Losing Mum and Pup (17 page)

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
.

Pup 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
M
AYO 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
P
UP 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 enough 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!”

In almost every photo taken during the painting sessions, you can see David Niven, wearing his smock, painting seriously.
He was good. Marc Chagall dropped by one night. Pup—he told this story with appropriate mortification—showed him one of his
paintings. Chagall remarked,
“Pauvre peinture!”
(Poor paint!) Ken and Kitty Galbraith, Greek shipping magnates, various Romanovs, Charlie Chaplin, Nabokov, James Clavell,
German
Grafs
, a Danish queen, King Constantine of Greece, Spanish ministers, English swells, Oxford dons, Swiss art dealers, the whole
jumbo jet set—they all came to Mum and Pup’s château to be wined and fed and laugh. (In addition, that is, to the painting.)
It was there, perhaps more than in New York and Stamford, that I saw most close up the binary energy that the two of them
put out. People just wanted to be around them. They were the fun Americans: the cool intellectual who wrote spy novels on
the side and his beautiful, witty, outrageous wife. They had—how to put it?—class.

One night, as they were getting ready for dinner, a chimney fire broke out and swiftly consumed the entire château. The Rougemont
fire department arrived late, and drunk, and unable to cope. Mum lost everything, including her recently deceased mother’s
jewels. Pup organized a sort of bucket brigade to rescue his book-in-progress and office library. David and Hjordis Niven,
driving to dinner there from the town where they lived, noticed an orange glow as they approached and wondered,
What could that be?
Another guest, the painter Raymond de Botton, driving from the other direction, also noticed a glow above Rougemont. I still
have the painting that he did of it. It’s called
Château Brûlée
. No one was hurt, but Mum went into a bad depression. Jerry Zipkin, staying in Paris, went out and bought her an entire new
wardrobe and arrived on the train from Montreux bearing a zillion shopping bags.

The immolation was the second trauma of their Swiss days. In 1965, Mum broke her leg skiing—broke it badly. The bone splintered
into a dozen pieces. The plate the surgeons installed was a foot long and contained dozens of screws. The X-ray of it, which
I have just tossed into a Dumpster, looks like something they study in med school. She was on crutches for two years. The
surgeon who did the operation became a friend. He was an avid mountaineer and many years later froze to death alone on a mountain
after falling.

The last time I visited them in Switzerland, in 2000, Pup called me a few days before I was to arrive to say that he wanted
to visit Auschwitz. He was writing a novel about the Nuremberg trials and needed to see it for himself. So we went, and my
last memory of seeing Mum and Pup amid the beau monde of Gstaad is a confused one, mingled with images of the worst place
on earth.

W
ORD CAME BACK
from Fort Lauderdale that Julian and the first installment of WFB tonnage had arrived, but with the sad news that Sebbie,
Pup’s devoted eight-year-old Cavalier and bedside defender, had suffered a heart attack on the way down and died.