The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (42 page)

His children met together in secret and made clandestine phone calls in which we talked about the brevity of Dad’s future. We all decided (although Carol Ann was not a part of these planning sessions) to make Dad’s going out as easy and comfortable as we could. Since brother Jim was working in Dallas at the time, he flew in many weekends to visit Dad, who was staying in Beaufort. Tim and Mike were down frequently; Kathy and Bobby Joe lived in Beaufort, but on most weekends we would find ourselves at my house on Fripp Island. If we needed to talk in private, without Dad’s overhearing and interference, we could always go to the lagoon and slip secret documents and passwords about Dad’s condition, his prognosis, or his mood. All of us longed for Dad to have a good death, surrounded by his children. Our love had been hard-won with screams and scars and battlefield commissions, but we were past that now.

So we began a year of submitting to Dad’s whims as he made a final tour of the most significant places in his life. He planned visits to every person he’d ever considered a friend, paying special attention to my daughters, who had worshiped him ever since they had learned to talk. He made two visits to stay with Colonel Joseph and Jean Jones, the parents of Barbara’s first husband, who was killed in Vietnam. They lived on a farm near Dyersburg, Tennessee, and opened it to me and my family without condition after our families merged into one. They and their Tennessee family, the Gauldins, were special additions to my life, and the entire group fell in love with my family, but especially with my father. They became a pit stop on his annual trek to Chicago and Iowa. Falling in love with Barbara had linked my destiny with dozens of histories I wouldn’t have had if we’d never met. A hundred new moons would appear in my horizon whenever my daughters had a child. Because of fate, love was a million-footed thing, and so was hatred. My father was behind the wheel of his car, urging it down the peripheries of blue highways, and he carried what was killing him as an honored guest in his liver. He connected himself to Chicago, to Atlanta, and the surprising realm of Beaufort, where his children had planted their own flags of belonging and home.

In the winter of 1995, I was editing
Beach Music
in New York City when I received a summons to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Hoover Library outside Birmingham, Alabama. Both my father and the Joneses attended the ceremony. Jean Jones later told me that when I stood Dad up and introduced him to the audience, he waited for his standing ovation to be over before he sat down to dry the tears from his eyes. Dad was always a big hit at writers’ conferences, and his bloviating descriptions of himself pleased whatever crowd he was addressing.

“To me, my son’s writing puts him in the fourth or fifth rank of American writers, but under my tutelage, the kid’s getting better,” he would boast to a crowd of Southern women. “I tell him, ‘Son, until you learn to write like I flew a fighter plane, you’re always gonna be a tail gunner and nothing else. You got to break a few sound barriers, sink a few aircraft carriers, bring down an enemy squadron—that kind of stuff, if you get my drift. Pat writes for homosexuals, lesbians, and people of that milieu [he pronounced it “mill-lu”], when he needs to find a way to make it popular among truck drivers and factory workers, the real people who make this country run.”

When I listened to this rant of his, I grew in admiration for that fixed star who had the stamina to teach me the alphabet in the home of such a proud philistine. “Thank you, Mama,” I would send a prayer aloft. “I can’t thank you enough.”

For the next year, Dad was running on fumes as he put thousands of miles on his car each month. As he pursued redemption in the freedom of the road, the cancer was always waiting for him well rested in Beaufort. It nested in the eaves of the attics of the Fripp house. It warmed itself during the cold winter at Kathy’s house. It matched Dad’s volatile impatience with a mineral stillness of its own. It was always on call and always at the ready. My father was the madcap voyager of those days and could not see what his children could see so clearly. But Dad was weakening, breaking down, losing the use of his once powerful legs, suffering from shortness of breath, and falling asleep in the middle of games long before bedtime. Yet no one mentioned a word to him about the progression of his illness.

The family would discuss him almost nightly by phone, and we would find out his itinerary of the day, or the symptoms of his long fade-out of health toward the time of senescence we all knew was coming. Once he fell in Bobby Joe and Kathy’s shower, and Bobby Joe had to lift him out, clean him up, and get him dressed. Bobby Joe was not thanked for his services. As he needed us more and more, Dad grew more contentious at our availability or wanting to help him. There was a whole platoon of proud men trapped in this one ornery man who passed in review with a scowl on his face when his own kids lined the parade route.

Over the long year, we learned to hide our deep concern by hosting great parties with Dad in the prow, always ready to assume his work as the centerpiece in the great circle of blood his family represented. On April 4, 1997, we planned what we thought would be the last birthday party we threw for Dad, and we planned it down to its last detail.

Dad had spent a couple of days in the hospital as they put him through several rigorous tests. I picked my unsuspecting father up from Beaufort Memorial and drove him out toward Fripp on a perfect sea island day in the low country. I had found him arguing with his doctors, saying, “Hey, Sinbad. They got any medical schools in Iran?”

“No, Dad,” I said, “they just let ’em work on dogs and cats. Then they get to practice on guys like you. Hey, Doc, why don’t you just put him down—like a rabid dog?”

“Hey, he took an oath, son. The hypotenuse oath, I believe it’s called.”

“The Hippocratic Oath, bookworm,” I said to my father as I helped him leave the hospital.

When Dad drove up to the house on Fripp that day, there were more than fifty guests waiting for his arrival. His brother Ed had come down from Iowa with Aunt Carol and several of their children. My father’s nephew, young Ed, came with his wife Ginny and their kids; at the time young Ed was an assistant college coach at North Carolina State. It would have thrilled Dad to know that Cousin Ed is the head coach of Tulane University today. Dad’s brother, Father Jim, was there, as was his helper in the faith, Sister Ludmilla. Aunt Marge
came, accompanied by two Chicago nuns from the Dominican Order in Chicago. The Harper boys showed up en masse. All of us remember how splendid and pacific that day was, and how Dad’s birthday lacked the usual fireworks displays or meteors flashing across the skies of our gatherings.

As we drove up to the house, the guests serenaded Dad with a timeless rendition of “Happy Birthday,” sung by two families that had never produced a good singing voice. I heard a sob come out of Dad’s throat.

“Get yourself together, Dad,” I said.

“How?” he asked.

“Just wing it,” I advised. “Pretend you’re still the shit who raised us.”

When the song ended, Bobby Joe drove Dad’s birthday present out of the garage. It was a spanking-new red Ford. We knew Dad loved the color red, and he’d never owned a new car. Bobby Joe said, “Don, this car is a present from your kids to the Great Santini. I picked it out myself and guarantee you this is a great car that’ll run forever.” When he handed the keys to Don, I thought my dad would lose his balance and fall to his knees. I’d never seen my father more surprised by a gift in my life.

Nor had I ever surprised myself by my own falling apart at my father’s receiving this gift with his children present. Moving toward the back of the semicircle, I watched Dad painfully sitting in his new vehicle, happy as a mockingbird. Something in the scene got to me, and I felt a raw and animal thing forming inside me that I could not control. Making it to my front door undetected, I closed the door behind me and broke down with a swift completeness. Only my daughter Megan saw me break out of the gathering, and I found myself in her arms weeping out an emptiness I would never be able to explain. Megan held me and told me all the soft things necessary to soothe the raw places of a broken father. I’d always worried that I didn’t teach my girls the simple ways of loving, but their natures were so fine and meticulous that they picked it up without my help. Through the last year or so of my father’s dying, I felt cherished and appreciated by the daughters I helped raise.

A whole pig was cooking in the backyard, and a family friend, Morgan
Randel, helped me make shrimp and grits for fifty people in the kitchen. Mrs. Randel served iced tea to all the guests and came up to kiss me and tell me the party was beautiful. Ever since their son Randy had fallen dead on a baseball field in front of me when he was fifteen, the Randels and I had been inseparable. My father, mother, and sister became part of their family circle, and it had proven to me how something grand could grow out of the wreckage of a ruined house. Three of my daughters, Jessica, Melissa, and Megan, all were so pretty they looked unrelated to me. They made over Don in a big Atlanta-girl way, and he had been as wonderful to them as he’d been a disappointment to us. There was a surfeit of food with great mounds of potato salad and drifts of coleslaw and the crackling goodness of crisp pig still steaming from the vinegar mop on the grill. Biscuits came out of the oven calling for fresh butter. Corn and tomatoes and onions wrapped in aluminum foil and cooked with soy sauce and a touch of sesame oil opened up in curls of sudden steam. Even the smoke tasted good.

When we waved good-bye to our father that night, his children thought we’d pulled off the perfect party. It was one of those nights when a lot of people stayed behind to clean up. It was satisfying to hear the stories being built after the party was over. Toward the end of the evening, my brother Jim called from his home in Dallas. He had not been able to break out of his work schedule, and his son, Michael, was too colicky as a baby to make the long trip back to the coast. I heard my brother Tim’s overgilded version of the day’s events.

“Yeah, we gave Dad a brand-new Ford. Terrye and I fought for a Mercedes, but we were overruled by the others. All cheap bastards, if you ask me. Terrye and I did the best we could, Jimbo. We took five thousand dollars from our life savings to contribute our share. I don’t know what you or Kathy or Mike gave. I’m not even sure Pat gave a cent, but Dad knew we did our damnedest to make the party a success. How much did you and Janice give, Jimbo, if I’m not prying?”

“Let me speak with Pat,” Jim demanded, then asked me, “How much did Tim and Terrye give for the car, Pat?”

“I don’t know for sure, but around five grand, as near as I can remember.”

“You’re as full of shit as they are,” Jim said. “Is Mike there?”

“Yeah, he’s across the room. That cheapskate didn’t give a cent,” I said, calling out to my brother.

•   •   •

Time becomes a trickster and a necromancer whenever it gets serious about the job of killing your parents. Then time speaks only to taunt you with the inevitable, with the hard knowledge that there is nothing to do but prepare for the remorseless day when the hurt for your parent reaches its grand finale.

In the last year of his life we learned how to arrange Dad’s pillows, turn the television to his favorite channels, take him to his favorite restaurants whenever we found ourselves passing through Atlanta. I watched the Chicago Bears, the Chicago Bulls, and the Chicago White Sox with him. In the winter after the Christmas of 1997, he began staying over at my house on Fripp Island all day. He grew exhausted, so I’d let him fall asleep in his chair while I went back to work. Working at my desk, I would hear the angry thumping of his cane on my door, and I would answer his summons with false aggravation.

“What do you want, Pop?” I would yell at him.

“Make me a sammich,” he’d say. “Make me a sammich like you did when I was in Rome.”

“Want some pasta with that?” I’d ask.

“Yeah, hit me with that shit too,” he’d say. “I eat better at Kath’s home.”

“Well, hell. Jump in that red car and get your ass over to Kath’s house, then,” I’d say, always rising toward the fresh bait.

Each night Dad would go to sleep at Kathy and Bobby Joe’s house, because Kathy, a registered nurse, was in charge of his medications and hygiene. Because his two bad hips had made any locomotion painful to him, it would often take him five minutes to make it from his car to the inside of my house. His one duty that he insisted on doing was to check my incoming mail each day. Afterward he would steal more than half the mail I received and boast when he got to Kathy’s. “A great day for the Archives,” he’d tell her. “I really racked up some great Arcs material.” That Kathy went along with this blatant theft bothered me
somewhat, but we both knew it caused much pleasure in my father’s larcenous heart.

That summer, the entire world of the Great Santini made plans to visit during what was most likely his last summer. His Marine friends from three wars came to reminisce about his battles fought about fifty years before. Col. Brown Pinkston came with his pretty wife, Salina, and I remembered the first time I saw Capt. Brown Pinkston in a baseball uniform at Cherry Point when I was six years old. He hit a double off the wall and became heroic to me for my entire life. I had a crush on his daughter Gail before I was in grade school, and the family Pinkston were the most solid neighbors we made in our shifting lives in the Marine Corps. It was with a sense of genuine pleasure that I watched the two fighter pilots talk about their experiences in the Pacific Theater. I wonder whether old soldiers in Athens came together to celebrate their parts in the fall of Troy. The soldiers came with their wives and families, and my house filled up with visitors as the days grew longer and my father’s life grew shorter. My sister Kathy told me that I averaged feeding fifteen or twenty people a day during those final days of Santini. As he lost weight, the fire inside him began to dim and his coloring became pale as an altar cloth. Yet he exulted in the attention his illness brought him, and the shameful ease he took in shining on center stage was never so apparent as it was in that fall of 1997.