The Lost Prince Read online

  From then on, the conference dealt with practical details. In Beaufort, should they carry him upstairs? Or was it better to bring his bed downstairs where he’d have a view he loved?

  Meanwhile, the results of my MRI indicated no change in the lentil-size tumor. Still, the oncologist recommended I undergo a biopsy. Not that it would put my mind permanently at ease, but it would tide me over until the next round of tests in spring.

  Alone and at loose ends, I walked the freezing windy streets. Linda had offered to accompany me here, but I preferred to manage my anxiety on my own and share lighter moments with her by telephone. At Sloan Kettering, an attractive female Asian doctor quizzed me about my sex life.

  “Erections?” she asked.

  “What about them?”

  “How often do you have them?”

  “At my age how often am I supposed to have them?”

  “Some men in their seventies never have sex,” she said. “Some have it every day.”

  “With the same woman?” I asked. That got a laugh out of Linda but no reaction from the earnest young MD.

  I knew that if Pat were here, not even cancer could have kept us from laughing. He’d probably tease me about my itty-bitty tumor, joking that it was something you’d barely notice in a salad or soup bowl. A mid-list malignancy, he’d call it—while he had the blockbuster bestseller variety.

  IN 1983, PAT HAD WRITTEN when he left Rome that our “life changing friendship . . . has four distinct parts like a weathervane and it all moves in harmony and we know how all the winds of the world are blowing when we’re together. The full diminishment of losing you has not hit me yet and I don’t think I could stand it if I faced it fully now.”

  The day after my MRI, March 4, 2016, I had no choice but to face his loss and confront the full diminishment of his death. The news reached me via emails and phone calls from London, Rome, Madrid, and Paris, Canada and throughout the United States. Everyone sent condolences at the passing of a man I hadn’t laid eyes on in decades. It was some small consolation that they still thought of us as friends, the link between us intact.

  Susannah emailed, “I was with my Dad a few days before he died and wanted to let you know that he was thinking about you and you were on his mind and in his heart. Megan also asked me to send a message from her that she thought of you often over the past month and that some of her favorite memories of Dad are when you were together.

  “There is a service on Tuesday at 11 a.m. at St. Peter’s Church located on Lady’s Island, South Carolina. No obligation to come, but know that you are most welcome.”

  I couldn’t make it. The funeral fell on the same day, precisely at the same hour, as my biopsy. But I thanked Susannah for letting me know I had been in Pat’s heart, which I imagined as an immense chambered nautilus, huge enough to hold all his loved ones. As Pat, a true prince of tides, would have known, a nautilus possesses a counter-shaded shell, dark on top, bright on the bottom, cunningly devised to confuse predators. Everything Susannah relayed to me, everything journalists reported, reinforced this image of a deeply camouflaged and conflicted heart.

  For most of his adult life Pat spurned the Catholic Church but conceded that “goosebumps spread down the keyboard of my spine” every time a priest intoned, “I will go to the altar of God, to God the joy of my youth.” Such a priest presided at a requiem Mass for Pat, and out of the vast congregation a handful of his siblings and Susannah received communion.

  Despite his love-hate relationship with the Citadel, he had invited the corps of cadets to attend his funeral and a number of them did, including two Summerall Guards in full regalia, with polished brass and shako hats. Among the twelve hundred mourners, some eulogized Conroy as a basketball prodigy who had once scored fifty-five points in a game. Some praised his books which had made the town proud, others his loyalty and humility for resettling in the place where he had started. Some recalled that he had excoriated the state as a refuge for racist bigots. In revenge, he had been labeled a “nigger lover,” and now, as if to embrace that ugly epithet, he chose to have his mortal remains and immortal soul buried outside of Beaufort in an African American cemetery.

  AFTERWORD

  THE COUNTERLIFE

  Die and become the man you are. That’s what the ancient Greeks believed. With death, the lifelong process of becoming ended and the person in full emerged. But Pat Conroy remained, just as he had been in life, a protean figure who cast a large shifting shadow. Fulsome obituaries, personal tributes, and reminiscences from fellow writers poured in, and he was no sooner buried than his grave became a pilgrimage site.

  In Beaufort, people proposed erecting a statue in his honor. Others, including Pat’s widow, Cassandra King, thought a more fitting memorial would be a literary center, providing museum space for his memorabilia, classrooms for readers, and a magnet for visiting authors and lecturers. Hailing him in its mission statement as “one of America’s best loved writers and truth-tellers, the Conroy Center continues Pat Conroy’s courageous and generous-hearted legacy as a teacher, mentor, advocate and friend to storytellers of every kind.”

  Jean-Paul Sartre opined that most writers aren’t as good as their books. But in many respects, Pat Conroy was better than what he wrote. He fought against child abuse, sexual abuse, racism, and violations of women’s rights. He advocated coeducation at the Citadel and supported Shannon Faulkner when she broke the school’s gender barrier in 1995. Then after Ms. Faulkner withdrew from the Citadel, citing psychological distress and death threats to her family, Pat paid for her college education elsewhere. In recognition of Pat’s international stature, President Clinton invited him to fly aboard Air Force Two to the 1997 Irish peace accords.

  But as our mutual friend Steve Geller observed years ago in Rome, the gods of laughter, those cosmic comedians, never rest. A week before a memorial service on the waterfront in Beaufort commemorated Pat’s life, Alan Fleischer died alone in his New York apartment on May 8, 2016. His body wasn’t discovered until the following day.

  Fleischer had long since disappeared from public view after a series of sensational newspaper headlines charged him with sexually molesting his daughter. The University of Arizona, although under intense pressure to fire him, kept Fleischer on its medical school faculty until he fell into a depression and committed several errors during operations. After losing his license to perform surgery, he accepted a buyout from the university and moved east.

  Among his personal effects, Fleischer’s survivors discovered a cache of documents related to his decade-long legal battle with Pat Conroy. In addition to hundreds of pages of affidavits, sworn depositions, trial pleadings, financial statements, medical records, and newspaper clippings, there were letters from Pat that had been introduced into evidence during court proceedings. All these papers were offered to me. Did I want them?

  Well, I did and I didn’t. To the extent that Pat’s dispute with Dr. Fleischer had played a part in our friendship, I thought I had already covered it. Still, I was curious about the contents of the file, and as the author of four books and countless pieces of investigative journalism, I felt a professional responsibility to double-check all the available information.

  The documents arrived in an overstuffed FedEx box that weighed more than ten pounds. It took days to separate them according to subject matter and arrange them in chronological order. As I read and digested the legal jargon, I was reminded of Short Circuit, which had originated as a lyrical hymn to tennis and ended as a forensic examination of the game’s underbelly. Again I had gone searching for gold and discovered uranium. How should I treat this radioactive material, much of which contradicted Pat’s reputation for kindness and truth telling.

  After some debate, I decided to follow Pat’s invariable editorial advice: Put in everything. As he had warned Susannah and Lenore, if you do “not tell the whole truth about me . . . then my whole life will have been a lie.”

  To someone raised in a military milieu and steeped in my
ths of American sports, the U.S. legal system probably resembled an athletic contest, with rules as straight as the lines on a basketball court, and winners and losers as clear-cut as the numbers on a scoreboard. Pat never mastered its arcane protocols and ambiguities.

  From the moment I first met him, he maintained that he fled Atlanta to escape Lenore’s ex-husband, a wealthy brain surgeon who hounded her for custody of their kids and filed frivolous suits against Pat. In self-defense, Pat had filed countersuits and accused Alan Fleischer of attempting to bankrupt him. But the documents tell a different story. Supported by his income tax records, Fleischer presented himself to the court as a father of modest means pleading to have his alimony reduced because his ex-wife had hooked up with a rich, famous author.

  This sort of domestic conflict was commonly resolved according to civil law. But somehow Conroy v. Fleischer mutated into a slow-growing cancer that spread and consumed everybody. It was the real-life equivalent of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the imbroglio in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House that raged for generations and bankrupted all parties to the litigation.

  Fleischer certainly played his role in this fatal folie à deux. He hired lawyers he couldn’t afford and filed affidavits that cost more than he could hope to recover. But Pat did the same thing, piling up expenses far in excess of what Alan owed in child support. Worse yet, Pat refused to leave it to his handsomely compensated attorneys to cope with the case. He intruded at every turn and dispatched defamatory letters to Fleischer, Fleischer’s wife, his attorneys, and his psychiatrist.

  Plenty of litigants have undoubtedly been tempted to take the law into their own hands. But few ever supply a paper trail of evidence for the opposing side to exploit. On top of charging Alan with perjury, Pat characterized Fleischer’s lawyers as “contemptible . . . I’ve never run across such stupid lawyers.” Then he singled out a judge in Georgia for his ignorance, complaining that he misspelled “meretricious” in a decision.

  As he did to Lenore and Susannah, Pat threatened in letters to expose everybody unless they did as he demanded. “I’m telling my full story to the Atlanta Weekly . . . because I’m a minor figure in Georgia, I know this information will be widely disseminated . . . a violent, drug abusing crazy man [is] operating on brains” at Emory University School of Medicine. Pat wrote the med school chairman that he personally wouldn’t trust Fleischer to perform surgery on “a gerbil’s anus.”

  Rather than intimidating the defense, these threats struck Fleischer’s attorneys as a golden opportunity. They alerted their client, “Your best evidence lies in Conroy’s letters which admit to a substantial effort to poison minds . . . against you.”

  Unwittingly Pat damaged not just his legal case, but his career and his family. Unlike his intemperate outbursts at Susannah when age and alcohol might account for his invective, the letters in this file had been written in Rome, while he was still in his thirties and supposed to be completing The Prince of Tides. Instead he churned out hundreds of seething pages, vilifying Fleischer, undermining his own marriage, and jeopardizing his children.

  In one sworn deposition Pat was queried by Alan’s attorney about his sexual relationship with Mrs. Fleischer, meaning Lenore. Pat glibly replied that he had had sexual relations with both Mrs. Fleischers, meaning he had also slept with Alan’s current wife, Alice. This prompted Fleischer’s lawyers to charge that because Alice had rejected him and married Alan, Conroy was motivated by revenge.

  Fed up with what Fleischer described as hateful, megalomaniacal diatribes, Alan pleaded in a letter to Lenore, “It is time for relief. For the well-being of all . . . please have Pat cool it.”

  Lenore cautioned Pat that their hatred of her ex-husband was interfering with what was best for the children. But this fell on deaf ears. He called her a fool, easily duped by Alan.

  When the Conroys returned to Rome for their second stay, Fleischer transferred to Tucson, Arizona. In court he testified that he left Atlanta for the same reasons as Pat and Lenore had. He was desperate to start over, free from family strife. He still hoped to have access to his children during vacations and summers. But the dispute soon swerved beyond questions of custody and child support and became a criminal case.

  When I first learned of Emily’s harrowing allegations of sexual abuse, I urged Pat to let the appropriate authorities deal with them. Instead he compiled a narrative based on interviews with his stepdaughter and stitched together a thirteen-page single-spaced J’accuse entitled “Emily Fleischer’s Testimony of the Sexual Abuse by Her Father, Dr. Alan Fleischer.” He turned this over to the police, to the press, and to Alan Fleischer. In an accompanying letter, he wrote that Emily had “had her entire childhood polluted by the satanic evil of her father . . . You kept your daughter as a sexual slave. There was bondage, violence, and you turned your home into a pornographic nightmare for your child.”

  He accused Fleischer’s wife, Alice, of being his “facilitator,” and wrote Fleischer’s psychiatrist, a witness in the case. Calling the psychiatrist “a whore,” and charging that he had known of Emily’s abuse and covered it up, Pat threatened to sue for malpractice. As usual he vowed, “I’m going to blow this story sky-high and take my case before the public.” He boasted of his contacts in the media, particularly CNN, who he said stood poised to broadcast the story. (Decades later, in his posthumous oral biography, Pat falsely claimed that the psychiatrist had been convicted of sexual abuse and imprisoned for life.)

  Unless he got satisfaction in court, Pat vowed he would reveal in writing how Fleischer “took off Emily’s clothes in the middle of the night and he masturbated on her.” He drafted an eight-page book proposal and sent it to Fleischer, to his wife, to his psychiatrist, to Fleischer’s brother Barry and Barry’s wife, to his editor Nan Talese, and “to everyone I’ve met in the legal system.” Once he finished The Prince of Tides he swore he would start this new project if Fleischer didn’t agree to Pat’s demands.

  In yet another letter he wrote, “Your daughter Emily’s story is now complete.” In addition to penetrating her vaginally, orally, and anally, Alan had, according to Pat, tried to strangle his daughter when she resisted.

  “I’ve thought long and hard after hearing Emily’s story of flying out to Arizona and killing you myself. And I tell you this with the utter confidence that any jury in the United States would carry me out of a courtroom on their shoulders after Emily told her excruciating story.”

  “I want prisoners to have a chance to do to you what you’ve done to your daughter . . . I’ve told Emily that it will never happen again, Alan, and that’s a promise I’ll die to keep. If you ever touch your daughter again, I’ll feed your genitalia to your dogs.”

  This was the sort of rhetoric Conroy readers would recognize from his novels, where villains are punished and victims always rescued by a hero. But in the real world of courtrooms, combative lawyers, and compromise, Pat was cutting the ground out from under his stepdaughter and himself. With his vituperative letters, he exposed himself to charges of witness tampering; of intimidating the defendant, his family, and his friends; and of bringing fraudulent charges against Fleischer to publicize his next book and land a lucrative contract. Worse yet, by offering Fleischer the opportunity to buy the rights to that book and bury it, Pat could be accused of extortion.

  Pat then willy-nilly provided Alan a perfect defense by conceding, “Emily has told more lies, more outrageously, more creatively and more often than any child I’ve ever known. A story she tells in the morning will have gone through five variations by mid-afternoon. With Emily, we are not dealing with a young George Washington.”

  Although he maintained that he believed his stepdaughter in this instance, no jury would convict a defendant, a doctor no less, on the basis of testimony by a child whose own stepfather had impugned her honesty. This may explain why prosecutors in Pima County, Arizona, never arrested or indicted Alan Fleischer, and why authorities in DeKalb County, Georgia, after handing down an indictment, never extra
dited him. Fleischer had voluntarily submitted to a lie-detector test, which he insisted vindicated him. He had also undergone a Psychological Report and Risk Assessment at the Center Against Adult and Adolescent Sexual Aggression. After clinical interviews with Fleischer and his wife, and a review of Pat’s letters and Emily’s allegations, the Center subjected Fleischer to a CAT 200 computer–assisted program to “measure penile response to target and standardized stimulus materials.” In plain language, wires were attached to Dr. Fleischer’s penis as he was shown erotic pictures, some of children. Then his state of arousal was measured.

  In an eleven-page summary, psychologist Steven R. Gray reported: “Dr. Alan Fleischer, based on this examination, does not demonstrate any of the known physiological, emotional or psychological correlates associated with multiple events of child molest [sic] incest or rape. He therefore presents no risk to the community at this time.”

  In the end, after all the charges and counter-charges, the hyperventilating headlines and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, Pat’s threats and insults had only prolonged the case and made it impossible to prosecute. Alan Fleischer was never cross-examined under oath. But then neither was Pat or Emily. If Emily had in fact been abused, Pat had destroyed her chances of justice. If she hadn’t been abused, he had destroyed Alan’s reputation and his life.

  Touchingly, at the bottom of the last page of her “testimony,” Emily had scrawled a note to Alan Fleischer, “Dear Dad. Just read this over. I’m sorry that it’s true. But I still love you.”

  IN ANSLEY PARK, THE SOURCE of Susannah’s middle name, Lenore Conroy lives in a modest, rented, two-bedroom house. She relocated to Atlanta to be near her children and her grandson, Wesley. Now in her seventies, still trim enough to wear stylish blue jeans, Lenore volunteers at a local hospital, occasionally travels to Europe to visit friends, and plays no part in the literary life of the city.