The Lost Prince Read online

  Now that Pat Conroy had entered the equation, Steve marveled again that some cosmic force seemed to control events. He had seen the film of The Great Santini, which in synopsis sounded similar to the Cenci family tragedy and to Life for Death. Conroy had been an abused child who harbored murderous rage toward his father, just like Beatrice, just like the central character in my book.

  Geller, an Academy Award nominee for his script of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, had graduated from the Yale School of Drama. In addition to his screenplay credits, he had produced a number of novels, one of which had been made into the movie Pretty Poison starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld.

  He also held the distinction of being the last café writer in Rome. Weather permitting, he worked outdoors in front of the Pantheon. Starting in the a.m. at Bar di Rienzo, he followed the arc of the sun and switched across the piazza to Bar Rotonda for the afternoon. Unlike a traditional café writer, he didn’t scribble in a notebook. He pecked at a battery-powered Brother ER44 portable typewriter, whose hum appeared to mesmerize his Maltese dog, Brio, poised on a wicker chair opposite him. Gore Vidal once taunted Steve, “You’re taking dictation from your dog. You’re ghosting The Tales of Fluffy.”

  The Gellers’ car, a slinky Citroën DS saloon, had a pneumatic suspension system, which lifted the chassis when the gears were engaged, then let it sag when the engine died. It was a bit like riding on a water bed—a water bed crammed that Sunday with four adults and four kids ranging in age from infancy to adolescence, everybody competing for space with the barking Brio. Joan Geller, like Steve, was tiny, and she was a yoga teacher who could coil herself into a corner. Their two daughters, Hillary and Polly, had babysat our boys before, but today they couldn’t stop Sean and Marco from squirming and squawking.

  Undaunted, Steve drove with the aplomb of a New York cabbie, and as we whizzed past Renaissance fountains, the two of us speculated about the Conroys and what had possessed them to pitch their tent out in the boondocks. In that pre-Internet era we couldn’t just Google Pat and read his Wikipedia entry. I had ordered his books and resigned myself to weeks of waiting while the somnolent Italian postal system slow-boated them from the States. None of us had a clue what he looked like or what had drawn him to Italy.

  At Olgiata’s front gate, an officious guard collected our IDs and compared our names to those on the visitors list. Three years after Aldo Moro’s assassination, most security measures in Rome were a mere charade, but this guy took his job seriously and stuck his mug into Steve’s window. “I could have you arrested for carrying too many passengers,” he said.

  “Tante grazie. Thanks for not doing that.”

  Steve accelerated into Olgiata, past horse stables, tennis courts, and a golf course bordered by massive villas. Private swimming pools glinted like faceted jade around the deeper green of fairways. With all the conveniences of an upscale American retirement community, Olgiata was popular with diplomats and corporate executives who feared having their kneecaps blown off by the Red Brigades.

  Rather than raucous cobblestone street life, Olgiata featured a grid of smooth asphalt that rippled with heat mirages at each deserted intersection. There must have been an ordinance against hanging laundry outdoors, leaving trash cans at the curb, or speaking above a whisper. The neighborhood was dead as a doornail. While most of the architecture paid lip service to the Mediterranean vernacular—red tile roofs, terra-cotta-colored walls—the Conroys’ house was a sturdy ensemble of concrete slabs and glinting windows. At this time of year I guessed it was hot as a sweat lodge. In winter it would be cold as an alpine ice cave.

  “Jesus, what were they smoking when they rented this place?” Steve asked.

  Pat Conroy advanced on us with the rolling, pigeon-toed gait and the meaty girth of an ex–football player, a linebacker ten years and thirty pounds past his prime. An inch shy of six feet tall, he wore a white polo shirt, rumpled khakis, and thick-soled jogging shoes. Everything about him—his shoulders, his head, his belly, his personality—was outsized. Everything, that is, except his hand, which was warm and small when I shook it.

  He looked, as my grandmother would have put it, as Irish as Paddy’s pig, with the same pale high coloring I inherited from my Hibernian forbearers. Prematurely grey hair was another genetic trait we shared, but at the age of thirty-five, he was going bald and had an unfortunate comb-over, later described in Men’s Journal as lobster claws clinging to his scalp. With its small blue eyes, snip of a nose, and nearly lipless mouth, his face, at rest, seemed stripped to the basics, but when he smiled it couldn’t have been more expansive and expressive.

  His wife, Lenore, six months pregnant, wore a chic silver-grey maternity dress. Her hair was dark and hung straight to her shoulders, and her lustrous tan made it seem as if Pat had cowered in a root cellar while she spent the summer sunbathing. Although she had lived in Atlanta for a long time, she didn’t have a hint of Pat’s Southern accent, and where he favored flowery, declarative sentences, she spoke in sly, sassy asides. Much later, watching Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, I became convinced that Quentin Tarantino had originally had Lenore Conroy in mind for the role of Mia.

  Pat introduced Megan, an eleven-year-old daughter from his first marriage. She had chosen to spend a year in Rome with him and was thoroughly at ease with Lenore’s children, Greg and Emily, from her previous marriage. Greg had attended private school with Megan in Atlanta. Emily was a couple of years younger, a shy, self-conscious girl, with slight strabismus in her right eye. She recognized Sean as a schoolmate at St. Francis and beamed at him.

  “These international schools are going to bankrupt us,” Lenore said.

  “Hell, I’m already flat broke,” Pat said. “Lenore’s ex, the famous brain surgeon Dr. Bonzo, is suing my fat ass for my last red cent.” With that he served notice that this wouldn’t be an afternoon of amiable chitchat.

  We circled the house to a patio of white concrete slabs and green squares of grass. Although the checkerboard pattern had eye appeal, the alternating hard and soft surfaces twisted the ankles of the unwary. Spread on a picnic table was a selection of antipasti: prosciutto and melone, mozzarella di bufala, tomatoes and basilico, and fiascos of white wine on ice. For the main course, Pat had prepared pasta with shrimp sauce, combining, he said, a South Carolina Low Country recipe with local ingredients.

  Thirteen of us squeezed in around the table. That black-magic number might have troubled Steve Geller, but he was as hungry and eager to eat as the rest of us. Seated on my lap, Marco, sixteen months old, ate from my plate, and while his manual dexterity left a lot to be desired, he had mastered one Italian gesture. Every time he swallowed a bite, I asked, “È buono?” and he jabbed his index finger at his plump cheek and rotated it like a true trasteverino.

  While Pat poured the wine, Lenore explained how the family wound up in Olgiata. Through Pat’s editor, Jonathan Galassi, they met an Italo-American music teacher in Rome, who introduced them to some impecunious nobles, one of whom had an aunt who owned a castle in La Storta with vast drafty rooms, flocks of sheep grazing on its grounds, and a staff of what Lenore described as “Micronesians inhabiting tiny spaces like those pull-out drawers on German tour buses. The trouble was the aunt was demented. She wanted to rent out the castle, but refused to move from her bedroom. We wisely decided against that weird arrangement.”

  “So we ended up with this weird arrangement,” Pat interrupted. “It’s like Stalag 17. Every time I go jogging, I get chased by guard dogs.”

  “I thought the kids would like it better than being in town,” Lenore said. “And there’s space for Pat to work. I had no idea how isolated we’d be and how bad the traffic is on Via Cassia. I’m liable to give birth in the backseat of the car.”

  “We’re trying to break the lease and move. That’ll be another fortune down the drain.” Pat mentioned their monthly rent, a flabbergasting figure, more than Gore Vidal paid for his penthouse on Largo Argentina. Yet for all their compla
ints, the Conroys didn’t really sound perturbed. Pat in particular delivered every lament as an elaborate joke, with him as the bumbling straight man.

  “There’s one iron law here,” he said. “Nothing works quite as it should, nothing is quite as it appears to be, nothing is easy when with just a bit of effort it could be rendered impossible. Italians accept this. I can’t.”

  Memory tends to turn the past sepia-toned. When I glance at photographs of that day we all appear so young and happy—thirty-somethings surrounded by beautiful children on a warm autumn day in Italy, enjoying an alfresco lunch. In his brown corduroy coat Steve looked like the college professor he would eventually become. Linda wore stylish velour slacks and a purple silk blouse, while I had on a safari jacket as if about to audition for Animal Kingdom.

  And yet even back then, long before life had taught us its lessons, I sensed melancholy lurking beneath the surface layer of bonhomie. Like writers the world over, we griped about agents and editors, fickle producers and directors, paltry advances and late royalties, dread of the empty page and deeper dread of the empty bank account. The conversation kept veering back to the same themes: failure, crippling disappointment, and black-ass depression.

  Surprisingly, even the Gellers, who seemed so rooted in Rome, admitted to clinging on precariously. They had counted on Life for Death being produced and Steve receiving full payment for his script. Now that the project was in turnaround, he had to fly to LA and hustle for work.

  Pat heard out the details of the libel suit against me. After commiserating, he described how Lenore’s ex-husband was dragging him through court.

  “I don’t have the dough to compete with a wealthy brain surgeon,” Pat said. “Not with my book sales. I’ve been luckier with movie and paperback deals.” Although Pat didn’t mention it, the paperback rights to his most recent novel had sold for $695,000, a stupefying figure in those days. But he maintained, “I’m up to my ass in debt. I’m not just paying support for Megan, but for two other daughters my first wife has from a previous marriage. In December, after the new baby’s born, I’ll have more mouths to feed than a mamma robin. And now Alan Fucking Fleischer’s bleeding me white.”

  I glanced at Alan Fucking Fleischer’s kids, Greg and Emily. They appeared to regard Pat’s excoriation of their father as no more than a Punch-and-Judy show, mean but funny. Conroy laughed and they followed his lead. We all did.

  “Dr. Bonzo is hell-bent on punishing us,” Pat said. “He started harassing Lenore for custody of the kids. One day he went too far and got up in my grill. I pushed him off Lenore’s front porch and he landed in some shrubs. He wasn’t really hurt, but he had me arrested for assault and battery. Rather than stay for round two, we decided to light out for the territories.”

  “So you’re on the lam from the law,” Steve said.

  “More or less,” Pat brightly agreed.

  “We considered Paris,” Lenore put in. “But we don’t speak French.”

  “Do you speak Italian?” Linda asked.

  “No, but we’re learning.”

  “Good. Italians are more forgiving than the French.”

  “The question is whether we can forgive the Italians,” Pat said. “The other day I caught the mailman picking mushrooms in our backyard.”

  “And you wonder why it takes a month to get a letter from the States,” Steve joined in.

  “We’ve also had this ongoing argument with the landlady,” Lenore said. “The lawn furniture and TV were locked in a storage room, and we asked over and over—always politely—for the key.”

  “So a flunky shows up,” Pat cut in, “and tells us, ‘No chiave.’” Pat pronounced it key-ave. “I tell him, ‘Here’s the key-ave,’ and I pointed to my foot and kicked the door down.”

  “Good luck at getting the damage deposit back,” Lenore said.

  “Nobody gets a deposit back,” I said.

  There might have been a transition. If so, it escaped me. Suddenly, Pat segued from one set of tribulations to another and began recounting anecdotes about his traumatic childhood, the urtext of all his books. With impeccable timing and perfectly pitched lines, he described his father, the template for the Great Santini, beating him and his siblings black and blue. Then he brought in his mother, Peggy, an alternate target of Santini’s sadism, and told how she once tried to protect herself with a kitchen knife, only to have her husband knock her to the floor.

  “Mom had seven children and suffered six miscarriages,” Pat said. “Those were the lucky ones. The fortunate fetuses! The ones who got away. The rest of us had to go on living and take it on the chin.”

  I swapped Pat anecdote for anecdote, the two of us dancing a choreographed recital of family dysfunction. Neither my biological father nor my stepfather ever beat me, but the former had been a compulsive gambler who frittered away the mortgage money; the latter, a foul-tempered alcoholic who left a trail of wreckage in his wake. In our house, it was Mom who meted out the physical abuse, walloping her four kids with whatever lay close to hand—belts, sticks, hairbrushes, broom handles. Attempting to one-up Pat, I told about the time Mom served piping-hot bean soup for supper. When my older brother bent down and sniffed it, Mom clapped a hand to the back of his head and shoved his face into the bowl.

  Conroy howled in glee and high-fived me across the table.

  The afternoon ended as swifts flickered out of Olgiata’s pine forest and dive-bombed the fairways. While we cleared the table and packed up the kids, Pat pulled on a red V-neck sweater against the evening chill. Then he showed Steve and me around the house, which had been designed by a yacht owner, with built-in furniture, highly lacquered floors, and sleek fittings. Up a broad curved staircase lay the master bedroom, which boasted a grey suede headboard almost as high as the ceiling and a matching suede bedspread. Just off the room, in a sitting area, Pat had his office.

  There was a desk, but no typewriter, only a pad of yellow legal paper and a Montblanc pen. Like me, Pat wrote longhand. Unlike me, he listened to music as he worked and had imported a hi-fi phonograph from the States. Galley proofs of new novels by other writers littered the floor. Publishers were eager to get blurbs from Pat, and he confessed he was “a whore, completely promiscuous” with his praise.

  Starved for reading material, I coveted those galleys. A fellow sufferer of lower back pains, I also coveted the ergonomic chair that he had shipped over to Italy. But what sparked the worst covetousness was a bronze trophy in the shape of a regulation-size basketball. It was inscribed Pat Conroy, Most Valuable Player, the Citadel, 1967. He had played for a Division I team and had starred.

  Pat brushed off my compliments. “We were a weak team in a weak conference.”

  “To a benchwarmer at DeMatha High School, your career sounds big-time to me.”

  “You played for Morgan Wootten,” he exclaimed.

  “I did. I’m surprised you’ve heard of him.”

  “Come on, DeMatha’s legendary and Wootten’s a Hall of Fame coach. I went to Gonzaga High School when Dad was stationed at the Pentagon. I probably saw you play.”

  “Not unless there was a minute left in the game and DeMatha was ahead by thirty points.”

  “I’ll leave you two jock-strappers to your reveries,” Steve razzed us, and drifted back through the house.

  “Next time we get together,” Pat said, “let’s skip the family bullshit and talk basketball.” As if a deeper connection had been established—or else he just felt the need to clear the air—he confessed, “I lied. It wasn’t Jonathan Yardley who suggested I call you. The mother of a girl at St. Francis School mentioned you were a writer and gave me your number. Hope you don’t hate me. I really am desperate for a friend.”

  “Did this mother tell you I wrote like a prince?” I teased him.

  “No, honest, I read your novel—I don’t remember its title—about a Catholic priest in Texas recovering from a mental breakdown. Usually, I skip anything to do with Texas. Can’t stand all the bragging about t
heir favorite sports—football, fighting, and fucking. But I figured such a funny well-written novel had to be by an okay guy.”

  On the Via Cassia, battling the traffic back from a Sunday in the country, Joan Geller gave voice to what I was thinking. “We have to help the Conroys. Otherwise Olgiata will drive them out of their minds.”

  “Okay, Olgiata’s awful,” Linda said. “But what’s this BS with Pat calling it a Mafia compound?”

  “Poetic license,” Steve suggested.

  2

  Like most foreigners in Rome, Linda and I didn’t give a fig about visas or resident permits. We didn’t consider ourselves illegal aliens, but rather the brother and sister of those millions of Italians who lived off the books and between the lines, never registering on census rolls or tax records. Without a bank account, we paid all our bills in cash and rented apartments from landlords who declined to provide written leases. The downside to this catch-as-catch-can existence was our vulnerability to arbitrary eviction. In the course of a decade and a half we were forced to move ten times.

  Families with corporate or diplomatic connections shopped at the Embassy PX, depended on international courier services instead of the slowpoke Italian post office, and hired Sri Lankans and Filipinos as maids and baby minders. But Linda and I were obliged to practice petty economies and hiked across town to dispatch our mail from the Vatican PO. Every envelope bore a mosaic of stamps picturing saints and popes. We drank our cappuccinos standing up in cafés to beat the supplemental charge for sitting down at a table. With meals at home we served vino sciolto from open carafes and saved bottles with corks for special occasions.

  Far from feeling deprived, I felt adrenalized and believed that Italy fed me what Rome-based British novelist Muriel Spark referred to as “writer’s meat.” The city’s unfathomable rituals infused it with the aura of a secret society accessible only to those who took the trouble to wise up to its ways. A great part of the pleasure of living there was learning the ropes and not getting tangled in them—or laughing at yourself when the red tape did trip you up.