I glared at him unamused, but he got in a last word before disappearing behind his paper. “Stay out of the woods, Alabama girl.”
* * *
Bad as I hated to admit it, Pat had a point about bears. I’d seen a total of four during my previous visits, much to the envy of some of my friends who said that they’d been coming for decades and never even seen one. Pat and I shared a love of bear-sighting stories, which are plentiful in the mountains. My first bear sighting was a couple of years after we’d started coming to Highlands in the summer. I’d gone ahead to our rental, an isolated cabin in the middle of the woods. Pat was to join me in a few days. I was alone and standing in the kitchen as I washed dishes, occasionally glancing out the window over the sink. It was midmorning. When I looked up and saw the bear loping along the driveway a few feet from the open window, I thought it was a black dog. I realized my mistake and shouted like a fool, “Oh my God—a bear!” The poor thing reared up on its hind legs then hauled ass like a scared rabbit. Like an even bigger fool, I took off after him, but he disappeared into the thick forest.
The next bear encounter, Pat was with me. A different summer, a different rental, and our friend Janis Owens was visiting us. Although a native Floridian who’d never seen a bear in the wild, Janis handled her first sighting much better than I’d done mine, thankfully, and we got pictures. She’d just stepped onto the front porch of our rented cabin when a mother and two cubs came by, actually cutting across our low-slung porch on their way to wherever they were headed. Without taking her eyes off them, Janis stepped back into the house and instructed me to come quickly, and to bring Pat and her camera. She took photos and I videotaped the bears’ progress across our porch and yard while Pat watched in sheer delight.
The bears were footloose. Later in the afternoon Janis and I were headed into town when we rounded a curve at the exact moment the same mother bear and two cubs (had to be!) started to cross the highway. Janis yelled for me to stop. She leapt out of the car and held up her hand to halt the oncoming traffic until the bears crossed safely to the other side. Cars in both lanes screeched to a stop and folks began popping out with cameras. The mother and little cubs made their leisurely way across and meandered back into the woods.
It’s unusual to go to any kind of social gathering in Highlands and not hear bear stories. Most of the adventures are hilarious rather than scary, tales of bears coming into kitchens and helping themselves, or getting into unlocked cars as though going for a spin. A woman who lived near us reported that a bear broke into her house and rearranged the furniture.
But my favorite tale is about a new resident, a very proper and well-to-do matron, in one of the upscale golfing communities. One evening she frantically called security when she discovered that something had raided her trash can. The security officer arrived and tried to calm the poor woman down. “Ma’am,” the officer said, “please don’t worry. It was just a bear.”
Instead of calming down, the woman was highly indignant. “How did a bear get in here?” she demanded. “This is a gated community!”
* * *
A couple of weeks before our Christmas in exile, Highlands had its first snowfall of the year. I ran outside like a kid to twirl around in the steadily falling flakes. Having grown up a few miles from the Florida Panhandle, I’d only seen snow a half-dozen times in my life. Scrooge was less impressed and his demeanor darkened even more. Instead of frolicking in the snow, he looked through the fridge to make sure we wouldn’t starve if we got snowed in. First he’d ordered me out of the woods; now he was forbidding me to drive in the snow. I reacted to his unusual bossiness with a childish retort. “Excuse me, Pat Conroy,” I snapped, hands on hips, “who died and made you the boss of me?”
I got even madder when he pretended to tremble in fear of my temper, but I soon found myself giggling. Pat and I had some kind of strange alchemy and could never stay snappish with each other for long, no matter how badly one of us irritated the other. I don’t know what it was, but if I could bottle and sell it, I would. Every time we tried to have a fight like all normal couples do, we’d end up laughing at how ridiculous we sounded. Guess at our age fighting just took too much energy.
Pat, much more of a people person than I am, came to terms with our isolation by suggesting we visit family during the holidays. He had a long-standing tradition that both impressed and touched me. He always spent some time after Christmas with his daughters Jessica, Melissa, and Megan at their mother’s house in Atlanta. Unlike a lot of divorced couples, Pat and his first wife, Barbara, had remained close friends since they parted ways in the late ’70s. Even so, I was still somewhat anxious the first time I went to Barbara’s for the Christmas visit. How could it not be weird and awkward? I wondered. My girlfriends were incredulous and said they’d rather have a root canal than share a meal with their husband’s ex-wife. But Barbara has such a kind and generous spirit that she always made me feel welcome, and over the years she and I became friends.
What I enjoyed most during the Christmas visit was the comfortable relationship between Pat and the mother of three of his daughters. It was bittersweet, since it appeared unlikely he and his second wife would ever be that cordial. I wished they could’ve been; I’d been in both places and cordiality was so much better. After my ex and I got over our animosity, the boys could enjoy both their parents equally without having to choose. Pat had heard that Susannah still lived with her mother in San Francisco, but no one ever heard from any of them. It remained a heartbreaking situation for all concerned.
In contrast, Pat and Barbara were easy and relaxed with each other, laughing together as they reminisced about their daughters growing up. Unwrapping gifts from his girls, Pat pretended to be disappointed and asked in mock dismay if that was all they’d gotten him. I can hear him now: “This is it? Sure didn’t break the bank, did you?” Obviously, he’d add, Barbara’s gifts were much more expensive than his and proved who they loved most. Everyone smiled indulgently, used to his well-worn jokes.
Watching Pat with his former wife and their daughters, I wondered why all our complicated past relationships couldn’t be as congenial, though I suspect the answer’s obvious. We refuse to let go of our grievances long after they have the power to affect our day-to-day lives. Some wounds never completely heal, of course, and stay buried in a tender place within us. It’s the ones that we don’t let go of that eat us alive, a cancer in the darkest region of the soul. And what does that get us? Nothing that I can see but the self-satisfaction of having been right, or wronged, or whatever it was that got us to such a bad spot in the first place.
The letter Pat wrote me that Christmas was a good reminder of the importance of nurturing the loving relationships of our lives. It pains me to admit that he was better at doing so than I was. My notes to him were nothing more than reminders: don’t forget your interview; pick up a roast; call your publisher. By that point we’d been married several years, which shouldn’t have made it easier to take our love for granted, yet did. Reading his letter, I vowed not to let it happen. The letter read: This is the time of year I write you a love letter and thank you once again for finding me at a party in Birmingham and rescuing me out of a life I should not have been living. Until I met you, I did not know I could love this deeply; in fact, was not sure I could love at all. Now, I feel it rushing out of me every time you enter a room or come into my line of sight. Merry Christmas, darling—Pat Conroy.
* * *
Although our return to Fripp Island in April was a joyous occasion at the time, it will be always marred by a tragedy that occurred after we’d settled back in. Mike Sargent came out often, not just to show off his handiwork and touch up final details, but also to visit. I’d liked Mike from the first and liked seeing him and Pat become closer. Pat’d told me of Mike’s background as a military brat with an abusive father, and I saw that Mike had come to regard Pat as a father figure. Mike never called him anything but Mr. Conroy, and at first he was shy and overly poli
te with me. But I treated him like one of my boys, and he relaxed. One day when Pat wasn’t home, Mike asked if he could speak to me, a troubled look darkening his expression.
“I’m worried about Mr. Conroy,” he said earnestly, and I told him I worried about him all the time. Mike explained that when he was tearing down stuff, he found several empty vodka bottles. “I’m afraid he has a drinking problem,” he said.
Instead of saying “You think?” I told Mike I appreciated that he felt comfortable enough to share his concerns with me. I assured him I’d talk with Pat, which I did. To give Pat credit, I can only think of once or twice when we talked about his drinking that he was defensive. Otherwise he readily admitted it was a problem he would always struggle with, and he vowed each time to do better. And he would, for a while.
Several weeks later I was at a book festival in Fort Lauderdale, speaking about Queen of Broken Hearts, when Pat called me. Mike Sargent, he reported, was in a bad way. Things had not gone well for him recently. His wife had left him, and he was terribly depressed. Pat, as always, had tried to tease him out of it. It was the bad Conroy vibes from our house, he told Mike—you absorbed all of them because you failed my psychology course. Mike had laughed, and Pat felt somewhat cheered. “When will you be home?” Pat asked me abruptly, and I heard something in his voice that disturbed me.
I cut my trip short but didn’t make it home soon enough. After his call to me, Pat checked on Mike, and Mike’s son answered. His son was in the military but had come home to see about his father, because he sounded so bad. Pat knew that Mike’d been seeing a doctor for the depression, but not that he’d been stockpiling pills. His dad had tried to overdose, the son told Pat, but they’d gotten to him in time and he was okay. Pat asked if he should come stay with Mike. The son said no, that his father was safe now and Mr. Conroy wasn’t to worry. Pat ordered him to put Mike on the phone. “I’m coming to stay with you,” Pat said, but Mike was adamant. His son was there and it’d scare him more to see Pat so worried.
Pat had been right to worry. That night Mike had to be taken to the hospital, where he was put on suicide watch in the psych ward. The thing was, Mike had been a contractor for a long time and knew his business. Left alone in his barred room for barely a minute, he took down a panel in the bathroom ceiling and used a sheet to hang himself from a beam. Pat took Mike’s death hard. If only he’d gone to see him as his instinct had urged him! Maybe he could’ve gotten through to him. He would never make that mistake again, Pat told me through his tears. From that day forward if his heart told him that someone was in trouble, he’d listen.
If only it were that easy, I thought as I took him in my arms. The problem was, we don’t always know when those we love are in danger. Even though I still had the crystal ball Pat gave me in New Orleans, I had yet to see the heartbreak that lay ahead.
Chapter 14
Real Characters, in Life and Fiction
Pat and I would return to Highlands many times in the years to come. The book I set there, Moonrise, was released in 2013, after several false starts and frustrations with capturing what felt like the essence of the place I’d come to love. Reading my first draft, I realized with both amusement and dismay that I’d relied a tad heavily on some of our real-life experiences. In many cases I hadn’t even bothered to change names. I’m not sure if other writers would say this (certainly not Pat!), but I’m not always conscious of putting autobiographical information into my fiction. If something that actually happened fits into the plot of whatever book I’m writing, I have no problem using it. I especially like to excavate conversations to ferret out good dialogue, and I have shamelessly given a lot of my and Pat’s pillow talk to my lovestruck characters. In Queen of Broken Hearts, I based a character on Pat but made him a Maine sea captain. My idea had been to portray a complicated man who hides his deepest feelings behind a devil-may-care demeanor, just as Pat always did.
I wondered how Pat’d react to seeing himself in a book for a change, but fortunately the sea captain amused him. Anne Siddons had gotten him good in Hill Towns, the novel she wrote after visiting Pat and Lenore in Rome for the wedding of Cliff and Cynthia Graubart. I think the character Anne based on Pat tickled him as well, though he pretended otherwise. “Annie made me a lecherous old fart who never bathes,” he told folks. “Naturally, the character she based on herself is a beautiful, nubile young woman my character tries to seduce. But the poor fool can’t even get it up.”
Even my most autobiographical novel, The Sunday Wife, is mostly fiction. When I base a character on myself, I make her as different from my true self as possible. She’s always drop-dead gorgeous, oozes charm and sex appeal, and has dozens of men desperately in love with her. I give her an angst-ridden or tragic childhood, unlike my decidedly ordinary one. And she’s likely to be a brazen floozie who has numerous flirtations and affairs with my hottest male characters. I used to read for vicarious experiences; now I write for them.
Guess I learned from observing a master. Pat’s family teased him endlessly about the protagonists of his novels, who are always him. The characters who Pat based on himself are saintly, heroic, godlike men of flawless character and integrity. And because he based his villains on real people who’ve wronged him, they’re always the most vile and despicable of characters. I joined in the teasing until I found myself doing the same thing in a couple of my books. The temptation to take a stab at the villains of our life is just too great to resist.
We were in Highlands when I finished the final draft of Moonrise and Pat asked if he could read it. I hesitated. Since I’d made the novel’s protagonist a cookbook author and her husband a well-known journalist, Pat might think that hit a little too close to home. One might even say the journalist-husband shared certain characteristics with Pat—and this time, I went for the gruffer, darker side of him. Not only that, I’d fictionalized some of our personal experiences that he was bound to recognize.
Sure enough, a few hours later Pat sought me out with several pages of the manuscript clutched in his hand. “Is this guy me?” he demanded. “He’s an asshole.”
I tried to reassure him. “Of course he’s not you. And I don’t think he’s an asshole. He’s tough, true, but he has a tender side too. Keep reading. You’ll see.”
An hour later he was back. “You used real names, Helen Keller. You can’t do that.”
I stared at him incredulously. “Is this the author of The Great Santini speaking? Remind me—what was your father’s nickname in the Marine Corps?”
I thought I’d shut him up but he returned when finished, looking a bit abashed. He didn’t meet my eyes when he said, “Ah, Sandra? I liked the way you used the eavesdropping incident. Worked out well. Good book, kiddo.”
Pat patted my shoulder and walked out quickly, so he probably didn’t hear my thanks. It was just as well. By my use of the incident he’d referred to, I’d taken a page out of his book (so to speak). He’d taught me that all personal experience is fodder for fiction, and the more unpleasant the better—for dramatic purposes, of course. One of the few bad rifts of our marriage had taken place a few years back in Highlands, and in a way similar to a scene I’d put in my book. I took the essence of the incident, a misunderstanding caused by something overheard, then spun it to fit the plot. It shames me (but only a little bit) at how excited I was to see how I could use it as a pivotal point of my story. Sometimes, once in a blue moon, a writer gets to spin straw into gold.
We were in Highlands the year it happened, and both of us were working on books in rooms at opposite ends of the house. The whole thing came about when I went to retrieve something from the room next to where Pat worked. The room was so stuffy that I opened a window. Pat, sitting by an open window in the room next door, was on the phone with Doug Marlette. A benign conversation, and no big deal—or so I assumed until I mentioned it to Pat later. (He was often on the phone in bed so I’d been privy to many of his conversations as I dozed off next to him.) Over dinner that night I
said, “So Doug’s still feuding with those former friends of his, huh? Thought they’d worked things out.”
I could tell by Pat’s expression that something I said irritated him. His response was quick and sharp. “Who told you such a thing? Don’t repeat stuff like that unless you know it’s true.”
I was taken aback by his reaction. “No one told me, Pat. I heard you and Doug talking this afternoon.”
Pat’s eyes narrowed and he snapped, “What d’you mean, you heard us? Are you telling me that you eavesdropped on our conversation?”
Of course not, I told him indignantly. I’d overheard them by accident and explained about opening the window. Things quickly went from bad to worse.
So you’re an eavesdropper, huh? Pat said, ignoring my explanation. If I wanted to know what was going on with him, how about just asking instead of putting my ear to the door? He and Doug often talked about things that were highly personal and not intended for anyone else to hear. He never imagined I’d be lurking around listening to them.
I’d been too furious and insulted to respond. Instead I jumped up from the table and left the room. My sulky, infuriated silence only made things worse. Pat reacted to our first real fight as he always did to stress, by retreating into his shell and increasing his intake of booze. For the rest of our stay, things were extremely tense, with both of us miserable but too stubborn to clear the air. We never really did; it just sort of dissipated after we returned home. Without referring directly to our argument, Pat did apologize, in the uneasy, roundabout way he had of apologizing. If he’d said or done anything to hurt me, he said in an offhanded way without meeting my eye, then he was sorry and would never do it again.
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