The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (45 page)

“Don’t fight a war in Asia,” Dad said. “That’s the Conroy rule.”

“It ain’t caught on,” I said.

My cousin John Harper held a morbid curiosity about Don Conroy and his ability to talk about nuclear weapons as though they were only carburetors for his Ford. Like the rest of us, John had read the books about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. John was certain that Dad’s nonchalance about talking about nuclear weapons was uncensored bravado and nothing else. I proceeded to ask Dad the same set of questions that Cousin John had once laid out before his favorite uncle.

“Okay, Dad,” I said, studying my notes. “If you got a lawful order from the president that you were to drop a nuclear bomb on Atlanta, could you do it? Now, remember, me and my family, Jim and his family, and most of your friends also live there. Could you really execute that order?”

“Boom,” my father said matter-of-factly. “Next question. That was too easy.”

“Let’s go to New York. If you drop a bomb in the New York metropolitan area, you’re sure of wiping out up to eight million people, and the greatest cultural center in the world. Your daughter Carol lives there. Could you do it?”

“Boom,” he said.

“Okay, let’s go to Chicago, the city where you grew up and that you love more than anyplace on earth. All your relatives live there, and all would be destroyed if you dropped the bomb.”

“Boom,” said Dad. “Hey, this game is getting boring, son. I’m a Marine, and I do what I’m ordered to do. End of story.”

That night I called up and told all my brothers, sisters, and daughters that Don was going to be dying soon. They’d better make plans to say their good-byes. The next day he struggled with the recorder, with his quavering voice, the power running out of him as the cancer ate him from the inside out. Though it was awful, it was part of his life’s cycle, as immutable as the tides that ran by Parris Island and the flight paths along the air station. The Conroy tribe began gathering again in Beaufort. We instituted a schedule where one of Don’s children would always be within call.

Unsurprisingly, my sister Carol Ann was avoiding all encounters with me. She would not come over to Kathy and Bobby Joe’s house unless my car was nowhere in sight. She bristled like a guard dog whenever I passed through her angle of vision. Even when we exchanged pleasantries, hers were barbed and loaded with mistrust. Whenever she looked at me, her contempt filled the distance between us. Finally, we were reduced to being two writers who could not find the language to soften the history we shared from different battle stations.

But five days before Dad’s death, Carol Ann and I were forced into a conversation that we had not prepared or planned in the elaborate architecture we designed to avoid each other. I came to Kathy’s house to relieve Carol Ann after she had pulled an early morning shift. I’d arrived to assume my duties for the next six hours, when Tim would take over my watch. When I drove into the driveway, pandemonium had broken loose. I heard Carol Ann screaming, with her voice carrying all over the neighborhood.

“Dad, you’ve got to tell me you love me. I need it so badly, Dad. I need to hear you say it before you die. You’ve never said it to me! You’ve never said you’re proud of me. I have to hear it from your lips. Tell me you love me, Dad. Tell me you’re proud of me! I need it. I have to have it, Dad.”

I gestured to Carol Ann that I needed to speak to her and gently led her out of Dad’s bedroom to the couch in Kathy’s living room. Dad was disheveled and rattled by Carol Ann’s assault, but like me, he took it in a spirit of recognition of what an impossible life Carol Ann had led, with madness and genius clashing against her spirit. I let her scream
and cry for a few minutes more. Then I finally spoke to her in a voice I hoped was conciliatory and loving at the same time.

“Carol, it’s important for you to know this,” I said. “Dad’s dying. He’s not going deaf. You don’t have to scream at him.”

“He’s got to do this for me, Pat,” Carol Ann cried, shifting up toward hysteria. “He’s never told me once that he loved me. That he was proud of my work as a poet.”

“He’s always telling me he far prefers your poems to my work,” I told her.

“Talk about damning with faint praise,” she said.

“Carol, just don’t scream at Dad. You’ve got him very upset.”

“Has he ever told you he loved you, Pat? Tell me you’ve ever heard him say he’s proud of you.”

“As a matter of fact, he has,” I said. “Every day of my life Dad calls me and tells me how much he loves me and how proud he is of the career that I’ve made for myself. Then he pauses and says, ‘I wish I felt the same way about Carol, but I just don’t feel shit for her.’ ”

Carol Ann threw a pillow at my head, and we both began laughing. Finally, I said, “Carol, that’s Don Conroy dying in there, not Bill Cosby. That’s the Great Santini in there, and he’s just not put together like other men. Though he can’t say it, he sends you money every month to support his daughter, the poet. He loves us with action, not with words. He’s done great by you.”

“I still need him to say it,” Carol Ann said, her jaw set in a cast of pure stubbornness.

So I took Carol Ann by the arm and led her back to the room so she could say good-bye to Dad. For several minutes, Carol Ann composed herself, looking up only when our brother-in-law, Bobby Joe Harvey, walked in from his huge workplace in the backyard. Bobby Joe was known as the “Conroy family redneck,” because that’s how he identified himself to the rest of Beaufort. He thought a couple more rednecks in the family would improve it immensely. As for our politics, Bobby Joe would scoff and call us pinko liberal communists. Over the years we all had grown fond of Bobby Joe. There was nothing he couldn’t do with his hands, from building a boat’s motor to assembling a wrecked
car into a collector’s dream. Though there’d been some fireworks in the initial years of his marriage to Kathy, he was now solidly ensconced as family. He and my father had hit it off big when they first met, and Dad had become the father figure Bobby Joe had needed his whole life.

Bobby shuffled into the bedroom with his white beard immaculate and his grooming impeccable. He paused by Dad’s bedside to say, “Hey, old man. You feeling any better?”

And my father, with his voice weak as a fawn’s, looked up at his son-in-law. I spotted that vile, impish laugh go off in my father’s head as he said, “I love you, Bobby Joe. I’m proud of you, Bobby Joe. I’ve always loved and been prouder of you than my loser children.”

I caught Carol Ann in midair going for my father’s throat. I’m sure she meant to kill him as he lay helplessly on his bed. Wrestling her out the front door and onto the lawn, I watched Carol Ann break into a run and disappear into her loaned house across the street. Bobby Joe came up behind me and said, “I don’t know what I did, bro. I didn’t mean to upset Carol so much.”

“You were perfect, Bobby Joe,” I said. “Remember that Carol is a wounded bird and always will be.”

“I think the whole family is fucked-up,” he said. “So does everyone else in Beaufort.”

“That could serve as a one-sentence history of the Conroy family,” I said. Bobby Joe put his arm around me, and we went back inside to be with Dad. All the commotion had exhausted him, and he was sound asleep when I returned to my post.

My father’s entire world sprang into amazing life as each of his children took over some role in his slippage into unconsciousness. Checking with one another on an hourly basis, we compared notes on how much Dad was running down after the cancer had begun to wreak havoc on his brain. Though he still had lucid moments, the end was clearly visible, and we filed our reports with the far-flung array of friends and relatives who awaited our notes from the field.

On our first full shift together the following day, Cassandra and I interrupted a strange, improvised rite that Carol Ann had made up in her long march through the mythologies of the world. There was some kind of incense burning that struck me as Roman Catholic in origin.
As we entered the room, Carol Ann was pouring oil onto Dad’s head, and it was streaming down his face, causing him great discomfort and, I believe, embarrassment.

“What in the living hell are you doing, Carol?” I said, trying to control my temper as I touched a drop of oil coming like a tear from my father’s face.

“This is an ancient Indian ceremony,” she said, “that I took from a Pueblo Indian ceremony, but also borrowed from the Sioux and the Apache.”

“Funny, Carol,” I said after tasting the oil on my fingertip, “I never knew that Apache Indians used extra virgin olive oil in their sacred rites.”

“That’s a chrism of mystery that our woman-hating Catholic Church uses for their worthless last rites of extreme unction. It’s a bow toward Dad’s own nonsensical religion.”

“Dad’s a lot of things, Carol,” I said through thin, trembling lips, “but quit using him as a tossed salad.”

“This incense may effect a cure,” she said.

“It’s our watch, Carol,” I said. “If your oil works, I’ll have Dad sprint over to your house across the street.”

“Always the funny man,” she snarled.

Cassandra went into the bathroom and came out with a towel rinsed with warm water, and one dry towel. She cleaned off and dried Dad’s head and face.

“Tell your little friend thanks,” Dad said about Cassandra. “Doesn’t she remind you of your mother?”

“Yep, Dad,” I said. “She sure does.”

Two days before his death, Cassandra and I appeared for our shift, with my brother Tim coming straight down after school to relieve us for the late-afternoon shift. Kathy seemed to be a member of every shift, since Dad was in her house. But we were having trouble with our hospice group, who was often late showing up and slow on the trigger finger about getting an ample supply of morphine to relieve the agony Dad was now going through. As I entered the house, I heard Dad desperately gagging. Sprinting around the corner, I saw Carol Ann holding Dad’s head on her shoulder, popping in morphine pills that he kept
spitting out. Undeterred, Carol Ann would throw another pill down Dad’s throat, and he would strangle it out in a blue foam.

I pulled Dad away from Carol Ann, and did it roughly. I turned his head toward the floor and a discolored wave of saliva came flooding out; then he gasped in a desperate convulsion and started to breathe again. His eyes held pure terror. Cassandra ran to the sink for a glass of water, and as I was wiping his foaming blue mouth, he swallowed for the last time in his life.

“Carol, you’re killing Dad. You’re drowning him. He can’t swallow anymore. He’s losing the ability to,” I said.

“How the hell was I supposed to know that?” she said, furious.

“Look,” I said; then I turned toward Dad. “This hospice shit didn’t work out, Dad. Your kids don’t know what we’re doing. But I know what to do, okay? I’m going to take charge of this right now.”

I picked up the phone and called 911 and got an immediate response.

“Hello, ma’am. This is Pat Conroy on Azalea Drive. My father has colon cancer and needs immediate help. Please send an ambulance here as soon as possible.” Thirty seconds later, I heard the cry of an ambulance being sent out from the hospital.

When Carol Ann heard the sound, she roused herself from some form of trance and began screaming in my face. “Did you hear that, Cassandra? Did you hear the sound of the slave master in Pat’s voice? That’s what I had to endure all my childhood—the horrible sound of the patriarchy making demands. The chauvinist’s crumbs are all I was thrown. A woman’s opinion was worth less than dirt in Santini’s house. We weren’t given human status at all. We were chattel and nothing else.”

“Hey, Carol,” I said, “shut the fuck up.”

I then went outside to meet the ambulance, which was coming down the street. Cassandra stayed behind and tried to minister to Carol Ann, who was caught in the tight netting of an agony that was a lifelong affliction to her. My sister Kathy followed the ambulance, then got Dad set up in a room in the oncology ward, where a morphine drip was started right away. He was breathing hard and overwhelmed by the scene his kids had just caused him to live through. When the morphine began to cut into his suffering, he looked up at Kathy and said, “I love morphine, sissy.”

And those were the last words my father spoke.

My brothers Tim and Mike sat with my father during the first night shift at his deathwatch, the first week in May. Dad had not spoken to them since they assumed their duties as watchmen. Flying in from Dallas, my brother Jim was already airborne, and he’d been scheduled to take over the second night shift. Carol Ann was so distraught in her lostness and her inability to balance her precarious hold on reality that we all feared to leave her alone with Dad.

My brothers Mike and Tim have never seemed related by blood. Certainly Mike could pass as part of a cousinry tenth removed from Tim, but there have always been canyons of difference pulling them apart by centrifugal, invisible forces. Mike gives off an aura of repose and self-containment that hides the fact that he is the most tightly wound of the Conroy siblings, his leg tapping away like a runaway motor as he sits on a couch, or appraises a situation, or renders an opinion about politics. He is the most trustworthy Conroy and has served as the executor of Mom, Dad, and Tom’s affairs. He throws himself into these deadly dull conundrums with resignation and follows each of them through to its final conclusion. Though cheapness is his most egregious flaw, he considers it a great virtue and wishes the rest of us could develop similar tendencies. Mike was reading the sports section when my father drew his last breath.

My brother Tim is overemotional, excitable, and passionate. From
his birth, the Bermuda Triangle—the family name for the three middle children—has picked on Tim and worried him to the point of hysteria. Mike, Kathy, and Jim could find something to criticize in every breath Tim drew. He would react with a cloistered rage, since he found our family as maddening and dangerous as I did. When Dad’s labored breathing came to an abrupt stop, Tim began leaping about, hopping up and down, feeling Dad’s pulse, checking his temperature, listening to his chest, but jumping in tiny three-step hops as the reality of the moment overcame him.