The Lost Prince Read online

  Nobody had ever written me such a letter. Not a lover. No one in my family. Certainly not a male friend. Its unabashed emotion moved me deeply. Who wouldn’t rejoice to hear, “I was waiting my whole life to meet someone like you?” My one fear was that Pat had set himself up for disappointment and set me up as another person he loved who would let him down.

  15

  As a featured speaker at the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, Pat invited Linda and me to his lecture and to dinner afterward. Because legions of Conroy fans overflowed the original venue, his talk was transferred to a nearby church, lending the event the electric charge of an evangelical tent-meeting. On the altar, at a pulpit-like dais, Pat didn’t depend on priestly vestments to transfix the congregation. He wore an oatmeal-colored sport coat, a shirt with the collar unbuttoned, and a knit tie loosely knotted at the neck. His charisma came from his words, and like Othello with Desdemona, he wooed the crowd through the ear.

  A rambunctious contingent of African American high school kids frisked amid the sedate NPR subscribers and soccer moms. Late arrivals loitered at the back of the church, which is where Linda and I landed. But Pat asked, “Are the Mewshaws here?” and when we waved sheepishly, he motioned us to reserved seats in the front row.

  With no prepared script, he plunged ahead: “You maybe are expecting or fearing I’m about to drone on for an hour, reading from my books. But to me nothing’s more boring and worthless than a novelist spouting his own work. You can read me at home. Why waste time and fight traffic and pay to park your cars just to hear my deathless prose? Instead, I’ll tell you a little about myself and my family and how I got started as a writer.”

  He might have been at a table in a Roman trattoria or on the front porch on Fripp Island as the origin legend poured out of him like the Iliad from the lips of blind Homer. He invoked his parents, as though they were the God of War and the Goddess of the Hearth battling for his soul. Like listeners eons ago who committed tribal lore to heart, I could have declaimed all these stories myself. No doubt, so could many in the audience who had read Pat’s books or caught him on radio or TV. He spoke of the wrath of Don Conroy, who dropped napalm on Asians for a living and spent his leisure hours battering his wife and kids. Pat’s role in childhood, as he described it, was to be beaten, dragooned from one forlorn military base to the next, and cautioned by his mother that for the good of the nation and the survival of his family, he should keep his trap shut about the violence at home.

  It was a Horatio Alger tale on steroids. Where other cultures had Künstlerromans dramatizing sensitive boys coming of age through the annealing power of art, Pat’s American crucible boiled over with cruelty—which paradoxically he played for laughs, as if he suspected nobody would care if he told it straight. He repeated the vignette about his father taunting him that if he had realized that abuse would transform Pat into a bestselling author, he would have hit him harder and made him a better writer. To which Pat replied with a well-honed punch line: “Dad, if you had beat me any harder I’d be Shakespeare.”

  Funny, obscene, provocative, transgressive as current academic jargon would have it, Pat’s performance worked a cathartic effect on the crowd. As for its effect on him, he stumbled offstage lathered with sweat, his comb-over askew. He hugged Linda and me and apologized that the PEN/Faulkner Committee had organized a sit-down dinner in his honor and the guest list was restricted to board members. “Let’s have lunch tomorrow,” he said.

  “We have friends in town,” I told him. “Two women from Arkansas.”

  “Bring them along. I’d love to meet them.” Then he was swept away on a swell of people and applause.

  AT THE GEORGETOWN INN, PAT awaited us in a dim corner of the Grill Room, wary of exposing his red-rimmed eyes to sunlight. Dressed in the same clothes—his sport coat had dried the color of congealed cereal—he was badly hungover. But he bucked up when Linda and I arrived with Helen Harrison and Katherine Downie, a couple of sisters we had known since the ’60s. While Helen lived in Little Rock, Katherine, a divorcée, had a house across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia, with her young son.

  That Helen and Katherine were attractive and intelligent, that they had honeyed Southern accents and delightful laughs might have charmed any man. But Pat was particularly susceptible to Katherine and her plight as a single mother. He paraphrased his article about divorce being the death of a small civilization, and added that while he understood a boy needed a father, he also knew there were times when it hurt, rather than helped, to have a man around. Still, he guaranteed Katherine, “You’re going to meet somebody who’ll love your bee-hind and marry you.”

  Somehow it was a short step from that to the subject of child and spouse abuse, and the lunch seamlessly meshed with last night’s PEN/Faulkner lecture, complete with sound effects of Don Conroy’s fist smashing Pat’s face.

  Perhaps I had listened to these tales too often. Maybe Prozac had chemically altered my POV or impaired my sense of humor. Something had changed, and overnight his shtick had turned into a tired joke. His admissions of inadequacy had previously struck me as signs of strength, his confessions of failure as secret triumphs. Now he simply sounded sad and sick, and instead of feeling an impulse to swap lachrymose yarns about our youth, I stayed quiet.

  Pat always claimed he told stories to understand himself. But it hit me that day at the Georgetown Inn that this might actually be an avoidance mechanism. Rather than seal a bond between friends, his anecdotes seemed to open a distance between the teller and his tales. He didn’t need another fan, I thought. He needed help.

  AFTER LUNCH, PAT WALKED US to our car and suggested we bring the boys to San Francisco over spring break. I promised to think it over.

  A trip to California appealed to the family, but nobody cared to settle there permanently. Sean had two more years of high school and was eager to graduate with his class. Now that Marco had quit trying to remake Virginia into Rome, he was happy in Charlottesville, and Linda said she needed to be near her mother.

  That ducked the question of what I should do. I took a stab at a novel set in contemporary Prague, a retelling of The Sun Also Rises with a female narrator replacing Jake Barnes as the sexually dysfunctional reporter. But no matter how often I revised it, publishers agreed with Pat Conroy that readers preferred multi-orgasmic women.

  Dreading that I’d plunge back into depression unless I found a project, I decided to do another book about pro tennis, this time the women’s tour. While Linda and the boys were in California visiting the Conroys, I shopped a proposal around in New York and landed a contract that kept me on the road for months.

  The Women’s Tennis Association’s circuit concluded at Madison Square Garden in November, which coincided with the premiere of The Prince of Tides. Pat put Linda and me on the invitation list, and although no cast members appeared, Gloria Steinem, Liz Smith, Gay Talese, and prima ballerina Heather Watts provided sufficient glamour.

  Pat had co-written the script, and I wanted him to be happy and wanted him to know I was happy for him. Still wrestling with Beach Music, he said he appreciated my high opinion of the film, and as we strode together up Fifth Avenue after the screening, the skyscrapers, strung with Christmas lights, seemed to raise his spirits.

  Pat and Lenore’s suite at the Pierre was banked with poinsettias and had a view over the Central Park ice-skating rink, where golden couples circled in silver light. Caterers had arranged a bar in the living room, and uniformed waiters bodysurfed through a sea of family and friends, serving flutes of champagne and baby lamb chops.

  Three of Pat’s brothers introduced themselves to me, and the one named Mike joked that a childhood with Don Conroy had been great preparation for his current employment at a mental hospital. Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Doug Marlette jogged my memory about our meeting eight years ago on Fripp Island. His syndicated series, Kudzu, continued to be popular, but increasingly, he told me, he was c
oncentrating on writing fiction.

  “Somebody’s got to stop him,” Pat said. “There’s already too much competition and too little money to go around.”

  “I’m in it for the glory,” Marlette gleefully needled him.

  “That’s worse.”

  Red wine had stained Pat’s teeth and blurred his blue eyes. Lenore slipped an arm around his waist and steered him toward a New York Times reporter whose article in the next day’s paper described him as groping for cheer and “tentatively” exclaiming, “What a night. What a city. What a life. I’m telling you, this is the life.”

  In private, Lenore explained why Pat was so frazzled and distracted. Emily had stayed behind in San Francisco. Now seventeen, she had had a horrendous year, and for fear that she would harm herself, she was under psychiatric care. No sooner had Pat and Lenore registered at the Pierre than Emily called—to make sure they were safe, she said. But Lenore sensed something was drastically wrong.

  The next day, Emily sneaked out, and the housekeeper followed her to Union Square, where Alan Fleischer was waiting for her. Emily refused to divulge the purpose of this rendezvous, but she promptly unraveled, and on the night of The Prince of Tide’s San Francisco premiere, she swallowed a bottle of Tylenol and had to be rushed to the emergency room. For the rest of ’91 and well into ’92, Emily was in and out of the adolescent psych ward.

  Usually at his most compassionate and loving when other people were falling apart, Pat snapped as his stepdaughter fell apart. He told me he had witnessed too many suicide attempts in his own family and couldn’t bear to watch another person self-destruct. Fleeing to Fripp Island, he said he had to save his sanity and salvage Beach Music.

  In Charlottesville, while I finished Ladies of the Court: Grace and Disgrace on the Women’s Tennis Tour, an acquaintance took a chainsaw to a tree in his yard and brought the trunk down atop himself, severing his spinal cord, paralyzing him for life. To my astonishment, he showed up in a wheelchair for a Christmas party and professed to be in high spirits. He granted that his recovery required many changes and the cooperation of everyone around him. His home and office had had to be refitted with ramps and grab-bars and widened doorways to accommodate his chair. He didn’t go so far as to refer to himself as “differently abled,” but he refused the label “handicapped.” He drove a hand-operated automobile, he taught his classes, he lived his life, and while he conceded he wasn’t the man he had been, he insisted he was the same person.

  This led me to picture Pat on Fripp Island, in his own kind of wheelchair. He could function, I thought, but you had to cut him slack and make allowances for what he had suffered, starting in childhood and ongoing today. Lenore and the family couldn’t count on him to rescue them. They had to help rescue him, and he had to learn to accept his situation. But when I ran this past him during our next phone call, Pat dismissed it as “Prozac talking.”

  “That’s better than Jim Beam talking.”

  “To each his own.”

  Again that year we celebrated the holidays with Linda’s father in Naples, Florida. Not that there was anything festive about the occasion. He had contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome, and although he regained the ability to walk, he tired easily and stayed indoors, bundled in sweaters and gloves. Despite the sweltering heat, he swore he was freezing.

  On the trip north, we laid over in Orlando, where my biological father, Jack Mewshaw, was visiting. I hadn’t seen him in twelve years, not since Marco was an infant. We met for a meal in a franchise restaurant at an anonymous strip mall. Perhaps compared to where he lived in Las Vegas this spot near Disneyland struck him as a homey setting for a family catch-up. But I staggered out of Denny’s sick at heart.

  The plan was to stop in South Carolina to spend New Year’s Eve with the Conroys. In winter Fripp Island was leached of all color except for strands of gaudy lights braided into the lank flags of Spanish moss. Pat greeted us at the front door, a glass of champagne in one hand, an oyster in the other. He wore a white pullover, and because I had on a dark blue sweatshirt, we might have been opposing images on a photo negative. Draining the champagne, inhaling the oyster, he set the glass aside and flung the oyster shell into the road. Rather than embrace me, as he customarily did, he fell to his knees and spread his arms wide like a crucified Christ.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Lemme guess. You met your father after all these years and it went just like one of the Hallmark cards you’re writing.”

  “Stand up, Pat,” Lenore said. “Help them with their bags.”

  Pat stayed on his knees, pretending to be Jack Mewshaw. “Please forgive me, son. I’ve been a terrible parent. You deserve better. You deserve to be loved. I hope it’s not too late. I’ve thought about you every day, every minute we’ve been apart. Let’s never lose touch again.”

  After lapsing into momentary silence, he asked, “How am I doing?”

  “Please, Pat,” Lenore signaled for him to get up. But she was laughing. So were Linda and I.

  “You’re slightly off the mark,” I said.

  “Tell me where I’m wrong.” He labored to his feet. “Tell me where I’ve failed as a novelist, an expert at reconciliation scenes.”

  “It wasn’t a reconciliation. It was more like a chance meeting between high school classmates who had never been close friends. He gave me a curt handshake and said, ‘How’s it going?’”

  “But then I bet you talked about your feelings for hours.”

  “Not exactly. Maybe it’s because we were at Denny’s. Great place for a Reuben sandwich. Not so hot for father-son reunions.”

  Pat threw back his head and shouted into the darkening South Carolina sky, “Fuck all fathers!”

  “You’re a father,” Lenore pointed out. “Or have you forgotten?”

  16

  Tennis authorities did not take kindly to Ladies of the Court. As the Miami Open got underway on Key Biscayne, news broke that the book revealed the frequency with which coaches sexually abused underage girls on the tour. The tournament cancelled my press credentials and revoked its permission to sell copies on site. The New York Times grumbled that this violated the First Amendment, which was something I gabbed about on a coast-to-coast promotional tour.

  When I reached San Francisco, the Conroys wouldn’t hear of my staying anyplace except their house in Presidio Heights. Fresh in from Fripp Island, Pat let me sleep in his top-floor office. If that weren’t enough to make me feel like a valued member of the family, Susannah, now eleven, announced that she was converting to Catholicism and wanted Linda and me to be her godparents. Without mentioning that her maternal grandmother might already have baptized her in a Roman bathtub, I happily accepted.

  Pat had no comment about his daughter’s conversion. He had little to say about anything. After his long absence, he seemed like a stranger in his own home. I put this down to our profession. Novelists lived mostly in their heads, which were often thronged with imaginary characters who made it difficult to deal with flesh-and-blood people and their mundane demands.

  The family pet, a King Charles spaniel named Jimmy, suffered from fly-catcher’s syndrome, an obsessive-compulsive disorder that caused the dog to snap at imaginary insects. It pleased Pat to report that the veterinarian had prescribed a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor for Jimmy. “Wouldn’t you know it? I’ve got a depressed dog on Prozac to go with my depressed friend.”

  “I’ve quit catching flies,” I said. “I’ve also quit chasing my tail.”

  “Congratulations. Lenore’s on my case for chasing a different type of tail.”

  It had crossed my mind that Conroy might not have lived alone all those months on Fripp Island. But I asked no questions, figuring he would tell me if he cared to. When he suggested we take a walk, I guessed he meant to discuss his marriage. Instead we tramped up and down the steep hills in silence. To tourists on cable cars we must have looked like a duo of white-haired gents trudging on a StairMaster.

  Pat eventually b
egan limping and told a scarcely credible story about being hit by a car. “I came back from the liquor store one night carrying a sack full of bottles. A car sideswiped me at an intersection, and my fat ass flew over the hood. I landed on my feet, still holding the bag. There was a woman at the wheel, and her husband or boyfriend was smacking the shit out of her. I assumed he blamed her for the accident. But he was shouting for her to step on the gas and get out of there.”

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “Nah. I staggered home and got no sympathy from Lenore. She didn’t believe a word I said.”

  “I hope you saw a doctor.”

  “I did. He diagnosed me with a herniated disk. I already knew that. I’ve had one for years. My problem now is neuropathy.”

  The condition damaged the peripheral nerves, Pat explained, and numbed his feet. Some patients improved if they reduced the stress in their lives—a suggestion that Pat pronounced “ridiculous.” He had no more hope of relaxing than he did of following the doctor’s other recommendation: Quit drinking.