The Little Book (53 page)

“Trust me, Arnauld. I know what I am talking about.”

“Oh, thank you,” he said, tears of relief now filling his eyes. “Thank you,” he said, the thought of suicide now far from his mind.

56

The Jew in Vienna

It was time to leave. Sigmund Freud was not going to show up for the offered appointment, a final sign of his firm belief that Wheeler’s strange story was only a complex hysteria. And so Wheeler picked up his bag and looked around the room to see that he was leaving nothing behind, nothing he needed for his trip, nothing to prove that he had been there. He turned to leave.

There was no telling how long she had been standing there behind him. She stood stone still, her eyes wide, her hair rumpled. She was holding the small suitcase she had carried to Baden. “You are planning to leave, aren’t you?” she said, glancing quickly at the blank walls and the carpetbag on the bed.

Wheeler turned, the life drained from his face. “How long have you been there?” he said almost under his breath.

Her eyes were blazing. “You can’t leave. I don’t care about all that I read,” Weezie said. Her voice was calm and steady, full of that famous resolve. “I don’t need to understand. You don’t need to explain anything. But you can’t leave me.” She walked purposefully toward where he stood by the window until she was close enough to reach out a hand to Wheeler. He hesitated for an instant, his eyes darting as if looking for an escape route, but then he reached out his own hand and took hers. “I only know one thing,” she said, “and that is how much I love you. And I know that we are not victims of this story. You have taught me nothing if not that.”

There was a total calm to Weezie Putnam’s eyes, something wondrous and inspiring. “We can leave Vienna together,” she said. “You have two tickets, I know that. We can play beautiful music together, and we can read and talk and grow. Nothing is holding us back. We can go anywhere and do anything.” Wheeler could not speak, transfixed by the conviction in those eyes, and the love. “But there is one thing I must have. I know that now with indelible certainty.” Her eyes would not move from his. They pulled him toward her, and he tried to evade them. “I must be with you, Wheeler. You are my life now, my total love and life.”

Wheeler felt he was losing ground rapidly. He began to pull his hand from her grasp, but then took both her hands in his. “It is what must be,” he said, penetrating with his eyes. “There are things you simply don’t know. You should have never come here.”

Her calm resolve gave way to incipient desperation. “I will die without you, don’t you see that?”

“You’ll be fine,” he said, shocked by how unconvincing he sounded.

“I know you love me. Nothing can shake that,” she said, her eyes now imploring.

“Of course, I love you,” Wheeler said, his hands slipping to her waist, where he could feel her soft warmth. “I love you now, and I will love you sixty years from now. I will love you forever.”

Finally, there were tears in her eyes. “Then you must not leave alone. I must go with you.”

Wheeler felt lost. “I must—” All his own firm resolve was gone. He looked into Weezie’s face.

“Don’t you see?” Weezie said. Then she paused and took a deep breath, summoning up all her strength. “There is something I know about you now. You have never finished things in your life. You have been to great heights and you have come to the brink of great accomplishment and fulfillment. And you have always walked away. I know now what you mean to me, but I know also what I mean to you. We are each other’s destiny.”

He pulled her to him and now could feel himself giving in completely, all traces of propriety and self-preservation gone forever. “My love,” he said into her ear.

“Yes, yes,” she said. And he held on to her as he had never held on before. This time he was not walking away.

“We will have to hurry to catch the train,” he said, sounding like Dilly.

“I’ll take the tickets,” she said.

As Wheeler opened the front door to Frau Bauer’s, turning to help Weezie after him, a man appeared on the sidewalk in his path. “Are you leaving Vienna?” he said, his voice cold and unfriendly. It was Frank Burden.

Wheeler was off guard. “I am going on a small business trip.” Slowly, he pushed Weezie away from him.

“No, you’re not.” Frank Burden’s blue eyes stared fiercely. “You are running out.”

“Am I not free to leave Vienna?”

“You stole from me.”

“I’m sorry,” Wheeler said. “I was desperate. I needed the clothes and the money. I can pay you back.”

“It’s not the clothes and the money,” he said, his eyes burning, his body shaking on the brink of control.

“I’m sorry,” Wheeler said, putting out his hands in supplication. “What can I do?”

“You have gone out of your way to humiliate me.”

Wheeler stepped sideways to be well clear of Weezie, who stood transfixed in the doorway. “It was not intentional.”

“Hah,” he said, the veins on the side of his neck protruding as he paused. “Don’t patronize me.” He glared at Wheeler, who put down his bag.

“There has been a misunderstanding. I’d like to talk about it.”

Frank Burden’s blue eyes narrowed even further. “You don’t understand, do you? I won’t be embarrassed.” The young man flashed a look of pure unmitigated hate. His hand appeared from behind his back trembling, trying to steady the revolver aimed at Wheeler’s chest.

“Stop this,” Weezie said, taking a step toward Frank Burden, who clicked back the hammer. Weezie froze where she was. Wheeler stepped back. “There is more than you know, Frank,” Weezie said, imploring. “You’ve got to stop.”

Frank Burden did not seem to hear and was glaring at Wheeler. The door to the hallway had remained open, and Wheeler stared dumbly. Over Frank Burden’s right shoulder from the street side Sigmund Freud appeared, arriving a bit late for his appointment to travel to Lambach. He looked at Wheeler, whose hands were raised waist high. Then he looked at Frank and saw the gun in the trembling hand. He seemed puzzled for an instant, and then, when he saw Weezie’s face, he knew all.

“Let’s sit down and talk,” Wheeler said.

Weezie probably had started her scream, “No, Frank!” an instant before the gun exploded.

57

San Francisco, 1988

It was after midnight by the time he signed the last book, polished off the last straggling conversation, and drove back to Stanyan and Parnassus to the famous ground-floor apartment where he had lived for fifteen years. He was distracted by the reflective state of mind that had settled on him over the past couple of months as he made the rounds of coffeehouses and small bookstores, talking about
Fin de Siècle.
This night had been especially distracting because the signing had been at City Lights Bookstore, a place he had been so many times he could not count, as an observer. Now to be the center of attention again, after his long retreat from the world, had been both exhilarating and unsettling. “They’re only coming because you are famous for doing nothing,” Joan Quigley would have quipped. He could hear her as if she had been lying next to him naked, blowing the words softly into his ear. “You ought to get a shave and a crew cut and see if they still come out.” That theme again, Wheeler would have quipped back. He missed Joan Quigley.

But these appearances were not about him, he would insist, they really weren’t, and the results proved him out, more or less. People came out for a combination of reasons, not the least of which were the reviews of the book that called it an important literary event. It was the Haze’s “Random Notes” that had occupied him for ten years, but it was not just the book, he had to admit. It was the “papers” that had been left to him in the old man’s will and that Wheeler had donated to Widener Library the moment he finished reading the last galley proof from Athenaeum Press. The Haze’s “papers” were cardboard boxes full of letters, scraps of paper, fragments of articles, and notes written on everything. It was the scattered brilliance of a truly great mind, he had begun to realize, and the reason it took him so long to pull it together in what was now the published
Fin de Siècle
was first that he wanted to be absolutely true to the old man’s thoughts and impressions and, second, he wanted to make sure that he, the editor, understood exactly what this extraordinary observer’s thoughts and impressions meant. Wheeler the eccentric athlete, musician, lover, became Wheeler the researcher. “So that’s what you’ve been doing all these years,” one of his old Shadow Self band members said to him at one of the signings, in Ann Arbor.

He never finished the manuscript, actually. “This thing could go on forever,” he told his mother one day in exasperation, when he was visiting her at the ranch, and then he pulled the last sheet out of his old Royal typewriter, sealed the whole goddam thing in a cardboard box, and mailed it to Boston. “I’m through,” he said and went for a long walk with her in the Feather River bottomland. He had made a few changes as the proofs came back to him, but that was pretty much it.

The first review appeared in the
Boston Globe
, timed to meet the date of the book’s appearance in local bookstores. Why it had been so positive Wheeler did not know, but it all had something to do with a connection Wheeler had not seen as he was poring over the notes. Arnauld Esterhazy, a young man at a pivotal place and a pivotal time in history, had been witness to the dawning of a new age. He had been born in an antediluvian period and had survived the flood. What he had been teaching his boys at St. Greg’s for some fifty years was his own personal wonder at the dawning of a new age. “The birth of modernism,” the reviewer called it, and he attributed to the book’s editor the compliment that he knew exactly what he was doing.

Wheeler’s mother collected the reviews dutifully, and when there were enough of them, coming in now from all over the country, she put them in a big floppy scrapbook. “I didn’t understand any of this,” Wheeler said to her, holding the collection of writings in his hand. “All I did was pick up the stone and throw.”

Athenaeum Press had no budget for promotion or book tours, so the invitations came in spontaneously, mostly from places that had no means of paying airfare or any kind of expenses. “If you happen to be in the area,” they often said. And Wheeler, using his mother and his mother’s telephone number as his agency, began saying yes and “coming up with the funds.” Coming up with the funds meant paying his own way, which was for Wheeler, the Last Burden and heir to the Hyperion Funds, no problem. That is how the bookstore visits came about, and soon Wheeler was saying no to big stores and yes to the little ones. “A brilliant strategy,” a reviewer called it later because the crowds were always overflowing out into the street. “Creating a frenzy,” the man called it. Creating a frenzy was something Wheeler knew something about.

The City Lights signing was a culmination in some ways, for reasons sentimental to Wheeler, and his reflections on his old mentor that night were especially evocative. Because of circumstances, that evening became as famous as his last appearance on the pitching mound or his singing of “Coming Together” that first and last time at the football stadium at Berkeley. “City Lights Bookstore could not possibly have contained all the people who claim to have been there that night,” a retrospective article in
Time
magazine said years later.

“It has brought back a flood of memories,” Wheeler said to the famous owner as he was leaving that night, and legend has recorded those as his last words because no one knows if he said anything to the man who confronted him in the alcove of his apartment just about half an hour later.

In that alcove, Wheeler had opened his mailbox as he always did and had turned to put his key in the front door. He probably was not aware that the man had come from somewhere in the shadows and was standing just a few feet behind him. We can only conjecture. He turned and saw the man then, but he did not become alarmed, just turned slowly to face him. Wheeler recognized his assailant, although it took a moment to metamorphose the scraggly, almost deranged appearance back to how the man had looked almost thirty years before. The men could have exchanged a few words, no one really knows, but probably not. The gun was of a large enough caliber to create a deafening concussion in the small alcove and knock its victim to the ground, a policeman told reporters. The first bullet struck Wheeler in the side, which meant that he was not fully turned, but the force spun him a bit so that the second bullet struck him square in the chest and knocked him backward into the wall beneath the mailboxes. Wheeler’s last moments were spent in a sitting position, looking up at where the man had been standing and out into the night of Stanyan Street. And it is from that position and time and place that this whole story begins.

“If you want my candid opinion,” one detective told a reporter off the record, “from the look on his face he knew what was going on. Last thoughts sort of get frozen there, ya know. You see all kinds, some gasping for breath, some surprise, real bad pain, some horror and terror. But you don’t see too many like this guy. For what he had just been through, this guy was real peaceful.”

What they figured out was that as Wheeler turned around before opening his front door he was surprised, startled even, by the face of a man whom he had last seen as he was walking from the pitcher’s mound at Harvard University in 1961 dressed only in a jockstrap. For all this time, apparently, through Woodstock and Altamont and the
Rolling Stone
articles and the famous last song in Berkeley and now—the final blow—the publication of a successful book about Vienna, the man had developed what researchers called a preoccupying and disabling obsession with the celebrity of Wheeler Burden. Now, the man was completely deranged, and from the fatal alcove he walked to Golden Gate Park, and in the center of the Japanese Garden he put the gun in his mouth and blew out the back of his own head.