The Lost Prince Page 21
But other sections of The Death of Santini were as pugnacious as a brandished fist, and in his portrait of his suicidal brother Tom’s madness the dialogue called into question Pat’s own stability. “Hey, baby Tom, the games are over. Your oldest brother has arrived. And you know what big brothers do best? We love to kick the asses of our baby brothers because they’re weak and pathetic and can’t defend themselves.”
With Tom sprawled on the floor, Pat planted a foot in his face and taunted him: “If you fight me, I’ll kill you. If I kill you, I’ll be sad for a day or two, but that’s all.”
Although Pat made no attempt to excuse his behavior, he offered an explanation: “My father’s DNA assured me that I was always ready for a fight and that I could ride into any fray as a field-tested lord of battle.”
For the first time he suggested that he inherited some of his belligerence from his mother. Rather than portray her again as the hapless martyr of her sadistic husband and of Marine Corps sexism, he quoted Peggy Conroy boasting, “I ruled the house and everything that went on in it. I could make [your father] dance like a puppet whenever I wanted. I was the boss and the police chief in every town we entered.”
Revising a scene from My Losing Season where his mother grabbed a butcher knife to defend herself, only to have her husband slap her to the floor, Pat now insisted that she had stabbed Don Conroy, and pledged her son to secrecy as they rushed him to the emergency room. Pat conceded that no one else in the family had any recollection of this episode. But then his brothers and sisters, he said, suffered from seriously flawed memories. When they recalled their childhoods they sometimes recited passages from his fiction rather than personal experience.
In The Death of Santini, one thing hadn’t changed. He continued to pound away at Lenore. “On a devastating, inexplicable rebound,” he wrote, “I married Lenore Fleischer who would teach me everything about life and love that I didn’t want to know . . . in the next ten years she would ruin my life and lead me into a suicidal spiral that I thought I would never recover from.” He accused her of “unadulterated hatred of her daughter Emily, the victim of incestuous sexual violation,” and said that Lenore “failed to tell me she had gone off birth control three months before our wedding, then surprised me by getting immediately pregnant, maybe even on our wedding night.”
While a memoir is clearly an author’s side of the story, and no one would argue Pat’s right to cannibalize his life for his books, it bothered me that he kept doing what his daughter had entreated him not to do. Was this the humiliating exposure he had threatened if Susannah refused to bend to his will?
BY NOW PAT WAS VERY sick, and during the summer of 2012, stricken with Type 2 diabetes, soaring blood pressure, and liver failure, he nearly died. Again, doctors cautioned him to quit drinking and to follow a strict health regime. Almost a hundred pounds over his college playing weight, he was dangerously obese, but he checked out of the hospital determined to get well. Never one to do things by half measures, he hired a nutritionist and bought a business interest in a fitness center staffed by his personal trainer.
Even under duress—especially under duress!—Pat remained funny and eminently quotable. He joked to a Washington Post reporter, “If there was a loving, just God, foie gras would have one calorie and bean sprouts would have 1,400.” In photos of him working out, sweating prodigiously in a tee shirt and shorts, his legs looked as robust as tree trunks, his belly as big as a basketball. He didn’t appear to be sick, just gargantuan as if he had to be huge to survive all that had befallen him.
On the blog he had begun posting, he acknowledged, “There’s nothing on my résumé that indicates I’ll be successful . . . but I’m doing it because there are four or five books I’d like to write before I meet with Jesus of Nazareth—as my mother promised—on the day of my untimely death, or reconcile myself to a long stretch of nothingness as my non-believing friends insist.”
One thing he had never managed to reconcile himself to was Susannah’s absence. On St. Patrick’s Day 2013, he sent a letter to her and Lenore, admitting that his health scare had forced him to recognize how fleeting life is and how pervasive his sense of loss. “Lenore, I’d like to beg you to let me make it right with Susannah.”
As an inducement to his daughter, he promised to find her a job in publishing and pay for her to finish college. Then he added, “Because I don’t reward bad behavior you’re now cut out of my will. This seems ridiculous and easily fixable to me.” All Susannah had to do was allow him a “chance to be your Daddy before it’s too late . . . It’s free money that’ll come to you at the time of my death . . . This is a serious offer and I hope you take it seriously.”
Susannah found the letter so insulting and hurtful she didn’t bother answering it. Thirty-two years old, living now in Atlanta and employed at Emory University Hospital, she resented Pat’s misapprehension that Lenore made decisions for her. It had been her own choice to detach from her father, and in this she had acted against her mother’s wishes. Lenore actively encouraged her to reconnect with Pat, not least because she hoped a reconciliation would create family peace and stop Pat from taking potshots at them in print. It saddened Susannah how little her father understood her.
A year later, anxious for Susannah to attend his seventieth birthday party, he pressed her to talk to him face-to-face. So on a day of breath-catching high humidity and heat, they met at an Atlanta restaurant named Bones. A steak house frequented by businessmen and politicians, it had been Susannah’s choice, and Pat considered this a propitious sign—he and Lenore used to eat here in the ’80s.
Because Susannah hadn’t seen him in sixteen years, she worried that she’d be shocked by his appearance. To prepare herself, she reviewed photos from recent interviews. Still, when he stepped into Bones wearing a red baseball cap and a dark blazer over a tee shirt, he looked diminished, even as he bragged that rehab had lowered his blood pressure to the normal range and got his weight down to 230 pounds. Bundled in his arms were books he had bought for her at a Barnes & Noble. As ever, she thought, Pat equated pedagogy with paternity.
He had studied the menu ahead of time online with his nutritionist, selecting dishes that suited his diet—a salad, sautéed mushrooms, and grilled vegetables. Neither of them drank alcohol. While Susannah nervously pushed a Caesar salad around her plate, separating croutons from the anchovies, they talked about people from Rome. Pat said he had read Sympathy for the Devil, my memoir about Gore Vidal, and praised its picture of the old days. Then they spoke of family members, living and dead, and as Pat moved from name to name, it was a bit like reciting the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary. No matter how painful, no matter how remote the relationship, it was important for him to caress every bead on the linked chain.
After lunch, he offered her a lift to her office in his new Volkswagen Passat. She opened the door on the passenger’s side, and a batch of CDs slid off the seat. They both laughed. Pat had changed in lots of ways, but he still drove a messy car.
Though that lightened the mood, Susannah made sure he understood that she hated being defined by the falsehoods he wrote about her. She hated it that when she Googled “Susannah Conroy,” she got “lost daughter.” She wasn’t “lost,” she insisted, and if he kept claiming that she was and berating Lenore in his books, “That’ll be a deal breaker.”
“I get it,” Pat said.
By email he stressed how delighted he had been to see her, “an Atlanta woman on the go.” Apologizing for the “hurt over the years because of my writing,” he explained, “it’s an old habit and a hard one to break. It is part of my credo as a writer to tell the truth as I see it . . . If you think I’ve been unfair to Lenore in my books, you have not been introduced to Dr. Lowenstein in the Prince of Tides or Shyla in Beach Music. I took the best parts of Lenore and celebrated those parts of her character.”
He offered no apology for the less than celebratory things, or the flatly inaccurate ones, he had written. He encouraged Lenore
and Susannah to cooperate with Catherine Seltzer, the biographer he had appointed. “If my biography does not tell the whole truth about me, Susannah, then my whole life will have been a lie. If you and Lenore choose not to tell your stories about me, then the book will be weaker . . . the book will read much stronger and more authentic with your voice alive and rolling afire with your own voices. Besides, you’re both beautiful, articulate and funny as hell.”
PAT CONROY’S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY WAS a three-day gala, thronged by 350 guests who paid to attend panel discussions and readings at the University of South Carolina Center for the Arts. An immense cake, baked in the shape of a shrimp boat, floated on a bed of white chocolate oysters and shrimp. Though hardly an occasion for father-daughter bonding, the party gave Susannah a chance to become reacquainted with her extended family, and to marvel at Pat’s ability to field multiple demands. The front door to his house in Beaufort, she noticed, had a formidable combination lock, but since everyone in town knew the code, privacy was non-existent in Casa Conroy.
Afterward, Pat volunteered to chauffeur Susannah to the Savannah Airport for her flight back to Atlanta. They had barely cleared the driveway when he stopped to chat with a neighbor’s child. Then he paused to speak to a boy on a bicycle. When Pat pulled over a third time to greet a friend, she reminded him that at this rate she’d miss her plane.
Among her father’s exuberant fans, where was she supposed to fit in? Pat had always claimed that if she spent more time with him, she’d come to adore him. But where Pat was uninhibited in proclaiming his love, Susannah was shy and soft-spoken. It troubled her that she couldn’t match his ardor; it left her feeling inadequate. She had deep emotions. She just hadn’t discovered how to express them to him.
She related all this in Rome where she flew shortly after Pat’s birthday. It pleased me that they had at last reconciled, and that Pat sent warm wishes to Linda and me. Susannah told us how much she admired Pat’s persistence. “If someone cold-shouldered me for twenty years, I’m not sure I would have kept trying. So a tip of the hat to him for that.”
OVER THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS, PAT fell off the wagon with a splat and was soon gravely ill. A local doctor diagnosed pancreatitis, a condition Pat had suffered in the past, and treated it with Tylenol. But by New Year’s his symptoms—acute abdominal pain, nausea, and extreme fatigue—hadn’t improved, and Susannah, who worked at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University, thought her father needed a second opinion. After consulting oncologists in her office, she arranged for an ambulance to transport him from Beaufort to Atlanta.
Normally this would have been an easy, if boring, five-hour trip on the interstate. A snowstorm, however, turned the drive treacherous, and as Pat lay strapped to a gurney, listening to the siren scream, he ached at every icy bump in the road.
By daybreak, the city shimmered under a crust of crystalline ice, and the streets to Emory University, usually crowded with students, were deserted as Susannah set off at 9 a.m. to visit her father. She had delayed leaving home to allow him more time to rest. En route she bought The New York Times. She had no idea whether Pat was in any condition to read it. But the newspaper had always been a part of his morning routine, and she decided it would be reassuring to stick to it.
This was the way Susannah expressed love—not with grandiloquent pronouncements or bold gestures, but with small favors and acts of kindness. Show, don’t tell, was her father’s literary mantra. She would keep him company, keep him comfortable, and monitor his medical care.
For forty-five minutes, she had Pat to herself, except for a nurse with whom he was already best friends. Then a tide of well-wishers flooded into the room and reclaimed him as public property. He reveled in this role, perhaps because it diverted him while he waited for his test results.
Susannah left, hoping the crowd would leave too. But when she came back that evening, the rogue’s gallery of friends and family hadn’t budged, and everybody was up to date on Pat’s diagnosis. Doctors had broken the dire news that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Under the best circumstances he would have had a few months to live. But “best” didn’t apply in his instance. Because he also suffered cirrhosis of the liver, standard procedures to prolong life would be futile.
Straining for words and stymied in the attempt, Susannah didn’t know what to say. Not in this mob. Not with everybody listening. Not with Pat, apparently in high spirits, holding court as if at a dinner party, flushed with laughter. “Here I was getting healthy with the help of a personal trainer and my own gym,” Pat said, “and suddenly I’m dying.”
The phone rang, and Pat told the caller, “I just learned I have terminal cancer. It’s the best day of my life.”
Susannah didn’t understand this, no more than she had understood it as a little girl when he phoned on Thanksgiving and declared he was going out to buy a gun. It didn’t sound like a joke. On the other hand, it didn’t strike her as a cry for help either. It was more like he meant to serve notice that he accepted his fate and so should others.
The next morning, his mood changed and he went into warrior mode. On Facebook he posted that he had pancreatic cancer and vowed to fight it. “I owe you a novel,” he told readers, “and I intend to deliver it.” This prompted a reply from two million fans.
Each day, a nurse updated Pat’s chart, and in the space after Goal?, she followed his instructions and filled in, “Finish novel.” It sounded like one of his 1982 New Year’s resolutions. “Work hard on writing every day.”
Released from the Winship Cancer Institute, Pat returned to Beaufort, where his condition quickly deteriorated. Palliative care no longer coped with his pain. Still, he refused to give up. Swimming in and out of consciousness, he submitted to an agonizing drive to Jacksonville, Florida, for yet another oncologist’s opinion. Doctors there confirmed the original prognosis: nothing could be done.
Back in Beaufort, Pat continued during lucid moments to speak of completing his novel, but as these intervals became fewer and fewer, he slept when he was lucky and drifted in a delirium of medication when his luck failed. Ketamine brought quick, trance-like relief, but afterward left him agitated and disoriented. In this state, he took a last trip to a hospital in Charleston, the family praying for a miracle, Pat befuddled by drugs.
DURING THOSE DREADFUL FEBRUARY DAYS, Linda and I were in Key West. On the nineteenth, I turned seventy-three, and if that and the specter of Pat’s death weren’t sufficient to sear my mortality into mind, I was due for an MRI of my prostate at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City.
On February 25, I wrote Lenore: “With the utmost caution and trepidation I broach a subject that’s been on my mind since Pat became ill. I feel there’s unfinished business between us, none of which is likely to be resolved now. But I would like him to know that I’m concerned about him and care for him and am sympathetic to his situation, especially as I set off next week to NY to have my cancerous prostate assessed . . . Could Susannah pass along my regards and tell him that I’m praying for him. If he’d like to see me or be in touch in any way, I would welcome that. On the other hand if that would cause him more trouble than it could possibly be worth, I’d understand that too.”
Of course, I could have flown to his bedside, whether he wanted me to or not. But I feared I’d be turned away. His sister Carol Ann had already attempted a deathbed reunion, only to be barred from his room. Pat didn’t need another terrible scene, and I didn’t believe I was equal to one either.
Gripped in a cold spell as icy as a corpse’s fingers, New York broke down all the defenses I had built up in Florida. At Sloan Kettering, I filled in a lengthy questionnaire, convinced that none of it applied to me. Other patients in the waiting room looked worse off. Or so I assured myself. They had cancer. I was under “active surveillance,” a status that sounded purely bureaucratic. As long as my numbers held steady, as long as the lentil-size tumor didn’t metastasize outside the prostate capsule, I was good to go on watching and waiting.
I wasn’t dying. Pat was dying. Thinking about him helped me not to think about myself. Or maybe this was just another way of thinking about myself. His absence had long exerted a strong presence in my life—like silence in a piece of music or blank space on a page of poetry. As I was inserted into the claustrophobic confines of the MRI machine, I prayed that Pat wasn’t in too much pain. (But how much was too much?) I prayed that he wasn’t paralyzed by fear. (Would he rather be conscious or comatose? Which would I prefer?) After a frenzied life, he deserved a peaceful death. (But as he would have reminded me, what does deserving have to do with anything?)
As Susannah later told me, Pat experienced periods of lucidity in Charleston and summoned Jessica, Melissa, Megan, and her to his room. Although she couldn’t recall his exact words, she remembered him rambling on about war and how Jessica and Melissa’s father, just like his own, had been a fighter pilot. He had died in Vietnam, and Lenore’s uncle had been killed in World War II. Pat urged them to honor their dead relatives as defenders of the country.
Susannah believed that Pat longed to say something that would live on after him. “Some choose children,” he blurted. “I chose literature.” To which one of the girls replied, “We noticed.” Even at death’s door the Conroys couldn’t pass up a punch line.
As Pat subsided into a silence relieved only by the occasional cough or fragmented word, Susannah said he looked like an athlete “who had left it all on the field.” Then remembering her father’s sport had been basketball, she amended that to, “He left it all on the court.”
Sandra and the girls gathered for a conference with the team of physicians, and while they asked questions, Pat lay mute and motionless. Chemotherapy, the doctors advised, was now more harmful than helpful. Liver disease, they repeated, had limited their options from the start. After four hospitalizations in six weeks, they suggested hospice care. No more aggressive interventions, no machines. One doctor asked if he wanted to go home, and Pat said, “Yes,” and didn’t speak again.