Excerpt
Like Mother, Like Mother
1
DeathLila Pereira died on the front page of The Washington Globe. She also died on the front page of The New York Times, astonishing and gratifying The Globe’s publisher, Doug Marshall. Lila had been The Globe’s executive editor, the female Jim Bramble, who’d out-Brambled Bramble, her predecessor during Watergate. In 2018, Lila and her Pirates, a gritty band of cutthroat reporters, exposed President Webb’s pay-to-play scheme and brought down him and his two hapless sons. Webbgate gave Watergate a run for its money. The Pirates collected two Pulitzers and a George Polk. Lila picked up honorary degrees from Stanford, UVA, and Georgetown.
Lila had retired on January 31, 2023. It was company policy for top editors to step down the year they turned sixty-five. Doug offered her a seat on the editorial board, but she turned it down. “I’ve never seen the point of the opinion pages,” she said. “All Talmud, no Torah. I want the facts, the red meat. I’ll die of boredom and aggravation.” Two months later, she was dead from Stage IV lung cancer. Everyone asked if she’d been a smoker. She had smoked in college, at parties. “I was a drinker. I should have gotten cirrhosis. Give it a rest. Bad luck.”
Lila was buried in Congressional Cemetery. She didn’t want a funeral, only a memorial service. “Hold off a bit,” she told Doug, who wanted to make sure she got the send-off she deserved. “You need to give people time to think about what they want to say. I wasn’t the GOAT. Remind them.”
Lila’s husband, Joe Maier, unstooped at sixty-nine, spoke at the memorial service, along with two of their three daughters, the virtual twins, Stella, thirty-six, and Ava, thirty-five. Her youngest daughter, Grace, twenty-nine, sat mute, in the reserved section, alongside Ruth, her best friend since their freshman year at the University of Chicago. Grace had visited Lila regularly during her illness, but their relationship, never easy, had become increasingly fraught for Grace ever since she published her novel, The Lost Mother, in the fall of 2022. The day Lila died, Grace sat with her for two hours, racked by sadness and sorrow. What was I thinking, she thought. Why did I write it.
“You can talk to her,” the nurse had said, looking in briefly to see how her patient was doing. “She can still hear.”
Grace nodded. “Thank you.” She laid her head gingerly on Lila’s chest and wept.
The memorial service was mobbed. Everyone in D.C. who wasn’t a Webbite, and even some who were, wanted a ticket. There was a guest list and a standing room list and a wait list. Rupert Murdoch was invited, over Lila’s dead body, but he wasn’t seated down front. Joe drew the line.
Doug had thought the funeral should be in the National Cathedral. Lila reminded him she was Jewish. “Isn’t there a cross over the pulpit?” She squinted at Doug. “Who would say Kaddish?” She decided on the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater.
Doug was disappointed. “Why not the Concert Hall or the Opera House?”
“They each hold over two thousand people,” Lila said. “The Eisenhower holds a thousand. Grand is okay, not grandiose.”
“Do you think I’m on the guest list,” Grace asked Ruth as they walked inside the theater. “Just kidding.”
“You’re going to have to make it up with Lila, dead or alive,” Ruth said. She had loved Lila. As with all of her daughters’ friends, Lila had been at her most charming, most engaging with Ruth.
“I thought she’d like The Lost Mother. It was funny, people said it was funny. She was the book’s hero.”
“Lila was a hero in life,” Ruth said.
There were ten speakers, each held to seven minutes, Lila’s hand from the grave. “I want stories, funny stories,” Lila had written in the instructions. “No tear-jerking the congregation.” Her sister, Clara, recited the Kaddish, memorizing it for a second sad time. The first time had been at their brother Polo’s funeral. He died in 2000, jolting Lila into a fury of mourning.
“I hate this feeling, like it’s the end of the world,” she had said to Joe at Polo’s funeral. “Is this the way regular people feel?”
“Yes,” he said.
“He was only forty-seven, three months away from retiring.” She blew her nose. “I guess he saw he was running out of time.”
For a month after his death, she had walked five miles a day, getting up at 6:00 a.m. so she’d be done by 8:00.
“What do you think about on your walks?” Joe had said.
“I don’t think. I walk. You know I can’t multitask.”
“How do you not think?”
“I don’t want to think, so I don’t. I walk to breathe. If I can just keep breathing.”
If she could have just kept breathing, Joe thought, as Clara finished the prayer.
Over everyone’s objections—the pandemic was still lurking—Joe’s mother, Frances, attended the service. “It keeps her alive for me,” she told Joe. “The day she died was the saddest day of my life.”
The virtual twins, both visibly pregnant, had also been discouraged from coming, everyone weighing in—Joe, their obstetrician, the airlines. They wound up leasing a plane, picking up Frances on the way.
“It’s sad Lila won’t know our babies,” Stella said.
“Sad too they won’t know her,” Ava said.
Doug Marshall was the first speaker. He had taken up the role of master of ceremonies. He was used to bossing people and he looked the part. Six-three, once blond, now graying, he was, as Lila often said, “an echt WASP and an echt mensch.”
He told the story about the midnight meeting the day the president’s counsel was fired, when Lila’s Pirates were working the phones, trying to find a second source for the rumor that Webb was going to let his younger son take the fall for the pay-to-play scheme. “Webb is a gerbil,” Doug said, gleefully, his voice rising for the peroration. “He eats his young.”
All the Globe stories were funny and fierce and first-person, as much about the eulogists as the deceased. None of them cried openly. Lila had forbidden it.
Felicity Turner, one of the Pirates, talked about a trip to Detroit she had taken with Lila, shortly after the cancer diagnosis. “We drove around her old neighborhood, which had been the site of the worst of the 1967 riots. Lila opened the window and pointed to a run-down brick house, with broken front steps and a sagging front porch. The houses on either side were in better repair, their lawns mowed, their front doors brightly painted. ‘I grew up there. Little House on the Prairie.’ She closed the window. ‘Detroitus.’ ”
Sally Alter was cleanup, the youngest last. As she opened her mouth to speak, tears trickled down her cheeks. “Lila treated me like a daughter.” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “Allergies.”
Grace folded her program. This is satire, she thought.
Sally told the story about the press conference in early 2018 when Webb attacked the stories in The Globe. “I never sold an ambassadorship. Never. Lila Pereira is a lying— You can finish the rest of that sentence.” Sally had been twenty-four, a guppy then. She wanted to catch Lila’s eye. “I called her to see if she wanted to comment. I was interning at Politico. I needed a break. ‘What’s he going to do about it,’ Lila said, ‘put my tit in a big fat wringer?’ I put it on Twitter and the trolls went wild. Lila hired me six months later.”
Joe and the twins had been affectionate. Joe told the story about Lila’s first day at her first job at The Cincinnati Courier, writing obituaries about “sainted” Irish grandmothers. “ ‘I thought at first the survivors were taking their revenge,’ Lila said. ‘I thought “sainted” was code for “drunk.” ’ ” He smiled, waiting for the laughter to die down. “Lila was like no one else. I never knew what she’d do or say next, but whatever she did or said, it seemed inevitable. She was Detroit to the end. She always had your back.”
Stella and Ava told the story of their first swimming lessons ages two and three. “Lila threw us in. We sank. She fished us out, disappointed. ‘I saw it on television,’ she said to Joe. ‘They were supposed to burble to the top.’ ” They spoke alternately, taking only a single speaker’s slot, one voice blending into the other. Lila had called them the Starbirds, synching their names translated into English. They had Lila’s last name, Grace had Joe’s. It made sense on the surface. The Starbirds looked like Lila, Grace like Joe.
“I don’t think anyone can tell them apart,” Grace harrumphed, “except, of course, Joe, and maybe their husbands.”
“Lila’s doing, I take it,” Ruth said.
