The Little Book (11 page)

“Do you have museums out in California?” She smiled this time to restore levity.

Wheeler smiled back. “It’s not the Wild West, you know.” He gestured to the broad open room. “But nothing like this.”

“I told you, my geography is terrible west of the Hudson River,” she said.

“You’re going to visit, remember?”

She looked genuinely pleased with the invitation. “I’m still absorbing Vienna. I don’t know if I will ever leave here.”

“What is it you find so compelling?”

“I’m really here for the music.”

“Any music in particular? This city seems alive with it, reverberating in every nook and cranny,” he said, quoting from the Haze’s revered
City of Music
, the “Little Book” by Mr. Jonathan Trumpp that he always read from with such loving care. “Echoing, you might say, off every grand marble exterior.”

“Oh my,” she said, impressed. “You have a way with words, Mr. Truman. ”

“No,” he said. “Not my words. I am just quoting again, this time from one of my favorite works, referred to often by the mentor I told you about.”

She paused and assessed him for a moment. “Actually, I’m writing,” she said. “But nothing as grand as your mentor’s favorite work. Mine is just a humble series of articles on the new composers.” She was amazed that she had said it. “But it’s sort of confidential, and I wish no one to know. I am using a pseudonym.”

“I have no one to tell,” Wheeler said. “I’m in Vienna alone.” If she only knew, he thought.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to imply.” She stopped. “I just saw you meeting Arnauld and his friends.”

“Secret’s good with me, ma’am,” he said, and it made her laugh.

“You have a very different manner, Mr. Truman. I must say, I like it.” Wheeler suspected that she was blushing again.

“Well, perhaps we can hear some Viennese music together.”

“I would like that very much,” she said with a sudden rush of candor. “Now, I must go. I’m expected back at my pension.” She held out her hand, and Wheeler took it and felt its soft warmth, then she turned and walked away, but then turned back before she had left the room. “Mr. Truman,” she said, framed against the baroque molding of the expansive doorway to the next room. “You have remarkably kind eyes.”

Wheeler watched her turn again and disappear around the corner, his heart feeling an incredible lightness.
What a striking woman
, he thought.

That evening in Vienna, distracted by the limits of his circumstance, Wheeler again ate modestly and moved even deeper into the old city to find an even cheaper room. His clothes were beginning to feel rumpled, and he longed for a shower. His money was nearly gone.

At the end of the second day, he began seeing in his new neighborhood a part of the Imperial City he would not have imagined. There was more of the poverty and wretchedness than he had seen before, the stench of crowded and abject conditions. As Wheeler walked deeper and deeper into the city he became even more aware of people asleep in the streets, uncared for, unwashed, crowded, and miserable, a homelessness and depression that had simply not come through in the Haze’s stirring descriptions. There were prostitutes everywhere. Wherever he walked women of all ages, as old as sixty and as young as twelve, as comely and as haglike as one could imagine, approached and offered company and specific services. Some of the more aggressive actually took his arm and walked a few paces with him until it became clear he was not a prospect.

Later in the day, in the clean, well-lighted comfort of the Café Central, he would ask Kleist about the wretched conditions. He was sitting at the usual table with the usual
Jung Wien
group. “It is not a problem if one does not see it,” the young Kleist said cheerfully. “There are not enough jobs and not enough homes. That is one reason coffeehouses like this one proliferate. People need a place for comfort. I know it might come as a surprise to you, but some of the gentlemen at these tables have no other warm place to sit and read.” He gestured around at the marble-topped tables, nearly all filled with people reading quietly or engaged in animated discussions with groups of friends. “A surprising number of their families at home are hungry and cold.”

“Is nothing being done about it?”

“You have found our vulnerable underbelly, Mr. Truman,” von Tscharner, the architect, said.

“The conditions are deplorable.” Wheeler raised his hands in frustration in the direction of the Danube Canal and the old city beyond. “There is filth and disease everywhere. And many of the prostitutes look no older than twelve or thirteen.”

“It is not the Vienna of the Strausses father and son, is it?” Claus, the writer and cynic, said.

“There seem to be thousands of people living in storm drains and culverts out there.” Wheeler could barely contain his exasperation. He stared across the marble tabletop at these well-educated young men with obvious liberal views who had become his hosts.

Kleist shrugged. “The famous liberalism of our fathers,” he added. “It built the Ringstrasse, but it had no sense of responsibility for the under-classes, did it? If one of the major functions of culture is to shield its members from chaos, and to reassure them that they live at the center of the universe, then our fathers have failed.”

“What’s to be done?” von Tscharner chipped in. “It’s a hopeless situation. ”

“You were expecting waltzes and gaiety, Herr Truman?” Claus said.

“Much is made of Vienna’s splendor,” Wheeler said. “It’s only natural to expect—”

“Ah, yes, splendor,” he said. “Splendor and
schlagg
.” Claus lifted a spoonful of whipped cream from his cup. “Splendor before the fall.” He dropped the dollop back into the cup. “It is a false sense of well-being.”

“
A sense of well-being
, oh no,” Kleist said. “Look out, here comes Claus’s false-sense-of-well-being speech.”

“The death spasms of a culture,” Claus said. “Dancing toward the Apocalypse.”

“Look out,” Kleist said. “Here comes the dancing speech.”

“And that’s where you see Vienna?” Wheeler asked.

“It’s cultural hubris,” Claus said. “It’s an overweening presumption of aristocracy in a world basically insensitive to human needs, and it can only lead to a rude awakening.”

“And what’s that awakening?”

“I have no idea,” Claus said gloomily. “But when people start believing that progress is inevitable and life easy, they abandon faith in the culture of their fathers and flounder.” He paused and looked vacantly across the café.

Wheeler looked at him empathetically. “And that’s where you and your friends are?”

“Exactly,” Claus said. “We’re watching the first signs of the unraveling of what our fathers still believe in—the rational rule of science and order—and we have no faith.”

“The city can’t take care of its own problems.”

“In Vienna, we follow the imperial example and pretend they are not there,” Claus said with an ironic little smile.

“How long can that go on?”

Claus kept his smile and gestured to a passing waiter for more coffee. He looked deep into Wheeler’s eyes. “Till the Apocalypse,” he said in both resignation and great wisdom. “And that may well be around the corner.”

Back on the street, Wheeler was growing desperate. Alone, in the wretched quarter of the city, with the thoughts of his new Viennese friends’ quips about poverty fresh in his mind, Wheeler had a practical problem. He needed to find a way of insuring himself room and board for the duration of his stay in this foreign city. The idea, wild and impulsive as it was, came in a flash and stayed with him through his humble dinner of sausage and cabbage in a grubby little café deep inside the old city where he had laid down his last marks for a room.

So in the morning of the third day, dispirited and drained of energy, nearly out of money and tired of his rumpled clothes, Wheeler Burden asked directions to the address he had learned from the Haze in his eleventh-grade year in prep school. “The modern age began at Berggasse Nineteen,” the Haze had said more than once, with that flair he had for pronouncement, and each of his boys was expected to know exactly what the pronouncement meant.

It was an unimpressive façade, the large front door opening onto a vaulted throughway large enough for a carriage. The stone stairs climbed to the second floor, where Wheeler stopped and waited a long apprehensive moment before knocking, driven to this monumental intrusion into destiny by practical necessity. Simply put, he needed support and a place to stay.

The sign on the door read, “Prof. Dr. Freud.”

11

A St. Gregory’s Boy

After the Dover game things turned around for Wheeler at St. Greg’s. In his solitary moment of athletic glory, an entire school seemed suddenly about to change its impression of the Burden Project. “In the eyes of the beholder,” the Haze said. What had been beheld previously as the California boy’s unregenerate reluctance to fit in now became charming eccentricity. “Something we can work with,” one of the faculty old-timers said. Teachers began to see in Wheeler a fascinating if peculiar mind. One day in English class his teacher asked loudly, “Good lord, Burden, have you read
all
of Victor Hugo?” He meant it facetiously.

“Only the seven novels,” Wheeler answered matter-of-factly. “But
Ninety-Three
twice.” The exchange became widely quoted among the students.

The headmaster, Mr. Wiggins, had been at St. Greg’s since before the war. He had cut quite a heroic swath in football and hockey at Harvard himself, a little before Wheeler’s father, and had known Dilly only obliquely. He taught French and then had been named headmaster in 1947. In many ways, Wiggins, whose craggy features looked as if they had been chiseled in granite, was the embodiment of the values of the school and the whole Bostonian way of life. It was largely because of his stirring talks before the boys twice each year, on the opening day of baseball season in the spring and on Armistice Day in the fall, that Dilly Burden’s memory remained alive and current. He was formal and gruff on the outside, but displayed a soft inside on those special days as he explained what everyone already knew, that the words he was about to read had been composed by the legendary Dilly Burden as his graduation speech in 1932, the words that were inscribed on a plaque in the main corridor of the schoolhouse. Then he would call up Dilly’s spirit with a kind of Barrymorian eloquence and always a tear in his eye. “I am a St. Gregory’s boy,” he would begin to the hushed all-school audience. “I win without bragging and can lose without whimpering; I am too brave to lie and too generous to cheat. Pride will not let me loaf and I will always insist on doing my share of the work in any capacity. I ask only to share equally with every boy, the sturdy or the weak, the talented or the humble, the wealthy or the poor, those blessings which God has showered upon all of us. All this because I am, above all else, today, tomorrow, and forever, a St. Gregory’s boy.” When he finished, there was rarely a dry eye in the auditorium, boy or man.

Even in the moments of darkest faculty despair over the Burden Project, the rough-hewn boy from California seemed to appeal to Mr. Wiggins’s soft side, and in these moments the headmaster would often throw his head back and give an understanding laugh, the rare sign of endorsement that lent the project the little hope it held. Most everyone knew that taking the chance on the rough lad from California had been mostly Headmaster Wiggins’s idea in the first place, out of reverence for the memory of his famous father and the widespread respect he and everyone else had for Wheeler’s grandmother, one of the school’s greatest benefactors, it turned out. “Your grandmother is quite a woman,” Mr. Wiggins told Wheeler at their first meeting. “I think few people in this school—” Then he thought on it for a moment. “Few people in this
city
realize what a significant person she is.”

Later, when Wheeler asked the Haze if the headmaster might not be exaggerating just a bit, the old man became a little teary himself. “Oh my, no,” he said. “She
is
quite a remarkable woman.” Then he too lost himself a moment in something like reverie. “Quite a remarkable woman.”

So it was not incidental that Wheeler’s coming to St. Gregory’s, in this radical departure from tradition, had been suggested and perhaps engineered by his grandmother. And, considering that initial influence, it was not coincidental that Mr. Wiggins became the idea’s dominant and enthusiastic proponent. An admitted admirer of the small bursts of informality that sprang up in the daily life of a school, especially from the younger boys, Mr. Wiggins had been from the start one of the keenest observers of Wheeler’s eccentricities and one of their greatest supporters. It was he who took Mr. Esterhazy aside and assigned him mentorship of the project. It was said that privately the headmaster thought that the young man’s eccentricities might be good for some of the stuffier and more staid elements in the school. He seemed to take Wheeler’s miserable academic performance in stride along with his unrestrained conversations. If Mr. Wiggins found what he called
a special spark
in a boy, his security was insured. And for certain, his reverence for the grandmother aside, Mr. Wiggins found in Dilly Burden’s son that
special spark
.

One of the few St. Gregory’s supporters who had not been at the Dover game was Wheeler’s grandmother, Eleanor Burden, widow of the prominent Boston banker Frank Standish Burden Senior and mother of Frank Standish Burden Junior, the famous Dilly Burden. Her heart was not strong, so she no longer visited the school. But it was she who had engineered and financed the Burden Project. When she received the headmaster’s phone call directly after The Game, as it was now being called, she expressed immediate joy, not out of a love of baseball but for the effect it would have on her grandson’s success, something that had seemed unlikely a few months before. She loved her grandson unconditionally and wanted the transplant to take hold, although she seemed always to have an ironclad confidence that it would.