Losing Mum and Pup

by Christopher Buckley

  “Pup—what are doing?”

  “Trying to make it warmer.”

  I managed to haul him back into bed and get him covered.

  “Oh, thank you. Thank you. That’s so much better.”

  We took him to the emergency room the next day; the wrist was broken. He had no memory of the night before. None. So it was time for the lecture.

  Pup, I’m worried that the next time, it’s going to be your hip or your pelvis or something like that. And if that happens, well, I don’t need to spell it out, but that would be a real bore.

  I was choosing my words carefully. Pup used the word bore where others might use catastrophe or calamity or even tragedy of earthshaking dimensions. If shee-it was his augmented word chord, bore was its diminished counterpart. Once, crossing an ocean in a sailboat, we ran out of water a thousand miles from landfall, causing him to observe that the situation was “a bit of a bore.” If you, too, have ever brushed your teeth with orange Fanta, you may agree.

  Whenever he added the intensifier real or bloody (he’d learned English, his third language, at age six in school in London), the subject at hand might be either a mass outbreak of the ebola virus or an imminent Soviet nuclear attack. So I thought that “real bore” might convey “months in some rehab unit with Nurse Ratched and no midnight milkshakes and beer.”

  He stared and said, “Yes, that would be a real bore.”

  But then a night or two later, there was another crashing sound—a loud one—and I had to cantilever him back into bed. It was clear that the era of day and night nurses was approaching. (I had dismissed them earlier on.) And that was problematic, for once nurses were introduced, it would be impossible for Danny and me to help him end his suffering, if he indicated to us that he wanted that. A year into keeping vigil with him, watching him suffer, Danny and I were growing desperate. We talked about scenarios.

  I told Dan about a movie I’d seen called Igby Goes Down, in which two young sons of a terminally ill woman (brilliantly played by Susan Sarandon) help her to die. They give her ice cream laced with sleeping pills and then, once she passes out, put a plastic bag over her head. Wrenching as the scene is, there’s a poignant, almost comical moment as through the plastic bag they see her eyes suddenly pop open, causing the boys to jump. In discussing this, Danny and I felt like some Ebert and Roeper broadcast from hell. I found myself wondering grimly, Am I really going to take my cue from a movie written by Gore Vidal’s nephew? In the end, thank God—an expression I still find myself using—it was moot.

  CHAPTER 17

  Boy, How He’d Have Loved This

  At nine-thirty the morning of February 27, my son’s sixteenth birthday, my cell phone rang in Washington. Julian.

  “Hello, Christopher. I’m sorry to disturb you, but there’s been an emergency.”

  He’d found Pup on the floor of his garage study. The ambulance had been called. I said without even thinking, “Get the bracelet on him” (the DNR bracelet).

  I don’t know the technical definition of shock, but after hanging up with Julian, I found myself wandering around the house aimlessly, thinking that I should go on with what I’d been doing—my income taxes. Maybe if I do them, this won’t have happened. My thinking was as jumbled as the verb tenses in that sentence. I waited five minutes and called the house. Julia, the maid, answered. She was sobbing, a kind of wailing sound. “Oh, Christobal, Christobal. Venga. Venga.” (Christopher, come.) So, that was that. I knew. Pup was gone.

  Julian came on. “The police are here and would like to have a word, if they might.”

  An Officer James came on. He said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” I thanked him. He said they had to wait for the medical examiner to arrive, “just to make sure there was no foul play involved.” I thought how archaic that sounded. Foul play, as if I’d wandered onto the set of an Agatha Christie play.

  I said, “He’s been very ill.”

  Officer James said, “Yes, I understand that. Where are you, may I ask?” Washington, I said. “Oh,” he said, as if I were no longer a suspect. “In… Washington.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He asked if I had a specific funeral home in mind. I said yes, nearly adding that we were regular customers at Leo P. Gallagher, up on Summer Street. Julian came back on, and I told him to stay with Pup.

  I walked about the house, conducting a kind of conversation with myself. Okay, so that’s that. Should we… do the taxes? No, we’re not going to do the taxes now. Okay, so what do we do, then? I leaned my forehead against a wall and took some deep breaths. I felt underwater.

  My instincts said, Get to the body, get in the car, and drive to Stamford. (Five hours up I-95.) But it was Conor’s sixteenth birthday. I’d promised him a driving lesson that day after school. One of Pup’s favorite mantras—though he did sometimes take liberties with it as an excuse not to do something he didn’t want to do—was: “Life goes on.” Another was “Where there are no alternatives, there are no problems.” I realized I was crying now, so I blotted my eyes with toilet paper, sucked in a few more deep breaths, and said, Okay, come on, get a grip. Time to grow up. At age fifty-five, this is a perfectly reasonable request to make of yourself, and indeed, it is a very major component of orphanhood. Phone calls. You have to make the phone calls.

  So I placed my calls, first to family. I said the same thing to them all: “I’m calling with some sad news.” It’s efficient; you almost don’t need to say anything more. I called Henry Kissinger. He wept. I went down my list. I made my calls. I called my friend John Tierney at The New York Times and asked him to alert the obit desk. I sent out an e-mail: “My father died this morning at 9:30, at his desk, in his study, in Stamford.” I added:

  Take him all in all, Horatio, he was a man.

  I shall not look upon his like again.

  I got it slightly wrong and later rebuked myself for not having looked up the correct wording.

  The phone began to ring. My doctor, married to a White House television correspondent, called: “They just announced it from the White House.” A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “Mr. Buckley, I have the president for you.” I assumed it was President Bush 41, but no, it was his son. It was a gracious gesture, especially given some of the things I had written about his administration.

  He was quite a guy.

  Yes, sir, he was.

  I started to choke up. I thought of his father’s “Bawl Brigade.” I really didn’t want to lose it over the phone with the president of the United States—grow up!—so I jujitsued the conversation into a different tone and told the president that he’d died at his desk.

  You might say he died with his boots on, sir. A Texan like yourself would appreciate that. He laughed at that and said, yes, that was a good way to go.

  God bless you.

  God bless you, too, sir. Thank you for calling.

  Chris Matthews called.

  He was such a great guy. Chris was very fond of my father and had continued to have him on his show Hardball, perhaps past the point where Pup should have declined. In one episode I’d watched, taped in Pup’s study, he kept leaning back in his Aeron chair, at points entirely disappearing from camera view, with the result that his appearance became a kind of Where’s Waldo? It was sort of funny. Chris had said more than once that Pup was “one of the reasons I went into politics in the first place.”

  The phone rang. It’s strange, who calls. You don’t hear from people you expect to hear from; and you hear from people you’d never expect to hear from. It was Larry Gelbart calling. We hadn’t spoken in maybe a dozen years. He’d reviewed Thank You for Smoking for The New York Times. He’s slightly more famous for having written, among other classics, Tootsie and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I remembered that his father was a barber and cut his hair.

  I don’t suppose your dad is still….

  Oh yeah. He’s still going strong. Well, listen, just wanted to call and give you a hug.

  Doug
Martin of the Times called. He was gentle but professional. He needed the precise cause of death. I said, “Old age, Doug.” He said that wasn’t quite up to New York Times standards of precision. I said we were still waiting for the medical examiner to arrive. Doug’s obituary, prepared in advance, could be studied in obituary-writing classes at journalism school. It was up on the Times Web site by 11:04 a.m.

  My e-mail in-box filled. My desk phone became a switchboard. NPR, AP, the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek. So I was press secretary now. There was no avoiding it. It was news and, it appeared, big news. I thought with a smile, Boy, how he’d have loved this, the mother of all WFB Google news alerts.

  It was a long day. Conor and I had our driving lesson, and that night we went ahead with the surprise birthday party Lucy had arranged with his friends. Life goes on. Sixteen years ago, I’d called Pup in Switzerland to tell him that he had a grandson, and he’d cried. Today I got a call, and I cried. Grandfather dies, father dies… you’re next.

  After his friends left, Conor and I watched a movie I’d happened to order from Netflix called Death at a Funeral: a black English comedy about a dysfunctional family holding a funeral at home for the dad, who, it transpires, had been conducting a homosexual affair with a dwarf. It’s very funny. I can’t quite explain why we watched such a movie on this night or why we found it so funny. Life goes on. I said, Well, Boog (my nickname for him), here’s hoping Pup’s funeral won’t be quite as exciting.

  CHAPTER 18

  He’s Looking Much Better

  Idrove to Stamford the next morning. I didn’t want to sit on the train blubbering and blowing my nose in the Quiet Car, disturbing the peace of my fellow Amtrak passengers. There’s something, too, to be said for a long, solitary drive—it concentrates the mind. By Baltimore, mine was concentrated to the point of calling Pitts to say that I’d decided to bury Pup in Sharon. She was delighted, though this wasn’t at all what Pup had specified. But having made the decision, I felt—for the first time in my life—entirely independent of paternal authority or rebuke.

  Years ago, Pup commissioned a large bronze crucifix from the Connecticut sculptor Jimmy Knowles. It’s a beautiful piece of modern art. He placed it in the middle of the lawn in Stamford, to a distinct grumbling from Mum, who viewed her garden as off-limits to my father’s artistic (and in this case overtly religious) intrusions. Mum’s ashes were now inside the cross, in a heavy brass canister that looked as if it had been designed as a container of plutonium. Pup’s wish was that he, too, be cremated and join her in the cross. The idea of Mum, who wasn’t all that religious, encased for all eternity inside Pup’s crucifix had afforded the two of us a few grim chuckles over the years. “Just sprinkle me in the garden or send me out with the trash. I most certainly do not wish to be inside that object.” But she went first, so that was that.

  Pup expected me to keep the Stamford house, but beautiful as it was and fond though (most of ) my memories were, it was expensive, and after death taxes, I seriously doubted I would be able to maintain it. But not wanting to hurt his feelings, I went along with the fiction that I would keep it. This, however, left me with a conundrum: what to do with the cross. I tippytoed into this minefield one evening over our martinis.

  “Say, Pup, I know you want your ashes in the cross…”

  “I absolutely want them in the cross,” he said in a preemptive tone of voice.

  “Right. Right. I was only thinking, what if, you know, the house, if I, well, you never know… if I ever had to sell it…”

  “Your point being?”

  “Well, I mean, a new owner… surely…”

  “Why wouldn’t a new owner want the cross?”

  “Well,” I said, taking a hefty swig of my frosty see-through, “they might be, I don’t know, Jewish, or… they might not want a big, a giant crucifix in their garden.”

  “Why not?”

  I stared. He added, “It’s a work of art.”

  “It is. It is absolutely that.” [Clearing of throat.] “Still…”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.” I knew this formulation well. I wouldn’t worry about it was WFB-speak for “The conversation is over.” I was left with the impression I had committed lèse-majesté by suggesting that a future owner—Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Amish, Zoroastrian—might be anything less than honored to have William F. Buckley’s last remains in his garden, encased in an enormous bronze symbol of the crucified Christ. Certainly it would present the real estate broker with an interesting covenant clause. Now, um, Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum, you do understand that Mr. and Mrs. Buckley’s ashes are to remain in the crucifix, in the garden….

  No, I decided, driving up I-95, Sharon was the place for him. Sharon, where he’d grown up, where he’d been—by his own admission—happiest, between the ages of five and seven. For all his high sophistication and cosmopolitanism, there was in Pup an eternal inner boy. A teenage fan once wrote to him at NR, asking him what was his secret of happiness. He wrote back, “Don’t grow up.” It may have been this quality that propelled him to sail gleefully into northeast gales in his sailboat or leap into the cockpit of his Ercoupe barely knowing which knob was up or down. Yes, Sharon. It felt right. And he wasn’t around to overrule me.

  But, Christo, I want to be in the cross. We discussed it.

  Sorry, old shoe, I’m taking you home, to Sharon. With the cross.

  The last time I’d been with him there was the previous October. It was a fund-raiser for the local library, organized around the theme of “A Bevy of Buckleys,” held on the grounds of Great Elm, once my grandfather and grandmother’s house. Pup, Uncle Jimmy, * Aunt Pitts, Aunt Carol, and me, all gave readings from the aggregate Buckley oeuvre. We’re a scribbly bunch: I count about ninety or so books among us—Pup, of course, having contributed the lion’s portion.

  The local newspaper had run a story promoting the event, and a line in it had caught my eye, affording me vast amusement: “The Buckleys are a well-known American family, William F. Buckley Jr. being arguably the most famous.” I handed the clipping to Pup and counted silently as he read it, in anticipation of the reaction I knew would come. He looked up suddenly with a majestic, ironic frown (I would say a semiamused look) and said, “‘Ar-gu-ably’?” We had a good laugh over that. My last memory of Pup at Great Elm was that Indian summer late afternoon, the sun slanting low over the green lawn, a large crowd hushed underneath the tent, as he read from a reminiscence about growing up there:

  Outdoors it was very, very still, and from our bedroom we could hear the crickets and see the fireflies. I opined to my sister Trish, age twelve, that when the wind dies and silence ensues, fireflies acquire a voice, and it is then that they chirp out their joys for the benefit of the nightly company, visible and invisible.

  I turned into the driveway at Wallack’s Point, the gravel crunching under the tires. The flag was at half-mast. Julian and Danny would have seen to that. I drove slowly past the garage study, where he’d died. His blue Greek yachtsman’s hat was hanging on a hook, along with his cane and sweater. I remembered the phone call the previous April from Tina Brown after Mum died. She talked about when her mother died and she came across her reading glasses. “That really did it. I completely lost it.” Now I thought, Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of losing it in the days ahead.

  Once they’re both gone, your parents’ house instantly turns into a museum. Every trace of them you see, you imagine inside a glass display case, along with a plaque or caption. This red pen was used by William F. Buckley Jr. These sunglasses belonged to William F. Buckley Jr. Danny had put Pup’s wallet and watch on the desk in my room. Wallet carried by William F. Buckley Jr. on the day he died. The watch is one of ten that he bought for companions aboard a sailboat he sailed in 1985 from Hawaii to New Guinea. I picked up the wallet. I thought of all the times I’d seen him pull it from his back trousers pocket. He was a great reacher for the check at restaurants, Pup. He was always so generous that way.

  T
hat night, going to sleep, I looked out the window and the thought invariably came, So, Pup, was it true, after all? Is there a heaven? Are you in it? For all my doubts, I hoped he was. If he was, then at least I stood some chance of being admitted on a technicality, with the host of Firing Line up there arguing my case. I doubt St. Peter was any match for him. There were quite a number of editorial cartoons in the days ahead showing him arriving at the Pearly Gates. In one, St. Peter is whispering aside to an angel, “I’m going to need a bigger dictionary.”

  ____

  THERE WAS A LOT TO DO. I knew this already from Mum’s death. How many death certificates do we need? Fifty? Really? It seemed odd we should need so many, given that his death was on the front page of every newspaper, on every TV news broadcast, and on a zillion Web sites. You’d have to be Osama bin Laden deep inside a rat hole in Tora Bora province not to know that conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. had departed this vale of tears (a favorite phrase of his). Pup’s family financial adviser had reported to me with amusement that an insurance company had sent the following letter: Dear Mrs. Buckley, Thank you for sending your death certificate. The raised seal on it is not sufficiently raised. Please send us another death certificate with raised seal and we can then be able to begin processing your claim. I’m surprised they didn’t add a P.S.: Have a nice day! What can one say to such bureaucratic idiocy, other than “Whatever”? I’m thinking of having it engraved on my own headstone.

  Danny and I drove to Leo P. Gallagher & Son Funeral Home. We both knew the way. Danny’s dad had been taken there after he died. He had been wounded at Iwo Jima. Now my Greatest Generation father was there. The grown-ups were all leaving.