Tell Me a Story Read online

  The police turned out to be right. Eventually the holy man would confess that he’d complained about me a tad too bitterly to a friend of his. In a moment of male solidarity, the friend had gotten drunk and done the dirty deed late one night. (In the upcoming years the preacher man and I would become friends again, but that time was yet to come.) I accepted my ex’s apology without comment, though I didn’t buy it. How had his friend known where I lived or what kind of car I drove? It had hit me hard. If one of my friends hadn’t helped me finance new tires, I would’ve been stranded. A car was a necessity for me, not a luxury. Teachers’ pay is abysmal at best, and to make ends meet while trying to help out my kids with their college expenses, I’d started teaching a night class at a community college thirty miles away. Monday through Thursday I left work at the writing center and drove straight to the six-to-nine class, eating a peanut-butter sandwich on the way.

  But I didn’t tell Pat any of that when he called me that night. My book had come out, and he wanted to hear everything—where I’d signed, how I liked the bookstores, which writers I’d met at various literary festivals. He sounded downright disappointed to hear that everyone had been fairly nice to me. Next time, I said, maybe some snooty writer would snub me, so I’d have a good story to share. Although we laughed about it, Pat warned me that it’d happen eventually. Stay midlist and nobody bothered with you; but land on the bestseller list and earn a target on your back. Unfortunately he proved to be right. In every field, success breeds jealousy, and writing is certainly no exception.

  Only later would I look back and divide others’ treatment of me into two camps, pre-Conroy and post-Conroy. It became a test of character, the way I defined a writer, bookseller, or critic to Pat. “I met a friend of yours at the book festival,” Pat might say to me, “and he seems like a nice guy.” If my response was “He was really nice to me when my first book came out” (the subtext being, before I married Pat), then said person passed the good-character test. On the other hand, if my response was more like “He claimed to be a friend of mine? That’s odd. He never spoke to me until I married you,” it was another story altogether.

  On a more cheerful topic, that evening I had an adventure to tell Pat about, and a good one: the English department had sent me to a two-week workshop at a college in Vermont that specialized in teaching learning-disabled students. It’d turned out to be one of the most profound experiences of my life. Because I not only taught freshman classes but also worked in the writing center, I ran across a lot of students with various learning disabilities. Most of them were mild, certainly in comparison to the severe cases I saw at the Vermont college. Some of their stories were heartbreaking, like the student who told us how his disability made reading so difficult. When he was in the third grade, his teacher, a nun, made him stand in front of the class in the position of Jesus on the cross for hours every day because he couldn’t complete his reading assignment. When he got home from school he was afraid to tell his parents why his arms hurt so badly he couldn’t hold them up. He failed third grade twice and was put into a class for the “mentally retarded.” He was dyslexic.

  Pat, whose first job had been as a teacher, asked me a dozen questions about the school and their methods. I wasn’t really surprised by the intensity of his interest. Recently I’d reread The Water Is Wide, about his experience as a young man teaching black students in a Gullah community off the coast of South Carolina, during the early years of integration. His unconventional teaching methods and outspoken criticism of the educational system cost him his job. Rereading the book now that I knew the writer, I understood something that would be proven to me over and over: first and foremost, Pat was a teacher. Although he never returned to the classroom, his love of teaching came out through his mentoring and support of other writers. I couldn’t help myself; I had to laugh when I asked him why he didn’t teach after The Water Is Wide came out. I’d assumed since the book was a success and had been made into a movie that he didn’t need to. Not so, he said. “It’s kind of hard to get another teaching job,” he told me with a laugh, “when you’ve been fired for gross neglect of duty and conduct unbecoming a professional.”

  After he and I said our goodbyes, my mind kept wandering back to our conversation, which had been as lively and stimulating as ever. Not to mention long—we’d talked past midnight. Ours was a unique relationship. We had met one time and knew little about each other, yet I considered him a good friend. Involved in my own chaotic and busy life, I wouldn’t think about him for ages, then he’d call and once again, we’d pick up where we left off. He had a remarkable memory. Sometimes he’d ask about a book I’d mentioned the last time we’d talked, or a new essay topic I’d assigned my students. It blew me away, how he could recall such details of weeks-old conversations. It was also embarrassing. I faked my way through half our phone calls by pretending to remember stuff that I’d totally forgotten.

  I’d only told a couple of my closest friends about Pat’s calls, and Loretta’s reaction made me think twice before sharing with anybody else. “Don’t give me that friendship crap, girl,” Loretta smirked. “He’s coming on to you.” I swore he wasn’t, but she didn’t believe it. If she’d been privy to even one of his calls, I argued, she’d understand. Pat wasn’t like that. “He’s a man,” Loretta said. “Of course he’s like that. God, you’re so pathetic.”

  While it might’ve been true that I wasn’t overly worldly in the ways of men, I relied a lot on intuition. I wasn’t so inexperienced that I couldn’t tell when someone was romantically interested. And if the signals got hazy, I wasn’t beyond seeking outside help: I read the tarot cards. Loretta challenged me to take it to the tarot, but I insisted there was no need. I trusted my intuition on this one: Pat Conroy wasn’t a player. His only interest in me was as a friend.

  Chapter 3

  First Steps

  Doing a signing for Beach Music sometime in 1996, Pat came to Birmingham, but I was teaching a night class and didn’t get to go. Based on my own signings, I foolishly assumed his would only last an hour or so. I still had a lot to learn about the publishing business. Although Pat had left a message several days before the signing to say when he’d be in my neck of the woods, I hadn’t called him back. He was traveling and said in his message that he’d call back when he could. He’d also mentioned that he’d only be in town briefly—flying in for the signing and out the next morning. I’d devoured Beach Music and looked forward to talking about it with him. But his calls were so sporadic that I never knew when (or if) we’d talk again.

  A couple of weeks after Pat’s appearance in Birmingham, which went on so long he had to have a hand massage before it was over, he called me from New York. And said breezily (as though it didn’t matter to him one way or the other), “Hey, King-Ray! I kind of hoped I’d see you at the bookstore in Birmingham.”

  I explained about the night class then quickly launched into my glowing review of Beach Music before he could get on another subject. I’d tried to talk to him about it before—it’d been out almost a year by then—but he would always brush me off by asking how things were going with my book. It was hard to get him to talk about his work, except in a vague or general manner. When he did say something more specific, it always caught me off guard. About Beach Music, his shocking comment was “My brothers are all characters in the book, except Tom. Well, he was in it, but he committed suicide before I finished the first draft.”

  “What?” I said when I found my voice. “My God! What happened, Pat?”

  His response was calm and measured. “Tom was mentally ill and had tried before. Truth is, I hardly knew the kid because of our age difference. I was gone from home by the time he came along. But it was still godawful.”

  “Of course it was. What a terrible thing. I can’t imagine how you ever finished your book after that.”

  Following a heavy silence, Pat said, “You know what, King-Ray? I’d planned for John Hardin, the character based on Tom, to commit suicide
in the book, but I changed his story afterward. And it helped me, to be able to give the fictional Tom a better, happier life.”

  “John Hardin’s a wonderful character, Pat. What a lovely tribute you gave your brother.”

  “It’s the only thing I ever gave him. Poor kid. He never had a chance.” As though catching himself before revealing anything else painful, Pat quickly changed the subject. “But enough of that! Tell me about your day. What’re your students like this semester?”

  On other occasions, my attempts to talk about his work had led one or the other of us to reveal personal information. When I told him that my oldest son could quote passages from The Lords of Discipline, Pat’d asked how many kids I had, and he perked up to hear I had three boys. Except for the time when he helped to raise a stepson, he said, his house had been made up of girls—four daughters. “Funny,” he said with a chuckle, “I can’t talk any of them into going to The Citadel. Seems like some shitbird wrote an uncomplimentary book about it.”

  (The “shitbird” in question was Pat himself. In The Lords of Discipline, Pat exposed the hazing and abuses he experienced as a student at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina. After reading it, I would’ve never let one of my boys go there, but I wisely refrained from sharing that thought with him.)

  Instead we laughed and moved on to another topic. I would soon discover that jokey, dismissive banter was Pat’s favorite way of avoiding painful subjects. Nothing he’d said in any of our conversations revealed the terrible turmoil he was going through during that time, or that the family he’d mentioned so casually had been split apart only a short while before we met.

  That particular evening, he interrupted my yammering about Beach Music to ask a question. “King-Ray? Have you moved again, or just changed phone numbers? I got a recording when I called your old number.”

  It hit me then that he didn’t know. Since our last conversation, I’d taken a job at a community college in eastern Alabama and moved halfway across the state. Such was the nature of our relationship that it hadn’t occurred to me to send him a note with my new address, like I’d done with other acquaintances. He and I were buddies, true; but casual, long-distance ones. In those days, the phone company gave out a new number when the old one was called, or Pat and I would’ve lost touch with each other completely after my move—which he didn’t hesitate to point out.

  “And you didn’t think to let me know about your move—or the new job?” he asked, sounding more bewildered than hurt by my oversight.

  “Yeah, I should have,” I muttered, chagrined. It sounded lame and was. I loved our conversations and valued his friendship, yet I’d been unintentionally careless with it more than once.

  Pat chuckled. “You’re not very forthcoming, King-Ray. I’ve had to drag every bit of information out of you, kicking and screaming. Anybody ever told you that?”

  “All the time,” I said lightly. “Now, tell me what you’re doing in New York.”

  Eventually Pat would claim to have found the perfect nickname for me. He started calling me Helen Keller because he said I saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. It was typical of Pat’s blarney, of course, since Helen Keller had been very vocal in her own way and for many causes. But the nickname, a tongue-in-cheek dig at my natural reticence, stuck. Even my sisters would ask to speak to Helen Keller when they called, claiming Tanna (their own nickname for me) never told them anything either. Over time it became a family joke, with everyone joining in. Even I got into it and signed my notes to Pat Helen K. It amuses me now to think of Pat’s papers, which are at the University of South Carolina’s special archives collection, and the questions future scholars will have when they come across the sweet little love notes Pat wrote and addressed to Helen Keller.

  I have to admit, Pat wasn’t wrong to poke fun at my taciturnity. Although I’m not intentionally tight-lipped or unforthcoming, I’ve always been private to such a degree that my reticence can come across that way. It’s something I assume all introverts deal with. In the life I led before meeting Pat, I’d worked hard to overcome what could be perceived as aloofness. A pastor’s wife lives in a goldfish bowl, where personal privacy is practically unheard of. During my two decades as a preacher’s wife, I coped by developing a public persona that was as different from the real me as possible. It took me a while to realize that’s why I enjoyed my conversations with Pat. I was myself with him and could talk about things in a way I’ve never done with anyone else. It took us a while to get there, but once we did he became my closest confidant.

  One time early on, our conversation turned to religion. Pat’d been surprised that I’d read a book by a female theologian he’d just discovered and said most folks had never heard of her. “On the contrary,” I responded. “All good Episcopalians know her work.”

  “You’re lucky to be Protestant,” he said, sounding truly wistful. “I was born and raised Catholic. You can’t imagine how it screwed me up.”

  “Oh, I think I can,” I said with a smile.

  * * *

  In my new job I had less time to chat because my teaching load was heavier. The two-year college was large and sprawling with many more students than the four-year school where I taught before. I was teaching not only night classes in creative writing, thanks to my credentials of having published a book and a couple of stories, but also an early morning class for returning adults (6:30 a.m.!). In addition, I had the usual freshman and sophomore composition classes. With that many classes, I spent weekends and every free evening grading essays. I loved my new life, though, and fit in easily with my colleagues, whom I came to adore. Being in a new environment helped my recovery from the bitter divorce more than anything else. (No slashed tires, at least.) After the turmoil of the preceding few years, I relished my hard-earned freedom and swore to never give it up again. Any landing you walk away from, I told myself, is a good landing.

  My new town, about halfway between Birmingham and Atlanta, was larger than Montevallo—it even had a mall—but lacking in the small-town charm I was used to. I was far from a regular at the stately Episcopal church I joined, but no one there spoke to me. Even so, I didn’t mind the anonymity of a larger place at that stage of my life. Being away from everything familiar forced me to start over and take on a new persona. I rented an unassuming little town house in a development built next to a wooded, derelict graveyard. When my sons visited, we roamed it searching for the fallen-over tombstones hidden in the brambles. I wouldn’t dare go in it alone.

  I even started going out with men again, though I cringed at the word dating and refused to call it that. I’d never liked dating, hadn’t enjoyed it even as a teenager. Nevertheless, I got involved with a colleague much sooner and more seriously than I intended. I was out of practice, I chided myself, or I would’ve seen it coming and pulled away before getting in so deep. In truth, I wanted nothing more than my freedom. I wasn’t ready for a relationship and getting into one with a colleague was a mistake that caused me a lot of remorse and guilt.

  Later, I would find out that Pat had done the same, which explained his off-and-on phone calls. In typical Conroy fashion, his involvements were even messier than mine.

  While still married, Pat had gotten involved with another woman, a major factor in the breakup of his marriage and hers as well. Once both Pat and the “other woman” were free, however, their relationship soured, and they went their separate ways. He started seeing someone else right away, a newly widowed woman he’d known for a long time. Soon he’d become a father figure to her kids, who were still grieving for their own father. Like me but to a much greater degree, Pat found himself caught in a situation that he couldn’t get out of without causing everyone involved a lot of pain.

  At that time, however, neither of us knew those things about the other. When I first moved to East Alabama, most of what I heard from Pat came from my answering machine. It took him a few tries to learn that the best time to call me was late at night, after my classes and ju
st before bedtime. In many ways, those late-night calls started a different phase of our friendship. Because it was late and both of us were tired (having had a few glasses of wine didn’t hurt, either), we talked much more freely. When he questioned my move, wondering if I’d been unhappy at the other college, I told him no, it wasn’t that. I admitted that I needed to relocate after an extremely difficult divorce. “No kidding?” was his response. “I went through one of those myself not too long ago. Aren’t they fun?”

  * * *

  Christmas 1996. My relationship with the colleague was still on, the one I needed to find a graceful way to exit, when Pat called me one night. How far was this new town of mine—Gadsden, right?—from Atlanta, where he might be over the holidays, he asked. Maybe a couple of hours, I replied. Why? Oh, he might come over and see me, he said in that overly casual tone I’d heard so often. That’d be nice, I’d said, but he needed to let me know because I’d be away for most of the holidays. I’d planned on seeing the grandkids then going to South Alabama to visit my widowed father, where my two sisters would be with their families.

  Pat’s plans were still uncertain, he told me, but he’d call if his visit to Atlanta worked out. We said our goodbyes with nothing settled, just a lot of maybes floating around. Even after that, it did not occur to me that he was interested in me in any way other than as a friend. To this day none of my friends believe that, but they weren’t privy to our conversations. He still hadn’t said a single thing to suggest his interest was anything other than companionable, even with his suggestion of a Christmas visit.