The Lost Prince Page 11

  I felt I had been found wanting as a provider, no better than a gypsy coercing his wife and children to ride aboard a claptrap wagon—toward a destination I couldn’t guess. My publisher offered a $12,000 advance for Year of the Gun. When I complained that this was 80 percent less than I received for Short Circuit, he suggested I try elsewhere. My agent shopped the novel around to no avail, and we skulked back, hat in hand to accept the low-ball advance.

  I wished Pat were around to swap tales of woe and laugh at ourselves. Instead we stayed in touch by airmail. Janet Malcolm has written, “Letters prove to us that we once cared . . . They are fossils of feeling.” This was certainly true in Pat’s case.

  September 12, 1983:

  I’ve sat down at my desk again to write—the first time I’ve done so since the last days in Rome when I could turn around in my chair and see the Campidoglio. Now there is kudzu growing in my window . . .

  The trips out to Arizona have been disruptive, discouraging and expensive—Lenore and I have been alternately despondent and furious—but so far I have not leapt across the courtroom and ripped out Alan’s thorax and larynx as [Mark] Helprin would have done . . . Having Fleischer call me crazy is like having a fly complain that someone has too many eyeballs.

  The expense is the killing thing. We’ve now built up thirty thousand dollars in legal fees and I’ve yet to testify. Lenore has testified for ten minutes. So far our version of the events has cost us three thousand dollars a minute.

  Pat confessed that he persisted with the court battle not at Lenore’s behest, but because of his own combative nature. When the bell rang, he was like a punch-drunk boxer, unable to resist his fighting instincts. “Alan is bullying Lenore,” he wrote, “is breaking the law, is arrogant beyond my tolerance to endure it and has pissed me off . . . I’m also not sure that Lenore can be happy if we don’t make a fierce fight for her kids. Already she weeps for long periods of most days. ’Tis a lovely atmosphere in which to write novels which will never die . . .”

  About Peggy Conroy, he said it’s “possible that I will have to be a bone marrow donor for Mom if she gets critical. [Dad] cheered me up by saying that the surgery for both the donor and the recipient is the most painful of any kind of surgery. I would be in bed for a month, then spend the next six months learning how to walk again. My first cheery impulse is to say quite merrily, “Fuck you, Mom. Sorry you gotta die,” but then the two-thousand-year-old guilt of the Catholic boy asserts itself and I offer my balls to be transplanted . . . wherever they might help. With my luck, Fleischer would be the visiting surgeon.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Who among all of Dr. Freud’s acolytes could possibly unpack the freight of these sentences?

  “Mostly, we miss you, Mike and Linda,” Pat concluded. “We have a nice thing going—a life-changing friendship that has four distinct parts like a weathervane, and it all moves in harmony and we know how all the winds of the world are blowing when we get together. The full diminishment of losing you has not hit me yet and I don’t think I could stand it if I faced it fully now. But what magic the world is full of . . . I owe my love for you to Alan Fleischer. He also gave me the gift of Rome, and as I sit here, hoping to write again, I feel that old love of the Mewshaws flowing off this desk, lifting above this city, sailing eastward and lighting like a bird on your terrace overlooking the city. I want that bird to sing to you, Mike and Linda, to thank you for everything, to sing its little ass off and let you know how much we, I, miss you both.”

  There was a lengthy postscript:

  My weakness is that I never mail letters the day I write them. Life continues and there’s more to say. I was in Augusta [visiting Mom] . . . They took a bone marrow sample and discovered that the latest round of chemotherapy had failed—the leukemia survived . . . I then reeled in, dazed, to my mother’s room to comfort her when she had just been delivered a kind of death sentence. She was lying in bed, her eyes tightly shut, with tears streaming down her face. I cannot describe the tenderness and helplessness I felt for her. The whole world seemed concentrated in that room and I could feel our shared history surging around us. I can remember sitting on Mom’s lap when I was Marco’s age and I remembered it that moment as I kissed her and felt her tears against my face. We talked, both of us crying, until I watched the courage return to her eyes. I could see it replacing the fear. But the fear never left my eyes and I can’t shake it. I thought I’d do much better with this . . . Basta! You’ll make me never write again or pay me not to.

  Actually, I would have paid Pat to write like this for the rest of his life. The hastily scrawled PS, produced under duress, represented his prose at its best.

  Before I had a chance to answer the letter, he sent another:

  “I thought I probably had everyone fairly suicidal after my last letter. I kept looking up and seeing the ass of the world sitting on my head. But not this letter, gentle readers . . . Victory on all fronts. Fucking victory with a capital F. Fleischer . . . lost everything in the Arizona courts including legal fees and our expenses.” Gregory and Emily—Pat called them Judas and Benedict Arnold—were now home in Atlanta. He continued:

  Also, my mother survived the massive chemotherapy. It was hideous but it seems to have worked and they think she might go into remission again. Oh Lord, am I getting good at the cancer lingo . . .

  Conroy (we writers sometimes refer to ourselves in the third person) is back at his desk but words eke out slowly and I’m out of practice . . . I think it has a lot to do with my overwhelming jealousy that Mark Helprin is on the best seller lists and I’m just sitting here writing about a guy catching shrimp. I’m not really jealous, just consumed with an Iago-like envy that will probably lead to manslaughter, except I don’t want Mark to rip out my thorax.

  In early November I replied:

  Thanks for your two fine, long, newsy letters. I fear this will not be their equal. Far from it. Linda & the kids are asleep. I’m awake, fighting various demons with which you’re familiar. If you can believe it I retain the capacity to be furious at [my publisher] . . . A sane & sensible man would put this whole thing—everything related to Short Circuit—behind him. But the doctor can’t cure himself. Perhaps because I keep being reinfected by the virus . . .

  Hey, this is sounding awfully negative—and I’m not a negative guy. Mordant and bleak maybe, but never negative. I want to be upbeat, I want to boogey, I want to be fun to be with, peppy, effervescent. I want to be a Seven-Up . . .

  We had a dinner party—the Nagorskis [the Newsweek bureau chief and his wife], Jim Fallows’s brother Tom and his wife Andrea Lee who wrote Russian Journal and Gore Vidal who has really porked out and talks of little except his advancing age and expanding waistline. He regaled the gathered masses with the news that he had been examining his naked parts in the mirror and had come to the conclusion that his cock—which he invariably referred to as his wee-wee or whang—was retreating into his body. He insisted that fat wasn’t overwhelming his whang, but rather that his member was growing in the wrong direction. That’s the kind of literary conversation we have in Rome . . .

  I’m relieved to learn that your mother is recovering, I’m glad to hear Greg and Emily are back, I’m proud to know you’re writing. But more than anything I’m pleased that you’re all going to a family counselor. It should help to have someone to talk to on a regular basis. The hardest thing, as that old insurance salesman Wallace Stevens said, is to know how to live and what to do. It seems to me inevitable that you’ll all feel better as you talk and work and let your nerves reknit.

  Lenore wrote then to tell us that the family had returned from a “four-day, foul-weathered, child-infested weekend . . . in the N[orth] C[arolina] mountains where Pat has gone to write and to escape the multitudes of well-wishers, welcomers, needers, users, and of course tension producers . . . I thought Pat was doing pretty well until he broke down and cried in our family therapy session . . . It’s his trick of putting distance between his fe
elings, filling time with too many strangers and drinking lots and lots of liquor to numb the pain.”

  She added that “while I am feeling constantly sad these days, I don’t feel quite as helpless as I did before we started in therapy.” Gregory and Emily appeared to her to have pulled through the custody conflict unscathed. “They have some crazy mechanism which enables them to fit in wherever they find themselves.” But she feared that Susannah had suffered a “radical change.” “We had to leave her every time we flew to Tucson so her former secure life suddenly got blown completely apart. After three weeks of being away she would not let us walk out of a room without becoming completely hysterical.”

  One positive development: “In four days’ time Pat has managed to get 86 pages of manuscript done and I decided I’d do the typing. An economy move as well as a justify-my-own-existence endeavor. In addition to every other pressure, he has a big deadline hanging over him. But I think it’s a healthy sign that words are flowing and he feels he can write again.”

  She closed: “I can’t even remember the reason why we decided to come back.” They both longed to return to Rome and were debating whether to do so.

  More frequently than I am comfortable admitting, Linda and I discussed Pat’s and Lenore’s letters and wound up arguing. What began as idle talk about the latest news from Atlanta provoked wrangles about our future. If we had been in family therapy, a shrink might have suggested we were indulging in a screen conversation. Fretting about Pat and Lenore and whether they should return to Italy, we were really fretting about ourselves.

  I always sided with Pat. I defended him. More than that, I identified with him as he and I coped with our cankered childhoods and negotiated a rapidly changing publishing industry. Balancing the demands of agents and editors against those of wives and kids, I believed I was better off overseas, in a city that nourished me. Now if the Conroys would come back, I thought life would be complete.

  Linda disagreed and reminded me of the hassles in Rome, the brain-deadening bureaucracy, the tax laws that created perpetual terror for foreigners. How much longer, she wondered, would we live in strangers’ houses? More than anything, though, she worried that the boys would always be interlopers here, and unless we moved back to the States soon, they’d wind up alienated there as well.

  Like our arguments, which fell into a predictable call-and-shout, Pat’s and Lenore’s choral complaints were repetitive, but expressed in such amusing letters it was difficult to accept that they were as desperate as they claimed to be. Pat wrote that it depressed him that “Mark Helprin, who is now a major hero to me, had the cover story [in] last week’s Sunday Times [magazine]. Because you will do tarantellas of pure ecstasy I give you the whole autobiographical squib rectangled below the article, ‘Mark Helprin, whose latest novel is Winter’s Tale, recently returned from a year’s residence in Italy studying European security.’ I recently returned from Italy after a year’s study of the effects of a diet of tomato sauce on congenital hemorrhoids. I can’t wait until the American Academy hears what Mark says he spent his time doing.”

  Never one to make his misery sound anything except hilarious, Pat added: “Alan [Fleischer], that moldy handful of rat’s sperm, has called our family therapist and wants to enter therapy with us—you know—as part of the family. I should have been born a eunuch tending the orchids in the Sultan’s greenhouse with airspace where my genitalia once modestly hung.”

  At Thanksgiving Lenore reported that she had “begun to have a delayed-reaction nervous breakdown. I actually don’t have time for a lengthy, dramatic breakdown so I have these mini-breakdowns, between carpools or while I load the dishwasher.”

  On December 30 she wrote: “Christmas this year was hectic and I am in post-partum depression . . . We had our Christmas dinner at Barbara’s [Pat’s first wife]. The cast of characters is worth noting since it included so many extensions of family and odd matings. Barbara [and her three daughters by Pat], Tom [Barbara’s current boyfriend and future husband], Tom’s kids from his first marriage, Barbara’s in-laws from her first marriage, Pat, me, Susannah, Pat’s father Don and one of his many women friends, two of whom gave him wristwatches this year, causing him to have to change watches whenever he was with one or the other.”

  She closed, “Your life sounds charmed. And I’m fully aware of how frustrating it is [in Italy]. But would you settle for boredom? Iceberg lettuce? Carpools? Lawn fertilizer? Congealed salad?”

  10

  Sometimes lawn fertilizer and congealed salad didn’t sound so bad to me, not when Linda was unhappy and the boys grumbled about having nowhere to ride their bikes except around and around Piazza Navona. It cut no ice with them that this was one of the most splendid urban spaces on earth, or that they wheeled past Bernini’s incomparable baroque Fountain of the Four Rivers, or that ancient Romans had flooded the square and staged mock naval battles here. Even the afternoon sun inflaming the pumpkin-orange and Pompeian-red facades didn’t stir them. They missed bland, broad American sidewalks.

  When foul weather trapped us in the apartment, the kids scattered Legos across the tile floor of the living room and constructed castles whose parapets toppled over in thunderous crashes that prompted the lady downstairs to pound at our door. At such times I didn’t know whether to lash out at my sons or at my neighbor. I remembered then what Hemingway wrote about Paris: “When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.” Nothing was sadder than Rome moldering under relentless March drizzle.

  Then a letter from Pat raised my morale. He had just sent off 580 pages of The Prince of Tides to Houghton Mifflin. “With luck I hope to finish the goddamn thing by May. I have promised myself never even to think about the south again, much less write a book about it, but I know that’s an idle threat. I will be delirious when this book is finished, edited, polished off and made fun of by discerning critics.

  “My mother continues to struggle . . . the overall prognosis still sucks, but her spirits remain high.”

  I promised to light a candle for Peggy at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where an elephant sculpted by Bernini stood in front of the church bearing an Egyptian obelisk on its back. In exchange, Pat encouraged Emily to pray for the success of my novel—a good little Jewish girl murmuring Hail Marys as the nuns at St. Francis School had taught her to do. Shrugging off my congratulations for his progress with The Prince of Tides, he predicted that Year of the Gun would be my breakthrough book.

  At first his prophecy seemed plausible. The New York Times, daily and Sunday, ran positive reviews, and The Washington Post compared it to the best of Alberto Moravia. The New Yorker declared, “Its depiction of the look and feel and fascination of Rome is almost beyond praise.” But then inexplicably—at any rate, I couldn’t explain it—Year of the Gun imploded.

  I didn’t have the luxury of indulging in what Lenore called a “mini-breakdown.” Our landlady notified us that we had a month to pack our belongings and move out. We counted ourselves lucky to find an attico on Via Santa Maria in Monticelli, across the tram tracks from the Gellers in Palazzo Cenci. True, it was a 110-step walk-up, with a staircase as grim as a Piranesi prison sketch. True, the apartment was occupied until September and we had to stay elsewhere for the summer. True, the lease stipulated that we allow the landlady’s daughter, a college student, to live upstairs during the Christmas holidays. But at last our address was in the centro storico, and the flat had a rooftop terrace where I could write with all the fabled geometry of Rome spread out around me.

  We piled the boys into the increasingly decrepit VW and forged north, bunking with friends in Provence. Then we imposed ourselves on other friends in Paris and Brussels. By August, ashamed of living on sufferance—and on fold-out couches—Linda flew to the States with Sean and Marco to visit her parents in Pittsburgh. In no frame of mind to face my in-laws, I caught a ferry across the Channel and holed up in yet another borrowed flat in London.

  There I
watched BBC’s coverage of the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles, where palm trees shook like a cheerleader’s pompoms. As the women’s marathon ground toward a ghastly finish, a Swiss competitor, Gabriela Andersen-Schiess, went rubbery-legged, missed the last watering station, and staggered on and on. By the time she stumbled into the LA Coliseum, Joan Benoit had won the gold medal twenty minutes earlier, and Andersen-Schiess’s body, from black shoes to peaked white cap, looked as attenuated and twisted as a candle wick.

  Alarmed TV commentators called for her to be rescued before she suffered a stroke. Medical personnel barged onto the track, but Andersen-Schiess waved them off; if they touched her she would be disqualified.

  While the crowd clapped and chanted her name, the phone rang. It was Pat Conroy from Fripp Island. “Are you fucking watching this? She’s me,” he said, “I’m her, dying in the home stretch.”

  “No, she’s me. Born to lose but still plodding ahead.”

  “Please, somebody save Mike and Pat before they’re brain-damaged.” He crowed with laughter. “Carry them off on stretchers and strap them into straitjackets.”

  “How’d you know where to reach me?” I asked.

  “Linda called Lenore from Pittsburgh and said you were hiding from your in-laws in London.”

  “I didn’t have the strength, the stamina, to make the trip.”

  “I love this,” Pat hollered as Andersen-Schiess wobbled along at the rate of four hundred meters in five minutes, clutching her head, on the brink of utter collapse. When she crossed the finish line, medics swarmed her, and the Coliseum echoed with the ecstasy of the crowd.

  “She’s a role model for us,” Pat said. “I don’t know about you, Mike, but I’ve got goose pimples from my elbows to my asshole.”

  “I conceal my emotions.”

  “Come on, I bet your bladder’s puckered like a pigskin. Look, the reason I called—”