Losing Mum and Pup (19 page)

Time for someone else, too: his great friend Van Galbraith. They’d met on election day 1948, in New Haven. Best friends for
six decades. They’d sailed across three oceans together (I was along); had seen each other through tragedies. Van’s were particularly
awful: the loss of two daughters, one a little girl named Julie, age six.
^†
Pup had maneuvered Van’s appointment as Reagan’s U.S. ambassador to France. Van—Ohio born, handsome, blond, brawny, broken-nosed,
Yale football player, navy officer, CIA man, and Wall Street banker—was a gleeful cold warrior and a most unusual diplomat.
He gave François Mitterrand’s Socialist government more heartburn than a dozen escargots.
Did you see what Van did yesterday? It’s all
over
the news. Boy, oh boy, Shultz is going to recall his ass, he keeps this up.
Van’s tenure in Paris was
An American in Paris
meets
Day of the Jackal.
He had the rare gift of being able to make almost any unpleasant situation funny. He was certainly the only person you could
forgive for waking you in the middle of the ocean at two in the morning to go stand watch.
Christo, good news. You don’t have to be asleep anymore.
I loved him. Everyone did. I’ve not yet lost a best friend to death. I could only imagine what losing him meant to Pup.

H
E CAME HOME
. I started at his appearance. He could barely walk now. The breathing had worsened to the point where he would attach the
oxygen tube to his nostrils without any preliminary Socratic dialogue about whether oxygen actually made a difference. At
table, he’d hunch forward over his food and fall asleep. We’d get him upstairs, and then just as I was going to sleep, the
intercom would buzz. He’d like a chocolate milkshake. So that would be made and brought, and having finished that, he wanted
a beer. And after that, peanut brittle. I wondered, administering these surely lethal midnight snacks to a diabetic, whether
this would be sufficient to send me off to jail.
We have evidence that Christopher Buckley did knowingly provide chocolate milkshakes and beer to the late conservative icon
William F. Buckley….

“Pup, do you think you ought to be having all this quite so late at night? I mean, with the diabetes and all…”

“It’s delicious. Have some.”

[Patting my own protuberant belly in hopes that self-deprecation might inspire moderation on his part.] “Oh, no, no. Ha. Look
at me. Jabba the Hutt.”

“Who?”

“The grotesquely fat alien in…” Never mind.

“Now,” he would say brightly, “what I would like, more than anything in the world, is a milk rum punch.”

We find the defendant, Christopher Buckley, guilty.

In the 1950s, Mum and Pup would hold the
National Review
Christmas office party in Stamford. Pup would make milk rum punch. I used to help him. Never one to waste time, Pup kept
to a simple recipe: one quart milk, one quart rum, one quart ice cream. He might, just for the heck of it, empty an entire
(large) bottle of vanilla extract into it. The effects of this milky elixir upon the conservative movement were quite galvanizing.
Pup would play Handel’s
Messiah
at full blast on the phonograph. By the time the final joyous hallelujah trumpet blasts sounded, the entire conservative
movement was passed out, comatose. The wonder is any of them made it home alive. How different history might have been.

He had begun to do odd things, like getting up at two in the morning, dragging himself to the shower, getting dressed, ringing
poor Julian, and asking for breakfast to be brought. Julian, as demure and accommodating a soul as has ever lived, never thought
to say to His Lordship,
It
is
two in the morning, Mr. Buckley, but if you would like breakfast, I can certainly bring it.
These scenes had a certain comic aspect to them, for Pup, having had his brekkers and declaring his intention to go to the
garage study, would then look out into the darkness and see that it was now three a.m.

Except that it wasn’t really funny. One night, sleeping in my room down the hall, I heard a sound and went in. He was sitting
cross-legged in front of the TV cable box and DVD player. The server of his computer, one of those heavy floor units, was
knocked over, along with his chair. His wrist was swollen, the skin broken. It was subarctic. He’d lowered the AC to fifty-two
degrees. His hands were roaming over the DVD player and cable box buttons.

“Pup—what are doing?”

“Trying to make it
warmer
.”

I managed to haul him back into bed and get him covered.

“Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
That’s so much
better
.”

We took him to the emergency room the next day; the wrist was broken. He had no memory of the night before. None. So it was
time for the lecture.

Pup, I’m worried that the next time, it’s going to be your hip or your pelvis or something like that. And if
that
happens, well, I don’t need to spell it out, but that would be a real bore.

I was choosing my words carefully. Pup used the word
bore
where others might use
catastrophe
or
calamity
or even
tragedy of earthshaking dimensions
. If
shee-it
was his augmented word chord,
bore
was its diminished counterpart. Once, crossing an ocean in a sailboat, we ran out of water a thousand miles from landfall,
causing him to observe that the situation was “a bit of a bore.” If you, too, have ever brushed your teeth with orange Fanta,
you may agree.

Whenever he added the intensifier
real
or
bloody
(he’d learned English, his third language, at age six in school in London), the subject at hand might be either a mass outbreak
of the ebola virus or an imminent Soviet nuclear attack. So I thought that “real bore” might convey “months in some rehab
unit with Nurse Ratched and no midnight milkshakes and beer.”

He stared and said, “Yes, that
would
be a real bore.”

But then a night or two later, there was another crashing sound—a loud one—and I had to cantilever him back into bed. It was
clear that the era of day and night nurses was approaching. (I had dismissed them earlier on.) And that was problematic, for
once nurses were introduced, it would be impossible for Danny and me to help him end his suffering, if he indicated to us
that he wanted that. A year into keeping vigil with him, watching him suffer, Danny and I were growing desperate. We talked
about scenarios.

I told Dan about a movie I’d seen called
Igby Goes Down
, in which two young sons of a terminally ill woman (brilliantly played by Susan Sarandon) help her to die. They give her
ice cream laced with sleeping pills and then, once she passes out, put a plastic bag over her head. Wrenching as the scene
is, there’s a poignant, almost comical moment as through the plastic bag they see her eyes suddenly pop open, causing the
boys to jump. In discussing this, Danny and I felt like some Ebert and Roeper broadcast from hell. I found myself wondering
grimly,
Am I
really
going to take my cue from a movie written by Gore Vidal’s nephew?
In the end, thank God—an expression I still find myself using—it was moot.

A
t nine-thirty the morning of February 27, my son’s sixteenth birthday, my cell phone rang in Washington. Julian.

“Hello, Christopher. I’m sorry to disturb you, but there’s been an emergency.”

He’d found Pup on the floor of his garage study. The ambulance had been called. I said without even thinking, “Get the bracelet
on him” (the DNR bracelet).

I don’t know the technical definition of shock, but after hanging up with Julian, I found myself wandering around the house
aimlessly, thinking that I should go on with what I’d been doing—my income taxes.
Maybe if I do them, this won’t have happened
. My thinking was as jumbled as the verb tenses in that sentence. I waited five minutes and called the house. Julia, the maid,
answered. She was sobbing, a kind of wailing sound.
“Oh, Christobal, Christobal. Venga. Venga.”
(Christopher, come.) So, that was that. I knew. Pup was gone.

Julian came on. “The police are here and would like to have a word, if they might.”

An Officer James came on. He said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” I thanked him. He said they had to wait for the medical examiner
to arrive, “just to make sure there was no foul play involved.” I thought how archaic that sounded.
Foul play,
as if I’d wandered onto the set of an Agatha Christie play.

I said, “He’s been very ill.”

Officer James said, “Yes, I understand that. Where are you, may I ask?” Washington, I said. “Oh,” he said, as if I were no
longer a suspect. “In…
Washington
.”

“Yes,” I said.

He asked if I had a specific funeral home in mind. I said yes, nearly adding that we were regular customers at Leo P. Gallagher,
up on Summer Street. Julian came back on, and I told him to stay with Pup.

I walked about the house, conducting a kind of conversation with myself.
Okay, so that’s that. Should we… do the taxes? No, we’re not going to do the taxes now. Okay, so what
do
we do, then?
I leaned my forehead against a wall and took some deep breaths. I felt underwater.

My instincts said,
Get to the body
,
get in the car, and drive to Stamford
. (Five hours up I-95.) But it was Conor’s sixteenth birthday. I’d promised him a driving lesson that day after school. One
of Pup’s favorite mantras—though he did sometimes take liberties with it as an excuse not to do something he didn’t want to
do—was: “Life goes on.” Another was “Where there are no alternatives, there are no problems.” I realized I was crying now,
so I blotted my eyes with toilet paper, sucked in a few more deep breaths, and said,
Okay, come on, get a grip. Time to grow up.
At age fifty-five, this is a perfectly reasonable request to make of yourself, and indeed, it is a very major component of
orphanhood.
Phone calls. You have to make the phone calls
.

So I placed my calls, first to family. I said the same thing to them all: “I’m calling with some sad news.” It’s efficient;
you almost don’t need to say anything more. I called Henry Kissinger. He wept. I went down my list. I made my calls. I called
my friend John Tierney at
The New York Times
and asked him to alert the obit desk. I sent out an e-mail: “My father died this morning at 9:30, at his desk, in his study,
in Stamford.” I added:

Take him all in all, Horatio, he was a man.

I shall not look upon his like again.

I got it slightly wrong and later rebuked myself for not having looked up the correct wording.

The phone began to ring. My doctor, married to a White House television correspondent, called: “They just announced it from
the White House.” A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “Mr. Buckley, I have the president for you.” I assumed it was
President Bush 41, but no, it was his son. It was a gracious gesture, especially given some of the things I had written about
his administration.

He was quite a guy
.

Yes, sir, he was.

I started to choke up. I thought of his father’s “Bawl Brigade.” I really didn’t want to lose it over the phone with the president
of the United States—
grow up!
—so I jujitsued the conversation into a different tone and told the president that he’d died at his desk.

You might say he died with his boots on, sir. A Texan like yourself would appreciate that
. He laughed at that and said, yes, that was a good way to go.

God bless you.

God bless you, too, sir. Thank you for calling.

Chris Matthews called.

He was
such
a great guy.
Chris was very fond of my father and had continued to have him on his show
Hardball,
perhaps past the point where Pup should have declined. In one episode I’d watched, taped in Pup’s study, he kept leaning
back in his Aeron chair, at points entirely disappearing from camera view, with the result that his appearance became a kind
of
Where’s Waldo?
It was sort of funny. Chris had said more than once that Pup was “one of the reasons I went
into
politics in the first place.”