius of the man. Not once did it occur to me that an entire foreign nation could fall in love with an American president. It was a certain incendiary love, driven by the passion and the attractive charms of the man that he could spread like pollen across the ground. If I complained about our workload, the president and Mrs. Clinton were on a schedule five times more arduous, and I never saw a harder-working man or woman in my life. The ecstasy of those Irish crowds invigorated the president, and he responded by setting them ablaze for all the possibilities of the future. I saw him wade into crowds, and for the first time realized that the world of politics was of a religious nature, and that there was the need for leaders to rise above their worst instincts and to teach people to rise up to their own finest. Bill Clinton made the Irish people long for a peace that was long overdue. You could feel the immensity of his belief in the country as he lifted his voice to address as equals the folks who wore orange and the people of the green. It was a great thing to be a part of. It made my heart ache for all I had lost by not being raised an Irishman.