Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley Read Free Book Online Page A

were in Vancouver.” By “king and queen,” she meant the parents of the current queen of England.
     My little antennae went
twing!
I’d never heard my grandparents refer to a royal visit, which is a pretty big deal. I looked at Mum and realized—
twang!—
that she was telling an untruth. A
big
untruth. And I remember thinking in that instant how thrilling and grown-up it must be to say something so
completely
untrue, as opposed to the little amateur fibs I was already practiced at—horrid little apprentice sinner that I was—like
     the ones about how you’d already said your prayers or washed under the fingernails. Yes, I was
impressed
. This was my introduction to a lifetime of mendacity. I too must learn to say these gorgeous untruths. Imaginary kings and
     queens would be
my
houseguests when I was older!
    When Mum was in full prevarication, Pup would assume an expression somewhere between a Jack Benny stare and the stoic grimace
     of a thirteenth-century saint being burned alive at the stake. He knew very well that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth did
     not routinely decamp at Shannon. The funny thing was that he rarely challenged her when she was in the midst of one of her
     glorious confections. For that matter, no one did. They wouldn’t have dared. Mum had a regal way about her that did not brook
     contradiction. The only time she ever threatened to spank me was when I told her, age seven, in front of others, following
     one of her more absurd claims, “Oh, come off it!” Her fluent mendacity, combined with adamantine confidence, made her truly
     indomitable. As awful as it often was, thinking back on it now, I’m filled with a sort of perverse pride in her. She was really,
     really good at it. She would have made a fantastic spy. She would have made a fantastic
anything
. She was beautiful, theatrical, bright as a diamond, the wittiest woman I have ever known (whatever talent I possess as a
     “humorist”—dreadful word— I owe to her). She could have done anything; instead, she devoted herself heart, soul, and body
     to being Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. (A full-time job.)
    I learned something about her that I had
not
known before, from the
New York Times
obituary— namely, that I owe my very existence to her inability with… math. The reason she had gone off to Vassar, an American
     college three thousand miles away, and where she roomed freshman year with my father’s sister Patricia—was that Canadian colleges
     required a level of math proficiency that eluded her. I don’t recall her ever mentioning this fact.
    She never finished Vassar. Pup and I heard her give various reasons for this over the years: She had to return to Vancouver
     because her mother had broken her back while riding; because her brother Firpo had broken his back riding; because
she
had broken her back riding. One night, after imbibing about two acres’ worth of vineyard grapes, she informed Pup and me—us!—that
     she had, in fact, left Vassar “to go back to Vancouver and save my parents’ marriage.” This revelation was as rococo as it
     was flabbergasting.
    What made it rococo was that she thought to tell it to an audience consisting of 1) her husband, and 2) her son—that is, the
     two people on earth who knew her best. One might suppose this would obviate the necessity for recreational prevarication.
     Oh well. Afterward, sitting in the basement sauna, Pup mused aloud, “That makes reason number eight I’ve heard for her dropping
     out of Vassar.”
    Whatever the real reason was—probably nothing much more than ennui with academics—her cap-and-gownless departure from Poughkeepsie
     left her, for the rest of her life, with a deep-seated insecurity that manifested itself aggressively, especially after the
     supernumerary glass of wine. On those occasions, more than one of my friends—by whom she was generally adored and whose adoration
     she returned—might be submitted to cross-examinations on the order