The Lost Prince Read online

  OUTSIDE OF THE PLAYBOY OFFICE autumn advanced in such slow increments I scarcely noticed any change until one afternoon grape-colored clouds closed over the city and hail hammered down so hard I feared it would crack the window. The storm lasted for hours, piling up drifts of icy pellets. By the time it stopped and I set out for home, the air was cold and my footsteps crackled on the cobblestones. Beneath low dripping tree branches, the 44 bus sprayed slush as it fishtailed up Via Dandolo. Astonished and saddened, I felt the seasons had vaulted ahead and ottobrata romana had vanished into deepest, deadest winter.

  THAT CHRISTMAS WE VISITED LINDA’S father in Florida, so he wouldn’t be alone now that Linda’s mother was in a nursing home. To our delight, Pat and Lenore drove down from Georgia with Gregory, Emily, and Susannah and registered at a hotel in Pelican Bay. Pat was on the wagon, following a strict health regime. He and Lenore hiked miles on the beach each morning, and he had already lost so much weight he wore suspenders to prevent his pants from falling off. A medical check-up had shown “some bad numbers,” he said, and doctors ordered him to stop drinking, start exercising, and cut back on coffee. Not that he had gone cold turkey on caffeine, but he no longer consumed twenty cups a day.

  “It’s taught me a lesson,” he said.

  “About mortality?”

  “Fuck mortality. I’ve learned I can’t write any better when I’m sober than I could when I was drunk or high on espresso.”

  Still, he was resolute. At cocktail hour he refused to be tempted. With dinner he turned down even a tipple of wine. But one afternoon while everybody else was out at the pool, I stepped into the kitchen and stumbled over Pat, crouched on his heels, chugging vodka straight from a bottle.

  The following day, he told me now that Gregory was headed off to the University of California at Santa Cruz, he and the family planned to live in San Francisco. Pat was sick of Atlanta, its provincialism, its redneck mind-set. His friend William Kovach had been ousted as editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and Pat was abandoning the city in protest.

  Then, too, he had a good friend, Tim Belk, dying of AIDS in San Francisco. He felt compelled to help care for AIDS patients who had been ostracized by their families. He said he knew what it was to be a pariah.

  Lenore encouraged Linda to believe that in California our two families could re-create the best aspects of Italy. Emily and Sean could enroll in the same high school, Susannah and Marco in the same grade school. I’d have plenty of tennis partners, and Pat would have me as a role model of sobriety and self-discipline.

  I interrupted with the news that I had accepted a visiting writer’s position at the University of Virginia. “Charlottesville’s where Linda and I met,” I said. “We loved the place.”

  “You’ll hate it now,” Pat said. “And they’ll hate you. That’s what I learned by going back to Atlanta.”

  “It’ll be different for them,” Lenore protested. “They don’t have your insane family and memories of being beaten half to death by your father.”

  “Right!” Pat laughed. “Linda’s mother is in an institution. Mike’s mother’s the one who beat him. That’ll make all the difference.”

  14

  As Pat had predicted and I secretly dreaded, our re-entry to the States was a disaster. A university town of thirty-five thousand smug citizens, Charlottesville seemed slow-poke and self-satisfied. As William Faulkner, himself a visiting writer at UVA, once remarked, Virginians are snobs. A faculty wife welcomed us with the warning that we would have to wait ten years before people made up their minds whether to accept us. The English department appeared to have decided immediately, billeting me in a cubbyhole without windows, without a phone, without a single grace note.

  The boys, too, suffered a bumpy landing. Sean, who had clamored to return to America for high school, discovered that his Roman street smarts didn’t translate into the local country-club style. His classmates called my lanky, clean-cut son “a big hairy Italian.”

  In the fourth grade, Marco was perplexed by black kids with Muslim names. At Marymount he had had plenty of friends from Islamic countries, but they were the sons and daughters of diplomats, not kids from the projects who declared they hated him because he was a honky. What was that all about? In Italy, Honky was a sportswear brand.

  Marco’s teacher assured us he was adjusting nicely to his new environment, but Marco insisted, “Questo è uno scherzo.” That’s a joke.

  “Your teacher wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true,” I reasoned with him.

  “I fooled her.” Then reverting to Italian. “Questo paese mi fa schifo.” This country disgusts me.

  “Don’t say that. America is your country.”

  “No, io sono quasi italiano.” I’m almost Italian.

  I trusted that time would change his mind and perk up my mood. Reluctant to admit I was depressed—the term carried too many calamitous associations with my mother and William Styron—I fantasized that fleeing to Rome would solve my problems.

  Meanwhile, the Conroys had settled in San Francisco and purchased a house in Presidio Heights. They also now owned a place on Fripp Island, where Pat isolated himself, attempting to write. This didn’t strike me as a healthy family dynamic. But I was grateful when he sneaked a break from Beach Music and drove up to Virginia.

  “I know this type of Southern town,” he said of Charlottesville. “I grew up in one like it. Everybody festering with envy and resentments. The creative writing program just makes it worse. You should join us in California.”

  Together we explored the rural roads of Albemarle County, west toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Orange, red, and purple leaves spangled the two-lane blacktop. On this clear, apple-scented day, no place on earth could have been more beautiful. But neither of us was in a fit state to appreciate the autumn foliage.

  At the Miller School, where Pat had coached basketball at Camp Wahoo for two summers during college, we traipsed around the campus, seeing no one and hearing nothing except the crunch of dead leaves beneath our feet. I hadn’t a clue where Pat’s head was at. Mine was in Rome, somewhere between the Pincio and the Borghese Gardens.

  He talked about his time at Camp Wahoo, fondly recalling friends. “I got to play with Art Heyman,” he said. “An All-American at Duke. He called me Peanut. ‘Just pass me the ball, Peanut.’ I must have had a million assists.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “The greatest fun was being far away from Dad.”

  Because I had to teach an afternoon seminar, we headed back to UVA, and Pat volunteered to sit in as a guest lecturer.

  “My students would love it,” I said. “But the department won’t pay you a measly dollar.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s worth it to have more time with you.”

  The seminar lasted three hours, and Pat spent every minute of it speaking. He said nothing I hadn’t heard before and repeated sprawling stories about his childhood, his hazing at the Citadel, and his first callow attempts at writing. Much as these recollections amused the class, they appeared to amuse Pat even more. He was like a child rubbing a scrap of silk between his fingertips, soothing himself and salving the pain behind these anecdotes.

  Afterward, my students strolled with Pat across the Lawns toward the Rotunda. People recognized him and fell into step. Some asked him to autograph their spiral notebooks. A few raced to fetch paperbacks for him to sign. I had walked these brick paths at UVA with great authors—James Dickey, Robert Lowell, Reynolds Price, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Levine, James Salter—none of whom ever attracted such a flash crowd. Everybody loved Pat Conroy—except, perhaps, himself.

  On Halloween, Pat took the boys trick-or-treating. Costumed as a zombie, Marco plastered his face with red grease paint, which at first didn’t look like blood. But a sudden rainstorm streaked his cheeks as if they had been clawed by a catamount. In his baggy khakis and tight shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his muscular forearms, Pat resembled Popeye, lacking onl
y a corncob pipe.

  Back at the house, he hugged Marco on his lap and once more implored the Mewshaws to make common cause with the Conroys in California; the mayor of San Francisco was already his good friend, and Pat promised to have him issue an official invitation to the city. Sure enough, a week later a letter with an impressive seal urged us to relocate to the culturally diverse and literarily sophisticated Bay Area.

  Linda wouldn’t hear of it. She was flirting with the real estate market in Charlottesville, citing the prevailing wisdom that paying rent was moronic; accruing equity was the key to financial independence. While she pored over the For Sale ads, I fumed that the independence I craved was the kind I had enjoyed in Rome and foolishly squandered. Restless, my heart was a helium-filled balloon about to slip its string and drag me along for the ride. Teaching only two days a week, I often flew to Italy, ostensibly on magazine assignments, in reality on futile excursions to cure my middle-age craziness.

  UVA invited me to stay for a second stint as visiting writer, and by now the boys had found their footing. At soccer matches Sean still shouted coaching instructions to Marco in Italian. Otherwise the two of them had become convincing replicas of American kids. Sean, who had never seen a football game before, made the varsity as a sophomore, and by the time he was a six-foot-five senior he started at tight end on an undefeated team that won the state championship. Marco, in decisions calculated to drive me mad, started drum lessons and acquired a lethargic python and a hostile boa constrictor.

  After a family referendum, I resigned myself to another year in Virginia. I drew the line, however, against buying a house. We rented from a professor on sabbatical and postponed any discussion about the future until fall.

  On the last day of the spring semester, the chairperson of the English department summoned me to her office. Since the creative writing program was a separate fiefdom, this was the first time the chair had spoken to me. Skipping the pleasantries, she informed me that my reappointment as visiting writer had been rescinded. Instead of a full-year position, she offered to hire me as “a community resource” for a single semester at a reduced salary.

  As cooly as I could, I explained that I wasn’t just some day laborer who happened to live in Charlottesville and was available to teach at the University’s convenience. My community was Rome, Italy. I was here at the pleasure of the creative writing program, and had consented to a second year with the promise of a raise. On that basis, I had rented a house, I had re-enrolled my children in private school, I had—

  The chairperson wasn’t listening. She had delivered her edict and had more pressing matters to attend to. At this point I went postal. Not that it ruffled the chairperson’s aplomb. She was unbudgeable.

  The creative writing program sympathized. They conceded there had been a mistake. They had renewed my appointment without consulting proper channels. Now it was too late to change the chairperson’s mind.

  A wiser man would have calmed down and reflected that Simon & Schuster had bought my latest novel, True Crime, and I didn’t need to teach. At no great cost I could have broken my lease and recovered the deposit from the boys’ school. But like Pat, who admitted that he fought Alan Fleischer in large part because the man pissed him off, I was seized by an irrational appetite for battle. The English department chairperson and the pusillanimous creative writing program had picked on the wrong guy. I prepared for combat, ready to do everything in my power to force the University to reinstate me for a second year in a town where I didn’t want to live in the first place.

  I met with the dean of Arts and Sciences and demanded satisfaction. If I didn’t get it, I’d take my case public. In a snarky piece for The Washington Post, I fired off an early salvo, recounting the University’s history of exiling writers who didn’t fit the mold at Mr. Jefferson’s academical village. The list was long and illustrious, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Paul Bowles.

  UVA capitulated. In short, I won. In truth, I lost and alienated everyone on the faculty. Pat Conroy compared my plight to cadets at the Citadel who violated some unwritten code and were subjected to “the Silence.” After I was shunned in Charlottesville, he again urged me to join him in California.

  Curiously, almost all his phone calls in favor of San Francisco came from Fripp Island, where he was writing little, drinking a lot, and surviving in what he described as solitary confinement. With Nan Talese bugging him to finish Beach Music and Lenore hounding him to come home, he declared that he hated our profession.

  “Forget the profession.” Low as I felt, I assumed the role of cheerleader. “Go back to the basics. Remember how you were a gym rat shooting hoops for hours?”

  “It’s not the same. I loved basketball.”

  “You used to love writing when you did it for yourself. Forget your editor and your agent and the million-dollar contract. Write for the pure joy of it.”

  “I wouldn’t recognize joy if it bit me in the ass.”

  “You will if you channel your feelings onto the page.”

  “I don’t feel anything,” he said. “Check that. I don’t feel pleasure, but I feel plenty of pain.”

  “Maybe what you need is to get away from it for a while.”

  “I am away from it. I haven’t written a word in weeks.”

  “Why not tag along on my next magazine assignment? Remember the trip to Munich?”

  “I’d love to travel. The trouble is I’d have to bring me along and that would ruin everything.”

  “Jesus, Pat.”

  “Sorry. Am I bumming you out?”

  “No,” I lied, smothered by the weight of my own dejection and now his. “But you’ve got to take care of yourself.”

  “Every time I think about taking care of myself, nothing comes to mind except pouring a tall drink.”

  “Maybe you need to go back on the wagon.”

  “That wagon has passed.”

  As the two of us thudded along like a phonograph needle in a dusty groove, I started to question for the first time whether this choral complaining did us any good. The hours of mutual commiseration, the quips and comic riffs were supposed to bolster our spirits. Instead they sent us spiraling lower. We needed to change the conversation. But to do that I’d have to change the discussion, the tumult of talk, in my own head.

  AT NIGHT I DREAMED OF Rome—the view from different bridges, the honeycombed arches and cupolas, the murals of angels and saints swimming on ceilings. Often I woke and gazed out the bedroom window at pinprick stars over Charlottesville and felt the vertiginous sensation of being sucked up into darkness. The agony of this out-of-body experience was almost strong enough to crack my ribs.

  Still, I resisted calling the condition by its name. For months I endured full-blown, clinical depression and didn’t acknowledge it until terrifically good news drove the truth home like a nine-inch nail. Half a decade after its publication and interment on remainder tables, Year of the Gun was made into a $16 million movie directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Sharon Stone. Because some dimwit in Hollywood had let the option on my novel lapse, my agent renegotiated the film rights, doubling the purchase price, putting me on the payroll as a $3,000-a-week consultant, and flying Linda and me to Rome first-class.

  Rather than euphoria, my reaction was one of profound regret compounded by currents of fury. I couldn’t help thinking, If this had happened a couple of years ago, if I had had the slightest inkling, I would never have left Italy, never lived in Charlottesville, never fallen into such a toxic funk. Like Pat bleating about the misery of his million-dollar advance, I railed against the cosmic unfairness of my good fortune. The sight of Frankenheimer shooting a scene on Piazza Farnese in the very same building where Pat and Lenore had lived left me lukewarm. Meeting Sharon Stone and Valeria Golino left me completely cold. Something was seriously wrong.

  Hurrying back to Charlottesville, I saw a therapist and was prescribed the then new antidepressant, Prozac. For a week my engine locked in neutral. I couldn’t
lurch backward or forward no matter how hard I gunned the gas. Then suffused with what I presumed to be a placebo effect, I turned energetic to the brink of mania. After a month I leveled off, as if a floor had been inserted between my feet and the abyss. I could wake from dreams and stare out the bedroom window and not fear my soul had been sucked away into an indifferent universe.

  My first instinct was to relay the good news to Pat. I called and told him how it had helped to speak to a therapist.

  “I’d rather talk to you,” he said.

  “I like talking to you, too. But I can’t give what you need.”

  “All I need is for you to listen.” His voice turned testy.

  “I’m listening and I hear you. I hope you hear me too. This antidepressant—Prozac—has been a godsend.”

  “I’m not taking any fucking chill pill.”

  “What’s the harm in trying?”

  “I’ll tell you the harm. You dope yourself with happy pills, and you’ll wind up writing Hallmark greeting cards.” For the first time in our friendship he hung up on me.

  Pat was a man of many faults, all of which he confessed and apologized for so effusively, it was impossible not to forgive him. In this instance, he mailed me what amounted to a Valentine:

  “I realized I’d never written you two a love letter and it was high time to do it. I don’t know how my life would be different if we had not moved to Rome and met you, but I do know that I’d be deprived of two of the best friends I’ve made on earth. I was waiting my whole life to meet someone like Mike and then I realized that he had [to] marry someone as fine and beautiful as Linda to make it work all around. I’m still amazed at your generosity and hospitality to all your friends in Rome. You taught me things about generosity and love that I never knew and I’ve tried to incorporate them into my life simply because I admired them in you first. I never like my life as much when I’m not with you, when we’re not living in the same city, when we’re not talking about books and friends and the cities of the world and the great damaged families that produced us. I’ve never had friends as splendid as you two and I’ve never thanked you for this inestimable and freely given gift. I cherish you and I love you and I say this without a single reservation.”