Losing Mum and Pup (24 page)

I
wrote my eulogy in Mum and Pup’s bedroom early one morning as the sun was coming up over Long Island Sound. At that hour the
mind is hard and focused, and I thought this would be the right atmosphere in which to write my words. I’ll admit to performance
anxiety: I would be following the Reverend George Rutler and Henry Kissinger, more or less the two most eloquent speakers
on earth; and St. Patrick’s Cathedral is Yankee Stadium. So as the sun rose, my thoughts were,
Let’s try not to screw this up.

Lucy and the kids and I spent the night before the service at the Yale Club, a few blocks from St. Pat’s. We breakfasted in
the dining room. At the next table was an old friend of Pup’s who’d worked on his 1965 mayoral campaign.
^*
He arched his eyebrows and reported that the “scuttlebutt” at a dinner the night before was that “Egan’s pulled out.”

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.

____

L
UCY 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.’ ”