The Death of Santini

by Pat Conroy

  Always full of surprises, Carol Ann opened the right-hand door and leaped out of a still-moving limousine in front of the church. She sprinted up to Curt Copeland, who was waiting beside Tom’s casket, and began screaming at our unprepared funeral director. What the screaming was about we didn’t find out until later. But I saw my brother-in-law, Bobby Joe Harvey, walk over to Carol Ann and Curt, and watched when Carol Ann turned her wrath on Bobby Joe. Crestfallen, Bobby Joe returned to the family as we lined up to enter the church.

  Later, we discovered that Carol Ann had jumped out of the moving vehicle to confront Curt Copeland off guard. She screamed at him that he had been part of fucking her out of being one of her mother’s pallbearers, and that she, as a part of the feminist nation, would never allow such an injustice to occur again. Furthermore, she demanded that she would proudly bear the weight of her brother’s body all the way to the grave. No one knew this piece of stagecraft had gone on before our eyes until we had taken our place with the family in the front right pews.

  When we entered the church, we had all broken down when we saw the church filled up with mourners who had come to stand beside us as we grieved the loss of Tom. Again, the town of Beaufort had come through for the Conroy family with a display of generosity that took all of us by surprise. Beside me, I heard my father’s sudden intake of breath as he gauged the size of the crowd. I thought he might fall to his knees in a gesture of pure gratitude. In droves, they’d turned out for my mother, and twice that number had answered the bell for Tom in the newly built Catholic church that was three times as large as the old St. Peter’s.

  Father James P. Conroy of the Davenport, Iowa, diocese came out to lead the congregation, and he seemed confused by the change of scenery. Some of us weren’t sure Father Jim had ever met our local priest.

  My brother Jim moaned in displeasure behind me: “Dad, why did you pick the worst goddamn speaker in the history of the Catholic Church to do Tom’s funeral?”

  “Settle down, Jim,” said Bobby Joe.

  Tim asked in surprise, “Why’re you here, Bobby Joe? You’re supposed to be with the pallbearers.”

  Bobby Joe explained, “Carol kicked me off. Told me to go sit with her sicko family.”

  “Go knock the shit out of her, Bobby Joe,” Jim said.

  “Jim, you’ve got to quit talking like that,” Bobby Joe said. “Show the proper respect.”

  I leaned back from trying to comfort my father and said to Bobby Joe, “Brother Jim goes crazy at all funerals and marriages. No one knows why. Just let him say what he needs to. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Father Jim approached the podium to deliver his eulogy for his nephew. I held out hope that my uncle would come up with the most inspired words of his lackluster career as a public speaker. As soon as he began to speak, I knew it would be far worse than I’d imagined. My brothers were harrumphing and grumbling from the beginning of his talk to its merciful ending. For Dad, we needed something that would refresh the soul and comfort the faithful.

  Father Jim looked down at his speech, and I could see a nearsighted squint and the flooded altar lights causing him to shift his head and crane his neck, seeking an angle of vision where he could read his own words to a breathless, nervous audience.

  Finally, he began to speak. “Today, we come together to celebrate the life of Timothy Patrick Conroy.”

  I turned around and said to Tim, “How does it feel to attend your own funeral? Sorry you’re still dead, Tim.”

  “Tim attended the University of Southern Colorado,” said Father Jim, and I thought there could be an open rebellion by my South Carolina Gamecock–loving brothers.

  “What the hell?” Mike gasped. “Tom’s never even been to Colorado.”

  “He can’t see the page,” I said, my father’s weeping growing more pronounced the deeper we went into the ceremony. He had started to sob, and no sound on earth could have been more devastating to his kids.

  “The worst part is over,” I told him.

  I could not have been more wrong, as my brothers would remind me for the rest of my life. Because I was trying to lay soft hands on Dad, I forgot all about Carol Ann waiting cobralike in the center of the pallbearers, who had never seen nor heard about her.

  In innocence, they listened to the monotonous voice of my uncle, who was starting to wing it when he reached the major high points of his thoughts about his nephew.

  “I’m the pastor at St. Anthony’s Parish in downtown Davenport; we have a huge number of homeless in our community, but our outreach program makes sure they are taken care of. As you probably know, a lot of the homeless are simply mentally ill with nowhere to go.”

  When the words “mentally ill” were spoken aloud, a round, greasy object was tossed in the air among the astonished group of pallbearers. It rose about five feet; then it was snatched angrily by a small, womanly hand.

  “Did you see that?” Mike asked.

  “Who in the hell is playing catch at our brother’s funeral?” Tim added.

  “This whole town’s gonna think we’re bananas—completely off our rockers—and they’re going to be right. Who brought a softball to this joyful occasion?” Jim said.

  Kathy whispered, “Calm down. It’s Carol and her ball of tears. She warned us that she’d make a scene if anyone said Tom was mentally ill.”

  “Just hang on,” I said. “We’ve got to get through this.”

  Father Jim continued, and unfortunately he got stuck in the same vein. “The homeless come by and we feed them twice a day. At lunch, we fix them all a sandwich and give them all a buck. I can’t tell you how good it makes the mentally ill feel when they’ve got some money in their pocket.”

  Again the tear-laden softball found itself flung into midair, this time glistening with too many tears to mention. But Father Jim had not completed his thought on the subject and offered, “Also, Don and I have got a brother who’s what you might call seriously mentally ill.”

  Again, the object of Carol Ann’s sorrow took flight, even higher this time.

  When Uncle Jim made his next error of judgment, I was ready for the moment. As I listened to Father Jim, I heard him continue to talk about his outreach program: “Now, our brother Jack has been seriously wacked-out for a long time, yet he’s doing better. He lines up each day with the mentally ill and I give him a sandwich and a dollar. Even though he’s my brother, he gets no special treatment from me just because he’s mentally ill.”

  By then, I had positioned myself where I was looking toward the back of the church. When Carol Ann let loose on her final toss of protest and futility, I saw three-fourths of the congregation with their heads tilting as they followed the fetid mound of tissue on its last flight. On its way down, Carol Ann had to move to her right to snatch her ball off the playing field.

  Then I heard a collective moan come up from my family as Carol Ann made her way up to the podium to read a poem she had written in commemoration of Tom’s life. She called it “The Deer Man,” and it had appeared in Carol Ann’s marvelous book The Beauty Wars. It is a book about unbearable hurt, but it is written with a fly-by-night eloquence that moves me. “The Deer Man” tells the story in all its misdirected power and energy of that week that our catatonic brother had gone to heal himself on Hunting Island by lying down in a pine hummock as still as a veil of lichen. It made a portion of beauty out of a disturbing moment when my mother and I watched a tick-covered, irrational young man who had made his stillness such a success that the island deer used the sweat from his body as a salt lick. The poem was a lovely tribute to our lost brother, which Carol Ann read as though it were a devotional she stole from a secret litany in her garden of language. The poem moved me and helped me make it through that dark ceremony.

  But I was part of a family lost in sorrow, who would insist on grieving in their own way. Jim tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Now I know why Tom killed himself—he always hated shitty poetry. That was the shittiest poem I ever heard.”
<
br />   Sotto voce, I said, “Easy, dark one. We’re almost finished here. We’ll bury Tom, then go home.”

  The funeral had collapsed my father from the middle, and his constant sobbing made his grief almost unbearable. Since none of his kids had ever witnessed such profound sorrow from our Dad before, it caused a field of profound disturbance in each of us.

  When we returned home after the burial, the women of Fripp ministered to us by their soft laying of hands and their preparing food for all who needed to be fed. My great friend Mary Wilson Smith fed a multitude that day and organized the Fripp women, who arrived in waves from afternoon till night. As Conroys, strangers in every town we ever entered, we both acknowledged and appreciated their labor for us. The food was plentiful and delicious and seemed to arrive as an endless bounty.

  Sometime over the long course of that afternoon, I managed to talk to all my siblings alone, except for the unapproachable Carol Ann. We talked about Dad and his remarkable devastation over Tom’s suicide. Before this event, none of us had been quite sure that Dad loved us. His breakdown over Tom was proof enough of Dad’s ability to demonstrate love for his kids and served as a window on his soul. He loved us, in his own way, with all his heart, but he had trouble demonstrating that love, which made him just like the rest of his children. From that day forward, my long war against Dad came to an end. The Conroy children wiped that slate clean. I was coming up to my fiftieth birthday. It embarrassed me what a mess I’d made of my life, and casting stones at my own parents lacked the allure for me it once had in my fire-eating youth. Forgiven at last, my father sat in a chair in the living room, not even trying to control his crying. His kids surrounded him, because his love of Tom provided us an understanding of his own love of all of us. It was a day of surreal, uncommon beauty.

  Carol Ann chose to have nothing to do with any of her family or friends of Tom’s, and headed for the edge of the lagoon behind my house, where she paced for hours smoking cigarettes and talking to the air, gesturing wildly at the osprey-haunted sky and the mullet-clefted lagoon. Our guests were able to watch Carol Ann’s antics as she performed before a full house. She could not have drawn more attention to herself if she had hired a marching band to follow her.

  “Conroy,” Mary Wilson Smith said as she walked to my side and we joined a sizable contingent of guests watching Carol Ann’s performance, “has anyone ever told you that your family’s crazy?”

  “Yeah, Mary,” I said, as I watched Carol Ann speaking to something the rest of us couldn’t see.

  “I feel the need to call nine-one-one and get some boys to throw a net over Carol and haul her away,” Mary said.

  “She’ll be gone by tomorrow,” I said. “Back to New York. That’s how poets act, Mary.”

  “You’re bad enough as it is, Pat, writing novels,” she said. “I’d better not catch you writing any poetry.”

  “No poetry for me,” I promised her.

  When Carol Ann left for Kathy’s house, she rode with Dad and Bobby Joe and failed to say good-bye to any of the rest of us. After they left, tempers began to flare as the pressures of the day caught up with us. Jim walked into the den, where Tim and his friends from high school had spent the entire day reminiscing, and he announced, “Tim, is there anything else we can do for you or your loser friends? Is there any other drink we can fix or plate we can wash?” Tim answered with a string of epithets that were forgivable under the circumstances. Mike and I made a move to get Jim out of the line of fire, but he was in a hotheaded mood.

  Mike said, “Tim’s getting through this in his way, Jim. He’s laughing and drinking with his friends. It may not be our way, but it’s Tim’s. Let him be.”

  Jim calmed down, then said, “Did Tim give you his poem after the funeral?”

  “He gave me a piece of paper,” Mike said. “I haven’t had the time to read it. Busy day, you know.”

  “I think you boys’ll find it worth your time,” Jim said.

  In the nearly empty house, I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper that had Tim’s handwriting on it. When Carol Ann’s book The Beauty Wars came out, all of us fixated on page fifteen, which was not exactly a poem but carried a title that caught all of our attention: “The Great Santini’s wild, sleek children.” Though we did not rate a complete poem, she named each of us with the moniker of one of the aircraft Dad flew in his career. I believe she took some time and pleasure in putting all of the Conroy children into our father’s phantom squadron. I was Skyhawk, and Carol Ann named herself Dauntless. Mike became Corsair; Kathy, Avenger; Jim was dubbed Hellcat; Tim was baptized Panther; and Tom carried the poetic name of Pilot Dawn to his death.

  Since Tim and I took the most delight in the quality of Carol Ann’s poetry and the value of her book, we took the naming of the winged children of Santini with great seriousness. Tim’s poem that he passed around after Tom’s funeral was pure homage to Carol Ann and her work. But it also offered a bended knee toward our family’s attraction to absurdity and a misshapen sense of humor that could induce either laughter or dismay.

  Tim had taken Carol Ann’s homage to her family and put his own twist on the subject matter. Instead of fighter planes, Tim named all his siblings after fast-food restaurants. The idea struck me as both ludicrous and hilarious. I read my own name first, “Pat—What a burger”; Carol Ann’s was “Wendy’s,” and Mike carried the moniker of “Bessinger’s Barbeque”; Kathy was honored with “Bojangles”; Jim was “Long John Silver.” Tim called himself “Yesterdays”—the restaurant the brothers had worked in during college. Tom was “Applebee’s.”

  Hearing the laughter of his brothers drew Tim into our circle, where he delighted in our taking pleasure in his attempt at poetry. He gave us the names of all the different fast-food joints he considered, then explained why he made the choices he made.

  “You only got one of them wrong. Completely wrong,” Jim said.

  “Tell me. I can still change it,” Tim said.

  “Tom. You got him wrong,” Jim said.

  I said, “It sounds pretty good to me. Applebee’s sounds about right.”

  “I like it,” Mike agreed.

  “It’s all wrong,” Jim insisted. “If you think about it, Tom should’ve been called ‘IHOP.’ ”

  “Why?” Tim asked.

  Jim said in the shadowy darkness where he stood, “Didn’t Tom just ‘hop’ off a fourteen-story building?”

  “My God, the dark one speaks,” I said.

  “The evil one,” Mike said. “MLD. Most Like Dad. A monster. Jim, you’re far worse than any of us could imagine.” Then the Conroy group started laughing, though we hated ourselves for it. It was a terrible ending for an unspeakable day that was indefensible and Conroyesque.

  Five years later, I was shopping in Publix when a stranger approached to ask me who was hurling the softball toward the rafters during my brother Tom’s funeral. Though I could not answer the man’s question, my laughter carried me through the arugula and the Belgian endive. In the way of my world, there are some things that don’t lend themselves to explanation.

  CHAPTER 16 •

  Losing Carol Ann

  My sister Carol Ann lived a valiant, unpraised childhood, but one of almost unbearable solitude. She was a prize for any family to engender, but she passed much of her time unnoticed. By any measure, she was a pretty girl who didn’t measure up to her mother’s lofty standards. Despite herself, Peg Conroy had a careless gift for making her two daughters feel unattractive.

  But my mother carried a dream of poets and novelists inside of her that her fixation on physical beauty could not touch. Mom drenched our childhood with poems and children’s books, then let fly with Gone with the Wind when Carol Ann and I were both closer to infancy than to adolescence. Slowly Mom began to read us the books she wanted to read, and this habit lasted until I got to high school, when Carol Ann and I could fill out our own flight plans at the library desk.

  But there was one story of
our reading life that our mother made perfect—and no novelist or poet could add a word to improve it. The year we moved to the pretty coastal town of New Bern, North Carolina, my second-grade year, was when my mother read The Diary of Anne Frank to her children.

  As a young boy, I was caught up in the immediacy and brightness of Anne Frank’s unmistakable voice. I studied photographs of Anne Frank and noted how pretty she was, and how she looked exactly as I expected her to look: fresh and knowing and—this was important to me—smarter than the adults around her. I fell in love with Anne Frank and have never fallen out of love with her.

  But my mother did not prepare her children for the abruptness of the diary’s ending. Anne’s voice went silent after the Nazis invaded her family’s attic hideaway, a place I visit every time I find myself in the watery, cross-stitched city of Amsterdam.

  “What happened to Anne, Mama?” I asked.

  “Why’d she stop writing?” Carol Ann asked.

  And my Georgia-born mother began telling us about the coming of the Nazi beast, the cattle cars, the gas chambers, and the murder of six million Jews, including babies and children and the lovely Anne Frank. I will always honor my mother when I think of the words she spoke next. “Carol Ann and Pat, listen to me. I want to raise a family that will hide Jews.”

  And I will always adore the spirit of my sister Carol Ann, who asked me to walk next door to Mrs. Orringer’s house. Mrs. Orringer came to the door, dressed in grand flamboyance.

  “Yes, children? What is it?”

  My sister Carol Ann looked up into Mrs. Orringer’s eyes and said with a child’s simplicity and ardor, “Mrs. Orringer, don’t worry about anything.”

  “What are you talking about, child?”

  “We will hide you,” Carol Ann said.

  “What?” Mrs. Orringer asked.

  “We will hide you,” Carol Ann repeated.