The Little Book (43 page)

“About what? Radical politics? Women’s right to vote? Garish interior design? Going without a bath?”

“No,” she said impatiently, “other things—”

“What sorts of things?” Wheeler was boring in, not letting her off the hook.

“You know,” she said, now sounding peeved.

“I don’t know.”

She balked, but then said finally, “Things sexual.”

“And why do they make one blush and faint?”

She looked back out the window, and her perturbation fell away suddenly and she became rapt in deep thought, then turned back slowly. “I do not know,” she said with great earnestness. “I have never given it any thought.”

“And was that what made you faint with Herr Mahler?”

Again, she looked pensive and took a long time to answer. “How curious, ” she said absently. “I had never thought of it that way.”

On certain afternoons when Wheeler knew Dilly would not be there, he brought Weezie to lunch with Kleist’s friends at the Café Central. They were more than gracious to her and seemed to like the way she held her own in a discussion of art or even politics. Of course, she had few equals on the subject of music, and her reputation on that subject preceded her because of her already-established association with the music crowd. “They think I am your sweet girl,” she said after one such lunch.

“They don’t mean it disrespectfully,” Wheeler said.

“I think it would be better if we were not seen together in public,” she said, “now that we have this new—” She paused, having trouble with the word. “—this new arrangement.”

“You are worried about how you are being perceived.”

“I know that proper girls, the ones these young Viennese will eventually marry, do not join them in artist’s studios for trysts. That role is saved for their shop girls and promiscuous workers’ daughters.”

“That is the old order,” Wheeler said, “for sure. But now there are modern women.” He would have told her of Alma Schindler, the well-born and ravishingly beautiful painter’s daughter who had numerous affairs before marrying Gustav Mahler, then Walter Gropius, the world-renowned architect, and then finally the writer Franz Werfel, who wrote
The Song of Bernadette
, but in 1897 she was only eighteen years old and still unknown. “I think that young artists in Vienna are the perfect people to understand such ‘arrangements,’ ” he said, just a little defensively.

“It is not only that. I have the feeling I am being watched. There is a young man who keeps his eye on me from a distance, and it makes me feel uneasy, as if he is a spy from back home.” She became quiet, lost for a moment in the enormity of what she had committed to with Wheeler. “However, I shall miss very stimulating company,” she said finally. “My friends at home talk about frivolities. Your friends in Vienna talk about matters of substance.”

“Like the end of the world.”

“Well, some of it is a little gloomy,” she said with a smile. “I don’t know why they do not have more hope for the future of everything. My frivolous friends think that Boston will be there, just as it is now, forever. These people give the impression that they really think Vienna is about to collapse on itself. But it is stimulating, nonetheless.”

It was late in the afternoon when she returned to the studio. Wheeler was waiting for her with an anxious smile. “I have a surprise,” he said. “Look in the corner, over there.” He pointed behind one of the brightly colored canvases.

She walked over and saw two instrument cases leaning against the wall. “A cello,” she said with a burst of unrestrained joy, opening the larger of the two cases.

Wheeler opened the other and pulled out a classical guitar. “I found a wonderful old music shop, and the proprietor loaned me all this, plus some music.”

Wheeler brought chairs from the sitting room, and arranged them. Weezie sat and straddled the cello, running the bow across the strings and producing a few tentative sounds. “I am very rusty,” she said.

Wheeler fashioned a music stand out of a wooden easel and propped onto it a piece of sheet music.

“Oh my,” Weezie said. “We are going to be serious about this.” She put her cello aside and walked over to her handbag, opened it, and withdrew a small packet, which she unwrapped and revealed a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. She came back to her seat and put them on. “I’m lost without these, not very ladylike,” she said, repositioning the cello.

“It’s Haydn,” he said, “written for cello and violin. It’s not quite my style, but I figured I could improvise.”

“To improvise,” she said with a sigh. “You are not afraid to do that. Me, I am stuck in following the rules. For me, playing music is sticking rigidly to the prescribed pattern, sticking with the traditions.”

“Perhaps we can change that a bit,” Wheeler said and began playing the notes as written on the page.

Faltering and hesitant in the beginning, both musicians slowly began to reach into their pasts and find that magical flow of the music and of what the other was doing with it. The deep rich tones of the cello slid under and around the fine finger-picking counterpoint of the classical guitar. Both Weezie and Wheeler let themselves travel with the music until they were lost together, far from Vienna or 1897, somewhere out with the stars. At one point, in the middle of their inspired collaboration, Wheeler looked over at Weezie and saw on her face an expression he would later describe as “dreamy ecstasy.”

“Will you play me something from San Francisco?” Weezie said, and with the guitar still in his lap Wheeler began the opening chords of the same melody they had been playing. And then he began singing the song that had had its origins in that blizzardy winter night in January 1959, when Wheeler played music with his idol Buddy Holly, and then had run around and around in his head over the years, until that night in 1975 when he came forward with his father’s old Martin guitar alone on the stage at the football stadium in Berkeley, California, when it became the legendary “Coming Together,” the best-known song of the era.

He had actually sung it one time before the Berkeley concert, to an audience of one, at the bedside of Joan Quigley, the last time he saw her. She smiled a contented soulful smile. “That’s beautiful,” she said in little more than a sigh and with no trace of her patented sharpness. “Will you sing that for me, when this is all over?”

“Just one time for the world,” Wheeler said, his eyes filled with tears. “Then I’ll retire it forever.”

“One and out?” she said, with barely enough energy to smile.

“One and out,” he said. “This time for you.”

With what little she had left, Joan Quigley laughed. “That is so
you
,” she said, back to her old self.

And now for just the third time in front of an audience, another audience of one, Wheeler Burden was playing the song “Coming Together” that had become a legend, in retrospect his signature piece. Weezie Putnam, leaning on her rented cello, watched him in amazement. “That is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard,” she said dreamily, lost in the moment of this first lesson in improvisation.

45

Worse Than You Know

You’ve been following her, haven’t you?” Wheeler said abruptly, on the train ride back from Lambach. "Who’s that?” Dilly said it quickly, betrayed by a twinge of embarrassment, knowing exactly who.

"I knew it.”

“Well, I did find her,” Dilly said. “And I will admit to standing and watching her a few times.”

“Staring? Enough so that she would notice.”

“Well, I guess maybe,” Dilly said, now looking uncomfortable.

“And I thought you were the one who said we had to be scrupulously careful.”

“I didn’t speak to her,” he said, defending himself. “Or approach her.”

“But she noticed you.”

“I guess so. She is so darned attractive. I can’t keep from watching her.”

“Well, you’d better,” Wheeler said without humor. “Or you’ll blow the whole deal.”

Earlier, he had joined Dilly in his small, poorly lighted, and unheated apartment by the canal off Rudolfs-Platz. Wheeler met him there early because Dilly was planning a train trip up the Danube and said that it would mean a great deal to him if Wheeler would come along. When he entered, he found Dilly surrounded by papers on his small unlighted desk. “What is all this?” Wheeler said.

Dilly looked pleased with himself. “Research,” he said, lifting a sheet of paper. It was Dilly at his best, the single-minded pursuit of a project until he got what he wanted. Endless trips to the civil service office, enlisting help, handing out coins and bills to bureaucrats, weaving his way through the paperwork of the empire. “Look.” He pointed with his patented gusto to the paper in his hand. “I’ve found an address.”

“And what were you planning to do?”

“I don’t know,” Dilly said. “It was such a big job and I had so little to go on. I didn’t really know much about him other than that he was born in a small town within the empire and that he would be around ten now. I knew his father’s name was Alois, that he was a petty civil employee, and that the name Schicklgruber was in there someplace. It’s funny though—” He pointed to all the papers scattered on the desk. “If you ask enough questions, you begin homing in. Now finally—” He looked down at the paper in his hand. “I think I have it. Alois Hitler in Lambach, retired civil servant, on a pension, near Linz, just a few hours. A train leaves soon. We could be back by tonight.”

Wheeler looked dumbfounded. “What about not interfering with history? ”

“We’re not going to do anything.” There was a fierce intensity in his eyes. “I just wanted to know if I could do it. And now I think I have it. We can be there in a few hours.”

“Hold it,” Wheeler said. It was all going too fast for him. He had experience—the prongball, Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb—that proved if you
can
do it you
will
do it, if you have it you will use it. “You think you have found Adolf Hitler. And you want to go right now to see him.”

Dilly was terribly serious, a great laboratory scientist on the brink of a cure. “I just need to confirm it. The pension lists don’t give the names of children. All I have is Alois Hitler in Lambach. I’ve done all the research, and now there is only one way to make sure.”

Wheeler looked at all the papers that amounted to an enormous number of hours. No wonder he had not seen Dilly more often at the Café Central. “I don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head. “You are the one who keeps telling me we have to be careful.”

Dilly’s face became softer. “I was driven by hate. I was going to garrote the little bastard. That’s what propelled me here, right out of my Gestapo cell. Well, now that it is real, and now that I have been here in this remarkable city with my son for a few weeks, my mission has become more gentle.” Then the hardness came back to his eyes and he seemed overtaken by an enormous shiver. “But we can’t forget all the terrible destruction and cruelty. We can’t—” He couldn’t find the words.

“But what would you actually
do
about it?”

Dilly scrunched up his face. “I don’t know, Stan. I actually do not know. Could I actually—when it got right down to it—harm the evil little bastard?”

“Well, let’s say you did decide to do something, and there was no Hitler. Then, for starters, there would have been no Lend-Lease, and no bombing of London, and you would never have met Mother or had a son.”

“I haven’t said I was going to
do
anything. I just want to go take a look. And it would mean an awful lot if you came with me.”

“I don’t like it. We haven’t gone to find the Haze, and we know he is right here in Vienna, easy to find. You don’t want to run into Frank Burden because you might breathe a germ on him—”

“I know, I know,” Dilly said. “And I’ve told you that we absolutely could not go anywhere near them, or Eleanor Putnam who is also right here.” Wheeler moved back a little in his seat. “I know all that. But that is small potatoes. That is just to make sure that the right people and circumstances come together in seventeen years, and after, so that you and I can be born.” He paused again and his face resumed its hardness. “But with Hitler.” He rolled his eyes, trying to estimate the effect of that one man’s presence. “We are talking about the ruin of democracy and the ruination of cultures and Coventry Cathedral, and millions of innocent lives.”

“And it’s worse than you know.”

The intensity was back in his eyes. “Let’s just go see.”

“A long train ride on a few scraps of possible evidence. It’s a crazy idea.”

On the train, Dilly was more excited than usual, an archaeologist on the brink of his great discovery. “I was getting nowhere, and then I happened to run into a retired provincial tax collector who was in Vienna for just one day. The guy was sort of feeble-minded and couldn’t stop talking, but he had a photographic memory. It was a lucky break.” He fell silent, watching the landscape pass. “What ever happened to all the Jews?” he said. “Did they get their property back?”

Wheeler sat astounded for a moment. “You don’t know about Buchenwald and Auschwitz?” he said.

“What are Buchenwald and Auschwitz?”

“The death camps?”

Dilly gave him a blank look. “There were rumors.”

“During the liberation, they turned into a lot more than rumors,” Wheeler said, incredulous. So Wheeler told Dilly the stories of the Allied soldiers coming to the concentration camps and what they found and what was revealed later from the Nazi documentation.

Dilly looked stunned. “I didn’t believe. No one could do that,” Dilly said, after he was finished with all the details. “I discounted what was being said. There are limits, after all, I kept telling people. Have faith, I kept saying. You know, when I was in France the time before that last one, I even got in an argument with a girl who worked for the Resistance. She told me the Nazis were gassing children, and I told her she was getting a little carried way.”