The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son by Pat Conroy

Author:Pat Conroy [Conroy, Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Literary, Military
ISBN: 9780385530859
Google: gHTtHyv8WgsC
Amazon: B00CNQ7MJG
Barnesnoble: B00CNQ7MJG
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Published: 2013-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13 •

Tom’s Breakdown

I never got to know my brother Tom. I was fifteen when he was born while Dad was stationed at Quantico. My father woke me in the middle of the night, brought me downstairs to sleep with my two-year-old brother, Tim, who could not sleep unless he held on to someone’s ear. Unless he had access to an ear, Tim would stay awake all night long, crying inconsolably. I eased into my parents’ bed and Tim latched onto my ear with a naturalness that surprised me. I blew Mom a kiss and wished her all the luck in the world. It was Mom’s twelfth and final pregnancy, and Tom would become the Conroy family’s last “baby.”

Tom was the best-looking of the Conroys, by far, but his handsomeness never seemed to grant him much pleasure or confidence. When I’d come home from college, he seemed to avoid me, would not even try to make eye contact with me or engage me in conversation. His face contained a quiver full of brimming emotions, but he was quiet as a whelk. Anything I asked him, he would respond with a monosyllabic answer without a molecule of substance to back it up.

Now, I look back and see I could’ve done a lot more to shore up my relationship with my youngest brother, but I failed to do so. I found him tedious to be around and his diffidence bored me. On the other hand, I had felt close to my baby brother Tim the moment he took up residence in our house, even though he was only two years older than Tom. Because birth order and the gap in our ages betrayed us, Tom and I could never recover what time had stolen from us. We were strangers to each other our entire lives.

The movie The Great Santini bestowed many acute gifts upon the Conroy family. The film itself did much to restore the hazardous equilibrium of a family badly shattered by our parents’ divorce. Though the movie held up a mirror for the world to glimpse a family in extreme breakdown, by God, it was a family where great love and loyalty could grow even in such a disastrous garden of souls.

But there is a gift the Hollywood people gave us that seemed happenstance at the time. When I finally got a tape of the movie many years after its release, I went straight to a scene where Ben Meecham is hurt during a basketball game, with his parents watching from the stands. Directly behind Blythe Danner, Lewis John Carlino has generously seated my real mother, who looks as happy as I’ve ever seen her, and as pretty as a boy could ever want his mother to be. She follows the game as it races up and down the court; my brother Tom, the boy wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, is playing on the same team with Michael O’Keefe. The camera goes from court to Robert Duvall and Blythe Danner, back

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