The Little Book (16 page)

Freud would have sensed a change in his guest’s composure.

“What is it you want from me?” Sigmund Freud asked the intruder.

Wheeler thought for a long moment. “Perhaps we could trade. I need food, clothing, and a place to stay.”

Freud was unimpressed. “And what do I need?”

“Good male patients are hard to find, Herr Doktor.”

Freud smirked at the pretension that struck a little too close to home. “And what makes you think you would be for me a good patient?”

“I have a classic dilemma.”

“And what, pray tell, is this classic dilemma that would be of such great interest to me?”

Wheeler looked stunned and said nothing, his confidence evaporating. “I wouldn’t be believed,” he stammered.

Still waiting for some sign of the truth, the doctor said nothing, allowing his dark probing eyes to do their work. He rose slowly. “I am a busy man, Herr Truman—or whatever your name is. I see no reason for us to continue. I am not fond of being manipulated, and certainly not by someone who possesses all the mental faculties to know better.” He walked toward the door and spoke without looking back. “You will let yourself out, I assume.”

Wheeler was now in full panic, seeing his last hope of rescue slipping away. He stopped his reluctant host before he reached the door. “Wait!” he blurted out. Freud turned. The guest’s confident exterior had evaporated. Suddenly, an appearance of desperation had taken its place. He looked hungry, lost, and out of place in his ill-fitting suit. “I need your help, Dr. Freud.”

The doctor maintained his silence. He only stared at the pathetic visitor. Sigmund Freud was basically a kind man and did not wish to state the obvious: “And just why is your needing help of any interest to me?”

“My name is not Truman,” Wheeler said quickly, searching desperately for a change in the great doctor’s face, but seeing none offered more, words coming out in a stream, memories returning in a flood. “That is the name of a twentieth-century American president. My name is Wheeler Burden. The last thing I remember was San Francisco, just a few days ago.” He paused, and Freud would have seen that he was about to drop his bomb. “A few days ago, only it was 1988, at the end of next century.”

Freud had turned and taken a few steps back into the room, his interest now slightly piqued. “I was coming home from a bookstore,” Wheeler continued falteringly, “where I had gone for a signing. My new book—” He appeared now to be completely in the grip of returning memories that surprised even him. “My own book,” he said decisively. “And I was confronted by a man on my front steps. He had a gun. I knew this man, someone I hadn’t seen in years—” Wheeler was lost now in the trance of recall, suddenly not caring about the listener or the fine line he had planned to walk. “I just stared at him and began to slip away, at first terrified. I drifted and many thoughts and images came to me and then more and more of them involved scenes from the Ringstrasse, until I realized that was exactly where I was.”

He paused for a deep breath. Suddenly, he was looking at the doctor again, with an expression Freud would have characterized as both authentic and quizzical, one not even the most experienced con man could have counterfeited. “I came back a century to be here, Herr Doktor. I’ve been in Vienna now a couple of days.”

The great doctor stood near the doorway for a long moment, his eyes piercing the distance between them, taking in all that his guest’s unconscious was allowing to surface, aware that he was suddenly getting the truth.

“And there’s more,” Wheeler continued. He paused, trying to collect his thoughts, now desperate to keep the doctor’s attention, all hope of restraint now evaporated. “I think I am here for a purpose.”

“Yes?”

“I am here to tell you something.” Wheeler now looked uncomfortable, but no longer seeking approval.

“Well, Herr Burden,” said Dr. Freud, pausing then and taking a tentative step back into the room, his face betraying genuine empathetic concern. “We are making progress.”

Wheeler cleared his throat and looked away. Then his eyes drifted back to the surprisingly short man, surprisingly neat and precise, across from him in the fin-de-siècle Viennese study. “I am here to tell you—You will have to pardon me for saying this.” He spoke distinctly, all restraint and caution abandoned. “You will be known as one of the great minds of the twentieth century, some say the greatest mind. Your theories are taken as great cultural and psychological truths. You would be very pleased—” Wheeler paused and looked at Freud, who seemed remarkably calm, engaged, and waiting. “On some of it, sir, you are way off the mark.”

“So that is why you have come to see me now?”

“I have come to tell you, sir, that you are dead wrong.”

The great doctor stood for a moment, watching the face of his strange visitor, then he stepped back into the room. “It seems, Herr Burden, that we have much to talk about.” And the relationship between my son and the great doctor had begun.

15

Last Waltz

It was shortly after his grandmother’s funeral, in the Yale game, that Wheeler threw his legendary last pitch, “The Pitch,” as it became known.

He had been with his grandmother the last night. She had turned eighty-seven that winter, and her heart was not good. He spent time with her whenever he could, often arriving with stories of his adventures in school, in which she took unusual delight. He could not explain it, but somehow Wheeler felt completely comfortable and at home in his visits, able to sit with his grandmother and talk for hours or sit with her quietly and read. Sometimes he brought his guitar, once even bringing Joan Quigley.

That last night, Mrs. Spurgeon, the woman who had been with the Burden family for more than fifty years, cooked lamb with mint sauce and apple strudel for dessert. Wheeler and his grandmother dined together and moved to the living room after dinner. She was feeling very warm and nostalgic.

“These four years have been wonderful for me,” she said, looking across the couch at Wheeler. She seemed very tired. “I have felt very close to you and have seen you grow.” She paused and looked serious. “I know you will probably not stay at Harvard.” It sometimes astonished him that from the start she could intuit so much about him. “St. Gregory’s and Harvard have been good for you. Helped round off the edges. You have handled the assignment admirably,” she said with a warm smile.

“I have been a little too eccentric, Grandmother,” Wheeler said, in something of an understatement.

“You get eccentricity from your mother,” she said without apology. “That is a good thing. I have never told you this, but I always admired your mother. She was Jewish and a communist or a pacifist or whatever she was.” Wheeler had never heard his grandmother speak of his mother. “But I have admired her most for her life force. And she gave your father something he needed so very much.” She seemed to be floating back over time, and her eyes moistened. “They would have had a deeply fulfilling life together.” She paused and collected herself. “Your father was such a good man, so full of talent and purpose. But too stiff and Bostonian, I always knew. She had something he needed. One could see a miraculous change in him. Under her influence, he was less staunch, more in touch with things, but also more vulnerable, as if he had just begun to feel. It was quite miraculous, actually.” Then she seemed to drift even further away, into a resigned sadness. She released a small controlled sigh that came from the depth of her being. “What a shame he could not have lived past the war. You would have enjoyed his company.” Then she smiled in total enjoyment. “And he yours.”

“I would have loved that,” Wheeler said. “Just to get to know him and see what he was really like.”

“You and your mother were greatly deprived.”

“Mother suffered, I know.” The thought stopped him. “You know Mother is different,” Wheeler said. His grandmother picked up on the tinge of apology in his voice.

“Do not undersell your mother. She is better than the whole pack of us Burdens.” There was a genuine warm sincerity to her words that surprised Wheeler. He had always thought his mother something of an embarrassment to the Burden family. “And, oh, how your father loved her. She had—” His grandmother paused, and Wheeler waited. “She had ardor.” Years later Wheeler still remembered how she pronounced that word and her devilish little smile. She repeated the word. “Ardor. That is what your straitlaced Brahmin father needed.”

“He could do so much,” Wheeler said. “He seemed to be a Renaissance man.”

“Yes,” she said, “but he was missing life force. That is what she gave him. Life force.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, as if trying to withdraw the very essence of this living room that held so much of her history: her own childhood, her early years of marriage, raising two daughters, her life with her only son, and even her brief memory of Wheeler’s mother, the Jewish girl from war-ravaged London.

Suddenly the memory turned painful. “How I loved!” she clasped her hand to her chest. “No one should love that much.” Then as if by will, she drifted past the pain, even further back, and for a moment Wheeler thought she might fall away completely. “The waltz,” she whispered dreamily, and slowly opened her eyes. He was completely with her in that moment. What a beautiful woman she was. Then she snapped back.

“I would like to waltz,” she said with her famous resolve, and she rose from the couch, suddenly the tiredness giving way to a kind of affectionate formality. “I feel like dancing with my favorite grandson.”

She was twenty again, with a twinkle in her eye, and a burst of almost reckless energy. She walked over to the hi-fi and put on a record, then walked back toward him holding out her hands. “Shall we?”

“I don’t know how, Grandmother.”

“Nonsense. Everyone knows how to waltz. It’s in your fiber, waiting to be released.” She pulled him after her as she took little steps around the carpet. “One, two, three . . . One, two, three,” she whispered a few times, then let the gentle rhythm of the steps take over. Within no time they were dancing. “Isn’t it divine? When I was young, people would waltz until they dropped. It was absolutely wicked.”

The music seemed louder than usual for his grandmother’s house, and for an instant he found himself lost in it, forgetting he was dancing with his eighty-seven-year-old grandmother. She was lithe in his arms, and she seemed to pull him toward her. It was at once sensual and delicious. Her eyes were closed and she smiled as if in a fabulous reverie.

Wheeler had lost track of time. He felt for another moment in his life that he was in that state of flow, connected to all things in the universe. It felt absolutely wonderful.

Suddenly he thought of her heart. “We had better stop, Grandmother. Your—”

He paused and looked down at her beauty. He had no idea where it came from, but he had a sudden impulse to kiss her. He stood frozen and looked into her face for an interminable instant before her eyes fluttered open and she became aware of his rapture. “I hoped—” she said and guided them gracefully over to the couch. She took his hand in both of hers. “Thank you, my dear grandson. I hoped just for a moment that I would be taken away right then. Is that awful?”

“You have many more years,” Wheeler said bravely, as if suddenly he was the elder.

She squeezed his hand tightly. “Dear Wheeler—” She had never before called him by that name. “You will have to remember this for later. You will have to
know
this later.” The words were puzzling to him, but he did remember them for use later. Then the evening was over. “Thank you,” she said, “for giving your old grandmother an evening to hold forever. ” He looked into her face again and saw pure beauty. They parted, and he went to his room.

Mrs. Spurgeon came to get him at one thirty in the morning, wringing her hands. “You must come, Master Standish.”

His grandmother had expired in the night. She had been propped up on pillows, her reading light still on, and then had tried to rise from the bed apparently and had fallen awkwardly, as if trying to get somewhere suddenly. The book she was reading had fallen out ahead of her, and her hand reached toward it protectively. The book, which Wheeler barely noticed in that moment of great trauma, was an old leather-bound volume, a diary or journal of some sort. It would be picked up by Mrs. Spurgeon afterward and placed in a box of special things, out of circulation. Wheeler walked over to his grandmother and lifted her back onto the bed, and closed her eyes. Then he sat down beside her and he wept with a ferocity that surprised him and that he had never experienced before. He sat there, guarding her, until the men from the funeral home came and took her away from the house where she had spent her childhood, in the dead of night.

At her funeral at Trinity Church, one of the saddest events in Wheeler’s life, there was a huge collection of people. He sat in the front pew with his two aunts and his four girl cousins. Among the mourners was Arnauld Esterhazy, the Venerable Haze. The main eulogy was delivered by the Trinity rector, an old family friend, and an eminent churchman and orator. Wheeler was too much in the fog of grief to hear all the details, but he absorbed the main points: Eleanor Burden’s childhood surrounded by intellectual luminaries, her distinguished college career, her accomplishments in the arts, her role as mother of two distinguished daughters and, of course, the legendary Dilly Burden, and finally her largely unknown prominence in the eleemosynary life of Boston. “Eleanor Burden,” he said, “was a far greater force for good than any of us know. She was always one to hide her light and allow others to bask in glory. She wist not that her face shone.” Wheeler did remember one detail among the flood of tributes and accolades when a small scholarly man from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, the president, it turned out, described her as “a significant force” and said that it had been a substantial gift originated and engineered by his grandmother’s family that had brought Sigmund Freud to the university in 1909. Freud’s famous “Clark Lectures” introduced psychoanalysis to this country and launched the modern psychological revolution. “The little-known fact,” the president said, “is that the idea had been entirely Eleanor Burden’s.”