The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (41 page)

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When I was a boy, I envied the Harper boys and the life they were leading more than anyone on earth. Since Uncle Russ was a dentist and a respected member of the community in Orlando and never planned to move, I wanted that kind of steadfastness in my own road-weary life. Aunt Helen was a beauty and soft-spoken, with a silky, accented Southern voice, who was incapable of any surprises or shocking eye-openers that would alter your view of her. The primitive Baptists of Sand Mountain, Alabama, had shaped her spiritual life out of the limestone and quarries of Piedmont. She was a pious and evangelical woman for her entire life. Whenever I spent the night with the Harper boys, Aunt Helen would send us to bed after a long reading from the King James Version of the Bible. The inflection of her voice was lovely, and the God of the Old Testament found one of his female soldiers passing His word on to her sons and nephews. The gorgeousness of language floated around her living room like tufts of cotton candy. I grew up believing that she was one of the great women of my life, and my sisters took me by surprise when they admitted to me later in life that they found Helen a priggish busybody who had tortured my mother about her divorce from Dad. Helen and Russ had swallowed my Father’s Kool-Aid and took his side during those ruinous days when
Mom and Dad went their separate ways. I decided to forgive Helen and Russ for this lapse. I needed a perfect aunt and uncle to fill in for the crestfallen days of my youth, and they fit the bill admirably.

The Harper boys had prepared a large barbecue in honor of Dad’s getting out of the hospital. Picnic tables overflowed with slow-cooked pork, and there were beautiful piles of blue crabs and shrimp taken from the St. Johns River. My father could not say a word without gales of appreciative laughter rising out of the semicircle of nephews surrounding him. The Harper boys had inoculated their own families with this bizarre form of Santini worship, and I saw my cousins of a new generation, Rusty, Benjamin, Robby, and Priscilla, all fall under Dad’s spell. As I listened to him regale the Harper family with his bright compendium of stories, the Harper wives kept the table overflowing with coleslaw and potato salad and biscuits hot from the oven. I don’t remember another soul speaking for the first two hours. It was a celebration of my father’s victory over congestive heart failure. Then Cousin John asked, “Uncle Don, tell us about the chemotherapy and what’s going to happen next.”

“That’s it, Johnny, break the spell. Make us get back to the subject of my untimely demise,” Dad said.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” John said. “Honest, Uncle Don.”

“You know how to make a fellow feel good,” Dad said. “Why don’t you get the undertaker on the phone and order me up a coffin while we’re at it?”

“I just want to know how they’re gonna cure you,” John said.

I interrupted: “I’d love to hear it too, Johnny.” Dad hadn’t mentioned a word of his treatment to his kids.

Dad told them about his hospitalization. “They sent over a little guy whose name I can’t remember or pronounce. [It was Dr. Majd Chahin.] He’s this Iranian dude who seemed like he knew what he was doing. Course, how would I know what he was doing? It’s all Greek to me, if you get my meaning. But he’s the one they sent to repair the plumbing and all the other stuff.”

“What’s the other stuff, Uncle Don?” Cousin Russ asked.

“The stuff. The bad stuff. The stuff that’s causing all the problems,” Dad said.

“The cancer, Uncle Don?” John said.

“Yeah, that stuff. That’s the bad stuff. Dr. Sinbad explained it to me.”

“Who’s Sinbad?” my cousin Mike Harper asked.

“My doctor. The Iranian whose name I can’t pronounce. Since I can’t pronounce his name, I’ve nicknamed him Sinbad. He seems to like it,” Dad explained.

“Better make sure, Uncle Don,” Russ warned.

“Well, he explained the process to me. I go in and he hooks me up with those jumper cables to the veins in my arms. Then he takes bags of stuff, hangs them up, then goes away for a couple of hours while I watch a ball game. The bag’s got the good stuff. It gets inside of me and sends out a search party for the bad stuff. When the good stuff meets the bad stuff, they duke it out, and the good stuff beats the living stew out of the bad stuff. If it does its job right, the good stuff cuts down the nets and the bad stuff goes home to sulk. But that don’t mean I’m out of the woods just yet. The bad stuff’s going to make a comeback. I’ll go out of commission …”

“Remission, Dad,” I corrected.

“Whatever the wordsmith says, but when the bad stuff makes its comeback, Sinbad will be there waiting with a couple more sacks of the good stuff. Again, the good stuff goes looking for the bad and they duke it out again. We hope the good stuff kicks ass again—pardon the French, ladies. I’ll do whatever Sinbad says. Hell, I’ll fly a magic carpet for that guy. He seems to know his stuff and he talks a good game. But the bottom line is, the good stuff dukes it out with the bad stuff and that’s the end of the tale. Over and out. Could we bring up a happier story?”

Over the last years of my father’s life, I heard many versions of the same story, and it all devolved into a sacred crusade of good and evil played on a game board of mortality. Dad could get you rooting for the good stuff and giving a unanimous thumbs-down to the bad. I believe it had formed because of my father’s inability to contemplate his own death, but his was as clear an explanation of chemotherapy that I’ve heard anywhere.

At five the next morning, Dad woke me up and said, “Reveille has
sounded, soldier. I’ve got something to show you that you ain’t going to believe, jocko.”

“I’ll believe it at ten in the morning, thanks,” I said, turning my head in the darkness. “I haven’t seen five in the morning since I left The Citadel.”

“You’re going to see this,” Dad said, as he turned on the flashlight and we walked down the dock. Bobby’s wife Lonnie handed us mugs of hot coffee as we went out to meet Bobby, who was waiting for us on the dock.

“Uncle Don wanted you to see this, Pat,” Bobby said as he turned a huge flashlight into the deep-currented St. Johns River. When man-made light swept across a river or a swamp in the marsh-haunted waters of the Deep South, I knew that an alligator’s eyes would glow like the light from Japanese lanterns. Over the years Dad and I had often seen the fiery witness of alligators to our passages on fishing trips with Uncle Russ. But in this moonless darkness we were stunned to see hundreds of gators regarding us with the carmine eyes of cold-blooded predators.

“Want to go for a morning swim, Dad?” I asked.

“That’s a good idea, Uncle Don.” Bobby grinned. “I’ll come in after you give the okay signal.”

“I wouldn’t go into that water after a squadron had strafed that water clean of reptiles. I wouldn’t put a single piggy of my left foot in that mess. Hell, I wouldn’t live within five hundred miles of the St. Johns,” Dad told him.

“Stay and hunt with us today,” Cousin Rusty said. “We’ll fry you guys up some gator tail. I guarantee that you and Pat’ll love it.”

“I made a pact with all the wild shit in the world,” Dad said. “If it don’t eat me, I won’t eat it. I used to see packs of sharks following in the wake of aircraft carriers, and they really helped me concentrate on my landings. I’m proud of the fact that I never got my feet wet when I fought in the Pacific.”

When we left the Harpers, we drove down back roads toward the Atlantic, where we made stops at Daytona Beach and Sanlando Springs and Rock Springs, places that the Conroy children had come to revere whenever Dad was waging war overseas. In Florida you are always near a bright-eyed source of water that flows with a quartzlike purity from
a plunging hole in the dark Florida earth. We were especially fond of Rock Springs, which was undiscovered and often deserted and seemed to boil out of the rock like the birth of a powerful river. All of us felt disappointment when we returned as adults and Rock Springs seemed like a waterway that was barely larger than a creek. We had grown up and the springs had not.

Cousins Mike and John met us over at the assisted-living facility where Aunt Helen had been a resident for two years, suffering from dementia. Though I knew my father was disconcerted by the milieu of hospitals, he had spent a lifetime teasing and poking fun at Helen, who carried no weapon to resist his insistence on mocking every word out of her mouth. It was an Irish street urchin going after a backward Southern girl who was defenseless to ward off his aggression. But they had somehow managed to discover a way to love each other, and Dad was the only person I knew who could make Aunt Helen laugh.

Using two canes that he now needed to walk because of his bad hips, my dad passed a hundred beds of people in various stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. There were vases full of roses and jasmine and every other blossom that gave off a delicious scent, fitting the state of Florida—the place of flowers in our national dream. The sweetness of the arrangements cut through the odors of antiseptics and bedpans as thunderstricken relatives sat around their loved ones in agony about what to do or say to comfort such lifeless vessels of silence, where souls had passed on to the next dimension, but their hearts still beat in time and one could only guess whether they could still dream.

Unnerved and shaken to the core, my father observed the gallery of the city without memory or affect and said to me, “I’m giving you a direct order, sports fans.”

“What is it, Dad?” I asked.

“If I ever get like this, you shoot me in the back of the head when they come to put me in such a place,” he said. “Now promise me.”

“Bang, bang,” I said as quietly as I could. But Mike and John had heard the words Dad had spoken, and it had alarmed and upset them both.

Mike Harper said, “Uncle Don—you couldn’t be more wrong about Mama. She understands everything that’s going on around her.”

John added, “She’s sharp as a tack, Uncle Don. Nothing gets by her. She knows what’s going on—at all times.”

“That’s great, Johnny,” I said. “I heard it was much worse.”

“Who’s spreading that rumor?” John demanded.

“It’s my horrible, untrustworthy sister Carol,” I said.

“Carol Ann hasn’t seen our parents in a coon’s age.” Mike snorted.

I explained, “Carol loathes everyone in our family until they start dying. Then she loves and cherishes them more than anyone else in our sick tribe.”

As we approached the bed of Aunt Helen, we came to the washed-out face as blank as a tablet. Still, Aunt Helen was one of those beautiful Peek girls who had come out of the hill country of Georgia to make their marks and find their husbands in Atlanta. She was as polite and self-effacing as she’d been in her lifetime. But you could wave a lantern in front of her eyes and she would not even be aware of the light.

Dad said, very upset, “She doesn’t know me from your Buick LeSabre, Pat.”

Mike and John jumped to their mother’s defense like guard dogs. “No, Uncle Don,” Mike protested. “She knows everything that’s going on. She doesn’t miss a thing. Mama, you recognize Uncle Don, don’t you? And that’s his oldest son, Pat. You know, the oldest cousin. They’re the Roman Catholics in the family. Look, Uncle Don, she sees both of you. She recognizes you both and understands everything that’s going on. Man, she was always sharp as a tack.”

“Mike should know, Uncle Don,” John added. “He comes and sits by Mom every day. Sometimes he stays all day long. He really looks after her and makes sure she’s treated right. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.”

My father was deeply shaken after our visit. As I drove through Orlando, I showed Dad the St. James Cathedral School at one corner, where I used to lead Orlando kids to safety as a member of the school patrol, then the outdoor basket where I scored my first two points as a basketball player, and the route I walked Carol Ann home on each day to the rat-infested house on Livingston Street. I pointed out the bridge on Lake Eola where Mom had bought her first landscape painting and stopped her young family, most of whom were still in their infancy, to
watch the artist Jack Gilbert finish his picture of the lake with a flashy whitewater lily.

That night Dad and I, along with the Harpers, ate dinner at the restaurant favored by our cousins and Uncle Russ. After his visit to Aunt Helen, Dad felt frisky and ready to rock and roll to an appreciative audience. Many of his jokes were at my expense, but I’d given him a dispensation that would last for the rest of his life.

“How was a guy to know he was raising Judas Iscariot in his own house?” he asked my cousins. “I mean, have some pity on an old man who fathered a boy who got his nose out of joint whenever Daddy raised his voice to him or gave him a little tap on the fanny.”

“That’s why I didn’t teach my boys to read or write, Don,” Uncle Russ said. “I sure didn’t want that to happen when one of my boys got his feelings hurt by me.”

“When I heard how much money Pat made,” Cousin Mike said, “I’ve been trying to get my nose out of joint, but I just can’t crack the code.”

“It’s easy, Mike,” my father said. “Just get your nose out of joint when you’re about ten and keep it that way for the next forty years. You won’t believe all the shit you can make up.”

We left the next day, because a strange restlessness plagued my father, who believed that keeping constantly on the move could calm all the mysteries and storms in his nature. His kids all knew he was stealing off in morning darkness to confuse his cancer into believing that he was too adept in all the chicaneries of movement ever to be caught and brought down from behind. Not once did it occur to him that his cancer had booked first-class passage on his grand ship of state, no matter where he ran or tried to hide. A short time later I would join him at the weddings of my two cousins Colleen and Bridget Conroy, both daughters of Aunt Carol and Uncle Ed Conroy—a happy wedding in Naples, Florida, and one in Davenport, Iowa. Dad was at the dead center of each one and danced more than anyone at the reception parties for the two pretty girls. Always full of life, he lived the last part of his with exuberance, ready for any new adventure, singing the praises of both morning sun and the rising of a new moon. He seemed to have the energy of a thousand lesser men, and his oldest son could
only watch in exhausted admiration. In the year he spent dying, he ran his kids into the ground.