Losing Mum and Pup (9 page)

B
y the end of May, I was in ragged shape. Mum’s death had come after long months of her final illness, which takes a toll on
those attending the sick-bed. She died as I was two weeks into a busy book launch tour that itself had come on the heels of
a busy lecture tour. I had my day job as editor of
ForbesLife
magazine in New York and had begun work on a new novel. Meanwhile Pup, his health increasingly fragile, required more of
my attention. At such times, the only child begins to yearn for an older sister to whom he can say,
I’m outta here.
You
deal with it.

Whatever. I was tired, terribly out of shape physically and emotionally, so I went off by myself to Zermatt, Switzerland,
for a week of hiking, sensible eating, book work, and general resetting of the old circuit breakers. I took along a promising
new book by Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn and son of Auberon, called
Fathers and Sons.
In the mornings I worked on my novel in bed while looking out the window at the Matterhorn, quite the most amazing vista
in the world; afternoons I hauled my adipose carcass up and down various mountainsides, then swam in the hotel pool, took
a steam, had a cocktail in my room as I did e-mail, ate an early scrumptious Swiss dinner, got into bed with Mr. Waugh’s superb
book about being the grandson and son of famous writers, and was asleep by nine to the sound of the river rushing past outside.
Just what the doctor ordered.

Upon arriving at the little hotel the first day, jetlagged and grimy, I checked my e-mail and found this:
Dear Christo, Jane died. Say a prayer. xxp
^*

Jane was my aunt, Pup’s slightly older sister. She’d been ill for many years with emphysema. Buckleys appear to have a genetic
predisposition to this condition: Pup, Jane, and my uncle Reid all got it. Jane in her prime smoked maybe three packs a day.
For nearly ten years, she had waged a valiant and uncomplaining battle against the gradual suffocation; by the time she died,
she was down to something like 4 percent of lung capacity. My uncle Reid, in his nicotinic heyday, had consumed four packs
of Kools—Kools! As for Pup, he had sworn off cigarettes at age twenty-seven after one lulu of an Easter Sunday hangover, but
he smoked cigars, which—unlike President Clinton—he inhaled, with the dreadful consequence that he now struggled for breath.
I have had asthma all my life, which every now and then lands me in the hospital, so I know something of the cold, sweaty,
3 a.m. panic of reaching for a lungful of air that isn’t there.

Pup had been in denial about his emphysema for years. Seeing him huff and puff after just a short walk or climbing the stairs,
I would say,
Pup, do you think you might have…?
He would wave off the e-word.
No, no. Just a cold.
But it was increasingly obvious, and doubly cruel on top of the sleep apnea he suffered from. Mum, who herself had smoked
for sixty-five years—sixty-five!—never pestered him on the subject, I suspect out of superstitition, not wanting to tempt
her own fate. Finally Pup hauled himself off to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where he got the official news; yet even then
he refused to use the word
emphysema,
at least for a time. He’d say,
There’s apparently some scar tissue down there from the cigars,
and change the subject.

There was a gloomy irony to his emphysema. In 1967, when I was fifteen and at boarding school, he had sent me a letter. He’d
just visited with a cousin of his in Texas who had emphysema. Pup reported its effects in lurid detail:
By the time he has finished going to the bathroom, he no longer has the strength to wipe himself.
As I read, horrified, I recall thinking,
Gee, Pup, thanks for sharing all this.
The letter went on and on; then he got to the point: It had come to his attention that I was smoking cigarettes.
Damn—who told him?
My sixteenth birthday was coming up, and his signature was required to get my driver’s license.
Uhoh….
Said signature would not be forthcoming unless I agreed to give them up. In return, he would give me “anything you ask for.”
He was always so generous that way. If you met him halfway, he’d meet you all the way. Unless, of course, it was a debate.
(Old story.)

I went into a prolonged, furious, impotent, adolescent sulk. Pup’s diktaks tended to have that effect on me. Perhaps it was
a consequence of our essentially epistolary relationship. But being a devious little shit, I came up with a devilishly clever
way of punishing him.
Okay
, I said,
I’ll give up smoking. But in return, I want to attend summer school here at Portsmouth so I can take Greek
. Take that! I would deprive him of my company over the summer! Brilliant!

Once the initial thrill of my clever stratagem had worn off, I began to consider the essentially Pyrrhic aspect of my ploy.
The idea of staying at boarding school over the summer to study—what was I thinking?—ancient Greek was about as appealing
as, I don’t know, being handcuffed to a radiator in Beirut by Hezbollah; but my twisted little brain was intent on revenge,
and I really had him over a barrel.
He’d promised!

There followed a fevered volley of transatlantic letters (he was in winter quarters near Gstaad, Switzerland, writing another
book). I clung to my position like a limpet. In the end, facing the actual prospect of summer at Portsmouth declining
ho potomo, hou potamou
, I relented. A cautious peace was established. Nothing more was said on the subject of smoking.

Then, years later, poking through his desk drawers in his study in Stamford—don’t ask; I’ve always been a sneaky little bastard—I
found a copy of a letter he had written to Father Leo, my headmaster at Portsmouth, inquiring if my inexplicable insistence
on attending summer school to learn Greek was due to—as he put it—“an amorous dalliance” (translation: homosexual) with another
boy. I was dumbstruck reading this. God only knows what poor old Father Leo must have thought. Had he instigated discreet
inquiries among the other monks?
Is young Buckley, um, doing anything… out of the normal these days?
I draw from this pathetic tale two lessons: Leave revenge to the professionals, and don’t go poking about in other people’s
correspondence—you might not like what you find.

I continued my idiotic, willful juvenile delinquency and smoked on and off until September 14, 1988, when, after three days
at the bedside of a friend dying of lung cancer (“He has twelve tumors in his lungs the size of golf balls,” the doctor told
us), I simply stopped. It was as if a toggle switch had forever clicked to the off position. Now Pup was writing to tell me
that his beloved sister Jane had finally been killed by the cigarettes she’d smoked. As I stared blearily at the e-mail, the
awful thought went through my mind that something like this lay in wait for Pup, too.

I loved Jane—everyone did. But I didn’t have it in me—this crowded, deathful spring—to turn around and get back on a plane
and fly three thousand miles to another funeral. I just didn’t. So I e-mailed my love and condolences to Pup and his brothers
and sisters—there were ten of them, originally; now six remained—and to my cousins, Jane’s six wonderful children. And then
unpacked.

A day or so later, there was another e-mail from Pup—they were getting increasingly indecipherable—referring casually (I felt)
to the fact that he would miss Jane’s funeral because he had to go to Washington, D.C., to accept an award. I thought,
Huh?
It wasn’t the Nobel Peace Prize, but some lifetime anticommunism award. (I don’t mean any disrespect.) I mused on this as
I dragged myself up steep alpine slopes, avoiding sheep dip. I kept thinking,
Pup… skipping your sister’s funeral? To pick up another award?

By now, Pup had more awards than have been given out in the entire history of the Olympics; more honorary degrees than Erasmus;
more medallions than the entire New York City taxi fleet; more… well, you get the point. He’d received about every honor there
is, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and—finally—an honorary degree from Mother Yale. But not to attend Jane’s
funeral… for this? I tried to put it out of my mind. I’d come to the lush Valais and its loamy, ovine pastures to rejuvenate,
not recriminate; and I chided myself that, having myself declined the bother of getting on a plane to fly back for the funeral,
I was hardly in a position to tsk-tsk.
Still.
A voice within me kept noodging,
Dude—it’s your sister’s funeral
! I e-mailed him to the effect,
Pup, are you sure about this?
He e-mailed back that he was attending the dinner in Sharon the night before the funeral with all the Buckleys and it was
fine that he wouldn’t be at the actual funeral. It was a “non-issue.” This was one of Pup’s favorite practical formulations:
It’s a non-issue.

I shrugged, there being nothing much further to say, and wheezed myself up the next mountainside. On these climbs, I was an
object of curiosity to the marmots, who would pop up out of holes and make high-pitched noises at me and then disappear. The
sun shone, the sky was cerulean, the air like Perrier. It was glorious.

Pup’s e-mails over the following days became increasingly incoherent, eventually to the point of near complete inscrutability.
I e-mailed Danny, who replied that he had returned from Washington “in kind of bad shape” but was “doing better now.” I’d
be home in three days. Pup and I had dinner planned for the night I got back.

J
UST AS
I
WAS PULLING OFF
the Stamford exit on I-95, my cell phone trilled. I was jet-lagged and a bit sticky from the flight. I didn’t recognize the
number, a 203 area code.

Chris?

Yes?

It’s Gavin McLeod, your dad’s doctor.

Gavin had never called. No, not a good sign.

Your dad is at the hospital here. He came here by ambulance. We’re doing tests. We’re not sure what it is, but he really needs
to stay here. But he keeps insisting to leave. He says he’s having dinner with you tonight.

So it was back to Stamford Hospital. The scene, on my arrival on the fourth floor, was—looking back on it—mildly comical.
Gavin had called me again, this time his normally equable voice pitched to a higher octave of urgency:
He’s insisting on trying to leave, and… you need to get here as quickly as you can
. I reported that I was driving through downtown Stamford as fast as the law would permit. But I did feel Gavin’s pain, for
when William F. Buckley Jr. “was insisting” on something, attention must be paid.

I arrived on Four South. There, at the end of the hallway, he was: wearing a green-and-white-striped polo shirt and his blue
Greek yachting cap, holding a cane and—weirdly—the Alexander Waugh book
Fathers and Sons
that I’d sent him for Father’s Day. He was in a wheelchair and being gently restrained from rotating himself down the hall
by 1) Gavin, 2) two nurses, 3) the unit head, 4) the deputy administrator of Stamford Hospital, and 5) a large black orderly
named Maurice.

Gavin, seeing me scurry toward this mobile levee, looked vastly relieved. He leaned over and said to Pup in the singsong child
tone that suggests the listener isn’t working off a full mental deck,
Bill—here’s Christopher. It’s Christopher. Christopher is here. Isn’t that wonderful?