The Lost Prince Read online

  Italians pursued their own lives with perfect indifference to “foreigners”—a term they applied to pretty much everyone except the immediate family. That was fine by me. Eventually I came to believe I occupied the same private spaces as they did, and my eyes slid in a slow ellipsis over the cityscape, eliminating the stock footage. The Colosseum, St. Peter’s, the Campidoglio exerted little purchase on my imagination. But I was hyper-alert to chunks of marble veined with green moss like slabs of gorgonzola cheese and busts of famous men, their noses knocked off, their hands gloved in green lichen, their feet shod in dead leaves.

  This was the Rome I introduced to Pat on walks through obscure bends and elbows of the city. He was eager to explore everything, be it a trattoria off the tourist path or the tiny jewel of a church, Santa Barbara, fittingly located on Largo de’ Librari, Bookbinders Square. As we stared up at its powdery blue vault, we exclaimed almost simultaneously, “It looks like pool cue chalk.”

  He joined Joan Geller’s yoga group and dressed for class in jogging shoes and a sweat suit, as if for football practice. The lone man among a dozen women, he made a lasting impression on Portuguese artist Celeste Maia, who remembered him lying stiff on his mat, eyes locked on the ceiling. But Joan soon had him doing the downward-facing dog and deep meditative breathing. He regretted that he often found himself striking poses behind elegant, egret-thin Francine du Plessix Gray, who never acknowledged his existence or spoke to him. I consoled him that perhaps Francine had attained a state of satori.

  Pat set about studying Italian, and although he never acquired anything approaching fluency, he formed a friendship with his teacher, Edward Steinberg. A fellow Southerner from Montgomery, Alabama, Edward gravitated to Rome after graduating from Harvard. An attractive Finnish cellist spotted him in Il Delfino snack bar on Largo Argentina and immediately made up her mind to marry him. This was the sort of serendipitous story that the city supplied with spendthrift abundance. For a writer of Pat’s omnivorousness, it was a goldmine. One night at a dinner party he encountered a one-armed woman who had had the limb torn off by a tiger at the Rome Zoo. Right away, Pat put a tiger into his novel in progress, The Prince of Tides.

  From the start, the Conroys cut a swath through the expat community, not because Pat was famous—at that time his books were barely known in Italy—but because of his charm and ribald sense of humor. A combination of Mark Twain and Lenny Bruce, of Martin Luther King and Richard Pryor, his anecdotes about his bellicose father riveted his growing crowd of friends.

  When Pat’s books reached me from the States, I promptly devoured two of them, which went down as easily as buttered grits. The Water Is Wide, Conroy’s nonfiction account of teaching black kids in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island, had the same hallmarks as his fiction—lush descriptions of the South Carolina coast, a lovable first-person narrator, dialogue crackling with quips. The book’s film version, entitled Conrack, starred Jon Voight, who vaguely resembled Conroy and gave an appealing impersonation of him on his best behavior. Later, Pat admitted that as a schoolteacher he had been “an impulsive, combative young man lacking any skills for compromise and diplomacy.” But on the page and on the screen, he portrayed an American hero battling small-minded provincialism and injustice.

  This theme, along with the same lovable first-person narrator, carried over to his first novel, The Great Santini. Now instead of confronting a racist school board, Ben Meechum, the Pat character, faced a ferocious father, a Marine Corps fighter pilot, who bullied his wife and kids like a drill sergeant running troops through the meat-grinder of Parris Island. As often as Ben fantasized about revenge, he craved love from the very person who tormented him.

  The obvious and overwhelming identification between Pat and his central characters made it difficult for me to know what to say about his books, beyond expressing admiration for the energy of his prose and the lyrical evocation of place. The slightest reservation, I feared, would strike him as cruelly personal while even the highest praise might sound to him faint in view of what he seemed to have suffered.

  THE CONROYS HAD BOUGHT A new BMW, to be delivered in Munich, Germany. Rather than fly north or catch an overnight train, Pat decided to drive a rental car over the Brenner Pass, pick up the Beamer, and break it in on a leisurely return trip through Italy. He invited me to tag along, riding shotgun. “We’ll be like Hemingway and Fitzgerald tooling around France in an open car,” he said. “Remember that chapter in A Moveable Feast? Remember F. Scott worrying about the size of his dick and begging Papa for reassurance? Me, I’m hung like a chipmunk, but I promise I won’t show it to you.”

  Because we lacked legal status in Italy, Linda and I couldn’t buy a car there. But foreign models, registered outside the country, usually deceived the carabinieri. So I strapped $3,000 into a money belt and joined Pat, hoping to find a used German car I could afford.

  On a smoky, leaf-scented morning in late September, traffic tore past the hill towns of Orte and Orvieto, two Etruscan gems hazy in sunlight. Pat didn’t give them a glance. A cautious driver, he clamped both hands on the steering wheel and wouldn’t let tailgating Italians goose him into violating the speed limit. Alfa Romeos and Lancias hurtled past us, blaring their horns. Several motorists waggled their fingers in the cornuto salute. The autostrada could be an X-rated experience. Still Pat wouldn’t be rushed.

  Yet while he kept a light foot on the gas, he pressed the pedal to the metal with his talking. Mile after mile, hour after hour, words spilled out of him. “I’m nothing like Dad,” he said. “I could never be a pilot. I’ve got bad eyesight. Plus speed scares me. Wouldn’t you know it, I’m the son of a famous fighter pilot and I’m afraid of flying.”

  I assured him this was something else we shared in common. “I avoid airplanes whenever possible. And I get seasick every time I set foot on a boat. One summer in college I signed on to sail a skipjack from the Chesapeake Bay down to the Virgin Islands. We hit a gale off Cape Hatteras and I thought I’d die of the dry heaves.”

  Laughing, Pat told me he had worked aboard shrimp boats and developed steady sea legs. But drinking often left him queasy and he described himself as a veteran vomiter. “You ever reach the islands?” he asked.

  “We barely made it to South Carolina. I jumped ship in Georgetown.”

  “That’s just up the coast from Beaufort, the setting of The Great Santini.” Pat viewed this as another link between us. “Both of us saddled with lawsuits and legal bills,” he listed another. “Both of us aging basketball stars from the DC Catholic League.”

  “I was no star.”

  “What was the problem? You suffer white man’s disease?”

  “No, I could jump.”

  “Could you dunk?”

  “That’s something I was desperate to do—dunk during the pre-game drills. The problem was I couldn’t palm a fully inflated basketball. So I deflated one enough to get my hand around it, then I took a good running start and jammed that sucker down.”

  “Great.”

  “Not so great. The ball splatted on the floor. Didn’t bounce an inch. I might as well have dunked a beanbag.”

  “Who’s the best player you ever guarded?” he asked.

  “Fred Hetzel.”

  “Bullshit!” Hetzel had been an All-American at Davidson and later played for the LA Lakers. “He must have been six nine,” Pat said. “You had no business guarding him.”

  “This was in a summer league game, DeMatha versus Landon High School. I held him to eighteen points and scored fourteen myself. What about you?”

  “I guarded Pete Maravich when he played at LSU. He carved me up like a turkey and scattered my bones on the court.”

  It didn’t escape me that I brought up Fred Hetzel and the absolute zenith of my career, while Pat, who was a much better player, chose to disparage himself.

  “You mentioned your father was an alcoholic?” he said.

  “My stepfather,” I corrected him.

  “Dad was a te
rrible drunk. He laid on the worst beatings when he got liquored up at the Bachelor’s Officer’s Quarters.”

  “My stepfather tended bar at the BOQ,” I said. “Which was like Willie Sutton working as a bank teller. He poured himself a drink for every one he served.”

  We were circling Florence, the Duomo visible in the distance across fields flecked with cypress trees. Pat had his eyes fixed on the road and his mind on our mutual experiences. “Were you an altar boy?”

  “Of course. And you?”

  He answered by reciting the Confiteor. “I remember all the Latin responses. But I forget the last time I went to Mass.”

  “I go every Sunday.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Me, I still hate all the mean nuns who taught me and all the mean Catholic girls who wouldn’t date me.”

  “I didn’t have much luck with Catholic girls myself. I married a Methodist.”

  “Lenore’s Jewish,” he said. “She comes with a lot of baggage. Her parents, the Gurewitzes, are Communists. I mean real card-carrying reds. But . . . well, she’s beautiful. The first beautiful woman who ever loved me.”

  I agreed that she was beautiful. Pat observed that Linda was beautiful too. Again, I agreed, and with that truth established, we followed the cutoff toward Bologna. “About your mother,” he mused, “you mentioned she slapped you around.”

  “Not just me. She belted her husband and the other kids too.”

  “What’s the worst thing she ever did to you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess bang my head against a wall.”

  “You’re shitting me.” He swiveled his eyes from the road for an instant. “My brother swears his first memory is of Dad holding me by the throat and banging my head against the wall.”

  “Smarts, doesn’t it?” The rhythm of our talk reminded me of teammates setting each other up, executing a pick-and-roll or the give-and-go. “Sometimes Mom grabbed my brother and me by the hair,” I told him, “and cracked our skulls together. She didn’t discriminate on the basis of age or size or sex. I saw her slug my sister at the age of twenty-one and bloody her lip.”

  “Jesus, she sounds worse than Dad.”

  “I bet the Great Santini had a harder punch.”

  Pat didn’t treat this as a joke. “Okay, he was a monster—about six three and 220 in his prime. But there’s something, I don’t know, just horrible about getting hit by your mother.”

  As the bond between us tightened, I told Pat how painful it had been when Mom asked me to protect her against my stepfather, Tommy Dunn. “He never hit me, but sometimes he got loaded and belted her. When I was older, I put a stop to that. But Mom would still hit me when she got a wild hair and I couldn’t fight back. That was the worst.”

  Pat described his mother, Peggy, as non-violent, yet deeply duplicitous and given to genteel airs. “She never wanted anyone to know she came from a dirt-poor family of Alabama crackers. At bedtime, she used to read us Gone With the Wind and change the names of the characters to the names of her children. She saw herself as Scarlett O’Hara. She was petrified somebody would discover Dad wasn’t Rhett Butler. His knocking her around was something she hid as long as she could.

  “She loved language, the more highfalutin the better,” he continued. “She did everything she could to encourage me to become a novelist. But then when The Great Santini came out, she accused me of dragging the family name through the mud. Her redneck relatives and Dad’s shanty–Irish Chicago brood picketed bookstores, protesting that I wrote a pack of lies. Later when she divorced Dad, she changed her tune. She wanted me to testify against him. When I refused, she submitted The Great Santini to the judge as evidence of Dad’s cruelty.”

  I didn’t just sympathize with Pat; I identified and filled him in on Mom’s rabid response to my book, Life for Death. She cut off all contact, accusing me of disclosing intimate details, such as the fact that she had divorced my father thirty-five years ago. Memoir-schmemoir—she wouldn’t concede that I had a proprietary right to my life’s story. Only now, two years later, were we tentatively back in touch. “She’s obsessed with secrecy,” I told Pat. “It’s a family tradition. Her mother, my grandmother, changed her name and lopped ten years off her age when she emigrated from Ireland. It’s like we’re all in the Witness Protection Program.”

  “Ah, the old sod,” Pat shrieked with laughter. “What a polluted gene pool we swam out of.”

  On the flat plains of the Po Valley we had a lunch of panini and coffee at a Pavese Autogrill. Amid the clatter of plates and cutlery and the hiss of the espresso machine, our talk never ceased. I had given Pat a copy of Life for Death, and he said, “When I read the part where the kid, Wayne Dresbach, loads the rifle and shoots his parents, I swear to Christ I stood up and cheered. Those people had it coming. I can’t count how many times I fantasized about killing Dad.”

  “Glad you didn’t or we’d be having this conversation through bulletproof glass at a maximum security prison.”

  “Your book makes your mom sound like a saint. Maybe she’d have gotten me sprung just like she did Wayne Dresbach.”

  “My mother has her saintly side,” I granted. “Then there’s the other side. Life for Death is an example of artistic selection.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m a master at selective memory.”

  IN THE CAR AGAIN, HEADED north, Pat said, “I never met anybody I have so much in common with. The only difference I guess is you’re not a military brat.”

  “Actually, I kind of am. My stepfather was in the navy, then went on working for them after World War II. I virtually grew up at the Naval Receiving Station in DC. Learned to swim in the base pool. Practiced basketball in the gym. My first job was at the PX warehouse. Whenever I got sick, navy medics treated me.”

  Pat hooted. “Medics, my ass. Pecker checkers.”

  “Okay, they fell short of being real doctors. I caught polio as a kid, and they misdiagnosed it. Same thing happened when I broke my arm, then again when I developed osteomyelitis.”

  “Anything more complicated than the clap, they’re in over their heads.”

  “I’m not complaining. Polio kept me out of the draft. How’d you beat it?”

  “The Reader’s Digest version: I was the only man in my class at the Citadel who turned down a military commission. I became a hippie war protester and taught high school in Beaufort and got married. Going back to your stepfather, what did he do for the navy?”

  “He ran the laundry and dry-cleaning plant that covered all the military bases in the DC area. When your father was at the Pentagon, my stepfather probably washed your family’s underwear and socks.”

  “Goddamn, connections don’t come much more personal than that.”

  I told Pat that Walter Reed Hospital was one of Tommy Dunn’s accounts and from adolescence until I left home, I wore what he pilfered from the laundry’s lost and found. When sailors and marines shipped out or, in the case of Walter Reed, when patients died, I inherited their wardrobes. The DeMatha yearbook shows me in strangers’ coats, shirts, and trousers, some too tight, some flapping loose. “Then at the University of Maryland, before military cast-offs came into fashion, I already dressed in dead men’s clothing. At least they were clean,” I said.

  “Ah, our golden youth.” Pat sighed. “Aren’t you glad that shit is behind us? Dad would have killed me if he caught me wearing military surplus after I dodged the draft. But to save money, Peggy sewed a sport coat for my high school senior prom. It fit me like Quasimodo’s cape.”

  THE AUTOSTRADA STARTED TO TILT beneath us. I felt the upward incline and heard the engine strain as we ascended the Alps. Everything got steeper—the pitch of slate roofs in villages, the gothic bell towers of churches in Trento and Bolzano, and the mountainous spires sparkling with glacial ice. At the Brenner Pass, long-haul trucks stalled at the frontier, like Hannibal’s army of elephants linked trunk to tail.

  As Pat and I had our pass
ports stamped and changed lire into Austrian shillings, an invisible waterfall gurgled over a cloud-shrouded cliff and reappeared as vapor puffs at the bottom of a canyon. Smaller vapor puffs formed at our mouths while we reminisced about college. This was one subject on which we figured to have little in common. No matter how unpleasant it had been for me as a penniless commuter at the University of Maryland, my plight couldn’t compare to the savage hazing Pat had endured as a new cadet—a “knob”—at the Citadel.

  “Knobs were lower than whale shit,” he said. “Between studying and marching and basketball practice, I didn’t do anything except polish my shoes and stand punishment details. I don’t remember having a date until my sophomore year. Then I fell head over fucking heels in love for the first time. But I was a little slow on the uptake,” he added. “My girlfriend was screwing another guy and got pregnant before I got to first base.”

  If he expected me to laugh—if he counted on cauterizing a wound by making himself the butt of a joke—he was talking to the wrong man. “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I told her I loved her and swore I’d stand by her. I must have been stealing my lines from a country and western song. I wore a path between the barracks and her house. We talked about getting married but never did anything more than kiss.”

  I had no trouble guessing where the narrative led next. With abortion illegal in the United States back then, everybody’s choices had been circumscribed. His girlfriend planned to put her baby up for adoption, Pat told me. But she went into premature labor and gave birth to a stillborn child.

  “Were you with her?” I asked.

  “No. I never saw the baby. I never saw much of the girl again.”

  There was a lot I might have said. I could have quoted the friend who consoled me with the rough wisdom, “Well, there’s one bullet you dodged.” I might have clapped him on the shoulder and welcomed him to the club. Instead I asked, “Did you ever write about this?”