A favorite author has died.
Pat Conroy, whose works include many of the books I have read and own, died on March 4 after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. He died at age 70, an age close to my own, of a disease that claimed my good friend, Bill Davis. And when I first saw the movie, Conrack, I did not know Pat Conroy, the writer, nor did I know that it was adapted from his memoir, The Water is Wide. It would take a few books for me to recognize our common bond: the brutality in our childhood and a love of words.
“Pat, get the kids into the car,” Mom said. “We’ve got to make a run for it.”
In the prologue to The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son, Conroy recalls a common event: His father’s rage and his mother’s interventions. When I read that line in 2013, I remembered a childhood moment at the train station in Pittsburgh, Penn., waiting for the great machine that would carry my mother and her children away from the damaged man she had married and into the safe haven of her own mother’s house in Baltimore, Md. The overriding memory though, is fear, and I know that some version of that fear was realized on a day similar to Conroy’s day, at an age similar to Conroy’s age.
“I define myself in this way: I am the son … of a volatile, brawling man …”
That line from The Lords of Discipline was part of Conroy’s never-ending cataloging of his pain. In My Losing Season, Conroy wrote of a moment when his father back-handed him across the face as they drove away from a basketball game in which Pat had played poorly. Conroy was able to achieve an uneasy peace with his father, who would attend book signings with the son he had brutalized. The closest I came to that kind of truce was when I took my first daughter to the rooming house my father occupied, where he proudly placed her baby body on his pillow. The next time that I saw him, he was dead, killed as a result of one of the bar fights he loved.
“Fall in love with me, Jack, I dare you to fall in love with me…”
In Beach Music, one of my favorite Conroy novels, Shyla Fox challenges Jack McCall as the deck of the house collapses into the ocean. I have not room to record the many ways that I love that novel, the many things I recognized in my family and Jack/Pat’s.
“The water is wide, but he has now crossed over.”
Conroy’s wife, Cassandra King, issued that statement through a family friend. Drinking, drugs and a couple of descents into mental illness – from which Pat penned his way back into a version of sanity – did far less damage than that great ravager of man, pancreatic cancer.
Ah, Pat: you wrote what I could not – cannot – and told the tales we shared in ways that I still, can only hope to be able to do, and if I am to believe what you wrote in The Death of Santini, made your peace with the man who made you. By the time this is published, Pat, your obituary and eulogies will have been written and spoken by those who knew you far better than I, but your words cannot have been loved in any greater measure than the way I loved them, and knew them. May those who loved you set your boat on the wide water and send you to the peace we all deserve.