When I sent three or four chapters off to my beloved editor, Anne Barrett, she wrote back a very kind note. The essence of her letter explained that my descriptions of Col. Bull Meecham troubled her profoundly. No reader could expect to believe that such an unsavory man could exist without a single virtue to recommend him. To make him credible, I had to include scenes that displayed a softer and kinder man.
So I took my walking orders from Anne Barrett, and had Bull Meecham give his son a flight jacket for his eighteenth birthday and take him out to the officers’ club for his first drink. On the night of his prom, Bull sent his daughter a dozen red roses. Both scenes were fictional and would never have occurred in my father’s house. To make my father human, I had to lie. Because Anne did not believe his violence against his wife and family, I softened up my hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners father.
One day, I was sitting around with my brothers and sisters and I asked them, “Did Dad ever do anything nice for us when we were kids—ever?”
They thought about it for a while, and then Mike said, “Nope. Not a single time.”
But I persisted. “Did he take us out to get us a hot dog or a root beer?”
“Are you nuts?” Jim said.
“Never happened,” Tim said. “Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Now, I’ve never had an insight into Dad’s behavior in my life, but I finally had one. Question: When was the only time you knew for certain that Dad was going to hit you?”
“When he was drunk,” Jim said.
“No,” Tim said. “Sometimes he passed out.”
“After he hit Mom,” Mike offered.
“No,” Kathy said. “Sometimes he’d just hit her.”
“When he was breathing?” Carol Ann suggested.
“Nope, sometimes he went for days without backhanding us.”
“I don’t remember those,” Jim said. “I think he brain-damaged me.”
“There was one thing that would set Dad off and he’d belt us every time. He would always hit us when he spotted us having a really good time,” Tim said.
We hollered and laughed and gave Tim a round of applause. He stood and bowed deeply in appreciation. Then he recalled a night when the family gathered in the stands to watch me play a basketball game at Beaufort High School. It was halftime when six-year-old Tim ran down to join a group of kids his age who were leaping high and laughing on the trampoline. Tim was bouncing and grinning and enjoying his time with little strangers when Dad backhanded him while Tim was in midair. Tim bounced once on the trampoline, then flew through the air and landed on his back, careening off the polished gym floor. In the ancient family dance, Tim went running to Mom screaming with hurt and fear. Her part in the game came swiftly as she comforted her son and turned a murderous eye on our father.
Dad said, “Trampolines are dangerous. The kid could’ve gotten hurt.”
The happiest years of my childhood were when Dad went to war to kill the enemies of America. Every time my father took off in an airplane, I prayed that the plane would crash and his body be consumed by fire. For thirty-one years, this is how I felt about him. Then I tore my whole family apart with my novel about him, The Great Santini.
Looking back, I can see that I made many mistakes in the field during my rookie season as a novelist. The writing of the book had taken an emotional toll on me that included a breakdown months before the book was in the stores. I had done almost no preparatory work on my family, no plowing the fields to ease their way into a country they did not realize was their native land. To Dad, I’d given more hints about what I was up to, and for the simple reason that he lived in Atlanta then, where Barbara and I had moved. Dad would visit the house often—too often for me, but Barbara had come to adore Dad, and our daughters rejoiced in his visits. It both moved and disturbed me to see my children scrambling around on my father’s lap like some comely litter of kittens.
I would often say things like, “Hey, Dad, why don’t you break all their facial bones? Then they’d know what it was like to be raised by you.”
“Don’t listen to him, girls,” Dad would respond. “Let me take you out for ice-cream cones. This weekend I’ll take you to Six Flags.”
Before he would whisk the girls off to Baskin-Robbins, he would say, “Visit the head before we leave, girls—no waterworks. Waterworks are strictly off-limits.” When he arrived on Friday to take my daughters to Six Flags Over Georgia, I had the first intuition and sense of dread and said to myself, “Oh, God—that damn book is coming out soon. How’s my family going to feel about it?”
When Dad first came to live in Atlanta, I had just committed the most unforgivable crime against him. I had refused to attend his retirement parade that took place in the summer of 1973. I did it with all the purposefulness and cunning of a man who knew how to cut deepest and wound another man. I was a son gifted in the art of patricide. Though I had loathed my father, I fell in love with the mystique and sense of fraternity I grew up with as the son of a Marine Corps officer. The corps stood for excellence and a code of honor that burned in me for life. I was raised in the mythos of the corps, and I knew about Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa. I took great pride in my dad’s gallant fighting at the Chosin Reservoir, when he provided air support for a brutal Marine retreat through entrenched Chinese lines. Don Conroy was a proud member of “the Chosin Few,” yet his oldest son did not go to his retirement parade. It sickens me to write those words.
To make matters worse, my family and I arrived for a visit the day after his retirement party, and I walked into a house touched with nothing but malice. I could feel the hatred in that house that I had sold to my parents so that they could enjoy a peaceful and fruitful retirement. My brother Mike told me that our mother had not spoken to Dad for days, not even on the day of his retirement ceremony. To Mike, their relationship had never been this poisonous. It now had turned into a disaster area.
When Barbara was out with the girls, I assembled all the powers of diplomacy I possessed. Unknown to me, it would be the last day when that melancholy alliance of Don and Peg would exist. They had come to the final days of their marriage, but none of us knew it then.
I entered Mom’s kitchen and she ran up and hugged me hard. She was crying, and because I am a Conroy male, I never learned the necessary set of skills to comfort a weeping female. But I managed to mouth a few ineffectual words intended to soften her sense of outrage. Something had snapped in her.
“I can’t stand it for another day, Pat,” she said. “It repulses me to look at him. Or speak with him. You’ve got to get him to leave this house.” She was begging me now. “One of us has to go. I want it to be him.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. “But the boy’s got a stubborn streak.”
“If he doesn’t leave, then I want you to play guard duty and stand between Don and the car when I load up the kids.”
“No, Mom. You’re not going to involve the kids. If you leave, load them in the car and tell Dad that you’re going shopping at Piggly Wiggly. Just lie to him.”
“You mean my oldest son, who witnessed everything, won’t lift a finger to help his own mother?” she cried, appalled.
“Of course I’ll help. Just let me talk to him first.”
I found Dad in the living room watching a baseball game on TV, but I could tell that he’d been shaken up by the events of the past couple of days. His eyes had the wounded look of a predator limping back to his den.
“Hey, Dad, who’s playing?” I asked.
“Cubs and the Phillies. The game sucks,” he answered, not looking up to greet me. Then he said, “Retirement is harder on women than it is on the Marine. That’s a known fact.”
I said carefully, “Dad, I think Mom’s planning to leave you.”
Suddenly he looked away from the ball game and stared at me with such ferocity that I braced for a charge.
“She can’t do that,” he said. “We’re Roman Catholic. We took vows to each other.”
“Them vo
ws don’t seem to be worrying her much,” I said. “Look, Dad, let me help you develop a plan.”
“I got a plan,” he said. “I’m staying here. This is my home. Where I belong.”
“If it doesn’t work out, come to Atlanta to stay with me, Barbara, and the kids. Mom looks bewildered, terrified, and even a little crazy. Your being away would give both of you some time to think things over.”
“There’s nothing to think over.”
“The offer is there,” I said.
“Thanks for nothing,” he answered.
“It was my pleasure. How does it feel, Dad? We just had our first conversation.”
“It sucks. It’s lousy. It’s shitty. Let’s never have another one again,” he said, red faced and angry.
Even for the Conroy family—as battle-scarred veterans of our own journey through the Peg and Don wars—that Memorial Day holiday of 1973 was as melancholy as any we had endured. It seemed as if both our parents had simultaneous breakdowns, and the retirement parade had only exacerbated the tension between them.
When we packed up the car to head back to Atlanta, I made one final attempt to get my father to consider a visit.
“Negative,” he said. “This is where I belong. I’m the head of this household.”
“You could just visit for a couple of weeks,” I said. “To give you and Mom a cooling-off period.”
“Negative. Do I have to draw you a picture?”
“You might even enjoy it,” I suggested.
“Negative. If you need me, you can find me in my quarters,” he said.
After Barbara and I unloaded the car back in Atlanta, she gave the girls their baths upstairs, and I heard a knock on the front door. I went to the door and opened it to find my very distraught father standing there. I couldn’t have been more surprised to find the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“Can I buy you a beer, son?”
When we entered Manuel’s Tavern, a legendary bar on Highland Avenue, I waved to Larry Woods and Paul Hemphill, two writers I had recently met. My father had not spoken in the short ride to the tavern. To me he seemed ready to launch off a carrier, but I’d respect his silence and talk when he needed to talk. Dad had never bought me a beer. As far as I could remember, he had never bought me a present, ridden me around any town he’d been stationed in, nor taught me any of the social skills necessary for a boy to make his way into an unforgiving world. I found myself strangely excited by this distinctive moment that I had read about in novels and seen depicted in movies—a father and son getting to know each other. The owner, Manuel Maloof, brought the two draft beers I’d ordered on the way in.
“Talk about it, Dad,” I said.
A look of bitterness engulfed his face. He was in an agony that was as authentic as it was vitriolic. In his newly minted despair, Colonel Conroy did the most terrifying thing: He laid his head on his powerful arms and burst into tears. The most pitiless of men had imploded on himself and felt the soft tissues of his emotions for what must have been the first time in his life. His cries began with stifled weeping, but soon turned to explosive sobs, attracting the curious attention of every patron in the bar.
Manny Maloof came rushing over to see what was wrong.
“He all right?” Manny asked. “Should I call an ambulance?” By now Dad was howling and blubbering and creating a scene that became increasingly alarming.
“He’ll be okay, Manny,” I said. “He just hates your fucking beer.”
“Buy him another one, Pat,” Manny said, staring at my distraught father. “Hell, it’s on the house.”
“Naw, I just had to tell him his mother died,” I said. “He was very close to his mother.”
Dad bawled and wailed for several minutes before he calmed himself and raised his sheepish face to survey the room. He said, “These people must think I am a fucking lunatic.”
“Yeah, most of them do,” I said.
“My mother ain’t dead, thank you very much,” he growled.
“I was just practicing,” I said.
“Practicing for what, sports fan?”
“For the day she does die,” I said. “You want to talk about Mom?”
At the mere mention of Peg, my father began weeping again, but his recovery was much faster this time. “Sorry. Sorry, son,” he said, whimpering.
“I kind of love watching you cry, Colonel,” I said. “It reminds me of a boy who once lived in your house.”
This angered him. After wiping his eyes and face with napkins on the table and blowing his nose, he turned to face me. We both carried hard looks without much love being conveyed between us.
“You ever tell anybody what happened here tonight, I’ll kill you. Got that straight?” he warned. Then he added a word he knew I hated: “Pal.”
“Yeah, I got it, pal,” I said. When he gathered himself together again, I asked him in a low voice, “Dad, do you understand your part in Mom’s kicking you out?”
“Of course I understand it, son. I see it clear as a bell. I was just too good to your mother. I was good for so long when what I should’ve done a long time ago was to crack down on Peg and you kids. My kindness got me into trouble. I should’ve cracked down really hard on all of you.”
Astonished, I said, “Crack down? Caligula couldn’t’ve cracked down more than you cracked down. Genghis Khan looks like Woody Allen next to you. Dad, you ran a reign of terror in every house we ever lived in. You were a hideous father and husband. Your own children hate your guts. You don’t know a single thing about any of us and you never seemed to care. You slap toddlers in the face. Little kids, Dad. Nice little boys like Mike and Jim, Tim and Tom. You hurt your whole family. You destroyed it. And what you got out of the whole experience was that you were too good, that you should’ve been tougher? My God. Dad, you don’t know anything about yourself.”
“Is the lecture over, padre?” he said, his fighting spirit restored by my outburst.
“For now, but it’s going to continue for the next forty years,” I said. “So get used to it.”
• • •
During my parents’ separation, my father made the most baffling decision of his world-traveling life—he became a citizen of Atlanta, Georgia, a city he had always held in contempt. He rented a two-bedroom furnished apartment in the Darlington—which had a sign in front of it tallying the population of Atlanta each day. Even though the place looked faded, if not shoddy, he lived in that apartment until his death twenty-five years later.
Soon enough, he found a routine that included breakfast at the Darlington Café while reading the Atlanta Constitution. For a while he kept a small notebook in which each day began with reveille and ended with taps. He made friends with a garrulous Jew named Lou Lipsitz, who was a neighbor in the complex. They would take daily walks through Atlanta that covered ten miles or more. In the late fall, he began courting Atlanta women around his age. They included some beautiful women who were nice to his kids. The company of pretty women helped him get out of his unfathomable moroseness after Mom kicked him out of her house.
Dad was a terrific dancer. Don and Peg Conroy had caused a sensation whenever they jitterbugged their way through any officers’ club of the American South. Strangely, they never taught their children how to dance; nor did they try. The Conroy children approached a dance floor as though it had warning signs about copperheads.
During those months, Dad got into the habit of coming over for a cup of coffee before I started writing for the day. That morning ceremony solidified when I separated from Barbara after four years in Atlanta and moved into a small but well-placed apartment in the ethereal curves and gardens of Ansley Park. Each morning, Dad would knock on the door and I would rise to let him in, then plug in the coffeemaker. Mostly we made small talk about sports. But, unknown to my father, I was writing a fictional rendering of my life with him in the room next to the one we were sitting in, and it was taking an outrageous toll on my emotional life. I found it hard to write all day about the bastar
d who raised me, then drink coffee with him the next morning.
One morning I finally asked him, “Do I have to spend the rest of my life having coffee with your sorry ass?”
“Affirmative,” Dad said. “Those are the orders of the day.”
“I’d rather stick a wet finger in a wall socket,” I said, then, “Don’t you remember our first night in Atlanta? What I told you? Let’s refresh. I hate you. I loathe you. I want to vomit when I hear you knock on my door each morning. That do the trick for you?”
“I told the kids you were trying to make me out to be some kind of ogre,” he said, pronouncing the word as “o-gree.” “Did you see where Hank Aaron hit two homers last night?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got it, Dad. I got it all.”
Yet the manuscript for The Great Santini was growing day by day. I suffered writing it as I tried to explain to myself the bottomless terror I felt as a boy. Because we moved on an almost yearly basis, my childhood loneliness would stay with me until I got to Beaufort High School. Though I did not perceive it at that time, the book was taking me at a rapid speed toward another great breakdown of my life. The question that troubled me most was what my father got out of putting my mom and their children on the floor of every house we entered. In full Technicolor, I remember every beating that my father administered and I could take you to the exact spot where it happened in each of those small houses of his early Marine Corps career. I would grow heartsick when he walked in the den every afternoon after happy hour. I was afraid of him and it showed in my eyes. He had supreme contempt for my cowardice and sometimes he would backhand me because I dared to show fear.
Driving in his car, me riding shotgun, was the most dangerous place in the universe for me. After a Little League game, a backhand if I’d made an error; after a football game, a slap to the face for missing a tackle; after a basketball game, a bloody nose for playing on the losing team. A boy played a game at his own peril when the Marine was in the stands. We all played scared when the colonel was in the field house. Dad had an odd, unsettling habit of yelling out to the opposing team to put Conroy on the deck, or “Cut Conroy’s legs out from under him!” When Mom would protest, Dad would say he was just trying to toughen me up. He wanted a street fighter and not the mama’s boy he had on his hands.