Losing Mum and Pup

by Christopher Buckley

  Pup’s aloofness in the matter of seat belts and stop signs and speed limits and other nuisances had long puzzled me, in a bemused sort of way. As his driving came more to resemble Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland, my bemusement diminished. One day Aunt Carol—Pup’s youngest sister—and I were chatting. Being the tenth and last of my grandparents’ children, Carol has a wry and perceptive take on her siblings. Oh, she said with her beguiling and beautiful double-dimpled smile, don’t you understand? The rules don’t apply to him. I chuckled and filed it away under “Pup, Mysteries of.” When he published his umpteenth book, Miles Gone By, a collection of autobiographical pieces, I came across something he had written that unlocked it for me, while in the process making me marvel that he had survived as long as he had.

  It was an article he’d written about owning an airplane when he was at Yale. It was called an Ercoupe. He and five other classmates had bought it jointly. One day, one of Pup’s friends, a pilot veteran of World War II, bemoaned to him that he badly wanted to see his girlfriend in Boston but had no way of getting there. Pup, ever the gallant, said, “Never fear, I shall fly you to Boston!” He had at this point in his flying career exactly one and a half hours of cockpit time. He had never soloed. So he and his friend flew to Boston, the friend doing the flying, which left Pup at Boston Airport all alone and now having to get the plane back to New Haven. I was a licensed pilot in my youth, and I simply shudder to relate the rest of this story.

  Pup revs up the Ercoupe for the return flight and takes off, at which point he notices that, gee, it’s getting kind of dark. He’s neglected to factor in last night’s switch from daylight savings to eastern standard time. This being way before GPS, he navigates back toward New Haven in the gloaming by descending to one hundred feet and following the train tracks. This somewhat basic mode of navigation begins to fail him when it turns pitch black. The situation now seriously deteriorating, he makes out—thank God—the beacon of the New London airport. He manages to set the plane down there. He then hitchhikes back to New Haven and goes straight to the Fence Club bar to steady his nerves and share his exploits. Next day, his flight instructor, upon learning of the episode, goes completely ballistic.

  I’d been unaware of this tale of—what should one call it?—derring-do until I read his piece. (I’m not sure “bravery” is quite the right word, though Pup was the bravest man I knew.) The only Ercoupe anecdote I knew was the one where, flying into Ethel Walker School for his sister Maureen’s graduation, he crashed the plane in front of the entire assembly and was carried off the field by the graduating class. As to the moral: A man who would think nothing of flying a plane solo from Boston to New Haven, having had a total of one and a half hours of—well, put it this way, this is not a man who is going to waste a lot of time in life on seat belts, stop signs, or worrying about going for a cocktail cruise in a northeast gale. At any rate, his rear-on collision with the ancient apple tree turned out to be impactful—as it were—not only on the Montana, but on him. After that, he consented to be chauffeured the fifty yards to and from his garage study.

  One day, two weeks after his return from the hospital, still ailing badly but bored witless by inertia, he determined to make it to the study and recommence work on his Goldwater memoir. This was valiant. Here he could barely breathe, could barely stand up, could—barely—speak. (The self-administrations of Stilnox didn’t help here, but never mind.) Into the bargain, it was blowing a summer gale. We were both drenched to the skin by the time I got him situated in the cockpit of his study. I approached him with the nose oxygen tube. He made a face. We had had, oh, fifty discussions about this.

  Let’s put in your oxygen tube, okay?

  What good would that do?

  Well, it’s oxygen, you know, and since you’re having a hard time breathing—

  I don’t see what good it does.

  [Looping the tubes around his ears and inserting the end into his nostrils.] Well, can’t be doing any harm, shouldn’t think….

  He fired up his computers. He hunched unsteadily over his keyboard. I hovered behind, ready to catch him if he pitched forward.

  I’m going to have to dictate to you.

  I’m a little rusty at WordStar, Pup. It’s been a quarter century.

  So he stood, holding on to the edge of his desk for support, and began to dictate the last chapter of his memoir about Barry Goldwater.

  The years ahead were, by the standards of Barry Goldwater, unhurried….

  I struggled to keep up. I’m a fairly fast touch typist, but WordStar, with its jillion complex key commands, made me feel as if I were at the controls of a steam locomotive.

  What amazed me, and still does now, a year later, on reading the final pages in the published Goldwater book, was how fluent it was. I have beside me the just-published book, and rereading the final chapter, I find it remarkably little changed from what issued from Pup’s oxygen-deprived blue lips that rainy morning in July in his study. It was as if his mind were a still brightly burning fire deep within the wreckage of his body. He made hardly any self-corrections as he spoke. The words came out punctuated and paragraphed. And quickly. My fingers scuttled across the keyboard like crabs. In less than ten minutes, we were on the last paragraph of the last book he would write.

  And that was that. No one else comes to mind who sustained for so long a comparable reputation for candor and courage. Over the years, if active in the political community, one comes across rejected aspirants for the presidency. But even in that rare company Goldwater, whether initiating a call from the South Pole to my wife, or puddle-jumping the Grand Canyon for his friends, was unique, and will forever remain so.

  My eyes misted up, typing that. I said, “It’s beautiful, Pup.”

  I searched the menu for the document save. I somehow located the right sequence of keys and pressed them, then held my breath until I saw the chapter file name appear on the screen.

  “Let’s print it,” Pup said.

  Here I was stymied.

  “I’ll do it.” He sat down at the keyboard and hit a few keys.

  “Oh, shee-it.” Pup had a way of intensifying the s-word, like one of his complex jazz piano chords. Shit-major-augmented-seventh.

  “It’s not here,” he said.

  My heart sank.

  “It was there,” I said.

  “Well, it’s not here now.”

  We searched. He phoned Jaime. They spoke in Spanish. Their conversation ended with Jaime saying, “Lo siento, compadre.” (I’m sorry, my friend.) This did not bode well.

  “We’ll have to start over,” Pup said, sighing.

  After some brisk recrimination, a deal was struck. I would retake dictation on the lost coda on the condition that it be on my Mac laptop. I went to fetch it, grumblingly, in the wet.

  Pup redictated the chapter, practically verbatim. When we went over it the next day, there was little it needed other than a comma here and a word there. * I was, for the thousandth time in my life, in awe of him.

  I remember, as a child, watching him in the car, with his portable blue Olivetti Lettera 32 propped on his knees, pounding out a deadline column. Between 1962 and 2008, he wrote some 5,600 of these. Assembled into book form, they would fill forty-five volumes. Add that to his fifty * published books and you have ninety-five. This is, I reflect as a fifty-five-year-old author of only thirteen books, a humbling tally. †

  I was always amazed, to use that word again, at how quickly he wrote. He could dash off a seven-hundred-word column in five minutes, about the length of time it took to type that many words. I would brag to people about how quickly my old man could write one of his columns, until one day he gently admonished me: “People might get the impression I don’t give them enough thought, and I do,” he said. “I just happen to be a fast writer.” He loved to relate a self-deflating anecdote of how he once told Gene Shalit, the extravagantly mustachioed and witty NBC-TV personality, that he had written a particular column in under five minutes.
Shalit replied, “Yeah, I read that one.”

  When I was starting out as a professional writer myself, my awe of his speed began to mix with a certain amount of envy. For me, the words usually flowed at the speed of a glacier. Pup went every winter to Switzerland to write his books and would return six weeks later with a more or less complete manuscript. I won’t make the posthumous claim for him that all his books are destined for literary immortality, but among those fifty are some real jewels, written in one and a half months—of part-time writing days.

  In Switzerland, his routine was to spend mornings on correspondence and National Review and column writing, then lunch with Ken Galbraith or Niven or some exiled European king or czar or whomever on top of a mountain, have a glass or two of Fendant or Dôle wine, ski a few runs, then be back at his desk by four and write his book until seven. It took me the better part of a year—of eight-, ten-, fourteen-hour days, with no time off for hobnobbing with the Gstaad gratin—to crank out my first book. While I was writing it, over the garage apartment now inhabited by Danny, Pup and Mum embarked on a fourteen-day trip on a cruise ship from Rio to Panama. His plan was to start writing one of his sailing books on the voyage. * One midnight, lone and dreary, while I rewrote, glum and weary, wondering if it was too late to apply to law school, my phone rang. It was the ship-to-shore operator, a call from Mr. Buckley. My pulse quickened. In those days, long-distance ship-to-shore calls were generally of a dire nature.

  Christo?

  Pup. Is everything… okay?

  Guess what I did today?

  What?

  I finished my book! How’s yours coming? Ho, ho, ho!

  He’d written it in twelve days. I’m sure the “How’s yours coming? Ho, ho ho!” was meant as a tease, but after congratulating him and hanging up, I spent some time staring at the .22-caliber rifle mounted on the wall, wondering if I could get the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger with my big toe. Anyway, he wrote quickly, Pup, right up to the very end.

  MOST AUTHORS ARE HAPPY—thrilled, even, to the point of doing cartwheels—upon finishing a book. But not Pup, not this time, for it left him, literally, without a reason to go on living. His depression deepened. I began to field alarmed phone calls and e-mails from his friends reporting that he sounded in low spirits.

  He summoned me one afternoon to his bed and said to me, a look of near despair on his face, “Oh, Christo, I feel so fucking awful.”

  “I know you do, Pup,” I said. “I know you do. I’m so sorry. I wish—”

  “If it weren’t for the religious aspect,” he said, “I’d take a pill.”

  The religious aspect. Here we were venturing out onto thin ice. This was not the moment to break what remained of his heart by telling him that although I greatly admired the teachings of Jesus, I had long ago stopped believing that he had risen from the dead; it’s an honest enough doubt, really, but one that rather undercuts the supernatural aspect of Christianity. At the same time, I was desperate to help put him out of his misery, if that was what he wanted. Misery it was. He missed Mum desperately.

  This was a mystery to me. There had been so many rocky times. And yet I understood. He had depended on her for so long. Even when Mum wasn’t speaking to him—which was about a third of the time—she looked after him: packing his bags, making sure he had everything he needed. “I’m just an Arab wife,” she said (the quote appeared in her New York Times obituary). “When Bill says, ‘Strike the tent,’ I do.” She had been brought up by a mother who inculcated in her daughters that their primary role in life was to take care of their men. Mum did that. She saw to every detail.

  Even when Pup was despairing of her behavior—as he did only occasionally—and sought refuge on the lecture circuit or wherever, he would call her every night, attempting reconciliation with, “Hi, Duck.” “Duck” was the formal vous version of “Ducky,” the word they called each other. If a transcript existed of their fifty-seven-year-long marriage and you did a computer quick-find search of “Ducky,” you’d find 1,794,326.

  When I shot the mock 60 Minutes for their fortieth anniversary, their great British friend Peter Glenville * told the story on camera of one night at the dinner table in Stamford. Mum was furious with Pup for God knows what. Peter spoke in a velvety Oxford accent right out of Brideshead Revisited.

  “And Bill said to her, ‘Ducky—’ She said, ‘Don’t call me “Ducky.” ’ Bill arched one of his eyebrows, perhaps both eyebrows, and said, ‘Oh. Why not?’ She said, ‘I’m not going to go into it. Just don’t call me “Ducky.’ ” And Bill said, ‘Then what would you like me to call you? Shitface?’” †

  Peter followed that story by shifting to a more somber tone and saying that he had never in all his years known a couple more loyal to each other. “If anyone ever said anything about him—a lioness.” Peter mimicked a paw in midevisceration.

  I experienced this loyalty from her myself, and recalling it now, I cringe to think of my presumption at her deathbed. (I forgive you.) Perhaps the most memorable—certainly it was the most public—occasion was in the late 1980s. I’d written a lead review for the New York Times Book Review of a biography of William S. Paley, founder of CBS. Mr. Paley, for all his achievements, was, in Sally Bedell Smith’s able telling, a bit of a bounder in the human being department, and I had commented in the review approvingly of this portrait of a flawed man. Well, oh dear.

  Shortly after the review appeared, there was a big dinner in New York at La Grenouille, the splendid commissary of le tout New York. A British aristocrat lady (they seem to abound in these pages) accosted Mum in full view of the crowded room with, “Your son is a shit.” The lady was, évidemment, a spear carrier for the Paley camp. The room froze. And then Mum let her have it, with both paws. (I speak figuratively, of course, but it was apparently an electrifying moment.) This clash of doyennes became topic A in old New York for weeks. The society and gossip writers could barely keep up. At the time, I was safely on the high seas, crossing another (damned) ocean with Pup. And now it occurs to me that I don’t think I ever thanked her for taking up my cause. But that was Mum: When it came to protecting her men, she turned into Boadicea, Warrior Queen.

  When Pup’s sister Patricia first reported to her parents that her freshman Vassar roommate would be “perfect for Billy,” the word she used to describe Mum was “regal.” Regal Mum most absolutely was. Schuyler Chapin, in his eulogy to her at the Met, said, “She didn’t enter a room, she took possession of it.”

  She was certainly regal in her proclivities and sensibilities. I remember one night arriving home at the apartment on Park Avenue to find her in a neck brace.

  Mum, good Lord, what happened?

  I was at a dinner last night and there was a—very—grand duchess present. I curtsied so low that I managed to catch my pearls on my heel on the way up. It’s a wonder I didn’t garrote myself to death.

  It’s a cliché to say of anyone that they could have been on the stage, but I’ll say it anyway: She’d have killed. Noel Coward or Moss Hart or Clare Boothe Luce would have loved to write lines for her. And she would have supplied some of her own bons mots. One night, watching one of the political conventions with her on TV, she said of someone giving a speech, “That woman is so stupid she ought to be caged.” Another of her signature lines: “It is of an imbecility not to be credited.” How—ever—did a “simple girl from the backwoods of British Columbia” learn to talk that way? When she and David Niven got going, you just stood back and went, Wow.

  She took possession of it. Schuyler had it right. She took possession of her husband. And he was desolate now that she had gone. It was only now, seeing him so helpless without her, that I saw the extent of his devotion to her. The phrase unconditional love has always been an abstraction to me. Now I understand. I think he even missed her being cross with him.

  HE MISSED, too, the roar of the crowd. That—I suspect—had been the reason for his skipping Jane’s funeral to go get the award in Washington. He missed—
everything: being able to breathe, being able to walk more than three feet without gasping. He was tired. He wanted to die. And I wanted to help him. I couldn’t bear to see him suffer like this. But a voice within whispered, For God’s sake, don’t end up in jail.

  I flash-forwarded through a deeply unpleasant filmat-eleven news segment, starring me, being arraigned for assisting suicide. I saw the district attorney stepping before the microphones. We have found sufficient evidence to indict Christopher Buckley, son of conservative icon—he’d be sure to put it that way—William F. Buckley Jr.—for homicide. On the bright side, maybe I’d get to spend some quality time with Michael Skakel.

  The conversation proceeded:

  Pup, I…

  I struggled over how to put it, stuck between my inability to tell him that I simply didn’t see “the religious aspect” as an impediment and my technical concern at being an accessory to suicide. But I’d learned the English language at the knee of one of its masters and, improvising, reached for the subjunctive.

  Pup. Suppose, say, one were—accidentally—to ingest more than a, you know, prescribed dosage of sleeping pills. Given your normal, say, high rate of ingestion, producing, as it does, a state of mental confusion… would that, really, qualify in the eyes of the Church as… you know… I mean, I’m hardly a priest, but still…

  He was propped up on his pillows, his eyes wandering sadly and philosophically into space. He looked at me with a flicker of the old wryness.

  “I know what you’re driving at,” he said. We stared at each other. Neither of us spoke.

  “Well,” he said, “to be continued.”

  I left him to his nap, the religious aspect before us unresolved. As I passed through the sitting room, I glimpsed on a side table an advance copy of my current novel, Boomsday (This one didn’t work for me. Sorry. xxB). I heard the district attorney add, This crime is especially heinous given the fact that Christopher Buckley’s new novel advocates mass suicide as a means of solving America’s Social Security fiscal crisis. Unfortunate coincidence, but—might be good for sales.