We had come, Pup and I, to arrange for a simple cremation, no frills, the plainest urn—by the end, I was about to suggest that a large Chock full o’Nuts coffee tin would do—but the American Way of Death is, as is the American Way of Life, complicated. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, fifteen minutes in, Chris had cleared his throat and said, “Now, would you prefer propane, mesquite, or charcoal briquettes?” I began daydreaming about just bringing dear old Mum home in the back of the car, building a nice roaring bonfire on the beach; but doubtless there’s something in the Stamford town code about that.
Buried deep in my Irish DNA is an atavistic habeas corpus craving for the body. The wake thing. Cremation nullifies that, even if the act of scattering ashes can be ritualistically clean and satisfying. One wants—or I do, anyway—corporeal presence. I remember reading an account by Ken Kesey, heart-wrenching but entirely dry-eyed, of how he dealt with the body of his son, killed in an accident: They brought him home and hand-made a coffin for him and buried him themselves. This need is—manifestly—at the root of the Catholic mass, in which bread and wine is “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ. But Pup was adamant. Her ashes were to go into the sculpted bronze cross in the garden, where his would, in turn, also be placed when his time came.
Chris left the room to go total it all up. You could hear a loud ka-chinng. When he returned, it all came, somehow, to $6,007. * What is one supposed to say? Jeez Louise, we’re looking for a little cremation, not a full-blown Viking funeral. Where is Jessica Mitford when you need her?
CHAPTER 4
That Sounded Like a Fun Dinner
Pup arranged with the pastor to hold a private service at St. Andrew’s, the Episcopalian—or, as my Canadian-born Mum always insisted on calling it, Anglican—church in Stamford. We gathered there Wednesday morning: Pup, me, Danny, Mum’s devoted friend Richard Heanue, and the household staff.
St. Andrew’s, it was obvious, had fallen into decay. The stained-glass rosette window above the entrance had been removed. The rectory next door was all boarded up. Perhaps it was because there were only ten of us, in a church built for four hundred or more, but there was a palpable sense of encroaching desolation. It made me sad on this gray and chilly April day to think that a part of Mum’s Stamford was passing away along with her.
She was here with us, by the altar, in a neatly wrapped box. Her priest was quite elderly now, semi-retired, birdlike, frail but irrepressibly chatty and ebullient, and proud of the homily that he had prepared. He delivered it in singsong tones, indistinguishable from his conversation. I was impressed, yet again, by the superiority of the Book of Common Prayer to the pasteurized blancmange of the modern Catholic liturgy. Listening to a contemporary American Catholic priest say the mass invariably reminds me of Robert Taylor as the Roman centurion in Quo Vadis, giving himself a salutary whack across the leather breastplate and saying in his Nebraskan accent, Hail, Marcus Glaucus. By Jupiter, what are they feeding those gladiators at the Colosseum these days? It just sounds better in the original Latin.
We thanked dear, sweet old Father Flutie. As we left, one of Chris’s funeral directors, a lady dressed in a pinstripe pantsuit, handed me my mother in a shopping bag. There was an undeniable symmetry to it: How many shopping bags had I seen Mum toting during her lifetime? Hundreds, anyway. I got into the car and handed the box to Sineda and Julia, Mum’s maids, saying—trying to lighten the mood—“Toma la señora.” (Here, take the señora.) At this they both burst into tears, these dear, devoted, faithful ladies who had taken such loving care of her over the years. They caressed and patted the box lovingly, murmuring to her as we drove back to the house.
Pup announced to me after lunch that we must catalog Mum’s books in her bedroom. I was a bit nonplussed. Mum’s library would not be mistaken for an annex of the Library of Congress, consisting as it did of a pile of (largely unread) mystery novels and thrillers. I was tired and chafed at this pointless forced labor, but sensing that Pup wanted to keep busy—industry is the enemy of melancholy—I went along, duly taking dictation from him on my laptop as he read off the titles. That done, we set down to the more plausible task of going through her papers.
Mum had lost all interest in deskwork during the six or seven months of her invalidity. We found unpaid Gristede’s bills, Amex bills; undistributed cash for staff Christmas tips; uncashed checks; unopened letters, including, I saw to my disconcertment, a number from me. This was not carelessness on her part or any failure of affection, but rather fear, and realizing it made me wince in self-rebuke.
Mum’s serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding—occasionally scalding—letters. Now I saw that she’d stopped opening most letters from me, against the possibility that they might contain another excoriation. I opened one of them and read:
Dear Mum,
That really was an appalling scene at dinner last night….
I wish, now, that I could take back that letter, even though every word of it had been carefully weighed and justified. But looking back, I see it wasn’t fair. I’m a professional writer; she was not. So it wasn’t a level playing field, however outrageous the provocations that had driven me, hot-faced, flushing, furious, to the keyboard. And they never—ever!—did a bit of good, these pastoral letters of mine. Why, I wondered now, had I never accepted the futility of hurling myself against Fortress Mum? My only consolation was that I had, finally, stopped sending them after our last battle, the previous June. Just as I had exhausted myself in religious warfare with Pup, so had I given up lobbing feckless, well-worded catapult balls over Mum’s parapets. I had even refrained from saying anything to her after the last great provocation.
A year earlier, my daughter, Caitlin (Mum’s only granddaughter, whom she had more or less lovingly ignored for nineteen years), had gone out to Stamford from New York for the night, bringing with her her best friend, Kate Kennedy. (I know; but there is simply no way to tell this story without using real names.) Cat and Kate look like Irish twin sisters and have been soul-mates since kindergarten. Kate is beautiful, vivacious, bright, witty, and naughty—a Kennedy through and through, nicknamed “Kick” after her great-aunt. The friendship between these two colleens is perhaps out of the ordinary given that their paternal grandfathers, Robert F. Kennedy and William F. Buckley Jr., were, shall we say, on somewhat opposite sides of the old political spectrum. At any rate, here were two enchanting young ladies at a grandparental country manse of a summer night. An occasion for joy, affection, delighted conversation. One might… sigh… think, anyway. I was not—praise the gods—in attendance. Mum and I were not speaking at the time, owing to a prior disgrace of hers, a real beaut even by her standards.
The general mood at the dinner table that night was not leavened by the continued—indeed, persistent— presence of a British aristocrat lady friend of Mum’s who had arrived for a visit ten days before. Now, nearly a fortnight into her encampment at Wallack’s Point, she showed no signs of moving on. Pup’s graciousness as a host was legendary, but it had limits. The poor man was reduced to sullen japery. So, A_______, you must be getting jolly homesick for Merry Olde England by now, surely, eh? Ho ho ho…. But Lady A______ showed no sign of homesickness for Old Blighty. Indeed, she had fastened on to our house with the tenacity of a monomaniacal abalone. Now, on day ten of Pup Held Hostage, his own mood had congealed from sullenness to simmering resentment. Meanwhile, Mum’s protracted, vinous afternoons of gin rummy with Her Ladyship had her, by dinnertime, in what might be called the spring-loaded position. In such moods, Mum was capable of wheeling on, say, Neil Armstrong to inform him that he knew nothing—nothing whatsoever—about astrophysics or lunar landing. No one in the history of hostessing has ever set a better dinner table than my Mum, but on such evenings, I would rather have supped with al-Qaeda in a guano-strewn cave.
At some point, Mum turned to—on, might be the more appropriate preposition—young Kate, informing her that she (Mum) had be
en an alternate juror in the murder trial of Kate’s father’s first cousin Michael Skakel. Skakel, nephew of Ethel Kennedy, Kate’s grandmother, had (as you are no doubt well aware) been the defendant in a sensational murder trial in Stamford several years before, for the death of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley back in 1975. Having presented this astonishing (and utterly untrue) credential, Mum then proceeded to launch into a protracted lecture on the villainy of Kate’s near relative.
Leave aside the issue of Mr. Skakel’s culpability, for which he is, at any rate, currently serving out a twenty-years-to-life sentence. Over the years, I had heard Mum utter whoppers that would make Pinocchio look button-nosed, but this one really took the prize, in several categories, the first being Manners. Why—on earth—would one inflict a jeremiad on an innocent nineteen-year-old girl, one’s own granddaughter’s best friend into the bargain? The mind—as Mum herself used to put it—boggles.
This supper table Sturm und Drang I learned about over the phone, from breathless, reeling Cat and Kate once they had reached the sanctuary of the pool after dinner, along with a much-needed bottle of wine. All I could say to poor Kate was a stuttery WASP variation on Oy vey, along with a candid expostulation: I am sooooo glad not to have been there. By the time I put down the phone, my blood had reached Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which it begins to spurt out your ears.
The good news was that I wasn’t speaking to Mum at the time, so it seemed pointless to haul out the ink-well, sharpen a quill, and let fly with another well-crafted verbal bitch slapping. Instead, I breathed into a paper bag for a few hours and then called Pup. Well, I said, that sounded like a fun dinner. Sorry to miss it. He feigned ignorance of the Skakel episode; perhaps he had excused himself early and gone upstairs to short-sheet Lady A_______’s bed. He was, anyway, past caring at this, my five hundredth Howl about Mum’s behavior. He tried to wave it away with a spuriously subjunctive, “But why would she say something like that if she wasn’t a juror at the trial?” (Pup would have made a superb defense attorney) and changed the subject back to what kinds of explosives work best for dislodging aristocratic British houseguest-limpets. At any rate, it was one letter from me Mum never had to not open. What, really, would have been the point of writing?
I forgive you. I was glad now to have had the chance to say that to her at the hospital, holding her hand, tears streaming down my face. As I type this, I can hear her saying, Are you quite finished? Or shall I go and get my Stradivarius?
I was five or six years old when I first caught Mum in some preposterous untruth, as she called it. It, too, featured British aristos.
She’d grown up a debutante in a grand house in Vancouver, British Columbia, the kind of house that even has a name: “Shannon.” Grand, but Vancouver grand, which is to say, provincial. Mum’s mother had been the daughter of the Winnipeg chief of police; her father, my grandfather, Austin Taylor, was a self-made industrialist (lumber, gold, ranching). His idea of fine art was an oil painting of a quail being retrieved by an English setter. But gosh, it was a glorious place, Shannon: a Georgian mansion surrounded by ten acres of English gardens, walled off from the city around it. It turns up as a movie set (Carnal Knowledge, Best in Show). Anyway, Mum’s parents were socially prominent in old Vancouver.
So one night, age six or so, sitting with the grownups at the dinner table, I heard Mum announce that “the king and queen always stayed with us when they were in Vancouver.” By “king and queen,” she meant the parents of the current queen of England. My little antennae went twing! I’d never heard my grandparents refer to a royal visit, which is a pretty big deal. I looked at Mum and realized—twang!—that she was telling an untruth. A big untruth. And I remember thinking in that instant how thrilling and grown-up it must be to say something so completely untrue, as opposed to the little amateur fibs I was already practiced at—horrid little apprentice sinner that I was—like the ones about how you’d already said your prayers or washed under the fingernails. Yes, I was impressed. This was my introduction to a lifetime of mendacity. I too must learn to say these gorgeous untruths. Imaginary kings and queens would be my houseguests when I was older!
When Mum was in full prevarication, Pup would assume an expression somewhere between a Jack Benny stare and the stoic grimace of a thirteenth-century saint being burned alive at the stake. He knew very well that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth did not routinely decamp at Shannon. The funny thing was that he rarely challenged her when she was in the midst of one of her glorious confections. For that matter, no one did. They wouldn’t have dared. Mum had a regal way about her that did not brook contradiction. The only time she ever threatened to spank me was when I told her, age seven, in front of others, following one of her more absurd claims, “Oh, come off it!” Her fluent mendacity, combined with adamantine confidence, made her truly indomitable. As awful as it often was, thinking back on it now, I’m filled with a sort of perverse pride in her. She was really, really good at it. She would have made a fantastic spy. She would have made a fantastic anything. She was beautiful, theatrical, bright as a diamond, the wittiest woman I have ever known (whatever talent I possess as a “humorist”—dreadful word— I owe to her). She could have done anything; instead, she devoted herself heart, soul, and body to being Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. (A full-time job.)
I learned something about her that I had not known before, from the New York Times obituary— namely, that I owe my very existence to her inability with… math. The reason she had gone off to Vassar, an American college three thousand miles away, and where she roomed freshman year with my father’s sister Patricia—was that Canadian colleges required a level of math proficiency that eluded her. I don’t recall her ever mentioning this fact.
She never finished Vassar. Pup and I heard her give various reasons for this over the years: She had to return to Vancouver because her mother had broken her back while riding; because her brother Firpo had broken his back riding; because she had broken her back riding. One night, after imbibing about two acres’ worth of vineyard grapes, she informed Pup and me—us!—that she had, in fact, left Vassar “to go back to Vancouver and save my parents’ marriage.” This revelation was as rococo as it was flabbergasting.
What made it rococo was that she thought to tell it to an audience consisting of 1) her husband, and 2) her son—that is, the two people on earth who knew her best. One might suppose this would obviate the necessity for recreational prevarication. Oh well. Afterward, sitting in the basement sauna, Pup mused aloud, “That makes reason number eight I’ve heard for her dropping out of Vassar.”
Whatever the real reason was—probably nothing much more than ennui with academics—her cap-and-gownless departure from Poughkeepsie left her, for the rest of her life, with a deep-seated insecurity that manifested itself aggressively, especially after the supernumerary glass of wine. On those occasions, more than one of my friends—by whom she was generally adored and whose adoration she returned—might be submitted to cross-examinations on the order of: So, you’re the world’s expert on feldspar, are you? Well, doubtless, then, you’re aware that 86.5 percent—how I marveled at the precision of her fabrications—of the world’s supply of feldspar comes from Baffin Island. So what do you have to say to that, Mr. Expert? The friend in question being a Yale mineralogy PhD was, nonetheless, left to splutter incoherently and beat a quick twitchy retreat in the direction of his borscht.
Pup remarked to me after she died that he had not once, in fifty-seven years, seen her read a nonfiction book. This did surprise me. Greatly. She was, after all, a woman who as William F. Buckley’s wife spent a great lot of time in the company of intellectual bigfeet—John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Kissinger, Tom Wolfe, James Burnham, Malcolm Muggeridge, Norman Mailer, Russell Kirk, Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Norman Podhoretz… you name ’em, she fed ’em. Every one of these people was enchanted by her razor-sharp wit and natural intelligence. Mailer used to call her “Slugger.” She may not have spent a lot of time with
her nose in biography and history, but she always read the paper thoroughly and kept up with the news on the telly. I remember one Sunday morning being stunned on picking up the Sunday Times magazine and seeing that she’d filled the entire crossword puzzle—a feat normally well beyond my own modest abilities. And yet, she might proclaim at the table with an exasperated air, “I simply don’t understand why the president just doesn’t pass the bloody bill himself,” leaving it to Pup, slightly embarrassed and sotto voce, to point out to her that passing bills was the province of the legislative and not the executive branch. In my mind, remembering this moment, I hear her coming back with, “Well, if you ask me, it’s all too ridiculous for words,” which is why everyone adored her.
CHAPTER 5
I Don’t Want Champagne
By the Friday after she died, I found myself in the kitchen, blurting to poor Julian, “Jules, if I don’t get out of here soon, there’s going to be another funeral in this house.”
Julian Booth (to whom this book is in part dedicated) is the kind, gentle, omnicompetent Briton who had been with my parents almost thirty years as cook and house manager. The nickname “Jules” was bestowed on him by David Niven. Jules nodded through his thick glasses and said quietly, “Yes, Christopher.” He is so even-keeled and sweet-tempered that he’d have responded exactly as he did if I’d said to him, “Jules, I am going to detonate a fifty-megaton nuclear device and destroy all life on planet Earth and usher in nuclear winter for a thousand years.” Yes, Christopher.
Losing Mum and Pup Page 4
