The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (46 page)

“Mike, Mike, Mike!” Tim cried out. “What happened? What just went wrong? What’s going on with Dad?”

Then Tim leaped to the other side of the bed to see whether the situation looked any better from that angle. Motionless, Mike continued to check the baseball scores until Tim yelled at him, “Hey, Mike, let’s talk about the important things. Did the Yankees beat the goddamn Red Sox last night? I couldn’t sleep, I was so worried about that game.”

Mike, not looking up, said, “The Red Sox won.”

“What’s happened to Dad?” Tim yelled. “You cold son of a bitch.”

“It looks like Dad just died, monkey boy,” Mike said. “Why do you keep jumping up and down like a little monkey boy?”

“What a cold, loathsome monster you are, Mike,” Tim said.

“Keep jumping around, monkey boy,” Mike said, finally putting the paper down and approaching Dad’s bed, eyeing his motionless form carefully. “Better tell the nurses that Dad died,” he ordered.

The nurses confirmed that Dad was dead and, after preparing the body for removal, left Mike and Tim in the room to say good-bye to him. That’s when it caught up with them. They both fell apart and wept in the penned-in closures of their own silence. Mike and Tim were the first to realize in the thunderclaps of pure grief how much the children of the Great Santini had come to love him.

Tim said, “We’d better intercept Pat before he gets up here. He’d go nuts if he walked in now.”

“You’re right,” Mike agreed. “Pat won’t do well with this. I might even have a second monkey boy on my hands.”

My brothers took the elevator down to the front of the hospital, then assumed positions to intercept me when I turned off Ribaut Road
into the hospital parking lot. They saw me as I was driving north on Ribaut, but I surprised both of them by gliding right past them and not even glancing at the hospital where my father had just died. According to Tim, I nearly ran over Mike, who tried to step in front of my car to inform me about Dad.

“Pat doesn’t give a shit about his own father,” Tim said, in both surprise and disgust.

“Pat’s going somewhere,” Mike said. “He’s probably buying new panty hose at Walmart.”

“He didn’t even glance over here,” Tim said.

Though I’d departed from Fripp early to go see Dad, it hit me that I’d forgotten to bring Julia Randel my annual Mother’s Day gift, and Mother’s Day was the next day. When I visited Anne Rivers Siddons and her husband, Heyward, in Maine for three straight summers, I’d discovered that Morgan and Julia Randel were crazy about boiled lobsters. Since then, I brought Mrs. Randel live lobsters each Mother’s Day, yet this year the day had crept up on me. Mrs. Randel had taken over the job of mothering me after the death of my own mother. Few people have ever loved me with such a soft laying on of hands, or asking for so little in return. My father died while I was lifting forlorn lobsters from a tank at Publix.

By the time I drove the five blocks to the Randel house, Cassandra had arrived at the hospital with my sister Kathy, and heard from my puzzled brothers about my strange dereliction of duty. Cassandra explained about Mrs. Randel and Mother’s Day. When I arrived at Mrs. Randel’s house, she was waiting for me in her driveway, having gotten the call from my brothers. The Randels were leading a youth group in a prayer meeting inside their house, and Mrs. Randel took me by the hand and walked me into their overgrown front yard, which was lush and azalea-covered. On her seldom-used front porch, she told me my father died and that it would probably do me good if I cried. She had often brought me to cry at this site, and she was an easy woman for me to shed tears in front of. When her son Randy died, I wrote my first poem in honor of his death. When her thirty-four-year-old son Darrell died of neurofibromatosis, a form of Elephant Man’s disease, I flew in from San Francisco to deliver his eulogy. As the years passed, I composed
eulogies for both Morgan and Julia Randel. When I die, their only surviving child, Julie, has to read a prayer at my funeral. As the tears made their way down my face, slowly at first, then at flood levels, Mrs. Randel soothed me. I lost control, and Mrs. Randel whispered prayers for me and my father. Something inside me realized that my faith had come from an ancient source, and I let myself be comforted and reconciled by it.

Then the business of Dad’s death held us all by the throats as we tried to organize the events surrounding the funeral. Our Beaufort closed ranks around us once again. We lived in a house full of cut flowers and home-delivered meals and notes of both condolence and appreciation. The Marine Corps information department at both the air station and Parris Island called to tell us they would help the family in any way they could. Marine Corps headquarters checked in to note the passing of a legendary Marine aviator.

Though Dad’s death was not a surprise to any of us, it still had the power to shock us into stupefaction. None of us performed at the top of his or her game during the stressful times leading up to his funeral, but we all forgave ourselves for doing so.
The New York Times
did a semisweet but disapproving obituary of Dad the next day, and Carol Ann had her first meltdown over the
Times
’s reference to Dad being an abusive father.

“That’s not the man who raised me,” she said in a histrionic voice. “I was raised by a gentle, kind man who never raised a hand to any member of his family.”

Jim said, “You must’ve been raised by a different father.”

“Give us a break, Carol,” Tim added.

Carol Ann fought back. “To me, Dad was the perfect father. We loved each other in a way the males of this family will never understand. I’ve lost my closest friend, and God knows he loved me best of all.”

The rest of us prepared ourselves and our children to accept any way Carol Ann reacted to her grief as her natural right. That night as the family fixed dinner, there was a shout from the den of my house, where the TV was on CNN. We ran in there to see a wonderful photo of Dad in his dress uniform, and a voice on the TV letting the world know that the Great Santini had died. His children fell silent, but a feeling of pride was let loose in the room, the unnameable sense of belonging that
comes to a family that has always suffered from the stigmata of being the new strangers in town. It was a lovely moment for all of us.

Meanwhile, the world of Santini began to move south, as a large contingent of the Irish Conroys were heading toward Beaufort. My publishing world was sending its representatives too, and it was a thrill for me to show my editor, Nan Talese; my longtime agent, Julian Bach; and Marly Rusoff, who would one day become my agent, the small town I’d been writing about for thirty years. During my tour of Beaufort, Nan looked around and said, “What on earth do you
do
here, Pat?” And Julian echoed her question several times. Because Marly had visited Beaufort on a number of occasions, I did not have to make my sales pitch on the illimitable, river-braceleted charms of Beaufort to her. Long ago I had pitched my tent in the marsh-possessed town enclosed by tidal creeks that smelled like some eau de cologne of oyster beds and salt. It was here we were going to bury my father, and I couldn’t have been happier that this would be his final resting place.

The next night was the viewing, and the saying of the rosary. The rosary was the idée fixe of the Chicago Irish, whose muscular Catholicism overpowered the weak-kneed, tepid religion of the Southern branch. Father James P. Conroy came in his priestly collar yet again, and took over the call for prayer, with Sister Marge Conroy in loud-voiced attendance. Looking at Dad’s open casket, I stared at his ghastly, mummified face and thought of a story Jim and Tim had told me the night before.

Jim began, “It was at Dad’s birthday party last month.…”

“And Aunt Marge and Father Jim were in the living room with Dad,” Tim picked up. “Someone told Dad that he looked a little yellowish.”

Jim finished the story. “Dad asked if anyone else thought he looked yellow. Sister Marge looked at her brother and said, ‘Like a fucking banana, Don.’ ”

My eyes traveled upward, where I saw for the first time a cartoon my great friend Doug Marlette had drawn for my dad’s funeral. It had been placed near the casket. It depicted a jet plane crashing through the pearly gates of heaven, with Saint Peter and several terrified angels running low to avoid the flight plan of the jet. Below the cartoon were
the words “Stand by for a fighter pilot.” On the cockpit of the plane, Doug had stenciled, “The Great Santini.” Doug’s gift cartoon was all the prayer we needed. Its quiet elegance eased our way through a fire-eating week of leavetaking.

The night before the funeral, Carol Ann came to my room looking troubled and mad-dog at the same time. Thus far, Carol Ann had behaved splendidly, with only a couple of outbreaks to remind us of past detonations of her jumpy spirit. But she and I found ourselves alone in my writing room off the master bedroom, where she had come with a stonewall agenda on her mind.

“Are you going to write a eulogy for Dad tomorrow?” she asked.

“I’m thinking about it, Carol. I haven’t written a word yet,” I said.

“Oh, you’ll write one,” she said. “Your ego is much too big to let such a golden opportunity pass by.”

“Well, thanks. Guess I’ll write one for sure now,” I said.

“I’ve written a poem. A very great one, I think. But I’ll not read my poem until you’re finished with your prose. Dad always agreed with me that poetry was a much higher art form than prose.”

“He even shared that sentiment with me. Dad, that aficionado of refined taste. I’ll be glad to read a eulogy if I can think of anything to say.”

“You’re an egomaniac,” she said. “You’ll come up with something.”

For a long time after the lights went out, Cassandra and I talked about all the enervating events that had led up to this ceremony. In the darkness I confessed to her that I wasn’t sure I could write a single word praising Dad’s life—that I was still caught up in the unhealable rancor I brought from my memory of my childhood. She said it didn’t matter. I’d written the novel
The Great Santini
, and that would always stand me in good stead as my valediction to my father. We went to sleep holding hands.

At three in the morning, I awoke and walked to the writing desk as if in a trance. As sometimes happens to me, I dreamed out what I was supposed to write. I wrote the first paragraph of Dad’s eulogy, then broke down. The second one came easily, until I broke down again. I knew what I was supposed to say and what I was required to say. Because it was the right thing to do, I went at it in a straight line that never wavered. I finished before dawn on the day I would attend my father’s funeral.

When I walked out of my room dressed for the ceremony, the house had turned into a maze of breakfast and showering and dressing in close quarters. I had rented the house next door for overflow, and it too was brimming with people in different states of dress. At nine o’clock a fleet of limousines from the Copeland Funeral Home parked in the circular drive. They began to fill up with Floridians, Georgians, South Carolinians, Iowamen, and the brash Chicago tribesmen. In silence we rode to St. Peter’s Catholic Church on Lady’s Island, me sitting in amazement at the easy beauty and spirit of my daughters—something that was beyond words to me on this strangely immortal day.

There was a huge crowd awaiting us at the church. The parking lot was overflowing and spilling into the parking area of a nearby shopping center. Folks were heading toward the church at a rapid pace. In the lines ahead of me, I witnessed one false note that filled me with a nameless dread. Yet again, Carol Ann had leaped from her limo before it came to a stop, causing the driver to panic and step on the brakes, sending the other passengers lurching forward. When she regained her footing, Carol Ann sprinted into the church and down the center aisle.

My Fripp friends Gregg and Mary Wilson Smith described the scene to me later. Gregg said, “You don’t usually see women doing wind sprints at a funeral, but that girl was flying.”

Mary added, “As soon as Carol was convinced that every eye in the church was on her, she began a slow unpacking of jars and bottles she had in this huge purse. She set out water, then poured a glass for herself and drank it down. Nobody knew who she was or what in the living hell she was doing. But she unpacked lotions and oils and stuff, then spent ten minutes arranging them near the pulpit. Then she went to sit in the first seat on the front row—nearest the aisle.”

“Goddamn, you Conroys sure know how to put on a show.” Gregg laughed.

We waited with the patience of cattle to be lined up by the funeral directors, who were working from typed lists of family and pallbearers. There was a bovine serenity in our milling around, ready for our call. One of the problems in our orderly lineup was Carol Ann’s sudden and unexplained disappearance.

Then the herd began to move, and we moved with a lack of grace, following the flight plan of Dad’s casket’s circuit through the church. The crowd was big and lively and ready for a show. It felt like a gaggle of well-wishers who had bought tickets to some private circus. I spotted Carol Ann already seated only when I heard Jim say to her, “Why don’t you move to the end of the pew, Carol? Then the rest of us wouldn’t have to climb over your ass to get to our seats.”

Carol Ann possessed the voice of an aggrieved thespian when she answered, “Because I was closer to Dad by far than any of the other children. Our love for each other was boundless. As deep as the ocean. As mystical as poetry itself.”

Jim, Janice, and their children then crawled over Carol Ann’s knees; so did Cassandra and I, and so did Kathy and Bobby Joe and my nephew Willie, along with the rest of the immediate family. Mercifully, we filled up the first pew. The next five pews filled up with relatives at a brisk, efficient pace.

I opened the daily bulletin of the church, which was specially printed for the funeral. To myself, I whistled when I saw they were giving Dad a solemn high mass, usually reserved for the most highly regarded members of a church community.

A phalanx of priests came out of the rear of the church, including the pastor, Father Cellini, Dad’s personal confessor; who was followed by Dad’s brother, Reverend Jim Conroy; and our cousin the Reverend Jim Huth. The priests made an elaborate circumnavigation of the church with smoke pouring out of censers, reminding everyone that the Catholic Church had emerged from the Middle Ages and still believed in ancient rites of purification and submission to God’s will. The priests gave the Protestants of Beaufort quite a show that day. They held nothing back from the mysterious origins of the Roman Church banished to caves beneath the Appian Way.