Any worries I might’ve had were unfounded; Susannah was lovely: pleasant, mature, and overly polite. She seemed relaxed with her dad and me and was particularly sweet to my five-year-old grandson when he came for a visit, fell madly in love with her, and followed her around like a little puppy. Because I’d already decided to take the summer off from work, I turned my writing room into a guest room for her and other visitors that summer. Pat and I were creating a new life together, and I felt that concentrating on our families was the most important thing at that time. Although Pat continued to research material for his basketball memoir as well as work on recipes for a future cookbook, he too devoted extra time to family. Understandably, our kids, siblings, and friends wanted to see for themselves how my and Pat’s union was working. Because our courtship had been so discreet, many of them thought we’d only known each other a few months.
At first I was oblivious to the family’s conjectures and speculations, but it soon became too obvious to ignore. One evening I was sous-chef while Pat prepared an Italian meal for a houseful, and he snapped at me when I handed him the wrong pasta. “Kiss my ass,” I snapped back, slamming the correct bag of pasta into his belly. As usual, everyone had crowded into the kitchen while we cooked, and two of Pat’s brothers, Mike and Tim, raised their hands to high-five each other gleefully. With a laugh Tim said to Mike, “Told you, bro! She’s not gonna take any shit off him.”
On another occasion I walked on the beach with the sisters-in-law and listened eagerly as they gossiped about Pat’s previous wives and lady friends. The first wife was beloved by all, the second less so, and most of the former girlfriends dismissed as flakes. We laughed about the stories of women pursuing Pat, including a stalker who sneaked on the island and crawled through a window looking for him.
“We shouldn’t be talking about Pat’s former women around you,” one of the sisters-in-law said to me. When I assured her that, on the contrary, I loved gossip, they exchanged curious glances.
“Were you really married to a preacher?” one of the others blurted out.
“From a holy man to Pat Conroy,” I said. “Talk about a leap of faith.”
“What was it like, being married to a preacher?” she asked, and I smiled.
“I’m writing a book about it.”
“Think you’ll ever write about what it’s like being married to Pat?”
“I might do that, one of these days,” I told her. “Or I might just threaten to. Think that’ll keep him in line?”
They exchanged glances again, then all of us giggled. “You go, girl,” Terrye Conroy said, and like her husband had done a few days before, raised her hand for a high five.
* * *
In between the comings and goings of summer visitors, I tried to make sure Pat and Susannah spent some time together, just the two of them. Although I didn’t witness any particular tension between them (that was to come the following year), both seemed a bit skittish as they treaded through hazardous emotional waters. The tension was understandable. Pat’d told me about the last time Susannah was on Fripp, when she was twelve. It wasn’t a pretty story. Her mother found evidence of Pat’s affair, letters from his lover, and Susannah witnessed the ugly argument that followed. A terrible thing for a child to see, I told Pat. I’d never do that in front of a child or anyone else. Instead, I’d just kill him and dump his body in the ocean.
Pat surprised me by studying me seriously before saying, “No, you wouldn’t. I know exactly what you’d do if you caught me running around on you.”
“This I can’t wait to hear.”
“You’d leave me,” he said simply. “Without saying a word. I’d never see you again.” On another occasion he surprised me even further by repeating his speculation to my boys. “I’ll never cheat on your mother,” he told them. The boys exchanged surprised glances before one of them dared ask, “Because she’d feed you to the fish?”
“Nope,” Pat said in a tone as serious as an undertaker’s. “Because she’d leave my fat ass and never look back.”
My oldest son laughed. “You’d better hope so. Granddaddy taught Mom to shoot at an early age and claims she’s a better shot than he is.”
Pat waved his hand dismissively. “Naw, she wouldn’t bother to waste a bullet on me. She’d just leave.”
I never understood how he came to that conclusion, or what in my behavior made him think that, and I didn’t ask. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
* * *
As the long summer days went on, Pat and his youngest daughter became more relaxed with each other. I enjoyed their stories about friends they’d had in Rome and San Francisco, and their animated discussions of books and writing. Susannah taught her dad how to email and gave him a user name he always cherished, Atticus. She traipsed around with us without complaint when we went house hunting in Charleston. For some reason Pat had decided for us to move there. I went along with him, but in truth I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Fripp. Life on a secluded barrier island suited me to a tee. Revealing how little he truly knew me, Pat kept asking if I was sure I’d be happy on Fripp. His previous wife had found it boring and isolated, he told me with a worried frown. My response was “Oh please don’t throw me into that briar patch!” Every so often he’d get a notion to relocate and we’d look again, him with high hopes and me faking it. Pondering this, I wondered if any of us could ever know the secret thoughts of another person, no matter how close we are.
The first real sign of the trouble to come occurred when Susannah’s visit came to an end after a few weeks, and Pat insisted she set a time for a return visit. Her hesitancy caused him to push even harder. I felt for him because I knew why he was doing it—the thought of another long separation from her terrified him. Susannah’d already talked of returning to her birthplace, Rome, Italy, to spend her senior year, which made a long separation even more inevitable. Unfortunately Pat’s fear came out the same way my father’s did, with anger. Let a child run into a road chasing a ball and my father would go ballistic, stomping and yelling in such a fury he’d scare the child more than the traffic did. Pat’s weapon of choice was always words, which he was a master at. He badgered Susannah for her reluctance to commit and kept pushing her. “I can’t believe you’re a Conroy,” he’d tell her. “Don’t you have a mind of your own?” I tried to catch his eye to send him a silent plea: Don’t do this. Take what she’s willing to give and quit pressing for more. To me, Susannah’s being there now was a big step in the right direction. Past the age of required visitations, she’d come willingly but needed time to rebuild the relationship with her father. Couldn’t Pat see what shaky ground he was on?
When we were alone, I said it aloud. Rubbing his face wearily, Pat agreed with me.
But he couldn’t help himself, he admitted. He was so scared of losing her that he kept overreacting and pushing her even further away. One step forward, two steps back.
I understood his frustration. On the day he was taking her to the airport, I walked with them to the car to tell Susannah goodbye. “Don’t worry, she’ll be back,” Pat said breezily as he tossed her suitcase into the trunk. “Hey—why don’t you come for Christmas, Susannah? Remember the Christmas we spent on Fripp? You loved it.”
She smiled at him. “Oh, Dad, you know I can’t come at Christmas. We always go to Hawaii for the holidays. It’s a family tradition.”
Pat snorted and flung open the car door. “Oh, really? A family tradition, huh? Let me tell you what kind of a family tradition it is, Susannah. I’ve never set foot in Hawaii.” And with that he jerked his head toward the car. “Get in. God forbid you miss your flight.”
I paced the floor until Pat got back. Had they endured the hour-and-a-half drive in sullen silence, or had they cleared the air? It was a volatile situation that one wrong word could shatter. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for either of them. Because my boys had always been so loyal to their mama, after the divorce I’d urged them to work on a personal relationship
with their father that had nothing to do with me. I could only hope that Susannah would come to that realization as well. Although Pat blamed his ex-wife for turning his daughter against him, in truth only Susannah could work out her relationship with her father. No one could do it for her. Being torn between her mother and her father was a heavy burden for a sheltered and sensitive girl, and one Susannah had carried since she was twelve.
Pat returned glum and slump-shouldered. There was nothing I could do but hold him and try to assure him that it’d be okay. I’d witnessed so much love between him and his daughter, I said, that even if they had trouble expressing it, things were bound to work out. Keep loving her and letting her know how much, I urged him. But Pat was inconsolable. I feared that his gut was telling him the same as mine: no matter how desperately he wanted to believe otherwise, this wasn’t likely to end well.
* * *
Pat and I saw Susannah again that fall when we made a trip to San Francisco. It was my first time to the Bay Area and I found it as enchanting as I’d always heard. The purpose of our trip was threefold: Pat wanted me to meet his longtime friend Tim Belk (whom he would base a character on in his next book of fiction, South of Broad); we were picking up some of Pat’s stuff that he’d left at Lenore’s house when he moved out five years ago; and best of all—we’d get a chance to see Pat’s brand-new granddaughter, Molly Jean, Megan’s first child.
Megan was the daughter most like Pat, so much so that I accused him of cloning her. His response was “My poor Meggie. She got all my bad traits except my temper.” Except for Pat’s clear blue eyes and sharply arched brows—even more striking in a female face—Megan doesn’t look that much like her father (thank God for that, Pat always said). Instead she inherited his droll wit, self-deprecating sense of humor, and absentminded approach to navigating the pitfalls of daily life. Stories of Megan’s misadventures still make the rounds in the family. After each visit to Fripp, where she inevitably loses her purse, we wait anxiously to hear how she boarded the plane without an ID. Somehow she always does. Because she’s not only hilarious but also drop-dead gorgeous, I figure she must either sweet-talk or joke her way through security. Either that, or they’d become so used to her tales of woe they just waved her through.
Pat’s favorite Megan story was the one she told about meeting her new in-laws for the first time. Awaiting their arrival for dinner, Megan went into a cleaning frenzy getting her apartment ready. Grabbing a green can off the counter, she scoured the entire place with Parmesan cheese thinking it was Comet. “No wonder everything smelled so godawful” was her laughing response. Her good-humored attitude to the chaos of her life makes her irresistibly lovable (also like her father), no matter what kind of mess she gets herself into.
My most cherished Megan story comes from the night she called her father to tell him she was getting married. Her announcement came as a surprise because we didn’t even know she was seeing anyone seriously. Pat and I were propped up in bed reading and I put my book down when Pat held the phone aside to announce in great excitement, “Megan’s getting married!” Holding the receiver so I could listen in, he said to his daughter, “That’s great, Megs. I’m really happy for you. Who are you marrying?”
“Hang on a minute,” Megan said. Pat and I looked at each other wide-eyed when we heard Megan say to her fiancé, “Hey, Terry? What’s your last name?”
* * *
In San Francisco, Megan brought six-week-old Molly Jean to meet Pat and me at Tim Belk’s spacious apartment near Union Square. The apartment had a lush garden in back where wild, jewel-toned parakeets flitted around a gigantic trumpet vine drooping with yellow blooms. Dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked Molly Jean won her grandfather’s heart the moment Megan placed her in his arms. With a look of wry amusement on his face, Tim watched Pat coo at his granddaughter and tried not to gag—or so he told me later. Although I’d talked with Tim several times on the phone (he was curious to find out who Pat married “this time around”), it was the first time he and I had met. I found him to be exactly as Pat’d said: a witty, flamboyantly gay man who played the piano like an angel. Although Tim was originally from South Carolina, I suspected his exaggerated southern drawl might be a bit of an affectation.
“Look at you, Pat,” Tim said with a roll of his eyes, “turned to mush by a little-bitty baby. God help us all!”
“I won’t ask what turns you to mush, Tim,” Pat shot back. “You’re liable to embarrass my Alabama bride.”
Tim winked at me. “Oh, honey, I don’t think so. I’ve read her book.” One of the subplots of Making Waves was the homophobia of small southern towns, a theme I would explore even further in The Sunday Wife. After he read my first book, Tim had called me to share some of his personal experiences and it helped me in writing the second, which had a similar subplot. Initially Tim had denied his sexuality and married his high school sweetheart, he told me. “But she and I got divorced shortly afterward,” he explained, “because of irreconcilable similarities.”
When Tim suggested we adjourn to a bar “for a drink or ten,” Megan wisely decided to take the baby home. We made our plans to meet the next day at Pat’s former home on Presidio Avenue, where Susannah lived with her mother. Lenore was out of the country but hadn’t objected to Pat and me coming to the house in her absence to collect the personal items he’d left behind. Somehow plans had been worked out between her and Pat; I’d stayed out of it. The main thing Pat wanted was his handwritten manuscript of Beach Music. Working on the screenplay at Fripp, he’d realized it must still be at his former residence. His typist, Betty Roberts, had picked up the handwritten pages at the house and told Pat she’d returned them there. Lenore hadn’t been able to find them anywhere, though. It was only later that the typist remembered she’d sent the handwritten pages to Nan Talese instead. To Pat’s great relief, Nan would find the manuscript beneath everything Betty’d mailed her on finishing the job.
At the time, however, the whereabouts of the Beach Music manuscript was unknown, and Pat was fretting to have it in his possession, so off to his old house we went. I was curious to see the remnants of his life before me. Pat pointed out a crossing at a street a few blocks before we got to the house. “Remember I told you about my accident? That’s where the car hit me. I was coming back from the store, wasn’t paying any attention, and walked right into it. Brushed myself off and walked on home. I didn’t realize how badly I was hurt until later.”
He ended up having back surgery that laid him up for several weeks. Although the impact of the car hadn’t seemed that bad at the time, the surgeon found the damage to his lower back that explained the unrelenting pain he’d experienced after thinking he was fine. “It was the perfect metaphor for my life then,” Pat observed bitterly. “No one believed the pain I was in. Lenore didn’t even believe a car hit me. She thought I’d made it up.”
“Why would anyone make up something like that?” I asked, bewildered.
“She thought I was drunk and fell down in the street.”
“Well?” I teased. “Did you tell me you were walking back from the liquor store when you got hit?”
As usual, my teasing lightened his mood. “I wasn’t drinking,” he said with a grin. “But as soon as the car struck me, I cradled the liquor bottles in my arms so they wouldn’t break. Turns out, it was me who broke instead.”
Seeing Pat overcome with emotion when Susannah let us into the house might not have surprised me, but the way it happened did. When Susannah’s dogs, two sweet-faced King Charles spaniels, heard Pat’s voice, they came hurtling into the entranceway and jumped him. He knelt to embrace them, laughing as the dogs yipped and danced and licked his face so ecstatically Pat almost fell over. Although he made no attempt to hide his tears at seeing the dogs again, I choked up and asked Susannah to point me to the nearest bathroom. The heartbreak of a failed marriage, I thought as I dabbed at my smudged mascara. Does it ever end?
“At least somebody’s glad to see me,” Pat said with a fo
rced laugh as Susannah led the dogs away. His attempt at humor fell flat. The tension was as thick as the fog drifting in from the nearby bay, and I couldn’t think of anything to do except blabber about the house and how lovely it was. While there was much to admire about the stately, three-storied Victorian, I knew how inane my compliments sounded. Unlike our home on Fripp, the San Francisco house, as beautiful as it was, felt formal and uninviting. Thankfully Megan arrived, and Pat went off with Susannah to look for his manuscript in the attic room that was once his office.
On the ride back to Tim’s, I took Pat’s hand, kissed it, then made a face. “I hope you washed off the dog slobber.” I instantly regretted my flippancy, but Pat was too gloomy to notice. Before we left, he’d had another go at persuading Susannah to come for Christmas, either before or after her trip to Hawaii, but to no avail.
Without looking my way, Pat squeezed my hand. “I cannot wait to get home. What a beautiful word.”
I put my head on his shoulder, dog slobber and all. It’d been almost a year since I’d moved into our cozy house on Fripp, and we’d made a home for ourselves. I prayed that the day would never come when one or the other of us would be forced to return to our beloved house to pick up what was left of a once-happy marriage.
* * *
In no time at all, the Christmas season was heading our way with the speed of a runaway train. Funny—when I was young, Christmas took forever to get here; after I turned fifty, I saw time in a different way. It felt like I’d been floating peacefully down a river on a small raft for a long, sweet time, then I suddenly notice that the current has picked up. When it hits me how treacherous the water has become and how fast it’s pulling me downstream, I grab hold of the raft and pray it’ll slow down. Somewhere in the distance is the unmistakable sound of the rapids, but there’s no way for me to turn back or slow the raft down. I can’t do anything but hang on helplessly and watch the scenery flash by me in a blur.
Tell Me a Story Page 14
