The Lost Prince Read online

  With Pat away, we saw Lenore alone at St. Francis School functions. It amused her that Emily had learned the sign of the cross and was praying to Jesus. After an ob-gyn appointment at Salvator Mundi Hospital around the corner from our apartment on Via Carini, she stopped by for a visit. Due to give birth any day, she displayed no great concern about being on her own. The few complaints she voiced were all so lighthearted, even serious troubles sounded like mere inconveniences.

  Lenore had a wonderful laugh and a wicked sense of humor. Pat liked to portray her as a ditzy material girl, accustomed to the luxuries a doctor’s wife could afford. But as a single mother between marriages, she had worked a variety of jobs and was now a stay-at-home mom in a country where she fearlessly negotiated in a new language with rapacious garage mechanics and the gangs of repairmen required to keep the house in Olgiata functioning. To watch her at the wheel of the BMW, threading the needle’s eye in Roman streets, was to realize how competent she was to protect herself. She pithily summed up her marriage to Alan Fleischer with a pair of anecdotes, both of which featured her wreaking revenge at the wheel of a car.

  Alan had cheated on her, Lenore said, but swore he was “processing out of that relationship” and wanted to rebuild their marriage. He suggested they celebrate their reunion with a dinner at home. But as Lenore drove back after shopping for the meal with baby Emily strapped into a car seat beside her, she noticed Alan’s car parked in his lover’s driveway.

  “I pulled in behind him, sneaked into the house through a side door, and found them upstairs in bed. I started breaking things as I went back downstairs. Then I drove into Alan’s car and hit his girlfriend’s car and ran over the mailbox. All this with poor little Emily witnessing the utter insanity.”

  Lenore leaned over her big pregnant belly, rocking back and forth, laughing in merriment. “Naturally after that I needed therapy, and Alan showed up for a session. We were hoping to figure out a way of not getting a divorce. The therapist thought divorce was the worst thing you could do to your children. But I asked the doctor if he’d recommend his own daughter stay in a relationship with a guy like Alan, who got his girlfriend pregnant and made her have an abortion. When the doctor couldn’t answer, I left, and Alan followed me to the parking lot, taunting me. He stood so I couldn’t move my car. I revved the engine and asked him to step aside. He propped his foot on the bumper and dared me.”

  “Dared you to do what?” Linda asked.

  “Go ahead and hit him. I told him to get out of the way, then I just stepped on the gas.”

  “You what?” Linda gasped.

  “I accelerated and he crashed over the hood.”

  “You could have killed him.”

  “At the moment I didn’t care. But there wasn’t enough space to build up speed, so it only knocked him down.”

  “What happened then?” Linda wanted to know.

  “I called an ambulance, and they called the cops.” Lenore collected herself and spoke with feline delight. “He was hurt, but not critically. He told the police he didn’t want to press charges. He was on crutches for weeks. He had to pee through a catheter. Still, he sent me flowers.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Didn’t Pat write an article about this?”

  “Yes. He heard about it before we even met. The gossip was all over Atlanta. Pat thought it showed how insane a marriage break-up can be.”

  “What a brave guy,” I said, “marrying you, knowing what you’re capable of.”

  “I doubt I’d ever do it again. I got it out of my system.”

  “I’m going to put this in a novel someday.”

  “As long as you describe me as thin.”

  It came to me that Lenore’s appeal to Pat was like his love for Rome—both were exotic, seductive, and dangerous.

  WINTER HOWLED INTO TOWN ON a tramontana wind out of the Alps, and by early December, Christmas stalls cropped up in Piazza Navona, selling hard candy, soft figs, and tacky figurines for Nativity scenes. In Campo de’ Fiori, fish vendors hawked eels for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner, while florists hustled poinsettias and what appeared to be holly. On closer inspection, the holly was fake. Sprigs of prickly leaves and blood-red berries from different bushes were painstakingly attached by narrow-gauge wire. Some viewed this as evidence of Italian deviousness. I regarded it as entrepreneurial ingenuity.

  Shortly after Pat returned from the States, Lenore went into labor on December 7, the eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Despite the blitz of holiday traffic on the Via Cassia, Pat transported her to Salvator Mundi with no mishaps, and Linda and I stayed in all day, awaiting word. Occasionally Linda peeked out the bedroom window of our apartment, as if she believed that, like the Vatican announcing a new Pope with a plume of smoke, the hospital would send up a signal as soon as Baby Conroy was born.

  At dusk, the intercom rang, and a voice, distorted by street noise, crackled, “It’s Pat.”

  “Boy or girl?” Linda shouted.

  “Girl.”

  We buzzed him in and raced to the elevator to congratulate him. Wind or cold or grit had reddened his cheeks, and tears trickled from Pat’s eyes. He smelled strongly of whiskey. Once we were in the apartment, he broke into sobs.

  “Is Lenore all right?” Linda asked.

  He nodded and flopped into a chair.

  “And the baby?”

  “The baby’s fine. She’s beautiful. Do you have something to drink?”

  I fetched a bottle of Scotch and poured him a double shot. He drained the glass in a gulp. In a plaid flannel shirt and flat wool cap, he might have been a rough-and-ready lumberjack. Lifting the cap and patting his comb-over into place, he had a look about him of abject defeat.

  “This is the worst, the most humiliating, day of my life.” He gestured for me to top up his glass. “Lenore had to have a cesarean.”

  “But you said she and the baby are okay.”

  “They’re fine and dandy. I was, too, until I learned why Lenore couldn’t give birth vaginally. She has herpes, and they were afraid she’d infect the baby. That’s the delightful news the doctor told me in front of a bunch of nurses and nuns,” Pat said. “Lenore has already infected me with herpes. That’s another bit of news the doctor announced. Now no other woman will ever want to have sex with me.”

  I didn’t think to ask why he was telling us this. I didn’t ask how no one had noticed the herpes until now. I didn’t ask why Pat was worried no other women would have sex with him. My response was to put myself in his place and pity him. After his fractious history with women, how could he not feel furious and betrayed?

  “If you could have seen how those nuns looked at me,” he said, “when they heard I have a venereal disease.”

  “Don’t call it that,” Linda said.

  “Whatever you call it, it’s incurable.”

  “But you can control it. The important thing is the baby’s okay. Tell us about her. What did she weigh? Who does she look like?”

  Slowly, with fewer and fewer outbursts of fury from Pat, Linda coaxed him into discussing names for the baby and how long Lenore would have to stay in the hospital. Had he told the other kids? But when she asked whether they’d move now to an apartment in the centro storico, Pat snapped, “I’d be happy in a place like yours. But Lenore feels entitled to a penthouse with a view of the Forum and the Colosseum.”

  “I’m with Lenore,” Linda said. “She’s going to be spending a lot of time indoors. Why not in a nice place?”

  We invited him to eat dinner with us before returning to the hospital for visiting hours. He had me pour him more whiskey and ignored our apologies about the menu—frozen fish sticks, bastoncini di pesce, as Sean called them. Both boys loved this batter-fried dish, and Pat pronounced it not half-bad. After a bite, he cued Marco, “È buono,” and jabbed a finger at his cheek.

  “By this time next year, your daughter will be fluent in Italian sign language,” I said.

  “Yeah, if Lenore and I are
still together.”

  In silence, he finished his fish sticks and a cup of coffee, plopped his flat cap on his comb-over, and departed. Normally even when I didn’t know what to say, I said something. That night, once Linda and I were alone, I said nothing, and neither did she.

  I feared Pat would leave Lenore. Or that he’d berate her so mercilessly, she’d leave him. On December 17 he called in an agitated state and I steeled myself against the worst. But political events had pushed his personal woes to the periphery. In their most audacious escapade since the assassination of Aldo Moro, the Red Brigades had kidnapped U.S. Brigadier General James L. Dozier in Verona.

  “Right away I thought of your novel,” Pat said. “It’ll put the Red Brigades back on the front page and make it easier for you to find a publisher in the States. When’ll the manuscript be ready?”

  Year of the Gun needed revisions, I told him. To refer to it as a work-in-progress was to dignify a mercurial process that had recently persuaded me to transform a central character, an adrenaline-addicted combat photographer, from a man into a woman.

  “Great idea,” he said. “Just let me know when I should recommend it to Houghton Mifflin.”

  “How’s your work coming?” I asked.

  “Let’s not talk about that.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about the baby.”

  “She’s a little princess. Thank God she got Lenore’s looks. Let’s hope she doesn’t have my scrambled brain.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Susannah Ansley Conroy. Lenore’s and my first date started with drinks at a friend’s apartment in Ansley Park.” This sentimental allusion to their past encouraged me to believe he and Lenore had a future. Still, when he invited us to Olgiata for Christmas dinner, I hesitated. “You sure you’re up to having a houseful of guests?”

  “There won’t be a crowd. The big kids have gone back to Atlanta for the holidays. More peace and quiet for the rest of us.”

  ELEANOR CLARK’S ROME AND A VILLA declared that for Italians to go out into the streets is to go home. On most holidays, they flood the piazzas and stream through the city’s complex venous system of vicoli as whole families—tottering infants as well as doddering old folks—indulge in the pleasure of circulating in patterns that were probably hardwired in them at birth. But on Christmas the streets of Rome resemble a home abandoned. Behind iron grates, shop windows show their wares through prison bars, and the tables and chairs outside of cafés are chained together like coffles of slaves.

  Through this extraordinary emptiness, our borrowed VW Derby advanced along the Lungotevere, past the Ponte Milvio, and onto Via Cassia, where brutal apartment blocks alternated with a few graceful private villas that had survived the bulldozers of real estate developers. Beside me Linda held Marco on her lap while Sean bounced around in back, unrestrained by a seatbelt. These days we’d be arrested and charged with child endangerment. Back then we considered ourselves doting parents.

  Strung with faerie lights and wreaths, Olgiata looked like an almost appealing place to live. The Conroys’ kitchen was warmed by a blaze in the fireplace, and the smell of woodsmoke added to the seasonal atmosphere. Susannah lay content in her bassinet, while Pat worked with Lenore in what seemed to be harmony. Although I felt it had been wrong for Lenore to hide her herpes from him, I was glad that they appeared to have patched things up.

  “You’re lucky to have a husband who cooks,” Linda told Lenore.

  “The problem is he makes a mess. He dirties every pot and pan and I have to clean up after him.”

  “That’ll be Mike’s job,” Linda said. “He’s a terrific dishwasher.”

  “A real man cooks.” Pat strapped on an apron as if it were chest armor. “Not like Cliff here, who’s too sexually insecure.” This was how he introduced Cliff Graubart, a longtime friend from Atlanta, a bookstore owner, who had flown in for the holidays.

  “I’m fixing an avocado mousse that was a big hit at our wedding reception,” Pat said. “I decided tonight was the perfect occasion to repeat the recipe. But because I know just two numbers in Italian—one and twelve—I wound up with a dozen avocados. Everybody better come back for second helpings.”

  “They’re good for the heart,” Linda said.

  I had completely forgotten Pat’s coronary problem. When I asked what he had learned in Atlanta, Cliff piped up, “Look at this man, and tell me how a little thing like heart trouble could bother him. He absorbs sickness, lets it sink into his blubber until it smothers to death.”

  Two more guests arrived, a young married couple, Garrett Epps and Spencie Love, who were studying Italian at the University for Foreigners in Perugia. Garrett had published his first novel, The Shad Treatment, and was finishing his next, while Spencie wrote One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew. Linda asked what it was like for two authors to live in close quarters. Spencie laughed. “We have separate typewriters. I’d rather share a toothbrush than a typewriter.”

  Garrett Epps’s uncle, George Garrett, had been my creative writing professor at the University of Virginia. It turned out we also had a mutual friend, James Fallows. Garrett and Jim had worked on the Crimson together at Harvard. Then after a couple of years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, Fallows moved to Austin, and he and I regularly played tennis together, both of us dogged baseline retrievers exhausting each other in the Texas heat. When Jimmy Carter hired Jim as his head speechwriter, we briefly entertained the fantasy of continuing our competition on the White House court. In that instance, common sense triumphed.

  As Pat and Lenore served up platters of turkey and dressing, I mentioned the misadventure Fallows had suffered when Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, arranged a match between the twenty-eight-year-old speechwriter and the fifty-four-year-old president. I could have predicted the result. Jim shellacked the Leader of the Free World, but rather than win praise for his performance he got his ass chewed out for embarrassing the commander in chief.

  Pat, who loved tales of the mighty brought low, crowed with delight.

  “Remember the article Jim wrote for Atlantic Monthly,” Epps asked, “after he resigned from the White House? He characterized Carter as a micro-manager who controlled everything, right down to who played on the tennis court and when.”

  “What’s Fallows doing now?” Linda asked.

  “He went back to journalism.”

  “The old revolving door,” Pat said. “Hemingway blasted literary critics as a bottle of tapeworms. The same holds true for Washington reporters. I hate that inside baseball bullshit.”

  “You mean inside the Beltway,” Garrett said.

  “I mean all those Ivy Leaguers trapezing from one top job to the next, never touching the sawdust and elephant dung on the ground.”

  “Jim’s a good writer,” I said. “You’d like him, Pat. He did a terrific piece, ‘Daddy, What Did You Do During the Class War?’ It’s about his dodging the draft, then realizing that’s a privilege available exclusively to rich white kids.”

  “Jim’s new book, National Defense,” Garrett said, “advocates re-instituting the draft.”

  Without preamble, Pat erupted in paroxysms of rage. “Now that his lily-white ass is safe, he’s ready to send other boys into battle. These guys who claim they regret not going to war piss me off.”

  “That’s not what Jim wrote,” I put in.

  “Eight members of my class died in Vietnam,” Pat roared.

  Then silence descended upon the table. Susannah lay wide awake but quiet in her baby carrier. Marco quit wriggling and sat motionless as a Buddha on Linda’s lap. For Pat, it appeared that Vietnam, like his childhood, was a war that would never end.

  Lenore raised her wineglass. “Well, merry merry, everybody.”

  4

  Starting research for my next book, Short Circuit, I set out on the 1982 men’s pro tennis tour with many misconceptions, none more quickly apparent than my delusion that because I loved traveling as much as I loved tennis, the
project would prove to be doubly pleasurable. In the following months, I took trains, planes, buses, and a long-haul ferry. But these led less to places than to a pervasive state of unease.

  In Genoa, at the first tournament, the top players received under-the-table appearance fees and demanded and got preferential treatment. Players routinely tanked matches, split the prize money, and orchestrated the action during sets to make them more exciting and to fill TV time slots. You didn’t need to be Woodward or Bernstein to unearth these improprieties. Players, reporters, even umpires and tour administrators openly discussed who had no incentive to win, who intended to tank and catch an early flight out of town.

  My first reaction was that I had fascinating information that no tennis journalist had previously revealed. My second thought was that I didn’t dare publish it and risk the legal consequences. The libel suit prompted by Life for Death had, after two years of misery, just been settled. That learning experience cost me $70,000—and I had no stomach, and no money, for another losing battle. I wrote my editor and compared myself to a miner who discovers uranium while digging for gold. Both are valuable minerals, but uranium is radioactive and dangerous. Unless the publisher indemnified me, I swore I would delete from Short Circuit all controversial material and deliver the lyrical hymn to tennis I had originally proposed.

  My editor encouraged me to go for the uranium, not the gold; the publisher promised to pick up the legal bills. Still leery, I discussed things with Pat and he blurted, “Put everything in the book. Don’t leave anything out.”

  That was his approach in to all spheres of life. Cram in everything—food, alcohol, knowledge, opinions, quotes. Whether fighting Alan Fleischer in court or grappling with family turmoil, he went all in.

  Yet at the same time he expressed concern for my safety and insisted on driving me to the Foro Italico to collect my press credentials for that spring’s Italian Open. He feared I’d be attacked by a player or tournament official for asking too many awkward questions.

  In one of those commedia dell’arte extravaganzas commonplace in Italy, the Red Brigades terrorists who had murdered Aldo Moro were standing trial in a gymnasium adjacent to the tennis courts. It was as if John Hinckley, President Reagan’s would-be assassin, presented his case to a jury at Flushing Meadows during the U.S. Open. Seeing squads of soldiers armed with automatic weapons patrolling near the main stadium, Pat murmured, “I guess I overreacted to the danger you’re in.”