Our Prince of Scribes by Nicole Seitz

Author:Nicole Seitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Great Yes

TIM CONROY

In 1993, eight months before our youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide, I visited Pat at his house on Fripp Island. It was in late November, one of those rare opportunities when I would get to spend time alone with Pat surrounded by a thousand books in the geography he loved best. This was going to be an epic brothers’ weekend. And that meant drinking Pat’s liquor and wine, enjoying his wizardry with fresh seafood, discovering what he was reading, prying out information about what he was writing, and talking about everything and everyone. I was excited to tell him about a poem I was struggling to write about Einstein and how our lives are a womb-to-tomb blur or some such bullshit.

He was working on Beach Music at the time. Neither of us had an inclination that he would be forced by events to add this line in the dedication of his novel: “And to Thomas Patrick, our hurt brother and lost boy, who took his own life on August 31, 1994.” Our youngest brother, Tom, who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia, was thirty-three years old when he died.

I was living in McClellanville and working as a special education teacher at Browns Ferry Elementary near the Black River in rural Georgetown County. Honestly, both Pat and I were messes. Pat’s second marriage had failed in epic proportions, and my marriage was flirting with disaster. Terrye and I would reconcile in part because of the grief and pain we shared over Tom’s suicide. I would pour what was left of myself back into her generous arms.

But during the fall of ’93, Pat called me weekly late at night. “Bro, Bro, Bro, Bro,” he would tease. We began our favorite game of dissecting the bloodline. No one was spared and no truth left out. “Heard from Carol?” He would laugh when I answered as the Great Santini, “Negative, pal.” When Mike’s turn came, we would praise him like he was Saint Jude for all he was doing to help Tom. Next was Kathy gossip, then Jim time, but we struggled when we got to Tom. We spoke in brief, anguished exchanges and could only salvage the moment with a tragic but hilarious Tom story to help us get through it. The family decoder ring: tragedy becomes the fodder for Conroy humor. That’s how we survived it all.

I knew little about the storyline of Beach Music except that Pat referred to it as a “brother book.” I suspected later that his invitation was somewhat motivated by a chance for him to observe me like a lab rat so I might reveal the finer oddities of Tee McCall, the pitiful and vocabulary-challenged character he created in mockery of me in Beach Music. In other words, the writer brother was mining family material again. But that didn’t matter a bit then or ever to me.

The weekend was magical. Pat told story after story, and I did my usual gut spilling. He loved to hear

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