The Lost Prince Page 20

  In answer, Susannah repeated her previous email, the one ending “there is no reason why you should ever be so hurtful.”

  Pat shot back:

  My third letter of the day. You are not going to do this to me. I will not suffer the utter humiliation of you attending my daughter’s wedding and then going to France. Got it. You come to the wedding and I’m taking my lawful visitation. You come here you stay here. Got it clear enough, bigshot? You will stay here and get to know me and learn to love me and honor me . . . If your mother thinks Gregory can get you to the airport after the wedding tell her I will move against her son as the son of the Great Santini. I have never laid a hand on Gregory but I know how to. I will rearrange his handsome face if he tries to interfere with my seeing you this summer . . . You’ll learn to waterski this summer instead of French grammar.

  As the day wore on Pat’s vituperation never diminished, but his self-control did. Ranting like Lear at a perfidious daughter, he forgot the King’s impassioned plea, “Let me not be mad.” Poor Pat sounded mad in both senses of the word.

  This is total warfare now. Lenore is wrong, has always been wrong about not letting me see you and will be wrong about everything she does or thinks the rest of her life. If you come to Megan’s wedding I intend for you to stay for the entire summer. It is because I love and adore you. If you do not come I’ll expose your mother publicly . . . No two days in Beaufort, then France. Got it. Am I being clear . . . A writing lesson . . . You have yet to discover the awesome power of verbs, especially the short punchy anglosaxon ones. They’re the ones that sing and burn and rip and scar. Write me and let me know what you’re thinking. If you attack me, do it better. I adore you, the Big Dad.

  Reading this, I refused to accept that Pat Conroy, the icon of the abused child, had become an abuser himself. As he mocked Susannah’s writing, I decided it was his own grasp of language that had let him down and deluded him into believing he could browbeat his daughter into loving him. Here was an author, who had swayed millions with “the liquor of language,” now wielding words like meat cleavers.

  Pat’s career had always been predicated on self-exposure, on an almost religious impulse to confess and seek forgiveness. Was that why he let me see their correspondence? To show himself at his worst and obtain absolution? My first instinct was to refuse him. He sounded sick, dangerous, and I wanted to protect Susannah. But then I hoped that if I could unblock the logjam between them, maybe he’d regain his bearings.

  19

  In autumn 2000, Sean, who aspired to direct films, was a production assistant on Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, then shooting at Cinecittà in Rome. Linda and I rented an apartment on Via Giulia, to be near him and Susannah, who was at St. Stephen’s School. Now eighteen, she looked no more than thirteen, and her dark hair and eyebrows exaggerated the pallor of her complexion. Frail and underweight, she had a voice so faint I had to keep asking her to repeat herself.

  Lenore alerted us that doctors had diagnosed Susannah with neurally mediated hypotension. A condition sometimes confused with chronic fatigue, it was caused by an adrenal gland malfunction which, in her case, might have been exacerbated by the stress of the divorce and a four-month bout of mononucleosis. In addition to extreme exhaustion, her symptoms included dangerously low blood pressure and a discrepancy between her lying-down and standing-up pulse rates. Despite the side effects of nausea and dizziness, she took Fleurinof, a corticosteroid; Dexedrine; and DHEA, a hormone replacement.

  I put off speaking to her about Pat until she had re-acclimated to Rome. Then in October, once her health and spirits improved, the two of us strolled downhill from the Aventino through the Circus Maximus, over gravel still dusty from the summer. In black slacks and a black turtleneck, Susannah might have been a Left Bank artist; she told me she was writing poetry and taking painting courses. She hoped to edit the school literary magazine. As we trudged around the track where legend had it Ben-Hur raced his chariot, she asked if I knew the Italian word for “goddaughter.” Shamefully, I didn’t, even after living in Italy off and on for decades.

  She forgave my ignorance, observing that since I hadn’t been a godfather before, I couldn’t be expected to know that she was my figlioccia. “And you’re my padrino,” she said.

  With no subtle way of broaching the subject, I explained that after years of estrangement, her father and I had struck up an email correspondence. It remained uncertain whether we could repair the rupture between us, but Pat had asked me to give her a message. He and his wife, Sandra, were willing to live in Rome that winter and work to resolve his differences with her.

  Thin and pale as she was, I had expected it to be easy to read Susannah’s reaction. But her face was a blank white page. We advanced to the foot of the Palatine Hill and sat on a stone wall.

  “Have you read the emails he wrote me?” she asked.

  “Yes, he sent me copies.”

  “It’s like he wants the whole world to read everything he writes.”

  “I’m sure the emails hurt you,” I said. “But when Pat loses his temper, he doesn’t realize how he sounds.”

  “I guess you read where I wrote I must be insane for still loving him. But he hates me too much.”

  “He doesn’t hate you. He loves you.”

  “He has a funny way of showing it.”

  I didn’t push Susannah. I didn’t press my thumb on the scale. I sat quietly on the cool stone with the massed ruins behind us radiating the last of the day’s heat.

  When she spoke again, it was with a strength of purpose out of proportion to her size. She promised to meet with Pat, but only if he swore he would quit writing terrible things about her and her mother.

  When I phoned Pat with what I regarded as good news, he sounded less than enthusiastic. He said he’d have to check with Sandra and consult Nan Talese about the publishing schedule for his book in progress, My Losing Season. Then he added, “I want Susannah to fly to South Carolina for Christmas so we can discuss things before I move to Rome.”

  “My impression . . . Actually, it’s not an impression. She told me outright she’d meet you here, but that’s on condition that you stop writing about Lenore and her.”

  “Let me get this straight. My kid, who I haven’t seen in years, who’s living off my money, wants to set the rules?”

  Into the teeth of his truculence, I might have thrown raw meat, saying, Take it or leave it, Pat. Or I could have tossed him a tranquilizer, pleading with him to compromise. I did neither. I listened to the oceanic static of the long-distance line. Or was that Pat’s angry breathing?

  “Fuck it,” he finally said. “If she won’t come here for Christmas, I’m not going there.”

  “Is that what you want me to tell her?”

  “Say whatever you like.”

  Filled with despair, I reminded Pat that I had done exactly as he had asked, and Susannah agreed to get together. Why had he changed his mind?

  He couldn’t or wouldn’t explain.

  Pat and I didn’t correspond for more than six months. Then in May 2001, bubbling over with bonhomie, he emailed me, marveling about a cruise he and Sandra had taken from Cairo to Lisbon. Almost as an afterthought, he wrote, “Again, Mike, thanks for your intercession with Susannah. I knew how it was going to come out but you had to learn for yourself. Lady Lenore has to quit pulling the puppet strings before there can be a resolution to this sad affair. Ah, but you had to learn that too. It touched me that you tried.”

  Pat appeared to have forgotten that he, not I, had suggested I intercede with Susannah. Lenore had had nothing to do with it.

  For a while, Pat and I corresponded about my memoir, Do I Owe You Something? His enthusiasm for it and his offer to write an introduction raised my hopes that this would lead to a meeting between us. But when the publisher, LSU Press, declined to include a chapter about Pat, he lost interest, and another long silence ensued.

  I broke it shortly before Christmas 2001 to say I had visited S
usannah in San Francisco and found her in good health and happily enrolled at UC Berkeley. Linda and I were spending the winter in Key West and invited him and Sandra down for a visit.

  Pat replied that there were too many writers in Key West for his taste.

  Two years later, at the Virginia Festival of the Book, Sandra popped up after I participated in a panel discussion and introduced herself. She said Pat had encouraged her to pass along his greetings. I asked her to join Linda and me for dinner, and Sandra accepted. An attractive ash-blond with a lovely Southern accent, she spoke of the four of us getting together in spring. She promised to give Pat our love.

  This led to nothing.

  And so I resigned myself to never seeing him again except in dreams where we crossed paths, with me uncertain whether to hug him or let him hurry by. The idea of a reconciliation had come to seem so remote, I could scarcely remember the point of it. Still, I never stopped hoping and never stopped thinking about Pat, and I never stopped puzzling over how a love story had turned into a tale as troubling and mysterious as any of the true crime tragedies I had written. A shrink might say—a shrink did say—that this all tied in with infantile separation anxiety and had reawakened memories of other significant figures who vanished from my life. Not that this insight salved the pain. “Loss,” as Pat wrote, “hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call your name in the night.”

  20

  Graham Greene remarked that a writer’s childhood is the bank account he’ll draw on for the rest of his career. In this respect, Pat inherited incredible riches, and like any heir to a fortune, he faced the difficulty of deciding what to do with his wealth. His natural impulse was to splurge. During the last two decades of his life, he produced only one more novel, South of Broad, but turned out books of nonfiction that continued to tap into the same vault and pay out the same currency as his fiction. Regardless of what he wrote, it revolved around familiar characters and central traumas—his mother and father and the damage they had done to him, the duplicity of women, the victimization of children, and his lifelong effort to coax order out of chaos.

  Even The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life served up second helpings from his childhood. It also served up a couple of curious comments about his literary career. Discussing the background to The Prince of Tides, Pat said there was no early indication that it would be a great success. He named me as a discourager: “The novelist, Michael Mewshaw, read it in Rome and suggested I cut it into twelve novels.” But Pat’s recall of this episode a quarter of a century ago was shaky. I responded to the first two hundred pages of a rough draft, not the full finished manuscript, and I never suggested that Pat cut it into twelve novels. His journal entry from that day in 1983, when we reviewed the first few chapters, contains a correct version of events.

  In My Losing Season, a chronicle of his senior year on the Citadel basketball team, he devoted almost as much space to rehashing his father’s cruelty as he did to dramatizing his thwarted hoop dreams. For me, a fellow aficionado of the game, the book was better when it focused on his adolescent fervor to achieve through sport what had been denied him in other arenas. The hard yards he put into practicing his jumpshot foreshadowed the labor Pat later applied to his books, lifting a wounded boy into world prominence.

  But a journalist attacked My Losing Season’s truthfulness, a serious accusation against any memoir, especially in Pat’s case, where his credibility, not to mention his popularity, depended on his being a reliable narrator of his misery. A Washington Post excerpt from the book dwelled on Pat’s days at Gonzaga High School, playing junior varsity basketball. At the annual athletic banquet he claimed Don Conroy had flown into one of his violent rages and hit Pat in front of an auditorium full of students and their fathers. According to My Losing Season, this set off “a free-for-all” as “dozens of dads . . . came roaring to my defense.”

  The scene prompted Dave McKenna, a reporter then at the Washington City Paper, now at Deadspin, to start digging. After The Washington Post acknowledged it hadn’t fact-checked the story, McKenna interviewed witnesses Pat had cited by name. None of them had any memory of the brawl. William Bennett, former secretary of education, had been at the banquet, but said, “I can’t recall that scuffle.”

  Pat Buchanan, a Gonzaga graduate, conservative TV commentator, presidential speechwriter, and former Republican presidential candidate, tried to verify the story with his six brothers who had all gone to Gonzaga. Not one of them had ever heard of the incident. Buchanan puckishly observed that Conroy’s “some writer, isn’t he?”

  McKenna unleashed “an armada of emails and phone calls” to the author, his agent, and his publisher. Finally, Pat responded through his agent, “No one saw him get hit, and he did not discuss it with anyone.”

  McKenna concluded, “if nobody saw Conroy get hit by his dad, then the whole passage about Gonzaga dads coming after the elder Conroy is bogus. And that means the whole brawl is bogus. And that means any lasting emotional impact suffered as a result of the brawl, meaning great chunks of My Losing Season, is bogus.”

  In a follow-up article, McKenna placed this matter in the context of the recent controversy caused by James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces, which had started off as a novel but had been marketed as fact. McKenna pointed out that Pat had blurbed Frey’s fraudulent memoir, and moreover Pat’s editor, Nan Talese, had edited A Million Little Pieces. This raised the question, at least in McKenna’s mind, of what kind of fact-checking the books had undergone.

  Apparently undaunted by this minor controversy, Pat repeated in his oral biography the episode of his father beating him the night of the Gonzaga athlete banquet. The scene now occurs on a parking lot, not in an auditorium. But that didn’t change Dave McKenna’s mind. In an article for Deadspin, he mocked Pat for lying from the grave.

  Pat’s next book, My Reading Life (2010), a collection of autobiographical essays, contained charming reminiscences about his baptism in the priesthood of literature. He dedicated it “to my lost daughter, Susannah Ansley Conroy. Know this: I love you with my heart and always will. Your return to my life would be one of the happiest moments I could imagine.” No one would guess that Susannah was now a grown woman of twenty-nine who long ago agreed to reconcile with her father.

  How much of the book can be accepted as truth, I don’t know. When Pat claimed to have bumped into Italo Calvino in a café and enjoyed a sprightly conversation with him, or when he described a tour of Rome with Gore Vidal as his private guide, I had my doubts. But these were minor quibbles compared to my reaction when Pat later maintained that he had often eaten out with Vidal, Linda, and me in Rome, and that Gore liked him because Pat always picked up the bill. To my recollection, Pat met Vidal precisely one time, at my fortieth birthday party, and Conroy’s diaries note no dinners with Vidal.

  AS I STARTED THE STEEP descent toward seventy, with Pat in a glide path behind me, time seemed to speed up. Other things slowed down. Still others slipped out of kilter. Doctors diagnosed me with a heart arrhythmia and cured it with a catheter ablation. An oncologist warned me that my prostate needed close monitoring.

  My mother died, professing her love by telephone, but refusing to allow me to visit as she faded away. In Maryland at her funeral, none of my siblings cared to speak after the requiem Mass. But I extemporized for a few minutes, startling the congregation and myself by paraphrasing the Koran. Even in death, I said, Mom would remain as close to me as Allah was to his children—as close as the vein in a man’s neck.

  Pat, no surprise, was a far superior eulogist. Family and friends frequently beseeched him to speak at obsequies of their loved ones. A number of these tributes were published in a posthumous miscellany, A Lowcountry Heart. At Doug Marlette’s memorial service he declared that their friendship was founded “on an untouchable loneliness” and “oceanic rage,” and he demonstrated his loyalty by stridently defending Marlette’s second novel, The Bridge, which had been criticized in
some quarters as slandering a fellow North Carolina novelist. Speaking directly to his dead comrade, Pat proclaimed, “For you, Doug, in honor of you, my next book is to be named Bring Me the Head of Alan Garganus. In memory of you, Doug Marlette, each year I am going to bring a hundred of my novels and conduct a seminar on the burning of books.”

  Not satisfied with refighting a literary feud at a funeral, Pat maligned Lenore. A dozen years after their divorce, he advised mourners that he and Marlette always referred to his second wife as “the Taliban.”

  Yet another memoir, The Death of Santini (2013), opened with an invocation of the family’s deities—Don Conroy “every inch of him a god of war” and Peggy Conroy “goddess of light and harmony.” The last book published during Pat’s lifetime, it was in parts as poignant as anything he ever wrote: “I was the oldest of seven children; five of us would try to kill ourselves before the age of forty . . . Love came to us veiled in disturbances—we had to learn it the hard way, cutting away the spoilage like bruises on a pear.”