The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (80 page)

Martha, the only daughter, was a serious and responsible child who remembers a girlhood wholly different from those of her girlfriends— one of snakes and turtles and baby foxes that had to be fed live birds and long expeditions with Eustace (“the ringleader”) out into the woods, where elaborate adventures took place. She remembers the dangers she and her brothers faced. All those afternoons spent messing around with raging rivers and poisonous spiders and homemade tree houses! Now, a highly organized and strictly protective suburban mother, she cannot even
begin
to comprehend why she and her brothers were allowed to glean such experiences unsupervised. She remembers a hard father, yes, but also an inconsistently permissive mother, and the fights that took place between the two parents over childrearing. (“Make up your minds!” Martha always wanted to yell at them.)

And she remembers Eustace as a child who “brought trouble on himself” by not doing as well in school as Daddy expected and by being “stubborn.” As for Walton Conway, he can barely remember the details of his childhood. It was “a blur, some paintbrush strokes of a dark color.” That, and a recurrent childhood nightmare that his father was going to take him down into the basement, tie him to a table, and saw off his limbs. That, and a specific middle-of-the-night episode where his parents were fighting and his father screamed at his mother that he was going to “drive an icepick through her heart.” That, and a remembrance of seeing his father towering over his ten-year-old brother Eustace, threatening to “beat him to a bloody pulp.”

But it wasn’t as bad as Eustace makes out, Walton says. His father was certainly capable of tender moments, like drying the tears of a child with a skinned knee. And what about that horrible night when Walton threatened to run away from home and his father broke down the bedroom door, caught his son slipping over the windowsill to escape, and then shoved Walton out the window? Well, it wasn’t really a
shove
. It wasn’t as if Mr. Conway intentionally threw his young son out a second-story window; he “just kind of pushed me a little bit.”

Anyhow. What Walton does not remember is the sense that his father was the prime source of the discontent and problems around the house. No, that was Eustace. Eustace was always the problem. Even as a young child, he made everything harder than it had to be. He was sullen, unhappy, and willful, and he “didn’t do his homework.” Daddy was moody and strict, yes, but he could be appeased with obedience. To both Walton and Martha, who were superior students and always at the top of their classes, the solution to the family’s unhappiness was pretty obvious: if Eustace would excel in school, Daddy would be happy. If Eustace would stop being so stubborn, Daddy would stop yelling at Mother and everybody else.

“Why couldn’t you give him any authority?” Walton would demand of Eustace, years later. “Why couldn’t you bend? Why did you always have to do things your own way, even as a toddler, just to spite him? Why did you always have to stand up to him and make him so mad?”

When asked for examples, though, Walton can’t remember a single specific instance of Eustace standing up to his father. Yet he feels certain that it must have happened. In fact, his image of Eustace as an aggressive challenger to his father, as an equally matched and willful adversary (“even as a toddler”), is one that Mr. Conway depicts and that the younger Conway siblings have all faithfully embraced. However, the notion of a combative Little Eustace is hardly consistent with the reports of outside adults who visited the Conway household during those years. Mr. Stout, of the Scheile Museum, remembers being invited to dinners at the Conways’ home, where he watched young Eustace eat in petrified silence, submissive and nervous and careful to “never make eye contact with his father.”

One of Eustace’s aunts remembers Mr. Conway waking four-year-old Eustace late at night and bringing him down to meet the company, then tossing difficult math questions to the child and grilling him to perform. Each time Little Eustace answered incorrectly, he was mocked and humiliated by Big Eustace, because this verbal batting-around was supposed to be entertainment for the guests, mind you. And so it went, on and on, until the boy was in a tearful meltdown, at which point the aunt left the room, thinking she could watch no more of this, thinking it “sadistic, the worst abuse of a child” she had ever witnessed, and promising herself that she would never return to this house again.

And, like Mr. Stout, the aunt apparently does not remember Little Eustace, at any point in the evening, saying anything to his father along the lines of “Up yours, Dad.”

Still, when Walton remembers hearing his father threaten to beat his brother to a bloody pulp, the question he asks is,
What did Eustace
do to make Daddy so angry that time?
When Walton remembers hearing his father threaten to drive an icepick through his mother’s heart, he supposes,
They must have been fighting about Eustace again
. And if Eustace had to spend hours locked in his room without food or water,
Well, the boy really must have misbehaved something fierce that time.

Perhaps the more difficult part of this story to understand is where the mother was during all this pain. How could it be that Karen Conway— who had once been Karen Johnson, the unrepentant tomboy horseback-champion able-bodied woodsman of a girl who sold her silver flute for passage to Alaska at the age of twenty-two—had grown into a woman who could not protect her son? Why was she never able to shield Little Eustace from Big Eustace?

She herself cannot explain it today. Such are the mysteries of a marriage, I suppose, and such are the tragedies of a family. Mrs. Conway says now that she was afraid of her husband. She was catching a lot of the same kind of abuse as her son. (Her husband seemed to love nothing more than egging his children on to make fun of their mother by calling her a “big fat hippo.”) Her friends and family encouraged her to leave the marriage, but she never found the courage to go away for long.

Some of this was surely due to Mrs. Conway’s sincere Christianity, which had her convinced that divorce was a mortal sin. And some of it was due to . . . who knows? Who knows why women stay? What she does remember is that whenever she did try to defend her son, it only made her husband more furious and more extreme in his punishments of Little Eustace. So she decided early on that it was kinder not to step in or interfere.

Instead, she devised ways to deliver secret help to her son. As though Eustace were a jailed dissident doing time in the solitary confinement block of a totalitarian prison, she would slip clandestine encouragement to him, under the door and through the chinks in the walls. Sometimes she literally slipped him notes (“with love from the one who has faith in you and cares most about you . . .”), and she also showed him affection privately, when nobody was looking. She gave him both the skills and freedom to explore the woods, where he could not only excel, but could breathe in a sense of safety far away from the tornado alley that was home. And what she also gave her son, more vital than anything else, was the secret but persistent idea that no matter what his father might do or say, Eustace Robinson Conway IV would grow up to be a Man of Destiny.

The Man of Destiny theory wasn’t Karen Conway’s invention. She had absorbed it from her father, an extraordinary idealist named C. Walton Johnson. This character, Eustace’s maternal grandfather, was an upright World War I veteran whom everyone called Chief. Immediately on returning home from the war, Chief Johnson founded the North Carolina branch of the Boy Scouts of America. He wanted to work with boys because of his strong idea—no, let’s go ahead and call it an inflexible and didactic dogma—about the process by which weak little boys could be transformed into powerful Men of Destiny. He believed that this evolution was best accomplished in the challenges of a frontier-like environment, and, like many Americans before and after him, he was apprehensive about how the evaporation of the wilderness would affect the development of American manhood. And Chief Johnson was not about to stand back and let America’s boys grow up effete, decadent, and pampered by the “softening and vision-curbing influence of the city.”

No, sir. Not on his watch.

So the first Boy Scout troop in North Carolina was a good start, but Chief quickly grew disillusioned with the program, feeling that it pampered the boys. Therefore, in 1924, he founded an extremely rigorous private summer camp on 125 mountainous acres near Asheville. He named it Camp Sequoyah for Boys: Where the Weak Become Strong and the Strong Become Great. (Unfortunately, it is nowhere recorded whether the Weak ever became Great, but I’d be willing to bet they tried.) He asked of his campers and his staff only one thing: that they ceaselessly strive to achieve physical, moral, and intellectual perfection in every aspect of their lives. Then, and only then, could they become Men of Destiny.

“Every age has need for Men of Destiny,” Chief wrote, in one of his many published tracts on the topic, “and in every age, some men will respond to the need, as did Aristotle, Galileo, and Wilson. . . . These men believed they were Men of Destiny, and prepared themselves for the task that lay ahead. They were gripped by a compulsion that they could not resist. No man becomes a Man of Destiny unless he believes, with great conviction, that he has a unique contribution to make to the society of his day. Conceit? No! Just a sense of mission and the courage to follow through. He who is
compelled
by an inner conviction that he has a mission which he
must
accomplish, that he was born for this purpose, that he
must
and
will
follow through; that man will be a Man of Destiny.”

The best way to groom such heroic figures was to start with the young, Chief believed, and in the wild. After all, he wrote, “the real American boy has inherited too much of the pioneer spirit to feel at home in the city.” So he suggested that parents remove their boys from the “emotional stress of life” and relocate them to “a Camp with a Purpose,” where the “grandeur of the mountains,” combined with the guidance of counselors selected by the director for their “mature, wholesome, intelligent, responsible leadership,” would help the boys grow, “as nature and God intended, into the full stature of manhood.”

Camp Sequoyah was no Hitler Youth Camp. Chief believed that no boy in America, no matter how weak or how flawed (or, incredibly, given the era, no matter what race or religion), should be excluded from the opportunity to become a Man of Destiny through attending Camp Sequoyah. Was your son a “regular healthy boy” already blessed with a “superb physique”? Why, he would naturally return from Sequoyah “with his splendid powers multiplied.” Was your son “over-bright, sullen, and sometimes antagonistic?” Don’t hesitate to enroll him in Sequoyah; the fresh air will teach him “the necessity of developing his body and keeping it on par with his mind.” Was your son “timid, diffident, and slow to make friends?” Sequoyah would teach him to socialize. Was your son a bully? Sequoyah’s counselors would teach him that picking on others was “cowardly and despicable.” Why, even if your son was “big and fat and always being teased,” Camp Sequoyah was where he should go, if not to achieve a superb physique, then at least to learn how to “take a joke and to make the best of being teased.”

Eustace Conway’s mother was Chief Johnson’s only daughter. (There’s a wonderful photograph of Sequoyah in the 1940s, with the whole camp gathered in rows according to age. It’s all ramrod-straight men and earnest crewcut boys grinning at the camera, with one exception— the little blond girl in a white dress seated at the center of the throng—Chief’s daughter, Eustace Conway’s mother, age five.) Karen grew up at Camp Sequoyah, surrounded not only by woods and boys, but by ideals. She loved her father and, more than either of her siblings, obediently accepted his dogma. When it came time for Karen to marry, she even chose one of her father’s favorite counselors as a husband. She fell in love with the brilliant young Eustace Conway III, who, with his strict personal discipline, physical grace, MIT degree, and keen love of the outdoors, must have seemed the incarnation of Chief’s dearest principles.

And though her husband put aside his dreams of teaching the natural world when he entered corporate life, she never lost
her
belief in the woods. So when Karen Conway’s first son was born, there was no question as to how she would raise him. Free, challenged, inspired to attempt heroic feats, and always outdoors. It was due to his mother’s hand that Eustace could throw a knife accurately enough at the age of seven to nail a chipmunk to a tree. And kill a running squirrel at fifty feet with a bow and arrow by the time he was ten. And set forth into the woods, alone and empty-handed, when he was twelve, to live off the land and build his own shelter.

While Mr. Conway kept patiently explaining to young Eustace what a feeble idiot the boy was, Mrs. Conway went to the library every day and brought home bigger and bigger piles of inspiring American biographies for Eustace to read. George Washington, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln, Kit Carson, John Frémont, Andrew Jackson, Geronimo, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull—bold, unironic tales of heroism and wilderness and fortitude. These were the lives to emulate, she told her son when Big Eustace wasn’t listening. This is the kind of man you can be: a Man of Destiny.

Eustace Conway was a literal-minded creature even as a child (especially as a child), and he absorbed the morals of these stories as purely as though his mother were holding a funnel to his ear and pouring them straight into his brain. When he read that Indian braves tested their mental and physical endurance by running miles across the desert holding water in their mouths but not swallowing it, he tried to run miles through the forest doing the same. When he read that frontiersmen used to wear the same pair of buckskin trousers for years at a time, he resolved to make himself a pair and never wear anything else. When he read that Lewis and Clark brought as much paper and ink on their journey as food and bullets, he started keeping his diary. When he read of the Indian brave left behind enemy lines in a battle with settlers— wounded and abandoned with a bullet through his knee—who survived the entire winter by hiding in a ditch, covered by leaves, and eating the rodents who crawled over him . . . well, that scenario was impossible to follow exactly, but Eustace imitated the spirit of the story by asking the family dentist to please not use Novocain when filling his cavities. He wanted to learn how to endure physical pain.