The Lost Prince Read online

  “Who? You? Overreact?” I razzed him. “I’ve been meaning to tell you it’s time to lighten up and change your tactics. Just go limp and let your problems solve themselves.”

  “It’s not my nature to go limp,” he argued.

  “Make it your nature.”

  Pat parked the car and sagged behind the wheel. “It’s more than Lenore and Alan Fleischer breaking my balls. It’s my mother. She has leukemia. At least that’s what she claims.”

  “She wouldn’t lie about that.”

  “She’s done it before. Years ago, after she divorced Dad, she said she had terminal cancer and started traveling overnight with a priest. Supposedly he was her spiritual counselor.”

  “He must have helped.” I tried to get a laugh out of him. “She’s still alive.”

  “She says she’s in remission now and means to fly to Rome as soon as we’re in our new place. She doesn’t want to die before seeing Susannah. I suspect she secretly plans to baptize her. Assuming you haven’t already done that.”

  AT THE END OF MARCH, the Conroys moved to Via dei Foraggi, in the shadow of the Forum and Palatine. Their apartment, like most of those rented by rich foreigners, boasted a lineage of celebrity tenants. Omar Sharif had preceded the Conroys, and Pat felt less than welcome there. When he washed the Beamer in a fountain on his street, a carabiniere fined him for desecrating a classical ruin. From then on he polished the car in his private courtyard, which had its own fountain and a wisteria vine that webbed the second-story windows with branches as thick as Pat’s bicep.

  In a corner of the cortile, a staircase led to a large living room and an ornately decorated dining room. The building belonged to a couple of Yugoslavian brothers who also owned an antique shop, and they had furnished the apartment from their vast inventory of bibelots in what Pat referred to as “fag gothic style.” The pièce de résistance was a painting of St. Sebastian with his torso pierced by arrows. Pat maintained this was a portrait of him and offered to buy it. But the brothers refused to sell.

  Up on the third level, a sitting room and terrace gave onto half a dozen of the city’s signature landmarks. When I first gazed at that view, I realized that ruins in the centro storico looked newer than recent construction on the Gianicolo. Two-thousand-year-old monuments were kept in good repair for tourists, while buildings like the one Linda and I occupied sank into shabby dilapidation after a few decades.

  Pat proclaimed that he had the perfect place to write. With the three older kids away at school all day and the baby in a crib on the bottom floor, he enjoyed as much silence and isolation as he could reasonably ask for. But the total absence of distractions was driving him mad. “People say they envy me living here. They say Italy must be an inspiration. But I’m completely blocked.”

  Now with his mother due to visit, he had another excuse not to write. He loved her, but the intensity of that love contained the seeds of what sounded like a disease.

  “I owe her everything,” he said. “The trouble is she expects to be paid back with interest, and nothing I do is ever enough.”

  “Maybe it’d help to write about her as honestly as you have about your father.”

  “I’ve thought of that. I’m just not sure how honest I could be, especially since she has cancer. It’d kill her to hear what I really think.”

  “Which is what?” I asked.

  “She’s a liar and a manipulator. She has as much to do with fucking up my life as Dad does. Still, she made me a writer.”

  This was a declaration Pat would repeat for the rest of his life. Once, at the American Booksellers Association convention, he reduced the audience to tears by proclaiming, “It is the power of her voice that moves me to write. My mother taught me what we all look for as writers. It is the moment when language and passion and the beauty of writing all come together.”

  But that day in Rome, staring at the astonishing view that failed to inspire him, he spoke to me about his loneliness as a child, and the tribulations of transferring every year to a new military base. When he complained, his mother demanded that he suck it up and suppress his hurt feelings. Even as a little boy he was supposed to sacrifice for the country, like a good Marine. He recounted Peggy Conroy’s penchant for building him up, then knocking him down and withholding love unless she got what she wanted. Above all he recalled her failure to protect him from his ruthless father.

  ON MY WALK HOME FROM the Conroys’, I passed the ancient pillars that erupt from the sidewalk in front of a row of Jewish restaurants. The damp ghetto air smelled of carciofi alla giudia and olive oil. As I swung behind Palazzo Cenci and the Gellers’ apartment, the drizzle became rain and I hurried toward Piazza Sonnino, where I could catch a bus up to the Gianicolo. Nothing seemed sadder at the moment than a city, made for sunlight, moldering in wet weather.

  On Ponte Garibaldi, I paused and peered down at the Tiber where it foamed over the Isola Tiberina as if over the prow of a ship. In the frothing water below the weir, stray soccer balls and plastic bottles plunged, disappeared under the river, then rose again. They looked as trapped and hopeless as Pat had sounded. I wished I could cheer him up. I wished I could cheer myself up.

  Then by some improbable magic, it transpired that the random bottles and balls in the whirlpool cohered for several seconds into a shape, a kind of kinetic art installation. If you were patient and lucky, Rome often provided such lovely fleeting consolations.

  PEGGY CONROY’S TRIP TO ITALY commenced with a similar miracle. Groggy after an overnight flight, she set her purse down in the arrivals area and hugged Pat and didn’t remember the handbag until they were in the car on the parking lot. With little hope of recovering her cash, credit cards, and passport, Pat raced back to the terminal, and to his astonishment found another passenger, an Italian lady, protecting the purse. Not satisfied with thanking her, he bought the woman a bouquet of roses at a flower stall.

  By the time I showed up at Via dei Foraggi that evening, his mother still marveled at her good luck. But in Peggy Conroy’s ebullient presence Pat seemed more subdued than I had ever seen him. His tendency to tease and needle vanished, and the timbre of his voice dropped into a softer register. It was as if he feared that any loud sound, any abrupt movement, would shatter Peggy.

  He had composed a list of sites he planned to show her. He had crossed off the catacombs. As he explained to me, he had no intention of taking her underground to the shelves of skulls and skeletons, catalogued like a grotesque library.

  Pale and fragile as a porcelain doll, Peggy had lost her hair during chemotherapy and wore a champagne-colored wig in a perky, slightly bouffant fashion. Because of her slow Southern drawl, her fatigue, complicated by jetlag and medications, seemed fathomless. She had been a great beauty in her day, and still carried herself like a grande dame, not the dirt-poor daughter of rednecks.

  Just as Pat showed his mother none of the ambivalence he bore her, she demonstrated none of the passive-aggressiveness he had warned me about. Because her son had prepped her in advance, she knew precisely the right questions to ask about my books, and about Linda and the boys. She performed a credible impersonation of the mother in The Great Santini—Blythe Danner as a battered wife trapped between a monstrous husband and a passel of moiling kids, yet still poised and well-groomed. To watch Pat and Peggy together was to witness a ballet, full of ritual bows and pirouettes, all as false as her wig. I feared that one of them might trip, collapsing the charade. But they remained sure-footed during her visit, each playing a deeply rehearsed role. Behind her back, he referred to her as “Queen Lear.” What she called him, I never knew.

  AFTER FIVE TENNIS TOURNAMENTS I felt I had competed in hundreds of matches, not merely watched them. At the Italian Open, I was feverish and on antibiotics, but I had to fly to Paris for the French Open. There I soldiered on for a few rounds, then landed in the American Hospital, laid low by a virulent intestinal virus. Convinced I had been poisoned, Pat volunteered to come to Paris and serve as my bodyguard
. I assured him I just needed rest and would soon rejoin the circuit, which had begun to seem like a snake consuming its own tail and me along with it.

  Crossing the English Channel, I joined Linda and the boys in London for Wimbledon. We leased a flat in Knightsbridge, a posh neighborhood surprisingly full of low-rent crannies formerly occupied by servants. Ours lay at the bottom of a basement behind Harrods, and it offered everything a short-term tenant might require except windows. One morning an explosion shook the submarine gloom as if we had been hit by a depth charge. Two massive IRA bombs, packed with nails and bolts, had slaughtered four soldiers of the Blues and Royals at Hyde Park and seven bandsmen of the Royal Green Jackets at Regent’s Park.

  That evening during dinner, Mom phoned from Maryland. I thought she was worried the IRA bombs had hit us. As was her habit whenever there was terrible news to deliver, she asked, “Are you sitting down?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you’d better.”

  I stayed standing.

  “Tommy has cancer,” she said. “The bad kind.”

  Is there a good kind, I wondered, and sat down.

  “He was trimming a tree in the yard,” she went on, “and felt a sharp pain between his shoulder blades. The doctors checked him and found a tumor. It’s already spread.”

  “How long do they give him?”

  “Not long.”

  “Is he there? Is he sober? Can I talk to him?”

  “Of course he’s sober,” she scolded me. “He’s been on the wagon almost a year.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “How could you—over there in Europe.”

  “Please let me speak to Dad.”

  When she handed over the receiver, he was halfway through a sentence, “—and I swear to Christ I’ll fight this thing and beat it.”

  “Of course you will.” To my own ears the words sounded hollow of hope.

  “You bet your ass I won’t throw in the towel.”

  I broke into tears. I tried to stifle my sobs, in part not to upset Tommy, in part because it seemed hypocritical to cry now when I had so often wished him dead. I told him that he was a lion-hearted fighter, when in fact I had never seen him fight anyone except Mom, the pair of them drunk and brawling in the living room.

  Mom came back on the line. “I have my hands full here, Mike. He can barely walk and I don’t have the strength to carry him.”

  I asked if she had contacted Karen and my brothers. She snapped, “They have jobs. They can’t help me.”

  I promised I’d fly home rather than to the next tournament. Linda and the boys would stay with her parents in Pittsburgh.

  Providentially Pat Conroy passed through London before we left. He was escorting his three teenage daughters—Jessica, Melissa, and Megan—on what he facetiously referred to as The Grand Tour. While the girls were as effervescent as the carbonated drinks they carried with them everywhere, Pat confessed to being frazzled. Before they caught the boat train from Paris, he had had to fight off a pickpocket at the Gare du Nord, and during the tussle the pocket of his khaki pants had been ripped. He wore the torn trousers like a badge of honor. Now, in addition to a needle and thread, he said, he needed—he was absolutely famished for—grown-up conversation.

  While in England he planned to visit the set of The Lords of Discipline, currently being shot as a feature film at a British boarding school. “The fucking Citadel refused them permission to make the movie on campus. They claimed my novel slandered the college and cast it into disrepute—as if the shithole didn’t deserve its reputation for racism and cruelty.”

  When he heard my stepfather was dying, Pat stayed in London several extra days, and while Linda and the kids went to Madame Tussauds wax museum, he and I walked in Hyde Park, to the site of the IRA bombing, still surrounded by crime scene tape. Pat asked about my earliest memories of Tommy Dunn.

  “I remember him in his navy uniform,” I said. “He bragged that he had been the boxing champ, lightweight division, of his unit. He laced gloves as big as pillows on my brother Pat and me and taught us to spar.”

  “Wait a minute. You’ve got a brother named Pat? You never told me that.”

  “Yeah, he’s two years older. We were close as kids. But we didn’t have a lot in common once we grew up. He’s the type of guy, in high school he built a television out of a Heathkit. He joined the air force and became a computer expert.”

  “I’ll be damned. Another Pat in your life. A pity you’re not close to him.”

  “I love him. But he’s tough to talk to. He doesn’t show his feelings, and I’m never sure he understands when I tell him how I feel. He’s not open like you.”

  “I’m the most falsely open person you’ll ever meet,” Pat said. “How old were you when Tommy got together with your mother?”

  “About three. We lived in Anacostia, and he was based nearby at the Naval Receiving Station. He brought us steaks wrapped in butcher paper from the PX. A big treat back when meat was rationed.”

  “Where was your real father?”

  “In the army. Mom sent him a Dear John letter.”

  “I used to pray my parents would get divorced,” Pat said. “When, that is, I wasn’t praying Dad’s plane would crash. They didn’t split up until it was too late to do me any good. But hell, from what I know from my own divorce, it doesn’t make anybody happy. Was Tommy a mean drunk, like Dad? Or a funny one, like me.”

  “Basically he’s good-natured. He’ll have a few drinks and start singing. Have a few more and start dancing. But then he’ll have one too many, and everything goes to hell.”

  “Oh, I know about going to hell,” Pat said as we pushed on to Regent’s Park, where the seven Royal Green Jackets had died. “I’ve been there myself. It scares me I’ll end up like Dad—a drunken wife- and child-beater. You say Tommy never hit you. Were you ever tempted to hit him?”

  “All the time. Actually I did slug him when I was little. He was giving me a bath and . . . I don’t know why, I just balled up my fist and punched him.”

  “Jesus, if I did that, Dad would have torn me a brand-new asshole.”

  “I was a kid. Tommy probably thought I was joking.”

  “That wouldn’t have mattered to Dad. He loved any excuse to punch my lights out.”

  “That’s where Tommy was different. By the time I was in my teens, I was taller than him and weighed more. One night when he and Mom were slapping each other around, I pushed him and he fell down. He wasn’t hurt, just insulted. ‘I don’t deserve that,’ he said, ‘I used to change your dirty diapers.’”

  “Jesus,” Pat repeated.

  I told him that Tommy sometimes drove home drunk after tending bar at the BOQ and passed out at the wheel of his car, slumped against the horn. My brother and I had to go and shake him from his stupor before the neighbors complained.

  I opened up to Pat as I had to no one else in my life except Linda. It was such a relief I rattled on and on, describing the night before I left to meet my pregnant girlfriend in Los Angeles. As I was packing, Tommy blundered into my bedroom to wish me goodbye and good luck. He had the shakes and steadied his head against my chest. He believed there were bugs on his arms and legs, crawling on his skin and inside him.

  “What did you do?” Pat asked.

  “I held him. His sweat smelled like Scotch whiskey, his hair like cigarette smoke. Then I walked him into the family room and eased him down in front of the television. There was a pre-season NFL game on TV, and he lost track of me and I tiptoed out of the room.”

  I never adequately thanked Pat for hanging around London and letting me talk. It wouldn’t be the last time he appeared at precisely the right moment and proved that I could count on him. Later he wrote that most men of our generation were “lock-jawed . . . [and] lacked a specific language to communicate in the deepest places those hardest of things.” Instead, they tended to trade insults and obscenities. But that wasn’t our way. Pat and I never lacked the words to communicate.


  BY THE TIME I REACHED my parents’ house, my stepfather had endured several bouts of chemotherapy and been released from the hospital. Doctors said there was nothing more they could do. The tumor had metastasized to his brain. His speech was slurred and he shambled around as he did during drunken benders.

  Mom asked me to help edit the obituary she had prepared for The Washington Post. I feared Tommy could hear us from where he lay in the bedroom. Perhaps at that point he was beyond caring and it didn’t matter that she spoke as if he were already dead. Still, I was relieved when she sent me out to fetch fast food for dinner. She insisted that when Tommy retired she retired too and never cooked again. For years they ate nothing except carry-out from Arby’s, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut. I brought home greasy bags of burgers and fried chicken, but Tommy couldn’t force anything down.

  Much as he protested that he’d rather die at home, he was hospitalized again, and that’s where we said goodbye. As he wavered between drowsy consciousness and drugged sleep, nurses tended the wires that attached him to monitors. Periodically Tommy murmured names I didn’t recognize. He had had a first wife and family in Cincinnati, Ohio, and maybe he was calling out to them.

  When I asked in a whisper whether there was anything I could do for him, he told me to switch on the TV. As fate would have it, a pre-season NFL game was in progress, just as there had been eighteen years earlier, the night he shook with the DTs. Before I left him for the last time, I pressed my lips to his papery dry forehead and mumbled that I loved him. To my astonishment he replied, “I love you too. I’m not your father, but I always considered you my son.”