Losing Mum and Pup (12 page)

Uh-oh,
I thought
. You’re leaving
all
your money to
National Review
?

“All right,” I said cautiously, “I’m listening.”

“I think we ought to invite to lunch—
tomorrow
—some very important players in the conservative community.”

Relieved as I was that my patrimony was not going to
NR
, I was somewhat at a loss. “Well,” I said, “gosh. I think that’s a really… wonderful idea.”

I lay down wearily across the foot of his bed, Daisy lapping at my face, Sebbie demanding to have his tummy scratched, their
having decided I had come in peace to their master’s nocturnal levee.

“But I mean,” Pup emphasized, “
only
serious
players.
”

“Absolutely…” I yawned. “So, who’d you have in mind?”

“Well,” he said, “we
have
to have McFadden.”

I nodded. Jim McFadden,
National Review
’s long-time associate publisher, had died in 1998.

“Right,” I said. “We can’t not have Jim. I’ll, uh, see if he’s available.”

Pop dictated to me his list of invitees. Some of them were alive. After five minutes of dictation, perhaps punchy, I suggested—inasmuch
as he had been working on a memoir of his friendship with Barry Goldwater—that we invite Goldwater. Pup appeared to weigh
this, then stared at me querulously.

“Christo,” he said, sounding faintly annoyed, “Barry Goldwater is
dead
.”

“Right,” I said, yawning, “good point.”

H
E WASN’T READY FOR VISITORS
, so for company it was just me and Danny. Danny lived in my old apartment above the garage. For twenty years, Mum and Pup
had rented it out to tenants, to help pay the taxes. One tenant, in the 1950s, was a man named Charles Blair.

One fine summer day in the early 1970s, we were having lunch on the terrace, Pup, Mum, me, one or two guests. A car pulled
up the driveway. “I wonder who that could be?” Mum said. A tall, lean, handsome man approached. My parents peered, then exclaimed
almost in unison, “Charley! For heaven’s sake!”

It was Charley Blair, their old tenant. He was in the neighborhood and thought to stop by. What makes this otherwise quite
dull story of interest is that Charley, while living over our garage, had been a top pilot for Pan American. On the side,
he was working for the CIA, training Francis Gary Powers how to fly the U-2 spy plane. (Powers was shot down by Soviet missiles,
resulting in one of the more embarrassing episodes of the cold war.) Charley, meanwhile, continuing to cut a dashing figure,
had gone on to marry the actress Maureen O’Hara (my personal platonic ideal of womanhood). After that, he started an air-boat
service in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Not quite end of story. Meanwhile:

Charley sat and reminisced with us over iced teas for, I suppose, forty-five minutes or so, at which point Pup said, “How’s
Maureen?”

“Oh, fine,” Charley said. “She’s in the car.”

“In—the car?” my mother said, appalled. “Do you mean to say, all this time you left her in the
car
?” It was a warm summer day.

“Yeah.” Charley shrugged. “She’ll be fine, really.”

Mum and Pup protested vehemently that he must ask her to come in. Charley shrugged reluctantly, as if asking one of the world’s
most famous actresses—his wife, incidentally—to join us at the table would be an intolerable imposition. My parents would
have none of it, and at length Charley was prevailed upon to fetch his suffocating wife. He returned with the radiant, if
slightly wilted, Maureen O’Hara. Eudosia, our ancient beloved, toothless Cuban cook, word having reached her in the kitchen
of the arrival on
la terraza
of
la grande estrella Señora O’Hara
, rushed in her slippers to the window that looked out onto the terrace and remained there, watching intently for the duration
of the visit.

I gathered, from things I read here and there in later years, that the two of them were inseparable, to the point where Ms.
O’Hara got a pilot’s license so that she could accompany Charley as co-pilot on his flights. One day, picking up my
New York Times
, I saw on the front page that Charley, unaccompanied by his wife, had been killed in the crash of one of his boat planes.

W
e settled into a routine of sorts, which somewhat depended on how many sleeping pills Pup had self-administered during the
night.

I did not, as a young
bacchante
in the sixties and seventies, absent myself from the garden of herbal and pharmacological delights—far from it—so I found
myself in an ironic position, lecturing a parent about drugs. The child/parent relationship inevitably reverses, but to this
degree I had not anticipated.

Pup,
I would say, eyeing the half-empty blister pack of Stilnox by his bedside,
how many Stilnoxes did we take last night?

I don’t know. One and a half? Two?

Two? [Examing the pack, which looked as if it had been half eaten by wolverines in the night.] Two. Okay.

I may have taken another.

Another. So—three, say?

[Becoming annoyed.] There might have been one more.

How many Rits
^*
did we take yesterday?

[Fully annoyed.] What does Rit have to do with not sleeping?

I still can’t say, a year later, whether this stunner of a rhetorical statement was simply denial or a
Firing Line–
quality countergambit. I’d made the (really pretty obvious) point to Pup, perhaps, oh, fifty times over recent years, that
Ritalin, which he took as a stimulant, was not a means toward a good night’s sleep—especially if you took your final one of
the day at dinnertime and washed it down with coffee. (While living in Mexico in the early 1950s, my parents acquired a taste
for coffee so strong, it could revive a three-thousand-year-dead Egyptian mummy and make it run the Boston Marathon; and win.)
Oddly, Pup found it difficult to get to sleep after these postprandial attachings of jumper cables to his cortex, and sought
to counteract them with “one or two” Stilnoxes. These would knock him out for an hour or so, at which point he would awaken,
and, semistuporous, gnaw open the blister pack and swallow God only knows how many more. It did not make for the kind of night’s
rest you see in the TV ads, with butterflies fluttering above the pillows; more like
Night of the Living Dead.

It occurs to me that in this increasing dependence, Pup had come to resemble another great Catholic author: Evelyn Waugh.
I don’t mean to adduce a tropism to sleeping pills among aging Catholic apologists, but—there it is. Waugh’s addiction to
paraldehyde, a popular “sleeping draught” of the 1950s, combined with his alcoholism, drove him to the breakdown he limned
fictionally in his late-career novel
The Ordeal of Gil-bert Pinfold
, a story of one very hairy ride through the subconscious. In any event, Pup’s reliance on uppers and downers was not hastening
his recovery. But short of tying him down and confiscating his meds, there wasn’t a whole heck of a lot I could do about it.
His youngest sister, my aunt Carol, was adamant that he be “detoxed,” to which I responded, “Be my guest.”

Pup’s self-medicating was, I venture, a chemical extension of the control he asserted over every other aspect of his life.
The term
control freak
is pejorative. I’d put it this way: Few great men—and I use the term precisely, for Pup was a great man—do
not
seek to assert total control over their domains. Winston Churchill, to pick one, wasn’t the type to shrug, “Oh, well, whatever.
Go with the flow.” I revere Mark Twain, but I’d say that for all his devotion to his family, he was moderately impossible
as a father and husband.
^*
Great men (and yes of course by that I include women) tend to be the stars of their own movies.

Some years ago, I came across a quote that could serve as the solipsist’s definitive credo: “Let me have my own way exactly
in everything, and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.” (Thomas Carlyle)
^†
Pup never plunged into bad moods or became grouchy if things didn’t go his way, perhaps for the reason that they always went
his way. He was invariably the sunniest and most pleasant creature in the room. The moods of those in attendance upon him—Mum’s,
mainly—did not always match his in the sunny and pleasant departments. Point is, great men tend to want things to go their
way.

A remote control, say, in the hands of an autocrat of the TV room becomes a
Star Trek
phaser gun set on stun. Evenings, if Pup was up to it, Danny and I would bring him down in the electric rail chair and then,
slowly—he had to stop every three feet and gasp for air—to the music room. The three of us would eat one of Julian’s delicious
meals on trays and watch a movie. I say “movie,” but “movies” would be more accurate, since five minutes in, he would, without
bothering to say, “Let’s watch something else,” simply change the channel. One day, when I called from away, Danny reported
with a somewhat strained chuckle, “We watched parts of five movies last night.”

This was not a new habit of his. He and Mum might be watching with half a dozen guests
Murder on the Orient Express
when, just as a key plot point was being introduced, suddenly the screen would fill with a documentary on Che Guevara or
the Tuareg nomads of the sub-Sahara. I wonder: Does the FBI keep crime statistics on murder committed by family members of
serial channel changers?

All this seems very trivial now, but at the time, Pup’s death grip on the remote took on a sort of proxy significance, emblematic
as it was of the control he exerted over the solar system he inhabited. Once or twice during the convalescence, I became so
splutteringly frustrated, after the fourth or fifth channel change, that I silently stormed out of the room, leaving poor
Danny to cope.
He’s sick
, I would tell myself, fuming off to my room. But halfway up the stairs, my inner noodge would whisper,
Well, yeah, but it’s not quite
that
simple, is it?

For my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary in 1990, I did a video in the form of a mock episode of
60 Minutes.
I taped interviews with thirty or so of their friends and even persuaded a sporting Mike Wallace to play along with an ambush
interview of himself in which he flees the interviewer (me), protesting, “I find these kinds of interviews
distasteful
!”

One of the interviews was of Pup’s great friend Dick Clurman (“the perfect Christian”) and his wife, Shirley. Dick and Shirley
had accompanied my parents on perhaps a dozen Christmas cruises aboard chartered sailboats in the Caribbean. In the interview,
Dick, standing in his Manhattan apartment dressed in yellow foul-weather gear, describes how it was one Christmas Eve on one
of the cruises.

Everything was perfect. Mum had brought and wrapped presents for everyone, placing them around a Christmas tree she had contrived.
(God, she was brilliant at Christmases, Mum.) She’d even brought and strung up little twinkly lights. Drinks were served.
“Silent Night” was playing on the CD player. The boat was anchored in the most charming, lovely, beautiful, protected cove
in the entire Caribbean. (You see where this is going?) Everything was perfect.

At which point Pup suddenly decided that it would be even more perfect if they up-anchored and moved across the way to a different
cove. Mum said,
Bill, just
leave
it.
But leaving it was not Bill’s way. No, no. Ho, ho, ho. Dick’s recitation of what followed is quite hilarious, but I imagine
it was very far from hilarious at the time.

Pup ordered the anchor up, and as they proceeded across the bay, a sudden squall hit, drenching everything, washing presents
overboard, shorting out the Christmas lights, knocking over the tree; whereupon, in the dark and confusion, the yacht went
aground. So instead of spending a lovely, calm Christmas Eve in the protected cove, listening to “White Christmas” with the
twinkly lights, they spent it in the dark, at a forty-five-degree angle atop a sandbar, in a rainstorm. All because Pup had
insisted that it would be “
much
nicer over on the other side.” Great men are not content to leave well enough alone.