The Little Book (27 page)

“Dressed like this? He’d be daft for it,” she said frivolously. She was wearing his pajama top, unbuttoned.

“Well, you’d better find something.”

She sat up and looked at him. “You’re serious.”

“No,” he said, laughing. “It’s worse. The prime minister.”

“Good lord, when?”

“This afternoon.”

In the Admiralty car on the way to 10 Downing Street, Flora was trying to hide her nervousness by remembering all the times in her life when she had imagined teaing with the prime minister. “I always made up the room full of people who were there to greet me,” she said. “Oh lord, Dilly. Who
will
be there?”

“Don’t worry,” Dilly said, leaning over to kiss her, remembering how she looked in his pajama top. “He knows your views.” He was wearing his navy dress uniform and of course looking purposeful and smashing.

“Oh lord, you didn’t tell him I was one of those peace maniacs, did you?”

“He already knew. One of his sisters is one. Don’t worry.”

It was not until they had been admitted and were in the prime minister’s living room that she realized that it was just a threesome for tea—they and the prime minister—and that she had all the reason in the world to worry.

“My dear,” Mr. Churchill began. Flora was amazed at how much like a parody of himself the bulldog of a man appeared. “Standish has told me of his promise to you not to return to France . . .” He drew out the word
France
with his patented elegance.

Flora sat on the edge of the sofa, her back straight, her legs together and pulled in beneath her knees, her teacup poised on its saucer a perfect eleven inches from her mouth. She was frozen in terror.

Suddenly, Dilly looked more like a war hero than ever. He was standing beside the couch where she sat. He was looking awfully handsome and awfully filled with purpose. It was then, in catching a good look at him out of the corner of her eye, that she realized the prime minister did not invite people for tea unless it was
very
important. What was
very
important in this case was the life of her fellow eagle.

“Standish has told me of your deep concerns for your country and for his role as father of the little fellow.” Mr. Churchill took in a wheezy breath. “Your friends at the Admiralty have told me”—he snorted, bulldog-like— “of your deep belief in the cause of peace, and that you are indeed a pacifist in the finest British tradition. They have for you the highest admiration,” and he pronounced the word as only he could, with an elegance that took generations to develop. There was a centuries-old ring of sincerity to his voice. And it was then that she realized that although she believed in peace as a general thing, it was really a very specific thing. Wars were folly, vain, and senseless, but they were awful and sinful because they killed individual people. The death of a million men is a statistic, the old saying went; the death of one is a tragedy.

“The highest admiration,” the prime minister repeated, his voice now parodying its own rich sonorousness. “Now, one’s country is asking for great sacrifices.” Flora’s head began to spin. She felt as if she might faint dead away, but she held her position, and stared back at the prime minister. “We are asking Standish to return to France on a mission so important and secret that even our meeting here today must never be known outside this room. We are asking that he return to France—” He snorted again and looked over at Dilly, whose eyes were on hers, hoping that she could understand, and now something immeasurably sad and tired came into his voice, the full weight of responsibility and war, Flora thought later. “We will ask him to stay until the invasion is successful,” the great prime minister said.

A million images seemed to rush into her mind as she struggled to stay conscious and vertical, but like a giant roulette wheel, spinning and spinning, it finally settled on one image: the look on Dilly’s mother’s face as she let him slip from her grasp on the Boston train platform. How like Cassandra she looked, she who knew her son so well, seeing the future but being powerless to stop it.

“Prime Minister” were the words that came out. “Might one have something stronger than tea?”

Only a handful of months later, a few days after the liberation of Paris, in August 1944, she sat in Rory Stuart’s office. They had learned that Dilly had been captured a week or so before the invasion, back in June, and disappeared, held in Paris somewhere, probably at Gestapo headquarters, or worse, a lot worse. The not knowing was killing her. “I want to go,” she said for the fifth time, after his objections.

“You aren’t Wonder Woman, Flora, you can’t just go across the Channel with the troops.” Rory looked at the set of her jaw. “You tell me. How?”

“Make me your assistant, and you take me.”

“You can’t be my assistant. You aren’t in the Royal Navy. You’re a woman and a bloody pacifist for god’s sake.”

“Get me a nurse’s position.” There was no reaction from Rory. “I could drive an ambulance.” Still nothing. “Ernest Hemingway is over there. Get me a press pass.”

Rory’s eyes lit up and he grabbed for the phone. Within hours he had a position for her as assistant to the official Admiralty photographer, accompanying the troops. “Who’s going to take care of young Standish?”

“I’m taking him with me,” she said, and Rory only shook his head in disbelief.

The rest was legendary. The wife of Rouge Gorge traveled across the Channel on a supply ship, then rode a British army caravan into Paris, her three-year-old son in tow. She traveled across war-torn France, like the heroine in Victor Hugo’s
Ninety-Three
, all the time running into French citizens who had heard of her husband, Rouge Gorge, and wished her and her son Godspeed. She found room in a small hotel in the fifth
arrondissement
and talked to everyone she could find who had ever heard of the Resistance, let alone Rouge Gorge and what went on in the gruesome Gestapo headquarters on Rue Hubert Simone. She was willing to follow the campaign across the Rhine and into the concentration camps until she found out. Resistance prisoners, it turned out, were held in Fresnes Prison, south of Paris, but were taken to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation, which entailed the most brutal torture, usually proportionate to the prisoner’s significance as an enemy. What was left of the prisoner after the last bit of information had been squeezed out was either executed immediately or sent by cattle car to Buchenwald or Dachau, most times never seen again.

Flora talked to a number of former prisoners who described lying on straw sacks on the cold stone floor of Fresnes, listening for the sound of the coffee cart that usually meant that prisoners were going to be given a last cup of awful ersatz coffee before being shipped out. But no one had news of Dilly. They had all heard of Rouge Gorge, of course, but no one had particular information. One former prisoner handed her a handwritten sheet in an envelope, which she did not open until later. It was written in French and had a title on the top, “The Last Shave,” like a schoolboy’s creative writing paper. It read: “A German guard told me to follow him and bring my razor. He led me to the north court, between the front gate of the prison and the entry to the main building. On a bench a man was stretched out, immobile. ‘Shave him,’ the guard told me, gesturing at the man lying on the bench. I took a closer look and recognized Rouge Gorge. He was unconscious and his eyes were sunken. Through his swollen lips he was barely breathing. There was no doubt that he had been tortured. The Germans urged me to begin. How ridiculous, I thought. I was trying to shave a man who was barely alive. I was able to get really close to Rouge Gorge, touch his clothing, his freezing-cold hand, but he showed no reaction. Suddenly he opened his eyes and looked at me. He murmured something I couldn’t understand, something Italian like
Ringstrazza
. He took a few gulps of water, then lapsed back into unconsciousness. I left him there and never saw him again.”

Finally, in her second week, with little sleep and horrible apprehension, Flora was led by a Resistance man to a cell in a Paris jail where she met an Alsatian who had been caught during the liberation of Paris trying to leave the city disguised as a priest. The man had been a guard at Gestapo headquarters. The Resistance man accompanied her into the small cell. “This man will tell you the truth.” He looked as if he had already been well roughed up.

The Alsatian man had seen the body of Rouge Gorge being taken out for cremation, he said. “Are you sure it was Rouge Gorge?” the Resistance man said sternly.

“Everybody knew
him
,” the man said. “There was no doubt. He had serious bruises on his face and one leg was broken at the shin, and an arm also, I think,” the man said, looking away from Flora, whose eyes were closed tightly. “Just above the wrist.” The young man now looked at Flora and for the first time perhaps realized who she was. His eyes filled with the closest he could come to sadness and compassion.
“Il ne chantait pas, madame,”
he said in consolation. “All that, and Rouge Gorge did not sing.”

Having fulfilled her tragic mission, Flora Zimmerman Burden and her son caught a military ferry from Cherbourg, and were soon in London where they waited out the end stages of the war. Later, in 1946, with the war finally over and England and all of Europe recovering from the shock and beginning the slow process of rebuilding, Flora Burden, like her country, emotionally ravaged, left home forever and headed first to Boston and then to a small farm in the Sacramento Valley of California, to a piece of land given to her by Dilly’s family, where she could raise her son away from the awful remembrance of duty and war, a solitary eagle.

28

An Awfully Modern Invitation

Wheeler had gotten in the habit of walking along the Danube Canal each morning before his first visit to the Café Central, so that when he began his journal writing he was fresh and alert.

Shortly after he had taken his seat at his usual table, he looked up to see Emily James from Amherst, Massachusetts, entering the café with a group of her friends. He watched for a moment before she noticed him. Her friends all looked to be in their early twenties, an attractive group. They looked a little less bohemian than Kleist and the group Wheeler had begun to associate with. She saw him and made her way over to his table.

“Good morning, Miss James,” Wheeler said, rising, noticing that he was not just a little ruffled.

She flushed slightly. “This is the second time I have seen you this morning, Mr. Truman. The first was down by the canal.”

“You were spying on me.”

“I saw you from the window of my pension. You were too far away to greet.”

“I’ve started taking that walk every morning. It helps settle out some of the rich experiences of the day before.”

“We shall have to walk together some mornings,” she said. “I think early-morning exercise is very good for one’s constitution, and for one’s outlook on the day. Unfortunately”—she pointed over to where her friends had seated themselves—“my friends are not a very good influence. They would rather congregate in a stuffy old café.”

“Will you join me?” He pointed to an empty chair.

“You are kind,” she said. “But I have to rejoin them, and I don’t want to disturb your work.”

Wheeler looked down at his journal, open on the table. “It is a compulsive habit, I guess. I’ve been writing regularly since the start of my stay in Vienna.”

“What do you write?”

“Just the details. Thoughts and reflections, mostly.” He didn’t mention that his work on the Haze’s book had given him the habit of daily observations.

“You could be a good influence there too, I suspect. I came to Vienna to write something of significance. I do wish I did more. There are so many distractions.” She gestured back toward her friends’ table.

“I am planning a trip out to the Prater this morning. I’ve never been. Would you like to join me?” Wheeler had no plans for the morning, but the return of the fluttering feeling provoked him.

She looked nonplussed for an instant. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I’ve an appointment at the university.”

Wheeler watched her walk back to her table and felt he had unknowingly breached the rules with his bold invitation, a breach that he hoped was not irrevocable. It was something of a relief that she had turned down his bold move. Dilly’s admonition against contact with anyone still rattled him. How could he explain in the face of Dilly’s anxious worry that he had actually attempted an assignation?

He struggled not to look up in the direction of her table as he wrote but was aware when her group rose to leave. “Mr. Truman,” she said, no more than two feet away. He had not heard her approach. “I have rethought your offer and have made other plans for the university. If the offer is still good, it seems a perfect morning for a ride to the Prater.”

He arranged to meet her in front of her pension on Ebendorfer-Strasse. He had a carriage waiting. “I must be honest with you, Mr. Truman,” she said once they were under way, sitting pertly on the edge of the carriage seat. “I did not have an appointment at the university this morning. I just thought it awfully modern to accept an invitation, unaccompanied. My very proper aunt would never approve.”

“I hope it was not inappropriate for me to ask.”

She could not suppress a sudden and complete smile. “I am glad you did.”

“Well, I am
delighted
you changed your mind.”

“I have been trying to be more venturesome. Young women back home are raised to be very cautious and proper, at least on the East Coast. I don’t think it is good for either men or women to conceive of themselves too narrowly.”

“Now
that
seems very modern.”

“Certainly not for San Francisco, I am sure. In San Francisco women probably smoke cigars and ride bicycles.”

Wheeler laughed. “And carry six-guns strapped to their bustles.”