The Lost Prince Page 23

  When Pat died, and journalists contacted her for a comment, Lenore declined to speak. This had always been how she handled the press. As often as her former husband belittled her in his books, she stayed silent. Partly this non-response was an attempt to spare herself and Susannah from retaliation. Partly it came from a conviction that nothing she said in self-defense would change anyone’s mind. “Pat,” Lenore pointed out, “was a very popular, charming guy.” She recalled a court appearance in San Francisco, when Pat was appealing to pay less alimony. The judge interrupted the proceedings to announce that his mother was a Conroy fan.

  I remained, in my fashion, a Conroy fan. But in fairness, and for the sake of accuracy, I felt Lenore should speak for the record. Less than a year after Pat’s death, just months after Alan Fleischer’s death, I visited her in Atlanta and asked how she felt these days.

  “Mostly relieved,” Lenore said. “The last year’s been grueling. Finally I feel I can crawl out from under the past.”

  The past, it seemed to me, pressed in all around us. On the walls of her house hung paintings I remembered from Rome. A bookshelf contained my complete works, which, depending on the story Pat told, Lenore had stolen from him or he had abandoned when he decided I had betrayed him. In a corner loomed the life-size Venetian statue that had presided over the apartment on Piazza Farnese. Leaning forward at the shoulders, hair swept back in a sixteenth-century version of a mullet, wooden right hand touching his wooden chest, the gentleman seemed to be listening pensively to our conversation and making up his mind.

  Janet Malcolm, writing about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, observed that a literary marriage never ends. It stays alive like the whiskers on a corpse as couples trade insults, acquaintances chip in their opinions, and critics debate the meaning of long-buried secrets. I described the documents that had been discovered among Alan’s personal effects and asked whether Lenore was aware of how badly Pat had undermined their legal position with his irrational behavior.

  She expressed shock; she knew nothing about his abusive letters to everybody involved in the case. On the other hand, she conceded they sounded like Pat. “His problem was he never understood when he stepped over the line. He had two speeds—on or off. Red hot or ice cold.

  “Look how he treated Emily,” Lenore added. “After all their hours together talking about her being abused, Emily felt very close to Pat. Close enough that she changed her last name to Conroy. The New York Times obituary listed her as his daughter. But Pat dropped her. Her story no longer interested him. Her neediness got in his way. He didn’t mention her in his will.”

  “Was Susannah in the will?” I asked.

  “Yes, and I’m grateful for that. But there are things I can’t forgive.”

  “Apparently Pat had things he couldn’t forgive either.” I mentioned the money he accused her of stealing. “He claimed his brothers wanted to have you arrested.”

  She laughed. “Lock her up! Lock her up! I feel like Hillary Clinton. The truth is, money made Pat nervous and guilty. He depended on other people to deal with it for him. Then he complained that they screwed him.

  “When he spoke at colleges, he sometimes didn’t pick up his honorarium. Or else he handed it back to the host institution to spend as it liked. It never occurred to him,” Lenore said, “that we had to account for that money and pay taxes. I finally got his checks mailed to our address. Then I deposited them in the bank to cover household expenses.”

  Expenses, she emphasized, that were always higher than Pat appreciated—when, that is, he bothered to consider them at all. On top of supporting six kids in private schools, and paying the mortgage on two houses, and compensating retinues of lawyers and therapists, Pat gave lavish gifts, covered the college tuition of absolute strangers, and extended unsecured loans to almost anyone who asked.

  “When he lived for months on Fripp Island,” Lenore said, “he never thought about the bills in San Francisco. His brothers and relatives used to pile in on me, and the cost of groceries alone was enormous.”

  She recalled the summer of ’94 when Pat was having an affair on Fripp Island and she packed up Susannah and flew back to the West Coast. Three of Pat’s brothers were vacationing in the house in Presidio Heights. They claimed they knew nothing about the other woman in Pat’s life, and Lenore let them stay on as long as they had originally planned.

  “The way I processed things back then,” she said, “people get through these problems. I believed I could put them behind me and fight for my marriage. So I made plans to celebrate Pat’s forty-ninth birthday in South Carolina. Then you called and said he didn’t want me there. After that, I had trouble getting him to pay for anything, even Susannah’s medical bills.”

  I pointed out that she emerged from the marriage with the house and $10,000 a month.

  “Which he soon got reduced to $5,000, then to nothing at all,” Lenore fired back. “He always portrayed me as a greedy pig. His father called me Lenoinks. Which was ironic since Pat said I was Santini with tits. But our settlement was based on Pat’s income. The year of the divorce he made over $800,000. I know a writer’s income can go up or down, but it looked like his would zoom up with the publication of Beach Music. I negotiated in good faith and assumed he did too. But right away he started doing what he hated Alan for doing. He claimed I was killing him financially. He filed suits so I had to hire lawyers. He was a financial bully. He blamed me when Susannah refused to see him, but he never considered how hurt she was by his hideous emails.”

  I couldn’t defend what he had written to his daughter, but I suggested that he inherited from his father the mistaken belief that a stern ultimatum could solve any problem.

  “I got so sick of hearing him brag he was the son of a warrior,” Lenore protested, “and that that made his craziness okay. To write that I hate Emily and wanted to get rid of her, how did he expect her to feel? And to put in his memoirs that he married me on the rebound and that I secretly stopped using birth control and tricked him into having a baby, how was Susannah supposed to feel? The fact is, Pat and I discussed having a baby, and since I was in my mid-thirties, we decided it had to be soon. Anyway, if he loved Susannah so much, why does it matter when I got pregnant?”

  This prompted her to wonder why his books hadn’t been better fact-checked. “It’s one thing to shade the truth and embellish his own experience. But what about the rights of other people and the truth of their lives?”

  I explained that I had interviewed Pat’s longtime editor, Nan Talese, who conceded that Pat’s books had never been fact-checked. “I’m not a newspaper,” she said, pointing out that Pat had signed a standard publishing contract spelling out his responsibility for the content of his work.

  My final and most difficult question to Lenore concerned the day of Susannah’s birth, when Pat rushed from the hospital to our apartment, sobbing that he had been humiliated in front of nuns when a doctor informed him that Susannah had been delivered by cesarean section because Lenore had herpes.

  Of all her possible responses—tears, fury, an abrupt end to the conversation—Lenore offered the one I least anticipated. She laughed. “He actually told you that?”

  “He did, and I bring it up now only because—”

  “You don’t have to apologize. I’m surprised you waited this long to ask about something so bizarre. I never had herpes. Pat did.”

  In November 1981, Pat had flown to Atlanta, she reminded me, to consult a cardiologist about a heart problem. Because he presented with symptoms of a sexually transmitted disease, the doctor had him tested and the lab report was positive for herpes. Although Lenore showed no symptoms herself, her ob-gyn advised her to have a cesarean. This was weeks before she went into labor, and it was Pat’s own doctor, not some stranger at an Italian hospital, who disclosed he had herpes.

  “Why he went to your place and acted so upset baffles me,” Lenore said. “Why would he tell you that? What could you do except conclude I’m a terrible person? It sounds
so puritanical of him, like I was a fallen woman. Look, we met when I was thirty-five and had been divorced for years and already had two kids. I never pretended to be a virgin. We were both adults. If I had had herpes—which I didn’t—we would have dealt with it and gone on with our marriage. Which was precisely what we did when Pat was diagnosed with herpes.”

  Lenore paused a moment before remarking, “Divorce reduces everybody to such pettiness. It killed me that when Pat came back to San Francisco to collect his stuff, he didn’t just take what belonged to him. He took the Marine Corps flight jacket that Don Conroy had given Gregory. The jacket meant a lot to Gregory. It was a symbol of his acceptance into the Conroy family. Why would Pat do that to a teenage boy?”

  Then she smiled and confessed that she wasn’t above a bit of pettiness herself. “During our separation Pat breezed back into town for an award ceremony and needed his tuxedo. He left a message that a go-fer would come and fetch it. I was so furious I did something awful.”

  “What?”

  “I brought the tuxedo to a tailor and had it taken in two inches at the waist and in the butt. He hated being fat, and I knew this would drive him nuts.”

  “I guess it could have been worse. You could have run over him with your car.”

  THE ERNEST F. HOLLINGS SPECIAL Collection at the University of South Carolina houses Pat Conroy’s papers. When donors put up the money to purchase the archive, Tom McNally, dean of University Libraries, announced to the press that this was a rare opportunity to obtain a celebrated South Carolinian’s complete work. Because Pat had never learned to type—his father dismissed typing as a chore for women—there were handwritten drafts, as well as fair copies, of all of Conroy’s books, except for his first self-published effort, The Boo. (Pat expressed relief that that manuscript had been lost, joking that it was too dreadful to preserve.)

  Everything else was said to be intact—his journals, diaries, letters from and to Pat, even letters from his lovers, his Selective Service file (which presents a much more complicated picture of his draft deferment than Pat had ever provided), photographs, birthday cards, and miscellaneous souvenirs. According to Mr. McNally, lawyers had advised Pat to keep his financial records and divorce documents confidential, but Pat insisted that they too be made available to the public. Mr. McNally told reporters, “He’s written about his family himself. He’s wide open, and he wants all his archives to be just the same.”

  Yet in February 2017 when I visited Columbia, South Carolina, the Conroy collection was not as open as Pat wished. His financial and divorce records had at some point been put off-limits. In addition, the transcripts of taped interviews that Pat gave his oral biographer had been sealed for twenty years. While selections from these interviews were published, the leftover tapes are inaccessible even to Pat’s children.

  Susannah in particular worried what might be on the embargoed tapes. She already felt that the published material was rife with inaccuracies and defamations, and she wrote the University of South Carolina Press to register her objections. Pat had utterly disregarded his promise to quit writing about Susannah’s mother. He went so far as to declare, “If Susannah doesn’t like the book—too bad—because I don’t think I’ve lied too much.”

  Although I couldn’t verify the terms of his divorce settlement or determine why Pat accused Lenore of stealing millions of dollars, his diaries and journals provided a great deal of other information about his daily life. He recorded many of his conversations with friends and family, and even his arguments with Lenore. “The women I love are always secret agents,” he wrote—and he wasn’t reluctant to confess his own failings. “I caught the disease of the time. Selfishness, lack of courage, sadness.”

  The journal entries for the early months of his marriage mention nothing about Lenore’s secretly going off birth control. Nor do they express any displeasure about her pregnancy or suggest that he married her on the rebound. On December 7, 1981, Pat described Susannah’s birth by cesarean section and his delight when a nun brought his baby daughter for him to see for the first time. There’s nothing about a doctor informing him that his wife had herpes and nothing about his hurrying to our apartment and sobbing that this was the most humiliating day of his life. Instead, he wrote that he drove Lenore home to Olgiata and served her breakfast in bed.

  It was cold in the library; the thermostat was set low to protect the rare books and manuscripts. I kept my Barbour coat on as I pored through Pat’s papers, which were delivered in cardboard cartons, each one stuffed with labeled folders. I was allowed to take notes, but obliged to do so in pencil, not ink, and I could examine only three boxes at a time.

  I requested his journals for 1994, 1995, and 1996, realizing there was every chance they might reveal that Pat had never cared for me half as much as he had professed to. In the period before and after his divorce, before and after he asked me to call Lenore, he might have regretted his dependence on me. Or perhaps he had wearied of being a famous writer with a less successful friend.

  The librarian came back empty-handed; the journals for ’94, ’95, and ’96 were missing. Like any diarist, Pat had occasionally skipped days. But to let three years slip by without a single entry—that struck me as implausible for someone of his obsessive-compulsive nature.

  The librarian and I discussed the possibilities. Maybe the emotional upheaval of his divorce had left Pat in no condition to update his diary. He later wrote that he had been suicidal. Then again, maybe those journals had been misplaced and would turn up later. Although the librarian didn’t mention it, there was also a chance those journals had been removed.

  I requested the folder of my correspondence with Pat. It included my letters beginning in the early ’80s, but none of those I had written him in ’94 and ’95 trying to break the impasse between us. Nor did the folder contain any of the emails we exchanged in 2000 when we attempted to reconcile, then when Pat solicited my help in reconciling with Susannah.

  Yet if a lot had been lost from the archive, much remained. Some of it I remembered as if it happened this morning, and incidents that I had forgotten were restored to me by Pat’s descriptive skills. Gradually I stopped fretting about what was missing and surrendered to the gift that made his novels and memoirs spellbinding.

  Pulled along by his prose and the pleasure of Pat’s company, I knew I couldn’t stop time or change the course of events or reverse the damage that had been done. But I felt that this was my last, best chance to be close to him.

  It wasn’t, I confess, an unalloyed joy. In his writing, as in his emotional struggles, Pat wavered between rhapsody and rage, with language alone as a spindly bridge between the extremes. Some pages shimmered with insight, others ached with pain: “There are times when I know I’m my father’s son,” he had written. “The anger is explosive; I’ve been worn down by the long war of attrition . . . I went berserk at Lenore tonight . . . At night I want to leave Lenore; in the daytime I do not. But I do not want to spend the rest of my life like this.”

  So much depended on his work. When he finished eight pages of The Prince of Tides, he wrote: “Lenore says I look happier . . . after I’ve written something, anything.”

  He recalled Roman dinner parties, preserving them as if in aspic. Concerning the evening with the Styrons, he noted that Bill “told stories about the writing life and listened to ours . . . I wonder if all writers talk about other writers with that same combination of humor and neurosis that we do.” Later when Styron plunged into depression Pat emailed me that Bill had always been kind to him. Many writers were bastards, but Bill had been “one of the good ones.” (Inexplicably, in his oral biography, Pat characterized William Styron as self-centered, aloof, churlish, and rude.)

  He relished life in Italy, the good food, the wine, the company of friends. At El Toula restaurant celebrating Marya Steinberg’s thirty-seventh birthday, he remembered, “Lenore had smoked goose breast that was heavenly—rich and velvety with a delicate taste which lingered long a
fter you’d swallowed.” The evening ended with Marya describing how she fell for her husband, Edward: “I believe in love at first sight because it happened to me,” she said.

  For a man who sometimes misremembered or conveniently forgot crucial events, Pat had keen recall for the ebb and flow of social conversation. From a lunch with the Newsweek bureau chief Andy Nagorski, he quoted me, “At an intimate moment a girl I dated in college said, ‘I hope you don’t mind that I sleep with a retainer.’ I thought she slept with the houseboy or the gardener. Then she put something in her mouth which made her look like Yogi Berra with a catcher’s mask.”

  Imitation, it is said, constitutes the sincerest form of flattery. Pat went one better and copied down stories verbatim about my in-laws, about Linda’s American Gothic grandmother, about my brothers, sisters, mother, and father. He consistently overrated my tennis and delivered as touching a compliment as I’ve ever received. “I’ll never be able to bring Mike’s consummate passion to the game. Or his passion about most things.”

  What moved me most were the set pieces that captured the spirit of our life together. Pat recalled a freezing winter day when our two families drove into the Alban Hills, searching for snow. Gregory, Emily, and Megan seldom got to see it in Atlanta, and what started off as a short jaunt evolved into a lengthy quest. Finding no snow at lower elevations, Pat plowed on into the Apennine Mountains, leading the way in his BMW, while the Mewshaws in their rackety VW brought up the rear.

  In the Gran Sasso National Park, we boarded a funicular that sported a sign warning visitors that wolves and bears, boars and bobcats roamed the area. The kids, beside themselves with excitement, stopped looking at the snow that lay all around us, and began begging to go after wild game. It took all Pat’s powers of persuasion to get them to be satisfied with renting sleds and tobogganing downhill through bands of bright sunlight and dark fog.