The Little Book (51 page)

“Right now, the whole thing feels like a huge mistake.”

“I hated what you did,” Dilly said, “and I certainly do not want to know the details. But you did what had to happen. You gave her what she needed to have to become the mother I knew and the woman of influence she was.” Dilly paused, as if weighing what he was about to conclude. “What has happened has had to have happened, just exactly as it has for Mother to be Mother. We did all this
for her
!”

Wheeler looked into Dilly’s face. “We are leaving out one detail, of course.”

“And that is?”

“The whole cycle.” He looked out at Vienna. “She’ll know all this too.” With his hand he swept out toward the city. “She’ll know that we all end up back here at the end of each loop.”

“And that’s consolation?”

Wheeler turned back from the window and faced Dilly. There was a look of deep resolve in his eyes. “Isn’t it for you?” And then his eyes surveyed his father in front of him, seeing objectively for the first time perhaps how he had wasted away in the past few days. “You don’t look so good,” he said.

“I think I need to lie down,” said the tireless Dilly Burden. “I think this might be it.”

53

The Last Burden

We’re getting a second chance, you and I,” Dilly said, lying nearly motionless on the bed in his small rented room. "That’s what we get out of all this, I’ve concluded.”

"I’ll buy it,” Wheeler said.

"We’ve had this time together, to find out things. How it all turned out.”

“Can you tell me one more then?” Wheeler said. He wanted to take advantage of their newfound candor.

“No limits now,” Dilly said, smiling, with barely enough energy to lift his head. “You have blown the cover off my ironclad limits.”

“What happened between you and your father that Christmas you came home from London?”

“Christmas of 1943,” he said, letting his mind drift. “Funny, it seems so long ago. I brought your mother and you home. You were almost three, and a pretty chipper little guy. We came over by the
Queen Mary
, on its way back from delivering troops. The war was going full-bore, but the Admiralty pretty much insisted that I take the time off. They said I was overworked and needed the rest. Your mother and I had a most wonderful time on the crossing. We sat and read to each other and, when you fell off to sleep—”

“You made marvelous and noisy love on the ship bunks.”

“Good lord, you remember?”

Wheeler laughed. “It’s all right. Mother told me.”

A soft smile crossed Dilly’s lips. “Your mother
would
have told you that. She was what we used to call
liberated.
” He closed his eyes to savor the moment, and then continued. “I had not seen my parents for a long time, and I was looking forward to showing off my wife and my beautiful son, to them and to Arnauld Esterhazy. The visit went well. Mother was in heaven having us in the house, and she and I had long talks together. She was unusually fond of her grandson, I think. And your mother was for her a happy addition: Flora minded herself and did not bring up some of her wilder ideas.”

“Such as sexual liberation and pacifism.”

“To mention a few,” Dilly said with a smile. “It was not until near the end of our visit that Father and I had our time alone. I think I have told you that my father and I were not very close. There was not any animosity between us, but on the other hand we had never talked about much of substance. He was, of course, very proud of my athletic accomplishments at his old schools, and he often told me stories of how it had been in his day and what the 1896 Olympic games in Athens had been like, but we did not share much in the way of ideas.”

Dilly stopped. “Say, I could sure use a glass of water,” he said, and Wheeler poured a glass from the porcelain pitcher on the bureau and held it while Dilly drank. “Mighty good,” he said, then continued.

Frank Burden and his son retired to the oak-paneled study and closed the door. “I am glad we can have these moments alone,” the father said, after Dilly had turned down the offer of a cigar but accepted the brandy. “There is much to talk about. I wanted you to know how much I admire what you have done in the war effort.”

“These are extraordinary times,” Dilly said.

“I am glad that you are content with a minor role in these last months. I fear things will not be pretty before the peace.”

“The peace?” Dilly said innocently.

“The invasion is coming. We all know that. Eisenhower’s attack will be enormous, and Hitler’s defense will be ferocious. Both sides will exhaust themselves, I fear, and there will be a negotiated peace.”

“You think the invasion will fail.”

Frank Burden took a long appraising look at his son. “Hitler’s defenses are stronger than anyone knows. So much emphasis has been put on air power that everyone has forgotten where his power really lies. It is in the tanks, his Panzer divisions. They are exceedingly mobile and can be moved anywhere in Europe in a matter of days. That is what the Autobahns are for.” Frank Burden looked into his son’s eyes. “The Panzer divisions are the key to the whole thing.”

“But the invasion force is stronger than anyone realized,” Dilly said.

“I’m merely talking strategy,” Frank said. “The invading forces will be successful in the opening days, then the Panzers will attack, right at the time when the invasion forces are most vulnerable, before the supply lines are established.”

“Are you saying the invasion will be a failure?”

The father could see the look of shock in his son’s eyes. “Standish, Standish, I am just being a realist. I am an American, a patriot, you know that. But we must prepare for reality. Hitler will sue for peace, and Franklin and his friend Winston Churchill will come to their senses. We will all come to our senses. The war will be over in a year, and both sides will lick their wounds and begin the recovery.”

“The Germans will stay in France?”

“European borders,” Frank said dismissively. “They change every hundred years. Look at what we now call Italy. Look at what used to be Austria-Hungary. ”

“I can’t believe you are saying this,” Dilly said.

“Realism, my son. Simply realism. The new Europe is coming, and we need to position ourselves. That is why you need to stick to your minor role right now, and you need to prepare yourself.”

“Prepare myself?” Dilly said, not understanding.

“You are being watched, believe me. You have been watched all along: the football, the music, the catch you made against Yale, that law school brilliance, now the war heroics. Believe me, my son, people have noticed. When the peace comes, there will be an international financial community, one of great power and reach.”

Dilly stopped him. “Are you saying that Berlin will control things?”

“Not Berlin,” Frank said confidently.

“London, then?”

Frank shook his head. “International banking, a new world order, a new way of doing things. You will be getting the call.”

“Wait,” Dilly said. “You’re losing me. Not London, not Berlin, then where?”

“Vienna,” Frank Burden said. “It is all set. The financial interests are ready to pull together and move there. That magnificent city with its rich history is now free.”

Dilly stared at his father, incredulous. “Free?” he said, dreading what was coming next.

Frank Burden tapped his cigar in the ashtray. “In the emperor’s Vienna there were two hundred thousand Jews. The Jews controlled everything, the newspapers, the arts, and especially the banks. They had a strangle-hold on it all. And now—” He tapped his cigar again. “Now, they are gone. The city is free. We funded him, and he has done his job, a little brutishly, I fear, but the job is done.”

“Wait,” Dilly said again, struggling to keep up. “You funded Hitler?”

“In the early days, when he was just getting started, there was a group of us who were well positioned. We made him, you might say, and I happened to be in the right position to pull it all together. Without that pulling together of banking interests, he would be—” Frank paused. “Well, he would have remained a former corporal and a failed postcard artist. We got him the money to found his Reich, and we got him the money for his Panzer tanks. It was an investment with enormous returns.”

“I can’t believe you are saying this,” Dilly said, staring in disbelief.

“Look, Standish, no one asked that it turn out this way, but a revitalized and industrialized Germany was an essential part of the formula. We all agreed on that. This is just simple reality. What has happened has happened. I am just advising you to the reality you might not have thought of. I am just encouraging you to keep your head down over there for the next few months. Wait it out. And when it is over, there will be a need for strong leadership. You will be getting a call. My son will be getting the call.” Frank Burden smiled proudly at his son. “I know because I know the people who will be making that call.”

Dilly could think of nothing to say. “Father,” he said finally, “Flora is a Jew. Your grandson is Jewish. The last Burden is a Jew.”

Frank Burden looked back at his son with that same matter-of-fact coldness, like a surgeon looking down at an inflamed appendix. “I have no grandson,” he said. “You are the last Burden.”

After he finished his story, Dilly was silent again, and Wheeler let out a soft sigh. “How horrible for you,” he said in little more than a whisper.

“Those were the last words I had with my father. It was at that awful moment that I decided to return to France and the Resistance.” Dilly’s head rested on the pillow. His eyes were closed and his lips puffed out with each breath. “That was when Mother told me that she and Frank Burden had lived very different lives, ‘parallel lives,’ she said. That was when Mother told me to go see Arnauld, alone.”

A long dark silence descended onto the room. “So you see,” he said slowly without looking over at Wheeler, using the compact language of someone who had few words left. “It appeared self-destructive perhaps. A mission of unreasonable risk.” He was coming near the end. “Not out of hatred for Hitler but, as Dr. Freud would pinpoint, to kill my father. But it wasn’t that. It was partly that I felt obligated to compensate for the awful influence of Frank Burden, granted, but there was more.” He fell silent again. Wheeler watched his own father and could see he was losing ground. His head barely came off the pillow now as he made his points, and his eyes became more and more hollow. “You know that your mother always blamed my tightly wound sense of duty, but this time it was more. I wanted to go because of what my father told me, yes. I wanted to go for the most sacred of reasons.” Wheeler said nothing, just let him continue. “I wanted to go for my son. I wanted to go for
you
.”

There followed another long silence, the two men just looking at each other, too far along now for any shyness. “Thank you,” Wheeler said. “It is the missing piece.”

“When I found out about my father, I thought the world had ended. Then I found out about the Haze and so very much fell into place for me. But, now, it doesn’t seem so important. Now that I have met you, I feel at peace. You are a good man, a tribute to your mother and me. I am so glad we met.”

“We’ve had a chance to see what each of us is like.”

“That is why I was sent here,” Dilly said in little more than a whisper. “A blessing for me.”

“You know,” Wheeler said, “I’ve never told anyone this, but when I edited the Haze’s ‘Random Notes’ in the seventies and eighties I found that the pages of that old loose-leaf binder were all different ages and conditions, and he was constantly changing the contents, over the years adding, subtracting, and consolidating from the boxes of papers in his closet. You could tell the progression of his thinking by the age of the paper. But what nobody knew was that the first page, the front of the Haze’s famous ‘Random Notes’ binder was the oldest and the most yellowed, the one that had been there from the start and had never changed. It was the dedication of a life’s work, I guess you’d say. And you know what it said?”

Dilly could barely move his head now. He nodded. “Tell.”

“It said, ‘To my son.’ ”

There was a stillness in the room that now had no time or place to it, an air that could only be described as sacred. “That’s good” was all Dilly said, but his smile told it all.

“You know I love you,” Wheeler said, reaching out and covering Dilly’s hand. “I have always loved you, Father.”

“That’s good,” Dilly repeated, then he whispered, “I love you—” He paused to savor the words. “—my son.”

“You’re slipping away,” Wheeler said, his eyes filled with tears. “You don’t have to, you know. There is a way—” There was now a desperation to his voice, and he leaned closer.

“It’s all right,” Dilly said, feeling the enfolding warmth of the hand, still smiling contentedly. “This time I’m trying for your mother.”

And Dilly Burden was gone.

PART FOUR

F
in de Siècle

54

A Powerful Resolve

As Wheeler stood at the window, taking in a last look out at the Danube Canal from the second-story window of his room at Frau Bauer’s, he felt heartsick about leaving Weezie. Once exhilarated by the thought of roving with Dilly, now he found there only a doubled sense of loss. The walls of his room were stripped bare and all that remained from his stay in Vienna was on the bed, a carpetbag with the few possessions he had managed to collect, including the suit he had stolen from Frank Burden on his first day and the journal, now safely back in his possession, into which he had written his last conversations with Dilly. For one last time Wheeler looked around the room that had been his home for this extraordinary time in Vienna, and his mind wandered as it had so many times back over the events and their causes.

His train ticket, one of two, was for Budapest. Why, he did not know really. It had been Dilly’s idea, seeming somehow more appropriate to head east for the time being, rather than to Paris or London. But first, if he showed up, he would travel with Freud to Lambach.