The Little Book (24 page)

This fascinated Freud. So too did the unusually complex historical epic the patient had created in order to give his father sufficient weight as a hero, a man who quite literally had been given the responsibility of saving the world. Perhaps it was not interest in the patient or his father that fascinated the great doctor, but the epic tale. It was an absorbing and fantastic view of the future.

According to the patient’s structuring of the future there would be a great war shortly after the dawn of the twentieth century, a first world war, the man called it. Following this would come a worldwide financial depression that had as its consequence, as well as the collapse of the Hapsburg empire (which happened almost in passing), two significant consequences: a worldwide military-industrial build-up and the rise of Germany under an evil dictator.

Another great world war was to ensue, with Germany taking over and occupying virtually all of central Europe (Austria and Vienna, again almost in passing). The first half of the 1940s would be consumed by the epic struggle that pitted America and Britain, with their heroic leader Winston Churchill, against the evil German empire. At one point it would even be called the Crusade in Europe.

Freud noted from the beginning the enormity of the struggle the patient needed to fashion in order to provide a sufficiently heroic stage for his father.

To a degree it was a fantasy with which Freud himself had some familiarity. As a boy he had identified closely with a hero of no smaller proportions than the great Carthagenian Hannibal in his own gallant struggle against the Romans. He had seen his own father as Hamilcar, a Semite general who had defended Sicily against the Romans in the First Punic War. It was a fitting heroic example for a son as well as for a father. Of course Freud was a boy at the time and not a forty-seven-year-old man.

Wheeler’s father had been a legendary schoolboy and college athlete, a ranking scholar in medieval history, and a superb musician, talented enough to play with a famous American band Freud would have equated with Johann Strauss. He studied law and became a navy officer who played a major role in the great war of the time, falling in love with the beautiful Jewish girl who became Wheeler’s mother. He served his nation gallantly as a spy, bringing great notoriety to himself posthumously because of accounts of his extreme bravery in the hands of the evil enemy. And the fact that his wife, after hearing reports of his capture by the enemy, entered the newly liberated war zone in search of him, dragging her young son along with her, only added to his legend. His death was mourned and his heroism celebrated by three nations.

Wheeler did not remember his father in more than photographs and family stories, but in 1952, at age eleven, he traveled with his mother to Paris where a plaque to his father’s memory was dedicated in a square in the heart of the city. By this time Wheeler and his mother had been living on the farm in California. She did not like war heroics in general, and the heroics of her husband in particular. She thought the former helped perpetuate the folly of war, and that the latter had deprived unnecessarily the world, and her, of a great and decent man.

Freud would have noted that Wheeler spoke with no resentment of his father, in fact he seemed to hold him in great affection and recounted a number of stories from his time growing up with his mother in which the memory of his absent father was an issue. And the doctor would have found most significant an incident when the patient found a trunk full of his father’s possessions in the attic of the California house.

That was when Wheeler found his father’s old baseball glove. He was ten.

His mother had asked him to stay out of the attic. She had always said it was dusty, there was no light, and it was filled with black widow spiders. Although all that gave the place a certain mysterious appeal, the black widow part kept him away.

One afternoon when Wheeler thought he was alone in the house and when his sense of adventure seemed high, he climbed the stairs to the attic and let himself in with the key from the old cookie tin in the pantry.

The spacious attic was lighted only from the small windows at either end. It was indeed dusty and there were cobwebs in the corners. He found the old rocking horse he had given up at age six, his mother’s dress mannequin, a number of cloth-draped chairs, a stack of large-framed paintings, and an old guitar case. In the center of an assortment of book boxes was an old steamer trunk, which creaked loudly when Wheeler opened it.

Packed inside was a clean, pressed navy uniform and officer’s cap. Sitting on top of them was a collection of medals, some of them inscribed in foreign languages, and a photograph of Dilly in the uniform, and a packet of letters, tied with a ribbon. In the next layer Wheeler found a clarinet, a crimson track jersey with a white
H
on it, and a college yearbook. It was in this layer that he found the baseball glove. It was the flat kind of five-fingered glove that Wheeler associated with the olden days, with shiny worn leather. He slipped his fingers into the holes. At first it felt stiff and cold, but as he opened and closed his hand and struck it with his fist, it seemed to warm to his hand. He lifted it over his head and caught a high pop-up, then, still on his knees, popped an imaginary ball in it and chucked it toward the bright afternoon light streaming in through the window.

He had not heard his mother climb up the stairs. “What are you doing? ” she said. Her voice was stern.

“I found this glove.”

“You were told not to come up here.” Wheeler could see his mother standing above him. In the dim light of the attic her look was cold and disoriented. He was filled with the most horrible feeling. He knew he was seeing something forbidden.

“I was looking at the black widows.” It was a stupid thing to say. He had come up with the sole purpose of exploring and had found exactly what he was looking for. How he wished in that moment that he had never come up to the attic.

His mother looked down at the opened trunk and the scattered contents. “You have made a mess.” There was an unfamiliar brittleness to her voice. Her eyes were fixed on the uniform on the floor beside Wheeler. “You know better—” she began, but her voice cracked and she stopped, letting out a soft moan. Slowly, she dropped to her knees beside him. He could feel the folds of her dress and her leg. She said nothing, but reached out and fingered one of the medals. Then her hand moved to the dark navy uniform jacket, and slowly she opened her fingers and ran them along the cloth beneath the lapel. Slowly, her head moved from side to side, and breath came out as a soft sigh.

Wheeler watched her face. It carried an expression unlike anything he had seen there before, one of terrible longing. “Such a fine man,” she whispered, but clearly not to him. “Such a good and fine man.”

Perhaps it was a moment. Perhaps it was an hour. Wheeler scarcely dared breathe. He just could only watch his mother’s gentle fingers stroking the material of the navy jacket, fingering the edge of the lapel.

When she rose, she did it slowly, the folds of her dress touching Wheeler lightly. Then she stood and looked down at the contents of the trunk. “You will put everything back as you found it? Carefully?” Wheeler nodded, relieved that she no longer sounded angry with him.

She walked back toward the attic stairs, where she paused and turned. She appeared in silhouette with the light from the far window surrounding her in such a way that he could not see her eyes. “Why don’t you keep the baseball thing,” she said, her voice having taken on a mystical softness.

She was in her bedroom with the door closed for the rest of the afternoon. This is how Wheeler acquired his trademark ancient glove, and in so doing, long before he realized the fact, picked up the heroic mantle of Dilly Burden.

25

No Ordinary Situation

An obligation to keep to oneself,” Dilly said with a staunch certitude for which he was famous, assuming as he often did that everyone with even a modest sense of propriety would be in agreement. “That is what the situation requires, and that is what we shall follow.” Dilly and Wheeler, father and son, were finishing their morning coffee at a café near the Imperial Art History Museum. “That is the most difficult challenge in this whole business. We must not intervene in any way. Even the slightest conversation could have a disastrous effect on—” He paused, weighing the gravity of his own words. “One slip could ruin everything. One errant word could do irreparable ruin to
the future
we need to be born into.” He buttered his bread and added a small portion of strawberry preserve.

“It’s a little staggering,” Wheeler said, obviously deciding to withhold information about the conversations he had already participated in, with a variety of people, Sigmund Freud being the most significant.

“We can say nothing to anyone.” He savored again a bite of croissant.

“Between ourselves, of course, the pressure’s off,” Wheeler said jovially. “We cannot change each other’s history.”

And even that dimension Dilly gave a moment’s pause. “Indeed,” he said finally. “That is a relief.”

“It is a relief to have someone to talk to.”

Dilly nodded. “And you still don’t remember how you got here?”

“Something traumatic, I’m pretty sure of that. Some sinister images have come back, but it is pretty much total amnesia, I am embarrassed to say. I just can’t remember.”

“Well, I can,” Dilly said, repressing a shudder. “I was lying on a cold cement floor, hoping and praying that it would end. I had been trying to reconstruct Vienna; it was a mental game. I’d been here in college, you know. I drifted.” He looked deadly serious for a moment, then shuddered again. “That’s how it works, I’m pretty sure. As you are going out of one world, you drift. In my case, I drifted here. And you—”

“I just can’t remember. I remember the drifting in, the morning I arrived here. I just don’t remember from where.”

“You had just finished the Haze’s book. Your head was full of Vienna. That’s it.”

“My head was full of Vienna, for sure. I was giving book talks all over the country. I just don’t remember the last few hours.” He paused. “Except for the man in my doorway—”

“It will come to you.”

“What caused yours?” Wheeler said. “You must have really wanted to be here.”

Dilly looked away, as if he might be hiding something. “I just picked a place,” he said a little too quickly. “Something I could reconstruct in my mind. That’s what you need to do in those torture situations; I studied up on it. You know, preparing for the adventure and all that. Have a vivid picture, you know. When you are in the position I was in, you grab at anything. I grabbed Vienna.”

Wheeler could have pressed: Why Vienna? Why 1897? But he let it drop. In a way both men were adjusting to the shock of being together in this strange and wonderful city, getting to know each other, adjusting to the enormity of it all.

“But I am still in something of a shocked state. When I left your mother, it was 1944, and she was thirty. When you left her, it was 1988, and she was seventy-four. When I last saw you, just a few weeks ago, you were three. Now you are old enough to be my father.”

“It is sort of hard to fathom,” Wheeler said, looking away, then bringing his focus back to Dilly’s eyes. “This has been more than I ever could have hoped for.”

Dilly did not look away and for a moment remained speechless, his famous staunchness falling away for just an instant. “Other than meeting your mother,” he said, tears coming to his eyes, “I simply cannot imagine—” Then he caught himself. “It is just bully,” he said, dropping coins on the table beside his coffee, leaping to his feet. “We’d better get out there into the morning.” They had decided earlier to do the one thing they both wished for, spending the day as ordinary tourists. Dilly had bought a Baedeker’s guidebook in English for the purpose and was prepared. He wrote his name boldly on the inside cover:
Frank Standish Burden, Jr.
“Remember,” he said, “I’m still not in tip-top shape, thanks to our friends the Gestapo.” He shuddered again. “You might have to wait for me from time to time.”

But it turned out to be quite the opposite. And Dilly, probably not ordinary at anything, was certainly not an ordinary tourist. Wheeler found that he was the one struggling to keep up, and that his father was not a walking history lesson as much as a cultural experience, one who appeared to be of boundless energy.

After lightning attacks on three museums, they found themselves at the cathedral of St. Stephen’s, looking up at the tower. “Just look at the majesty, ” he said, pointing up. “This one is not among the finest examples of Gothic magnificence, but still one of the marvels of medieval Europe.” The serrated silhouette of the slender Gothic spire rose out of a bundle of light buttresses and pointed arches. “It was in its day a modern-day Tower of Babel, bringing together a mass of cultural influences. This cathedral has been vandalized and restored so many times since the 1100s that it’s like an architectural history lesson. Look—” He pointed to various places on the cathedral edifice. “There is Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, not to mention some nineteenth-century tampering thrown in.”

Dilly paid the twenty-kreuzer admission charge for both of them at the sacristan’s office and led the way up the more than five hundred steps to the top, which he seemed to reach without stopping. “That’s some climb,” Wheeler said, catching his breath. Dilly seemed unaffected, exhilarated rather by the brisk climb.

Dilly was standing at the stone railing, his eyes closed, breathing in the Viennese morning air. “Isn’t it thrilling,” he said, looking out over the countryside. “In the fourteenth century people came from all around just to climb those steps and see this view.” They were facing west, out toward the foothills, where the Vienna Woods rose in a gentle slope off into the mountains. He pointed out beyond the Ringstrasse. “It makes you realize why this was such a valuable piece of landscape. A flat plane between two worlds—Europe out there beyond the Alps and”—he turned and swung his hand behind them—“the east with all its riches out there beyond the Hungarian steppes. In the thirties, people who rode the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul called it the last Western city before the plunge into the Balkans. It is such a beautiful combination of mountains, river, and the plain. And it has been fiercely fought over. Out there, just outside where the great wall used to be is where the fierce Turks camped during their devastating siege that was raised in 1683, driving the infidels back home for the last time, leaving their coffee behind. There, on that plane, are the great battlefields of Essling—where Napoleon in 1809 was driven back across the Danube—and Wagram, in which he united with the Italians at the Lobau and drove back, to become master of Vienna. For ten thousand years people have fought for control of this lovely fortress city on the bend of the Danube. Metternich said that Asia began just east of his palace. Incredible wealth and treasure passed through here when this cathedral was being built.” He gave the railing in front of him a hearty slap.