The Little Book (39 page)

“I don’t know about that.”

“Give it a try,” Wheeler said, and waited.

Dilly’s eyes were watering now, but he still had trouble with the word. “Prentice Olcott was a racist and a bigot,” he said. “And a real—” His sides were splitting, and he rolled onto the blanket. “He was a real and roaring asshole.”

“It must have been genetic,” Wheeler managed to get out, himself rolling backward, off the blanket onto the grass.

“Like father,” Dilly said, still convulsed, “like son. Asshole father. Asshole son.” Dilly sat up and wiped his eyes, shaking his head. “Whew. I hadn’t thought of Prentice Olcott in a long time.” He looked over at Wheeler, who was lying on his back, gazing up at the Austrian sky. “Maybe you didn’t know this, but when I made that catch against Yale that you say became so famous, there was a lot more riding on it than just a game.” The thought stopped him for a moment before he continued. “There was a little kid in the fourth class at St. Greg’s when we were first classmen named Silver, Maury Silver, and one day I saw Prentice rubbing his nose in the snow, and I stopped him. Little Maury Silver looked up at me and said thank you with his deep brown eyes. I’ll never forget it. The little guy was truly humiliated. Prentice looked back at me as he was leaving and said ‘I didn’t know you were a Jew lover.’ Well, Maury Silver was about ninety pounds, but he loved the Red Sox and knew about everything there was to know about them. Later that spring Maury Silver got hit by a car. His parents buried him in his Red Sox cap. When we were in that game against Yale, it was spring of our senior year. We were ahead three to two, when that batter came to the plate. I thought of Maury Silver and what it must have felt like to have a big first classman hero rubbing your face in the snow, and I thought of those awful words, ‘Jew lover,’ and I remember thinking I was going to catch that ball if he hit it all the way back to New Haven. You know who the batter was?”

“Oh Jesus,” Wheeler said, sitting up.

“Right. Prentice Olcott.”

They had folded up the picnic blanket and were back in the open space, now yards apart, throwing the Frisbee. “I forgot to ask what happened, ” Dilly yelled out across the space.

“To what?” Wheeler said, barely moving to catch the long soaring throw from his father.

“What happened to the pitch.”

“Which one?” Wheeler launched a long soaring throw back.

“Your perfect game against Yale.”

“I walked off,” Wheeler said matter-of-factly.

“You walked off?” Dilly stopped and stared and let the disk drop quietly beside him. “You were one pitch away from a perfect game against Yale, and you walked off?”

“I got to the last pitch and I put down the ball and my glove—it was actually your glove—and took off my Harvard uniform item by item, right there on the mound, picked up your glove, and walked off.”

Dilly looked at Wheeler for a long time, at first in astonishment before he picked up the Frisbee beside him, and then as his mind drifted back to thoughts of his brief and happy life with Wheeler’s mother, to understanding and respect. “Your mother’s son” was all he said.

Dilly picked up the Frisbee and with a quick flick of the wrist sent it soaring across the open space with an absolutely perfect throw. As it hovered over Wheeler’s head, about to descend to the exact spot where he stood, the son looked across at his father and saw a smile of absolute satisfaction.

“That’s it!” Wheeler called across their special plot of the Vienna Woods.

On the ride back to the inner city, Dilly sat with the hardwood Frisbee in his lap, picking it up and feeling the smooth surface from time to time, his mind reconstructing the beautiful disk in flight. He said nothing, but smiled contentedly. Wheeler interrupted his reverie. “You know, your words became famous,” he said. “Your graduation speech is on a plaque in the main hall of the school, and every St. Greg’s boy knows it by heart.” And Wheeler drifted into part of it, the part that went “too proud to cheat, too brave to lie.” And then he closed dramatically, “For I am a St. Gregory’s boy!”

“Good lord,” Dilly burst out. “That saccharine thing!”

“The headmaster, Mr. Wiggins, quoted it each spring, on the opening day of the baseball season.”

“Charlie Wiggins?” Dilly said with surprise and Wheeler nodded. “You didn’t tell me Charlie became headmaster. We used to play on teams together at Harvard.”

“Oh, didn’t we all know that. He used to tell the whole story of how heroic and self-effacing you were, ‘always looking out for the other fellow,’ he’d say, usually with tears in his eyes. Then he would recite your speech. There wasn’t a dry eye in the study hall, especially with the older people. ”

“They weren’t my words,” Dilly said curtly.

“Weren’t your words?” Wheeler sounded shocked.

“I explained that at the time, but I guess it got lost in the retelling. I found them in an old book in mother’s private bookshelf where no one was supposed to be. I was snooping. The words that caught my eye were handwritten and entitled ‘A Gentleman.’ I adapted it by plugging in the ‘St. Gregory’s boy’ part, and it made quite an impression when I read it at graduation. Funny—” He paused and reflected. “Mother never commented on it.”

“Not your words?” Wheeler said, shaking his head. “Well, let’s not tell the two generations of St. Greg’s boys who had to memorize it.”

Dilly too shook his head. “It is peculiar being a legend. There is much to adjust to, so much that gets embellished.” He looked back at the hardwood disk in his lap and gave it a slight flip, then went silent again.

That evening back in his room at Frau Bauer’s Wheeler opened his journal to a fresh page and tested his memory by writing out the words he had memorized years ago as his heroic father’s graduation speech, only this time substituting “a gentleman” every time he came to “a St. Gregory’s boy.” He found that he remembered the whole thing, word for word.

40

A Perfect Place for an Assignation

The perfect place for an assignation,” Kleist had said with a wink as he led Wheeler through his friend’s studio near the Stephans-Platz. When Wheeler had mentioned he was looking for a place to be alone, his artist friend was more than a little enthusiastic. “Einhorn will be gone for four months, to Paris, and would be offended if you did not use it.” Kleist laid the key in Wheeler’s hand. “I have to apologize ahead of time. It’s a little cluttered. Our Secessionist group is using it for storage.”

“A place for a little well-deserved privacy,” he said to Weezie as he unlocked the door and ushered her in. “Perfect, except that it smells a bit of turpentine and linseed oil.”

She walked in and looked around at the loft apartment lit by a large overhead skylight and cluttered with sheet-draped easels, stacks of draped paintings, and the painter’s velvet couch in the corner. “This is perfect,” she said, taking in a big breath. “It smells like creativity.” When she looked back at Wheeler and gave him that smile full of resignation and joy, he could see she was blushing.

“This embarrasses you?”

She put on her courageous face. “I would wish to stay here forever,” she said. “It is a place to let one’s hair down, to be freed from one’s constraints. ”

“And to quiet one’s stern disapproving voice.”

Weezie smiled and sighed. “One’s aunt Prudence’s voice perhaps?”

“Precisely,” Wheeler said, offering her his arm gallantly and ushering her over to the couch where he sat beside her. There was a rosy glow about her, and she leaned toward him with just a suggestion of the release from her Boston propriety for which he had been the catalyst.

“I thought you would prefer this to a perpetual series of cab rides.”

“That was very romantic,” she said. “A lovely risqué overture. But you are right in assuming that the following movements deserve something more stationary, say like a faded velvet couch in a rustic painter’s studio. A place where a proper Boston girl would never consent to meet.”

Her freshness made him laugh. As he looked into her eyes, he felt more rich and fulfilled than ever before in his life. Here it was at last, the feeling of oneness he only hoped for. “This is more the way it is supposed to be,” he said, and he encouraged her to stay sitting beside him. “A place to settle and be comfortable.”

“Oh, I am comfortable,” she said. “That I am
so
comfortable with all this is an amazement to me. I cannot decide if I am losing or gaining strength.”

“I would vote for
gaining
,” Wheeler said lightly.

“I have totally compromised my principles, totally given myself up to lust and desire,” she said, frowning and closing her eyes. “And yet, I feel so unafraid. I feel like one of those women in the paintings. I cannot explain it, but for the first time in my life I feel the warring parties have quieted.”

“The Puritan side has been vanquished by the sybarite side, I think.”

“You make it sound light,” Weezie said, smiling cautiously. “I think that is so. Totally vanquished. I am completely grateful to you. I have found rapturous pleasure, that is for sure, but I also have a strong feeling of independence.”

“That is my rapturous pleasure, seeing you grow in strength.”

“I so hope that pleases you.” Then she looked at him quizzically. “Has your ardor been quenched?”

He laughed again. “What a delightful turn of phrase,” he said. “Where ever did you find it?”

“It is out of my past,” she said, allowing an expectant pause. “Well, has it?”

“Quenched it has been,” he said, meeting her eyes. “And so much more.”

“I think it is good for the soul when the body’s needs are quenched.” She said that last word with a look of total contentment, as if just finishing a difficult puzzle. Then she smiled even more broadly. “I had no idea what it all meant,” she said, suddenly becoming serious. “I guess you would say that I was pathetically naïve, or innocent, or worse. Now, I cannot believe how quickly I have adapted to the role of sybarite. There must be a term for needing to experience something before knowing how to describe it.”

“Aren’t you being a little overly analytical?”

“I feel I have to analyze it to describe it.”

“And to convince yourself that you have not fallen from grace.”

“Oh, I
know
I have fallen from grace. But I asked for it. It is what I wanted,” she said without much concern, wistfully more than with any overtone of guilt. “I do feel as if all my backbone is gone. I have been reduced to a sack of feathers.” She looked at him with a wild desire in her eyes. “I do love it, and I do not wish for it to stop.”

Wheeler smiled and touched her cheek. “Don’t you suppose everyone really wishes to find this?”

“And now, I will tell you something shocking.” In the pause, she seemed to be deciding if it was too awful to divulge. “Why I came back,” she continued. “I thought that if I were going to roast in hell for what I was wanting—” She paused again. “—that I might as well come back to you, and do it right. And now I cannot think of anything beyond the intoxication of complete sensual delight. I don’t think I will ever again have it off my mind, nor will I ever eat again. I have totally lost my appetite for any other earthly food.”

“Is that bad?”

“I keep thinking, what if everyone decided to say whatever and do exactly what he or she felt like, just did what felt good, not what he or she should do. What would happen to civilization? How would continents ever get discovered or novels be written or heroic deeds done?”

“Do you think people who discovered continents and did civilized and heroic deeds never experienced this?”

“That is what I am trying to comprehend. I don’t understand how it all fits together.” She released an involuntary shudder.

“To everything there is a season,” he said.

“A time to embrace,” she followed, it coming as something of a relief. “And a time to refrain from embracing.” She thought further on it. “So you are saying there is biblical permission for this sort of thing?”

“I am.”

“I think that is stretching things a bit.”

“Sounds like permission to me.”

“I don’t think that is what my aunt Prudence had in mind when she read Ecclesiastes.” With that, she rose and walked over to one of the large draped easels. “You know, there is something I have been very desirous of doing.” And she reached up and freed the sheet and pulled it from the first canvas. Both she and Wheeler gasped and stared in amazement. There before them was a large brightly colored painting of a totally naked woman, surrounded by color and gold, with a look on her face that Wheeler would later describe as “dreamy ecstasy.” Weezie walked over to the first stack of paintings and again pulled off the sheet. This time a man and a woman, both clothed but with the most sumptuous expression toward each other. She moved the painting and found beneath it yet another riot of color. Then another. Then another. Before ten minutes had passed, the two lovers found themselves surrounded by brightly colored paintings, all of them, to one degree or another, radiating an irresistible sensuality.

“These are the Secessionists,” Wheeler said.

“I have never been in the presence of such incredible vitality,” Weezie said emphatically, her eyes shining.

“And look at this beauty,” Wheeler said, pulling the wrapping off one last canvas. They both stood speechless for a long moment, taking in the penetrating green-eyed gaze of a goddess in full golden warrior armor, her brown hair cascading down from her golden helmet over a large golden medallion on her chest, her hand reaching out to hold a golden spear. “This is Athena,” Wheeler said when he could speak, “favored daughter of Zeus, born from out of his head, the most magnificent of the deities, beautiful and powerful guardian of ancient wisdom and the whole wonderful city of Athens. You can always recognize her because she has the likeness of the fearsome Gorgon Medusa on her breastplate.” He reached out with his hand and touched the gilded paint of the armor. “This is the essence of feminine strength, the beautiful and the horrible.” He stopped and looked at her. “You have Athena strength in you. I have seen it and felt it.”