The Little Book (40 page)

Weezie stood staring without speaking for a long time. “Oh, I wish,” she whispered.

“You do,” Wheeler said. “That is something you must know with absolute certainty, and never forget.”

They made long passionate love on the painter’s velvet couch, surrounded by the splendor of the paintings, and afterward, under a down comforter they found in a cabinet, they lay naked in each other’s arms.

As they were leaving, they did one more tour of the easels. “I think we should keep the covers off,” Weezie said. “What do you think?”

“Absolutely,” Wheeler said with conviction. And as they stood again in front of the painting of the magnificent Athena, he said again, “She is within you. Most definitely. You must never forget.”

Weezie looked into his eyes, languidly at first, and then with a conviction to match his. “I must train myself to remember, mustn’t I?”

“You must. She is within you when you need her. She always has been, I suspect. You just haven’t noticed.”

And as they were leaving, dressed again and proper, Weezie pulled on his arm and caused him to look back with her over the paintings. She spoke, still in awe. “A perfect place for an assignation.”

41

The Right Place at the Right Time

She’s here,” Dilly said excitedly, as soon as Wheeler found him at the café table in the Prater where they had agreed to meet.

"Who’s here?” he said.

"Mother, Eleanor Putnam. She’s here in Vienna.”

Wheeler, caught a little by surprise, probably tried his best not to overreact. “How in the world did you conclude that?”

“Last night, I remembered. The reason Father came to Vienna in 1897 was to study the international banking that became his profession and chase down Mother and ask her to marry him. That was part of their story that for some reason I didn’t recall until last night.”

“Have you seen her?” Wheeler asked.

“No, but I know she’s here. We have to be very, very careful. As much as it would be tempting to approach her, we cannot. Absolutely cannot.” He stopped and looked worried. “One thing we know for sure. She is a very attractive young woman.” Dilly paused for thought. “And quite a powerful one, you know,” he said suddenly. “You would never know it from her demeanor, and she did everything possible not to attract attention, the last thing she wanted. And, as you know, Bostonians never show their wealth
or
their power. But she headed the board of the family investment fund, and it was much larger than anyone suspected. She was, I discovered fairly late in the game, its principal architect.”

Wheeler listened with high interest as Dilly began to unwind. Images of his evenings with his grandmother at 6 Acorn Street kept running through his head, the intensity with which she always greeted him, the total attention and affection that radiated from her eyes, the beauty and grace that she conveyed, even in her late eighties. And then the magic of the last night of her life, the waltz; feeling her light and graceful in his arms as they glided so easily around the living room, losing all sense of time, and how she had said with such warm assurance, “Everyone knows how to waltz.” And then Mrs. Spurgeon’s summoning and the awfulness of finding his grandmother on the floor of her bedroom, and the terrible, unexplainably debilitating sense of loss.

“It was my father who was full of bluster,” Dilly continued. “Puffing about how the Burden family had such a tradition, but it was Mother’s Hyperion Fund that quietly ran things in a significant segment of Boston culture, with large anonymous gifts to the symphony, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Episcopal church, even the Pops. Harvard University and our old school St. Gregory’s were also major secret beneficiaries, as was the Athenaeum and its publishing company.”

“Wait,” Wheeler interrupted. “The Hyperion Fund supported the Athenaeum Press?”

Dilly noticed the consternation on his face. “You know of it?” he asked.

For a moment Wheeler only stared, collecting his thoughts. “It was the Athenaeum Press,” he said finally, “who had sought out and published both Mother’s book
Persephone Rising
and the Haze’s and my
Fin de Siècle
.”

“Mother’s hand,” Dilly said, letting this new information sink in for a moment, then he continued. “When I was at Harvard Law School, I was doing a study of foundation grants and gifts and kept coming upon the Hyperion Fund, so I investigated. It seems that the fund had made incredibly wise and strategic investments since the beginning of the century. When I dug into the records, I found that the fund had gone from a small inheritance in 1900 and converted over the next thirty years into a major financial force in the investment world.

“I interviewed the fund’s director, a man named T. Williams Honeycutt, whom I had known for years. I found him infuriatingly private and reserved, willing to answer my questions only in the most brief and cautious way. He was such a typical conservative Boston banker that I could not imagine him being the leader of a financial institution that had made such amazingly wise and sagacious decisions, especially the one stunner. In the summer of 1929, he had directed the entire fund out of the stock market and into other holdings, thus totally avoiding the Great Crash of that fall. When I asked him questions about that move, he was remarkably unforthcoming.

“After 1929, the fund was back at it, fully invested in the market, again making shrewd choices and again increasing its value by leaps and bounds each year. Again, I asked Honeycutt and again he gave cautious and reserved answers. I was becoming more and more frustrated and less and less willing to give it up. The more Honeycutt stonewalled me, the more the investigative reporter I became.” He broke off the stream of exposition. “You know I tend to get a little obsessive about things.”

“You were on to something,” Wheeler said.

Then he resumed. “I noticed patterns: big gifts to institutions who then made big changes. In 1908, for instance, a large donation to the New York Philharmonic, which they said in an acknowledgment allowed them to pursue the new director, who just happened to be Gustav Mahler. In the same year, a gift to Clark University near Boston, which enabled the large and significant conference in psychoanalysis in 1909. Then, later, a number of personal grants to artists from Europe, all Jewish, who were fleeing Nazi oppression. When I asked Honeycutt for patterns to these gifts, he simply said they were timely and thoughtful foundation decisions. I kept after him, I was relentless, trying to discover how the foundation had been so extraordinarily prescient, and how they had known to plant such strategic gifts in such strategic places.

“Finally, Mother came to me. She told me she would answer my questions, and asked that I stop harassing Will Honeycutt. ‘You are driving the poor man to distraction,’ she said. ‘He is just the fund’s conservator,’ she said, ‘not the decision maker. I have what you want to know, but you must keep it between us.’ And she proceeded to tell me that the decisions were all hers, that she was the president of the fund and that it was entirely under her control. Honeycutt was simply the very dedicated and loyal manager. As she spoke, she sat across from me on the couch and I saw her in a totally different light. She looked poised, controlled, and I must say, strikingly beautiful, the embodiment of feminine power, one of the Greek goddesses.

“When I asked her how she had made such fortuitous investments, becoming a financial partner in about ten of the most successful companies in America as they were just starting up—a number before they had even gone public—she just smiled benignly and said she studied hard and had an instinct for it. ‘I visited companies,’ she said. ‘I got a feeling for what areas were the future, like automobiles and electricity and soap products, and I found the right horses to back. I took the train to Detroit in 1902, the year before he founded his company, and met with Henry Ford, and I wrote him a check right then and there. I told him I had faith in his vision. A few years earlier, I made our initial investments in automobile production, first backing a man named David Dunbar Buick, who built an automobile even before Ford, and then Champion Ignition Company, who made spark plugs. Both of these companies later became General Motors, in which we have now a major holding. It was simply the right thing to do at the right time,’ she said, very calmly and with matter-of-fact precision, as if it were the most logical thing in the world.

“I asked her how she knew to make these investments, and she repeated that it was just intuition, from knowing how important automobiles were going to be. Then I asked her the big one: how did she know to get out of the market before the 1929 crash? You know what she said?” Dilly looked incredulous.

“Intuition,” Wheeler said.

“She looked at me with the most serious and honest expression and said ‘I just had a hunch.’ A hunch, she said, just like that.”

“I guess she was just good at it,” Wheeler said, beginning to get a grasp on what he was being told.

“General Motors,” Dilly said, shaking his head. “If you had to make one single investment at the beginning of the century, that was it. And she was in on the ground floor.”

“And Ford Motor Company,” Wheeler said. “And General Electric?”

“Right. She bought the fund’s Eli Lilly, Proctor and then Gamble, and General Electric holdings in 1898, when very few people had ever heard of them. In 1919, just after the Armistice, she went to William Boeing and told him she would fund any of his new airplane projects in which he needed help. He was building dressers, counters, and furniture on the side, just to stay in business.” Dilly rattled off a number of other names and years. “The remarkable thing I discovered was that the investments came just a year after the company started. Mother would just go to the founders and say she wanted to invest. She was very attractive and very captivating and deceptively shrewd. I don’t need to tell you that the returns were enormous.”

“I’d add International Business Machines and Hewlett Packard in 1950,” Wheeler said. “But you wouldn’t know about those.”

“Mother probably kept going after I didn’t come back from the war, so if those were good investments, she would have bought in. She had an uncanny eye, it turns out. She was still going then, right?”

“Into the sixties,” Wheeler said.

“Well, anyway,” Dilly said, “you get the idea. At the beginning of the century, everyone was thinking railroads, and the Hyperion Fund did not ever buy one share of railroad stock. And the more I looked into it, the clearer it became that it was Mother calling the shots. In 1920, she arranged for the fund to give St. Gregory’s an endowment for a faculty salary. Did you ever hear how the Haze referred to his faculty status?”

Wheeler paused, searching his memory bank. “A ‘funded position,’ ” he said. “That is even how the headmaster referred to him in public. I had never heard of such a thing and thought it sort of odd.”

“So he was for over forty years, an anonymously funded position, supported by a permanent endowment. Funded from guess where.”

“And you’re saying that your mother set it up.”

“After the First War, Arnauld Esterhazy returned from Europe pretty much a wreck. Shell shock, or something. Some said he had been gassed. Mother arranged for the school to give him housing and a part-time faculty position, like the one he had left to go to war, until he recovered. In the beginning, he taught only a few classes of geography to the little boys. He was pretty much a nervous mess, I guess, and didn’t reach his full bloom as the Venerable Haze for about ten years.” Dilly paused. “Just as I was rising to the upper grades in the early thirties.”

“It turned into another good investment, I guess you’d say.”

“I guess,” Dilly said. “He was certainly important to me.”

“And to me,” Wheeler said, looking up to notice that like his own Dilly’s eyes were filled with tears.

“There is more I need to tell you about Arnauld Esterhazy,” Dilly said, suddenly becoming serious. “Christmas 1943, your mother and I took a break from the war and brought you home to Boston. During that visit, I introduced you and your mother to Arnauld. We went out to his ‘rooms’ at St. Greg’s. He was delighted to meet your mother and enthralled by you. You were absorbed in your three-year-old world, of course, and for some reason, as we were sitting and talking, you looked at Arnauld, and because of his prematurely white hair, I suppose, you shouted out,
Grandfather!
and ran to him, climbing up into his lap. Arnauld was overwhelmed. He loved it, and held you, and then suddenly he began to cry. As you know, he could get a bit emotional, but it would usually pass. But this time it did not, and he held you and began to sob. I got up and walked over to him, and put my hand on his shoulder, and I could feel his heaving. At the time, I did not know what it was, but I was deeply touched, as was your mother.

“Later in our stay at Acorn Street, I had a disastrous and fateful conversation with my father, and I became deeply upset, and told your mother that we would be leaving. Mother came to me. She was saddened, of course, but she seemed to know exactly how disturbed I was, and exactly why. She was very serious, and sort of matter-of-fact. ‘There is something you must know before you return to England,’ she said. ‘You must go see Arnauld Esterhazy, and you must go alone.’ I called him, and we agreed to meet at the St. Greg’s skate house.

“The Haze had grown to love skating,” Dilly continued. “I was quite involved in hockey when I was a boy, and I taught him to skate on the Charles River on Sundays during the winters, and he loved going out with me. We would skate and talk, and I must say that he got better and better at it, and after I graduated, he kept it up. During my senior year at Harvard, I was captain of hockey, and one Sunday I organized a team skate from the college to St. Greg’s, and I told all the Haze’s old students at the college. Together—we must have been almost fifty strong—we skated the hour or so along the Charles, an impressive sight, and arrived at the St. Greg’s skate house at noon, the exact hour I told the Haze I would meet him there. What a thrill it must have been for him. Just as he stepped out of the skate house onto the ice of the river, around the bend came fifty college students, most of whom he knew by name. We formed a circle around him and gave him a thunderous
Haze, rah. Haze, rah, rah.
Tears came to his eyes, of course, and to the eyes of all of us, even the hockey players who didn’t know him.