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.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1 •
The Promise
On June 4, 1963, I walked off the graduation stage of Beaufort High School without a single clue about where I was attending college next year or if I’d be attending one at all. My parents had driven me mad over this subject and neither would discuss it with me further. I had planned to get a job at the tomato-packing shed on St. Helena Island to earn some money if my parents somehow managed to enroll me in a college. But my father received orders to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, for the following year. I didn’t want to leave Beaufort, and I sure as hell didn’t want to move to Nebraska, a place where I didn’t know another human being. I wanted to go to college.
My father had the car packed and ready when I turned my graduation robe in to my teacher Dutchen Hardin, hugged my other favorite Beaufort High teachers and classmates, then fled in tears toward my life in Nebraska. Before I entered the car, I composed myself, dried my eyes, and got in the shotgun seat. The motor was running and Dad threw me a map, saying, “You’re the navigator, pal. Any mistakes and I whack you.” Before a single graduation party had begun, we were already crossing the Savannah River into Georgia. Our journey took us on back roads and through scores of towns that we hurtled by in their sleep. It was the age before interstate highways were common, so most of our trip would take us through the rural South and the farmlands of the Midwest. To my shock, Dad planned to make it a straight-through shot to Chicago, pausing only for pit stops and gas.
“Dad, you sure you want to do this?” I asked.
“Hey, jocko, you a detective?”
“That’s a lot of driving. It might be too much for you.”
“That’s why you’re on guard duty, pal,” he said. “I start nodding off, you rap me on the shoulder to keep me awake.”
During the twenty-four-hour drive, my father fell asleep three times, and I knocked his right shoulder, hard, three delicious times. Once in Indiana, he had failed to follow the curve of the highway and drove the station wagon over a cow guard and into a field heavily populated with Black Angus cattle. When I punched his shoulder, he woke suddenly, dodging fifty cows on his way back to the highway.
“You’d get a court-martial for that one, navigator,” he said.
“I kept all of us alive, Dad. This is getting dangerous.”
We arrived at Uncle Willie’s house on Hamlin Drive, where my mother had flown to the day before with her two youngest sons. Willie lived in a Polish neighborhood that looked like an elaborate card trick to me. The houses going up and down the street from Willie’s were exact duplicates of one another as far as the eye could see. Variation was forbidden, and this neighborhood stretched for miles in all directions. You could sleepwalk out of Willie’s house at night and find yourself lost as you tried to find your way back through a labyrinth that seemed to run on forever. It was an ugly house, as charmless as a Rubik’s cube.
The Conroy kids were sent to the basement, where Uncle Willie had put pillows on the carpet and mattresses all around so we could camp out during our two weeks there. It turned out to be a deadly long visit, with tension breaking out unintentionally between my mother and grandmother, who lived nearby. Grandma Conroy was a harsh-voiced, unstylish woman who could have played a walk-on shrew in some of Shakespeare’s lesser comedies. I never saw her wear makeup or try to prettify herself, and her dresses all looked like she had bought them from castaway bins at the Salvation Army. To her Southern grandchildren, she seemed to be yelling at us all the time.
“Don’t do that. Get out of the way. Go back to the basement,” she would say to us. It became a joke to my brothers and sisters that Grandpa and Grandma Conroy had no idea what our names were and little curiosity in remedying this lack of knowledge. My father and his brothers played pinochle every day, then went out to catch a Cubs or White Sox game in the evening. My mother was left behind with her seven kids. Since she was terrified of getting lost in Chicago traffic, she could not use the car. When she asked my father to take her and the kids to the art museum, he refused. A fearsome argument broke out and I could feel Mom’s fury rising as each day passed. Dad’s neglect of Mom and her kids and his abandonment of his family by night and day were not sitting well with our pretty mother. The claustrophobia alive in that sad household was turning into a troubled, living thing.
It was Uncle Willie who set off the fuse. I had always liked my uncle Willie, because he was a schoolteacher and had no problem being around kids. He was the smallest of his brothers by far and looked like half a Conroy man as he stood in the middle of his platoon of tall brothers. His nose had been broken so many times in street fights that it gave him the appearance of a harmless bulldog. He was a droll man with a great sense of humor and we’d become golfing buddies on his visits to Beaufort. But Willie had a deep fear of my father that I could sense whenever Dad turned prickly. In his own house, Willie ignored my presence and barely spoke to me. When I offered to go golfing with him, he shrugged his shoulders and said he’d think about it. Three days later he took Dad golfing with some high school buddies of my father’s, but didn’t ask me to come. I never thought the same about Uncle Willie again.
But Willie did ask the combustible question that I think helped to get me into college. I was lingering after dinner as my grandfather and uncle were arguing about Chicago politics. Carol Ann had already joined the kids watching television in what she called “Dante’s Inferno” in the basement. There was much talk about Mayor Richard Daley and the efficiency of his machine. My grandfather was a block captain for Mayor Daley and told a story of a man on his block who balked about promising to vote for the mayor in the next election. “He called Mayor Daley a corrupt Irish son of a bitch,” my grandfather said, laughing at the memory. Grandpa Conroy reported it to the mayor’s people and the man received no garbage pickup for three straight weeks. After his neighbors complained about the stench of his garbage overflow, the poor man appeared on t
he doorstep to beg for my grandfather’s intercession with the mayor. He even added a small contribution of twenty-five dollars for the mayor’s reelection campaign. His garbage was collected the following day, compliments of Mayor Daley.
“What a great story, Grandpa,” I said. “Dad used to tell us about the great Daley machine, but I never knew how it worked.”
“Are you interested in politics, Pat?” my grandfather asked. I was grateful he knew my name.
“Yes, sir, I sure am. I’m interested in everything,” I replied.
Uncle Willie asked the question that ignited my parents’ unspoken rage at each other yet again. “Where are you going to college, Pat?”
“That’s a really good question, Willie. Where is Pat going to college next year?” Mom said in a voice that was pure acid.
“Shut up, Willie,” my father growled. “It’s none of your beeswax.”
“None of my beeswax?” Willie echoed, not interpreting the signal flares of war lighting up my father’s eyes. “Hell, college starts in two months’ time, Don. If he’s not enrolled in college now, he’s not going.”
“Drop it, Willie,” my father warned again, but now my mother was in the middle of it.
“Pat hasn’t even applied to college because the great wise one over there hasn’t allowed him to do so,” she said.
“Is your kid a dope, Don?” Willie said, studying me for signs of imbecility. “You can still get him into trade school.”