Losing Mum and Pup

by Christopher Buckley

  CHAPTER 13

  I’d Do the Same for You

  Iwas supposed to leave mid-July on a long-planned trip to California. One night as we watched the first of three—or was it four?—movies, he said apprehensively, “When are you leaving for California?”

  “I’m not, Pup. I’m going to stay here with you.”

  He began to cry. I went over and patted him on the back. He recovered his composure and said somewhat matter-of-factly, “Well, I’d do the same for you.”

  I smiled and thought, Oh no, you wouldn’t. A year or two ago, I might have said it out loud, initiating one of our antler clashes. But watching him suffer had made my lingering resentments seem trivial and beside the point.

  I had wondered, while keeping this vigil with him, whether to bring up certain things and talk them out so that when the end came, nothing would be left unsaid between us. But each time I hovered on the brink, I found myself shrugging and saying, Let it go. Perhaps it was another way of saying, as I had to Mum that night in the hospital, I forgive you, on the installment plan. I felt no need for what is called in other contexts “the exit interview.” I was able to love him now all the more and actually laugh (inwardly, anyway) at that “I’d do the same for you.” Oh yeah? Ho, ho, ho.

  When I was eleven, I spent three weeks in the hospital without a visit from him. True, he was on a trip to South Africa at the time, and in 1962, South Africa was a long way off. Still. When finally the doctors told Mum that I might not make it, she flashed word to him: Come home. And that he did, briskly, catching the next flight and changing planes—as he related proudly—in Nairobi, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Paris, London, and… Reykjavík! His absence from my sick-bed was not any failure of love. It was, perhaps, just how it was in those days: The mothers took care of the children. By the time he arrived back, I was out of danger, and he brought with him spectacular presents: a leopard-skin rug, which he christened “King Kaiser” and whose head would serve as a gnaw bone to generations of Cavalier King Charles puppies; also a splendid ceremonial Wilkinson sword of the type, he said, carried by the guards at Buckingham Palace.

  PUP’S LEGENDARY IMPATIENCE—a trait among the Great—could sometimes be, well, maddening. Ten minutes into my college graduation ceremony, he got bored and rounded up the family and friends in attendance and whisked them off to lunch at what we now call an “undisclosed location,” leaving me to spend my graduation day wandering the campus in search of my family. I ended up having my graduation lunch alone, at the Yankee Doodle Diner. When I confronted him back home, grinding my back molars, he merely said airily, “I just assumed you had other plans.” Pup—on my graduation day? He could be a bit aloof that way. He could also be absentminded. When my mother went into labor with me, Pup and Uncle Firpo, Mum’s brother, bundled her down the elevator at 444 East 57th, hailed a cab, got in, and drove off to the hospital, merrily chatting away; only after five or six blocks did they bother to notice that they had left her standing on the curb. She delighted in telling that story.

  By the beginning of August, I had convalesced—if the verb can be used transitively—him back to some semblance of health. I’d been with him night and day since mid-June. Lucy reported that my fifteen-year-old son, Conor, had been reduced to looking me up on YouTube. I ached to be with him, yet I feared leaving Pup, sensing as I did that every time I left might be the last I saw him. But I had to get away, and I comforted myself knowing he would be looked after by the devoted Danny and a household staff of five. He would not be left to depend upon the mercy of strangers.

  I woke early, bursting to go. Pup was still asleep, amid the doggies and a heap of crushed reading matter and the chugging oxygen machine. I kissed him, tiptoed out, and made it to our summer rental cabin in Maine in less than eight hours, where Conor and the Faithful Hound Jake were waiting for me in the little studio house. It felt like heaven. That night, to the smell of pine woods and the cry of loons, I e-mailed him.

  Dear Pup, I don’t know when you’ll get this but I just wanted to say how much being with you these past weeks, despite the circumstances, has meant to me. I love you very much. Your devoted Christo.

  He replied the next day, OChristo, that note on TOP of everything you have done for me! XXXXp

  CHAPTER 14

  Please Not to Arrest My Dear Father

  In September, his health deteriorating, Pup announced his intention to go back to the Mayo Clinic.

  Why, Pup?

  To find out what’s wrong with me.

  This was a bit of a conversation stopper, for by now it was pretty well established what was “wrong” with him: emphysema, diabetes, sleep apnea, skin cancer, heart disease, the usual prostate afflictions.

  I didn’t know what to say, other than a stammery, Um, what is it you think they’ll be able to do for you?

  Tell me how to get better.

  It came out like a martini: six parts serious and one part wry. I nodded, Well, why not? Pup had always said, “Despair is a mortal sin,” and though postreligious myself, I still admired the sentiment. * You don’t want to tell someone who is dying (emphysema is progressive and incurable), Forget it, you’re toast. At the same time, one doesn’t want to hold out false hope.

  The Mayo—venerable institution that it is—had a certain grim resonance in our household. In the early 1980s, David Niven had come to stay with Mum and Pup in Stamford after receiving the definitive diagnosis there that he had Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).

  David had been alarmed some months earlier by an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. David was one of the great raconteurs. He had told some very funny stories on the show, but that night after the taping, watching himself on TV in his hotel room, he was shocked by what he saw. He slurred his words and mumbled. He sounded drunk. The debility worsened, accompanied by other enfeeblements. Finally he took himself to Mayo, where he received the awful diagnosis. I remember Pup looking horrified as he told me that David had pressed the doctors to know what, exactly, would kill him in the end and was told: Suffocation. You’ll reach for a breath and eventually it won’t be there. This was a haunting memory for me now, given Pup’s increasing difficulty breathing. But, bowing to his wishes—one didn’t not bow to Pup’s wishes—we drove him to La Guardia one Sunday morning and put him on a plane for Rochester, where he would be met and taken to the clinic. He choked up when we said good-bye on the curb at the airport. I offered to go with him, but he said no.

  The next morning, my phone rang: Julian, reporting that Pup had been found wandering around the lobby of the Mayo hotel in the middle of the night, “apparently a bit disorientated.” I prepared to fly to Rochester; but by then Pup had announced that he had no further use for the Mayo and was on his way to the airport to come home. By the time he got back to Stamford, he was exhausted and physically depleted. I could barely make out what he was saying over the phone. He rallied a bit in the days following, but it was now clear that we were, as he often put it in other contexts, “approaching the point of diminishing returns.”

  Some years before, he’d gone off to Lourdes along with his friend William E. Simon, who’d been Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury. The thought of these two—one a prominent political and journalistic figure, the other a captain of U.S. industry and former administrator of the world’s biggest exchequer—carting lame and diseased pilgrims to and from the grotto where the Virgin Mary had allegedly appeared to a peasant girl is, well, humbling. One typically makes a pilgrimage to Lourdes for a special intention; Pup never vouchsafed to me what it was, but it was about the time I had declared my agnosticism, and I speculated whether he was petitioning Our Lady on my behalf.

  When I was younger and periodically confessed to him my doubts about the One True Faith, he dealt with it in a fun and enterprising way: by taking me off to Mexico for four or five days, during which we would read aloud to each other from G. K. Chesterton’s great work of Catholic apologetics, Orthodoxy.

  P
up had been in the CIA in Mexico City in 1951. His boss there was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to… well, you know all about that. After dinner, Pup and I would walk around the city and he’d point out the various safe houses where he was to take refuge in the event of “being blown.” (As a teenager, I was enchanted by this coinage.) Mexico City had been a pretty hot spot back during the cold war. It was here that Trotsky was pickaxed through the skull by Stalin’s agent; here that Lee Harvey Oswald had applied to the Soviets for a visa. And it had been here, too, in Mexico City between 1905 and 1921 that Pup’s father, William F. Buckley Sr., had had his great adventures as a lawyer and oil wildcatter. Living in Mexico between those dates was roughly the equivalent of living in Paris between 1789 and 1801, and my grandfather was right in the thick of it. He’d talked Pancho Villa out of shooting a train conductor; was kidnapped by thugs hired by competitors and taken into a forest to be killed. When U.S. Marines bombarded Vera Cruz, they asked him to serve as governor-civil of the city. He refused indignantly, disgusted as he was by Woodrow Wilson’s interventionism. Later, the Mexican government paid him the compliment of asking him to represent it at the ABC conference in Niagara. He made a fortune in oil there, only to have it confiscated by a subsequent government.

  So we Buckleys had history down here, and it was delicious to inhale it as I walked along dark calles and avenidas with Pup as he pointed out his cloak-and-dagger locales. The next morning, we’d drive up into the hills of Cuernavaca and Taxco and sit on narrow balconies overlooking the zócalos, drinking margaritas and reading Chesterton aloud to each other. Not a bad way to restore one’s faith, really. * Four or five days of this and I was content to shrug off my doubts about the Immaculate Conception or the Trinity. They were some of the best days I ever had with him. In one of the last conversations we had before he died, we smiled at the memory of what we always called “the most amazing meal we ever had”—at a roadside stand in Taxco, a cheese-and-chicken tortilla washed down with an ice cold bottle of Bohemia beer. Cost: one dollar.

  A MONTH AFTER THE MAYO EPISODE, I came to Stamford for Thanksgiving. Our annual ritual was to drive up to Sharon, the town in northwestern Connecticut where Pup had grown up with his nine brothers and sisters. I have an early memory of one of those drives. I might have been five or six. Pup may have been the only human left on the planet to use WordStar, but he had always been a gadget freak, and on this November day in 1957, there was between us on the front seat of the diesel Mercedes an enormous reel-to-reel tape recorder, playing a recording of Macbeth. I could make no sense of it whatsoever, and what little I did understand sounded pretty grim. Pup explained the story. When Lady Macbeth started going on about not being able to get her hands clean, I asked why didn’t she just try Palmolive? And so began my tutelage with the world’s coolest mentor.

  Over the next fifty years, we had some of our best talks on those drives up to Sharon. The November sun was usually far down in the sky by the time we would set off. There’s something to be said for long drives in the dark. They seem to enable candor. It’s cozy, and you’re not looking into each other’s eyes. As a matter of fact, Pup, I’ve taken LSD on a number of occasions, and you know, it’s really quite amazing. Try saying that to your dad, when you’re age twenty, across a brightly lit dinner table, with Mom looking on, wide-eyed.

  I’d been looking forward to it this year. I sensed that it would probably be our last Thanksgiving drive up to Sharon. I’d brought Caitlin along. Pup doted on what he called “my favorite granddaughter.” (He had only one.) I’d warned Cat that driving with Pup now often involved a tendency that she might find a bit unusual—namely, his habit of opening the front door while the car was moving, and peeing. He did this routinely now, including from his limousine, in traffic. I’ve often wondered if there are people out there scratching their heads and saying, Marge—was that William F. Buckley Jr. who just peed on our Lexus? If you’re out there, the answer is, yes, you were selected from among thousands of other motorists on I-95 to be tinkled on by the Lion of the Right. You should feel honored. Caitlin, being a nineteen-year-old of sensitivity, was naturally horrified by this prospect; but, understanding that Pup was “not himself,” she agreed that in this dire eventuality, she would keep silent and slink low in the backseat.

  Embarrassing One’s Young is in some ways the entire point of having children. I discovered the joy myself when Cat was perhaps three years old and I did something (a public burp) that caused her to turn crimson with shame and to renounce all consanguinity with me. In addition to making me fiercely proud of him over the years, Pup provided a number of Beam me up, Scotty moments, and the role his prostate played in the occasions of filial mortification must not go uncelebrated.

  It’s possible that his utter casualness in the field of public urination stemmed from a lifetime of peeing off the side of his sailboats. (There are two places where a man can really be a man: at sea and in the woods.) But afflicted as he was by the prostate conditions that seem to account for 95 percent of TV advertising during the evening news, Pup disdained normal conveniences and instead opted for what in the Watergate era was called a “modified, limited, hang-out option.”

  One time, on a father-son visit to Montreal, he announced that he had just received a flash priority message from Bladder Command. Given that we were standing in front of the city’s main church, my own sphincter tightened at what I feared might ensue. I suggested that we would certainly find a loo just around the cor—But no, already he was wending his way, unzippingly, to the side of the Notre-Dame basilica. Oh, no. We were not alone—indeed, there were hundreds of Montrealers in attendance, no doubt many of them devout Catholics. I hastily cinched my scarf about my face so that I was no more recognizable than Omar Sharif in his opening scene in Lawrence of Arabia and made my own way hastily in an opposite direction, meanwhile rehearsing my French for Respected and handsome Gendarme, please not to arrest my dear father, who is a grand personage in our French-loving country of America and, to be sure, a Knight of Malta. He is most vocal in his opinion that Quebec should be allowed to separate from the hateful, English-speaking government of Ottawa. If you would kindly direct us to a Protestant church, he will be pleased to urinate on it instead! It was always an adventure with Pup.

  But not this time, for when Cat and I arrived, he greeted us in his garage study and said, sadly, that he was too ill to make it. So we had Thanksgiving in Stamford and on Saturday celebrated his eighty-second birthday, along with his best friend, Van Galbraith, and our neighbor Jimmy Edgerton. Jimmy, now eighty-eight years old, had grown up on Wallack’s Point and told of having been in this room, our dining room where we sat, in the 1920s. Van, once bulldog-athletic, had undergone thirty radiation treatments for cancer in the previous month. He could barely walk. Pup, Van, and Jimmy, handsome Yalies all. Within six months, they would all be dead.

  We will serenade our Louie, while life and voice shall last,

  Then we’ll pass and be forgotten with the rest.

  I’D FOUND PUP A RENTAL HOUSE in Fort Lauderdale for December–January, where he could repair with his latest amanuensis/protégé and write his new book, a memoir of his friendship with Ronald Reagan.

  Having a new project had lifted Pup’s spirits, as had the prospect of being near his old friend Carl Wohlenberg. Carl and Pup had formed a lifelong friendship one day at Yale in 1946, when, at the end of the first lecture in freshman physics, the professor had said, “I assume there are no questions.” There were two bursts of hysterical laughter from opposite ends of the auditorium. Pup and Carl had found each other.

  Julian and Danny were tasked with conveying Pup’s equipage there from Stamford: his complicated array of computers, which took up about as much space as the original ENIAC; his books; music machines; vast trove of CDs; breathing machines; doggies. Pup did not travel light. His and Mum’s annual departures for Switzerland were a mirth-rich anecdotal environment. They would present themselves at the Swissair check-in counter with enoug
h bags to fill the entire hold of a C-5A Galaxy, along with at least three dogs, including a malevolent Pekingese named Foo. At which point Pup would deploy full-frontal WFB situational charm.

  So, Monsieur Buckley, we have today, oof… eighteen baggages? In addition to the dogs?

  Is it that many? Heavens. Ha, ha. Well [eyes twinkling] I would never disagree with a Swiss on the matter of accuracy, especially as my own ancestors were Swiss. * Ha, ha….

  At the end of the negotiation, Pup would have bargained Swissair down to charging him for only one extra bag and one malevolent Pekingese. He would relate his victories in the field of excess baggage surcharge with the pride of a general who had just turned back a German tank offensive.

  It was during those forty-odd winters in Switzerland that Mum and Pup were, perhaps, their best selves together. For a quarter century of those years, they rented a château in Rougemont, near Gstaad—a tenth-century castle at the foot of a tall alp called the Videmanette. Pup wrote his books, and Mum turned the pile of stones into a salon. Everyone came. After one of Julian’s excellent dinners, they and the guests would descend to the ground floor, where a painting atelier had been set up. In one photo, you can see Dame Rebecca West slapping paint onto a canvas alongside Princess Grace. There’s even a photo of Teddy Kennedy and Pup painting together. At evening’s end, he asked if he could borrow a car to drive himself back to Gstaad. Mum shouted out, “Don’t give him one—there are two bridges between here and Gstaad!”