Losing Mum and Pup

by Christopher Buckley

  My old friend Chris the funeral director was punctilious and correct and soft-voiced. He allowed himself a mild smile when I greeted him with, “Wee’rre back.”

  I’d brought along a gray suit, white shirt, and a tie. The tie appeared conservative, but if you looked closely, you could see I LOVE MY WIFE repeated along the stripes and underneath, in backward-facing letters, BUT OH THAT BOAT! I’d puzzled over it, standing in his closet that morning. You don’t want to send dear old dad off across the river Styx wearing a joke tie, and it’s not a revocable decision, unless you’re prepared, wearing a haunted expression on your face, to explain to the state of Connecticut exhumation officer that you need to dig him up because of “the tie.” But in the end I thought, Why not? A conversation piece for Charon, a yachtsman himself. Nice tie, Mr. Buckley.

  Mum had spent a considerable portion of her career as Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. trying to make Pup look good—not just in the larger sense, but presentable. He was not a clotheshorse, my old man. Handsome, yes; slim-figured, to be sure; a bit of a slob? Um, yeah. Left to his own devices, he’d show up in khakis, Top-Siders, and a ratty blazer. Mum was forever saying, “Bill, you cannot go out dressed in that ridiculous attire,” and then performing fashion triage on him, removing the tie with the stain, combing his hair, making him put on shoes that were shined, for heaven’s sake. Her own sense of style was impeccable, and he delighted in it, even as he continued to shuffle along beside her, slightly unkempt.

  The first time I was aware that Mum was, well, not like most other moms was when I was fourteen and under lock and key of the monks at boarding school. The day after parents’ weekend, at which they had dutifully shown up, one of the older boys said to me, “Hey, Buckley, your mom’s a piece of ass.”

  I stood there with face burning, trying to figure out what the appropriate response was. I wasn’t actually sure if what he’d said constituted an insult, inasmuch as there was no higher accolade at Portsmouth Priory School, circa 1967, than “piece of ass.” But it sounded like fightin’ words, so I let fly. The scuffle was over in about five seconds, with me on my back on the floor and the older boy kneeling on my chest, explaining—sincerely, as I seem to remember—that he’d been referring to “her clothes.” Well, okay, then. *

  Further evidence that she was a bit different came from the school’s switchboard operator—a fat, gossipy woman who regularly pored over the “Suzy Says” society column in the New York Daily News. “Your mutha went to a big party last night for Walter Cronkite!” she would yell out at me, into the crowded room where we checked our mailboxes. “She wore an Eves Saint Lawrent dress! Musta cost a fortune!” she bellowed, occasioning smirks from thirty other boys as I attempted invisibility.

  It was around this time that the phrase the chic and stunning Mrs. Buckley entered our lives. It first appeared—we think—not in Women’s Wear Daily, but in some other publication. Typically, Mum would use it when she was coming in from the garden—dirty, in jeans and black T-shirt, hair pulled back, no makeup. (She was never more beautiful to me than when she appeared thusly.) She’d say, “So much for the chic and stunning Mrs. Buckley.”

  Chic and stunning, she was, whether in Oscar de la Renta or her favorite Bill Blass. Pup was so proud of her, despite his own relative slovenliness. When she made the Best Dressed Hall of Fame, the Valhalla of Seventh Avenue, he called me up and said, “Be sure to make a big fuss. This is apparently a very big deal.” I called her and made a big fuss. She changed the subject to the dog’s bladder infection.

  I asked her, many years later, where she had gotten her high sense of style, given that she had grown up in provincial British Columbia. * “From me,” she said, not terribly interested in the subject. “I think I’ve always had an eye for my own sense of style. Mind you,” she added heavily, “there have been many mistakes made. Fashion is fun,” she went on, “as long as you don’t embarrass your husband. I remember last year coming down the staircase at the apartment in an outfit that I thought was absolutely, startlingly gorgeous, and your father said, ‘Ducky, you look absolutely gorgeous. Where’s the rest of the dress?’ It was up to the kazoo.”

  I KNEW THE DRILL BY NOW. Chris slid Jessica Mitford’s price list across the table. I wasn’t going to haggle over the embalming fee ($1,395). Or “dressing and casketing of deceased” ($495). Whatever. Burial is, of course, pricier than cremation. There’s a lot of itemizing involved.

  Truck rental? Do we really need a truck? He wasn’t that big.

  Actually, a “truck” is the rolling stand that the casket rests on.

  Aha. Well, yes, we’ll definitely want one of those.

  Finally, it was time to go into the next room and look at coffins. Death’s showroom. All the latest models, a coffin for every taste. Some of them would not have been out of place in, say, a Sopranos episode.

  I remembered years ago Pup telling me about going into Frank Campbell’s in Manhattan to choose his father’s coffin and the look of horror on the face of the salesman when he picked out the plainest. From his description of it, it sounded like something they’d put a John Doe in for burial in Potter’s Field. I was six when Pup told me this story, and I vaguely remember asking him why he’d picked out such a plain one for his pup. Wasn’t Grandfather rich? Yes, Pup said, but Grandfather was a humble man and the son of a very poor Texas sheriff, and he was very religious and didn’t want God to think he needed to be buried in some $500 coffin. (This was 1958, bear in mind.)

  There were some pretty plain coffins in Chris’s showroom. I liked them, but Chris pointed out that they were for Jewish funerals. Jews—quite sensibly and admirably—shun funereal ostentation. (Either that, or they don’t have any money left after the bar mitzvah.) I was tempted, but on closer inspection they looked almost as if they’d been hammered together by thirteen-year-olds during woodwork at summer camp. I imagined the Buckley family seeing Pup wheeled up the aisle of St. Bernard’s in one of these jobs and murmuring about how that cheap SOB Christo was clearly trying to shave a few nickels off the tab. Danny and I settled on one made of pecan wood, a steal at $2,795.

  “Now, I should let you know,” Chris said, “pecan is a slightly heavier wood than some others.” At first I didn’t get it, but then I inferred that he was trying gently to point out that the coffin, fully loaded with Pup, who’d added a few pounds toward the end, might have the pallbearers popping hernias or collapsing as they groaned their way up the church steps. We did some quick math: six hundred pounds gross weight divided by eight (manly) pallbearers. No, that was doable. Sold.

  We talked handles. This model, as others, came with or without handles. The coffin was grooved underneath on both sides so that pallbearers could grip it with their fingers and then heft it onto their shoulders, à la, say, Princess Diana. “It’s an elegant approach,” Chris said, “but I think in this case I would recommend handles. I could tell you stories.” Yes, I said, let’s go with handles. So we settled on that and went back to the conference room for the final tabulating. Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung…. $11,105. But—remember, when it’s your turn to do all this—tax-deductible! Perhaps someday, some congressman will bravely introduce a bill to remove the coffin deduction. I just hope I’m still alive to watch.

  Finally, I said to Chris, “I’m going to want to put a few things in the coffin with him. Should I have you do that or is it something I can do when you bring him to the house for the wake?”

  Chris nodded thoughtfully, frowned, shifted in his seat, and said in a very soft voice, “Before I answer, let me ask you: How frankly may I speak about the condition of Dad’s remains?”

  Dan and I glanced at each other. I said, “Shoot.”

  After the heart attack, he had lain on the floor for a while, facedown, before Julian found him. Blood had pooled. He looked “a little flushed.” One doesn’t want one’s last glimpse of a parent to be a startling one that you can’t ever get out of your head. My last glimpse of Mum, as she lay dying, is not the one I p
refer to recall, but it comes to me at times and I have to consciously put it back inside that locker in the hippocampus. I said, “If he’s not looking his best, why don’t I bring you the items and you can put them in.”

  He called me on my cell as Danny and I were driving home to say, “I was just with Dad, and good news, he’s looking much better.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Something I’ve Written for the Paper

  Iwas about to leave for another meeting with Pup’s lawyer. Our now-regular meetings consisted of a series of tutorials on the U.S. tax code, which seems to have developed over the years into a version of The Da Vinci Code. Figuring it out requires that you have a law degree and accounting degree; alternatively, you can hire lots of people who do. Boiled down, it basically says, “We’ll split it with you.”

  The phone rang. It was Sam Tanenhaus. Sam is Pup’s biographer as well as editor of The New York Times Book Review and—since then—also the “Week in Review” section. I respected Sam. I’d been hugely impressed by his biography of Whittaker Chambers. Over a lunch, he’d told me he was now casting about for a new project. I’d said, I’ve got one for you. He’d leapt at the idea of writing a biography of WFB.

  He said how sorry he was about the news. I thanked him. He said, “I’m calling because of something I’ve written for the newspaper.”

  “Yes?”

  “A month ago I was out to Stamford and had dinner with your father. He told me that he was thinking about committing suicide.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “He said that he had discussed it with two priests and that they had told him that while it would be a sin, it would be a forgivable sin.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, he didn’t commit suicide.”

  Pause. “Oh?”

  “He died of a heart attack, Sam.” I began to feel uncomfortable.

  Pause. “So that’s official?”

  “Well, I have the death certificate here in front of me. It says under cause of death, ‘Cardio-pulmonary arrest.’ So, yes, that would appear to make it official.”

  “Well, that’s why I called. I wanted to run it by you.”

  We rang off politely. My mind was reeling, but I went on with getting ready for the lawyer. Then, a few minutes later, I did a sort of mental double take. Had he said “something I’ve written for the paper”? I called him back.

  “Sam,” I said, “sorry, I’m a bit confused, with everything going on. Did you say you’ve already written something about this for the paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean, you’re running a story about this?”

  “Yes.”

  I took a breath. “Sam,” I said, “if Pup told you that, and I don’t doubt that he did, he was surely telling you that in your capacity as his biographer. Not as a reporter for The New York Times.”

  I saw a headline: IN FINAL DAYS, BUCKLEY CONTEMPLATED SUICIDE. Fine, but run that through the blogosphere and in thirty seconds it becomes BUCKLEY KILLED SELF. This is not mere filial hysteria on my part. This is America.

  I wrote a book some years ago about the UFO world and learned a bit about what passes for “evidence” out there in this great, credulous nation of ours. I’ve read a little, too, about the Kennedy assassination. Roughly the same percentage of Americans believe in UFOs as believe that JFK was killed in a conspiracy. (Seventy-five.)

  I knew Sam Tanenhaus to be a writer who gets his facts straight, but given the way America often connects its dots, I felt I had legitimate reason to fear that many would leap to the conclusion that the Lion of the Right had offed himself. And this was not a story I wanted to read and see rereported and twisted around as it zinged through cyberspace. And frankly, there was this, too: My father wasn’t forty-eight hours dead. Why was Sam subjecting me to this?

  After a pause, he said, “That’s why I called you.”

  “Well, Sam,” I said, shifting gears, “I think that were such a story to appear in the paper, a great number of people would be very upset.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. It’s one thing if this appears on page 684 or whatever of your biography. You have every right to include it. But it’s another matter if it appears in The New York Times as a news story. People are going to leap to conclusions, never mind what the death certificate says.”

  “I understand,” he said. Pause. “But I should tell you that certain pressures are being brought to bear on me here, by Bill Keller and Jill Abramson.” (Respectively, the top and number two editors at the Times.)

  “Well then, Sam,” I said, my voice now at about freezing point, “speaking as Pup’s literary executor, I guess I can only say that you’re just going to have to weigh those pressures along with others.”

  It was an explicit threat to shut the door on the William F. Buckley Jr. archive at Yale, consisting of 550 linear feet of his papers. * Sam had at this point invested half a dozen or so years on the project. Having his access cut off at this stage would be far from ideal, certainly not for the sake of one headline. Making threats isn’t my thing, but I had no other weapon at hand.

  “Okay,” Sam said after a pause. “I will factor that in. And I appreciate your telling me all this.”

  And so we rang off. I was shaking. The world had been told, truthfully, that William F. Buckley had died at his desk while working. Now it was about to be informed by the newspaper of record that he had been in a suicidal state. I fast-forwarded to spending my life waving his death certificate at sniggerers and bloggers who would be saying, Yeah? Well, that raised seal doesn’t look so raised to me. I had to stand up and pace around the room. I was now—it appeared—at war with my father’s biographer and, into the bargain, the editor of the nation’s most influential book review.

  A few hours later, as I was on my way in the car to Sharon to pick out a grave site, still sputtering with anger, Sam left a message on my voice mail. The tone was conciliatory and warm. He said, “I gave a lot of thought to what you said, and I’ve decided not to proceed with that story, and I wanted to tell you that and to thank you for talking to me about it.” I e-mailed him back with reciprocal cordiality, thanking him.

  A few months later, Sam’s chapter on Pup’s Yale years appeared as the cover story in Yale Alumni magazine. It was brilliant and fascinating, a perfect match of writer and subject. I can’t wait to read the book.

  CHAPTER 20

  A Bit Much to Spring on a Lad with a Morning Head

  One morning, in the midst of negotiating with the padre in Sharon, who, it turned out, had a strict policy against “winter burials,” the phone rang. It was a well-known writer, an old friend of my parents. He was so upset that he could barely speak. He was literally spluttering over something that Pup’s old adversary Gore Vidal had done. *

  “I’m just appalled. I don’t know what to say. I’ve known Gore since I was twenty. We all know he drinks and can be bitchy, but—this. It’s disgusting. I don’t know what could have gotten into him.”

  The item in question was from that morning’s New York Daily News:

  In an attack brutal even by Vidal standards, Gore writes on TruthDig.com that the National Review founder was “a hysterical queen” and “a world-class American liar…. Buckley was often drunk and out of control.” Vidal blames the “tired hacks” at Newsweek for letting Buckley’s “creepy,” “brain-dead” son, Christopher, talk them into a reverential cover story on his father. Vidal concludes, “RIP WFB—in hell.”

  As Bertie Wooster would say, a bit much to spring on a lad with a morning head. I puzzled over this and could only conclude that the outpouring of admiration, respect, and affection for WFB had driven old Gore over the nearest cliff in a sputtering rage. This explosion of spittle and foam was somewhat at odds with the opening sentence of his most recent memoir: “As I move—I hope gracefully—toward the door marked ‘Exit…’” But there were more pressing matters to attend to: negotiating with the priest in Sharon. And there was the matter of the organist.

 
; Pup was a serious amateur musician (piano, harpsichord) and devotee of Bach. He’d played harpsichord with the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra. Perhaps not his most successful hour onstage, but you had to hand it to him for chutzpah, and oh Lord, how he practiced. Three hours a day—for a year. He said to me, “I have never worked harder on anything, ever.” For someone of his accomplishments, this was no whistling “Dixie.”

  He’d specified certain musical pieces for his funeral mass. The Sharon church organist was a sweet, elderly lady with a name like Prudence. When I called Prudence to go over the music, she didn’t recognize any of the pieces. Not a one. I was reduced at one point to humming Bach’s Air on a G String. There was a long silence at the other end. I hereby apologize to Prudence for putting her through such aural torture, but I was flailing. Doubtless she also would have preferred water-boarding to my rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, another tune unfamiliar to her. I had visions of Pup—friend of Rosalyn Tureck and Alicia de Larrocha, among other luminaries of the keyboard; who had once tricked the great Vladimir Horowitz into playing an impromptu recital—going into the empyrean to the sound of Prudence’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” sounding as if it were being played on kazoos. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I called Rick.

  Rick Tripodi is an old friend of Pup’s, an accomplished and sophisticated church organist possessed of a lovely, gentle, slightly mischievous touch. Rick has played for popes.

  Rick, I said, we have a problem.

  Rick got it right away. No, no, no, he said, we can’t let Dad go off that way! He would intercede with Prudence and “Father.”

  He reported back a few hours later that Prudence had graciously, even eagerly, withdrawn. Rick would play and would bring along first-class vocalists for the “Ave Maria” and other pieces. “Father” couldn’t have cared less; he didn’t want anything to do with the music part.