Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley Read Free Book Online

my Mum,
     but on such evenings, I would rather have supped with al-Qaeda in a guano-strewn cave.
    At some point, Mum turned to—
on
, might be the more appropriate preposition—young Kate, informing her that she (Mum) had been an alternate juror in the murder
     trial of Kate’s father’s first cousin Michael Skakel. Skakel, nephew of Ethel Kennedy, Kate’s grandmother, had (as you are
     no doubt well aware) been the defendant in a sensational murder trial in Stamford several years before, for the death of fifteen-year-old
     Martha Moxley back in 1975. Having presented this astonishing (and utterly untrue) credential, Mum then proceeded to launch
     into a protracted lecture on the villainy of Kate’s near relative.
    Leave aside the issue of Mr. Skakel’s culpability, for which he is, at any rate, currently serving out a twenty-years-to-life
     sentence. Over the years, I had heard Mum utter whoppers that would make Pinocchio look button-nosed, but this one really
     took the prize, in several categories, the first being Manners. Why—on earth—would one inflict a jeremiad on an innocent nineteen-year-old
     girl, one’s own granddaughter’s best friend into the bargain? The mind—as Mum herself used to put it—boggles.
    This supper table Sturm und Drang I learned about over the phone, from breathless, reeling Cat and Kate once they had reached
     the sanctuary of the pool after dinner, along with a much-needed bottle of wine. All I could say to poor Kate was a stuttery
     WASP variation on
Oy vey
, along with a candid expostulation:
I am
sooooo
glad not to have been there.
By the time I put down the phone, my blood had reached Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which it begins to spurt out your
     ears.
    The good news was that I wasn’t speaking to Mum at the time, so it seemed pointless to haul out the ink-well, sharpen a quill,
     and let fly with another well-crafted verbal bitch slapping. Instead, I breathed into a paper bag for a few hours and then
     called Pup.
Well,
I said,
that sounded like a fun dinner. Sorry to miss it.
He feigned ignorance of the Skakel episode; perhaps he had excused himself early and gone upstairs to short-sheet Lady A_______’s
     bed. He was, anyway, past caring at this, my five hundredth Howl about Mum’s behavior. He tried to wave it away with a spuriously
     subjunctive, “But why would she say something like that if she
wasn’t
a juror at the trial?” (Pup would have made a superb defense attorney) and changed the subject back to what kinds of explosives
     work best for dislodging aristocratic British houseguest-limpets. At any rate, it was one letter from me Mum never had to
     not open. What, really, would have been the point of writing?
    I forgive you.
I was glad now to have had the chance to say that to her at the hospital, holding her hand, tears streaming down my face.
     As I type this, I can hear her saying,
Are you
quite
finished? Or shall I go and get my Stradivarius?
    I was five or six years old when I first caught Mum in some preposterous untruth, as she called it. It, too, featured British
     aristos.
    She’d grown up a debutante in a grand house in Vancouver, British Columbia, the kind of house that even has a name: “Shannon.”
     Grand, but Vancouver grand, which is to say, provincial. Mum’s mother had been the daughter of the Winnipeg chief of police;
     her father, my grandfather, Austin Taylor, was a self-made industrialist (lumber, gold, ranching). His idea of fine art was
     an oil painting of a quail being retrieved by an English setter. But gosh, it was a glorious place, Shannon: a Georgian mansion
     surrounded by ten acres of English gardens, walled off from the city around it. It turns up as a movie set (
Carnal Knowledge, Best in Show
). Anyway, Mum’s parents were socially prominent in old Vancouver.
    So one night, age six or so, sitting with the grownups at the dinner table, I heard Mum announce that “the king and queen
always
stayed with us when they