The Little Book (15 page)

“It is not unlike being a Jew,” he said. “You must learn to intrude yourself, if you expect to get anywhere. One cannot always be concerned with being polite and proper, if one is going to achieve anything.” He was arranging a group of papers on the top of the piano. “Come, let me show you my work in Vienna.” She rose and joined him, feeling both stimulated and light-headed.

“You have heard my symphonies?”

“I have not,” she said too quickly. “That was my point. I have not, nor has anyone else in America. But I have read the scores.”

The great musician looked surprised. “I am impressed.”

“But I must admit that I read incompletely. I hear music imperfectly through the cello, the strings.”

“And what would be better?”

“For your music, Herr Mahler?”

“For my music, yes.”

She looked at him appraisingly for an instant, to see if he was perhaps belittling her. “Are you testing me?”

He suddenly looked concerned. “No, no,” he protested quickly. “Far from it, Fraulein Putnam. I am deeply interested.”

“Why, the horns,” she burst out. “It is the horns, Herr Mahler, that distinguish your second symphony. That is what I want to hear in full symphony.”

“An excellent point,” he said with a wry smile. “I am impressed. And that is what you wrote in your
feuilletons
?”

“Yes,” she said, looking a little sheepish. “I am afraid I came off a little pretentious.”

“And the prestigious
New York Times
published it.”

“That,” she said apologetically, “and others.”

“I am flattered that you came to my defense.”

“How could I not?” she said.

Perhaps she was too agitated to perceive that Mahler was liking her conversation very much.

He guided her attention to the sheets of music spread out on the piano top. “These are the songs, my ‘Lieder Eindes Fahrended Gesellen,’ the songs of a traveling journeyman, I think you would say. They have made quite a splash.” He ran his hands over the manuscripts of musical notations.

“We have not had the honor of hearing these either,” she said quickly.

“My time in America has not yet come, I think you would have to admit. But with your help, it sounds as if it might come sooner, rather than later.”

“That is my hope,” she said, and he could not have helped hearing her earnestness.

He looked into her eyes with a vibrancy she found both attractive and disquieting. “They are really my most original work. The symphonies are more conventional, but the songs express—” He closed his eyes and placed his fingertips on his forehead. “Express my true—” He closed his eyes again, tapping something even deeper. “My deep inner feelings.” His eyes were on hers again. They had a hypnotic appeal, pulling her toward him. “Take one,” he said and handed her a number of the sheets. As he did, his hand brushed hers. He had picked up a baton from the piano and used it as a pointer. “These passages in here, written for voices, have become without tone, almost disharmonious.” The baton brushed against her hand. She saw the point of the baton gliding across the ink scribblings. The images began to swim in her head. He had moved closer and she could feel the touch of his lapel against her shoulder. “Always I need to restrain myself, always I need to remember what an audience is willing to tolerate. Always—”

She was aware of his hands moving and suddenly his voice began to fade away and her vision blurred. Later she recalled the room spinning and the feeling of falling. Then blackness.

“You dropped like a sack of turnips, Fraulein Putnam,” Herr Mahler said to her after she had come back to earth, lying on the couch beside the piano. He had been gracious and stayed with her until she had fully awakened. Before the maid showed her to the door he asked that she come back, “sometime when you have had a full meal,” he said with a charming smile, supplying a reason for her collapse. But she had not returned. She had been to see him direct at the opera, and she had written much of the article.

But she had been too embarrassed to return.

14

Berggasse 19

Berggasse 19, where Sigmund Freud lived for nearly half a century, was an unpretentious apartment house on a respectable residential street. When he moved there in the summer of 1891, Freud was a promising but unknown young neurologist with unorthodox ideas and an uncertain future; when he left the house and Nazi-occupied Austria for London in June 1938, “to die in freedom,” he was a world-famous old man, “an explorer as significant as Copernicus or Columbus or Charles Darwin,” the Haze used to say.

As Wheeler Burden climbed the narrow stairs to Dr. Freud’s second-floor apartment on his third morning in Vienna, he was more than a little familiar with the building and its soon-to-be-famous occupant. As he knocked on the door, we know from his journal, he was filled with both awe and relief. The awe came because from his earliest days he had heard stories of the great man from his mother, who as a young woman had been a devoted disciple, then later, because of her
Persephone Rising
, a famous antagonist. And he felt the relief because this bold move on his part promised to lead to some kind of support for his desperate condition. Recently, in preparing the Haze’s book
Fin de Siècle
, in which a whole chapter was devoted to Freud, Wheeler had devoured many descriptions of the man and the apartment, including many photographs. So Wheeler felt well prepared for what he was about to see and the delicate intrusion into the great man’s history he was about to engineer.

Also, from his journal, we know something of his purpose in concocting the plan, his thinking that if he could interest Dr. Freud in his plight, he could perhaps prevail on him for room and board, at least until the Frisbee was ready, or until he found some other means. But we know also that Wheeler was fully aware that he would be walking a fine line between interesting the doctor and interfering with the great man’s future, something he very decidedly wished not to do. A fine line indeed, but he was confident that he was up to the challenge.

The maid answered and led him into a small waiting room, where he sat for some time before the door to the inner sanctum opened and Wheeler found himself staring into the face of one of the most famous men of the twentieth century. Freud was surprisingly short, five six or so, and meticulously groomed. His manner was immediately cordial, curious perhaps, but definitely guarded. “How may I help you?” he said.

Wheeler reached out his hand. “My name is Harry Truman,” he said as he entered the study. “I was wondering if I could have a moment of your time.” Caught off guard perhaps or simply wishing to be polite, Freud took the hand and invited his guest in without much second thought. There is, of course, the possibility that from the very first glance the doctor recognized in this visitor the potential of a conversation, and even more importantly, fellowship.

What might have had something to do with his willingness was that at this moment in 1897, Sigmund Freud was at a transition point, waiting for an inspiration. He was still two years away from his monumental
Interpretation of Dreams
and over ten years away from the fame and recognition he gained in 1909, when, seemingly out of the blue, the great Viennese doctor would receive a rather remarkable invitation to travel to America and deliver a series of lectures at Clark University, near Boston, “his breakout event,” Wheeler called it. And, of course, the great doctor, laboring in near obscurity in 1897 Vienna, had no way of knowing that the arrival of this strange visitor was setting in motion a series of events that would lead to that all-important invitation.

But the storyteller is getting ahead of herself. Here in 1897, the great doctor was at a pivotal point in his career, just formulating his first historic connection with mythology, catalyzed by his recent attendance at a production of Sophocles’ tragedy
Oedipus Rex
. In a letter to a friend, he had recently written, “I have discovered in the human condition a great similarity with the Greek myth of Oedipus, who murdered his father and married his mother.” This shift to the “Oedipus complex” meant that he had moved away from his broader child-abuse theories and was now seeing as the cause of devastating sexual hysteria a primal drive he would describe and would fervently continue to believe in for the rest of his life. In short, he would conjecture, little children wanted to murder and sleep with their parents.

For the past decade Freud had been on the trail of the unconscious mind and the connection between mental state and physical disorder, and proof positive that the causes of physical ailments were often mental. Alone with his patients in his office, he had begun to realize the power of what he called “the talking cure.” Patients with debilitations could find relief by simply engaging in free-form exposition.

Like Darwin’s new science, where clues to the mysteries of evolution rested on the surface of the earth in fossils, the clues to the mysteries of the unconscious lay in surface gestures and words. Freud, an astute observer anyway, had over the past few years become obsessive in his observations of mannerisms and how they presented clues to the unconscious mind. The clues, of course, led slowly to discoveries that the brilliant doctor hoped would eventually bring him notoriety, wealth, and fame, and in that stubborn and solitary quest had isolated himself. At this moment in Sigmund Freud’s life, for anyone such as Wheeler Burden who sought his attention there was one huge advantage. In 1897, in his early forties, Sigmund Freud was a deeply lonely man, desperate for companionship.

We can only speculate about Sigmund Freud’s reaction to his visitor. He must have been intrigued from the beginning, watching his strange guest with more than usual interest and care, searching for clues as he and the visitor exchanged introductory conversation.

He must have found himself uneasy and indefinably fascinated. This total stranger had shown up without introduction and without an appointment, entering the room confident, clear-eyed, and offering his hand as if meeting an old acquaintance. At first Freud might have suspected a prank, concocted perhaps by university students or Mayor Karl Lueger’s anti-Semitic nastiness, but those suspicions were put to rest by the obvious sincerity of his visitor.

From the doctor’s point of view, the new intruder, Harry Truman, he called himself, appeared to be in his late forties, about Freud’s age. He was tall and slender, and he wore a rumpled suit that looked as if it had been tailored for another man, and might have been slept in. His tanned skin suggested that he came from a clime sunnier than Vienna’s. Although he spoke intelligently and articulately in both German and English, he preferred the latter, obviously his native tongue, with an accent that suggested the western United States, with a touch of the British, although Freud admitted to not being proficient with American accents. His German, although perfectly understandable, was academic rather than colloquial. His hands were soft, suggesting a bourgeois lifestyle, his fingers long and delicate, like those of a musician.

Clearly, the man was less than fully familiar with Vienna and the Viennese, a fact that came out in a number of points of conversation. He seemed unusually open and forthright about most aspects of life, but he had spoken his name hesitantly: the thought that the name Harry Truman was a pseudonym occurred to Freud.

For certain, there was something he was hiding. Perhaps overly sensitive to the threat of being duped by the con man, Freud had trained himself to see duplicity in the eyes, the windows to the soul, and now with this stranger he watched for it vigilantly.

From the start Freud sensed that the man held him in a certain reverence and possessed more than a passing knowledge of his theories.

“You know my work then, Mr. Truman?”

“A bit,” the man said without hesitation, looking away for an instant, obviously hiding something while at the same time appearing almost too open and naïve. He was, after all, an American, and from his bearing Freud gathered that he had not traveled in Europe. How would he have known? A puzzlement.

Sigmund Freud usually knew the truth when he was being told it, at least truth as the patient saw it. Patients rarely lied for any other reason than to suppress painful thoughts and to avoid embarrassment. Even on the conscious level, some facts were simply too painful or confusing or even shocking to admit, although in time patients usually found they could discuss most details of their lives openly. Sometimes they lied for another purpose.

He often retold with amusement a story from his student days about a patient in the state mental hospital incarcerated because he was certain he was Napoleon Bonaparte. This particular patient was famous among the hospital staff for having an eye that twitched violently whenever he was in the middle of lying. One day, the patient was on his best behavior during a psychological examination because he wanted very much to be released from the ward. He had been doing well in the interview, and when as a final question the doctors asked him if he was Napoleon, the man answered an emphatic no, and his eye began to twitch.

Now in his study with the surprise visitor, Freud bore in. “You are here then because of amnesia, Herr Truman?”

Wheeler nodded. “I have absolutely no idea how I got to Vienna.”

“What are your last memories?”

“I was in San Francisco,” Wheeler said, now genuinely troubled, struggling with his memory. “Then I drifted away. And I came to my senses slowly, walking along the Ringstrasse.” Up to this point he was telling the truth. His answers were clear and direct.

“San Francisco is very far from Vienna.” There was a calm neutrality to the doctor’s tone, nothing judgmental or accusing. “How long ago were you there?”

But now Wheeler’s eyes shifted focus, imperceptibly perhaps, unnoticeable to the untrained observer. “It was not long ago—” he began, clearing his throat. “A month ago.”