The Little Book (36 page)

“I could not—” Wheeler began.

“Oh, you do not need to speak,” she kept going.

Wheeler realized he wasn’t going to be called on for much of a response; all he could do was look into her beautiful, innocent face. “I think—”

She stopped him with the slightest movement of her hand. “Let me finish,” she said. “I have had too much time to think, and now I need to tell it.” They began walking again. “I do not want to be a dry, shriveled spinster like my aunt Prudence. I want to drink fully from the cup. If what has happened so far is sinful, then it is a sinfulness I want to embrace openly. You and your spirit have become an opiate to me. And I return for it willingly and willfully, like a moth to a flame.”

“And Fraulein Tatlock?” Wheeler said with a smile letting show his immense relief.

“Fraulein Tatlock was overjoyed,” she said. “She somehow had neglected to get my trunk to the station.”

They stopped again, and he looked at her in amazement. “I was devastated by your leaving,” he said, then caught himself, saying more with his eyes than any outburst of words could. “You fill my head so that I’m even beginning to talk like you.”

“You are not shocked then by my return?”

“I’m like Fraulein Tatlock. I am overjoyed,” he said, and they continued walking. “I could keep walking with you forever.”

“That would fill my time well,” she said with a warm smile.

“But unfortunately, I have an appointment at the university.”

“You keep many appointments in Vienna, Mr. Truman.” She pulled good-naturedly on his arm. “You are quite the man of mystery.”

“Hardly that,” he said lightly. “I just have made certain acquaintances, all very masculine, I assure you.”

“Well, I will admit to being jealous of time lost.” The determination had returned to her brow, and she pulled them to a stop again. “Now that I have returned to Vienna, I want very much to be alone with you.”

When he met Dilly in his small office in the university, as they had planned, his mind was so full of Weezie Putnam that he could barely concentrate on what on earth he was going to tell Dilly now.

“Look,” Dilly said, gesturing to a stack of papers on the desk.

Wheeler assessed the stack of translation work. “Looks like enough to keep us out of the bread lines for a long time.”

“I’m so glad you came,” Dilly said cheerily. “There is more than enough work here for both of us. Take a stack.” He pointed to a group of paper stacks on the table in front of him. Wheeler reached out and picked up one. “Oh, not that one,” Dilly said quickly, and Wheeler looked down at it.

“What is this?” Wheeler said, his eyes scanning the papers in his hands.

“Oh, nothing,” Dilly said, reaching to retrieve the papers. “Just some hasty notes.”

Wheeler pulled them back and continued to examine what he had in front of him, his eyes darting across the surface of what looked like a collection of scribblings in Dilly’s hand.

“That is nothing,” Dilly said, reddening. “Here, give those to me.”

“Hold on a minute,” Wheeler said. “What is this?”

Suddenly, Dilly looked a little sheepish, as if he had been caught shop-lifting. “Doing some research in public records,” Dilly said.

“You’re trying to find
him.
” Dilly’s face reddened just enough to arouse suspicion. “Aren’t you?” Dilly said nothing, and Wheeler began reading aloud from the notes. “Father’s name: Alois. Civil service pension. Linz, moved to Lambach. That’s the name of the town, isn’t it?” It started to sound familiar. Dilly said nothing. “Oh my god,” Wheeler said slowly. “I don’t believe it.” Dilly only looked sheepish, wanting to change the subject. “You’re hunting down Adolf Hitler.” The idea had not sunk in until that moment. “And what are you going to do if you find him?”

Here Wheeler was feeling guilty about pursuing Dilly’s mother, and all the time Dilly was preparing an intrusion of far greater impact. “I thought you wanted to walk softly so you wouldn’t change any history.”

“I’m just going to go look at him,” Dilly said quickly.

“He’s a ten-year-old boy, for god’s sake.”

“Eight, actually. I just want to see him,” Dilly said. But he didn’t sound at all convincing.

It was dawning on Wheeler. “That’s why you came here, isn’t it?” The thought was just beginning to form in his head.

Dilly looked relieved more than anything else. “I’d better tell you the last detail of the story,” he said. “I’m not exactly objective on this subject.” He paused and collected himself. “The torture—” He paused again, closing his eyes. “It was the most terrible— It wore me down. I was supposed to die, but the magic pill contained no magic, and after it went on and on and I kept holding out, they finally got me to the breaking point and I broke. I gave them the names of the Resistance contacts and the details of the invasion as I knew them. I spilled it all. Then they left me alone for what seemed like days in my cell. I was a wreck. I could barely move, but at least they didn’t come back and drag me to that awful room. They were checking facts, I guess, and as soon as they confirmed my story, they had no more use for me and left me alone to die. I guess in case there might be more information to squeeze out. They wouldn’t spare me my terrible guilt.”

His easy demeanor had hardened now, like a man possessed. “That’s when my hatred of Hitler began to totally take over; it became all I could focus on. It was not hard to blame the whole thing on him, and so I started thinking of him as a child and thinking of coming to Vienna to find him. I thought and thought and reconstructed every detail of the city I knew from my college days and Mother’s stories, and slowly I drifted away from that hard bench in the cold cell and found myself here, transported by hatred, sent to kill the child. I began asking around, then took a trip to Linz, where I remembered him coming from and found out what you just read. His father, Alois, is a retired civil servant with a pension, and the family has moved to Lambach. We can travel there, and we can find them.”

“All this because of the torture?” Wheeler said.

“That, and what I found out about my father.”

38

First Waltz

You see so much beneath the surface,” Weezie said as they walked along the Franz-Joseph-Kai. “It is as if you come from a different world. You seem to have none of the . . .” She paused, searching.

“None of the repressions?” he supplied.

“That is the phenomenon we do not even have a word for. You seem to have words for ideas my friends and I have never thought of. Where do you get it all? Are you a sorcerer?”

Wheeler laughed. “No, just from San Francisco,” he said quickly.

“And my fear is,” she said, looking up at him, “that to someone from San Francisco, someone from Boston appears a horrible bore.”

He stopped for a moment for emphasis. “Do I look like someone who is bored?”

That brought to her the Botticelli smile that melted his heart. “No, I guess you do not. But I do fear that I enjoy our conversations too much. In fact, they have gone beyond enjoyment, so far as to be counted along with food and rest among my daily necessities. It is as if my soul were a deep rich basement into which you, for some natural or supernatural reasons, have a window.” She spoke with the same innocent freshness that had long since captivated Wheeler so that he too now counted their morning walk along the canal among his own daily necessities. “I do not want to go back home and become a boring old slug,” she said seriously. “But then again, I cannot very well afford to become a gypsy.”

“What about a gypsy slug?” Wheeler said quickly, and she lifted her head toward him and gave a small laugh.

“Is there such a thing?”

“Not really, not even in San Francisco. I made it up for the occasion.”

“You see,” she said, tugging on his arm. “You tease me out of my seriousness in such a compelling way. You are always seeing the light side of what I say. The elders in my father’s church think me progressive, and my friends roll their eyes and call me perverse when I talk like this. It’s not that they are empty-headed, but they just don’t seem to look very deeply into what they call ordinary things.”

“You are very introspective, that’s all.”

She paused. “
Introspective.
What an interesting word.” She tilted her head and thought about it a moment. “Looking within. I
am
introspective. That is what my mother’s great friend Dr. James calls me.”

“Would that be William James?” Wheeler asked, dipping into his secret source of knowledge about her.

“You have heard of him?”

“Even in San Francisco we have heard of William James, and his brother Henry.”

“They were both dear friends of my mother’s, and Dr. James took a great interest in my education after Mother died. He is a dear man.”

“And he calls you introspective?”

“He does. That is not such a bad thing, is it?”

“On the contrary. It’s very good. Very modern. Introspection is the fashionable thing these days in Europe, the rage with the café crowd, and at the university with Dr. Freud and his colleagues.” Then he smiled. “It is very good, that is, unless overused. I am famous for overusing things.”

“I too am famous for that, I fear. My aunt Prudence would say introspection was self-indulgent, that it was—” Involuntarily her face took on a stern frown that she turned playfully on Wheeler, shaking an accusing finger at him. “It is not Christian.”

“I don’t mean to cast stones,” Wheeler said, “but your aunt Prudence doesn’t sound very Christian.”

“Oh, she has good intentions. She’s just a little rigid, I guess you’d say.”

“What would she think of all this?” Wheeler gestured to the life of the inner city that had begun to unfold around them.

“Oh goodness, she would never approve of Vienna. She would call it
careless
and
wanton
, or some such word. She has never traveled away from Boston.”

When they came to the end of the Franz-Joseph-Kai, at the point when they usually turned and headed back to Fraulein Tatlock’s, Wheeler had an urge to extend the morning meeting. He began walking toward an outdoor café. “Could we sit awhile?”

It was a gloriously sunny morning, and the number of strollers was beginning to increase. “Do you ever wonder,” she said as the waiter brought the trays of coffee and milk, “why there are so many people walking by in this city? Don’t people have places to go or obligations or occupations?” In Weezie’s charming purposefulness the smitten Wheeler saw the soft side of Puritanism.

“Couldn’t you learn to adapt to it?”

She brought her index finger to the side of her cheek, and thought for a moment. “I would need to be doing something. Playing the cello, or writing, or—”

“Or working in a bank?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think I could ever be shut up inside for hours and hours.” Then she looked at him, assessing. “You know,” she said, “I want to ask you something.”

“Ask.”

“Your openness is very disarming and different. But I want to know if there is not anything that you would not say.”

“Like what?”

“Certain unmentionable subjects. Would you not hold back on anything? ”

“Let’s try one,” he said.

Suddenly, she looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t mean to demonstrate. It was a theoretical—”

“Try one,” he insisted. “Tell me what you were feeling the night in the cab when you fled.”

“Oh, I could never—” She stopped and looked down. Wheeler allowed the silence to remain until it became intolerable for her. “I felt a surging,” she whispered, and looked up. Wheeler remained silent, encouraging her with a motion of his hand. “I felt overtaken by something animal. I had to stop it.”

Wheeler shrugged. “That was unmentionable, and you said it. Did anyone die?”

She gave him a resigned smile. “I thought I was being taken over by my baser nature and was heading for something terrible. There, I said it.”

“And where was it headed?” Wheeler was not letting her off the hook.

“It was headed for wildness, and—” She stopped.

“And?”

“And release.”

“And is that so bad?”

Weezie had closed her eyes and an expression of calm had come to her face. She opened her eyes and looked at him with a slight tilt of her head. “No, it is not,” she said finally. “It might be a blessed release.”

On the walk back, she had her hand on his arm again. “I keep fearing we will run into Frank Burden.” From what we can tell from the journals, it was the first time she had ever mentioned him and must have near stopped Wheeler in his tracks.

“Who is that?” Wheeler said, trying to appear nonchalant.

“Oh, Frank is from Boston. He was a football hero at Harvard College, and he went to the Olympic games in Greece last year. He asked me to marry him. I told him I needed time to find myself. But he is very single-minded about it and wants me to say yes to him. I think he is impressed by my family.” She laughed. “Frank Burden is a banker. He is not the sort of man to care much for finding oneself. He is not very introspective, as you would say. He is actually quite possessive. He would not enjoy seeing me on the arm of another handsome man.” She readjusted her hand on his arm. “He has come to Vienna to study international monetary structure. ” She wrinkled her nose again. “That, and to ask me again, I think, although we seem so far to have avoided each other.”

“Well, do you want to marry him?”

“Eventually, I suppose, it would be fine to marry someone as respected and proper as Frank. He is very handsome and well educated. He comes from an old Boston family—of which he is the last male—and he is decent and well read. And he will probably be the father of a good line of children.”

“Then why haven’t you jumped at his offer?”

“For the moment I need to try to figure out a few things about myself, and Frank has very set ideas about what life should be and about what role women should play in it. Before I settle down to that, I’d like to know a little more of the ways of the world.”