The Little Book (32 page)

“I too feel that.” She looked into his eyes. “I feel the ultimate trust right here, right now.” She leaned toward him. “I suppose this is how it begins,” she whispered.

“Are you comfortable with this?” he said.

She had closed her eyes and did not move. “Completely,” she said, and he lifted his arm and surrounded her with it. “Completely,” she repeated.

“Don’t look up,” he said.

“I want to look up,” she said, her lips now close to him, a convulsive tremor taking over her body. She let go a deep moan. “I want to see it all.”

“Small steps, remember.”

“Small steps,” she whispered, and she seemed to dissolve into him, and their kiss became intense, their bodies pressed against each other, first gently, then with the ardor that had been for her such a mystery. She let go a deep sigh and moved her hand to the back of his neck and pulled him to her, and he responded in kind. There was a moment of wild explosive release, and she let go a small almost helpless whimper. Wheeler was about to signal to the driver to drive on.

Suddenly, she was struggling free and gave him a push with a strength that caught him completely by surprise, and with a stifled moan she pulled herself across the leather seat of the cab and threw open the door. Before Wheeler could collect himself she had fled the cab. He rose and saw from the window her white skirt disappearing into the front door of the Pension Tatlock, too far ahead to follow. “Please,” he called after her, which in retrospect seemed a silly thing to say.

As the cab circled on Ebendorfer-Strasse and headed for his room at Frau Bauer’s, he collapsed back into the leather seat shocked and amazed by the remarkable and ironic turn in this forbidden relationship.

33

A Feeling of Desperation

Wheeler called for her at the Pension Tatlock a little later than his usual nine o’clock. It was not that he wanted to make her wait; in fact this morning he had been sensitive to the fact that she might worry if he was not on time. But he needed time to think. He had been up early and had taken a long walk alone along the Ringstrasse.

He turned Dilly’s warning and the consequences of disregarding it over and over in his mind. Dilly was a rules man, and Wheeler was for spontaneity. Dilly decided what was right to do and stuck with it. Wheeler was more of an adaptor. Dilly was an oak, Wheeler a bamboo. He certainly never intended for things to have taken this turn, but actions on both their parts had brought about this consequence, and now he needed to be with her, to guide her past the torment she must be feeling. His thoughts were with Emily James as Fraulein Tatlock greeted him, wringing her hands. “Something urgent has come up,” she said fretfully. “She packed in the night. She has left for home. I did not know about it until this morning, and there was no stopping her.”

Wheeler’s heart sank. “Did she mention the cause?”

“She said nothing, but she looked as if she had not had much sleep.” Fraulein Tatlock walked into the sitting room, to the fireplace mantel and retrieved an envelope. “She left this letter for you.” Her hand shook as she handed Wheeler the envelope. He didn’t open it because he could guess its content.

“How long ago did she leave for the train station?” he asked Fraulein Tatlock suddenly.

“An hour ago, sir. She asked me to take care of the shipping of her trunk.”

Wheeler ran out into the street and down to the corner, where he found a cab. He told the man to hurry. Jumping from the cab at the Nordbahnhof, he asked about the Paris train and ran to the platform. “There it goes,” the platform attendant said and pointed down the tracks to the departing observation car, now a quarter of a mile distant. “There is another one at eleven.”

Wheeler stood watching as the train disappeared down the complexity of tracks, a feeling of desperation growing within him.

Weezie had an abundance of time to think on the train ride to Paris. As the countryside of the Danube basin rolled by outside the window of her private compartment, she tried to sort through her complex anguish.

Shame had descended on her once again like the shroud of night. She had felt it first from the cabby’s eyes burning into her back after she had struggled free from the cab and hurried toward the door of the pension. How many times had he witnessed similar scenes of fallen women slinking away? She felt it in Fraulein Tatlock’s sharp eyes as she must have seen the ruddy glow of passion still burning on her boarder’s cheeks. She felt it closing in on her as she lay sobbing into the counterpane so as not to spread the news to the neighboring rooms.

She tried to recall how the embarrassment had happened, but the painful memories came only in fragments, enveloped in haze like the events leading up to a head injury.

Leaving Vienna was precipitous, but the only way out. All her life people had tended to find her impulsive, jumping this way or that because of a moment’s fancy. It was a criticism she never much cared for nor one she found particularly accurate or fair. Certainly now she was not acting impulsively. Her useful time in Vienna had run out anyway, she reasoned. She had abundant notes for future writings about the new music, and now she simply could not stay there. She would return home to lick her wounds and restore her self-control. That was it, get herself back under control. And come to terms with the great loss of love that even now had begun to tear at her. And yet she could not shake the feeling that somehow she had fallen from grace.

She had given in to the heat of illicit passion, she who had always very privately thought of herself as someone special and elevated. What man would want to marry her now? What gentleman would be fascinated by her and would travel across the globe for her hand, as it had been rumored back in Boston? Was that sort of romantic tale now lost to her forever, gone with her lost innocence and purity?

She had joined the world of the women of easy virtue who seemed ubiquitous in Vienna. She had lost access to the world of light and had inherited one of darkness, her integrity and essence stolen by urges she seemed to have no control over. Again, she felt her aunt Prudence’s judgment upon her.

How had she succumbed to it? Why now, in the feverish hallucinations of the past few hours, in her fitful flashes of memory and dreams did the incident with Herr Mahler keep coming back to her? How was that embarrassing incident now tied at least symbolically to what had happened the night before with Mr. Truman? Who was the man who had caused her to feel reckless and daring in his presence and who had ever so subtly, without ever asking, gotten her to join forces with the dark evil world Aunt Prudence had depicted so vividly in her evening readings?

“Enough!” she said out loud, to stop the downward slide of her self-reproach.

She could not stop thinking about Mr. Truman. She remembered how she had been drawn to him that first day she had seen him in the park, and had given the name Emily James. How like Svengali he had been for her, luring her into his world, rendering himself irresistible with the way he defied formality. That was definitely it: He was not the stuffed shirt Weezie was so accustomed to in Boston, and he seemed relaxed and without pretension. What a powerful drug that was.

How like an alien he seemed, as if from another planet, with a different set of values. He had guided her so effortlessly toward a physical release, all the time giving her the illusion that it had been her instigation, paying little heed to the strict moral code that bound those of her upbringing. Perhaps he was some Mephistopheles. Faust had, after all, lived for a time in Vienna. That was it. He did not believe in duty and honor and righteousness, the forces that drove Aunt Prudence in her stern and holy life. In rejecting the cruelty of her aunt’s view of the world had she not thrown out the good of social rules and moral codes?

At the bottom of it Weezie had sinned, had slid into wantonness, and now in the loneliness of her private cabin on the Paris train she felt the desperate consequences of that sin. She felt hopelessly alone and wretched. In that last week in Vienna with Mr. Truman she had felt so vibrant and fully alive to experiences, as if she was about to open up, to look down into her soul and finally understand the conflicting forces pulling at her. She felt on the brink of the most exciting of discoveries. But somehow the same forces that drew her toward self-discovery also drew her to the desire for consummation that welled up in her with such force and for which she was now paying such a dear price. Her head whirled and she fell into a troubled sleep.

She awoke with her head resting against the glass window of her private compartment. She rose and opened her door. “What is the next station?” she asked a passing conductor.

“We will be in Nuremburg”—he pulled his gold watch out to the end of its chain—“in forty-five minutes, Fraulein.”

“Thank you,” she said, and went back to her seat by the window where the German countryside rolled by.

On the ride back to Frau Bauer’s in the cab he opened the envelope. The letter was written on pale blue stationery with a fine steady hand.

He stared at the letter and at the name that he knew so well. Slowly, distractedly, Wheeler folded the letter carefully and replaced it in its envelope, then removed it again. He sat without moving for a long time, staring at empty space in front of him. Had we been able to see him in that moment, we would have described his appearance as ashen. Wheeler’s hand shook as he stared down at the handwritten note from his young grandmother.

PART THREE

T
he Last Burden

34

Keeping No Secrets

We can assume that Dr. Freud remained fascinated, addicted even, and that he held doggedly to his assertion that, like all of his hysteric patients, this patient Herr Burden was making up his elaborate time-dislocation story. As engaging as he was, the man who called himself Wheeler Burden was delusional and deranged. And therefore the patient’s intense relationship with this beautifully innocent and yet highly sexualized young American woman—whom in a remarkable turn he now had fashioned into his own grandmother—must be serving some useful function in his complex and highly compelling fantasy.

We know some things about Sigmund Freud in that pivotal year of 1897. We know, for instance, that this brilliant, relentlessly logical, and scientific thinker, depressed by the isolated path where his steel-trap logic had placed him, alienated from his colleagues at the university, found himself lonely for conversation and company.

And so Dr. Freud had come to enjoy more than he was willing to admit his conversations with his extroverted American visitor, setting aside time every few days. He encouraged Herr Burden to tell his story, and he listened with great interest. As soon as he learned of the journal’s existence and guessed at the wealth of evidence it contained, he encouraged readings from its full contents at each session.

Wheeler reacted quickly. “I cannot,” he said.

“And why is that?”

“Because it is uncensored and unvarnished.”

“And you still believe that your honesty can somehow compromise me, that you might somehow alter history? That history cannot bear it?” There was nothing sarcastic or deriding in his tone.

“I know things you shouldn’t know.”

“I am my own man, my friend. I think I can cope with that which I should and should not know. You are not going to turn me to stone.”

And so Wheeler, the compulsive conversationalist, in order to keep up the interest of the great doctor who had become his material and financial support in this strange land, began reading from the journal, at first bit by bit, with summaries and editings, then slowly evolving to every word, every day, unabridged, and unexpurgated.

One can see in reading the journal entries that eventually Wheeler held back nothing. Dr. Freud would hear the whole story. Wheeler must have reassessed and decided it would do no harm, probably because he knew that the doctor viewed him as one of his hysterical patients—compelling, but hysterical. “Dr. Freud thinks I am delusional,” he wrote and subsequently shared on the day following the decision. “And as such my truths will always seem to him my separate reality. Fascinating, for sure, but a separate reality always. But the die is cast now. He will know all the details of my strange visit to Vienna. I will be keeping no secrets.”

The deal was struck. Freud would sit attentive to every word, weighing every detail and allusion, giving this visitor—“my American visitor,” he called him—an intensity of concentration he gave to no other person in his family or his professional life. As Wheeler read, the great doctor would focus his steely gray eyes on him, smoke his cigar, and listen, always searching for that golden path that would lead him and his patient back to the causal traumatic event, to the mother lode of a complex and fascinating hysterical state. As we have the journal in front of us, we know what the doctor knew, and we can surmise how he interpreted it. To crack the code of the offending amnesia, Freud wanted all the information he could get, and having a patient keep a meticulous daily journal and then be willing to share it was, in short, a gold mine.