The Lost Prince Page 4

  “Yeah, in my second novel, The Lords of Discipline.”

  “Maybe I should sue you for plagiarism. Your story is right out of my second novel, Waking Slow. The same thing happened to me.”

  We sped into the mountains, toward a tunnel. Above its yawning mouth an old rockslide had spread through a pine forest like frantic fingers digging for a grip. “When my girlfriend, Adrienne, got pregnant by another guy, we moved to California and lived in Los Angeles for six months,” I told Pat. “I offered to marry her and raise the baby as mine. She had other ideas. After the adoption we went back to Maryland and—”

  “She said, ‘Adios, motherfucker.’”

  “No, she’d never say anything like that. Adrienne had been very properly brought up.”

  “And properly fucked.”

  “I was an idiot. I had read too many novels. I believed in love. She believed in a future that didn’t include me.”

  “This is starting to creep me out,” Pat said as we entered the tunnel. “All this stuff in common—I thought that kind of cosmic synchronicity was just something Steve Geller invented in his screenplays.”

  WE STOPPED FOR THE NIGHT in Innsbruck, and after a stroll around the old town, we ate in a Rathskeller where murals of rosy-cheeked milkmaids smiled at us from the walls and a band in the back room played Viennese schmalz. Although Pat’s appetite for food and drink was Falstaffian, he fed himself in a fastidious fashion, with small bites, after each of which he patted his mouth with a napkin. Then he swigged from his beer stein and blotted his mouth again. He caught me staring and shoved his hands out of sight.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “My fingernails are filthy. I forget to clean and clip them. That’s something my mother never taught me.” He spoke as if the only lessons that stuck were those imparted by Peggy Conroy, and whatever she hadn’t drummed into him as a child, he had no hope of mastering as an adult.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” I said.

  “They’re the kind I like.”

  “Do you ever wonder why your college girlfriend ditched you?”

  “No need to wonder. She showed up at a bookstore and had me sign a novel for her. I figured if she had the balls to do that, I had the right to ask why she dumped me. She said after the shame of getting knocked up and the pain of losing the baby, she couldn’t bear to be around me. She said if we had stayed together, I’d have been a constant reminder of nothing but bad news.”

  “I assumed my girlfriend bugged out because I didn’t do a better job of taking care of her in California,” I said. “Maybe I need to rethink things.”

  WE REGISTERED AT A SPOTLESSLY clean hotel whose rooms called to mind monastery cells. Stretched out on one of the hard single beds, I was eager for sleep. But Pat insisted on updating his diary, a buckram notebook as big as an accountant’s ledger. When he finished writing, he went into the bathroom to shower, leaving the ledger open on the night table. A Freudian might speculate that he was inviting me to take a peek. At least that’s how I justified invading his privacy.

  “Mewshaw is the first writer I’ve ever met who at one time in his life could dunk a basketball,” Pat had scribbled, failing to note that I had deflated the ball and told the story as a joke on myself.

  He repeated another anecdote I had told, this one about a boy on the DeMatha football team who was notorious for being afraid of physical contact. When this reputed chicken-shit started dating a teammate’s girlfriend, the aggrieved party challenged him to a fight. The “non-hitter” showed up carrying an axe handle. The other guy snarled, “You don’t have the nerve—” which were the last words he uttered before the axe handle cracked his skull. Pat invented dialogue, as well as the boys’ height and weight, which I hadn’t mentioned.

  It’s not uncommon for a novelist to keep notes on the day’s events, to record striking lines of dialogue or rough out a scene, then later reframe this raw material for his fiction. But Pat frequently skipped the interim stage and moved straight from experience or observation to fictionalized details in his diary. He ended that day’s entries by remarking on “the human need to tell stories, the exact stories that shape you, and made you you.” Yet as I would learn, regardless of whether Pat was writing a novel or a memoir, his stories were seldom “exact.” He always shaped them for his own purposes.

  IN MUNICH, WE CRASHED WITH a German woman named Uta who had attended high school in the States with Linda. Now divorced, she lived on a sylvan lake outside the city, and as lovely as the setting was, she conceded she suffered from loneliness. She welcomed us into her A-frame house and into her confidence. In Pat, a complete stranger, she discovered a kindred spirit and empathetic listener who elaborated on the turmoil of his own divorce. He said he had been in and out of therapy, in and out of clinical depression, on and off the brink of suicide for years.

  Touched by his candor, Uta unburdened herself. She was now involved with a married man who kept promising, and failing, to leave his wife.

  “Get rid of that asshole,” Pat advised her. “Find a different guy.”

  “But I’m getting older. If I wait too long, I’m afraid I won’t be able to have children.”

  “I’ve got half a dozen. Believe me, you can live without them.”

  The next day, at the BMW distributorship, Bavarian efficiency suffered a serious glitch; the sales papers had been misplaced. It took five hours to locate and process them, prompting Pat to joke, “Everyplace is becoming like Italy.”

  In what remained of the afternoon, we made the rounds of used car lots, searching for something I could afford. Pat did his best to be patient, but his heart wasn’t in it and I didn’t blame him. Few experiences in life are as dispiriting as dealing with used car salesmen who sound the same no matter what language they speak. At three places in a row a grinning German guided me behind the wheel of a clunker that failed to start. Shaken, I decided I wasn’t in the market after all.

  That evening, at Uta’s urging, we ate at a lakeside restaurant hung with hunting trophies, whose matted fur and bristling horns curdled my appetite. While Pat ordered stag meat, I stuck to sausage and a salad that to my disgust was seasoned with shredded eel. Pat scraped the slimy excrescences onto his plate and pronounced them “delicious.” He judged me as suffering from “a timid palate, a legacy of your lower-middle-class upbringing.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” I fought back. “I realize your father was an officer. But I bet your family didn’t dine on bear meat or sheep eyeballs from the PX.”

  “No, I grew up eating the same shit you did. Now I want to taste everything.”

  This ardent quest defined the way Pat went headlong at everything in life. He even read the newspaper as if devouring it. To watch him consume the International Herald Tribune was like looking at a starving man cleaning his plate. Page by page, he didn’t skip a morsel, not even the world weather report or fashion tips from Paris.

  The following day, at his instigation, we dropped by Oktoberfest where, surrounded by drunken college kids, fat waitresses in dirndls, and oompah-pah bandsmen in lederhosen and knee-length stockings, he declared, “Dad brags that he majored in gooks. He’s proud of bombing Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. But I bet he’d sacrifice his left testicle for a chance to drop the big one here.”

  AUTUMN VANISHED OVERNIGHT, ROUTED BY wind and rain full of icy intimations of the winter ahead. Pat and I beat a retreat across the Alps to Italy where summer lingered, and the land fell away in green folds, smelling of plowed fields and harvested grapes. Amid palm trees, flame-shaped cypresses flickered. “As we have candles to light the darkness of night,” D. H. Lawrence had written, “so the cypresses are candles to keep darkness alive in full sunlight.”

  The Beamer had a radio. I suggested that Pat remove it, at least while he lived in Italy, where thieves targeted cars with radios. A news story, perhaps apocryphal, claimed twenty-two German dentists, all Mercedes owners, had driven to Milan for a conference and returned home minus their automobiles. Pa
t noted this in his journal—not that he took out the radio. He was simply a compulsive recorder of odd vignettes.

  I exhorted him to step on the gas and get us back to Rome before dark. But he kept to his resolute pace and continued talking. Language, some salty and scabrous, some as baroque as a Borromini sculpture, poured out of him. He had no appetite for small talk or banal exchanges of information. He craved bold, heartfelt conversation in which everything was on the table and nothing was taboo. He may no longer have been a practicing Catholic, but he appeared to have retained an abiding faith in the sacrament of confession.

  He told me that after college he returned to Beaufort and taught high school. He rented a cottage on a huge estate, and nearby lived Barbara Bolling. They struck up a friendship which flowered into love. In his free time he wrote and self-published The Boo, a book about Thomas Nugent Courvoisie, the assistant commandant at the Citadel. After Barbara and he married in 1969, Pat switched to teaching on Daufuskie Island, which entailed a three-hour daily commute by boat.

  “When the school board fired me,” Pat said, “they claimed I didn’t follow the state curriculum. The real reason I got canned—I’m quoting here—‘You’re too cozy with the niggers.’ Plus, I wouldn’t use corporal punishment on the kids. So there I was in my mid-twenties, unemployed and with a wife and two children and one on the way.”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said. “You’d just got married.”

  “Guess I forgot to mention Barbara was pregnant when we met and she already had a two-year-old daughter.” He chuckled. “To plant a cherry on top of the sundae, she was a widow. Her husband was killed in combat in Vietnam. Her family was military, just like mine, and they were none too pleased with her marrying a draft-dodging peacenik who couldn’t even hold on to a job teaching black kids.

  “They made noises about going to court and getting custody of the kids,” he continued, “on the grounds that I was an unfit father. I was furious.” In fact, he sounded positively giddy about the recollection. “So I—you’ll love this—so I sallied forth like a white knight and adopted Jessica and Melissa. I adored them and nobody was about to take them away from us. Then we had Megan.”

  I sat there dead silent, stifling what I wanted to say: How had he gotten trapped in such a sticky web so soon after his affair with the pregnant college girl ended?

  “When they made The Water Is Wide into a movie,” he resumed, “that gave us the money to move to Atlanta and for Barbara to enroll in law school at Emory. But I was in an awful state. I was writing The Great Santini, dredging up a whole raft of family shit, and that strained the marriage. Barbara said she promised to stay with me for richer or poorer, not for crazy.”

  When he wrote, Pat said he required isolation and quiet, not the exuberant company of three little girls. His first novel bled from him line by line, and he had to hole up out of town to get any work done. Barbara blamed him for withdrawing from the family, and Pat didn’t deny it. Becoming a published author made him more difficult to live with and at the same time more attractive to other women. He was drinking heavily and running around, all the while wracked by guilt. Then in 1975 he swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills.

  “They didn’t work,” he said. “I was the sort of fuck-up who couldn’t even manage to kill himself. Instead of me dying, Barbara and I got a divorce. Which in a lot of ways felt worse than dying.”

  As we crossed Tuscany into Umbria, the timbre of Pat’s voice altered. There was no mistaking the shift in tone; his self-mocking metamorphosed into high-minded sentiments. “Each divorce is the death of a small civilization,” he said. “Two people declare war on each other, and their screams and tears and days of withdrawal infect their entire world with the bacilli of their pain.”

  When he told his daughters that Barbara and he were splitting up, the girls gazed at the floor and refused to look at either parent. “I felt like Judas Iscariot as he fingered his thirty pieces of silver,” Pat said. “I was ashamed of being a man. By the time I started dating again, I searched for women who would make me be more like a woman.”

  I assumed what he said was in italics and he would soon return to his wisecracking self. But then the rhythm of his sentences persuaded me he was repeating something he had written in earnest. Later I learned he was quoting from “Anatomy of a Divorce,” an article he had published in Atlanta Magazine. I didn’t doubt that his emotions, even as he plagiarized himself, were genuine. Still I wondered whether anything in his life had eluded his writing.

  As his voice swung back to its default setting of self-deprecating humor, he said, “After Barbara got the law degree I paid for, she wrote up our divorce agreement. I felt so guilty I signed whatever she set in front of me. Child support for Megan, and the other girls’ expenses up through college.”

  “Wait a minute. Don’t the dependents of soldiers killed in combat get financial benefits?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Come on, man. You can’t have grown up in a military family and not know about VA benefits.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t care about money.”

  “Spoken like a guy in the market to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  I nagged him until he acknowledged that Barbara and her first two daughters did receive VA benefits. But these didn’t cover all the expenses of private schools, and when the girls went to college there would be bills for room and board and so forth. Within a matter of minutes, Pat massaged the story in one direction, then gave it an altogether different spin. After suggesting Barbara had somehow tricked him, had played on his naïveté, he ended up admitting that her drafting their settlement made the divorce cheaper.

  In the whirlpool of rush hour traffic on the Raccordo Anulare, Rome’s ring-road, Pat brought up Lenore, another woman with two kids and one on the way. “When I met her,” he said, “it relieved me to learn her ex-husband was a brain surgeon. I figured that meant there would be no trouble about his paying child support.” He found this tremendously funny. “You’d think I would have learned something about women and marriage by now, but you’d be wrong. I fell for another damsel in distress, hook, line, and sinker.”

  After the seething length of Via Aurelia and the great grinding stone of cars at Porta San Pancrazio, we entered the calmer streets of Monteverde. At our building on Via Carini, I invited Pat up for a drink and breathed easier when he begged off. I liked him and hoped we’d be friends. But he wore me out and he worried me. He slid from his new Beamer and kissed me on both cheeks as he had learned to do after his two months in Italy. He was a big guy and strong. But he’d have to be lucky too, I thought, if he hoped to hold up under all the weight he had haphazardly taken on his shoulders.

  3

  Having returned from Germany without a used car, I improvised. Alfred Moir, an art historian from UC Santa Barbara, spent several months a year at the American Academy and, during his absences, he left behind his VW Derby. Rather than have it rust into disrepair, he agreed to let Linda and me drive it. In exchange, we kept the car insured and serviced, and we delivered it to Alfred freshly washed and full of gas whenever he flew into town.

  As time passed and Alfred aged, however, he took fewer trips to Italy and eventually forgot about the VW Derby. Because its tax-free tourist plates were long out of date, the carabinieri occasionally questioned us at roadblocks during terror alerts. But they never arrested us, and we ended up driving the Derby for a decade. Only for death, as Italian wisdom has it, is there no solution.

  Three days a week, I played tennis on the American Academy’s court, which was bordered by an umbrella pine at one end and by a green waterfall of ivy at the other. Along the western sideline grew a grape arbor, and during long rallies I sometimes lost track of the score and simply admired the arabesque shadows encroaching on the red clay.

  I invited Pat Conroy to play and he arrived in a bulky sweat suit, resembling the roly-poly Michelin Man. Although out of shape and soon pink in the face, he had lost none of the nimbleness that ha
d made him a star point guard. For his size he possessed surprising quickness, nifty footwork, and fine hand-eye coordination.

  Between sets as we cooled off under the grape arbor, we chewed the fat about basketball more often than we did about backhands and forehands. He was still passionate about hoops, and reminisced nostalgically about practicing in stifling gyms in summer and on icy outdoor courts in winter. After hours of dribbling, he said, the skin on his hands cracked like alligator hide, and because he always dived for loose balls, the scars on his knees never healed. A tireless student of the game, he described how he had broken the jump shot down into its component parts, honing his wrist-snap and follow-through.

  Sean and I sometimes shot around on a court near our apartment, and I asked Pat to help teach my son the rudiments of the sport. But he said, “I’ve retired.” Then he added, as he often did when talk turned to life’s passage, “It’s a short season.”

  It didn’t occur to me until later that he may have been protecting me against the fact that he was far better at basketball and didn’t care to show me up in front of my son. He preferred that we play tennis, where I won easily. It was an example of his incessant envy preemption. Starting with his family of origin, people had been jealous of him. Now he did his utmost to avoid that ugly emotion, encouraging everybody to believe they were better than him so he could feel okay about himself.

  In November, he let it drop that he had an enlarged heart. My reaction echoed that of Joan Geller, who exclaimed, “Of course everybody knows Pat Conroy has a big heart.” I didn’t take him seriously until he announced that he was flying back to Atlanta to consult a cardiologist. “Be nice to me. Li’l Abner’s on his last legs.” Naturally he played his predicament for laughs.