I said I hadn’t heard anything about that.
“Apparently he went ballistic over having to share the altar with Monsignor Clark.”
I hardly knew what to make of this. I did know that there were to be a number of priests at the altar concelebrating (as it is called) the mass and had indeed very much hoped that Monsignor Clark would be among them. Eugene Clark was a friend of Pup’s from way, way back, a jolly, rubicund-faced Irish New Yorker with a keen intellect and mischievous wit. For years, he’d served as a sort of chaplain to the right wing. He’d been Cardinal Cooke’s consigliere but had then somehow gotten on the wrong side of Cardinal O’Connor and been exiled to the Siberia of Westchester County for a few years. He’d made a comeback and been appointed rector of St. Patrick’s, the equivalent, I suppose, of being sergeant at arms of the U.S. Congress. A big-deal job. He was at the altar in Washington in 1984 when Lucy and I married. Everyone loved Monsignor Clark. And now you probably see where this is going….
A few years ago, returning from an overseas trip, I called Lucy from the airport. She said, “Oh, gosh, isn’t it awful about Monsignor Clark?” I braced. This was about the time of the endless (and repugnant) altar boy molestation scandals. I groaned, “Oh, not Monsignor Clark!” Lucy quickly added, “No, no—it was his secretary. A woman.” I practically burst out laughing. “Oh, well, for heaven’s sake, what’s all the fuss, then?” But it was a big fuss: a front-page tabloid-level fuss and the end of Monsignor Clark’s career as rector of St. Patrick’s.
Pup, who had always been legendarily loyal to his friends, had—oddly—written an entire column about it, rehashing the whole sorry mess and in the process wagging a finger at his old friend. I had sent word that I would be pleased, even delighted, to see Monsignor Clark among the other priests at the altar. But now, as I set off for St. Patrick’s, I was left to wonder if I had created some fracas in the cathedral that had sent His Eminence stomping off in a crimson huff—a real confidence builder as you set off to the church to eulogize Dad.
It was—surprise—raining as we walked to the cathedral. As we turned the corner of Madison and headed west down 49th Street, I thought back to another day, in October 1965, when I walked down this same sidewalk, hand in hand with my father.
The occasion was the visit of Pope Paul VI, a papal mass. But there was something else going on, I soon realized, as the police steered Pup and me down the cordoned-off sidewalk and we began walking, almost alone, down the long sidewalk toward the cathedral’s entrance. The mayoral campaign was in full swing. Pup waved to the large crowds on the other side of the cordon. The crowd responded, and it was abundantly clear that they were by no means unanimous in their support of the candidate for the Conservative Party. Boos, jeers, catcalls. It got pretty raucous. Pup clutched my hand tightly. The shouts got louder and louder, coarser and coarser. I was thirteen. It seemed a very long way from Madison Avenue to Fifth Avenue. Pup gripped my hand tighter and grinned back, as candidates must while being pelted with verbal rotten vegetables. As we reached the end of the block, I heard a voice shouting: “Buckley, you asshole! I hate your fucking guts!” I’d been keeping my eyes on the ground, but this voice sounded… familiar. I turned, and our eyes met: It was a seventh-grade classmate of mine from St. David’s. I don’t think he’d seen me as he spat out his epithets. Now he did, and he went ashen-faced; but no more than I. The rest of the event passed more pleasantly, and I got my first up-close look at a pope, in a pew sitting next to actor-turned-senator George Murphy.
____
LUCY AND THE KIDS AND I made our way to our seats. It was a full house, twenty-two hundred. There was George McGovern, having braved the snowdrifts: frail, cancer-ridden, smiling. Former mayor Ed Koch—Hiya, howyadoing?—jimmied his way into our family pew. Senator Joe Lieberman was there. Congressman Chris Shays was the only Republican I saw there. Just before the service began, in came Kitty Galbraith, John Kenneth Galbraith’s ninety-five-year-old widow, supported by all three of her sons and various granddaughters; a more valiant sight, I’ve never seen. Christopher Hitchens, having dashed off a plane from Grand Rapids, trailing his roller bag, slipped into the last empty seat. Christopher, bosom friend of thirty years, our most eloquent atheist, was observed belting out John Bunyan’s “He Who Would Valiant Be.”
I’ve dumped all over Mother Church for her tepid liturgies and “kumbaya” and the rest, but she can rise to an occasion, and she sure did on this day. Rick Tripodi and Donald Dumler were at the organ, accompanying the St. Patrick’s Cathedral Choir. They gave us Bach’s Air on a G String and Adagio in A Minor; the “Kyrie” and “Sanctus” and “Agnus Dei” from Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Missa; St. Bernard of Cluny’s “Jerusalem the Golden”; “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” During communion, Palestrina’s “Ego Sum Panis Vivus” was followed by a gorgeous, triumphant Albinoni Adagio in G Minor, whose deep bass notes sounded as though they were issuing from the Titanic’s smokestacks. The pews were practically vibrating. Then came Holst’s “I Vow to Thee, My Country”; and finally, for the postlude, the one piece that I had asked for: the joyful, high pipe notes of the third movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, familiar to many Americans as the theme music to Firing Line.
Father Rutler officiated. His Eminence, as it turned out, had not—for heaven’s sake—huffed off on account of having to share the altar with a naughty monsignor. He’d been called to Rome—called to Rome, that pungent phrase—in connection with the imminent papal visit. Monsignor Clark was not at the altar, anyway; but he was there somewhere, for I was able to give him a hug at the reception afterward. I counted twenty priests around the altar. There ought to be a collective noun for that—a “bless” of priests? It was—to use the word literally—spectacular.
Henry Kissinger, his voice cracking at various points, eulogized his old friend.
“He wrote,” he said, “as Mozart composed, by inspiration; he never needed a second draft. A man of such stunning versatility might have proved daunting to those around him. Yet we mourn him for his civility even to adversaries, his conviviality, his commitment, and, above all, the way he infused our lives with a very special presence….
“‘I am a Burkeian,’ he would say. ‘I believe neither in permanent victories nor in permanent defeats.’ But he did believe deeply in permanent values. ‘We must do what we can,’ he wrote to me, ‘to bring hammer blows against the bell jar that protects the dreamers from reality. The ideal scenario is that pounding from without we can effect resonances, which will one day crack through to the latent impulses of those who dream within, bringing to life a circuit that will spare the republic.’”
He touched on Pup’s faith: “Over a decade ago, Bill and I discussed the relationship of knowledge to faith. I surmised it required a special act of divine grace to make the leap from the intellectual to the spiritual. In a note, Bill demurred. No special epiphany was involved, he argued. There could be a spiritual and intellectual drift until, one day, the eyes opened and happiness followed ever after. Bill noted that he had seen that culmination in friends. He did not claim it for himself….
“Those of us who have grown old with Bill know better. We will forever remember how we were sustained by Bill’s special serenity, the culmination of a long and very private quest. The younger generation, especially of his collaborators whom he so cherished, was inspired by the inward peace Bill radiated, which he was too humble and, in a deep sense, too devout to assert except by example. In the solitude of parting, all of us give thanks to a benign Providence that enabled us to walk part of our way with this noble, gentle, and valiant man who was truly touched by the grace of God.”
I took the podium and said, “Pope Benedict will be saying mass here in two weeks. I was told that the music at this mass for my father would in effect be the dress rehearsal for the pope’s. I think that would have pleased him, though doubtless he’d have preferred it to be the other way around….
“On the day he retired from Firing Line after
a thirty-three-year-long run, Nightline did a show to mark the occasion. At the end, Ted Koppel said, ‘Bill, we have one minute left. Would you care to sum up your thirty-three years in television?’ To which my father replied, ‘No.’ Taking that cue, I won’t attempt to sum him up in my few minutes up here….
“José Martí famously said that a man must do three things in life: write a book, plant a tree, have a son. I don’t know that my father ever planted a tree. Surely whole forests—enough to make Al Gore weep—were put to the ax on his account. But he did plant a great many seeds, and many of them, grown to fruition, are here today. Quite a harvest, that.
“It’s not easy coming up with an epitaph for such a man. I was tempted by something Mark Twain once said: ‘Homer’s dead, Shakespeare’s dead, and I myself am not feeling at all well.’
“Years ago, he gave an interview to Playboy magazine. Asked why he did this, he couldn’t resist saying, ‘In order to communicate with my sixteen-year-old son.’ At the end of the interview, he was asked what he would like for an epitaph and he replied, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.’ Only Pup could manage to work the Book of Job into a Hugh Hefner publication.
“I finally settled on one, and I’ll say the words over his grave at sunset, in Sharon, when we lay him to rest. They’re from a poem he knew well, each line of which, indeed, seemed to have been written just for him:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die;
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ’grave for me:
‘Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.’ ”
CHAPTER 23
Postlude
Ibegan this book on the note of becoming an orphan, so perhaps it makes sense to return to that theme in this penultimate chapter. I type this now a year and a half after Mum died and over half a year since Pup left. Some dust has settled, some continues to swirl.
I think about them every day, and not—I venture—because I have been at work on this book. Writing it (I suspect) was intended to enable catharsis; now, as I reach the end, it seems to me that I may have written it out of a more basic need: as an excuse to spend more time with them before letting them go—if, indeed, one ever really lets them go. So instead of a working-it-out exercise, perhaps this is just a black-and-white album of memories, in which the unfond memories can be leeched of bitterness and settle quietly and stingless like scattered autumn leaves on the soft forest floor. It feels to me like that, at any rate.
Orphanhood proceeds, meanwhile, tanned (as Leon hoped) and otherwise. People are wonderfully solicitous. How are you doing? they say, putting a sympathetic emphasis on the last word, to show that they actually mean it. Suddenly—writing this—I remember Pup telling me years and years ago about a book by Wilfred Sheed with the title People Will Always Be Kind. I’ve never read it; it’s just that somehow everything one way or the other seems to remind me of Pup or Mum.
It comes in waves, my fellow orphans will probably inform you. One moment you’re doing fine, living your life, even perhaps feeling some primal sense of liberation—I can stay out as late as I want and I don’t have to make my bed!—and then in the next, boom, there it is. It has many ways of presenting (as doctors say of a disease). Sometimes it comes in the form of a black hole inside you, sucking the rest of you into it; other times it’s a sense of disconnection, as if you had been holding your mother’s hand in a crowd and suddenly she let go, and now here you are, not alone, exactly, but it feels alone. Yesterday on television, I watched young children pay tribute to their fathers and mothers who died in the two towers on 9/11 when the children were four, five, or six years old. I can’t imagine their sense of orphaning. Prattling on about mine, at age fifty-five, seems pathetic by contrast. As Mum would say, “Oh, do pull yourself together and stop carrying on in this fashion.” Yes, Mum. I’m almost done.
Advice? Let’s see. Having been through the experience, one really ought to return with a pointer or two. There are seventy-seven million of us boomers; many of us have already lost the ’rents, and the rest of us will be going through the experience later if not sooner.
The only concrete bit of advice—don’t laugh—is: Have Mom and Dad prenegotiate the funeral expenses. I’ve told my story of the funeral home price list to a number of people, and one of them said, nodding, “Mom negotiated her cremation ahead of time. You’d be surprised how much the price comes down.” This sounds like very good advice, so I pass it along. And if that doesn’t work, when Mom or Dad begins to fail, get them to Belfast, Maine. (See footnote, page 46.)
As to the “you’re next” aspect that I mentioned in the preface: There’s not a whole lot to be done on this score, other than the usual boring things—don’t smoke, don’t eat anything that tastes really good, and spend most of the rest of your life on a StairMaster. In a few days, I’ll come up on the twentieth anniversary of the day I gave up smoking, and that’s a good feeling. I rather like breathing. Still, I wonder if our obsession with longevity is entirely… healthy.
“Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death,” wrote William Hazlitt, “is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not; this gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?”
Well, any English major can quote all sorts of people and talk a good game. Ask me how I feel when Dr. Hughes tells me, “I’d like to do another PSA test, if you don’t mind.”
My dear friend Rust Hills, who died this summer (in Belfast, Maine), was a great fan of Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne spent a lot of time thinking about death. (This seems to be a French trait.) Rust died a darn good death at age eighty-three: One August day, in the company of his wife and daughter and grandson, in a house by the sea, he had a Scotch, a bowl of clam chowder, and a slice of blueberry pie and—died. Not a bad way to go. Put me down for the same.
I couldn’t find anything in Montaigne about Scotch, clam chowder, or blueberry pie, but I found this: “The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.” Probably too downbeat-sounding by American smiley-face standards to end up on a refrigerator magnet, but pas mal. I guess one way or the other, it boils down to being able to look the Reaper right in the eye with a smile and say, “Oh, puh-leeze.” I bet that was how Mum did it, adding, “And what, pray, is that absurd costume supposed to indicate?”
Yesterday, I was driving behind a belchy city bus on the way back from the grocery store and suddenly found myself thinking (not for the first time) about whether Pup is in heaven. He spent so much of his life on his knees in church, so much of his life doing the right thing by so many people, a million acts of generosity. I’m—I shouldn’t use the word—dying of curiosity: How did it turn out, Pup? Were you right after all? Is there a heaven? Is Mum there with you? (Grumbling, almost certainly, about the “inedible food.”) And if there is a heaven and you are in it, are you thinking, Poor Christo—he’s not going to make it. And is Mum saying, Bill, you have got to speak to that absurd creature at the Gates and tell him he’s got to admit Christopher. It’s too ridiculous for words.
Even in my dreams, they’re looking after me. So perhaps one is never really an orphan after all.
CHAPTER 24
The Hunter Home from the Hill
Three days after the memorial service at St. Patrick’s, and a week shy of the first anniversary of Mum’s death, Danny and I loaded the heavy bronze cross into the back of the van and drove up to Sharon. For the first time since February 27—it seemed—it wasn’t raining. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful Connecticut spring day.
Aunt Pitts and Uncle Jimmy and the funeral director and two grave diggers were waiting for us along with the hearse, at the little cemetery by the brook. Brian the funeral director had called me on my cell as Danny
and I were on the road, to report with professional alarm in his voice that the cover on Pup’s pecan coffin had “split” somewhat during his stay aboveground. It didn’t sound like a Faulknerian-level coffin disaster, so I said not to worry. Pup wouldn’t have. As to burying him in corpore in Sharon, I think he’d have forgiven my final disobedience. Doubtless Mum will haunt me to the end of my days for bringing her back to Sharon, but she’ll make a great ghost and I can’t wait to be haunted by her.
With the help of Brian’s teenage son and the grave diggers, Danny and I lifted Pup and Mum from the hearse and carried them across the graves of his sisters Mary Ann (buried here in 1928, having lived for one day), Maureen (1964), Aloise (1967), and Jane (2007). I could hear Jane saying with an unmistakable hint of triumph, Why, Pat, what a pleasant surprise. And Mum replying heavily, Yes, isn’t it?
Pup’s English goddaughter, Camilla, who had poured gin into all the flowerpots at the wake, sent a beautiful spray of white flowers all the way from Wales, with a note inscribed in her own hand: Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. So between my e-mail on the morning he died and Camilla’s note, Pup went off well bracketed with quotes from Hamlet. One could do worse.
We set the coffin on the straps and lowered them into the spring-warm earth. Birds sang in the budding branches. The late afternoon sun slanted through the still-bare limbs. We each took a handful of earth and sprinkled it into the grave, said our various silent farewells, and left them there, together, in each other’s arms.
There’s a Greek myth that Pup loved to retell, of Philemon and Baucis. They were a devoted old couple who provided hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury, traveling incognito. The gods then revealed themselves in all their glory, smote the crap out of everyone who hadn’t shown them hospitality, and rewarded the old couple by turning their hut into a gorgeous temple. They asked them if there was anything else they wanted. Philemon and Baucis replied that, yes, they’d like to be together for all eternity. So the gods changed them into two trees whose limbs intertwined. It’s a lovely story.
Losing Mum and Pup Page 16