The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (79 page)

“You are stupid,” Eustace recalls his father saying. “I’ve never met a child more dimwitted. I don’t know how I could have sired so idiotic a son. What are we to surmise? I believe you are simply incompetent and will never learn anything.”

And then Mr. Conway would encourage the younger children to laugh along with him at the ludicrous stupidity of their worthless older brother. Which they would willingly do, in the manner of the outcast kids at the lunch table with the braces on their legs who are always relieved to see another child bullied in their stead.

The other matter that stood out to Randy Cable was the incessant harping on table manners. He’d never been in a “proper” household before or experienced such rigid formality at mealtime. If Eustace ate too fast or used a utensil incorrectly, the father would come down on him with both feet for his “absurd and primitive” table manners. It made Randy nervous to pick up his fork; he never got in trouble for anything like this at home. Thirty years later, Randy is still puzzled by Mr. Conway’s emphasis on mealtime etiquette. “At our dinner table,” Randy recalls, “it was every guy for himself.”

Yeah, well. It was something like that at Eustace’s dinner table, too.

The reasoning behind a man’s decision to name his firstborn son after himself has, I think, many factors. I understand that the custom is generally seen as a mere societal convention (particularly in the American South) but it seems to me more loaded. Some interpret the custom as vanity, but I wonder whether it’s vanity’s opposite: insecurity. To me, it seems a touching and hopeful wish, as if the father—frightened by the importance of having created a new life, a new man, a new rival—utters a small prayer that in the naming of his baby there will be a kind of twinship between himself and the child. In wearing this most familiar name, the child is no longer a stranger or a possible usurper. It’s as though the father can look upon his newborn son without fear and proclaim:
You are me; I am you
.

But he is not you, and you are not him. Which is why there is ultimately as much danger in this custom as there is comfort.

Mr. Conway’s full name is Eustace Robinson Conway III, and he named his son Eustace Robinson Conway IV. From the beginning, the two were differentiated only by an adjective: Big vs. Little. They even looked alike, the Big and Little Eustaces, with the same wide and intelligent hooded brown eyes. At first, Big Eustace was beside himself with joy at having a Little Eustace in the house. He was wonderful with his baby, charmed by him, proud as could be, attentive, patient, affectionate, boastful. Wanted to play with him all the time. And when the baby got a little bigger, he’d take him out to the woods behind the family’s house and point up into the trees and say, “Look . . .”

Little Eustace was bright and keen, and that certainly made sense, because Big Eustace was an acknowledged genius. The pride of an old, wealthy family of Southern landowners and businessmen, Big Eustace was a chemical engineer with a doctoral degree from MIT. (He had skipped grades in high school, skipped more grades in college, and had walked out of MIT with his doctorate in his early twenties.) He had a true gift for numbers and for science. More than a gift, it was a
love
. Calculus, to Big Eustace, unfolded its mysteries as easily as harmony unfolds for those who are blessed with musical instinct. As for physics? Gorgeous. Trigonometry? A pleasure. Chemistry? Why, there was nothing hidden in chemistry but ease, fascination, and excitement. He lived for puzzles and figures and tables and equations. He was, in his favorite self-description, a man whose “whole being is controlled by pure logic.” Was he vain? Perhaps. If so, only because it was logical to be vain in a world where other humans were amusingly careless creatures who made choices based on whims and emotion instead of precise reason.

Eustace Robinson Conway III was, through his twenties, on the faculty of the University of South Carolina and North Carolina State, where he taught chemical engineering to students not much younger than he was. It was good work, but he didn’t like the politicized world of academia. He always had trouble working with people. Eventually he left teaching and found employment in the private sector, at a chemical plant. He did not socialize with his peers there, either, but his intellect was respected and a bit feared. A former co-worker, who remembers Big Eustace as
Dr.
Conway, recalls coming to him one day with a quick question about a specific chemical formula. Eager to give the answer with explicit thoroughness, Dr. Conway started writing an equation on a blackboard, and kept writing and adding more data until the equation snaked across the whole blackboard, expanding into new chemical concepts, until, giddy with excitement, he ran out of blackboard to write on. By which point, of course, he had long since lost the comprehension of his co-worker.

Frankly, he was in love with his brain, so he must have delighted in watching the evolution of his son’s brain. Surely it was exciting for him to see his namesake cleverly solving all those wonderful dilemmas encountered in human infant development. See how he learns to tell sunlight from shadow? See how he learns to identify faces and objects? See how he pulls himself up to stand? How he tries to make sentences? How you can show him the shape of a leaf and he’ll tell you the name of the tree? What a genius! Any minute now, he should be ready to solve calculus problems for fun!

And then Little Eustace turned two.

At breakfast on the birthday morning, Big Eustace gave a present to his son, who was still in the highchair. Big Eustace was eager to see his boy play with the gift before he left for work. It was a jigsaw puzzle. But it was far too sophisticated for a two-year-old, and Little Eustace, frustrated after a few attempts to put it together, quickly lost interest. As Mrs. Conway remembers, her husband went crazy on the kid. “He started screaming at him and saying terrible things.” The child, horrified and confused, was howling at the top of his voice, and when Mrs. Conway tried to intervene, her husband screamed at her, too, for spoiling the baby and encouraging him to be a quitter and an imbecile. Jesus Christ! The puzzle was simple! It was obvious! What kind of mentally retarded child can’t put together a simple jigsaw puzzle?

As perhaps goes without saying, things didn’t get better as time passed. Only horribly worse. Mr. Conway decided that his son was goading him by acting stupid out of “stubbornness,” and that what the boy needed, therefore, was more discipline. So it is that Eustace remembers— and his mother and siblings confirm—an upbringing that was more like a stint in a POW camp than a real childhood. If Little Eustace so much as touched a hammer from Big Eustace’s toolshed without asking permission, he would be sent to his room and forced to stay there for hours without food or water. If Little Eustace didn’t finish every morsel on his plate in proper time, Big Eustace would force him to sit at the dinner table all night, even if it meant the child had to sleep upright in his chair. If Little Eustace, in his play, accidentally kicked up a divot of grass from his father’s lawn, he would be beaten with a wooden paddle. If Little Eustace, in doing his chores, dared to mow the grass in a counterclockwise pattern instead of the clockwise pattern his father had commanded, there would be a huge scene and hell to pay.

Looking back on it now—and he is surprisingly willing to do so— Mr. Conway concedes that mistakes may have been made. Maybe he was a little hard on the boy. But his interest was only in producing a perfect child, and his anger was the result of the keen disappointments he suffered through his son’s unanticipated shortfalls.

“It is very human,” he told me, “to think that you can control your children, but now I realize it’s an impossible proposition. The best plan is to have no plan at all; just let them go and become the people they were meant to be. But I didn’t realize that when I was a young parent. I was excited to have a son, and I figured I could manipulate Eustace to be the way I wanted him to be. But he turned out to have all these personality problems. I wanted him to be just like me!”

“How so?” I asked.

“I expected him to be a good student, at the very least, as I had been. I certainly thought that a son of mine would be able to count! I used to work with him for hours, trying to teach him how to count a stack of pennies, but he was incapable of learning. He was the antithesis of what I’d expected. I wanted to work on projects with him, but he was impossible to work with. Always a problem child. I don’t understand him at all. We cannot understand each other.”

On another occasion, I asked Mr. Conway, “Do you ever wish that things were different between you and Eustace?”

He answered immediately, as though he had been waiting for this very question.

“It has been a true disappointment for me to have this flawed relationship with Eustace. It is the greatest disappointment of my life. And I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t think there’s any hope of my having a good relationship with him.”

“No hope? No hope whatsoever?”

“I hesitate to subscribe to the theory that I did not love my son enough. Perhaps people will say this is true. I don’t know. But I believe that I loved my son very much. I was excited to have a son. Did I tell you that? I could not
wait
for him to be born.”

Eustace Conway, it must be said, also remembers those stacks of pennies. Night after night, on the living room floor, hour after hour, his father would amass and divide piles of pennies and demand of Eustace the answers to division and addition and multiplication problems. He remembers the horrifying blankness that his mind would retreat to, and his father’s refusal to allow him to go to bed until he got it right, forcing him to stay up past midnight with those frightful stacks of pennies. Then his own weeping and his father’s screaming. The humiliation and the endless ridicule.

There was something both extreme and personal about Mr. Conway’s reactions to his oldest son. It was as if he had early made a decision to refuse to validate this child, to the point of flat-out bizarreness. When Eustace’s picture began to appear in the newspaper for successes in competition with his Indian dance troupe, his father wouldn’t read the articles. (“Ridiculous, in my opinion,” he would say, “but nobody’s listening to me.”) When Eustace was presented with a national youth achievement award from the Smithsonian Institution, his father did not attend the ceremony.

At Christmas one year Little Eustace, having saved all his money, bought his father peanuts and chewing gum as a gift because he knew his father loved peanuts and chewing gum. On Christmas morning, he nervously presented his father with the gift. Big Eustace accepted the package, said “Thank you,” set it aside, but never unwrapped it.

To make everything worse, Eustace was not a good student. He did all right in kindergarten (his report card shows that he could satisfactorily hop, tie his shoes, get along with others, obey orders cheerfully, and recite his telephone number), but by second grade he was getting straight C’s, making only average progress, and needing, his teacher suggested, “a great deal more help at home with his work.”

“Eustace puts forth little effort in his work,” reported his third-grade teacher.“He needs to memorize his addition-number facts.”

What a prescription! The seven-year-old was already locked down at the kitchen table for four hours a night with a father who would shut the doors and pull down the window shades (thus isolating both Big and Little Eustace from the rest of the family) and yell at his son over the arithmetic homework in dead privacy. More help at home? Eustace was already wound up like an eight-day clock over the whole concept of school, scared to death of homework, gripped in panic over the dreaded nightly cycle of effort and failure and punishment. It wasn’t the brand of child abuse you read about in the papers; it wasn’t as if Little Eustace was collecting cigarette burns on his arms. But make no mistake about it: he was utterly traumatized. He was so distressed that his fear manifested itself in a particular physical grip; he was constipated throughout his whole childhood, “too terrified to even take a shit.”

“Night after night,” Eustace remembers, “week after week, month after month, year after year, it was as if my father would cut my legs off. Then he’d cut off the stumps where the legs had been. Then he’d cut off my arms. Then he would run the sword through my body.”

* * *

There were three other children in the house—Walton, Martha, and cute baby Judson. Their experiences were all different, which makes sense if you subscribe to the theory that every child in every family is basically raised in a different country, given how vastly events may vary over the years. When the other children came along, they never took the kind of heat from their father that Eustace suffered.

Judson, the youngest, seems to have missed out more than anyone on the hardest drama of the family, the way that the lucky and oblivious youngest child always seems to do. His father was “stubborn and selfish,” but Judson was never terrified of him. He was an adorable child, whom his father loved and called Little Bug. Anyway, by the time Judson was born, his father had essentially given up on raising perfect children, had turned them over to his wife, and, in his own words, had “abdicated down to the basement” to brood in resentful silence. So Judson never saw the worst of it.

Judson’s childhood, in effect, was an endless summer camp, because he had this older brother, Eustace, who took him out into the woods and made him climb mountains and taught him cool things about nature. Judson was, from birth, Eustace’s special project; Eustace was always getting him out of the house and into the woods, where things were safer. He was trying to keep Judson hidden from the radar of Big Eustace. It was a deliberate decision that Eustace clearly remembers making. He knew it was too late to save Walton and Martha (he felt they had already been “brainwashed” by their father), but when Judson was born, Eustace took one look at him and said to himself, “This one’s mine. I’m going to save his life.” In return, Judson worshipped Eustace, although, he admits, “I was never the achiever Eustace wanted me to be. I was lazy. He’d be, like, ‘Let’s make buckskin!’ and I wanted to stay in my bedroom and play with my Star Wars action figures. But I’d do anything to have his company.”