The Lost Prince Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL MEWSHAW

  NONFICTION

  Ad In Ad Out

  Between Terror and Tourism

  Do I Owe You Something?

  If You Could See Me Now

  Ladies of the Court

  Life for Death

  Money to Burn

  Playing Away

  Short Circuit

  Sympathy for the Devil

  FICTION

  Blackballed

  Earthly Bread

  Island Tempest

  Land Without Shadow

  Lying with the Dead

  Man in Motion

  Shelter from the Storm

  The Toll

  True Crime

  Waking Slow

  Year of the Gun

  THE LOST PRINCE

  Copyright © 2019 Michael Mewshaw

  First hardcover edition: 2019

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Photographs courtesy of the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mewshaw, Michael, 1943– author.

  Title: The lost prince : a search for Pat Conroy / Michael Mewshaw.

  Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018024660 | ISBN 9781640091498

  Subjects: LCSH: Conroy, Pat—Friends and associates. | Mewshaw, Michael, 1943– —Friends and associates. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PS3553.O5 Z74 2018 | DDC 813/.54 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024660

  Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  For Emerson Wallace Mewshaw,

  my first grandson

  Your lacerations tell the losing game

  You play against a sickness past your cure.

  How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?

  ROBERT LOWELL, “Mr. Edwards and the Spider”

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Afterword: The Counterlife

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Plates

  PROLOGUE

  Pat Conroy was a manic talker and tireless narrator of stories, some much too tall to be true, some so searingly true they left scars on his listeners, just as they had on him. More than a gifted soliloquist, he invested as much energy in listening as he did in speaking, and the telephone was for him a piece of equipment every bit as crucial as a breathing apparatus for a deep-sea diver. A roster of friends received calls from Pat around the clock and stayed on the line with him for hours. He referred to his fellow phone junkies as his “go-to guys,” as if he were still a college point guard feeding teammates the basketball on a fast break.

  During the 1980s when we both lived in Rome, Italy, and in the ’90s after we returned to the States, we maintained constant contact. Our wives, Linda and Lenore, became close friends, and our kids were classmates at school. The Conroy and Mewshaw families traveled together in Italy, Austria, Germany, France, and England and exchanged stateside visits in Virginia, Florida, New York, California, Georgia, and South Carolina. It seemed inevitable that Pat and Lenore’s daughter Susannah would invite Linda and me to be her godparents.

  Whether eating dinner at each other’s homes or spending hours at a Roman trattoria, Pat and I seldom stopped talking—or as our wives viewed it, trading intersecting monologues. It was uncanny how much we had in common—a boyhood love of books and basketball, harsh Irish Catholic upbringings as military brats, abusive alcoholic parents, a deep amazement that we had survived to write about early turmoil and our attempts to overcome it. Pat in particular produced work that was the prose equivalent of lacerating confessional poetry, the kind in which a courageous artist unbandages his wounds in public and through some precious alchemy brings healing to others. Yet for all he disclosed about himself and his vulnerabilities, there’s much that he never acknowledged, perhaps never allowed himself to know.

  I expected us to be best friends forever. But then Pat’s second marriage fell apart, and as he once wrote: “Each divorce is the death of a small civilization,” and there’s always collateral damage. He went stone silent on me. For almost six years there were no calls, no letters, no contact of any type. It was only through a literary agent we shared for a short time that Pat and I got back in touch by email and tried to reconcile.

  During that period, I was cobbling together a collection of reminiscences about older, famous writers I had known who had influenced me as a young aspiring author. Titled Do I Owe You Something? the manuscript contained chapters on William Styron, James Jones, Robert Penn Warren, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Paul Bowles, and Gore Vidal among others. In mid-June 2001, Pat wrote me an email in his distinctive hunt-and-peck style:

  dear michael. i asked Carolyn krupp to send me a copy of your memoir and i just finished it. the book is perfectly wonderful, mike, and i fell in love with your writing once again. i used to own your entire collection, mike, but i left all your books at lenores believing that you had chosen her at the tailend of that awful marriage. i think you know who collected and read those books with great appreciation and care. but they remain in lenores house where i felt they belonged until i read your memoir and fell in love with them all over again. . . your book is a cautionary tale and lets me know why i have avoided writers like the plague for most of my life and why i ended up living on an island at the end of an american highway. the book is great, mike, but . . . i have an idea. i suggest that you write a full chapter on me and you and what happened. this is not sheer egomania because i know it would cause much pain to both of us. but here is what that story has that none of your others have. you and i got to know and love each other like none of those other writers, mike, and we were intimate parts of each others lives and our families knew each other and as i have told you before, mike, i was the guy that loved you most and you were the guy i referred to as my best friend and i said it to people as close to me as cliff graubart and doug marlette. but that chapter would have an emotional power that i think would help the book, mike. and to prove to you how much i like the book, i offer to write an introduction . . .

  Touched by his generosity and reminders of our friendship, I took heart from Pat’s enthusiasm. Louisiana State University Press agreed to bring out the book in 2003 and was interested in Pat’s doing an introduction, but was adamantly against including a separate chapter about him. They believed this would violate the book’s theme. Do I Owe You Something?, they pointed out, was a coming-of-age story about a novelist and his mentors. Conroy was my contemporary and former friend, not a literary influence. Then, too, if I added a secti
on about him, it would raise suspicions that this was payback for his introduction and perhaps a bribe to bring him back into my life.

  When I explained this to Pat, he was disappointed but replied, “I’m going through my own personal nightmare and can’t wait for this long edit [of his memoir My Losing Season] to be over. Nan [Talese] doesn’t know the difference between a basketball and a Buick LeSabre and I’m having to do most of this myself.” Still, he took the time to send LSU Press a blurb, calling Do I Owe You Something? “the best book about the American expatriate experience since the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.”

  For years, Pat’s suggestion that I write about “me and you and what happened” stuck in my mind. The story deserved to be told. I agreed with him about that. But I hesitated to tear open old wounds or to divulge anything that might undermine Pat’s image as an icon of suffering and survival. It caused me no small torment as I vacillated between the impulse to protect Pat and the urge to understand the events that had estranged us. I also wanted to recall what had first brought us together. I wanted to remember the years in Rome and the man he used to be—not yet famous but on the brink and already revealing tiny fissures that would result in the damage ahead.

  Once at an American Booksellers Association convention, Pat described his mother on her deathbed, whittled down to a skeletal eighty pounds. He promised that after she died, he would write about her: “And because you taught me how to be a writer, I can lift you off that bed and I can set you singing, I can set you dancing. And I can make you beautiful again for the entire world.”

  In the same spirit, now that Pat’s dead, I have decided to do as he urged and write about us as honestly as I can. I can’t promise that what I write will make everything Pat said and did appear to be beautiful, or that I can raise him from the dead and set him singing and dancing and talking again. But I can fulfill one of the few favors he ever asked of me and tell the story he wanted told. Whatever else it shows, I mean it to declare as I never did when he was alive that I loved Pat every bit as much as he loved me.

  1

  No Italian ever asked why I uprooted my family—a wife and two sons, one five years old, the other an infant—and relocated to Rome. As locals viewed it the city lacked nothing that made for a sweet life. The skyline hadn’t changed in centuries, and viewed from a rooftop terrace, the landscape resembled a vast lesson from an architectural textbook, every dome, campanile, and famous ruin a monument to long history and deep culture.

  Moreover, Italy was cheap in those days, the food first-class, the wine a revelation compared to the gallons of Gallo Hearty Burgundy I had chugged at faculty parties. For a novelist who aspired to support himself with his writing, Rome in the early ’80s was a perfect berth.

  Americans, however, did question why we chose to live in Italy. A whiff of suspicion attached itself to anybody who turned his back on the land of the free and home of the brave. Because I had resigned a tenured position at the University of Texas, people of a practical disposition regarded me as deranged while conspiracy theorists thought I must be running from something. Those were Italy’s “years of lead,” an era of urban terrorism when the Red Brigades were rampant. That was part of my reason for settling in Rome—to write a novel about the kidnapping and assassination of the Italian premier Aldo Moro.

  Through the American Academy, I rented a humid, pumpkin-colored cottage that bore an ominous skull and crossbones on the facade and a sign that said Pericolo di Morte—Danger of Death. Constructed atop an electrical transformer, the place was as cramped as a ship’s cabin, and Linda and I slept in shifts, like sailors on duty for four hours, then flaking out for four. In the morning, after my son Sean caught the bus to kindergarten, I strapped his brother, Marco, into a backpack and hiked around the Doria Pamphilj park in the batik-patterned shade of umbrella pines. Later, I tottered back to Pericolo di Morte, woke Linda, transferred Marco to her, and tumbled into bed myself.

  Progress on the novel was delayed not just by parenting but by a calvary of colds, flus, and viruses that Sean carried home from school and passed on to his brother. A perfect little incubator of diseases, Marco spread them on to Linda and she to me. For a time it appeared we might have to medevac to the States. But then a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation allowed us to upgrade our accommodations and hire better doctors.

  We moved outside the Aurelian Wall to a three-bedroom apartment, furnished with plush purple couches that looked as if they had been salvaged from an antique railroad car. It cost $140 a month, minimal rent for a minimalist residence that appealed to our conviction that we had pared our lives down to the essentials. Free of distractions, with the family in restored health and our finances solvent, I looked forward to a long stretch of calm and quiet—little knowing that a cyclone was about to sweep through our lives.

  One hot morning, more like mid-summer than September, our upstairs neighbor flung a carpet over her balcony railing and began beating the dust out of it with a broom. It sounded like she was pounding a snare drum. Because of the racket, I barely heard the phone ring and didn’t catch the caller’s first name. His last name was Conroy and he said he was a writer, recently arrived in Italy. He explained that Jonathan Yardley, the book reviewer at The Washington Post, had suggested he contact me.

  “I was hoping,” Conroy went on, “you might help me get a handle on this city. It’s a pretty confusing place for a Georgia boy.” He had a Southern accent, a faint one that was less countrified than the slow cadence of his sentences.

  “Stop-Time is one of my favorite books,” I told him.

  He giggled. “I’m the other guy—Pat.”

  “Jesus, I’m sorry. The lady upstairs is beating her carpet.”

  “No problem. I’ll pretend to be Frank Conroy if that’ll make a difference. I’m fucking desperate, man. I need a friend.”

  It wasn’t uncommon for newcomers to crack up in Rome, unhinged by the amiable mayhem, the blaring traffic, and the habit locals had of speeding the wrong way up one-way streets. Visitors often called me for the name of a good doctor or a trustworthy lawyer. Some craved a patient listener in lieu of a psychiatrist. Pat was the first and only one to admit he yearned for a friend.

  He spoke in great gusts of language, salted with self-deprecating humor, his diction Faulknerian one moment and locker-room the next. As he rattled on, I recalled the little I knew about Pat Conroy. He had written The Great Santini, a novel I hadn’t read, which had been made into a movie I hadn’t seen. By way of apology I told him Rome lacked a respectable English-language bookstore and seldom showed American films. Then, too, busy with my books and the kids, I hadn’t kept current with the U.S. literary scene.

  “I’ve got three kids myself and one on the way,” Pat said. “All of them bitching they’d rather be back in Atlanta rooting for the Georgia Bulldogs. I swear to Christ I’d rather have my dick cut off than spawn another baby.”

  By now I was chuckling along with Conroy. It was astounding how many slapstick laughs he could milk out of his misadventures.

  “Look, Mike,” he said, “I’m sweating my balls off in a phone booth beside a snack bar toilet. No place or time for beating around the bush. You and your family have to promise to come to my house for lunch this Sunday. I’ll fix whatever food you like. I’ll lay on second and third helpings. What the hell, I’ll pay you money. I’ll give you a blowjob. But hey, don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not just because I’m lonely that I’d like to meet you. I’m your greatest fan. You write like a prince.”

  I didn’t ask what he had read of mine. Most writers regarded compliments as little more than air kisses; they seldom touched solid flesh. But I agreed that we’d join him for Sunday lunch.

  EXPATS WHO COULD AFFORD IT or who lucked into rent-controlled apartments preferred to live in the centro storico, an atmospheric nest of narrow alleys and splendid piazzas. In those gilded precincts, with Gore Vidal, Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, and various movie stars for neigh
bors, one could indulge in the delusion that la dolce vita had never ended and that Hollywood-on-the-Tiber still purled along between polished marble banks.

  Temporary residents on sabbatical tended to huddle on the Gianicolo Hill, within walking distance of the American Academy. Historically the Academy had always attracted distinguished classicists, architects, artists, and composers to its McKim, Mead & White palazzo to conduct independent research. But in the ’80s it hosted an impressive group of authors, including Nobel Prize winners Joseph Brodsky and Nadine Gordimer, and American grandees Mary McCarthy and Francine du Plessix Gray. Regardless of one’s own modest station in the Great Chain of Being, it was easy to feel like the scion of a wealthy family when one had access to the Academy’s lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and, especially for me, its tennis court.

  Yet somehow Pat Conroy had marooned himself out on the Via Cassia, in the nouveau riche gated community of Olgiata. This presented a mystery—how the hell did he wind up there?—and a problem for Linda and me. We didn’t own a car and couldn’t afford a taxi, which, on Sunday, would tack on supplemental charges and cost a fortune. The bus trip to Olgiata involved several transfers and would eat up hours. So I asked Pat if he minded that we brought along friends, an American couple who had a car and two kids.

  “Bring anybody. Bring everybody,” Pat said.

  Steve and Joan Geller lived in a luminous, sprawling apartment at a legendary address, Palazzo Cenci, the ancestral home of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century aristocrat who had been executed for murdering her sexually abusive father. To Steve, a devotee of crystal power and occult practices, it seemed a thrilling piece of synchronicity that he and I had met when he was hired to write the screenplay for Life for Death, a true crime book I had written about child abuse and parricide. That the book contained elements of memoir, centering on two boys I had known since adolescence, added to Steve’s conviction that karma connected us. Our link remained intact even after one of the boys filed a libel suit that killed the movie as surely as his brother had murdered their parents.