The Little Book (50 page)

That night as Wheeler was preparing for bed he noticed that his journal was missing. He looked for it everywhere. He even walked over to the Café Central to see if he had left it there. Losing it had given him a cold clammy feeling, and he was about to spend an agonizing sleepless night when he remembered very vividly laying it on a table in the studio as he was picking up the instruments to cart them back to the music store.

He rose at his usual hour the next morning and had a short breakfast before heading over to the studio. He let himself in and walked to the table where he knew it would be. There was no journal. A cold terror grabbed at his gut as he turned slowly to the window seat where Weezie had sat that first day, looking like a painting by Vermeer.

She sat gazing at him with a curiously vacant expression. All the color seemed gone from her face. In her lap, opened to the middle pages was his journal.

“Have you read it?” he said, a painfully obvious question. She nodded. “The whole thing?”

She nodded gently and continued her vacant stare. “I stayed up most of the night,” she said. “From cover to cover.”

52

What Had to Happen

I have to admit it,” Dilly said, looking pale and drawn, standing beside the bed in his rented room, “that music was beautiful.” He reconsidered. “No, it was better than beautiful.” He was picking up steam. “It was jim dandy. It has given me a whole new lease on life.”

“I thought you were going to shoot me,” Wheeler said, now sitting on the bed beside him.

“It was the right thing to do. Everything is the right thing to do. The future will be the future. For things to turn out as they did, for Mother. This is what had to happen.”

“Everything?”

“Everything! She told me that in confidence one evening, when I was in law school, when I was pressing hard for information about the Hyperion Fund’s unusual investment history, that what happened to her in Vienna changed her life forever, ‘in ways you will understand later,’ she said. I’m beginning to understand. And one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You know that old book I found in her bookcase, snooping?” Wheeler nodded. “The one where in 1932 I found that passage about the gentleman that I used in my graduation speech?” Wheeler again nodded. “The one that contained a detailed investment strategy for the twentieth century. I know now what that book is,” he concluded and stared at Wheeler until he received a nod. “Mother has to have that book to become the woman she becomes.”

Wheeler looked uncomfortable. “Well,
that book
is now safely stored away among my things.”

“It’s all right,” Dilly said, as if having seen a vision. “Don’t you see? Whatever happens happens. I was supposed to tell the Gestapo my secret. You were supposed to meet up with Weezie. Whatever has happened has happened.” He looked very much at peace.

“You’ve changed your tune, then?”

“I’ve realized what has had to be. And now it has. And now you and I are free to go. It will be painful for Weezie, but she will be all right. We, of all people, know that. She will become a great woman.”

This was Dilly’s famous mind over matter springing into action. He was going to take over and get them both out of this mess. You could see it in the sparkle that was struggling to replace the dull gray that had settled in his eyes over the past few days.

“We have enough clothing, and Dr. Freud has loaned you enough money for us to live for a while, until we can find jobs and build up some reserves. We have your flying disks and a wealth of twentieth-century talents and imagination. We could eventually set ourselves up well somewhere in Europe and earn enough money for the passage to New York, where we would be at home with the language and the geography.” He was talking himself into health, not entirely effectively, Wheeler could see. “We could even try our luck as baseball players,” Dilly continued, “introducing that prongball thing of yours to the national game. Maybe eventually we could even buy a piece of land in the Sacramento Valley and start a farm. We can even start doing some investing; we both know where to place our money, and what to avoid. Considering our enormous differences of personality, I think we could both be happy and productive with a long partnership.”

He pulled a pocket watch from his vest pocket and eyed it, then looked up at Wheeler. “We want to be careful with time. The train leaves in an hour.”

Their train ticket from Nordbahnhof was for Budapest, where, traveling with forged American passports as Hoover and Truman, they planned to begin as street performers or perhaps find a band that needed a couple of hack musicians. “We’ll be like a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movie.” It was a simple matter of planning, Dilly said, and of exploring all the options.

“I suppose nothing can be done,” Wheeler said finally, with a tone of restrained exasperation that brought things back down to earth, at least for a moment. “She will return home to Boston and marry that arrogant prick.”

Dilly looked over at him, surprised for a moment. “I would have said it a little more evasively.”

“I was looking for a stronger word,” Wheeler said. “But my vocabulary failed me.”

“He really is—” Dilly paused as if searching his own vocabulary. “—a little severe,” he said with a faint smile to Wheeler’s back. “Isn’t he?”

“What I don’t get is the mechanics of it. I mean, how in hell is she going to bring herself to marrying the guy?”

“She just will,” Dilly said firmly. “That’s all.”

“But, I mean, how? What on earth will provoke it?”

“After she had met you?” Dilly said with a kind of nonjudgmental clarity that now caught Wheeler by surprise. Dilly was smiling understandingly.

“I would have said
that
a little more evasively,” Wheeler said. He had risen and turned back to the canal scene out the window.

“It will just happen,” Dilly said, sitting down on the bed beside Wheeler’s packed bag. “That’s all we need to know.”

“I guess she’ll want to shake the memory of all this.” Wheeler’s heart sank, as he thought of losing her. He gestured with his hands out toward the world of Vienna, a new frustration showing on his face. He knocked the flat of his hand against the window casement.

Dilly shrugged. There was a surprising lawyerlike certitude in his voice. “What am I supposed to say? She’s going to get over it and you. She’s going to return to Boston.
And
, she is going to marry Frank Burden. Maybe because she’ll have a mental collapse and forget this whole nasty business, maybe because she’ll figure out that’s the only way this story can unfold again, her destiny, you could say. Maybe because she will simply find a way to fall in love with him. Who knows? Anyway it happens, she’ll marry the man.” Dilly paused and waited. “And it’ll be a good thing for the two of us.”

“I was really worried that, you know, that he was going to—” Wheeler stopped, more incredulous than concerned.

“You thought something sinister was going to happen?”

“The thought had occurred to me,” Wheeler said.

“Well, nothing’s going to happen in Vienna,” Dilly said. “We’re gone for good.” He held up the two railway tickets to Budapest.

“Right.” Wheeler looked off in the distance, shaking his head slowly. “It’s my story anyway, not yours.”

“Well, I know some of your story, don’t forget.”

“And you know what’s in Weezie’s future?” Dilly nodded, showing suddenly in his eyes a great sadness. “It will be so damned hard on her,” Wheeler said, striking the casement again. “She’ll get back to Boston, and life will return to normal. You and I will be out of her life, and it will be years perhaps before the first event.” There was an abstract emptiness to his voice. “The sinking of the
Titanic
, probably, or who knows?” Wheeler paused, as if noticing something in the street below. “That won’t be for fifteen years, so maybe she will have forgotten by then. But some of it will come back—the rising fame of Sigmund Freud, the arrival of Arnauld Esterhazy at St. Greg’s, World War in 1914, or—” He looked over at Dilly.

“The birth of her own son.”

“It will hit her sometime in there.”

“She will always know what’s coming.”

“Maybe she didn’t read very much,” Dilly said suddenly. “I mean, maybe she flipped through it quickly.”

“Wishful thinking,” Wheeler said with a sickening finality. “If you could have seen the look in her eyes, you’d know. You of all people know how persistent she is. She attached to that thing like a lamprey.”

“You took it back from her, right?” Dilly said.

“I’ve got it safely packed away in my bags, I told you that. At least she won’t have it with her. You know how damn thorough she is.”

A heavy silence fell between the two men, as if for the first time they both realized what it all meant. “If only you hadn’t been so detailed in writing it,” Dilly said with a sad, almost admiring smile. “She’s going to be a damned Cassandra. To know the future and be powerless to do anything about it . . .” His voice dwindled away into the profundity of the thought.

She would watch Hitler grow like an evil flower. The child in Lambach would lose his father at fourteen, become the art student in Vienna, and the political activist in Munich, where in prison he would write
Mein
Kampf
. He would rise to become chancellor of Germany, then spread his hatred throughout the world. Weezie would see all this, knowing what would happen next, knowing how the hate would kill her own son.

Dilly cringed this time. “She is going to have a great effect on the world because of what she is going to know, both the good and the bad. That’s what I found out in my law school research. She caused things to happen. Major things.” He paused to think. “When you put it all together, it is pretty impressive, amazing even. In 1909, she made the major contribution to Clark University that created the conference that brought Sigmund Freud to America and launched him. A few years earlier, it was Mother who gave
The Interpretation of Dreams
to her family friend William James at Harvard. Around that same time, she arranged the gift to the New York Philharmonic to bring Gustav Mahler for his tenure there, and Mahler’s initial fame in New York came from a little book by a pseudonymous author named Jonathan Trumpp, and you know who that was.”

At first Wheeler could only stare, letting the words sink in. “Wait,” he said suddenly. “What are you saying?”

“Mother was Jonathan Trumpp,” Dilly said. “I thought you knew that.”

“No!” Wheeler was stunned.

“It’s true.”

The revelation was still sinking in. “Eleanor Burden,” he said slowly, “your mother, the Weezie Putnam who is now here in Vienna wrote
City of Music
, the Haze’s beloved ‘Little Book.’ ”

“Yes,” Dilly said.

“I can’t believe it.”

“It’s true. The best of well-kept secrets, but I figured it out that year in law school. Mother made me promise never to tell anyone.”

Wheeler was still shaking his head. “That Trumpp book was in the Haze’s collection, heavily marked up by him. I used it for writing
Fin de Siècle
. I practically memorized it. He used a lot of it in his famous ‘Random Notes.’ ”

“It was pure Mother. The reason she came to Vienna in the first place, I think, published when she returned to Boston. It was a big hit.”

“She says she’s abandoned it.”

“Well,” Dilly said, shrugging. “She is going to go back to it.” He shrugged again. “Unless you have really fouled things up.”

“Right. And you know about her investments and the avoidance of the crash in twenty-nine. Then in the thirties she made the significant gift to Princeton University Press that began the publication of the complete works of Carl Jung, whom she is going to meet in 1909. You know that, right?” Wheeler nodded. “She funded women’s suffrage activities, citizen’s rights movements, peace movements, anything that promoted introspection and tolerance. And the list went on and on. And there was always a theme to it.”

“And what was the theme?”

“That was what I could never get my arms around. It was all Vienna-connected, that’s for sure. And it all had to do with introspection, and self-discovery and psychological depth, but that was as far as I got.”

Wheeler suddenly looked pensive. “Flora’s book!” he burst out. “It was when I was pretty lost in Victor Hugo and baseball and the mythology book my grandmother sent me on my ninth birthday and I totally memorized, so I never really marveled at it. But a representative from a Boston press came to her out of the blue and solicited it. Mother was in her reclusive period, you might say, and she did nothing but pull together all her thoughts, a lot of it from conversations she and I’d had about mythology, and it became
Persephone Rising.
It was beautifully written. I wish you could see it. The book seemed to take off on its own, sort of what they called a cult classic, and you know that it has been credited as the beginning of the American feminist movement.”

“Athenaeum Press, a Hyperion Fund creation?” Dilly broke in.

“Right. And my book, the Haze’s book,
Fin de Siècle
,” Wheeler said. “Same thing. A guy shows up, again out of the blue, again from Boston, and offers me a contract. I always thought that some St. Greg’s alum found me, but it wasn’t, it was Athenaeum Press.”

“And that was after she was gone. Posthumous instructions from Mother.”

“It’s funny,” Wheeler said, shaking his head. “That book is really the reason I’m here. The notoriety I got from it sort of did me in.”

“So you see,” Dilly said. “It was all the work of one person. She caused it all to happen, always behind the scenes and anonymous, but always the instigator. The list is a long one. She was more of a force than either you or I know.”

“She will be all right, then?” Wheeler let out a sigh of great relief.

Dilly stared at him hard. “You know that. You saw her at the end. You know what a force she became.”