Losing Mum and Pup (5 page)

I remember Pup’s telling me, in 1981 as we trudged up the snowy lawn after scattering the ashes of his beloved friend and
column syndicator, Harry Elmlark, “
Ojalá que hubiera sido Católico.
” (If only he had been a Catholic.) Pup and I often spoke in Spanish—his first language—when we had intimacies to convey.
Harry was a Jew and about the furthest thing from a Catholic as one could be, though come to think of it, he had been happily
married to one all his life. I recall being stunned by the statement. I said, “What do you mean, Pup?” He replied matter-of-factly
that as Harry was not Catholic, he had no expectation of seeing him again in heaven. This truly hit me like a smack in the
face. Pup loved Harry wholeheartedly, but rules were—apparently— rules: The gates of heaven were shut against nonbelievers.
I was crushed, for I too had loved Harry. I was, at the time (age twenty-eight), very much a believer, and I tended to take
Pup’s theological pronouncements as having ex cathedra papal authority.

Sometime later, he spoke—with genuine relief in his voice—of his discovery of a loophole called “the doctrine of invincible
ignorance,” which, if I understand it—theological half-gainers can leave a lad’s head spinning at times—means that the normal
rules with respect to admission to heaven are suspended
if
you are incapable intellectually or culturally of accepting that the Catholic Church is the one true Church, the only means
of redemption. How Pup smiled with relief as he explained it across the lunch table that summer day!

Catholic theology is generally thought to be rigid— and indeed is on certain points—but sometimes Mother Church thinks like
a $700-an-hour lawyer. One doesn’t hear the word
Jesuitical
as much as one used to, but I found myself, during the Clinton years, musing on the fact that the president who gave us “It
depends on what the meaning of the word
is
is” was educated at the nation’s leading Jesuit university. I suppose it’s worth mentioning that the celebrated English-speaking
saint Thomas More was himself a very clever lawyer.

Pup’s faith was in a sense binary. He had imbibed his catechism at the knee of a deeply devout New Orleans Catholic lady who
instilled in him what Chesterton and Waugh called the nursery-story aspect of Christianity. His father was a stern, perhaps
even forbidding, but deep-down loving and affectionate Texan, the son of a hardscrabble-poor, sheep-farming sheriff. But exigent
and unbending though Pup’s faith was, he was himself the son of a lawyer and could find his own loopholes if it came to that.
Perhaps his own heart was the largest of the loopholes. In 1996, speaking at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue memorial service for
his great friend Dick Clurman, he ended his eulogy with a line I can quote today from memory: “It occurs to me that all my
life I have unconsciously been on the lookout for the perfect Christian, and when I found him, he turned out to be a non-observant
Jew.”

“Yes, M
R
. B
UCKLEY
, I have you and Dad down for eleven o’clock.” At the funeral home, that is.

You and Dad
. Pup and I had a giggle over that.

We stopped en route at Dunkin’ Donuts. As we pulled into the parking lot, Pup’s cell phone trilled. He fumbled it open, listened,
and said, “Get a time and I’ll call back.” Inside, waiting for our iced coffees, he looked up at the TV screen, which showed
President Bush. Pup said, “He just called.
Very
thoughtful.”

I agreed that it was, extremely so. Later, when we returned to the house from the funeral home, it turned out that it had
been President Bush 41, calling not for him, but for me. (I had worked for George Herbert Walker Bush when he was vice president.)
As a fan of Stephen Potter, author of the
Upmanship
books, I could hardly let this go to waste. I waited for the right moment at lunch and said, “Oh, by the way, that was my
President Bush, calling for me.” Okay, maybe you had to be there, but it was the day after my mother died and you take your
laughs where you can find them. Pup, who himself held a tenth-degree black belt in Upmanship, wasn’t quite sure whether to
be amused by my remark. He had been on the receiving end of many, many calls from presidents of the United States; not to
mention that
my
Bush had awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1991. (Touché, I can hear Pup saying.) One morning, during the Nixon administration,
the phone rang in Stamford at what Mum deemed an inappropriately early hour on a Sunday. “The president is calling for Mr.
Buckley,” the voice announced. Mum fired back in her most formidable voice—and trust me when I say formidable: a cross between
Noel Coward and a snapping turtle—“The president of
what
?” To which the White House operator calmly replied, “Our
country
, ma’am.”

I didn’t return the call from
my
Bush but instead sent an e-mail to his assistant Linda, saying that I was touched but not yet ready to talk, being unconfident
of my emotions. I knew he’d understand. I had called him at Camp David in December 1992, after his own mother had died. I
was writing a piece about her for
The New Yorker
. Between his mother’s death, his impending departure from the White House, and running the country, Mr. Bush had a lot on
his plate, but being the generous soul he is, he took the call. In the course of reminiscing about Dorothy Bush, the petite
but also formidable Bush family matriarch, the president alluded to his membership in something called “the Bawl Brigade.”
I inferred this consisted of Bushes who cry easily. George Herbert Walker Bush is, surely, the honorary colonel of this moist
brigade. I learned early on while writing speeches for him (between 1981 and 1983) that he may be a New England Yankee blue
blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother. The man mists up during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner”
on opening day at the ball park. I can’t imagine what tears flowed when, as a young navy wartime aviator, he watched comrades
killed or, as a young father, endured the death of his six-year-old daughter from leukemia.

“No me digas nada triste,”
Pup said as we sat around the conference table at Leo P. Gallagher & Son Funeral Home. (Don’t say anything sad to me.) He
was afraid of breaking down in front of the young funeral director—named, as it happened, Chris. Chris was gentle-mannered,
considerate, and punctilious. But then I suppose rudeness and brusqueness are not considered prize qualities in the funeral-directing
business. In the presence of death, one craves the soft touch, the lowered voice, even if it verges on the baroque. I remember
reading in the memoirs of one of my favorite actors, Richard E. Grant (
Withnail and I
), the gruesome moment when a hospital worker holding a box containing his newborn son’s corpse shoved it at him with all
the tenderness of a grouchy janitor handling a bag of garbage. (A vignette like that sticks in the mind.) I remember, too,
a friend telling me of going to fetch the body of a mutual friend of ours after he was killed in a car wreck in Mexico. He
arrived at the police station to be told the body was in a room out back. As indeed it was: lying in a pool of congealed blood
on a concrete floor swarming with flies. So one is grateful for the antiseptic plainness of Leo P. Gallagher and for soft-spoken
Chris.

We sat around the conference table, surrounded by wall displays of headstones, coffins, urns, and reliquary keepsakes—you
can put some of the loved one’s ashes in a pendant and wear it around your neck, making for one heck of a conversation starter
on a first date. As Chris gently slid a piece of paper toward us, I thought of Jessica Mitford’s book
The American Way of Death
, published in 1963, coincidentally the year of America’s most indelible death. The paper was the price list. Chris said,
somewhere between earnest and apologetic, “
Because
our industry is so heavily regulated, that’s why all these charges are explained in such detail.” So… “Basic professional
service fee: $2,795.” What does that buy you? Don’t ask. “Care and prep of remains: refrigeration: $600.” Hm. Okay… “Transferring
remains to funeral home: $695.” “Transfer to or from crematory: $395.” Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to hire a limo? “Brown
standard cremation container: $295.” Such detail indeed. Well, the industry is so “heavily regulated” in no small part because
of Ms. Mitford’s exposé. She was, of course, one of the famous five, highly variegated Mitford daughters: Nancy wrote
Love in a Cold Climate
; Diana married British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, gloriously satirized by P. G. Wodehouse as Sir Roderick Spode, “the
amateur dictator” and leader of Britain’s Fascist “Black Shorts”; Jessica married an American Communist lawyer with the Dickensian
name of Treuhaft and herself made a brilliant success of muckraking journalism, causing vampiric shrieks in U.S. funeral homes
coast to coast and, into the bargain, exposing as a money-minting fraud Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writers School. I took a course
from her in my senior year at Yale; we cordially loathed each other. But here I found myself her beneficiary, staring at Chris’s
weirdly detailed price list while scratching my head.

We had come, Pup and I, to arrange for a simple cremation, no frills, the plainest urn—by the end, I was about to suggest
that a large Chock full o’Nuts coffee tin would do—but the American Way of Death is, as is the American Way of Life, complicated.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if, fifteen minutes in, Chris had cleared his throat and said, “Now, would you prefer propane,
mesquite, or charcoal briquettes?” I began daydreaming about just bringing dear old Mum home in the back of the car, building
a nice roaring bonfire on the beach; but doubtless there’s something in the Stamford town code about that.

Buried deep in my Irish DNA is an atavistic habeas corpus craving for the body. The wake thing. Cremation nullifies that,
even if the act of scattering ashes can be ritualistically clean and satisfying. One wants—or I do, anyway—corporeal presence.
I remember reading an account by Ken Kesey, heart-wrenching but entirely dry-eyed, of how he dealt with the body of his son,
killed in an accident: They brought him home and hand-made a coffin for him and buried him themselves. This need is—manifestly—at
the root of the Catholic mass, in which bread and wine is “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ. But Pup was
adamant. Her ashes were to go into the sculpted bronze cross in the garden, where his would, in turn, also be placed when
his time came.

Chris left the room to go total it all up. You could hear a loud
ka-chinng.
When he returned, it all came, somehow, to $6,007.
^*
What is one supposed to say?
Jeez Louise, we’re looking for a little cremation, not a full-blown Viking funeral.
Where is Jessica Mitford when you need her?

P
up arranged with the pastor to hold a private service at St. Andrew’s, the Episcopalian—or, as my Canadian-born Mum always
insisted on calling it, Anglican—church in Stamford. We gathered there Wednesday morning: Pup, me, Danny, Mum’s devoted friend
Richard Heanue, and the household staff.

St. Andrew’s, it was obvious, had fallen into decay. The stained-glass rosette window above the entrance had been removed.
The rectory next door was all boarded up. Perhaps it was because there were only ten of us, in a church built for four hundred
or more, but there was a palpable sense of encroaching desolation. It made me sad on this gray and chilly April day to think
that a part of Mum’s Stamford was passing away along with her.

She was here with us, by the altar, in a neatly wrapped box. Her priest was quite elderly now, semi-retired, birdlike, frail
but irrepressibly chatty and ebullient, and proud of the homily that he had prepared. He delivered it in singsong tones, indistinguishable
from his conversation. I was impressed, yet again, by the superiority of the
Book of Common Prayer
to the pasteurized blancmange of the modern Catholic liturgy. Listening to a contemporary American Catholic priest say the
mass invariably reminds me of Robert Taylor as the Roman centurion in
Quo Vadis
, giving himself a salutary whack across the leather breastplate and saying in his Nebraskan accent,
Hail, Marcus Glaucus. By Jupiter, what are they feeding those gladiators at the Colosseum these days?
It just sounds better in the original Latin.