I told the mayor’s wife at that instant, “Madam, consider that story stolen.” The story fills the prologue of The Prince of Tides with just the right spillage of light, and it anchors the last chapter with the sudden coming of darkness. Alertness is a requirement of the writing life, staying nimble on your feet, open to the stories that will rise up and flower around you while you are walking your dog on the beach or taking the kids to soccer practice. The great stories often make their approach with misdirection, camouflage, or smoke screens to hide their passage through your life. Once when I was a boy, I witnessed an angry father ricochet a basketball off the back of his son’s head after the kid had beaten him in a game of horse. That image was lost to me for twenty years when I wrote a chapter about Ben Meecham defeating his fighter pilot father in a one-on-one game early in The Great Santini. I needed a scene of unendurable humiliation for the son, then I recalled that man bouncing that basketball off that lost boy’s head. As the Great Santini followed his son Ben into the house, he taunted him all the way to his room, mimicking again and again that terrible father who had followed me out of time to present me with a story which had all the immediacy, power, and cruelty to demonstrate what Ben Meecham’s life felt like at that very moment he had beaten his father in a game for the first time. Ironically, my father and I would witness the filming of that alarming scene and watch as Robert Duvall and Michael O’Keefe would play it to perfection while Blythe Danner looked on in horror in the film version of The Great Santini. A diminutive older woman who was on the set that day approached my father with some trepidation and asked, “How often did you and Pat play games like that, Colonel?”
My father stared down at her and then deadpanned, “Every day, madam. Every single day.” And another story was born.
But sometimes stories hide themselves from writers like trolls under bridges. Then the writers of the world must keep their bodies attuned for the sudden appearance of the story that is powerful enough to change their novels and their lives. They must train themselves to recognize the divine moment when a great story reveals itself. I know dozens of Southern writers who followed the murder trial of socialite Jim Williams in Savannah, Georgia, but it was the stranger from away, John Berendt, who saw the incredible richness of the story and blended it together with the bizarre and magical atmosphere of the city itself in his book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The story can be living beside you or locked in the house next door or delivering your mail. The gift of the writer is recognition—the awareness when the story has introduced itself to you.
I grew up in the house where a man who called himself the Great Santini initiated a reign of terror that was to last for twenty-one years. I carried my deep hatred of him inside me because I thought he would kill me if I ever let it spill out. I never felt safe a single day of my disgraceful, anxious childhood.
In 1975, I was finishing my first novel, The Great Santini, in a farmhouse in Dunwoody Georgia, provided to me by the great Houghton Mifflin book rep Norman Berg. For two months I wrote at a furious pace, then came to the last chapter and hit an impassable wall—I lacked all imagination about how I would end the book, or to put it in other words, I ran out of story. That night I had a startling dream that took me back to a funeral at Cherry Point, North Carolina. A friend’s father had crashed his plane during maneuvers over the ocean. I remember my friend and his sister and mother weeping as they followed his coffin out of the church, and I remembered shocking my third-grade heart by thinking that I’d be the happiest boy on earth if my father’s plane crashed.
I awoke the next morning, and I had my story. I said aloud: “I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.”
I drove to the Darlington Apartments on Peachtree Street, where my father lived in a one-bedroom pied-à-terre. My parents were not fully aware of what I was up to in writing The Great Santini, but then again, neither was I. The week before I had caught my father, in flagrante, with a strange woman after he had forgotten that he had invited me over to watch a basketball game that same night. A better man would have quietly closed the door and never mentioned the intrusion, but I howled with laughter. As Dad and his lady friend hid under the sheets, I marched to the bookshelf, pulled down Dad’s Bible, dusted it off, and read Dad and his lovebird the Ten Commandments out of Exodus with great relish and showmanship.
My father was still petulant over the encounter when I knocked at his door. Dad said, “Thanks for knocking this time, jocko.”
“Good to see you, Romeo,” I said. “I need to ask you some questions about flying an airplane.”
“You came to the right place, pal,” he said.
“I told you I was writing a book based on a Marine Corps family?”
“Anybody I know?”
“Nope, total fiction. But at the end of the book I need to kill my pilot. I can’t have him just flying through the air and have his plane explode. It ain’t artful, Dad. I need suspense. I need danger. I need excitement. Then I’m going to kill the bastard.”
“Bad idea, son,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’ll screw up the sequel.”
“Let’s start, Dad,” I said. “I don’t know one thing about flying. I don’t know if you turn on a key, if you have four on the floor—not zip.”
“You came to the right guy,” my father said, beginning our afternoon together. “Let’s make it a night flight. I used to have to get four hours of flight time at night every month.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Let’s put it in Key West. I loved flying out of Key West. Make it 0330, which would put me in Beaufort at about, say, 0520. We’ll fly the bird at thirty-two thousand feet. Flying is the most amazing thing a human being can do. No one loved it more than your old man.”
“Keep it going, Dad,” I said, writing. Dad shifted his wooden chair around so he was facing me, straddling the chair like a detective questioning a criminal he loathes. But Dad reached out over the chair’s back and grabbed the stick with his left hand. For the rest of this imaginary flight, he would control that throttle with his left hand. He was the fighter pilot and he was in control. I wrote as fast as I could as he described that night flight over Florida.
My father’s face became transformed as his eyes wandered over the gauges in his imaginary cockpit. He described the lights of Orlando, then the lights of Jacksonville, and on his right, the great abyss of darkness that was the Atlantic. Closing fast on Savannah, my father reached for a phantom radio and said, “Atlanta Center. Marine 657 over Brunswick at flight level three-two-zero. Requesting a Tacon approach to Beaufort. Over.”
Then, in a different voice, Dad spoke as the voice of the anonymous controller in Atlanta. “Roger. Six-five-seven is cleared to the Sand Dollar intersection for Tacon approach. Contact Beaufort approach control on 325–0 at this time.”
My father switched frequencies and called the Beaufort tower, pressing the radio near his mouth. “Beaufort approach, Marine 657 inbound. Sand Dollar intersection for Tacon approach. Flight level three-two-zero.”
“Roger,” the air station controller said, and my father surprised me by using a different voice than the Atlanta controller. “You are cleared to approach altitude. Report leaving three-two-zero.”
I had entered a world of my father’s that was a complete mystery to me and where I had never ventured before. Every word he uttered I took down, every number, and I could feel the tension build in the cockpit between us. Then I looked up at my father, whose intensity and concentration were in perfect congruence, and I said, “Dad, now you got to help me kill the guy. We’ve got to kill the pilot.”
My father looked up and pointed his finger to something he could see, but I could not. “Right there, son. High on the left of the instrument panel—the fire warning light.”
“Is that bad?” I asked, writing furiously.
Dad looked at me as though I was a moron, then said, “It could ruin your whole day.” He made an involuntary movement with
his right hand to his face that I didn’t understand.
“Why’d you do that, Dad?” I asked.
“I’m pulling up my oxygen mask to check for smoke. Any smoke in this cockpit and I’m outta here, pal.”
“No smoke, Dad. No smoke at all,” I said. “Is there anything else I can add to make this flight more difficult?”
“Fog,” he said. “A pain in the ass. Hell, I can’t bring this plane in from this direction.”
“Why not?” I asked as I wrote.
“Too many civilians if I bring it in this way. Got to go around.”
“Who cares about civilians if your plane’s on fire?”
My father glared at me with contempt and said, “Fighter pilots do, pal. Part of the code.”
“Oh, I see. Good code. Now, Dad, something bad’s got to happen to this airplane.”
“Okay. I’ve started this bird down the slope, my boards are out, I’m ready for anything.”
Then something shifted radically in the nature of both the interview and the history of this mythical flight taking place on a wooden chair in my father’s cramped apartment. His left arm jumped and he had trouble controlling the stick as he reached for the radio and said in a measured voice, “Mayday. Mayday. Six-five-seven. I’m in the soup at two thousand. Have severe engine vibration and oven temp. Am going to guard channel and squawking emergency. Out.”
“What’s guard channel?” I asked, writing.
“It’ll put me on every radar screen on the East Coast,” he said as he fought the stick, his left arm fighting against the convulsions taking place deep inside his aircraft.
He reached for the radio again, every nerve in my father’s body alert with the mortal danger of the situation. “Six-five-seven is out of five thousand feet at ten miles. Unable to contact GCA. Request a straight-in approach. Give me full lights. Losing power and engine vibration severe. Tower. Engine explosion. Cockpit lights out. I can see the runway.”
Dad replaced the radio and then took the stick to fight it with both hands. I looked up and saw that he was sweating profusely and fighting against that fighter jet with every skill he could summon from a lifetime of flying. Both arms were shaking with the death of that fictional plane. My father took me by complete surprise by looking me straight in the eyes and snarling through tightened, grim lips: “I can bring it in.”
“What?” I said, looking at him.
“I can bring this bird in, pal,” he said. “I’ve done it before and I can do it again.”
“Sorry, Dad. This is for the book. You’ve got to die.”
“I’m not letting you crash a twenty-million-dollar airplane just for your goddamn book,” he said. “It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money.”
“It’s not a real plane, Dad,” I said. “You’re sitting in a chair.”
“Then let me turn it starboard. I’m too near civilians again. I’m not going to let you kill any civilians on my watch.”
“Turn it starboard, Colonel. No civilians die.”
“I want to die on land,” he said. “I never wanted to dump a bird in water. I know a place. A tomato field. I’ll take her in there.”
“Take her in there, Dad.”
He took her in, and we both fell back exhausted in our chairs. I thought I knew every story of my father’s, and I had hated every one of them. He was the worst father I had ever seen, and I have not been shy about proclaiming that. But, until that day, I had no idea I was being raised by one of the goddamnest fighter pilots in the history of the Marine Corps. My father and I looked at each other, and I believe we both realized we had just completed our first great day as father and son. There would be many, many more, but this was the day my father took me into his life as a Marine Corps aviator and did me the high honor of asking me to be his wingman, at last.
“Let me take you to the Colonnade for dinner,” I said, mentioning my father’s favorite restaurant. “You earned it, Colonel.”
“I need to take a shower,” he said. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and so was mine.
My father had just delivered me of the last chapters of my new novel by offering me a great story. I could reward him with food, because it is my most religious belief that a recipe is just a story that ends with a good meal.
“Tell about Italy,” my wife says, her voice sugared with her deep Alabama accent. “Tell me what you loved the most.”
I tell her two stories: In the house I once rented on the Via dei Foraggi in Rome, my landlord stood beneath a painting of St. Sebastian.
I asked the man, “This house I’m renting, is it very old?” “No, no, no, no,” he said quickly. “You Americans love the old things, but this house is not even five hundred years.”
Stunned, I said, “It was built before Columbus set sail.”
“Yes,” my landlord said. “But you don’t understand. In Rome, she is a baby.”
That is how Italy taught me about time.
Then I tell my wife of the morning I left Rome to return to the South to help my mother fight the cancer that would soon kill her. I walked to the small piazza where my family did its shopping to say goodbye. My infant daughter, Susannah, was radiant in her stroller, and everyone in the piazza knew la famiglia americana was leaving their city forever. When I rolled Susannah to the center of the piazza, all the shopkeepers boiled out onto the cobblestones. One woman scooped Susannah into her arms and cried out, “You cannot take Susannah tutta panna from us. She was born here. She is a romanina. She belongs to Rome!”
The women passed the baby back and forth, smothering her with tearful kisses. Adele, the vegetable lady, in a mournful, ancient voice, said through tears, “We did not do our jobs. We did not love your family enough. If we had done our jobs better, you could never leave us. You would be Romans forever.”
Then the wine man handed me a bottle of Frascati for the journey and the cheese lady cut off an enormous wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Sausages and loaves of bread, pizza bianca, fragrant mozzarella, bunches of grapes and olives: every shopkeeper in that piazza came forward bearing gifts, generous as the Magi.
I always compare this completely unexpected scene with the time I was moving to Rome and shopped in Atlanta’s Kroger for the last time. For ten years I had shopped there and nowhere else in my hometown. I did not know the name or face of a single sourpuss employee in that store, and not one knew mine.
That is how Italy taught me about being alive.
After I told my wife these two stories, she said, “A honeymoon in Italy. It has a ring to it, Southern boy.”
Since I met Cassandra King of Pinckard, Alabama, daughter of a peanut farmer who once walked from Alabama to Miami looking for work during the Depression, I am finally living the life I think I was meant to live. I had no idea that a man in his fifties could fall in love with a woman in her fifties and that they could teach each other things about love and ecstasy and wonder, things I have tried to infuse in the secret corners of my novels but have rarely encountered in real life. Because our nation is stupid and Hollywood is coarse, there is no one to tell us of the deep and extraordinary beauty of older women. I now see them all around me and am filled with a fierce joy that one of them has come to live in my house.
The president of the College of Charleston, Alex Sanders, married us in the gardens surrounding his lovely eighteenth-century mansion, where John James Audubon once taught a class in ornithology. My father had just died, and our children from various marriages over the course of our sloppily lived lives were visiting our island house for their summertime breaks. There was no time even to think about a honeymoon. Our lives were busy, disjointed, American. No one told my generation that none of our children would ever grow up, that they would be forever discontented, underemployed, and woebegone. We share seven children and six grandchildren between us, and our hands are constantly full. Still, Sandra deserved a honeymoon, and we began a long dialogue about where it should be.
It amazed me that she had never seen the Pacific Ocean
and, though she had traveled to London twice, had never drifted over to continental Europe, where our language is put out to pasture. Not to have traveled widely seemed unlucky to me, but not to have seen Italy was heartbreaking. My own heart has been shaped like a boot since I lived in the city of Rome for three years in the faraway eighties. If you cannot find happiness in Italy, I told Sandra, then I do not think you can find it in Eden.
We plan our honeymoon in Umbria, a part of Italy where I have never spent a night, and on the flight over, I fear I have erred greatly, perhaps tragically. I tell my new wife I should have taken her to Venice, that gondola-blessed city that looks as if it were carved by swans from ice. If not Venice, then immovable, Tiber-cut Rome, which I could walk through blindfolded; I know those beloved and noisy streets so well. Then there is the incomparable Amalfi coast. And how could I leave out Florence or unknowable Siena or the Alpine majesty of Lake Como? Then I relax and put my trust in the simple mystery that Italy has never let me down, never refused to lay its dazzling treasures at my feet.
You go to Tuscany because you must; you go to Umbria because you can. It is the province in Italy you travel to when you want the country itself to enter the pores of your skin after you have grown weary with sites and endless churches and surly crowds moving through the taut, sovereign air of museums. Umbria is Italy turned inward, its prayer to itself.
We stay at the Palazzo Terranova, a sublime eighteenth-century restoration, recently opened, that looks like the castle you always hoped Cinderella got to live in with the prince. A British couple, Sarah and Johnny Townsend, run the palazzo, which I predict will soon be famous all over the world. Above the hotel, a footpath cut into the crest of the mountain by the Etruscans themselves winds its way to a small hill town three miles away. The walk is breathtaking. Sandra and I tell each other we are in the best place in the world to be on a honeymoon.