Losing Mum and Pup (22 page)

“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.

O
ne 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.

The next day, Rick drove up to Sharon to inspect the facilities. He called.

That organ,
he said.
My God! It must have been tuned last during the Truman administration. I’ve heard better-sounding hurdy-gurdies. But don’t
you worry about it. I’ll think of something. Like maybe dynamite.

Pup had served in the army in World War II, and though he hadn’t stormed ashore at Omaha Beach, I liked the idea of giving
him his military due.
^*
“You need his DS-214,” said Brian Kenney, the Sharon funeral director.

My advice to you is: If your dad—or mom—served in the military and you would like to have the honors at the funeral, find
out
now
where that DS-214 (certificate of service) is. I spent
many
hours in the days ahead trying to find his. And I had a friend in the Pentagon, pretty high up, looking. And the
Pentagon
couldn’t find it. (Well, that’s not quite accurate: They located seventy-four William F. Buckleys who’d been discharged from
the army in 1946; but none of them was
my
William F. Buckley.) Finally, after an archaeological dig so intensive it might have unearthed a second Troy, the elusive
document was found—at the Stamford Town Hall, where he had deposited it in 1952.
^*
So now we had that.

At which point Brian called to say that he’d just seen the weather report for Saturday: torrential, freezing rain. “I was
just down to the cemetery,” he said, pulling off several layers of rubber outerwear. “It’s underwater.”

There was a certain symmetry to it: just the sort of weather Pup liked to go sailing in! But at least it made moot my negotiations
with “Father” over digging a winter grave. There wasn’t much point in bringing in the “special” (translation: really expensive)
equipment from Poughkeepsie if the grave was going to be a cistern by the time we tried to lower him in. But the church was
booked, and Buckleys were flying in from everywhere. Brian volunteered in his springy, upbeat way, “I have just the place
for him.” An aboveground vault in another cemetery. “It’s actually ideal,” Brian said. I was unfamiliar with the logistics
of body storage, but it seemed like an occasion to say, “Whatever.”

The night before the funeral, I brought Pup home to Stamford for one last night in his home. He arrived by hearse, the pecan
coffin covered with the American flag. We all choked up at that.

Once he had him situated in the dining room, Chris said, “Would you care to put in those items?” I nodded, and he opened the
casket, and there was my Pup, in his gray suit with the white shirt and the i love my wife tie. He looked all right. But at
the sight of him, we all lost it. I stroked his hair, careful not to touch his skin, which I knew, from contact with other
bodies, can be a jolt, the hardness and the cold.

I’d transferred Mum’s ashes from the brass plutonium canister to a red Chinese lacquered box I’d bought her years before for
a birthday. I laid it on Pup’s lap, so now they were together again. I put his rosary in his hands. Danny put in a jar of
peanut butter. We looked at each other and simultaneously had the same thought. He went off and returned with the TV remote
clicker and we put that in, too, and then we said one last good-bye, and I kissed him on the hair and we closed the lid and
that was that. I pinned to the flag his Medal of Freedom. It looked heroic, and I was very proud of him.

Camilla, his English goddaughter, daughter of his great friend Sir Alistair Horne, was on hand, and being British, she had
taken charge of the flowers, rearranging and freshening them and adding gin to the water. “
Always
add gin,” she said. “They
adore
it.” Camilla and Conor went off into the garden to smoke cigarettes. It was the first time I had seen my sixteen-year-old
son with a cigarette, but there was something weirdly sweet about it, the two of them. I can’t explain.

I put on a Whiffenpoofs CD and through the night played “Down by the Salley Gardens,” a haunting melody set to the Yeats poem;
and “Time After Time.” A hundred people came and went. There
is
something to be said for having the body. You could, I suppose, hold a wake around an urnful of ashes, but it’s not quite
the same.

Everyone drank and ate and talked; much of it was merry. The rain sheeted against the windows. There were three priests, all
friends of Pup’s. At seven, when it was time, I said to Father Kevin, “Padre, care to do the mojo now?” He put on vestments.
Two other priests joined him in saying prayers over the body. We all said an “Our Father.” Father Kevin produced an aspergillum,
the perforated bulb-shaped piece of metal that’s dipped in the holy water to sprinkle a crowd or altar or coffin. I thought,
watching as he wet the flag:
church and state, literally fused.

I spent the night on the couch beside him, watching the candles guttering, listening to the rain and to the Whiffenpoofs,
waking, stiff-necked, at four to find myself with a blanket over me. Camilla had come down in the night and covered me up.

Brian arrived next morning at eight and we loaded Pup into the hearse for his last drive up to Sharon. The hearse driver was
Brian’s father-in-law. We had a bit of a discussion over how to get to Sharon. Having made the drive perhaps three hundred
times, I had my views; but he had his. He seemed quite certain, even adamant, so I said my mantra, “Whatever,” and off we
went, the hearse and eight cars following. Fifteen minutes into the drive, he turned onto a very unfamiliar road and then
turned back toward Stamford. I cell-phoned, “Halt,” to Brian, bringing our motorcade to a stop in a subdivision. Brian’s father-in-law
stoutly maintained that this was the way. “Whatever” has its limitations as a mantra.

At length, we got back on a correct road, at which point another aspect of Brian’s father-in-law’s driving became evident:
his tendency to drive at eighty miles an hour in the rain while leading a procession of eight cars. This made for a lively
caravan. We wove in and out of traffic on Route 22, blaring our horn occasionally at some innocent interloper. Lucy and Conor,
beside me, held on for dear life. We made it in record time—a fitting homage, I suppose, to Pup’s driving, which was never
less than bracing.