The Little Book (56 page)

Weezie kept her eyes locked on his. “Oh, I fear that it is.”

“And where does my assistance come in?”

“I need to tell you that a few days ago a man came to me, a man from San Francisco. He provided some shocking information. It seems that he was a business partner of Mr. Truman, and because he felt he had been betrayed, he wanted me to know the truth, to protect me, he said. He told me that Mr. Truman was a very experienced and well-traveled confidence artist and that he was out to get my money and that this man and Mr. Truman were in the process of victimizing Frank Burden also. I need to add here that Mr. Burden and I are both from very wealthy Boston families.” The moment she began telling this part of the story, she could see the thoughts whirring through the cerebral doctor’s mind.

“And what is this man’s name?”

“He is Mr. Robert Dilly.”

Dr. Freud took a moment to process the information. “How did you react to this Mr. Dilly’s information?”

“Not well, I fear. I knew of Mr. Dilly because I had met him before. He is quite an accomplished musician, as is Mr. Truman, and we had played some music together, which I now see was part of the plot to draw me into their confidence. Because I was desperately and shamefully in the thrall of Mr. Truman, I decided to disregard Mr. Dilly’s information and follow my seducer wherever he went.”

“You know that you are not the first woman to have found herself in such a position,” Freud said. His attempts to comfort were touching.

“As for Frank Burden, they had befriended him also and were in the process of enticing him into an investment. They had acquired his hotel room key and were about to steal from him some personal papers that would allow them access to his private dealings and his bank account.”

“And you believed this story?”

“I did. Mr. Dilly acknowledged that Mr. Truman was indeed from San Francisco, but he had traveled through Europe for many years, victimizing young American travelers. He said, by way of example, that he and Mr. Truman had just recently traveled to a town near Vienna because Mr. Truman had fathered a child some years ago, and the mother was asking that he provide some funds for the child’s schooling. Mr. Truman borrowed money from Mr. Dilly to pay the woman, and Mr. Dilly feared that in traveling to the town Mr. Truman intended to do the child harm, although nothing transpired on the trip. Mr. Dilly had recently discovered that Mr. Truman intended to leave Vienna with me and the money they had inveigled from Frank Burden.”

Freud looked concerned. “And Frank Burden discovered the plot?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Why do you say that?”

“Why then did he show up at Frau Bauer’s with a gun?”

Weezie gave Dr. Freud a look of seemingly genuine confusion. “I do not follow,” she said.

“Mr. Burden, why did he come forward?”

“I am still not following.” She paused, summoning all her courage to look hard into the doctor’s face. “You have never seen Frank Burden,” she said. “Have you?”

“I have not,” Freud said.

“He is slightly overweight, slightly portly, and has balding red hair.”

Now it was Dr. Freud who looked confused. “I assumed—” he began.

“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “That was not Frank Burden,” she said emphatically. “That was Mr. Dilly.”

“And I saw you approach him and take something from him. What of that?”

“I told him he had better depart quickly—I don’t know why I said that—and I demanded that he give me the key to Frank Burden’s room.”

Freud needed a moment to think. “You mentioned an illegitimate child. You don’t happen to have a name and the name of the town.”

Weezie shook her head. “I am sorry, but that was a detail I wasn’t able to absorb. The whole story came as quite an enormous shock to me.” She looked very distressed, then suddenly remembered. “Wait a moment, ” she said. “I wrote it down.” And she opened her small handbag and began fingering in it. “Here it is,” and she handed a slip of paper to the doctor.

He took the slip and examined it, and she could see his head whirring. “Adolf Hitler,” he said, “Lambach.” He paused and looked up at her and said, almost under his breath, “Very interesting.” Weezie said nothing. “And now what do you want from me?”

“Dr. Freud, you are astute enough to see that I am in very grave despair. I intend to extract myself from this very disturbing situation as soon as the Viennese police will allow. I intend to return to Boston, to recover my equilibrium, and to marry Mr. Burden, if that is still a possibility. He had nothing to do with this frightful mess, and it is very important to me that his name not be dragged into it in any way. I know that Frau Bauer will tell the police of your close relationship with Mr. Truman, and I know they will come to you for information.”

Freud nodded. “The police have already contacted me, and we have an appointment this afternoon.”

“Then, I have come none too soon. I know also that in the complicated story Mr. Truman told you that Frank Burden seems to be implicated, and I assure you he is not. To be quite selfish about it, the best outcome for me is for Frank to return to Boston, and for him not to hear anything about the death of the unfortunate Mr. Truman.” She did her best to fully collect herself. “I cannot stress that strongly enough.”

“So you want me to leave any mention of Mr. Burden out of my story to the police?”

“That is all I can ask. I will leave him out of mine, and I can only implore you to leave him out of yours.”

Dr. Freud thought for a moment. “I think that can be done.”

“I thank you more than you can know,” she said and after some brief parting conversation she prepared to leave.

“I know this has been a great shock to you, Fraulein Putnam,” he said at the door. “If there is any way I can help, I hope you will return.”

“Thank you. You are very kind,” Weezie said. “But I intend never to bother you again.”

Her conversation with Dr. Freud seemed to have served well its purpose— the police never made the connection to Frank Burden—but that fact brought little relief. The darkness settled on her more and more, and she sank deeper and deeper into despair. She stayed in her room and left only to take long walks by herself. Fraulein Tatlock expressed her concern by bringing food to her room on trays, but Weezie ate little. At night, she slept only briefly and then fitfully, the dark figure visiting so menacingly and with such regularity that she would cry out. This went on for almost a week, endlessly. And then one night something very strange happened. She had slept soundly for what must have been two hours; then the dark figure came to claim her, and off to the side of the bed she saw something glittering and stirring, and the black figure retreated, hung back, then vanished. Beside her bed was the figure of the goddess, with her fierce eyes, gold helmet, and medallion of the petrifying Medusa. She said nothing, only smiled, powerful and confident, and pointed across the room to the table where there sat a neat stack of blank papers and a fountain pen. Slowly, painfully Weezie rose from the bed and moved to the table, sat down, picked up the pen, and began to write. Suddenly, all the words they had spoken about Vienna and music and Gustav Mahler and the waltz, some his, some her own, began pouring out of her. She wrote that night for what must have been two hours, and then she walked back to bed and fell asleep, and just as she was falling away, she glimpsed the goddess standing over her, beautiful, wise, noble, and tall, and somehow she knew that that figure would be with her for the rest of her stay in Vienna and for the rest of her life.

Weezie’s own questioning by the Vienna police continued as an ordeal, forcing her to stay in this city that now held such painful memories. It began at the scene at the time of the murder when Weezie told them quite honestly that she and Mr. Truman had been close, and she gave them her address at Fraulein Tatlock’s. Finally, after three weeks of periodic questioning, in which there had been no mention of Frank Burden, they returned her passport and said she was free to leave the city. The last night she was sitting with Fraulein Tatlock, thanking her for all she had done, and the cheerful lady looked at her and said, “Was it Frank Burden?”

Weezie was caught totally by surprise. “What on earth makes you ask that?”

“The descriptions.”

Weezie paused, looked the old Viennese in the eye, and took her hand and squeezed. “It is very, very important that you not think that.”

And Fraulein Tatlock said, “I understand.” And years later, when Eleanor Putnam Burden heard that there were rumors, she conjectured that Fraulein Tatlock had been the source, certainly not Sigmund Freud.

She bid a tearful farewell to Fraulein Tatlock and left, first by train to Paris, then by boat from Le Havre. During her month of forced stay and the passage home, she wrote continuously on music and Vienna and Gustav Mahler. In New York, on her way back to Boston, she stopped by the
New York Times
office and handed an editor the lengthy manuscript.

“Something of significance?” he said with a smile, remembering Weezie’s promise in going to Vienna in the first place.

Weezie shrugged. “Catharsis,” she said. “Jonathan Trumpp has written his last.”

The editor weighted the manuscript in his hand. “This is a whole book,” he said with an amazed and a proud smile.

“I wish it titled
City of Music
,” Weezie said with authority.

When Eleanor Putnam returned home, she was rarely called Weezie again. As time passed, she could recall the memories of her time in Vienna and with Wheeler Burden with poignancy, then joy, then inspiration. She could even revisit the fateful last moments outside Frau Bauer’s as she knelt beside him, this remarkable man who was the love of her life. As time passed, she remembered less and less the awful feeling of loss and more and more the beatific smile and the last words that held her entire future.

“We will waltz again,” he had whispered, words she now cherished above all others.

“I have an enormous responsibility,” she had said at the end, holding his hands, struggling to gain control, struggling to find that Athena strength he had said was within her all along.

Wheeler’s eyes were fixed on hers, and he could muster only enough strength to nod.

Her eyes were filled with tears now, but they shone with the ancient fierceness that came up from primordial fires. “You must know this,” she said, squeezing his hands. “It seems too much—”

“You are up to it,” he said with what breath he had left.

“Too much—” She paused. “But I can do it. You must know this, Wheeler Burden, the love of my life. You must know that I
am
up to the task, and I can do it.”

He smiled at her. “I know,” he whispered.

“I can do it for you. For all of us.”

“That’s good” were Wheeler Burden’s last words.

This time around.

Acknowledgments

This novel had its beginnings over thirty years ago when my friend Steve Cohen was reading
Wittgenstein’s Vienna
by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, and he and I began theorizing about transporting ourselves there. I was in graduate study at Stanford University that year, and during the spring term, I submitted the first draft of the story as an independent study for a visiting professor from Rutgers named George Levine. Over the years since then, as I expanded, refined, and embellished the story, I became grateful to many sources, among the best being the Janik and Toulmin book;
Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
, by Carl E. Schorske;
The Eagles Die: Franz Joseph, Elisabeth, and Their Austria
, by George R. Marek;
The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile
, by Paul Hofmann;
Freud: A Life for Our Time
, by Peter Gay; and
The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought
, by my Princeton classmate Bill Everdell. It is the Schorske book especially that has most inspired me over the years and that first made me realize that fin de siècle Vienna was a rich time worthy of my greatest efforts. And it is Schorske’s book that served as model for the Haze’s magnificent “Random Notes” and Wheeler’s subsequent bestselling
Fin de Siècle
.

Wheeler Burden, of course, came to life over the years and developed an identity all his own, but the details of his story were enriched by three influences. Much of his early life comes from my growing up on a prune and almond farm in northern California and my journeying east to Boston for prep school. His middle years with baseball and music were inspired by my friend, another Princeton classmate, Doug Messenger. And his rock-star success, from Woodstock through Altamont and Berkeley, is inspired by another friend, David Crosby. To Doug and David I am grateful.

The novel’s discovery and success after all this time came about thanks to an extremely fortuitous sequence. My basketball friend Milt Kahn recommended a gifted freelance editor in New York named Pat LoBrutto. Pat was invaluable in helping me see and develop a unity within my story that had evaded me for thirty years. Pat recommended the manuscript to an extraordinary literary agent, Scott Miller, at Trident Media. Scott recommended it to my very talented and attentive editor, Ben Sevier, who presented it beautifully and passionately to his team at Dutton, and suddenly the project was on its way to becoming a book. The faith and enthusiasm that Dutton has shown for my novel has been overwhelming and heartening beyond words. During the long and arduous process of converting manuscript to book a number of people played key roles. I am indebted to Randall Klein at Trident; Brian Tart, Trena Keating, Erika Imranyi, Lisa Johnson, and Rachel Ekstrom at Dutton; and my readers Mike and Bobbi Wolf, Louis Sanford, Mallard Huntley, Susan Coats, Jano and David Tucker, Beth Clements, Barbara Kimmel, my sister Hannah, and fellow writer, Dan McCaslin, a Schorske buff. To this list I add Jim Davidson, a friend and patient advisor. My children, Nan Pickens, Paula Edwards, Kirsten and Bruce Edwards, sharp and perceptive readers all, lent loving support along with timely and wise commentary. And of course, my wife Gaby, ever the attentive and well-read English teacher and editor, read the manuscript aloud and attended to each page with devoted care.