The Little Book (29 page)

She had looked forward to the next time she would be with him more than she admitted to herself, a fact she was forced to confront when, up and dressed, she noticed in herself a distinct apprehension that perhaps he might not appear, that he had been leading her on for some reason and had no intention of meeting her for the morning walk. Why had this feeling developed as quickly as it had? He seemed so deeply sensitive, so aware of what she felt. He said that he had had a love of his life many years before and that he had loved her very much, maybe he had even been married, but she had died. Perhaps that was the reason.

She felt such a surge of relief when he called for her at the pension that it took a good deal of time before she realized he was slightly reserved this morning. As they walked and she told him more and more about herself and about the Mahler incident, she began to attribute his subtle distance to the fact that, as an older man and not one of her circle of friends, he felt with her something of an outsider, and that perhaps he found her immature and silly. One of her tasks for the morning was to convey to him how very much she preferred his company to any of the young Viennese she had come to know, and how she found him unusually kind. Of course, what one was going to say before the event is markedly different from what comes out of one’s mouth in the immediacy of the situation. “Mr. Truman, ” she began as they walked along the canal. She had placed her hand on his arm, as she had done in the cabin of the Giant Wheel, when she had found in him such warm reassurance. “For the remainder of your stay in Vienna, I would enjoy spending the majority of my time—” She paused. It was not exactly as she had planned to say it, but it was close enough. She pressed on. “I would enjoy spending time in your company.”

She had not realized until that moment how vulnerable she had made herself, how for the second time in Vienna she was about to appear terribly foolish in front of an older man. She watched in something akin to horror as he hung his head and looked down at his feet. She could tell from the way he held himself that he was preparing to deliver in the most tactful and considerate manner possible—in the name of pity and sensitivity to her innocence—what would be the most stinging rebuke of her young life.

Wheeler had spent the evening mulling over his conversation with Dilly about minimal contact and the dilemma it brought with it. Dilly’s reproaches about interfering with Frank Burden’s time in Vienna in even the slightest way sat heavily on him. His candid conversations with Sigmund Freud were already a violation, and now to begin a liaison of the heart? He would simply have to go out of his way to avoid this young Emily James from Amherst, Massachusetts. It did not matter that he found her independent spirit irresistible and compelling and that he felt a warm glow from her cheery company, an antidote to the loneliness of being in a strange land. He would simply have to avoid her, and the way to do that in the most effective manner was to walk with her along the canal the next morning, be cordial but distant, and then simply not arrange any more meetings with her, making the necessary excuses so as to cause her the least discomfort. He needed to establish clearly that he was an older man with older tastes in both art and company. Without hurting her feelings— he did not wish to interfere even the slightest with her emotions—he would gently arrange not to see her again.

He called for her at the pension. Fraulein Tatlock was exceedingly friendly and offered him a seat in the front room as she went to the stairs and called for Miss James. She entered the room with a burst of good cheer, as if she might have thought he was not going to show up.

Outside it was a glorious morning, clear and with a fresh chill in the air. She placed her hand gently on his arm as she had done on the Giant Wheel the day before, an act he interpreted then and now as one of polite but innocuous convention. They walked along Karntner-Strasse, past St. Stephen’s Cathedral, to the canal. He had been powerfully impressed the day before with the story of her publication of music articles in
The New York Times
, under the pseudonym of a man. Now, with a remarkable calmness she told him of her meeting with Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna Opera, and of her embarrassment of fainting.

As he was taking his last walk with her, just as they passed the cathedral, where Rotenturm-Strasse began, the enormity landed on him suddenly. What if they walked headlong into Dilly or Sigmund Freud, or, for that matter, Frank Burden?

“I so much prefer seeing Vienna,” she broke into his thought, “through new eyes such as yours than through the jaded vision of the young Viennese. ”

When they reached the canal, she had begun telling him how much she enjoyed this time in Europe by herself and how greatly she appreciated the kind, inattentive sponsorship of Fraulein Tatlock. “I will not stay in Vienna forever,” she said with purpose, “and I will certainly return to a conventional life back home eventually. But for the time being—” She looked out beyond the canal to the Praterstrasse and the Danube beyond, and sighed with conviction. “—I am enjoying myself greatly.”

She stopped and took a deep breath, as if to cinch up her courage. And, at the very moment that Wheeler was thinking how lovely she looked with the rosy glow of a morning walk on her cheeks and her eyes so clear and full of life and future, she spoke her mind.

Wheeler could not remember ever seeing another human so completely devoid of guile saying something to him so completely captivating and appealing. He looked away for a long moment, recapturing the steely resolve of the previous evening, knowing full well what he was obligated, by fateful circumstance and Dilly’s admonition, to do. Wheeler himself took a deep breath and began. “Miss James, I think that is the nicest offer anyone has ever made to me. However, I must tell you—” He stopped, feeling the enormous weight of history on his head, catching for a briefest instant the look of apprehension on her face.
Oh, to hell with it!

“I too would enjoy—” he began again. “I would enjoy very much spending the majority of my time with
you
.”

30

The Illusion of Flight

In 1897, during Wheeler Burden’s time there, Vienna sat at the center of the vast and richly diverse Hapsburg empire that had once controlled half of Europe and now included a collection of important satellite cities, Prague, Cracow, Sarajevo, and Budapest among them. Twenty years later, by the end of World War I, the empire would be dissolved, the ruling family exiled, and the great imperial city reduced to a small insignificant position governing little more than itself. During the time of Wheeler’s visit, Vienna was a city in turmoil, although few people living within the confined perspective of the time—listening to operetta music, eating Sacher torte
mitt schlagg
, waltzing till exhaustion—wanted to notice it or admit it. The pro-Germans wanted alliance with Germany; the Slavs and Hungarians wanted independence, their own separate states and their own language; the working classes wanted better public services and housing; the artists wanted freedom from the old order; the sons in general wanted out from under the oppressive thumbs of their fathers. Just below the surface of the gaiety of the city there was such a powerful turmoil, in fact, that to an astute and pessimistic critic of the Café Central crowd or a historian with the benefit of hindsight who searched for the kernel by peeling away the layers nearly a century later, the whole culture appeared a whirling mass, headed for apocalypse. And if there was any one unifying and precipitating event that symbolized and perhaps played a major role in causing the unraveling, it was the tragedy at Mayerling nine years before.

At the time of Wheeler’s visit, the tragedy surrounding Crown Prince Rudolf was still on everyone’s mind, and still cloaked in mystery. The royal family’s efforts at covering up the facts had been successful, or one would say later, had been as successful as anything the royal family had tried to do. Within weeks of the awful tragedy, German newspapers, freed from the yoke of imperial censorship, were beginning to uncover the details, real and imagined. But even nine years after the fateful night in the imperial hunting lodge, fact and romance blended together into a version that the national psyche could accept and endure. The suicide of the heir to the throne seemed to be a metonymy, a part that represented the whole, an event that symbolized what lay deep in the great heart of Vienna and the empire itself: intrigue, enigma, and doom.

The Haze would tell the whole story, filling in all the details. The tragedy at Mayerling, after all, was a central part of his gospel, the gospel according to the Haze. The crown prince was despondent for a number of reasons. He had contracted a painful, and then incurable, case of venereal disease, the same disease that had driven his mother’s cousin Ludwig of Bavaria to lunacy and suicide only a few years before. He hated the thought of Germany, and perhaps all of Europe, being dominated by his crude bully cousin Wilhelm II. He feared—and justifiably so—that Austria would lose the Balkans to Russia. He had become addicted to opium and alcohol. And he was unhappily married. More than all these, however, the most significant contributor, probably, was the crown prince’s relationship with his father, who had thwarted him at every move and had systematically and cruelly excluded him from all decisions of state.

For a city and an empire that so associated itself with optimism and gaiety to accept that the heir to the Hapsburg future had killed himself in a fit of temporary derangement was difficult enough; accepting that he was a murderer was nearly impossible.

In his refusal to let out the truth about Mayerling, it would be said later, the emperor displayed the same hardness of heart that had made him a disaster as a father. The son who had embarrassed him in life shamed him in death. And yet Franz Joseph was unable to share authority with his son, unable to bear the spark of independence the young man possessed, could not bear sharing authority with his offspring and eventual successor.

The crown prince’s mother, the aloof and beautiful Empress Elisabeth, a concerned and loving mother perhaps but caught in the cold distancing of a patriarchal military society, powerless to intercede between frustrated son and harsh rule-oriented father, could only watch and hope. After that awful night she never again appeared in public except in mourning. Rudolf, her beautiful son, wrote her a good-bye note saying he had not been worthy of her. “In the dawn of the modern age of psychology, born in Vienna,” the Haze would intone, “when mental anguish would be pinned on the doorstep of parents, Franz Joseph and Elisabeth’s was exposed by implication as the prototypical destructive family.” Then he closed the notebook, the storyteller at the end of his story. “Mayerling,” the Haze would say in barely more than a whisper, “dashed hopes and ended the era of optimistic liberalism in Vienna.”

Wheeler’s personal involvement with the tragedy came about in a peculiar way. On his way back from one of his meetings with Freud one morning, he set his mind on the Imperial Academy of Art and the “Crown Prince’s Album” he had been so impressed with when Emily James showed it to him. It was, by coincidence, the morning he had stopped at the cabinetmaker’s shop and picked up the finished Frisbee. “An object of true elegance,” the cabinetmaker had said to him with a broad satisfied smile, “no matter its function.”

“Beautifully turned,” Wheeler said, giving the disk an upward flip and catching it. “Light, just as we designed it, and stained and finished like a fine violin.” He had thanked the cabinetmaker, paid him, and told him he would report back after a trial flight in the Prater. “It will do magic. I’ll invite you to come see,” Wheeler said as he left the shop.

When he entered the museum and climbed the huge marble stairway to the second floor, he ran into a sign that announced that the section was closed. Never one to allow signs and rules to stand in his way, Wheeler looked around to see that he was in the clear of guards and stepped nimbly around the sign and found himself all alone in the collection of watercolors and drawings. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a dark shadow and turned. Standing alone beside him, having appeared from around a corner, stood a woman in black, wearing over her head a thin black veil. She possessed an arresting beauty, ivory skin, dark eyebrows, and deep sad eyes. She took no notice of Wheeler, yet had slid up beside him with quiet grace. “Hello,” he said with a nervous extroversion that belonged neither with this setting nor with this century.

The woman showed no alarm, but looked over to him with an ethereal calm, her eyes showing first a sad indifference, then seeming to catch something in his face that brought the traces of a distant smile to her lips. “Good day,” she said.

“These watercolors are exquisite,” Wheeler said, as if he needed to explain why he had intruded in the closed wing. “I’ve come from the American west, from San Francisco, to see them.” For an instant it occurred to Wheeler that perhaps he could pass as some special visitor with privileges and not just the crass interloper that he actually was.

“I hope they meet your satisfaction.” Her voice was soft and genuine, intended to put him at ease. There was in it nothing to suggest her being impressed or offended by what Wheeler had tried to imply. At that moment a man in elaborate military dress appeared around the corner and, seeing Wheeler, seemed startled. His sudden move toward him was stopped by an almost imperceptible sign from the woman in black. The officer frowned, eyed Wheeler haughtily, then moved to the far end of the room. “They were made lovingly,” she said.

It was only then that Wheeler realized why the floor had been closed and the profound pretension of his being there. “I am sorry to have intruded, ” he said, stepping back.

“No, no,” the woman said, raising her hand gently. “I enjoy the company. These works are to be enjoyed. And we would not want to discourage someone who had come from as far as San Francisco.”