The Lost Prince Read online

  I answered that with Sean now living in California and Marco away at college, I missed the boys terribly. “There’s something ineffably sad about losing contact with a kid, all the more so in your case where you’ve seen Susannah so seldom, haven’t gotten the feedback you deserve and lack basic information.”

  To remedy the situation to some extent, let me assure you that [Susannah] did graduate from high school. But the jaundice she seemed to be suffering the last time you saw her was actually an early symptom of chronic fatigue syndrome. She’s been fighting that for the past year, seeing specialists, receiving treatment and mostly resting as much as possible . . . [This left] her with little energy to apply for college. So that’s been postponed for a year. Health permitting, her plan is to go to Rome this fall, attend St. Stephen’s School for a year, concentrate on painting and art courses, and get down to the business of applying to colleges.

  Much as it must torment you to be estranged from Susannah, I hope we can keep the discussion of our estrangement and, I hope, our reconciliation a separate issue. Regardless of whether I had cut off all contact with Lenore and had kept in constant touch with you, I don’t believe I could’ve had much or any influence on the situation with Susannah. I could, of course, have offered sympathy, something I would have been more than willing to do had I been able to get through to you . . .

  I pointed out that while Pat claimed, “‘I cut you and Linda off because of the terrible things you were saying about me to Lenore,’ you now allow for the possibility that we weren’t saying those things, or that whatever we said had been exaggerated or twisted in the transmission. I trust that with hindsight you can understand how hurtful it was to Linda and me that you would believe that we were saying terrible things. More especially that you would believe them without allowing us an opportunity to respond and set the record straight.”

  You’ve gone through a great deal of suffering and misery in the last decade, and I’m sorry for that and even sorrier that I wasn’t in any position to offer support. In many ways, most of which don’t really bear going into, I too have been hurting . . . for the past decade, and have only in recent years recovered a bit and begun to take tentative steps toward trying to live more or less sanely and as happily as possible [in] whatever time I have left to me. It isn’t easy and never will be. How could it be otherwise? Given the start you got in life, you’re lucky to be able to chew gum and walk at the same time. I feel the same about myself. I’m trying to take simple survival and the occasional accomplishment for the miracles they seem to me to be. I hope I don’t sound, as you once said I would when I began taking Prozac, like a writer of Hallmark cards. I don’t have the sort of bravado that would lead me to say that anything that doesn’t destroy me strengthens me. Nor would I agree that we become stronger at the broken places that have healed. Frankly I feel pretty bruised and scuffed up, but I refuse to let that fuck up the rest of my life and prevent me from enjoying the things I look forward to, which include seeing you and having a chance to talk face to face, to reflect on old times and to have some new ones.

  Pat responded with a seething email that would have offended me had it not made me fear for his mental health:

  that you do not feel any outrage for me or what has happened to me makes me wonder why you are attempting to resuscitate one of the great friendships of my life . . . your missing sean and marco has nothing to do with the tragedy that befell me and susannah. it cheapens and belittles the agony i have endured because of that shitbird i once married. you cannot understand how painful my estrangement with susannah has been and you should never write a sentence like that . . . for whatever reason, mike, i lost you and linda during my divorce from lenore. i lost no one else of consequence. in fact i found something out. i discovered that i’m greatly loved, that i’m generous spirited and that spirit makes people want to be around me. i was with a group of old friends from high school recently and one of them asked the group if they got in serious trouble who would their first phone call go to. i was considering the question when i found the whole room pointing at me.

  Then in an abrupt about-face, he wrote:

  i sent your letter to doug marlette and cliff graubart and both agreed that you wrote me a love letter. i thought you did too. you are also right that I should not have believed anything lenore told me you had said. she is satanic in her use of lying. because of that, mike, you and linda know nothing of what happened in our marriage and I repeat the word nothing.

  Just as he seemed to be softening, however, he veered back on the attack:

  don’t do the i made this phone call and you didn’t answer my message and i told cliff i could be of this service or i tried to open up these lines of communications . . . when the smoke cleared you stood with lenore. i would tremble with shame to tell a father that his child had graduated from high school when that father had paid for that diploma . . . that’s how horrible lenore is, mike, and mike, mike, mike, what has she done to my child?

  It came to me that Pat might be right. Maybe there was nothing to be salvaged from a friendship that had sunk to such a low ebb. The Pat Conroy who had been my friend would never have referred to himself as “much loved”—not without laughing.

  I replied:

  Clearly, you’re very upset and very, very angry, and just as clearly a great deal of that anger has splashed over on me. Some of this may have been deserved. I’ve granted that in my previous e-mails. I’ve attempted to account for my actions, apologize for my shortcomings and place things in context. But at the risk of adding to your distress and making you still angrier, I’m afraid I have to say that I cannot accept the blame and responsibility that you seem determined to heap on me. The simple fact is—you repeat it with emphasis in your last e-mail: ‘You and Linda know nothing of what happened in my marriage, and I repeat the word nothing.’ As a matter of logical consistency, how can we be held culpable for things that we neither caused nor knew about?

  I’m not privy to the details of your divorce, your alimony agreement, your child support, your visitation rights etc etc. . . . I never had any reason to know that Lenore had ‘stolen’ Susannah from you. Frankly I still don’t quite understand that. Since I assume that legally you have visitation rights, even if Lenore refused to send Susannah to see you, I don’t understand why you didn’t take legal action to remedy the situation or simply fly out to California to be with your daughter . . .

  The problem seems to come down to one thing. You feel extraordinarily aggrieved by what happened in your marriage and by much of what has occurred after the divorce. But if I accomplish nothing else, I’d like to convince you that I don’t stand with Lenore. I stand where I’ve always stood. I stand on my own. I don’t agree with or approve of all that Lenore does and what she seems to value. But to tell the truth there’s much that you do and seem to value that I don’t agree with or approve of either . . . I don’t believe that loving someone or being close friends demands complete congruency of values, morals, ethics or, dread phrase, lifestyle . . . With difficulty, I’ve learned that we live in a highly flawed world, that I’m flawed myself and that there’s no way of surviving and retaining one’s sanity unless one accepts that. You, however, appear to be an absolutist in certain areas. I accept this about you and still want to be your friend. But in fairness and in the hope that it might prompt you to examine your own conscience, and simply for the record, I feel compelled to point out that you’ve played fast and loose with some essential truths . . .

  It’s not crucial to our relationship for you to iron out the inconsistencies in your explanation of why you cut me off. I assume you had your reasons and they seemed justified to you at the time . . . I’m prepared to pick up and move on from here. But I get no sense that you’re willing to move on . . . The suggestion that comes up over and over again is that you can’t forget what’s happened, you can’t forgive. To me that doesn’t sound like love, much less friendship. It sounds like a child who insists on unconditional love, unqu
alified acceptance and unquestioned agreement. I’m afraid I can’t give you that, Pat. It’s no more in my nature than in yours to accept ultimatums.

  After saying all this, I fear you’ll cut off the dialogue. That would make me very sad and would be, I believe, a great loss for both of us. But you’ve been frank and forceful in stating your views. I accept that as the price of friendship and trust that you do too. When we were at our closest, candor seemed to be the essence of the relationship. I wanted always to be honest with you. I wanted to be the person in your life who wasn’t in business with you, or borrowing money from you, or doing a script with you. I simply wanted to be your friend. I still do.

  Pat held off answering for nearly a week. Then, weary of wrangling, he denied that he was issuing ultimatums. “Let me make this easier,” he wrote. “I take full responsibility for the break-up of our friendship . . . Now what, mike?”

  For a month we remained in desultory contact. I inquired about progress on his new project, a book about basketball, and described my life in London. “I have a very good physiotherapist—as ever my back aches—and a psychoanalyst—as ever my brain aches.”

  In a move that wrong-footed me as deftly as a crossover dribble, Pat wrote back:

  i have an idea that I wanted to run by both of you. i would like you and linda to act as intermediaries . . . between susannah and me. i do not know where she is on this planet at this moment. i’ve talked to sandra [his new wife, the novelist Cassandra King] about this at length and if susannah is indeed going to school in rome this year we would be more than happy to move to rome this january. i need to get to know my kid again and she certainly needs to get to know me . . . you are the only two friends on earth who even know where she is right now . . . i have been sickened over this thing with susannah. i implore both of you to consider this and i would simply beg you to help me with my daughter.

  Recalling the last favor he had asked of me and how catastrophically it ended, I hesitated to serve as a go-between again. I even wondered for a moment whether his accepting the blame for our break-up had been to soften me up for this request. Why get involved?

  But in fact I didn’t require much softening, and I was already involved. For her good and for his, Susannah needed to reconnect with her father.

  When I agreed to help, Pat was lavish with gratitude. Still he cautioned me: “i thought you should know this. you will hear from susannah that i sent her harsh emails. I sent her fatherly ones. she does not take criticism well.”

  He offered to copy me on their correspondence. I replied that that wasn’t necessary. “My hope is that . . . you’ll both start from ground zero and not have to thrash over the past. I don’t want to get caught between you and Susannah any more than I want to get caught between you and Lenore. My hope is to open a door or two, and have you take it from there.”

  “You’re under no pressure at all,” Pat wrote. “If you have any success, it will be a great victory and tremendous opportunity for me to reunite with my beloved daughter. if you have none at all, i will be ever grateful for your gracious [attempt] to put humpty-dumpty back together again.”

  Pat went ahead and sent me their correspondence anyway, and as I read the letters and emails to Susannah, I couldn’t say what shocked me more—Pat’s venomous tone or his delusion that he sounded “fatherly.”

  Shortly before Susannah’s birthday in December 1997, he had written,

  Susannah:

  Sixteen is a big year . . . I had my sixteenth birthday in Beaufort, South Carolina, my first in the town that would change my life. It was the year I scored 28 points in my first basketball game against Ridgebrook, was elected President of the Senior Class and watched Randy Randal die on the baseball field. It was the year my brother Tom almost died when a penny lodged in his throat, the day Dad’s squadron flew to Cuba during the Missile Crisis, and the year that Gene Norris [his English teacher] gave me Look Homeward, Angel. Make it a great year for your own sweet self. Try to include me in the year.

  If he had left it at that, his letter would have been a gift any child would treasure. But Pat switched gears and began grinding at Susannah

  Lenore can do this for two more years and then it’ll stop. You yourself can see the injustice of my not seeing you—not seeing you but paying every penny that makes that household in San Francisco possible. I am supposed to write the check every month, but not supposed to see the daughter I love with all my heart. I trust your sense of justice, dear-heart. What has been just about this?

  Great Love,

  The Big Dad

  Because he believed Lenore was the puppet-master, he held his daughter blameless and thought that once Susannah turned eighteen, she would choose him over her mother. When that didn’t happen, he often lashed out at her several times a day. By April 23, 1999, she had had enough:

  Okay, who is the mean, disrespectful one here? Tell Sandra to read the e-mail you sent me, or any of them for that matter and after that ask her to review your conduct towards me over the past couple of years. I wouldn’t allow anyone to speak to me as you [do], but I have swallowed it because you bear this title ‘father.’ But I have come to realize that this kind of passive behavior is ignoble and non-productive, and challenging your distorted view and offering alternatives to your condemnations is pointless as well. I say with confidence that you are an incredibly irrational person and in the interest of my health I am not going to fight with you, nor take to heart your words and judgments proffered only to hurt me. I am equally confident that I am not at fault here and years of enduring your brutality makes me owe you nothing at present. Yet still, and I must be insane, I will willingly come together with you if you decide that you want to begin to heal our relationship. I would love to love you but you hate me way too much.”

  Unmoved, Pat demanded by email that Susannah attend Megan’s wedding in June. Under no circumstances would he permit her to put in a brief appearance, then depart for France, where she was enrolled in a summer language course. At 2:30 a.m., the night of Susannah’s senior prom, he wrote:

  Some ground rules about the wedding. My brothers and sisters noted with great displeasure that you and Gregory hung back and apart at my father’s funeral. They did not get to talk to you. That will not happen at Megan’s wedding. Both of you will mingle among Megan’s and my friends. Get the word to your brother. You are going to act like Conroys at my daughter’s wedding, not Gurewitzes . . .

  Susannah re-sent her earlier email: “Who is the mean, disrespectful one here?” and Pat fired another volley in what became a two-day fusillade.

  You do not write worth a damn because you don’t think worth a damn . . . But congratulations for finally getting up the guts to write back. Quit trying to outwrite me. I’ll kick your ass every time you do. Send me your plans. You hear that. Got a problem with that? Send me your plans. Having trouble reading that? I’ve asked about eight times . . . Where are you thinking about going to college? In your mother’s rapacious greed to rob me of every penny I had ever made, she forgot to include your college tuition. She gets enough from me every month to send three kids to college but she likes spending all that money on herself . . . If I see you and your brother even talking together at Megan’s wedding there will be a scene. One day, Susannah, when you are no longer a prisoner of war, you are going to hate Lenore for this. Before I die you are going to adore me. I love you more than your mother ever can or will. Because I can love, Susannah. Another writing lesson. Be clearer. Be sharper. If you wish to attack me, which you clearly do, get better. Get far better. You are simply insolent and petulant, not incisive and cutting. Be an assassin who goes for the jugular. You kill by being sharp, not windy . . . I know your squirrelly mother engineered France and this summer. Tell her this. While she is in France I go for her throat in San Francisco. A mass letter talking about her divorce from me and what she has done to me and you . . . You do not know what Lenore did to me but you are about to find out. Everything you have or eat or buy or ow
n I have paid for, Susannah, including the tickets to France this summer. I’m going to cut your mother up for bait for not allowing you to see me. I’m furious. I rage against this. It is wrong, it is totally wrong and you know it is wrong. You self-righteous little urbanite. I will win this eventually, Susannah, and that is a promise. Why your mother is getting you out of the country is she knows you will fall in love with your father if you ever spend any time around him. And you will, Susannah. That’s a promise . . . I adore you, the Big Dad.

  Susannah replied:

  I do not want to fight with you. I am committed to Megan’s wedding . . . and I think that it is imperative that I attend. It will only be more difficult if you continue to abuse me because I am not going to retreat from this wonderful occasion. Please try. I am giving you no reason to be mean to me, and furthermore, there is no reason why you should ever be so hurtful.

  Pat reacted like a creative writing teacher chastising a deficient pupil:

  I just reread your last three e-mails. Lenore has not only eclipsed your ability to write she has murdered your ability to think. Your e-mails are nasty things which is OK by me since I am very aware I’m not exactly sending you Valentines. But . . . I have never seen a girl in a divorce treasure or honor her father less than you. Your cowardice has been breathtaking. Lenore makes eunuchs of all her children. Who the hell are you? Do you stand for anything? . . . why can’t you even raise your voice for that poor Southern boy who rose out of the South without much education but only a dream of becoming a writer? I have never seen a check that a publisher has ever sent me, Susannah. I’m the easiest person in the world to steal from. I never have money in my wallet and I don’t care about it. I don’t even care about the millions your mother stole from me. Money is her demon, not mine. It cheapens her spirit. You are her last weapon against me and you let yourself be so used. Shame on you, Susannah. You are half me, yet you do not love that half . . . Gloves are off now. You shame me and you shame my family. My father fought for his country in three wars . . . I’m famous all over the world for my struggles with and love of family. How did Lenore kill yours? What did she do to you? How did she make you so mean that you could do this to me?