The Lost Prince Read online

  The next day we had another aborted conversation. “Catch you later,” he said. But there was no “later.” As October vanished into November, Pat never called back, no matter how many voice mails I left. I wrote several letters, and he didn’t answer them either. Once more, I feared he must have killed himself. What else could explain his silence?

  In panic, I phoned Cliff Graubart at the Old New York Bookshop; he assured me Pat was at least alive. But he was a physical and emotional wreck. Cliff promised to pass along a message, and have Pat contact me once he recovered.

  “When do you think that’ll be?” I asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Has he spoken to Lenore?”

  “I stay away from that subject,” Cliff said. “Anything to do with her or their marriage sets him off.”

  A NOVELIST NEEDS THE PATIENCE and stamina of a long-distance runner. After thirteen books I should have been an expert at waiting, confident that the plot would pan out. But I couldn’t shake a woeful sense of abandonment and couldn’t fathom why, after appealing to me for help, Pat had disappeared. For fourteen years we had had what he called “a life-changing friendship.” Why would he turn his back on me?

  Because there had been no warning, I was utterly unprepared and wondered what I had done wrong. How could I repair the damage? I considered flying down to Fripp. But if he refused to phone me back, how could I be sure he’d agree to see me?

  Lenore had scarcely heard from Pat herself. After cutting off contact, he cut off the money, and as mortgage payments, school tuition, and household expenses piled up, she had to plead with his agent for interim support. Occasionally he surprised her with bouquets of flowers from Bloomers in San Francisco. Otherwise he communicated through his lawyers.

  During Thanksgiving dinner, which Lenore fixed for Melissa, Megan, Susannah, and Pat’s brother Jim and his wife and daughter, Pat called and asked to speak to Susannah. Confused and angry, his youngest daughter asked why he wasn’t there with them. He told her he had to go shopping for a gun. Frantic, the family feared he meant to blow his brains out.

  Suicide, some have remarked, is an unanswerable accusation leveled like a gun barrel at surviving loved ones. But what Pat was doing felt worse. Though still alive and talking to other people, he refused to tell his family or me why he had ghosted us.

  Then I discovered something that hurt almost as much as his absence. I wasn’t the first person Pat had pleaded with for help. He asked a former colleague of Alan Fleischer’s at Emory University School of Medicine to tell Lenore the marriage was over. The doctor had declined to do so, because he knew something I didn’t: Pat was involved with another woman. Now in addition to feeling ill-used, I felt like a fool.

  Still, I didn’t stop hoping, and after six months Cliff Graubart said Pat was ready to speak to me. He provided the name of a hotel in New York City and a room number. “He expects your call.”

  “Why doesn’t he call me?”

  “He’s embarrassed,” Cliff said. “He’s afraid you side with Lenore and you’ll guilt-trip him about the divorce.”

  The hotel phone rang and rang, then a robot instructed me to leave a message. I was tempted not to bother. Instead, I said I missed him and was worried about him. Linda’s mother had died and we now felt free to leave Charlottesville. We were moving to London, I told him, and I’d hoped to see him before we left.

  Pat never replied.

  In June, Cliff passed through Charlottesville with a signed copy of Beach Music and called to say Pat had asked him to hand-deliver it. I told Cliff not to bother.

  “But there’s something in it you should read,” Cliff said.

  “I can’t believe you’d be his messenger boy again after fucking me over before.”

  While I was out of the house, Cliff left Beach Music with Linda. In the acknowledgments, Pat praised “the novelist Michael Mewshaw and Linda Kirby Mewshaw who taught me the meaning of hospitality and made the Roman Years the great ones.”

  I might have been touched had I not been so bewildered. Was this the final kiss-off? In no mood to read Beach Music, I put it aside. But I followed the reviews, and every synopsis of the novel reminded me of the letter Pat had composed about Year of the Gun, blaming its failure on its lack of bestseller ingredients. By contrast, The New York Times remarked, Beach Music’s narrator, Jack McCall, “seems to have been mysteriously on hand to suffer the psychological bruises of almost every historical tragedy of the century.”

  As Beach Music climbed the bestseller charts, the paperback, film, and foreign rights sold for a king’s ransom. Yet Pat sounded despondent in interviews and decried his separation from Susannah. To People Magazine he confessed, “I was a distant father. I’d just go off and write. I did the thing that screws up kids more than anything else in America. I went and got myself a little bit famous.”

  Tabloids and mainstream newspapers, slick magazines and literary quarterlies, television talk shows and NPR spread the accusation that Lenore had stolen his daughter from him. Pat referred to Susannah as his “lost child,” suggesting the image of a waif on a milk carton.

  In public Pat expressed melancholy. In private he dispatched menacing letters: “. . . you’re going to see me fight for you Susannah. I’m entering the fray now and I’m going to write about my marriage to your mother. Several magazines, including San Francisco Focus, have asked me to write about my divorce . . . I do not want to do it, but I see no other recourse. The Lenores of the world hate exposure. I’m going to give her some . . . It has gone beyond mere cruelty. I miss you with every pore of my body. The marrow aches when I think about you. You’re being raised by Fleischers, not Conroys . . . Please come this summer to Fripp for a long visit. If this thing ends, there will be no article about the divorce.”

  Much as I worried about the damage he was doing to Susannah, I also worried he was hurting himself. He didn’t sound like the man I had known. It was as if he believed he could solve his personal difficulties the same way he resolved scenes in his novels, with a deus ex machina, like the tiger in the Prince of Tides that miraculously saves the Wingo family. Or with an ultimatum, like Tom Wingo threatening to throw a Stradivarius violin out a window. But he could never force Susannah to fall in line.

  IN THE END, LEARNING TO live without Pat, I attempted to see things from his perspective. While I had lost an irreplaceable friend, he had lost his marriage, his youngest daughter, millions of dollars, and, by his own admissions, his mind for a time. It was hard to stay furious at someone who had squandered so much.

  I recalled our discussion of the college coeds who had ditched us. Pat’s girlfriend explained that he reminded her of a shameful period in her life, and she had abandoned him out of self-preservation. Perhaps that was why Pat disappeared from me. Maybe it humiliated him to have asked for my help. No son of the Great Santini would want to be reminded that he hadn’t been up to telling his wife he wanted a divorce.

  This drew off some of the pain. It was better than the alternative theory that gnawed, rat-like, at my brain. To a man of Pat’s effusive emotions, my behavior might have seemed withholding. He was wet Irish, as Vidal put it. I was dry. Had I failed to take on board how my refusal to move to San Francisco hurt him? In interviews he claimed he divorced Lenore because he believed she no longer loved him. Did he believe the same about me?

  18

  Boyhood had beaten Pat into a strange shape, like a horseshoe forged in fire. Don Conroy had left hammer marks on his son, just as my mother had on me. Long before Pat cut me off, Mom had withdrawn from all contact except for the occasional phone call. Although we lived less than 150 miles apart, she saw me only once in six years, and when I showed up unexpectedly at her house, she wouldn’t open the door, reducing me to speaking to her through the mail slot.

  Whenever I suggested a get-together, she said, “I’m too old and ugly. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.”

  “I don’t look so hot myself. But wouldn’t you like to get
to know your grandsons? You haven’t laid eyes on Sean and Marco in years.”

  “Send me their picture.”

  As I had done with Pat, I attempted to piece together her reasons for rebuffing me, and in the lead-up to Linda’s and my departure for London, I was determined to say goodbye in person.

  My sister Karen told me Mom couldn’t understand my insistence.

  “I’d like to talk to her face-to-face,” I said. “She’s seventy-eight years old. We may not get another chance.”

  Mom, Karen, her husband, John, and I rendezvoused at a restaurant between Baltimore and Washington, DC, like warring armies powwowing in a demilitarized zone. Mom’s hair was still dyed black and cut in bangs straight across her forehead. With age, she had shrunk and wore glasses with lenses of radically different strengths so that she appeared to be scrutinizing me from a distance and in a disconcerting close-up at the same time. At a secret signal, Karen and John excused themselves, giving Mom and me privacy.

  “I hope you’re not here to tell me something awful,” she said.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like you have a terminal disease. Or you and Linda are getting divorced.”

  “You don’t sound like you’d be very sympathetic.”

  “Don’t keep me guessing.”

  “Does there have to be a special reason for me to want to say goodbye?”

  “You could have done that over the phone. You had me worried sick.”

  “I’m sorry. I offer an unqualified apology. There’s no bad news—unless it’s that I love you.”

  “Now you’re being a smart-ass.”

  Karen and John rejoined us, and we ordered crab cakes and debated why they never tasted as good outside of Maryland. Was it the state water? Blue crab lump meat? Bay leaf? Afterward Karen and John drove Mom home, and I checked into a motel, starved for company. In the past I had called Pat whenever I was overwhelmed by strangled feelings toward my family. One of the worst aspects of his loss was this desire to speak to the very person who has abandoned me.

  I wound up thinking about my mother, who for better or worse had passed on so much of herself to me. She had encouraged me to become a writer and had typed my first stories. It struck me that she had an artistic sensibility. The tragedy was she had no art form—no outlet, no means of expressing her inner chaos except through anger. How could I not love her? How could I not leave her?

  WE LIVED IN A TOP-FLOOR walk-up in Hampstead that used to be a church priory. Among its astounding views of London, the only landmarks I recognized were the BT Tower and the dome of St. Paul’s. The rest of the city remained, as Churchill said of Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

  At first, we were all miserable. Marco and Linda resisted letting go of life in America, and even I, who had pushed hard for the move, had difficulty acclimating. A pinched nerve in my neck—a perfect symbol of deeply buried pain—disabled me and required months of physiotherapy and rehab.

  Then like a convalescent risking baby steps, I began jotting notes, lines of dialogue and narrative fragments. Slowly, over half a decade, these coalesced into a novel, Shelter from the Storm, set in Central Asia, and a memoir, Do I Owe You Something? about various authors who had influenced me.

  In 2000, to mark the new millennium, I sought new representation at the IMG Agency, where Carolyn Krupp took me on as a client and only afterward revealed that she was now Pat Conroy’s agent. He had often spoken about me, she said. She knew the story of our estrangement and suggested it was time we got back together.

  She must have told Pat the same thing in the same peremptory manner. He rang me in London and left an emotional message. I called back several times, but never got through to him. Desperate not to hit another dead-end, I wrote him:

  Carolyn Krupp gave me your email address, but warned me that you don’t often check it. In fact, you depend on your wife to do it for you. Let me confess I don’t know diddly about this medium either and I depend on Linda to send, receive, etc. But I did want to avail myself of another channel of communication in the hope of reestablishing contact with you. It was painful for the past five years. I can be honest about that, can’t I? I don’t mean to guilt-trip you. I’m simply trying to say that you matter, and from what you said in your message we matter to you. So I’d like us to be back in touch.

  Pat answered in a great tumbling breathless email whose subject line read “only connect.” It lacked paragraph breaks or capital letters, but brimmed over with love and lamentation, bitterness and profound misremembering:

  dearest michael. a funny thing happened on our road to reconciliation. my friends and family protested mightily and their point was mostly: the mewshaws chose lenore over you then fuck them. their point carries some resonance. it was only when i announced i was leaving lenore did i come to realize how loathed she was by everyone I loved except the mewshaws . . . you and linda have no idea what happened in that lousy marriage because you have been listening to the most untrustworthy narrator. do you remember that unbelievably ostentatious party we threw for you in san francisco, mike? i think it was the most embarrassing night of my life. by then i was beginning to understand her shallowness and vanity, but underestimated her cruelty and her evil. yes, evil and i do not use the word often or lightly. need an example? try this one: i have seen my beloved daughter, susannah, for only thirty days in the last seven years. i bet you have seen her more. at this moment i do not know if she graduated from the high school i paid fifteen thousand dollars a year to attend. i do not know if she is alive or where she is nor does any member of my family, including sweet megan. the last time i saw susannah she was yellow and lenore had given one more daughter an eating disorder. did lenore ever mention that she stole every penny i ever made from my writing career? did she report to you that she originally asked for a mere $38,000 a month for alimony? poor kid had to settle for a measly ten grand a month and for two years she has been making more money than i’ve made. luckily i will soon be filing for bankruptcy but am trying to stave it off until january. michael have you ever had a better friend than me? i’m serious, who has loved and cherished you more than i have? who has done you the honor of liking your work more than me? what other friend has tracked down your books and read them as carefully and lovingly as i did yours? do you have lots of famous friends in london? let me guess . . . martin amis, salman rushdie and all the usual suspects. do they love you more than i did, mike? i adored you mike and everyone in my world knew it and that love for you was as pure as anything about me . . . but i do not desire a spy in my camp who makes periodic reports to the malignant lenore. unless she appears at my bankruptcy proceedings, i plan never to lay eyes on that woman again. i will lead cheers when i read her obituary which will include not a single accomplishment. i lost two friends and two only in my divorce from lenore. the mewshaws. the rest rallied around me. because of my fame one might think? could be. but i couldn’t tell at the time because i had a breakdown and was suicidal and had a tough time of it. my friends and family rallied around me. then they began telling me their lenore stories and what i put those people through because i married that woman causes me to shiver in remorse and shame . . . so let this be a start, mike. i needed to say some of these things because your withdrawal seemed like a betrayal at the time. but lenore was the one telling me what you were saying and how do i know you were saying those things? she’s like the kgb. you never know what part of the evil empire you’ve entered . . . think about these things, michael, and talk it over with linda. i’m sorry I can’t type and it just took me hours to peck this out. but you hurt my feelings. i can see linda choosing lenore, but not you. write me. great love pat conroy.

  I was gobsmacked that he thought I had withdrawn and betrayed him. But he was right about one thing: I had never had a better, more generous friend. Still, I wrote back: “I don’t feel that I chose Lenore . . . I don’t feel I was given any leeway to make a decision. It struck me at the time that you simply withdrew
from me . . . You stopped calling me and you stopped returning my calls.”

  I reminded him that I had had to phone Cliff to find out whether he was alive or dead. I reminded him that for five years, ever since he asked me to call Lenore, he had cut me off. “I never said anything to Lenore that I wouldn’t say to you, Pat. My constant advice to her was to forget the past and if the marriage was over to get on with her life, to involve Susannah in it as little as possible, and to defuse the emotional pressure at every opportunity . . . But to get back to you and me for a moment, as ’94 turned to ’95 and months passed and I still didn’t hear from you, I do know that my disappointment and bewilderment deepened . . .”

  I explained that my motive for keeping in touch with Lenore was mostly to stay connected to my goddaughter Susannah. “I assure you that I’m not a message carrier or a spy . . . despite all the time that has passed, I’d like to reestablish contact. More than that I’d like to see you and talk to you. I’ve never forgotten you for a moment. I’ve dreamt about you repeatedly, and it’s always a question of my encountering you unexpectedly and not knowing whether to embrace you or pass you by. I’m convinced it would be an embrace. Let me hear from you.”

  Pat replied that while my email was “beautiful and powerfully moving,” it didn’t address “the thing that has almost killed me in the five years of estrangement from you and linda. it is the hideous lenore’s stealing susannah’s childhood from me.”

  He challenged me: What if Sean and Marco didn’t acknowledge gifts, such as the necklace he bought for Susannah last Christmas? It galled him that he had been so generous when “my father never got me anything my whole life.”

  you’re her godfather. tell me, michael, did my pretty daughter graduate from high school or not? . . . something else, godfather, did my daughter apply to college or not? where is my daughter right now? is she okay? the last time i saw her she was yellow and obviously suffering from an eating disorder. why do you wish to remain friendly with a woman who stole my kid from me, mike? my brothers think she is a common criminal for how she stole my money and [they’re] trying to get me to have her arrested.