The Last American Man (5 page)

Eustace was crazy about Randy Cable and about Randy’s father, a mountain-raised man who knew everything about hunting and
fishing and what kind of wild greens you could collect from the river banks for food. Eustace went to Randy’s house as often
as he could. Randy visited the Conways’ place far less often. It wasn’t as comfortable there. Mrs. Conway was nice, but Mr.
Conway was scary. Dinnertime was an especially terrifying event. The children rarely spoke during the meal and neither did
their mom. Mr. Conway, seated at the head of the table, was stern and sarcastic, with a hair-trigger temper. All his attention,
it seemed, was concentrated on Eustace. If the boy even started to speak, Mr. Conway would ridicule his grammar. If the boy
mentioned something about his day, Mr. Conway would laugh it off as “ridiculous, childish.” If Mr. Conway asked Eustace how
he’d done on a recent math test, and got an answer he didn’t like, he would release a barrage of insults and ridicule.

“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.