The Little Book (48 page)

“Of dying from swallowing a bone?”

“I know it’s odd. Just one of those things a little girl misconstrues, I guess. Someone must have said something to me that suggested it.”

“What did the older girls say in the hallway at Winsor School?”

Weezie looked puzzled. “They said, ‘Maybe she swallowed his bone.’ ”

“Do you know what they were talking about?”

She looked at him disgusted. “Well, I do now,” she said disdainfully. “I didn’t then.”

“And they said you’d find out soon enough?” Weezie nodded. “And that evening you asked at the dinner table.” Weezie nodded. “What did you ask exactly?”

“I told you. I asked what
ardor
meant.”

“And your aunt hauled you off to the bathroom for the soap treatment? ” Weezie nodded again. “Isn’t that awfully harsh for one word? Even the Puritans used the word
ardor
in public.” She looked puzzled again. “Put yourself there again. Think about it.”

“We were eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I remember that. My father had just said he thought his sermon would be on forgiveness, and the thought just came to me. I asked it.”

“How did you say it?”

Weezie closed her eyes tightly. “I put my fork down. I reached for a glass of water,” she said slowly. “I said I had a question from school, and my father looked over at me and asked what it was. And I said—” She fought to recall it accurately. “I asked it.”

“And exactly what did you ask?”

Weezie paused and looked puzzled for a moment. “You know I don’t remember.” Then she spoke after another pause, curious about what came out. “I said, ‘What is a man’s bone?’ ”

“And that is what sent your aunt Prudence into a rage?”

“That’s it.”

“And what did she say when she washed your mouth out?”

“She said that Mother was willful and asked if I knew what God brought her?”

“And you thought she died from eating a bone?”

Weezie shook her head. It was going too fast. “The bar of soap, and the swallowing of the bone and the willfulness, and the picnic,” she said in little more than a mumble.

“Your aunt told you. She said God killed your mother.”

“She said it was her willfulness.”

“You were eight at the time. You heard the older girls’ story.”

“The dream. I go into the dark basement and my mother is in white at a picnic. She invites me to join her, and then she chokes on the piece of chicken.”

“You want to join your mother.”

“Yes.”

“She is in light, at the picnic, the antithesis of your aunt Prudence’s darkness and black. She calls you to her.

“What did your aunt say killed your mother?”

“Willfulness.”

“Keep going.”

“The bone the girls were talking about.”

“Keep going.”

Weezie wrinkled her brow again, then a light came into her face. She shook her head slowly. “Sexual intercourse,” she said slowly. “It’s the one thing Aunt Prudence never had.” She looked up. “The witch made me believe that sexual intercourse killed my mother.”

It was now late at night. Weezie had not moved from her place at the window seat. Wheeler was lying on his back sideways on the bed, looking up at the ceiling but listening to her attentively. She had gone over and over the details of how she had structured her own story from the events and from what her aunt had told her over the years. She had pieced together the very complicated sequence of incidents that had led her to believe that her mother’s sexuality had been both her great life force and the cause of her death. The force had drawn her toward it and repelled her. It had drawn her to Wheeler. It had drawn her into Herr Mahler’s advances and thrown her into a deathlike swoon. It had driven her out of the carriage and away from Vienna that night after the opera. And it had pulled her back.

The puzzle was close to finished, waiting for the last fateful piece. Weezie’s face was drawn; her voice was without emotion, as she worked her way in the dimly lit hotel room. She went quiet for a long time. Then suddenly she spoke. “I am ready,” she said, and Wheeler rose from the bed and came over beside her.

“I was in bed,” she said. She closed her eyes. The words came without expression. “I had been there for over an hour, unable to sleep, thinking about princesses in airy castles. I heard the footsteps on the stairs and thought it unusual because Father had already kissed me good night. The door creaked open and he said my name. I answered. He came over to my bedside, but did not turn on the gaslight. Light from the street came in the window and I could see his sad, careworn face. I was so happy he had come into my room. The times without Aunt Prudence between us, watching everything I said and did, were rare. ‘Sugar Plum,’ he said, ‘I am so very lonely.’ I could smell that he had been drinking, and he slurred his words, but I had become accustomed to that in the year or so following Mother’s death. I had also become aware of the sadness in Father’s face, and I would have done anything for him to make it go away. He touched my forehead, and I felt the sadness in his cold hands. ‘I am so very lonely,’ he kept repeating. I wanted so very, very much to take away the grief that had sat on him now for so long and that gave him so little reprieve. He lay down beside me and was still for a long time. I did not move, but I wanted to hold him, to make him whole again.”

She stopped. The air in the room was dark and heavy. Wheeler did not move or speak. She was long past needing any prompting from him. “I hardly knew what was happening. It was not sudden or violent. I only knew that Father had come to me for the first time and the last time. It happened and I knew what the bone was and I could tell that Father knew it had killed Mother. And after he left I knew it would kill me. And as I lay there in the darkness waiting for death I hoped I would see Mother, and I hoped for Father to find peace.”

Her hands were covering her face now and she wept, at first softly, and then with a wrenching violence that racked her body. It was some time before Wheeler moved to her and held her in his arms in the dim light of a rented hotel room in Baden in the year 1897. She wept in his arms, at first convulsively, then gently, before falling into a deep and peaceful sleep.

On the train ride back to Vienna they sat across from each other, the only two passengers in their first-class cabin. Wheeler could not take his eyes off Weezie as she stared out the window with a soft smile on her lips. “What are you thinking?” he said.

She turned her head ever so slowly, pulling herself back from a distant reverie. “It is hard to explain,” she said, “but for the first time in my life I can remember the golden years with Mother, without the black cloud. It’s as if the darkness has lifted.”

Wheeler could not help smiling. “That’s the way it is supposed to work.”

“You did it for me.” There was a look of the deepest love in her eyes.

“I didn’t,” Wheeler said. “And I’m not being humble or coy. You did it for yourself. The hero must go it alone. That’s one of the oldest stories in the world. You searched in the corners and found what needed to be found. I just handed you the lantern.”

“I love you very, very much.”

Wheeler looked a little uneasy. “You know, you’re supposed to separate the two—the guide and the lover.”

“I think that is too sophisticated for me. I just know I am not the same person I was, and it is only because of you. And what we have shared physically. I do love it so! Too much, I fear. It is such a wonderfully powerful part. I cannot imagine one without the other. You have opened me up, and I love you for that, and I will love you forever. I am absolutely, absolutely certain of that.” She refused to look away. “I will love you forever, no matter what you are or what you do or where you go.”

For the first time, Weezie was beginning to sense Wheeler’s unusual circumstances. For a moment he just looked into her eyes. “There is something I want you to have.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the packet in the embroidered handkerchief. “This was given to me by a very special person. I would like you to have it and keep it to remember this time. No matter.”

Weezie took the packet apprehensively and slowly and carefully peeled back the layers of fine linen. When she came to the last layer, through which she could see an image of the contents, she let out a little gasp and looked up at Wheeler with an expression he would choose to remember forever, one of love and wonder. “What is it?” she said, lifting the last fold.

The sight of the ring brought from her chest now an almost imperceptible sigh. She held it in her hand like a wonderfully colored bird, examining the details before speaking. “It’s incredibly beautiful.”

“You’ll keep it then?” Wheeler said. “No matter.”

Her voice was still more like a sigh. “No matter.”

51

The Legend of Dilly Burden

Aren’t you angry about the way it turned out?” Wheeler said, as they sat in Dilly’s small room, Dilly on the bed and Wheeler on a chair beside the bureau. Dilly had not mentioned his condition again, but the dark shadows under his eyes had deepened and he seemed depleted of his usual boundless energy.

“You mean the deception, the Churchill stuff?”

“Well, your own side did turn you over to the Gestapo.”

“For a greater cause,” he said with a shrug. “They knew I would crack. They knew the Gestapo would believe me because I believed. That was a brilliant strategy—a little diabolical perhaps—”

“A little!”

“—but look at all the lives it saved.”

“But you were a pawn. You, the great Dilly Burden, of all people.”

“Your mother pointed out that I was a pawn all along. The people of St. Gregory’s School needed a schoolboy hero to prove that their narrow way of looking at the world was right and proper. Then at Harvard I played into similar hands, always wanting to prove myself within the system, the system that had been around for three hundred years. My making such a success out of my career made the complacent old fogies even more complacent. God really did go to Harvard. I was a pawn in a huge game, and it didn’t really matter what I thought my duty was, the outcome was inevitable. My ‘rigid sense of duty’—as your mother called it—was my blinders. It kept me seeing the world the way I wanted it and kept me from looking into the heart of darkness.”

“And a cell in Gestapo headquarters changed that?”

“You have a lot of time to think.” He looked away. “I kept wondering how they could do what they were doing. Torturing adults is one thing, but I heard they were torturing children! That was it for me, thinking about the children. And then I began thinking about Hitler—the king of the darkness and about finding him as a child. And I thought of my awful last conversation with my father.” Dilly went silent for a moment, then looked over at Wheeler. “I told you I had thought of Vienna because of Mother,” he said, “but that was not really the case. It started because of Hitler. I reconstructed Vienna in my mind because I wanted to put my fingers around his scrawny little neck and squeeze the life out of him.

“That torture is awful stuff. You’ve got to do something to keep your mind off it, so I just thought more and more about him and then about him as an eight-year-old child, and then about Vienna. Pretty soon it occupied my every moment, reconstructing the details of this time and place and piecing together all that my mother and the Haze had told me.” He raised his hands and gestured out to the world of Vienna in 1897. “I created the Ringstrasse. That was it, the Ringstrasse. I re-created the buildings, the trees, the parks, the music, the food. I began to imagine my father and my mother, as they would have been as young adults.

“It was like a detailed journal in my head. I wrote in it painstakingly page by page every day, giving lifelike details to each person—the coffeehouse intellectuals, the famous men like Freud and Mahler, my father, my mother, and you. I even imagined the story that my mother used to tell about a meeting with Gustav Mahler and how she fainted dead away from the shock.”

Wheeler’s eyes had not moved from his father’s face. He watched him with complete attention. “And pretty soon I couldn’t tell fact from fantasy. And pretty soon—”

“You were actually here,” Wheeler said.

“Exactly. I had to pinch myself.”

“But you were actually in Vienna.”

“That’s right,” Dilly said. “And then I realized how much I had botched it.”

“How’s that?”

“I should have spent my time calling up your mother. How I would love to see her!”

“And you realize it will not be too long until 1914 when I am reborn—” Dilly continued a while later. He frowned and looked over at Wheeler. “Unless you have fouled that up with all your attention. You know,” he said, frowning, “you really should have stayed far away from her.”

“You know about that?”

“I know enough,” Dilly said.

Wheeler looked down at his feet, but couldn’t hold it for long. “It is worse than you think,” he said, looking Dilly in the eye.

Dilly snapped his head around and glared at Wheeler, and then saw too much written in his son’s face. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “How long?”

“Quite a while.”

“And how bad?”

Wheeler grimaced. “Pretty deep, I fear.”

“Does Frank Burden know?”

“He’s seen us together, I think.”

“Oh lord,” Dilly said, rolling his eyes. “You certainly have a feel for drama.”

“There’s more.” Wheeler looked into Dilly’s pale face. “I ran into him. He seemed pretty angry.”

Dilly frowned. “That’s great,” he said in a rare moment of sarcasm. “That’ll fix things up just fine.” Then he thought for a long moment. “I guess I have created a monster. I just needed a way to get out of my cell at Gestapo headquarters, and look what we have now.”

Wheeler became aware suddenly that Dilly was not angry that he and Weezie had become intimate, and the reason was beginning to sink in. “You really think you created all this, that you gave it all life?”