The Little Book (6 page)

It was right about that time that his mother’s extraordinary book was born. On one of their long walks in the bottomland, Wheeler began talking mythology, one of his favorite subjects at age twelve. His grandmother in Boston had given him a copy of Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology
for his ninth birthday with a note: “My dear Stan, I think you will find this according to your tastes,” and of course he had devoured it, in between Victor Hugo novels, and for a time, he could not have a conversation, see a movie, or read a newspaper article without referring to one Greek myth or another. One day, in the middle of one of their walks, he said, “Why doesn’t anyone think of Persephone’s side of the story?” His mother, long accustomed to the stream of thoughts that came from her son if she simply asked a prompting question or two, said, “What exactly is Persephone’s side of the story?” and out came a most remarkable string of thoughts that Flora went home and immediately wrote down in her notebook, not realizing at first the conversation’s critical role in her own life.

The young mythologist’s point was essentially that Persephone, the beautiful young daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, when forcefully abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, and taken away to his dark kingdom, is put in an awful fix. When her mother goes into mourning, the world is thrown into dark infertility, perpetual winter. Zeus gets involved and strikes a deal. Persephone can return to her mother for part of the year but will stay in the underworld as queen for part of the time. “She’s in a very bad position,” Wheeler said. “She has to be a little girl for her mother half the time and a big queen for her husband half the time. I don’t think anyone has been too interested in her side of the story.”

Over the course of the next few walks, Wheeler and his mother explored the subject in more depth. On each return to the house Flora wrote more and more in her notebook, until she and her son had pretty much exhausted Persephone’s point of view.

One day, not long after, Flora Burden had one of the strangest visits of her life. She was sitting in the ranch office, working on the books, when a man in a dark suit and tie came in asking for her. He introduced himself as Smallwood or Woodcock, or some such, and said he represented a small academic press on the East Coast. He had heard that she had been a student of Sigmund Freud in London and asked if she might wish to write a book derived from the experience. Flora explained that she had not actually been a student of Freud’s per se, but that she had been a psychiatry student in general, had been an admirer of Freud’s work, and had been in the inner circle of Londoners who had arranged for his move there in 1938.

“Did you actually meet him?” the man asked.

“Of course,” Flora answered a little dismissively, and she could see a look of genuine admiration on the man’s face. “I would not have missed
that
.”

“Well then, would you consider writing a book for us?”

At first, Flora insisted that there was not a book in her future. “I’m not that sort,” she said. “Thank you very much.” But then she saw the fat Persephone notes sitting on her desk. “There’s just this,” she said quickly, and handed it to Mr. Smallwood or Woodcock or whomever, who was staying the night at a local motel.

He came back the next day with a wild look in his eye. “This is it,” he said. “This is the book we were hoping for.”

And so Flora Burden worked for a year refining the ideas in her notes that Persephone represented the plight of the modern woman, raised by a patriarchal society to be the dutiful daughter, but expected by the responsibilities of the changing world to be the independent sovereign of her own life. “The counterweight to Freud’s Oedipus complex,” a reviewer in
The New Yorker
would say, “modern woman taking charge of her own destiny.” After much struggle with herself and further conversations with her son,
Persephone Rising
was born, published in 1955 in a thin volume under a pseudonym. It was Flora’s first literary effort, and it established her, a few years later, as one of the first voices, along with Betty Friedan’s
Feminine Mystique
, in the American feminist movement. More than forty years later the book was still read on college campuses, and the pseudonymous Flora Standish was still getting speaking invitations, most of which she turned down, at places like Berkeley and Northampton, Massachusetts, and Montreal. In all the times she appeared to talk about her book, as an act of motherly protection, she never really credited her main source, a somewhat erratic and hyperkinetic twelve-year-old boy who did little to control the stream of ideas that came when walking with his mother in the Sacramento Valley bottomlands. And she never talked about or explained the book’s dedication: “For Dilly.”

6

Going East

The idea of Wheeler’s going east for his last two years of high school had been something of an armistice between his mother and his Boston grandmother. The grandmother had wanted young Standish to come board at St. Gregory’s, where his father and grandfather, her husband, had gone. Wheeler was, after all, the last male to bear the Burden name, and he ought to get some sense of the family tradition. But the grandmother seemed to accept Flora’s argument that selfishly, perhaps, she wanted her son and only child near her during the impressionable years of adolescence. Actually, Flora wanted her young son to have nothing to do with the Burden family as long as the cruel and bigoted old grandfather was around.

Wheeler’s mother had never liked the Burdens, St. Greg’s, Harvard, or Boston, for that matter, knowing very little about them except for their influence on her husband, who—in spite of the fact that she had loved him desperately—had been very poorly served, she thought, by the combination. In fact, she had thought the whole business of schoolboy heroics, preserving tradition, and rigid sense of duty a dreadful influence that had probably contributed to his heroic and totally unnecessary death. All that duty and honor had taken a perfectly nice and bright young man and convinced him that he had to give his life for some cause. She did not like it, did not want her son to have any of it, and she put up stolid resistance.

But when the stern old grandfather Frank Burden died in 1956, during Wheeler’s freshman year in high school, Flora changed her mind about her son’s receiving the benefits of a cultured education in Boston. And when it came right down to it, she had always found Mrs. Burden thoughtful and considerate, and—very much like Flora herself—a generally no-nonsense sort of woman. It was just the thought of her being married to that awful man that soured Flora’s every impression. Now, the specter of him out of the way, the proper Mrs. Burden wanted Wheeler to learn Latin and German and wanted him to get some European history. She had always wanted him to be near her, a thought she had been expressing delicately and faithfully every month in letters. Flora, a woman famous for her resolve—sometimes thought of as stubbornness—finally relented. “There is only so much a single mother and a small farming town can do,” she said to Wheeler in putting forward the plan. “And there is more to education than reading all of Victor Hugo and throwing the baseball.”

Wheeler, who had suddenly and surprisingly added popular music to his narrow range of passions, had agreed to the plan not because he wanted to learn German and Latin, or because, as the last Burden, he wanted to be closer to his New England roots, but for the simple reason that he thought he would be near his new hero.

It was in the fall of his sophomore year, at a dance in the Feather River Union High School gymnasium, when he’d had another one of those life-altering experiences. The band, brought in from out of town, was playing music Wheeler had never heard before: country-and-western music with a rock-and-roll rhythm. Wheeler listened for two hours, barely able to concentrate on anything but the lead singer’s twang and the skip in his voice and the way he wiggled around as he sang. After the dance, he told Bucky Hannigan that the singer was a pure original and a genius. Bucky laughed and looked at him cross-eyed. “He’s just copying Tex-Mex,” he said. “Sucker’s just a poor fella’s Buddy Holly.”

It was the fall of 1956, when most of the world was going wild over Elvis Presley and had never heard Holly’s name. Bucky had family in Lubbock, Texas, and had heard the local star three times. He took Wheeler to the local radio station where the DJ had a tape of Tex-Mex groups and let Wheeler hear the real thing. Wheeler immediately retrieved his father’s old Martin guitar from its dusty case in the attic and began learning chords and picking out what he could remember of the songs.

In the spring of that school year when two Buddy Holly songs had made it to the Valley radio and to the national pop charts, he knew that Holly had traveled from Texas to New York City. Having an undeveloped sense of geography and how prep school students spend their time, Wheeler thought a Boston prep school would become a good launching pad for meeting his hero.

Frank Standish Burden III was out of place at St. Greg’s. In the words of his dorm master, a hockey player from Bowdoin College, “His classical training is flawed, he can only barely write a coherent sentence, and he has read next to nothing. Would that he could master more than the Frisbee. ”

The Frisbee remark derived from one of Wheeler’s great discoveries upon arriving at St. Gregory’s. From the moment he saw a group of the younger boys throwing the brightly colored plastic disks on the school’s broad green athletic fields his first weekend, he was captivated. “This must be something of the gods!” he exclaimed famously as his first disk came floating toward him. He did indeed master the skills of throwing and catching almost immediately, eventually earning the name “The Frisbee King,” one that stuck with him, especially among those original younger boys, throughout his time at the school.

But the strange young man from California developed nothing else of distinction in those first months, and he would have been asked to leave by Christmas had he not been the only son of Dilly Burden, the greatest hero ever to attend the school, and had he not been befriended by the Haze, the beloved history master, who grabbed hold of Wheeler the moment he set foot on campus as if it had been a sacred assignment.

Shortly after Wheeler’s arrival at St. Gregory’s, one of the younger boys came to get him in his dormitory room. “The Haze wants to see you,” the boy said cheerily. “He’s Mr. Esterhazy and he’s German or something and he’s lived in the dorm forever, but everyone calls him the Haze, although never to his face.” Then he paused with a quizzical look. “But I think he already knows you. He says he taught your father and that he knows your family and he is calling you the tabula rasa from California.” Wheeler had no idea what the Latin meant, but he sought out the old man anyway.

Wheeler still did not know the Latin an hour or so later when the old man fixed his watery blue gaze on him at the end of their first visit and intoned, “So, Herr Burden, you are here at last, and we begin scratches on your persona, the tabula rasa.”

Arnauld Esterhazy seemed to know everything about Wheeler, about the California provinces and small-town public education. Strangely, he also knew about the difficult transition to what his Brahmin grandmother was calling “the classical period” of his education. In fact, it was uncanny how the old man had picked him out and immediately knew all about his Boston grandmother, his hero father, his English mother, the rough details of his boyhood on the Sacramento Valley farm, even his prowess in throwing the baseball. From the moment the Haze sought him out on the first day and reached out his fine-boned hand, Wheeler felt an indefinable kinship and comfort with the old history master, something he had not felt before or later with anyone, regardless of age. It was, he realized much later, the feeling of complete understanding and unconditional acceptance.

The Haze’s apartment—his “rooms,” the old man called them—was a beautiful oak-paneled arrangement filled with knickknacks, small art treasures, and antiques, at the end of a dormitory corridor. “It’s a museum,” the boy who delivered Wheeler had said. “He’s lived there since he came during the time of Paul Revere,” all the boys said. It seemed foreordained that the Haze was taking the young Californian unquestioningly under his wing, and that was that.

“He’s always in a tie or ascot, and you’ll never see his bare arms,” an old boy told Wheeler in his first week. Even though he was near eighty and supposedly retired, Wheeler got the impression that the way the Haze looked and smelled now was the way he had looked and smelled even when he himself was a schoolboy in Vienna.

The boys told scattered tales of his background, most of them filled with grand myths about his having been a spy during World War I, how he had never married because of a long and secret love affair with a prominent Bostonian married woman, about how one of his St. Gregory’s boys years ago had actually been his son. But from the broad strokes, Wheeler pieced together the fine realities: how he came to St. Greg’s from turn-of-the -century Vienna in the first decade of the century and left mysteriously during the Great War. It was never clear exactly what he did except that sometime after the war’s end, he returned to the school, where he had to recuperate—from gassing, some said—for two years before taking on a full load again.

He had hit his stride during the late 1920s and never left, not returning to Europe, even in the summers, except for one ill-fated return in the midfifties, some years after Wheeler’s father was killed in Nazi-occupied France. He had never married and had never even been seen alone with a woman, it was said, although he was considered very social and invited to all the proper homes and parties. On rare occasions, over the years, it was said that he had told one group or another that he held the great Renaissance poet Dante as his model.

Dante had written his monumental
Divine Comedy
on the inspiration of a most beautiful Florentine woman named Beatrice, whom he had kept constantly before him as a vision but whom he had never married, never touched, even, and yet to whom he had remained indelibly faithful. “I am like Dante,” the Haze said on those rare occasions. “I have my own Beatrice. ”