by Pat Conroy
When my mother began wiping the blood out of my eyes with a moistened towel, I saw the bloody knife in her hand. I caught a glimpse of my wounded father trailing blood as he made his way to the staircase. The kids were all going nuts, and Carol Ann seemed traumatized to the point of psychosis.
“Pat, get the kids out into the car,” Mom said. “We’ve got to make a run for it.” Mike, who was five, and Kathy, age four, were already running to the front door. I made a grab for the toddler, Jimbo, as I blew out Carol Ann’s birthday candles and helped walk her to the car. She babbled in a strange patois that seemed like a form of madness itself. Although Dad had bloodied my nose and Mom was bleeding from the mouth, she drove us away from that unhappy house, everyone in the car weeping and terrified. Mom drove us to the Hot Shoppe in Fairlington Shopping Center, where she cleaned everyone up, then bought us ice-cream sodas. She kept saying, “I’ll never go into that man’s house again. I’ll not subject my children to that kind of life. All of you deserve better than that. I’ll divorce him and go live with Mother in Atlanta. It’s just a matter of time before he kills me or kills you, Pat. Why’s he so mean? What makes him so goddamn mean? No matter, I’ll never enter his house again. None of us will. That’s a promise and I’d swear my life on it.”
An hour later we drove back to the house on South Culpeper Street in Arlington, Virginia. I don’t remember the next year of my life.
My siblings freely admit that they made frequent use of denial and repression in their growing up. My problem was different. I seemed to remember almost every violent thing, and the memories tortured me. But I shut it all down as a seventh grader in Blessed Sacrament School. Although Sister Bernadine was my teacher, I don’t recall a thing she taught me, but she complained to my mother that she found me drifting, unserious, and remote. She told my mother I was unpopular and didn’t even try to make friends. I can’t recall a single name of my classmates that year, though they sprang to life again when I entered Sister Petra’s penal colony in eighth grade. I know I played on a football team and a basketball team, but I couldn’t venture a guess at the names of those teams. We moved up the street sometime after the stabbing incident, but I have no memory of the move. I can’t conjure that year out of darkness or bring it up to the light. Because I’d been blinded by my father’s blood, I had to battle my way back to being a seer and recorder of my own life. I learned about grief covered by the forgetfulness of havoc.
My sister Carol Ann sustained the most ruthless collateral damage in that blood feud between our parents. When I was writing The Great Santini I thought about putting that scene into the book as the final assault in the tempestuous marriage of Col. Bull Meecham and his wife, Lillian. But I ran into an obstacle I could not overcome, one that I had not expected to encounter. Though it didn’t surprise me when both Mom and Dad denied any knowledge of the bloody scene on Culpeper Street, it shocked me when Carol Ann agreed with them and claimed it was part of my overwrought imagination. Neither Mike nor Kathy had any memory of the ordeal, and Jim had been too young. Even though I remembered every detail of the event down to Mom’s anguished soliloquy at the Formica table at the Hot Shoppe, I was uncomfortable being the only witness who carried the memory of that dreadful day.
Several years after The Great Santini came out, Carol Ann called to tell me she had gone through a most extraordinary therapy session in which she recalled those long-ago crimes committed during the lighting of her birthday candles. Because of her lousy childhood, Carol Ann had spent her days tormented by voices and visions and hallucinations. She was the clear winner in the Conroy siblings’ sweepstakes for human lunacy until our youngest brother, Tom, made a last-minute lunge at the finish line and leaped to his death from a fourteen-story building in Columbia, South Carolina.
Carol Ann’s voice was slow and shaken as she told me what she had revealed to her therapist. Carol Ann loved her birthday parties better than any of the other kids. All during her girlhood she would look at the presents piled up for her and she would cackle, “Every present on the table’s for me. You other kids get nothing. I love that you get nothing and I get everything. This is my favorite day of the year, by far. Pat, you get zero. Mike, look all you want but don’t touch, midget boy. Kathy, I may share something with you, but probably not.”
I had always been Carol Ann’s most supple interpreter in the family, and her oddball view of the world struck me as hilarious. But on that day in 1956, she had hardly slept the night before because of her rising excitement over her party. When the fight broke out, it was so violent and bloodthirsty that she had the first psychotic break of her life. She looked up into the kitchen and saw Mom and Dad locked in what seemed like mortal battle; she hallucinated two wolves slashing at each other’s throats with their cruel and lethal fangs. She remembered the bloodcurdling curses and my terror-induced runs to get into the middle, which sent me flying out of the kitchen onto the living room floor. Then, for the first time, she heard the initial hisses of the voices that would corrupt all possibility of untroubled thinking for her.
The voice was cruel and satanic: “My name is Carol-Wolf. I’m going to be with you for a very long time. And I’m going to hurt you. That’s a promise. I’ll hurt you.”
So my sister’s lifetime of madness was born in the wavering light of birthday candles, and she would speak for the rest of her life in fiery tongues of poetry to fight off that pack of wolves on the hunt in her psyche.
In my father’s sock drawer, he kept a deadly looking knife that fighter pilots carried into battle with them if they ever got shot down. As the men made their way back to friendly lines, the knives could sever the throats of the enemy or stop their hearts. It had a blade curved like a serpent’s lips. Each time we moved, I made sure I knew where to find that knife. Whenever Dad was on a night flight or away on maneuvers, I would study the edges and point of that frightening weapon. If I ever witnessed a beating of my mother like that again, I planned to sneak into their bedroom at night, unsheathe the knife, and drive it into his throat at the windpipe, trying to sever all the way through the backbone. I knew I would have to be swift and silent and remorseless. A glancing blow or a missed thrust would get me killed, and I wanted to be the killer that night. I longed to remove that malignant aviator from my mother’s bed. My father had succeeded in turning me into a murderous, patricidal boy. I never regretted these deplorable visions of making an abattoir of my father’s bed, nor ever confessed these sins to any parish priest. The only thing about that knife in my father’s drawer that struck me as strange was that I would never leave such a deadly weapon near a woman who had once stabbed me with a butcher knife. I don’t know what happened to that knife, but it brought me comfort in a wife-beater’s house.
When I was thirty years old, my novel The Great Santini was published, and there were many things in that book I was afraid to write or feared that no one would believe. But this year I turned sixty-five, the official starting date of old age and the beginning countdown to my inevitable death. I’ve come to realize that I still carry the bruised freight of that childhood every day. I can’t run away, hide, or pretend it never happened. I wear it on my back like the carapace of a tortoise, except my shell burdens and does not protect. It weighs me down and fills me with dread.
The Conroy children were all casualties of war, conscripts in a battle we didn’t sign up for on the bloodied envelope of our birth certificates. I grew up to become the family evangelist; Michael, the vessel of anxiety; Kathy, who missed her childhood by going to sleep at six every night; Jim, who is called the dark one; Tim, the sweetest one—who can barely stand to be around any of us; and Tom, our lost and never-to-be-found brother.
My personal tragedy lies with my sister Carol Ann, the poet I grew up with and adored. She has spent much of her adult life hating me with a poisonous rage she can’t control. Her eyes turn yellow with the fury of a leopardess whenever I walk into a room. For a long time I endured her wrath with a stoic forbearance because I
was an eyewitness to her forlorn life as a girl. I watched Mom and Dad coax her to madness and I grew up applauding her wizardry with the English language. She was the original truth teller in the family and she force-fed me the insider information that our parents were crazy. Her perspicacious voice formed the anthem of my own liberation. Don and Peg devastated a sweet kid and smothered her like a firefly in a closed-up bottle.
My books have always been disguised voyages into that archipelago of souls known as the Conroy family.
When The Prince of Tides was published, my father said, “I hear you made me a mean shrimper in this one.” I replied that my father couldn’t catch a shrimp with a fork in a seafood restaurant. When Beach Music made its appearance in 1995, Dad said, “Hey, I’m a drunk judge in this one. And as mean as shit again. Folks are gonna get the idea that your old man is something of a monster. Let’s face it, Pat, you can’t write down the word ‘father’ without my face hovering over you. Admit it.”
It was superb literary criticism. I realized its truth when I wrote down the word “mother” on a blank sheet of paper and my mother’s pretty face appeared in the air above me. Once, I wrote that my father and mother always appeared like mythical figures to me, larger-than-life Olympians like Zeus and Hera. For many years, because of the house they created, I’ve wished I’d never been born. I’ve felt like I was born in a prison yard and would never be eligible for furlough or offered safe passage into a cease-fire zone. My family is my portion of hell, my eternal flame, my fate, and my time on the cross.
Mom and Dad, I need to go back there once again. I’ve got to try to make sense of it one last time, a final circling of the block, a reckoning, another dive into the caves of the coral reef where the morays wait in ambush, one more night flight into the immortal darkness to study that house of pain a final time. Then I’ll be finished with you, Mom and Dad. I’ll leave you in peace and not bother you again. And I’ll pray that your stormy spirits find peace in the house of the Lord. But I must examine the wreckage one last time.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAT CONROY is the bestselling author of The Boo, The Water Is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, and Beach Music. He lives on Fripp Island, South Carolina, with his wife and two dogs.
ALSO BY PAT CONROY
The Boo
The Water Is Wide
The Great Santini
The Lords of Discipline
The Prince of Tides
Beach Music
MY LOSING SEASON
“Moving…will lunge for nostalgic readers’ hearts.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“As heartfelt and poignant a memoir as they come and a splendid
contribution to the literature of sport.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Haunting, bittersweet and as compelling as his best-selling fiction, My Losing Season succeeds because Conroy fuses his basketball story with a remarkable portrait of tireless teammates, a fractured family, a nation in transition and a young boy learning the hard way that sometimes losing can be just as rewarding, if not more so, than victory.”
—Boston Herald
“Conroy revisits his past with naked candor.”
—Houston Chronicle, Fall Books Preview
“A coming-of-age theme can hardly go wrong when spun by a real wordsmith. This won’t disappoint.”
—Daily News of Los Angeles
“Thrilling and heartbreaking.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“A sports memoir written with the darker music.”
—The Miami Herald
“The triumph of his losing season!”
—Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale
“Ties a lot of loose ends together for legions of fans who follow Conroy’s signature lyrical prose, as languid and haunting as the Spanish moss along the South Carolina coast where he grew up and lives. . . . He is a beacon; a tough little s.o.b. whose sports book about losing contains a smart lesson few of us ever get: Never wait on anyone’s permission to become who you know you are.”
—The Charlotte Observer
“A remarkable little gem that speaks not just of camaraderie and courage, but of the times.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Pat Conroy makes a winning book out of a losing season. . . . A voice you will recognize if you ever loved the game and waited in vain for it to return the favor. . . . A book you may want to hand to your children.”
—The Sunday Oregonian
“When Conroy’s on his game, he is unbeatable.”
— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Compelling. . . a memoir that reads like fiction. . . irresistible.”
—Akron Beacon Journal
“A moving. . . intimate look at how suffering can be transformed to become a source of strength and inspiration. . . Anyone who has a son or knows a son will be touched by this book.”
—Publishers Weekly
MY LOSING SEASON
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Doubleday hardcover edition published November 2002
Bantam trade paperback edition / September 2003
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2002 by Pat Conroy
Excerpt from The Death of Santini copyright © 2013 by Pat Conroy
Team photograph: From 1967 Sphinx, The Citadel’s yearbook
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002066212
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
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Published simultaneously in Canada
eISBN: 978-0-553-89818-7
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