The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son Read Free

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 outof 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