The Little Book (41 page)

“So, now, around the new year of 1944, just a few months ago for me, over forty years ago for you, the Haze told me to meet him at the skate house. We laced on our skates and began to glide along the smooth ice of the Charles River, the fresh clear New England air in our faces. ‘I love this,’ he said. ‘I could go on like this forever.’ And then he looked at me, and he said, ‘Dilly, dear boy, your mother and I have agreed that before you go back to the war there is something you must know.’ And he told me this story.” Dilly paused and took a deep breath. Then he recounted to his son exactly what the Haze had said.

Later that evening, alone in his room at Frau Bauer’s, Wheeler wrote a detailed record of his remarkable conversation with Dilly. At the end of it, in outline form, on one whole page of his journal, he included the names and dates of the Hyperion Fund’s momentously prescient investments.

42

Just This Once

Arnauld Esterhazy grew up as the third son in a famous aristocratic family in fin de siècle Austria-Hungary and spent a remarkable boyhood and young adulthood surrounded by art and music and ideas in Vienna. In his young manhood, he spent much of his time in the coffeehouses of the city and became a part of the intellectual crowd that made Vienna famous at that time, a branch of which called itself
Jung Wien.
In 1897, when he was nineteen, he met a young American woman, Weezie Putnam, who captivated him and determined, it turned out, the direction of the rest of his life. When she left Austria and returned to Boston and later married, Arnauld kept up a correspondence. Some years later, after he had completed his degree in philosophy and had spent a few years teaching in the university as an academic fledgling, she encouraged him to come to Boston and take a teaching position in German and European history at St. Gregory’s School, from which her husband had graduated.

Arnauld taught for a number of years, and the life of an American schoolmaster agreed with him. In 1914, when the tensions in Bosnia Herzegovina seemed to suggest war, he was preoccupied and torn. If Austria declared war and sided with Germany, he would feel honor bound to return home and join the army, something he deeply did not want to do.

His admiration of Miss Putnam, who now had become Eleanor Burden, had continued, and he greatly enjoyed the evenings on Beacon Hill, when he was invited to dine with her; her husband, Frank Burden, the St. Gregory’s hero who had competed in the first modern Olympic games in 1896; their two talented young daughters; and the society of the Boston Brahmins who graced their table. He loved the beauty and serenity of Eleanor’s home, the charm of her conversations, and the vision of her loveliness in the formal setting of her elegance. It was an infatuation he had carried with him from Vienna years before, and it remained secretly in his heart. He was sure it would last forever, never expressed and never in any conscious way to be acted upon. Arnauld was certain that he would remain a bachelor all his days and that Eleanor Burden would remain forever his inspiration, his Beatrice, and the love of his life.

He made the fateful decision to return home, and he came to Acorn Street the night before he was to sail for Germany. He and Eleanor dined alone. He could barely keep his hands from shaking, the enormity of this departure weighed on him so powerfully. He had a premonition that Austria’s decision to go to war was absolute folly. The major powers would slug it out in a most ugly fashion and the poor Austria-Hungary empire would be trampled in the process. And yet he felt compelled to return and do his part.

He drank a few glasses of wine and at least for the evening tried to concentrate on Eleanor’s beautiful face and forget the cauldron he was about to throw himself into.

“I sail from Hoboken, New Jersey,” Arnauld said, as if it was quite a distinction.

“Sooner or later,” Eleanor said with a wry smile, “everything ends up in Hoboken, New Jersey.”

But the mirth did not last long. “I fear I shall never see you again,” he said solemnly to her in the living room after the meal. “My heart is breaking. ”

She looked into his eyes. “Oh, dear Arnauld, you are such a fatalist.” She was doing her best to make light of the moment and perhaps to dissipate the negative energy. “As soon as the unpleasantness is over, you will return here and resume your teaching.”

“Do you really believe that?” he said.

She looked down for a long moment. “The future is the future,” she said. “However it turns out, there is something you must know and carry with you.” She looked into his eyes, about to speak, but no words came, from either of them.

She rose from her chair and walked toward him, holding out her hand, and it gently touched his cheek, wet now from his own tears. She sat beside him and leaned into him, as if to kiss him on the wet cheek, but her lips found his. Arnauld, always the timid one, began to pull away, and Eleanor, always the strong one, whispered, pulling him back toward her, “No, Arnauld. Just this once,” and their lips remained together tenderly. Slowly, she reached for his hand and slowly she brought it to her breast and repeated, “Just this once, Arnauld. Just this once.”

She led him to the guest bedroom on the second floor, where he had stayed overnight on a number of occasions, and she undressed him slowly and lovingly, and she helped him undress her. At times when he seemed fearful or tentative, she always guided his hands, and turned them into those of an experienced lover, encouraging him not to hurry, showing him how to enjoy and savor each part and each special sensation. “Gently, gently,” she would whisper. “Slowly, slowly.” The flickering candlelight of the bedroom lit their bodies in images that would stay in his mind forever, he knew. As much as he wanted to speak and to tell her that this was truly amazing and the fulfillment of all of his dreams of love, beauty, and desire, he said nothing, only waited for her coaching and instruction. At what seemed to his guide and mentor the appropriate time, she led him to enter her, and there he felt for a moment a completeness and connection he never imagined possible, then able to control himself no longer, he exploded.

“We can stay here all night,” she said afterward. “The coast is clear.”

And so, for just one and only one time Arnauld Esterhazy fell asleep in the arms of the love of his life, thousands of miles away from the events that had ruined his equilibrium. When he awoke, he was alone, in the second-floor bedroom of the Burden home at 6 Acorn Street, Beacon Hill, Boston, where he had awoken enough times before to find it familiar, so familiar in fact that he wondered if he had just experienced a wonderful and forbidden dream. Later that morning, he did indeed leave for Hoboken, New Jersey, and the transatlantic steamer passage to Bremen, Germany.

Exactly nine months later, to the day, when Arnauld was in the middle of the harrowing anguish of war, Frank Standish Burden, Junior, was born, and the legendary life of Dilly Burden began.

43

The Gloves Come Off

Sigmund Freud would confess of himself that he needed a close friend and a passionate enemy, and there were times when the two were united in the same person. “I always knew how to provide myself with both over and over,” the great doctor admitted, late in his life. Those passionate friendships he entered with such intensity, such as with Josef Breuer, with whom he wrote the famous Anna O case, and Wilhelm Fleiss, his Berlin friend whom he was writing regularly during Wheeler’s time, all ended in bitterness. And, of course, the most celebrated example of this passionate friendship turning to rancor would come with Carl Jung, with whom Freud would begin an intense father-son collaboration in 1906 and with whom he traveled to America and Clark University in 1909. When the two strong-willed psychologists began to disagree about the nature of libido, the sex drive, their disagreements became so personal and rancorous that they split in 1912, and never communicated again.

Wheeler began to notice the subtle shift in the great doctor’s attitude toward him after they had settled into the genial routine of their regular meetings. As Wheeler prepared his journal entries, we can notice more and more care with the sections that dealt with Freud, and we learn that Freud began reading to his American visitor passages from his own writings and from his letters to Fleiss. Suddenly, as the intensity increased and the two men were sharing intimate details, a certain tension began to arise.

The great doctor was vacillating. One minute he affected the objective distance of a scientist, the next he was moving in close as an intimate colleague. When the subject was history or the life of the mind, he was close and personal; when it moved to anything approaching the subject of time dislocation he slid back to his usual distance. For Wheeler, the change seemed to begin in one moment when he told his host about the significance of the stock market page.

“You could make a lot of money with this,” Wheeler said, not entirely jokingly, but Freud did not return his smile.

“And why do you say that?” Freud asked, penetrating with his dark eyes.

“Because it really is the future,” Wheeler said, tapping his fingers on the page emphatically. The doctor did not budge. Friendship or no, Wheeler realized in that moment and recorded in his journal, “The doctor is simply not going to believe my story, so the gloves are off.”

“You really are on to something unique here,” Wheeler told his host at the beginning of the next session, and the rest came out in a burst. “What you offer as a scientific theory of the unconscious mind is an inspired vision. You are going to establish forever that childhood determines the course of adulthood. This is not lightweight stuff!” Wheeler’s enthusiasm was now unrestrained. “You can see beyond the details. You explore the controversial. You can’t help that.”

Overwhelmed by this sudden and surprising change of pace, the great doctor began to warm to his guest’s affirmation. “You make it sound heroic. ”

“It
is
heroic. How do you think Heinrich Schliemann found Troy?”

Freud nodded his pleasure at the comparison, and Wheeler continued. “Schliemann found his way through relentless criticism, people calling him an amateur and a huckster. But always he had one vision in front of him. Troy was not fictional. It actually existed, and Schliemann was determined to find it.”

“The sexual center is not my invention alone, you know. Charcot planted that seed.”

“I know that.” Wheeler could see in Freud’s eyes that he liked the way his visitor paid attention to details.

“So I am not to blame for that fixation on the sexual.”

“No,” Wheeler said. “But you are the one who is waving it in the face of the proper bourgeois Viennese.”

“I am the messenger who is going to be shot at.”

“The hysterics you have been treating have displayed an astonishing array of symptoms—debilitating body pains, paralysis of limbs, depressive moods to intermittent hallucinations. And you know the cause is not physical. Am I right?” Freud nodded. “So, you are seeing early traumatic experiences and sexual conflicts as the cause.”

“That is a fair summary.”

“These early traumatic experiences of childhood cause the bizarre symptoms of adulthood.”

“That is what I am saying, yes.”

Wheeler paused, weighing his words. “You are moving the conversation forward in a way that cannot regress. You are bringing to the table the fact that Troy exists. From now on all arguments against that truth will be reactive. A profoundly important step.”

“Then you don’t disagree with me?”

Freud looked genuinely curious, a signal that, in spite of himself, the doctor was beginning to take his strange guest seriously. Wheeler spoke with extraordinary insight and clarity, as if he, like some ancient mystic, had seen the future. As much as Sigmund Freud knew with absolute certainty that his patient’s complex story was an immense fabrication, he was still fascinated by the glimpse into the future that it held, much the way workers on the mental ward learned French history from the man who thought he was Napoleon.
Very perplexing,
Freud would say.

“Quite the contrary. You are very right, and if you stick with the idea, you are going to get what you want.”

“What is it that you are so sure I want?” The doctor now sounded a bit impatient.

“What you want is fame for a breakthrough idea.”

Freud paused and looked at Wheeler for a long moment, obviously startled. “Then what is the problem?” Freud was now fixed on Wheeler, at once both defensive and expectant. He was really listening, and Wheeler, by Dilly’s admonition to have no effect on the present, was moving into dangerous territory.

“The problem is—” Wheeler paused, aware perhaps in this instant that he had gone too far. “The problem is that it is too damned logical. You think you have to abandon the one for the other.”

“They cannot coexist,” Freud said suddenly, with the first hint of defensiveness. “Children cannot have been abused and also
imagine
the abuse.”

Wheeler shrugged. He knew well the problem. Like himself, Freud was given to extremes. In order to take interest in an idea he had to proclaim it as the
only
idea. He needed the extremes, both to attract attention and—more importantly—to sustain his own interest. “Well, that is for you to work out. I am just saying that in your zeal to move toward the most important discovery of your life, you are stating it in the extreme. In your rush to get to Troy, you are digging through the evidence of lots of other civilizations.”

Freud glared at him, his mind gripped suddenly by the reality of what he was doing: taking seriously and seeking the counsel and wisdom of a madman.

The narrator must intrude here and point out what may be obvious at this point. Over the past few meetings, since the first sharing of Wheeler’s journal, both men had become swept up in the intensity of the conversation, each more involved, to a much higher degree than either wished. Wheeler had definitely gone too far, sharing with the great doctor details of the future he had definitely wished to hold back, and Sigmund Freud, for his part, had fallen in and out of the thrall of his patient’s alternative reality in which he clearly had had no intention of believing.