Losing Mum and Pup (20 page)

The phone rang. It’s strange, who calls. You don’t hear from people you expect to hear from; and you hear from people you’d
never expect to hear from. It was Larry Gelbart calling. We hadn’t spoken in maybe a dozen years. He’d reviewed
Thank You for Smoking
for
The New York Times
. He’s slightly more famous for having written, among other classics,
Tootsie
and
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
. I remembered that his father was a barber and cut his hair.

I don’t suppose
your
dad is still….

Oh yeah. He’s still going strong. Well, listen, just wanted to call and give you a hug.

Doug Martin of the
Times
called. He was gentle but professional. He needed the precise cause of death. I said, “Old age, Doug.” He said that wasn’t
quite up to
New York Times
standards of precision. I said we were still waiting for the medical examiner to arrive. Doug’s obituary, prepared in advance,
could be studied in obituary-writing classes at journalism school. It was up on the
Times
Web site by 11:04 a.m.

My e-mail in-box filled. My desk phone became a switchboard. NPR, AP, the
Chicago Tribune
,
Los Angeles Times, Newsweek.
So I was press secretary now. There was no avoiding it. It was news and, it appeared, big news. I thought with a smile,
Boy, how he’d have loved this, the mother of all WFB Google news alerts.

It was a long day. Conor and I had our driving lesson, and that night we went ahead with the surprise birthday party Lucy
had arranged with his friends.
Life goes on.
Sixteen years ago, I’d called Pup in Switzerland to tell him that he had a grandson, and he’d cried. Today I got a call,
and I cried.
Grandfather dies, father dies… you’re next
.

After his friends left, Conor and I watched a movie I’d happened to order from Netflix called
Death at a Funeral
: a black English comedy about a dysfunctional family holding a funeral at home for the dad, who, it transpires, had been
conducting a homosexual affair with a dwarf. It’s very funny. I can’t quite explain why we watched such a movie on this night
or why we found it so funny. Life goes on. I said,
Well, Boog
(my nickname for him),
here’s hoping Pup’s funeral won’t be quite as exciting.

I
drove to Stamford the next morning. I didn’t want to sit on the train blubbering and blowing my nose in the Quiet Car, disturbing
the peace of my fellow Amtrak passengers. There’s something, too, to be said for a long, solitary drive—it concentrates the
mind. By Baltimore, mine was concentrated to the point of calling Pitts to say that I’d decided to bury Pup in Sharon. She
was delighted, though this wasn’t at all what Pup had specified. But having made the decision, I felt—for the first time in
my life—entirely independent of paternal authority or rebuke.

Years ago, Pup commissioned a large bronze crucifix from the Connecticut sculptor Jimmy Knowles. It’s a beautiful piece of
modern art. He placed it in the middle of the lawn in Stamford, to a distinct grumbling from Mum, who viewed her garden as
off-limits to my father’s artistic (and in this case overtly religious) intrusions. Mum’s ashes were now inside the cross,
in a heavy brass canister that looked as if it had been designed as a container of plutonium. Pup’s wish was that he, too,
be cremated and join her in the cross. The idea of Mum, who wasn’t all that religious, encased for all eternity inside Pup’s
crucifix had afforded the two of us a few grim chuckles over the years. “Just sprinkle me in the garden or send me out with
the trash. I most certainly do not wish to be inside that
object
.” But she went first, so that was that.

Pup expected me to keep the Stamford house, but beautiful as it was and fond though (most of ) my memories were, it was expensive,
and after death taxes, I seriously doubted I would be able to maintain it. But not wanting to hurt his feelings, I went along
with the fiction that I would keep it. This, however, left me with a conundrum: what to do with the cross. I tippytoed into
this minefield one evening over our martinis.

“Say, Pup, I know you want your ashes in the cross…”

“I
absolutely
want them in the cross,” he said in a preemptive tone of voice.

“Right. Right. I was only thinking, what if, you know, the house, if I, well, you never
know
… if I ever
had
to sell it…”

“Your point being?”

“Well, I mean, a new owner… surely…”

“Why wouldn’t a new owner want the cross?”

“Well,” I said, taking a hefty swig of my frosty see-through, “they might be, I don’t know, Jewish, or… they might not
want
a big, a giant crucifix in their garden.”

“Why not?”

I stared. He added, “It’s a work of
art
.”

“It is. It is absolutely that.” [Clearing of throat.] “Still…”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.” I knew this formulation well.
I wouldn’t worry about it
was WFB-speak for “The conversation is over.” I was left with the impression I had committed lèse-majesté by suggesting that
a future owner—Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Amish, Zoroastrian—might be anything less than honored to have William F. Buckley’s
last remains in his garden, encased in an enormous bronze symbol of the crucified Christ. Certainly it would present the real
estate broker with an interesting covenant clause.
Now, um, Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum, you
do
understand that Mr. and Mrs. Buckley’s ashes are to remain in the crucifix, in the garden….

No, I decided, driving up I-95, Sharon was the place for him. Sharon, where he’d grown up, where he’d been—by his own admission—happiest,
between the ages of five and seven. For all his high sophistication and cosmopolitanism, there was in Pup an eternal inner
boy. A teenage fan once wrote to him at
NR
, asking him what was his secret of happiness. He wrote back, “Don’t grow up.” It may have been this quality that propelled
him to sail gleefully into northeast gales in his sailboat or leap into the cockpit of his Ercoupe barely knowing which knob
was up or down. Yes, Sharon. It felt right. And he wasn’t around to overrule me.

But, Christo, I want to be in the cross. We
discussed
it.

Sorry, old shoe, I’m taking you home, to Sharon. With the cross.

The last time I’d been with him there was the previous October. It was a fund-raiser for the local library, organized around
the theme of “A Bevy of Buckleys,” held on the grounds of Great Elm, once my grandfather and grandmother’s house. Pup, Uncle
Jimmy,
^*
Aunt Pitts, Aunt Carol, and me, all gave readings from the aggregate Buckley oeuvre. We’re a scribbly bunch: I count about
ninety or so books among us—Pup, of course, having contributed the lion’s portion.

The local newspaper had run a story promoting the event, and a line in it had caught my eye, affording me vast amusement:
“The Buckleys are a well-known American family, William F. Buckley Jr. being arguably the most famous.” I handed the clipping
to Pup and counted silently as he read it, in anticipation of the reaction I knew would come. He looked up suddenly with a
majestic, ironic frown (I would say a
semi
amused look) and said, “‘
Ar-gu-ably’?
” We had a good laugh over that. My last memory of Pup at Great Elm was that Indian summer late afternoon, the sun slanting
low over the green lawn, a large crowd hushed underneath the tent, as he read from a reminiscence about growing up there:

Outdoors it was very, very still, and from our bedroom we could hear the crickets and see the fireflies. I opined to my sister
Trish, age twelve, that when the wind dies and silence ensues, fireflies acquire a voice, and it is then that they chirp out
their joys for the benefit of the nightly company, visible and invisible.

I turned into the driveway at Wallack’s Point, the gravel crunching under the tires. The flag was at half-mast. Julian and
Danny would have seen to that. I drove slowly past the garage study, where he’d died. His blue Greek yachtsman’s hat was hanging
on a hook, along with his cane and sweater. I remembered the phone call the previous April from Tina Brown after Mum died.
She talked about when her mother died and she came across her reading glasses. “That really did it. I
completely
lost it.” Now I thought,
Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of losing it in the days ahead.

Once they’re both gone, your parents’ house instantly turns into a museum. Every trace of them you see, you imagine inside
a glass display case, along with a plaque or caption.
This red pen was used by William F. Buckley Jr. These sunglasses belonged to William F. Buckley Jr.
Danny had put Pup’s wallet and watch on the desk in my room.
Wallet carried by William F. Buckley Jr. on the day he died. The watch is one of ten that he bought for companions aboard
a sailboat he sailed in 1985 from Hawaii to New Guinea.
I picked up the wallet. I thought of all the times I’d seen him pull it from his back trousers pocket. He was a great reacher
for the check at restaurants, Pup. He was always so generous that way.

That night, going to sleep, I looked out the window and the thought invariably came,
So, Pup, was it true, after all? Is there a heaven? Are you in it?
For all my doubts, I hoped he was. If he was, then at least I stood
some
chance of being admitted on a technicality, with the host of
Firing Line
up there arguing my case. I doubt St. Peter was any match for him. There were quite a number of editorial cartoons in the
days ahead showing him arriving at the Pearly Gates. In one, St. Peter is whispering aside to an angel, “I’m going to need
a bigger dictionary.”

____

T
HERE WAS A LOT TO DO
. I knew this already from Mum’s death.
How many death certificates do we need? Fifty? Really?
It seemed odd we should need so many, given that his death was on the front page of every newspaper, on every TV news broadcast,
and on a zillion Web sites. You’d have to be Osama bin Laden deep inside a rat hole in Tora Bora province not to know that
conservative icon
William F. Buckley Jr. had departed this vale of tears (a favorite phrase of his). Pup’s family financial adviser had reported
to me with amusement that an insurance company had sent the following letter:
Dear Mrs. Buckley, Thank you for sending your death certificate. The raised seal on it is not sufficiently raised. Please
send us another death certificate with raised seal and we can then be able to begin processing your claim.
I’m surprised they didn’t add a P.S.:
Have a nice day!
What can one say to such bureaucratic idiocy, other than “Whatever”? I’m thinking of having it engraved on my own headstone.

Danny and I drove to Leo P. Gallagher & Son Funeral Home. We both knew the way. Danny’s dad had been taken there after he
died. He had been wounded at Iwo Jima. Now my Greatest Generation father was there. The grown-ups were all leaving.

My old friend Chris the funeral director was punctilious and correct and soft-voiced. He allowed himself a mild smile when
I greeted him with, “Wee’rre
back
.”

I’d brought along a gray suit, white shirt, and a tie. The tie appeared conservative, but if you looked closely, you could
see
I LOVE MY WIFE
repeated along the stripes and underneath, in backward-facing letters,
BUT OH THAT BOAT
! I’d puzzled over it, standing in his closet that morning. You don’t want to send dear old dad off across the river Styx
wearing a joke tie, and it’s not a revocable decision, unless you’re prepared, wearing a haunted expression on your face,
to explain to the state of Connecticut exhumation officer that you need to dig him up because of “the tie.” But in the end
I thought,
Why not?
A conversation piece for Charon, a yachtsman himself.
Nice tie, Mr. Buckley
.