Her heart rate and respiration slowed. It didn’t requicken. I texted on my cell phone to Lucy: “End near.”
Just before two o’clock in the morning on April 15, the respiratory line indicated that her breathing had stopped. Yet her heart continued to beat, according to the faint but distinct blips. I rushed to find the nurse. It’s normal, she said. It takes a little while. She examined the monitor, held Mum’s wrist, and nodded. It was over.
She went to fetch the doctor so he could “pronounce.” He arrived, held a pen flashlight to her eyes, put a stethoscope to her chest. I’m sorry, he said. Did I want an autopsy? No. My journalistic training kicked in as I remembered the “TK” in my obituary. What had she died of? I volunteered, “Natural causes?” thinking to provide cover for the apologetic doctor and Stamford Hospital, for whom I had nothing but gratitude and praise. “No,” he said, “infection. She died of infection.” I winced at the thought of entering, “at two a.m., of infection….” Surely one of the least attractive (Mum’s term) words in the language. Couldn’t we get away with “after a long illness”? It had certainly been that, too.
I noticed the doctor’s name on his ID badge. It sounded exotic. I asked where he was from. “Macedonia,” he said almost warily, as if that required some explaining. I managed not to say, “Alexander the Great.”
He left us alone. I stroked her forehead for a while, as she used to mine, and spoke a few words to her, which, strangely, I cannot remember. Words of goodbye, I suppose they were. I tried to close her eyes. In the movies, they close. In real life, they don’t. This is why in the old days they would put coins over the lids. I pulled the sheet up over her face, which had the effect of transforming the room from a state-of-the-art medical site into a funeral parlor. I took my last look at her and left.
Danny found me sitting by the emergency front door, weeping onto my opened laptop as I e-mailed out the obituary to the first wave of recipients. We drove home through empty Stamford streets. We tried to wake Pup, but by now he had taken enough sleeping pills to narcotize a rhino, so I left a note by his bed that said, “Mum’s suffering is over,” drank two stiff Bloody Marys with Danny, and went to bed in the room I grew up in, listening to the rain against the windows and watching the branches of the tall pine tree I used to climb sway wildly in the wind.
CHAPTER 3
I Guess We Can Do Anything We Want To
Pup woke me about eight-thirty, calling from his garage study. I’d e-mailed him the obituary before going to sleep. He said how glad he was to have it. He’d always been encouraging and complimentary about my writing—and just as often critical. Pup was generous, if a tough grader. But in recent years, he had found it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to compliment something I’d written, unless it was about him. (I say this with bemusement now, but at the time it wasn’t all that bemusing.) Of my last book, a novel published two weeks before Mum died and which reviewers were (for the most part) describing as my best to date, he’d confined his comments in an e-mail P.S.: “This one didn’t work for me. Sorry.”
I walked to his study and tried to give him a hug, though it was hard to reach him through all the clutter and Jaime. Pup had occupied this converted garage space since 1952, and except for the papers serially shipped up to Yale over the years, he hadn’t thrown away anything, with the result that the study had become a son et lumière exhibit that might be titled “The William F. Buckley Jr. Experience.” (About a year later, I would find myself cleaning out this truly Augean stable. One week and two Dumpsters later, I had only scratched the surface.)
Jaime was Pup’s computer factotum. They spoke Spanish exclusively. He seemed always to be there, possibly owing to Pup’s Rube Goldberg computer habits. In 2008, he was probably the only human left on the planet who still used WordStar, the word-processing system he had learned in 1983. Loading WordStar into his up-to-date Dell computer was akin to installing the controls of a Sopwith Camel in a F-16 fighter jet, but Pup could not be budged from his WordStar. Generations of WFB amanuenses had to learn this cuneiform in order to edit his manuscripts and articles.
He was, on this dreary, rain-swept Sunday morning, red-eyed, puffy-faced, out of breath, in rough shape. He was gradually suffocating from emphysema and had just lost his wife of fifty-seven years. We embraced as best we could amid the office and Jaime jam. I glanced at his computer screen. He’d been stabbing at the keyboard, composing an e-mail alert about Mum’s death. There were multiple typos. Her name was misspelled. In recent years, Pup’s e-mails had become celebrated among his many correspondents for their increasing inscrutability. Once one of the most expert and accurate touch typists in the land, he now simply put his hands over the keyboard wherever they fell and commenced typing—and kept on typing—with the result that his e-mails often read like coded transmissions from a submarine:
Daer cgurisito,
Am sO hpinyg yiy wiutgh jw her for thep conserg tyjis friady!!! xxP
[Trans.: Dear Christo, I am so very happy you will be at the concert on Friday.]
I teased him that he ought to provide his correspondents with Enigma machines in order to decode these transmissions. Once, despairing of being able to decipher a single word, I wrote back, “Dear Pup, I honestly am eager to know what you say here, but I just can’t make it out.” He called back and said, laughing, “I can’t tell what it’s about, either.” I cleaned up the spelling of Mum’s name on his e-mail. Age six, I had sat on his lap right here in this room and learned to touch-type, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cow,” on his old Royal typewriter.
The storm was still blowing. Pup, Danny, and I went out to lunch at Jimmy’s Seaside Tavern. We ordered Bloody Marys and beers and wine and Reuben sandwiches and onion rings. “Shall we go see a flick?” he said, and the words brought me back a half century. Summer evenings after dinner when I was little, he’d say, “Shall we go see a flick?” I’d race to get the Stamford Advocate with the movie listings. We’d jump into the car and make it to the theater just as the movie was starting. Within five minutes he’d be snoring like a chain saw. Mum would poke him—“Ducky, wake up”—whereupon Ducky would snort back to consciousness, look up at Gary Cooper (or whoever) on the screen, and demand in a loud voice, “Ducky, who is that man? What is he doing?”
I said to him, “Well, sure, why not?”
He smiled in a funny way and said, “I guess we can do anything we want to.” It occurred to me, looking at him, that it was the first time in fifty-seven years he didn’t have to wonder what Mum might say. He could—yes—do whatever he wanted; not that he hadn’t always—I chuckle a bit darkly as I type—but that droit du seigneur autonomy had come at considerable cost. We didn’t go to a movie after all. He was tired and needed a nap. About five o’clock, Danny rang me from his apartment over the garage study to say that Pup was going to mass. I said I’d come.
Normally, I didn’t. Normally, when home of a Sunday, I would discreetly make myself scarce around this time, when he would gather up the Hispanic staff and drive to St. Mary’s Church, where a complaisant priest would say a private Latin mass for him. Pup was a defiantly pre-Vatican II Catholic. One of the reforms of Vatican II, along with a perfectly comprehensible but perfectly bland liturgy, is the Sign of Peace, at which the priest urges the congregants to turn to one another and shake hands, or kiss, hug, high-five, power dap, whatever. Pup, despite his paradigmatically generous Christianity, found this “kumbaya” beyond the pale, and ten seconds in advance, he would preemptively drop to his knees and bury his face in his hands in perfervid orison.
Today, however, I reckoned, was not a day to skip church, so I went with them in the still-sheeting rain. Pup wept throughout the mass. Afterward he told Danny, our go-between, that he was “so pleased” I had attended.
Pup and I had engaged in our own Hundred Years’ War over the matter of faith. Finally exhausted, I had— whether hypocritically or cowardly or wisely—put on a Potemkin facade of being back in the fol
d. My agnosticism, once defiant, had gone underground. I no longer had the desire to nail my theses to his church door. By now I knew we didn’t have much time left, and I didn’t want to spend it locking theological antlers, making him heartsick with my intransigence.
It’s only now, after his death, that I’m able to write about this, without fear of initiating another cannonade volley of (all-too-intelligible) e-mails on the subject of my eternal damnation. * Our sturmiest und drangiest times were over religion. Pup had the most delicious, reliable, wicked, vibrant sense of humor of anyone I knew, yet his inner Savonarola was released at the merest hint of (to use his term) impiety. I was never, even in the fullest bloom of my agnosticism, a mocker—more the bemused skeptic. I’ve written both a serious play † about a sixteenth-century Catholic martyr and a comic novel †† about some corrupt winemaking monks. The latter was an affectionate farce. I myself spent four years at a monastic New England boarding school and look back on it with great fondness and abundant admiration for many of the monks who suffered through those four years of me.
As for the novel, Pup did not find the humor in it, though others were chuckling. An uncle of mine, every inch as pious as Pup, said to me at his son’s wedding, “That is the funniest darn book I have ever read!” I pointed to Pup, across the room, and said, “Do me a favor, would you? Tell him what you just told me.” Uncle Gerry scurried off enthusiastically on his evangelical assignment, only to return, shrugging. “What did he say?” “He just stared at me.”
I remember Pup’s telling me, in 1981 as we trudged up the snowy lawn after scattering the ashes of his beloved friend and column syndicator, Harry Elmlark, “Ojalá que hubiera sido Católico.” (If only he had been a Catholic.) Pup and I often spoke in Spanish—his first language—when we had intimacies to convey. Harry was a Jew and about the furthest thing from a Catholic as one could be, though come to think of it, he had been happily married to one all his life. I recall being stunned by the statement. I said, “What do you mean, Pup?” He replied matter-of-factly that as Harry was not Catholic, he had no expectation of seeing him again in heaven. This truly hit me like a smack in the face. Pup loved Harry wholeheartedly, but rules were—apparently— rules: The gates of heaven were shut against nonbelievers. I was crushed, for I too had loved Harry. I was, at the time (age twenty-eight), very much a believer, and I tended to take Pup’s theological pronouncements as having ex cathedra papal authority.
Sometime later, he spoke—with genuine relief in his voice—of his discovery of a loophole called “the doctrine of invincible ignorance,” which, if I understand it—theological half-gainers can leave a lad’s head spinning at times—means that the normal rules with respect to admission to heaven are suspended if you are incapable intellectually or culturally of accepting that the Catholic Church is the one true Church, the only means of redemption. How Pup smiled with relief as he explained it across the lunch table that summer day!
Catholic theology is generally thought to be rigid— and indeed is on certain points—but sometimes Mother Church thinks like a $700-an-hour lawyer. One doesn’t hear the word Jesuitical as much as one used to, but I found myself, during the Clinton years, musing on the fact that the president who gave us “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is” was educated at the nation’s leading Jesuit university. I suppose it’s worth mentioning that the celebrated English-speaking saint Thomas More was himself a very clever lawyer.
Pup’s faith was in a sense binary. He had imbibed his catechism at the knee of a deeply devout New Orleans Catholic lady who instilled in him what Chesterton and Waugh called the nursery-story aspect of Christianity. His father was a stern, perhaps even forbidding, but deep-down loving and affectionate Texan, the son of a hardscrabble-poor, sheep-farming sheriff. But exigent and unbending though Pup’s faith was, he was himself the son of a lawyer and could find his own loopholes if it came to that. Perhaps his own heart was the largest of the loopholes. In 1996, speaking at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue memorial service for his great friend Dick Clurman, he ended his eulogy with a line I can quote today from memory: “It occurs to me that all my life I have unconsciously been on the lookout for the perfect Christian, and when I found him, he turned out to be a non-observant Jew.”
“Yes, MR. BUCKLEY, I have you and Dad down for eleven o’clock.” At the funeral home, that is.
You and Dad. Pup and I had a giggle over that.
We stopped en route at Dunkin’ Donuts. As we pulled into the parking lot, Pup’s cell phone trilled. He fumbled it open, listened, and said, “Get a time and I’ll call back.” Inside, waiting for our iced coffees, he looked up at the TV screen, which showed President Bush. Pup said, “He just called. Very thoughtful.”
I agreed that it was, extremely so. Later, when we returned to the house from the funeral home, it turned out that it had been President Bush 41, calling not for him, but for me. (I had worked for George Herbert Walker Bush when he was vice president.) As a fan of Stephen Potter, author of the Upmanship books, I could hardly let this go to waste. I waited for the right moment at lunch and said, “Oh, by the way, that was my President Bush, calling for me.” Okay, maybe you had to be there, but it was the day after my mother died and you take your laughs where you can find them. Pup, who himself held a tenth-degree black belt in Upmanship, wasn’t quite sure whether to be amused by my remark. He had been on the receiving end of many, many calls from presidents of the United States; not to mention that my Bush had awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1991. (Touché, I can hear Pup saying.) One morning, during the Nixon administration, the phone rang in Stamford at what Mum deemed an inappropriately early hour on a Sunday. “The president is calling for Mr. Buckley,” the voice announced. Mum fired back in her most formidable voice—and trust me when I say formidable: a cross between Noel Coward and a snapping turtle—“The president of what?” To which the White House operator calmly replied, “Our country, ma’am.”
I didn’t return the call from my Bush but instead sent an e-mail to his assistant Linda, saying that I was touched but not yet ready to talk, being unconfident of my emotions. I knew he’d understand. I had called him at Camp David in December 1992, after his own mother had died. I was writing a piece about her for The New Yorker. Between his mother’s death, his impending departure from the White House, and running the country, Mr. Bush had a lot on his plate, but being the generous soul he is, he took the call. In the course of reminiscing about Dorothy Bush, the petite but also formidable Bush family matriarch, the president alluded to his membership in something called “the Bawl Brigade.” I inferred this consisted of Bushes who cry easily. George Herbert Walker Bush is, surely, the honorary colonel of this moist brigade. I learned early on while writing speeches for him (between 1981 and 1983) that he may be a New England Yankee blue blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother. The man mists up during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on opening day at the ball park. I can’t imagine what tears flowed when, as a young navy wartime aviator, he watched comrades killed or, as a young father, endured the death of his six-year-old daughter from leukemia.
“No me digas nada triste,” Pup said as we sat around the conference table at Leo P. Gallagher & Son Funeral Home. (Don’t say anything sad to me.) He was afraid of breaking down in front of the young funeral director—named, as it happened, Chris. Chris was gentle-mannered, considerate, and punctilious. But then I suppose rudeness and brusqueness are not considered prize qualities in the funeral-directing business. In the presence of death, one craves the soft touch, the lowered voice, even if it verges on the baroque. I remember reading in the memoirs of one of my favorite actors, Richard E. Grant (Withnail and I ), the gruesome moment when a hospital worker holding a box containing his newborn son’s corpse shoved it at him with all the tenderness of a grouchy janitor handling a bag of garbage. (A vignette like that sticks in the mind.) I remember, too, a friend telling me of going to fetch the body of a mutual friend of ours after he was
killed in a car wreck in Mexico. He arrived at the police station to be told the body was in a room out back. As indeed it was: lying in a pool of congealed blood on a concrete floor swarming with flies. So one is grateful for the antiseptic plainness of Leo P. Gallagher and for soft-spoken Chris.
We sat around the conference table, surrounded by wall displays of headstones, coffins, urns, and reliquary keepsakes—you can put some of the loved one’s ashes in a pendant and wear it around your neck, making for one heck of a conversation starter on a first date. As Chris gently slid a piece of paper toward us, I thought of Jessica Mitford’s book The American Way of Death, published in 1963, coincidentally the year of America’s most indelible death. The paper was the price list. Chris said, somewhere between earnest and apologetic, “Because our industry is so heavily regulated, that’s why all these charges are explained in such detail.” So… “Basic professional service fee: $2,795.” What does that buy you? Don’t ask. “Care and prep of remains: refrigeration: $600.” Hm. Okay… “Transferring remains to funeral home: $695.” “Transfer to or from crematory: $395.” Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to hire a limo? “Brown standard cremation container: $295.” Such detail indeed. Well, the industry is so “heavily regulated” in no small part because of Ms. Mitford’s exposé. She was, of course, one of the famous five, highly variegated Mitford daughters: Nancy wrote Love in a Cold Climate; Diana married British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, gloriously satirized by P. G. Wodehouse as Sir Roderick Spode, “the amateur dictator” and leader of Britain’s Fascist “Black Shorts”; Jessica married an American Communist lawyer with the Dickensian name of Treuhaft and herself made a brilliant success of muckraking journalism, causing vampiric shrieks in U.S. funeral homes coast to coast and, into the bargain, exposing as a money-minting fraud Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writers School. I took a course from her in my senior year at Yale; we cordially loathed each other. But here I found myself her beneficiary, staring at Chris’s weirdly detailed price list while scratching my head.
Losing Mum and Pup Page 3
