The Little Book (38 page)

“Next thing you know, they’ll want the vote.”

The music started again, and the crowd whirled. “This is what my venerable teacher called Gay Apocalypse,” Wheeler said, looking around in awe.

“It is wonderful,” she said with a broad, delighted smile. They danced away in the center of the vortex, until the orchestra played its last strains and the crowd began filing out of the great hall. “I feel wild and liberated too.” Her face positively glowed, and he acknowledged in that moment how very much he wanted her.

Out in the cool night air, they found a cab in a long waiting line. “That was absolutely enthralling,” Weezie said once inside. Her eyes flashed with a new light, and her face was still flush from the exhilaration. “I think this has been the most thrilling night of my life.”

“I’ve told the driver to take the long way back,” Wheeler said as they left the gaiety of the Sperl. “I hope you don’t mind.” He looked over at her in the dim light from passing streetlamps. Outside he could hear the
clip-clop
of the horse’s shoes on the cobblestone streets and feel the gentle swaying of the carriage. Her eyes looked back at him with a depth that went beyond gratitude or even respect. The press of her arm against his seemed to transfer a warmth that filled the interior of the cab.

“You know, I did think you a sorcerer in that awful moment when I fled. I felt you pulling me down to a dark world.”

“And how do you think of me now?”

“No change,” she said with a lascivious smile. “But I think that I am meant to be here with you, that you have been sent as my guide.”

He took both her hands in his and looked deep into her eyes. “I will not guide you where you do not wish to go.” Then he paused, still looking into her eyes. “I need to tell you something directly,” he said.

She did not budge from his gaze. “You are the most direct person I have ever met.”

“Well, in that spirit of directness, I must tell you that when you left, I was devastated. I had pushed too far and driven you away, and I found the results devastating.” She began to offer an explanation, and he stopped her. “I have been deeply touched in this glorious city where we have found ourselves, this city of music.” She took in the words and released a gentle sigh. “And I must tell you that I have found in your presence a peace and comfort that I have waited for a lifetime. I have wanted to be your guide, and yet you have guided me. I do not want to go too far or too fast, but I am the one totally enthralled, and I wish—”

“We both wish,” she said, now stopping
him
, meeting his gaze and leaning forward ever so slightly.

Without taking his eyes from hers, he matched her forward movement, as if to examine more closely the glow that the evening bacchanal of music had placed within them. And then his lips met hers and he felt their welcoming softness, and he lost track of time or space, being drawn to her by a strange and powerful force that began to surge within her, matching his own. “This time, we will go very slowly,” he whispered. “Slowly and surely.”

“Remember, small steps,” she said once again, this time as a full commitment.

Together they rose with the strains from the imagined music, and suddenly, almost without knowing it consciously he was with her, again driven forward by the inviting vitality and warmth, riding the wave of mutual passion to the crest, then together crashing in each other’s arms. “Slowly,” Wheeler repeated.

This time no one ran away.

39

Coming Together

Wheeler had gone back to the cabinetmaker in the heart of the inner city, this time to replace the wooden Frisbee he had given the woman in black. “Let’s go out to the woods,” he said to Dilly, holding up the wooden disk. “This is our meal ticket. I want to show you how it works.”

They took the train out of the city and found an open spot in the trees in the fabled Vienna Woods, the
Wienerwald
, and Wheeler gave his father his first lesson in the fine art of Frisbee. “Try to release it level,” he said, as his father looked at a disappointing toss that tilted and sank to the ground just a few yards from his feet, one of only a few awkward moves Dilly Burden had ever made in his life. “And flick your wrist,” Wheeler said patiently, standing close by. “Put as much spin on it as you can.”

Dilly tried again, and this time it thudded to the ground just short of Wheeler’s outstretched arms. “I’ll get the hang of it,” he said with gusto, always up for an athletic challenge.

“You’ll get it,” Wheeler said, sending the disk floating back to the younger man with a deft flick. “It’s all in the wrist.”

Soon, the two men were standing fifty feet apart, flipping the wooden disk back and forth. “It could be very satisfying,” Dilly said, still concentrating too hard to smile. “Yours seem to hover in air. Mine sink like pewter plates.”

“Wasted hours of working at it,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler had brought some cheese, wine, and bread, and a blanket. They sat in the Vienna Woods and talked for hours, relaxed and far from the cares of worlds that now seemed far, far away in time and place.

“Tell me what you did after Harvard,” Dilly said.

“I stayed in Boston and studied at a music school. It wasn’t there in your time. I studied guitar and played with my band nights. We were called Shadow Self, and we developed quite a following.”

“Married?” Dilly cut a slice of the rich yellow cheese and laid it on a chunk of bread.

“Never married. There were a number of women in my life then.” He looked at his father warily. “The life of music concerts discouraged monogamy. Things had changed pretty much in terms of sex, and people had many relationships. It was supposed to make you more open and developed. But there was one woman. We saw each other serially. She was a student at Radcliffe, Joan Quigley was her name, from an old Boston family, and serious about school, although she is really the one who encouraged me to go with music and drop out of Harvard.” He looked off into the distance, remembering. “She broke me in, freshman year, when I was green and wet behind the ears. For years after that, when my band started doing road trips, she would show up in one city or another. She was married to a stiff and successful lawyer in Pittsburgh, very prominent, who became a federal judge. I don’t know how she got away. It was pretty easy to find me in those days. The band was famous, I guess you would say, sort of like Glenn Miller or even, dare I say, Benny Goodman.”

Dilly lit up. “Did you know Benny?”

“Everybody knows about Benny Goodman.”

“I played with him one summer.”

“Everybody knows that too. It’s part of the Dilly Burden legend.”

Dilly came down to earth. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was a bit much, I guess.”

“I’m not saying we were as good as Miller or Goodman. I’m just giving you an idea of the context.” Then Wheeler laughed, the thought of comparing a swing band to full-blown sixties acid rock amused him. “We were popular. And the crowds were pretty big. Fifty, a hundred thousand, easy.”

Dilly looked impressed. “Holy cow!” he said, in what had been a trademark.

“Oh yes. Sound amplification got sort of out of hand. Bands were loud and raucous. I don’t think you would have liked the music. Or the way we looked. You had to have seen it, but we had hair down to our shoulders, played loud electrified instruments, with bright lights flashing most of the time—strobe lights, they were called—and we wore wild cowboy clothes. Not exactly what you looked like with Benny Goodman.”

“People liked that?”

“Well, it was kids mostly, sixteen, eighteen, around in there. The same sort of thing as with Frank Sinatra.”

“What happened with the woman?”

“Well, in 1973, she wrote me. I got the letter in Fairbanks, Alaska. She said she had something pretty major to tell me and was sort of depressed. I got on a plane that afternoon and showed up in Pittsburgh. She was more glad than usual to see me.” Wheeler looked off into the woods. “I was sort of the love of her life, I guess you would say. She liked me because I was unconventional, and her life was very much the opposite. It seemed to be her destiny she couldn’t escape, she said, at the same time she told me how ill she was.”

“She died?”

“A year later. She had a congenital blood disease and it caught up with her. It was her death—it took about a year—that changed things. There was a concert in Berkeley, at the football stadium, tens of thousands of people. I wrote a song for her and sang it alone on the stage. I was playing your old Martin guitar, which became sort of my trademark. No one had ever heard this song before, and I never sang it again. It was called ‘Coming Together,’ and it became, some said, the most famous song of the 1970s. I sang it that night alone on the stage in front of forty thousand people and then walked off and never came back. I became sort of a legendary recluse, I guess you’d say. It all created sort of a mystique. It was all for Joan Quigley.” There was a long silence as Wheeler looked off into the distance. “I never really got over her.”

“How about your mother?”

“The year Joan was dying, she came out to the ranch and lived with me in the guest house from time to time, until she was too weak to travel. Mother loved it.”

Wheeler looked over at Dilly. He was sitting with his hands locked in front of his shins, letting his mind drift. “I guess I told you she never remarried or had any male company to speak of. She was sort of a one-man woman.”

Dilly’s eyes were closed, and he let go a deep sigh. “She was some kind of woman, Stan. I guess it goes without saying that I was pretty naïve physically when I met her. We did not have a sexual revolution going on in my time. She knocked my socks and everything else off. I know it sounds corny, but I never even came close to knowing what love was until I met her. I was all tied up in knots, and she untied them one by one. She had no constraints.”

Wheeler laughed. “That’s what a lot of people say about me.”

“When I grew up in Boston things were reserved. I mean people were guarded about expressing anything. I didn’t think about it because that’s the way it had always been. You kept things pretty much to yourself. Not Flora. She hit me like a whirlwind. She unwound my clock, she used to say.” Dilly was still looking off in the distance. “She was a great follower of Sigmund Freud. You know he came to London to live in his last year. The Nazis drove him out of Vienna, and your mother was part of the group that prepared the way for him and found him a home. She said he would have loved to get a hold of me, that I was a textbook case of repressed sexual desires.”

“Overdeveloped superego,” Wheeler added.

“She said that?” Dilly said, smiling proudly as if it was a compliment or a reminder of special moments.

“She said it once.”

Dilly laughed. “Look,” he said, “I hope I won’t embarrass you. I mean it’s not the sort of thing a father is supposed to tell his son, but your mother did a lot to unsuppress me. She took it on as her life project, I think.” Dilly’s eyes were closed, his smile suggesting the deliciousness of his thoughts. “And she was on her way to being very successful when I accepted that last mission in France—” His voice dwindled away.

“She was always so proud of you,” Dilly said. “She said you were going to be the first liberated Burden. She said you certainly were not going to get involved in all that silly schoolboy hero business, but that you were going to have a proper combination of family virtues.” Suddenly Dilly snapped around and looked at Wheeler for a long moment, perhaps realizing for the first time that the small son he had left in London only a few months ago was now a middle-aged man, older than his father, beside him. “How did you do?” was Dilly’s curious question.

“Well, let’s put it this way. I don’t think anyone would have called me repressed. In fact, Boston and St. Greg’s and Harvard tried to have the opposite effect of Flora on you. They tried to get me to wind my clock. I did save the Dover game and get carried off the field.”

Dilly looked genuinely impressed. “You did?”

“Yep. They all said it reminded them of you. I was just about flunking out. The Haze was working overtime to get me to be conventional, and I did it. I had this pitch I learned in Feather River called the prongball.” He held up his pitching hand. “You wet the inside of your middle finger and apply it to one spot near the stitches, like this.” Wheeler held up an imaginary ball between two forked fingers. His father was delighted. “And when it’s goopy, the ball pops out from between these two fingers like a watermelon seed. It makes the ball jump around, if you throw it hard enough. It worked against Dover, and it worked against Yale.”

“What’d you do against Yale?” Dilly’s face was full of interest.

“I came one pitch short of a perfect game. In my sophomore year. It was the prongball and it was jumping all over the place, and the Yale batters couldn’t hit anywhere near it. I got two strikes against the last batter.” Wheeler paused, sinking into the memory. “There was this bigoted jerk from St. Greg’s named Prentice Olcott, about everything I despised in stuck-up Bostonians—”

Dilly interrupted suddenly, “Prentice Olcott. No kidding?”

“No kidding. But you couldn’t have heard of him.”

“His father went to St. Greg’s with me. He tried to be student body president and captain of everything that I was, and was insanely jealous. If your mother thought I was repressed, she would have had a field day on Prentice Olcott.” Dilly smiled broadly. “He was—” Dilly restrained himself.

“His son was a real asshole,” Wheeler said without reserve.

“So was his father.” Dilly had started to laugh. “He was a real—” Laughter was getting the best of him. “I’ve never said that word. You see, people didn’t talk this way in my day.”

Wheeler had begun to laugh. “They didn’t in mine either.”

“But you did.”

“Most of the time.” Wheeler looked over at Dilly. “You can too, you know.”