The Little Book (19 page)

In the euphoria following Woodstock, a San Francisco promoter organized a festival to be staged in Golden Gate Park a few months later. The show was to feature the Jefferson Airplane and a number of famous California bands, with rumors including the Rolling Stones. Shadow Self was among the invitees, and when permits with the city fell through, the remote location of the Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California, was chosen for December 6, 1969. Plans were finalized less than twenty-four hours before the event was to take place, and the result was disaster.

Things began to get out of control even before word leaked that the Rolling Stones were in fact planning to perform there, and that the event would be free, a “thank-you concert.” Someone made the disastrous decision to hire the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang as security—for five hundred dollars in free beer, it was said—a shocking bit of naïveté on the part of the organizers. The crowd swelled to three hundred thousand, and it became obvious that the Angels intended to use sawn-off pool cues for control. “After one of the Angel’s bikes got knocked over,” a reporter told Wheeler afterward, “nobody was safe anymore, not even you band guys. Somebody thought that keeping the bands playing would quiet things down, and you saw where that went.” Actually, Wheeler remembered very little, having been knocked pretty much silly by one of the supposed peacekeepers.

Trouble reached its climax during the Stones’ appearance, after Shadow Self had finished playing. From the beginning, the performers had bad feelings about the staging and the audience. What had blossomed at Woodstock, the charm and spontaneity of the free, limitless conditions, had ripened and rotted at Altamont into dangerous recklessness. “I have a bad feeling about this,” Hitzie had said, as Shadow Self finished their last number. The crowd, many of them hallucinating on one drug or another, bleary-eyed and for some reason angry, not peaceful, pushing up toward the stage, was filled with disorderliness and hallucination. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

He and Wheeler were standing side stage watching when a confused naked man rose from the seething audience and rushed the stage. A burly Angel saw him coming and felled him with a blow from his pool cue and then continued to beat him on the ground. Wheeler stepped forward, and Hitzie grabbed his arm. “Watch it, man!” he yelled, but it was too late. As Wheeler lunged in to try to shield the fallen naked man, the Angel took a mighty swing at the top of his head, doubling him forward, and then drove the butt of the cue into his gut. In the mayhem, no one realized how hurt both the naked man and Wheeler were, and they both almost bled to death before an ambulance could be directed to the stage area to carry them off. Again to try to keep the crowd under control, the show went on until an eighteen-year-old African-American man with a gun came flying up toward the stage and hit the wall of Angels, one of whom pulled out a switchblade and stabbed him to death right in front of Mick Jagger, the famous Rolling Stones lead singer. The awfulness of that culminating incident fixed the disaster at Altamont as the end of the innocence imagined by Woodstock. Oddly enough, the near-death disaster was the final event that propelled Wheeler Burden and his Wild Bill appearance into national symbology as one of
People
magazine’s Most Recognizable.

“It’s not your music,” said Joan Quigley, who was married to her football captain, now a lawyer in Pittsburgh, and would meet Wheeler clandestinely on the road when she could. “Which has gotten very good, by the way. You are famous for being famous.” That was the public part.

What no one knew, the deep secret part, was that shortly after he left Harvard, an attorney from Boston had tracked Wheeler down at music school and broke the news to him of the family trust. It seems that his grandmother had been an extremely active investor and had invested her own family money with extraordinary shrewdness over the years. “Beginning at the turn of the century, she picked start-up investments in the most prosperous American corporations,” the family attorney said. “Her choices were uncanny.”

The highly secret result was the Hyperion Fund, which she had controlled totally from behind the scenes it seemed, making contributions to civic causes and Harvard University. Her will had made Wheeler Burden along with his two aunts her heirs and directors.

“Mr. Burden,” the attorney said, “you are an extremely wealthy man.”

Wheeler paused for only a moment. “Who knows this?” he said to the lawyer.

“No one,” he said. “That is how Mrs. Burden ran it. She was one of the wealthiest and most secretive investors in Boston. No one knew. Not even her husband, your grandfather, I am told. Our firm held her secret for over sixty years. We are not going to change that now.”

“We’ll keep it that way,” Wheeler said. “Top secret.”

“Absolutely,” the banker from Boston said.

“Fine,” said Wheeler and continued with his study of the guitar.

It was not until some time later that Wheeler noticed a most unusual detail about the Hyperion Fund. Aside from the fact that his grandmother had made a number of uncanny investments over the course of more than fifty years, in the summer of 1929 when stock prices were soaring and investors were speculating and buying wildly with huge margins of credit, Eleanor Burden had withdrawn all the funds from the stock market a few months before the Black Monday crash of October 28, 1929.

19

A Great Weight

Dilly Burden’s discovery of his son had come in two stages. The first was the shocking realization that this man, who approached him in the midst of the chaos of the Language Ordinances riots now wildly running to escape the mounted soldiers charging into their number, was someone who knew him. That could mean only one thing, of course: that this man had experienced the same dislocation in time as Dilly himself. “You must have traveled here in the same manner as I,” Dilly said above the tumult around them.

“I have,” Wheeler said.

“And you knew me at Harvard?” Dilly said.

“I knew
of
you,” Wheeler said. “Dilly Burden was a hard person not to be aware of.” Wheeler held out his hand. “The name is Harry Truman,” he said.

“Like the senator from Missouri.”

“Exactly,” Wheeler said, “but no relation. And actually, I am from San Francisco, but I have spent a good deal of time in Boston.”

Dilly shook his head. “And you went to Harvard?”

“Actually, I did,” Wheeler said.

“What class?” he said, then realized before Wheeler had to answer that both of them had for the moment disregarded the surging crowd and the melee of rioters running to avoid the sword-wielding horsemen. He looked up to see one of the mounted soldiers, sword raised above his head, charging straight for them. “Look sharp,” he yelled and gave Wheeler a shove and the two of them nearly fell backward into the fray. “We’ve got to get ourselves out of here.”

And both Dilly and Wheeler abandoned their preoccupations with each other and concentrated on weaving through the crowd and off to a side street. “I suggest we find a nice secluded café somewhere far from here,” Dilly said.

Wheeler nodded and followed. “That would seem a good idea.”

After they had retreated for a few blocks, the sound of the melee fading behind them, Wheeler found his new friend and himself in a neighborhood he knew and a workman’s bar where he had eaten once before. “Could you use a meal?” he said, and just for a moment Dilly closed his eyes and said without words that, yes, he could sure use a square meal.

“So you recognized me?”

“You were in the papers. And we attended a few events together.”

“You knew my parents then?” the thirty-year-old Dilly said, once they were seated, acknowledging their difference in age.

“Only indirectly,” Wheeler said, trying to mask his discomfort, then changed the subject. “I believe you played with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. ”

“Only one summer. How did you know that?”

“I ran into a teacher of yours. We met on the train to New York. He was a very dignified Austrian gentleman, and he seemed quite proud of you.”

“Oh my,” Dilly said. “That would be the Haze, Arnauld Esterhazy. I am sure you heard quite a trip’s worth. We were very close.”

“So now you see how I know so much about you,” Wheeler said, comfortable that he had come up with an acceptable explanation.

“While I was in school, through law school actually, I dabbled in music. I played the clarinet and always wanted to play with John Philip Sousa.”

“Don’t you have to be in the Marine Corps for that?”

Dilly smiled for the first time. “A minor obstacle.”

After lunch they walked out on the Ringstrasse toward the Danube Canal. “How did this happen?” Dilly said suddenly, gesturing out toward the whole city. “I mean, how did we get here? What have you figured out?”

Wheeler shook his head. “I have no idea. I was hoping you would know something.”

Dilly shook his head. “It baffles me. I just woke up here. I was sitting at a table in the Prater. No idea how I got there.”

“Me, I was walking right along here by the canal. I just sort of came to and found myself walking, sort of out of a fog.”

“Mystifying,” Dilly said. “I find myself a little out of touch with Vienna. I suppose it is my weakened condition. I am rehabilitating, I think you would say.”

Wheeler nodded. “Part of it is just traveling, I think. It has taken me a long time to adjust to being here.”

Suddenly Dilly stopped and stared ahead. He pulled on Wheeler’s arm. “Would you mind stepping into this shop?” he said, and pulled Wheeler out of the sidewalk. Once inside, looking out the shop window, Dilly continued. “There is a man I am trying to avoid, and he was heading right toward us. I thought it best if we ducked in here for a moment.” As he finished, a young man, walking briskly, appeared in their view out the store window. Wheeler watched for a moment before recognizing him as the young man in the Hotel Imperial from whom he had stolen the clothes he had on his back.

“Who is he?” Wheeler said.

Dilly looked grim. “Someone with whom I have had some dealings, and whom it would be better to avoid.” Almost without wanting to, Wheeler’s eyes scanned Dilly’s clothes, wondering if perhaps he too had encountered the same problems Wheeler had faced upon entry to Vienna and had victimized the same poor man.

“You didn’t steal from him,” Wheeler said, thinking of the remarkable coincidence he was proposing.

“Oh, goodness no,” Dilly said quickly. “I just don’t want him to see me.”

“Well, he doesn’t look very friendly,” Wheeler said.

“I would just as soon avoid him all together.”

After the man had passed, they continued walking and came to the stone bridge over the Danube Canal. They walked out onto it and stood at the stone railing and looked out to where the river wound around through the city out to the main river.

“You have been by yourself a good deal, I gather.”

Dilly sighed. “Yes. I thought it better as I was recovering. When I first arrived I needed time to myself.”

“How have you been supporting yourself?”

“Not very well, I fear. I found that I could do some translating at the university. I found an assignment the first day.”

“You seem to be—” Wheeler paused, wondering if it would be appropriate to bring it up. But holding back had never been one of his fortes. “You seem to be carrying something heavy.”

The remark caught Dilly off guard. He stood up straight and looked at Wheeler, considering walking away at the same time sizing him up as you would an unknown sparring opponent. “What do you mean?”

Wheeler pressed on. “It’s just that you look like someone who is carrying a great weight.”

For just an instant Dilly looked as if he might let down, but then he pulled back. “I have come from a terrible experience.”

Wheeler looked out at the city, as if he was not particularly interested in the conversation, then he looked back into the tortured face beside him. When he spoke, his voice was full of compassion. “This time travel is rough stuff, isn’t it?”

Dilly closed his eyes and leaned back onto the stone railing. He took a deep breath of the canal air. “Yes,” he said finally. “The last thing I remember it was 1944. I was—” Then he stopped.

“You were with the Gestapo?”

Dilly eyed his companion suspiciously. “You know about that?”

“Yes,” Wheeler said. “After the war, we all heard.”

Dilly looked too tired to resist. “Oh my,” he said. “You come from
after
the war then?”

Wheeler nodded. “Quite a while after.”

“It is all very confusing.” He released this time a huge sigh, then he became reflective for a long moment. “I kept thinking about Vienna. My mother had filled my head with stories about all this, as had the teacher you met on the train.”

“Your Mr. Esterhazy. The Haze, I think you called him.”

“Exactly, he knew all about this.” Dilly raised his hands out toward the city. “And I tried to fill my head so full of what it must have been like that I didn’t think of what was happening. I guess as I got weaker and weaker and the thoughts got stronger and stronger something broke loose. However it was, I woke up in a chair in a café in the Prater, listening to waltz music. How I got there, I have no idea, but I much preferred it to where I had been.”

“They were torturing you, weren’t they?” Although he had not dwelled on it, the thought of his father’s torture at SS headquarters in Paris had occupied some of his thinking about what his death must have been like.

“They certainly know how to do
that
,” Dilly said, repressing a shiver. Then he stopped, with his hands spread out on the stones, pulling himself back to the present. Slowly, he turned his head and eyed Wheeler, an idea beginning to grow in his mind. “How do you know about the Gestapo?”

“It became pretty well-known,” he said, giving his father a shrug and a conciliatory smile. “Dilly Burden worked with the French Resistance.”