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

of:
So, you’re the world’s expert on feldspar, are you? Well, doubtless, then, you’re aware that 86.5 percent—
how I marveled at the precision of her fabrications—
of the world’s supply of feldspar comes from Baffin Island
.
So what do you have to say to
that,
Mr. Expert?
The friend in question being a Yale mineralogy PhD was, nonetheless, left to splutter incoherently and beat a quick twitchy
     retreat in the direction of his borscht.
    Pup remarked to me after she died that he had not once, in fifty-seven years, seen her read a nonfiction book. This
did
surprise me. Greatly. She was, after all, a woman who as William F. Buckley’s wife spent a great lot of time in the company
     of intellectual bigfeet—John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Kissinger, Tom Wolfe, James Burnham, Malcolm Muggeridge, Norman Mailer,
     Russell Kirk, Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Norman Podhoretz… you name ’em, she fed ’em. Every one of these people was
     enchanted by her razor-sharp wit and natural intelligence. Mailer used to call her “Slugger.” She may not have spent a lot
     of time with her nose in biography and history, but she always read the paper thoroughly and kept up with the news on the
     telly. I remember one Sunday morning being stunned on picking up the
Sunday Times
magazine and seeing that she’d filled the entire crossword puzzle—a feat normally well beyond my own modest abilities. And
     yet, she might proclaim at the table with an exasperated air, “I simply don’t understand why the president just doesn’t pass
     the bloody bill
himself
,” leaving it to Pup, slightly embarrassed and sotto voce, to point out to her that passing bills was the province of the
     legislative and not the executive branch. In my mind, remembering this moment, I hear her coming back with, “Well, if you
     ask me, it’s all
too
ridiculous for words,” which is why everyone adored her.

CHAPTER 5
I Don’t Want Champagne

    B y the Friday after she died, I found myself in the kitchen, blurting to poor Julian, “Jules, if I don’t get out of here soon,
     there’s going to be another funeral in this house.”
    Julian Booth (to whom this book is in part dedicated) is the kind, gentle, omnicompetent Briton who had been with my parents
     almost thirty years as cook and house manager. The nickname “Jules” was bestowed on him by David Niven. Jules nodded through
     his thick glasses and said quietly, “Yes, Christopher.” He is so even-keeled and sweet-tempered that he’d have responded exactly
     as he did if I’d said to him, “Jules, I am going to detonate a fifty-megaton nuclear device and destroy all life on planet
     Earth and usher in nuclear winter for a thousand years.”
Yes, Christopher.
    A week after Mum’s death, the novelty—if that’s the right word—of it had worn off. Pup and I had run out of books to catalog,
     papers to sort. Now there was the matter of Mum’s memorial service, and over this we clashed, filling the dining room with
     the sound of dueling antlers.
    But Pup, the New York apartment can only hold, what, eighty, ninety people? How can we possibly hold the reception there?
     There are going to be
hundreds
of people at this thing. Mum was—
    They don’t all have to come in at once.
    [
Sighing.
]
But we can’t have people standing in
line
out on 73rd Street, for heaven’s sake.
    Let me think about it.
    This was WFB code for: I’ve made up my mind. Discussion over.
    Well, let’s at least do it right, wherever we hold it. Serve champagne and—
    I don’t want champagne.
    But Mum—
    I don’t like champagne.
    [
Sighing
.]
Okay, but let’s at least have
nice
wine.
    I
have
nice wine.
    Arguable Pup had a fetish about not paying more than eight or nine bucks a bottle, a practice that, though economically sound,
     did not always result in wine of lip-smacking quality. *
    Two cases should do.
    [
Spluttering.
]
Two
cases?
For… five hundred people?
    People don’t drink much, anyway.
    By the end