by Pat Conroy
During this time, I felt like a shut-in locked in the turret of a medieval castle. I spent much of my life alone praying for a novel to present itself in a form that would light an interior fire in me and attract readers at the same time. But all my days, I found myself with a need for conversation and friendship after I had wrestled with the aching loneliness of the English language. In San Francisco, except for Tim Belk, I found myself cut off from the stimulating conversation of friends. As I thought about this painful isolation and incurable solitude, I finally figured out that Lenore had isolated me from all the friends I had brought to our marriage. Because she was merciless and conniving, I found myself in my late forties facing a loneliness that cut like a horse’s bite. Into this vacuum I heard a woman’s voice, and it was calling out my name.
Before my back went out, the loveliest woman imaginable came up to talk to me at a party. She approached me, and we began talking easily. She was a great reader and was selling screenplays in Hollywood, near where she had grown up on a farm in the Los Angeles area. Her name was Sylvia Peto, and her marriage to the glass artist Dale Chihuly was winding down at a rapid pace. Before she left the party, Sylvia said, “Pat, you are aware that your wife hates you, aren’t you? If not, everyone else in this room knows it.”
She began calling me every day, and we’d always speak for more than an hour. She too found herself locked into a loveless marriage, and our histories floated out to meet each other in the middle of San Francisco Bay. I was crazy in love with her and had forgotten what that rare concoction of the spirit was like. I told her every story of my life and tried to leave nothing out. I’m still shocked I did not marry this woman, but she and I both underestimated my capacity for breakdown. I began my longest season as a likely suicide. It cost me the love of this fabulous woman, and making love to her was like a form of communion to me. One day, I hope to get to write a novel praising her for her intervention into my collapsed and hopeless life. She deserved much better than me, and I pray she found it.
Though the doctors could find nothing odd in the X-rays they took of my spine, they decided to operate to see whether they could find something by opening me up. After the operation, the surgeon told me that he had found a fragment of spine, shaped like an arrowhead, that had floated into my sciatic nerve. When I got on the elevator to go home, Lenore told friends I burst into tears, I was so happy to be returning to my home. I wept and couldn’t help it, but I was weeping not because of any joy in the homecoming, but because I inhabited a loveless home, and one where I couldn’t depend on my wife to take care of me.
“I will not die with this woman at my side,” I promised myself in secret.
Lenore told me when we got back to the house, “I’ve always hated sickrooms and invalids. I just can’t stand it, and it’s nothing I can help.”
“You make it very clear, Lenore,” I said.
That night I called my father, who was staying at Kathy’s house in Beaufort.
“I’m coming home, Dad,” I said. “I’m a very unhappy man.”
“You’re married to a jerk,” he said. “C’mon home and we’ll take care of you. You need a good shot of family. We’ll snap you right out of it.”
A week later, I took a flight to Savannah, and my father was there to meet me. I almost fell apart with gratitude when I saw him. I’d been running away from him for my entire life—now I was home to stay. I needed a dad to take care of me.
CHAPTER 18 •
Don and the Chicago Irish
Whenever I go to Chicago, that city of winds and foghorns and calloused hands, I’m always a stranger on arrival and a stranger when I leave. It should not be so. My father was as marked by the stockyards and railroad freight yards as Studs Lonigan was. When I read Saul Bellow’s psalm to the city, the immortal The Adventures of Augie March, I felt cheated out of a natural birthright. The streets of the city should flow through my veins in rivers of green dye, but Chicago will always remain a part of my life I never got to live. My father bragged about Chicago almost every day, making it sound like the prince of rough-hewn cities, where the Irish had escaped the potato famine to embrace a new, all-enfolding destiny. Growing up, I knew nothing about Chicago, and Ireland was nothing but a sundered worrisome canker on each Irish soul. Though my father reigned as the most grotesque of Irish Catholic males, I never knew the origins of his blue-collar crudeness. In my high school years, my dad grew enraged as I went through the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, and Austen.
“They write in the enemy’s language. Plus, the Irish write a lot better than the English,” Dad said with that air of authority backed up by nothing but wishful thinking.
“What Irishmen should Pat and I read to catch up on the genius of the Irish?” Mom asked him.
My father could not name a single Irish author of note, much to my mother’s delight. Chicago was the great mystery of my childhood—Ireland the black hole, a secret frigate moving angry men and contraband through my bloodstream.
Whenever I came to Chicago to sign books, I never told my father’s family that I was arriving, because some of them had humiliated me when my first book came out. One distant cousin really liked The Water Is Wide, calling it my “book about the niggers.” At the time, I could get that same response in the South, and my patience for it on the shores of Lake Michigan wore out fast.
Even so, my lines at signings in Chicago have been long, enthusiastic ones, and my name has attracted a lot of attention for a long time. When I signed at Marshall Field’s in 1980, it was big news among the Chicago Conroys and represented some healing of their broken spirits in the new world. I’d never heard of Marshall Field’s and couldn’t make out what all the fuss was about.
But over and over again, I would sign books for Irish Catholics who bought my books only because I was an Irish Catholic, which took me by surprise.
“When are you going to write a book about being an Irish Catholic raised in Chicago?” a hundred Irishmen and -women have asked me.
“I don’t know a single thing about growing up Irish Catholic here,” I responded.
“Why not?” I’d be asked. “Your name is Pat Conroy, and it doesn’t get any more Irish than that. Where’d your father live?”
“On Bishop Street,” I’d reply.
More than a few times, I’d be answered, “It’s all niggers now.”
This is how I learned that Chicago was as racist as Birmingham in its most primitive years. It surprised me, because I believed that an oppressed people like the Irish would have a great national compassion for a group that suffered as much as the blacks have. Yet, as I visited Chicago more often, I came to believe it was as racist and ethnically polarized in a mean, rather careless kind of way as any city on earth. It was a municipal sport for every ethnic group to hate every other ethnic group. Chicago seemed to have a meat-eating gift for it.
In 1986, The Prince of Tides was published, making the largest splash of any book I’ll ever write. When I got off in Chicago on my book tour, the climate of the city itself had changed for me. After being driven to the hotel, I was delivered to a restaurant where I was to have lunch with Mayor Richard Daley and his charming wife, Maggie. To be honest, I think Mrs. Daley was the only member of her family who had read the novel, but she was curious about its origins and asked smart questions. Maggie talked about books with grace and ease, then brought up the inevitable Chicago story—“When are you going to write a book about the South Side Irish?” Again, I had to disclose my ignorance of the subject, but Maggie and the mayor promised me limitless access to men and women who could tell me everything I would need to know.
“But that’s research,” I said. “That’s not living a life.”
“Just pretend,” pretty Maggie said. “Just make it up and no one will know the difference.”
Though more reserved and watchful than his wife, Mayor Daley started talking about his own Irish childhood, which seemed to have left him with a serious sense of responsibil
ity, but not much time to be a child. Like all of the Chicago Irish, he was a huge White Sox fan, and it was some mark of baptism that never wore off. He told me that his children were more fanatical than he and Maggie. They both had wanted to move to a beautiful house in the northern section of the city, but his children rebelled because it would put the Daley family into the heart of the city where Chicago Cubs fans were most numerous and loudmouthed. While he explained that bit of ephemera, I observed the obeisance of the waitstaff at the front of the house, and I felt like I was eating with some exiled Irish king. He wore his power well, but I would not have wanted to cross the man. If he’d taken a strong dislike to me, I could envision being picked up for speeding ten or fifteen times on my way to the airport.
Among my father’s relatives, my luncheon with the Daleys took on mythic proportions, the kind that transform a family’s destiny on a hard new continent. My uncle Willie, aunt Marge, and uncle Jim took special pleasure in my relating every word spoken to the most untouchable family of Irish renown in the history of Chicago.
My relationship with Aunt Marge had its bumps and sharp corners from the beginning. Marge is a six-foot Catholic nun who could hit a softball as far as her brothers and had the charming habit of swatting her nieces and nephews across the room with a squidlike arm. “It’s my love pat to the kids,” she would say, as another Conroy nephew went flying across the room.
Marge could punch with the best of them and drink with the worst of them. In Chicago’s Irish community, there was enough priest worship and nun euphoria to stop a lesser religion in its tracks. In fact, the fanaticism of Catholicism among Irish Catholics seems one of their least attractive qualities. All critical thinking seems to stop at the holy water font near the front door.
As a Catholic boy growing up in the South, I bought the whole program without caveat or discouraging word. In my final years at The Citadel, I thought my faith endangered, so I persuaded Reverend James Hopwood to open up the new chapel every day. I went there to fight off my transfiguring doubt about my religion with an avalanche of the Eucharist. Father Hopwood met me on a daily basis in the year that I felt my faith slipping away. The priest’s generosity could not stem the tides of my incoming apostasy, however. I’d been set on fire by Vatican II and saw a church I could fall in love with. With the death of John XXIII, I began to lose the faith of my forefathers.
Several times, over many years, I’ve asked my brother Mike what he remembers from his Chicago visits.
“Nothing,” he says. “Not a single thing.”
“Oh, c’mon, Mike,” I nudge. “You were in a younger generation. Surely you saw things that Carol and I missed.”
“You didn’t miss anything, because nothing happened. Look, Kathy, Jim, and I got to Chicago three times at the most. We learned the Irish were awful to their kids. Big surprise. We knew that from Dad. They’d hole us up in our bedroom while they took over the basement, where they played pinochle and the aunts danced to Uncle Willie’s shitty music.”
“Did they take you to any museums?” I asked.
“What museums?” Mike said. “I didn’t know there was one in town. After Kathy graduated from Beaufort High School, we drove to Chicago to attend a graduation party for our cousin Chrissie Huth. They made a real big deal out of it, but no one knew our sister Kathy’s name. Hell, they didn’t know any of us, and our grandparents didn’t seem to know or care whether we were alive.”
Brother Jim said, “Because of Mom, we weren’t considered to be Irish, or even Catholic. We were like hitchhikers through their lives.”
Despite myself, I kept running into the open propellers of my Chicago family’s sensibility, often without knowing what I was doing. When I was on business in the city in the mid-eighties, my father asked me to drop by and see his family, because his mother had been under the weather lately. I arrived for dinner with a beloved Houghton Mifflin sales rep, Dana Baylor, who brought me to Uncle Willie’s house in the Polish neighborhood where he spent the last half of his life. Neither my father nor my relatives informed me that Grandma Conroy was in the last stages of an active and violent form of Alzheimer’s. The family, of course, pretended she had a bad case of the flu.
At the front door, Dana was making plans to meet me for breakfast when Grandma Conroy roared out of her bedroom like a harridan. Making a race for the door with her strange, unkempt coiffure sticking up a foot in the air, she went straight on the attack with me and poor Dana.
Now, there is nothing funny about Alzheimer’s disease and I fear it more than any disease on earth. It has swept through my family like a plague, and it’s difficult to deal with and to bear. My grandmother had become pathetic. But my long dislike of her had stopped up the valves of pity, so I watched her approach toward me and Dana with a wary eye.
Grandma screamed out, “Are you two fucking? That’s what it looks like to me. I can smell it all over you.”
I watched the heels of Dana’s shoes as they sprinted down the walkway to her car and she yelled that I would see her for breakfast the next morning. Turning toward the group, I could feel the collective relief from the family that the secret of Grandma’s illness now was part of the Southern narrative. Shaken by the encounter, I sat down to a meal of Uncle Willie’s famous Italian meatball pasta, which was an abomination to the spirit of Italian cuisine. My grandmother took her place at the head of the table and stared me down with a cobralike hatred I could not mollify.
As the bowl passed into the hands of my grandma, she picked up a meatball and bounced it off my face, leaving a red stain of pasta sauce on my cheekbone. In silence, I wiped my face, then heard Sister Marge and her raucous laughter hee-hawing.
“Now Pat’s been baptized by Maw. She still has a strong arm,” Aunt Marge said.
Uncle Ed added, “And throws with accuracy.”
Uncle Willie could barely contain his mirth and reloaded the pasta bowl. Within a minute she had inked my face with three well-placed meatballs that splattered each time they hit. When she ran out of meatballs, she began hurling handfuls of undercooked pasta that draped from my shoulders like some freakish Medusa’s hair. The uncles and aunts screamed with laughter as each assault was delivered, but no one was much surprised when I ran from the table, cleaned up in the bathroom, and asked Uncle Willie to take me to the Roosevelt Hotel.
“Oh, he’s too good to stay here. He’s got to put his shoes under a bed at the Roosevelt,” Uncle Willie mocked.
“I signed a contract with the publishing company,” I said. “I sleep where they tell me to sleep.”
“Part of the job,” said my uncle Ed, the youngest and most successful member of the family.
“I think he’s just got the big head,” Aunt Mary said.
“I’m going out,” I said. “It’s been such a pleasure to get to know Dad’s family better.”
It was the last time I ever saw my grandmother, who died when I was living in Italy. I went to the Vatican to light a candle and have a mass said for the repose of her soul. It brought me into a larger family, denied to me, and I felt like a good little Irish Catholic for the first time in my life. My father and his family believe in the Church as unquestioning believers all set on autopilot. The rosary was the special province of Father Jim, who could utter it without a trace of adoration to cut through its repetitive lines. When Uncle Jim said the mass, there was not an ounce of awe or mystery when he lifted the host into the air and turned bread into the living, bleeding entity of Christ. Without ecstasy, the mass is a puppet show with human hands. But that’s the promise the Catholic Church always contains, heirlooms of priceless beauty formed from texts of the New Testament. That the church has let itself slide into the bloat and agues of its worst self is utterly repugnant. Among the choices of the world, there are many forms the Catholic Church may take, and for rigidity and suppression, there is none more disgraceful and gaudier than the liturgy debauched by the Irish Catholic Church. If there were no doctrine of hell, there would be no need for such a
church at all. It’s one of the heart murmurs that has degraded Ireland for me.
There is a submerged Atlantis that overwhelms the immigrant and brings almost everyone who claims to be Irish to his or her collective, nostalgic knees. Ireland is a scattered nation, and my family is part of a great, damaged tribe obsessed with exile. My father once gave yearly donations to the Irish Republican Army. He and I almost had a fistfight when I found out about it.
“You raised me to avoid killing the innocent,” I said.
“Then I raised you wrong,” he said. “In Ireland, anything goes.”
“Raise an army, uniform them, arm them, and meet the enemy on a common field of battle,” was my argument.
“Study geography. That doesn’t work in Ireland,” he said.
“Study philosophy; the terrorists are the lowest scum on earth,” I said, our voices growing louder.
“Not when they’re Irish,” Dad said. “Then they’re heroes beyond compare.”
“Did everybody stupid leave Ireland during the potato famine?” I asked.
Dad answered, “No, we left a few idiots behind. Guys like you.”
One of the reasons I had moved to San Francisco in 1989 was to be near my friend Tim Belk who was dying of AIDS. It was a time of the uneasy rule of death in San Francisco, where boys died impoverished and alone in squalid hotels in the Tenderloin. Tim and I made it our mission to hunt out Southern boys abandoned by their families, disgusted by their homosexuality, and left to die alone. We had our work cut out for us.
During early work among these suffering boys, I gave an interview to San Francisco Focus magazine. Surprising me, the editor, Amy Rennert, interviewed me about a subject I had rarely considered: my Irishness. Her questions sank like depth charges, but it has been part of my nature and my belief system that I’d answer any question I was asked by a legitimate reporter. So I let loose on the Irish for the first time, and it wasn’t pretty.