The Lost Prince Read online

  Pat was more exuberant than I and predicted a commercial bonanza. Then he asked a favor, one of the few times he ever appealed to me for help. Having finally managed to complete two hundred rough-draft pages of The Prince of Tides, he wanted an outsider’s opinion.

  I hoped to help, but feared that I’d hurt him. Pat had very thin skin and we had debated about writing often enough for me to realize that we approached novels from radically different perspectives. Thomas Wolfe was his greatest literary influence. Graham Greene was mine. Wet versus dry, as Gore Vidal might put it.

  In a trattoria around the corner from Piazza della Pigna, we served ourselves at the antipasto table. For this working lunch, we chose light appetizers and mineral water, no pasta, no wine. It was warm and we ate outside, under a canvas umbrella that smelled like a sail. Pat said he had spotted eight lizards on the wall of his courtyard—a sure sign of spring. In the background a waiter unloaded wood from a truck, flinging it down a metal chute to a pizza oven.

  Uncapping his Montblanc pen, Pat opened his journal, poised to take notes. Since we sat side by side, I could read every word he jotted down. I started off praising his novel’s energy, its pace and propulsive story line. I said I was jealous of his knack for creating likeable characters. But as chunks of wood kept rattling down to the pizza oven, I was distracted and thought back to the antipasto table. More and more, it seemed to me a metaphor for the first seven chapters of The Prince of Tides. In the abundance on offer, one could, I told Pat, be overwhelmed by choice. “You know, there’s fish, there’s fowl, there’s cheese, there’s cooked and raw vegetables.”

  A slightly stricken expression crossed his face. So I switched to a different tack, telling him, “I don’t like big moments in film or in books. I like small moments. I enjoy insignificant moments that have large reverberations.”

  Pat dutifully copied this down, but after that what he transcribed seldom corresponded to what I said. “There’s a war in all your books between autobiography and invention,” he scribbled on his own with no reference to my remarks, “between what you imagine and what you know damn well happens. You want to make all your characters wonderful—much more wonderful than yourself. To realize your full potential as a writer, you need to feel you have the right to your own emotions.”

  “There’s no right or wrong way,” I assured him. “But chapter by chapter, you introduce a seven-foot giant skulking around the suburbs of Atlanta. Then vicious convicts rape members of the Wingo family. Then a tiger escapes from its cage and kills the convicts.”

  I paused, and there was the thud of wood chunks. “This is just one man’s opinion. But these all seem to me like opening chapters, the kind meant to grab a reader’s attention. I wonder whether you shouldn’t have peaks and valleys, not a straight line of Mount Everest summits.”

  Pat bore down on his notebook. I wished he would look up at me. But then I noticed what he scrawled and decided it was better that he had his eyes averted. “I cannot write the book Michael would write. The faults he discusses will always be my faults. I’ve monitored them carefully. They’re not accidents.”

  I felt awful and wanted to order wine. “Take everything I say with a grain of salt. If it’s not helpful, forget it. There’s only one scene I wish you’d cut.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You remember the story I told you about a friend of mine who killed a kid during the Korean War to save his own life?”

  “Sure,” Pat said. “I changed Korea to World War II and didn’t think you’d mind my retelling it.”

  “Normally I wouldn’t. The problem is I already used that scene ten years ago in my novel The Toll. I wouldn’t want anyone to think you lifted it.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up. Thanks for all your help.” He closed his journal, capped the Montblanc, and called for the bill.

  When The Prince of Tides came out, Nan Talese had tidied up the first two hundred pages considerably. A soldier still kills to save his skin, but Pat changed the little boy to a woman. Later in the novel, he named the nefarious corporation that designed, built, and operated the factory that threatens to pollute the rivers of South Carolina with weapons-grade radioactive waste the Y.G. Mewshaw Company of Baltimore, Maryland. Linda regarded this as a personal dig. I preferred to view it as an homage, and trusted that whatever we thought of each other’s work, we’d always remain friends.

  8

  The gods of laughter, as Steve Geller dubbed them, deserted me that June and my high hopes for Short Circuit collapsed. Harper’s Magazine, which had contracted to publish a 5,000-word excerpt, ran a 12,000-word abridgement of the entire book, cherry-picking the best passages from each chapter. Worse, they invented transitions and edited interviews so that questions no longer connected with the correct answers. Never consulting me, the magazine also eliminated the names of players and tennis officials I had quoted, and this led to charges that I had indicted pro tennis for corruption on the basis of anonymous sources.

  The Washington Post emulated Harper’s Magazine, deleting the names of my sources. Newsweek went a step further and airbrushed me out of the picture altogether, publishing what purported to be its own investigation of men’s tennis. When I threatened legal action, Newsweek inserted the title, Short Circuit, into a footnote. Still, the article contained so much information from my book, the London Daily Telegraph scotched its plan to serialize Short Circuit for £40,000 and simply reprinted the Newsweek piece.

  In Germany, Stern ran a chapter, which it credited to a staff reporter. In Rome, during the Italian Open, a tournament official dragged me out of the press box, roughed me up, and threatened far worse if I didn’t recant what I had written. While none of the journalists on site deemed this incident newsworthy, BBC dispatched a crew to Rome and professed outrage at my mistreatment. Pressing me for the names and phone numbers of my sources, and borrowing a videotape interview with Arthur Ashe, they promised to promote Short Circuit in their broadcast during Wimbledon.

  I made it onto the screen for a minute and was identified as “the most hated man in tennis.” Never mentioning my book, BBC tracked down my sources, asked the same questions as I had asked, and passed off the answers as its exclusive exposé of pro tennis.

  The editor of Short Circuit in France, a true philosophe, advised me to bow to the new paradigm in journalism. “You’ve enjoyed a succès de scandale,” he said. “Be satisfied with that and resign yourself to the position of authors in today’s marketplace. You’re in the research and development wing of the entertainment industry. Your task is to produce raw material. After that everything is out of your hands. As far as the mass media are concerned, the content of Short Circuit doesn’t belong to you any more than a diamond belongs to the black South African miner who digs it out of the bowels of the earth.”

  Pat loved this tranche of Gallic wisdom and did his best to cheer me up while I was in the States staggering through a gauntlet of early-morning and late-night talk shows. As one did in those days, he and I communicated by airmail, and what a colossally generous and gifted correspondent Pat was. On July 1, 1983, he commiserated about the publicity snafus but congratulated me on the fine reviews I was receiving. “Even you, Mewshaw, with your unassailable powers of finding horse turds hanging from magnolia trees, must be backflipping through your own rectum.”

  In Rome, he said he was suffering “world-ennui, soul ague, spiritual cancer.” He hadn’t written a word of his novel since I left, and he stunned me by announcing that he was moving the family back to Atlanta. Not for a summer vacation, but for good, for bad, and forever. “My old hatred of moving and insecurity and money-doubt have all arisen to dance upon my heart,” he wrote.

  By telephone, Lenore explained that Pat’s mother had relapsed and was undergoing another round of chemotherapy. Then, too, Alan Fleischer, having transferred to the University of Arizona medical school, had petitioned the court in Tucson for custody of Gregory and Emily. Tired of dealing with these troubles long-distanc
e, they had called it quits on Italy. But before they drove to Antwerp to ship the BMW to the States, they distributed going-away gifts and delivered to Linda their high-end German refrigerator with its huge freezer compartment.

  When Linda and the boys met me in America and tagged along on my book tour, Pat invited us to visit Fripp Island, South Carolina. After weeks on the road, I couldn’t wait to unwind with the Conroys. First, however, I had an interview with CNN in Atlanta.

  TV appearances, I had learned, followed a basic formula. A grinning commentator, who had never read my book, lobbed questions as fluffy as his hairdo. But these amiable exchanges had the potential to turn poisonous. The CNN correspondent thrust a letter on Associated Press stationery into my face and demanded why I had lied on my application for tournament credentials. AP’s European Sports editor had notified the International Tennis Federation that the news agency had no relationship with me.

  I blurted that the Rome AP bureau chief, Dennis Redmont, had hired me to cover two events. After that I was credentialed by different outlets.

  “That’s not what it says here,” barked the CNN inquisitioner. “This document”—suddenly it was a document, which sounded far more incriminating than a mere letter—“insists you never wrote for AP.”

  For the rest of the interview and the remainder of the summer I floundered like a man in quicksand. Although Dennis Redmont corroborated that I had freelanced for AP, the damage had been done. AP’s letter continued to circulate in the tennis community through the U.S. Open, effectively killing Short Circuit.

  By the time I arrived on Fripp Island, I felt half-dead myself, and Pat didn’t appear to be in any better shape. Pale and paunchy, he might have spent the past month on a barstool rather than at the beach. Following the move from Rome, he admitted, he couldn’t write, couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t quit drinking. Lenore carped that she missed Italy and she missed Gregory and Emily, who were with their father in Tucson on a court-mandated visit. “God only knows when or whether he’ll let those two shitbirds come back,” Pat said.

  Pat had arranged for us to rent a condo that abutted what appeared to be a fetid swamp. He swore this splurge of spartina grass and cattails was actually prime real estate. “Only Yankees buy oceanfront property, and their houses blow away in hurricanes. You’re safe back here.”

  Batting aside a scrim of sand flies and mosquitoes, he pointed to seagulls, sandpipers, and ospreys. “Keep an eye open for alligators,” he told the boys.

  On a tour of the island, his car crunched over oyster shells and tunneled beneath live oaks bearded with Spanish moss. He conceded Fripp was a slow-poke, politically conservative, culturally vapid place compared to Rome. “Everything’s spanking new and as fake as a retiree’s toupee. But I like it. I’d stay here full-time. But Lenore won’t hear of living anywhere except Atlanta.”

  “I’m sure the kids’ll be happier in a city,” Linda said.

  “The hell with the kids. I say leave Greg and Emily with Dr. Bonzo in Arizona.”

  The next day he and I traveled nineteen miles to Beaufort to stock up on supplies, and Pat spent the trip singing arias to the Eden of coastal South Carolina, the turquoise sea, the canopy of pines, the opalescent sky. But as we crossed the causeway to the mainland, he spotted a pick-up truck with a bumper sticker that read, “When you’re tempted to sin, think about hell.”

  “I think about hell all the time,” Pat said.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Talk about hell?”

  “Talk about whatever’s bothering you.”

  “Everyfuckingthing’s bothering me.”

  He bleated about the slow bleed of words from his Montblanc pen onto yellow legal pads. He normally finished five or six pages a day. Now he was lucky to squeeze out a few lines.

  Meanwhile, his mother had been hospitalized in Augusta, Georgia. Pat apologized that he needed to drive there next week and discuss her care with the oncologist. “I wanted to show you and the boys a terrific time. I wanted this to be R & R after your awful book tour.”

  “We’re fine. Take care of yourself and Peggy.”

  “I promise this week we’ll have fun every day.”

  True to his word, he taught Sean to bait crab traps and clean and prep their catch for dinner. He swam laps in the pool with Marco on his back. One night we watched a DVD of The Great Santini. Then, as a treat for me, he ran a tape of this past year’s NCAA basketball championship game, Houston versus North Carolina State. Because NC State started two players from DeMatha, Pat figured I’d be interested—and I was.

  Together we traipsed through the tree-colonnaded antebellum lanes of Beaufort where Pat’s childhood flashed past as if on film ever fresh in his mind. We dropped by the high school gym where he had starred in basketball, introducing this somnolent outpost to the big-city game he had developed in Washington, DC. We walked the baseball diamond where, Pat said, a teammate had keeled over with a heart attack and died. After sightseeing at Tidalholm, the handsome white frame house where the movie of The Great Santini had been shot, Pat showed me the more modest home where he had lived with his parents and six siblings.

  In August heat thrumming with insects, we toured the Marine Corps Air Station where his father had piloted fighter jets. At the entrance to Merritt Field, several planes were canted on stanchions, looking as fierce as sharks. Everything about the base—the crew-cut troops, the cropped lawns, the sun-drugged barracks, the sound of hard boots on soft asphalt—called to mind my summers at the Naval Receiving Station working for Tommy. Back then my every second thought had been to escape the military life, which Pat also professed to despise. Yet here he was, smack in the middle of it, claiming he would settle in Beaufort if Lenore would allow it. Already I was longing for Rome and regretted that Pat wouldn’t be there with me.

  One evening, the Mewshaw and Conroy families gathered on the beach to release baby turtles and watch them scuttle across sand that rippled like a weightlifter’s belly. The sea tossed the turtles back once, twice, then sucked them out into the lemon-colored Atlantic.

  After that, Pat disappeared for a couple of days to the hospital in Augusta where Peggy Conroy’s prognosis had deteriorated. When he returned he invited us for a farewell dinner at their rented house in a thicket of pines. The summer was over, and we had, as Pat said, to break camp. He made no effort to hide his foul mood. There was no banter, no kibitzing with the kids, just steady drinking and slow talking that sounded like a Southern sheriff with a fist on his holstered pistol as he read you your Miranda rights.

  Lenore and Linda shooed the kids onto the porch and had them eat outside. Then they came in to fix plates for the adults. Pat poured himself a brimming tumbler of wine. “Tell you what, gang, I’m too tired to eat. Too tired and too drunk and too fucking fed up.”

  “You’ll feel better,” Lenore said, “once you have some food in your stomach.”

  “No, I won’t. Not when I have to go to Atlanta in the morning and fly to Tucson, Arizona, while my mother’s dying in Augusta.”

  Lenore broke into tears. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry’s not going to cut it. Not this time. You always say you’re sorry, then you keep doing what you’ve always done. Alan calls and tells you a lie and you believe him.”

  “Don’t do this,” she begged him. “Don’t ruin Mike and Linda’s last night.”

  “We’ll leave and let you two work this out,” I said.

  “No, stay,” Pat urged us. “You need to know what’s happening. Alan Fleischer has sworn in court that I’m insane and not a fit parent. He’s suing for custody of the kids again and won’t send them home.”

  “He won’t win,” Linda assured him.

  “Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t.” Pat’s pose as a Southern sheriff was losing its taut control. “The one sure thing is I’ll bleed cash from every bodily orifice. How can he trick you over and over, Lenore?”

  Her sobs deepened, and she shrank in her chair, miserable t
o the core. Linda went to comfort her.

  “I don’t get it. Are you desperate to find some redeeming qualities in Dr. Bonzo because otherwise you couldn’t justify being married to him?”

  I moved between them, replaying a scene from my childhood, from Pat’s childhood.

  “The thing I hate about you, Lenore,” he said, “is that you loved Alan Fleischer. It kills me that I could love the same woman as that monster. I can’t stand that you stayed with him for twelve years, that you have such hideous taste.”

  “You’re right,” Lenore said. “I have no taste, no excuse at all. Just stop screaming at me. If you’re going to bring up Alan every time we argue, you should leave me.”

  Pat lurched, as if to push past me. I had one hand on his chest; his heart pounded against my palm. I hadn’t seen him like this since Susannah’s birth, when he blamed Lenore for infecting him with herpes.

  “I’m as dumb as she is, doing the same thing over and over.”

  “Please,” I said. The kids leaned against the screen door looking in from the porch.

  Pat drained his wineglass, blotted his mouth with a napkin, and tramped off to the bedroom.

  “It’ll be okay,” Linda soothed Lenore. “He’s exhausted.”

  “I know he wants me to leave him,” she said.

  “The important thing is to decide what you want.”

  “I want to die.”

  9

  Back in Rome, we returned to the same apartment, camping out amid the landlady’s belongings, subject to eviction at her whim. After sampling the seductions of America, Linda was disappointed with our helter-skelter existence, and the boys clamored for sugar-coated Cheerios and color TV.