The Little Book (7 page)

He rowed a single skull on the Charles River during the warm months and skated with the boys or alone in the winter. Through the school’s long association with Harvard College, he had full use of Widener Library, where he did research for the writings in his “Random Notes.” He was an honored member of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and he loved and knew intimately all the European masterpieces found there.

“Life is rich and good, if you study history,” he told Wheeler, as he had been telling St. Gregory’s boys for almost fifty years, fixing each of them in the affectionate blue fire of those legendary cobalt eyes—Klimt’s blue, he himself pointed out. “You know history from your reading of Victor Hugo.” Somehow, he knew before Wheeler’s arrival that the young man had read all the novels of the great French writer, and
Ninety-Three
more than once. “I know history—” He paused for theatrical effect. “—because I
lived
it.” And he parceled out his truth in staccato bursts. Litanies of historical detail as it had really been, history from the yellowed pages of the black binder he seemed to have with him always and that Wheeler, his most notorious pupil, would eventually have published. “My ‘Random Notes,’ it is called, although it was not really very random. I’ve worked on it over the years. The world according to Mr. Esterhazy, I’ve heard some boys call it.”

Wheeler’s father, Dilly Burden, like his own father before him, had attended St. Gregory’s, he from 1926 until 1932, the period Arnauld Esterhazy called his Golden Years. The Haze never hid his admiration of Dilly, but with Wheeler he was purely and simply emotive. “So many people make much of your father’s prowess on the athletic field—he taught me to skate, by the way—but it was the acuteness of his mind that we all should memorialize. He was a truly remarkable boy.” He paused, obviously calling up images of time past. “A truly remarkable mind.”

Also like his father before him and Wheeler after him, Dilly’s given name had been Frank Standish Burden, the Standish inherited from the great Puritan leader. Where the Dilly came from no one fully remembered, except that “it’s a dilly” was his favorite boyhood expression.

Dilly had sat through the word from the Haze’s “Random Notes” as now Wheeler was sitting through it. At Arnauld Esterhazy’s funeral in 1965, Dilly’s famous maxim had been quoted liberally: “St. Greg’s boys will carry the Haze inside forever.”

And the sixteen-year-old Wheeler adapted to those classical lessons immediately, in a theoretical way at first, thinking they sounded to him like Victor Hugo plots. “Consider the empire,” the Haze would say, and Wheeler became fascinated by its complexity. Once, he even memorized the names of the various Austria-Hungarian nationalities and could rattle them off rapid-fire: “Germans, Ruthenes, Italians, Slovaks, Rumanians, Czechs, Poles, Magyars, Slovenes, Croats, Transylvanian Saxons, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Slavs.”

“That’s capital, Standish,” the old man said with glee, hearing the staccato recitation and laughing. “And the citizens of the multi-empire paraded through the city,” the old man would say, “each conversing as he passed in languages and dialects as picturesque as the city itself. They couldn’t fight worth a hoot, but they looked simply dashing.” And the old man told Wheeler with moist eyes, becoming lost in the thought, “Oh my, how I wish you could see it all for yourself!” And then he would become quiet. “Some day, perhaps.”

“I haven’t traveled much,” Wheeler would say.

“You will,” he had said confidently. “It is part of your heritage. Your father traveled to Vienna during his college days. He wrote me wonderful letters. He saw how it was grand and dashing. He grasped the full sense of the old days, of the splendor. And that was it, wasn’t it?” He would look at Wheeler as if looking at his own son, someone who understood all that he understood.

“You are the last Burden. We shall have to educate you as to what that means. I taught your father. It will be my job to get you through St. Greg’s.” His charge, the old man called it: to get this young naïf “up to speed.” And quite a charge it was. Wheeler’s mind was undisciplined and rangy, his study habits abysmal. “It would help if you could focus,” the old man said once in near exasperation. And, to add to the problem, Wheeler seemed to care nothing about conventional success.

In a Boston prep school, one earned the right to be eccentric by coming up through the ranks. Few students joined the school as upperclassmen, and when they did they had to be careful about learning the ropes, and learning ropes had never been even remotely an instinct of Wheeler’s. He had no interest in being broken in. To the seniors, St. Greg’s first classmen, he was a constant irritant. Wheeler was unconventional and irreverent, with no respect for the time-honored pecking order, qualities hard enough to abide in an old timer let alone an upstart from California.

Wheeler’s chief antagonist was a first classman named Prentice Olcott, the school’s best athlete and head monitor. In spite of the exterior he showed to the majority of the world, Olcott was to Wheeler mean-spirited and cruel. Their first run-in came at the dinner table, where Olcott was presiding in place of one of the masters. After the first course, Olcott instructed a younger boy, a fourth classman, one of the Frisbee boys, to clear the soup dishes because he did not know the year the school was founded. “I’ll help him,” Wheeler said good-naturedly. “I didn’t know either.”

After the meal Olcott came up to him and pushed his index finger into Wheeler’s chest. “Listen, pal. You stay out of my business. When I tell an underclassman to do something, it gets done.”

“You were picking on the little kid.”

Olcott looked furious. “I’m a first classman.”

“You’re a student here, like the rest of us,” Wheeler said to the older boy. Olcott stared hard at him, incredulous that he had been spoken to in that tone.

“You don’t get the picture, do you, pal?”

“What picture?” Wheeler said without even a modicum of the expected deference.

That was when the work details started. Whenever work assignments were made, Wheeler’s name was on the list. His response to the persecution was simply not to show up. “It’s that Prentice Olcott,” he told the Haze.

“Don’t let him bother you,” the old man said, his eyes showing an understanding patience. “His father was imperious, and he is imperious. He’s just trying to get your goat. But you had better start performing your assigned chores, and doing what the older boys say. It is just the way things work.”

One day in the hall Olcott said, “I’m going to have you out of here by Easter.” Then he laughed and snarled. “And your old Viennese faggot won’t be able to save your ass. We’ll have one less Jew at St. Greg’s.”

Wheeler eyed him coolly. “Is that it, Olcott? You don’t like me because I’m Jewish?” The thought of being Jewish had never really occurred to Wheeler. His mother, whose parents had been Zionists and Marxist socialists in London, gone before Wheeler was born, rarely mentioned her heritage or her family, and they had certainly never practiced any religion together. Growing up in Feather River, Wheeler gave little thought to religion, one way or another. It was only around Boston, where people knew the Dilly Burden legend, that anyone knew or cared that Dilly had married a Jewish girl in London before the war. And it had never occurred to Wheeler that the Haze might be homosexual.

Olcott sneered. “I don’t like you, Burden. Because you are an uncouth boor. And because you have no self-control. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re a hebe, or a spick or a ginni, or even another faggot. You don’t belong in this school, and you won’t be around for baseball season. That’s a promise.”

7

Emily James from Amherst

His first evening in Vienna, aware of his limited resources, Wheeler dined alone at a small rustic but clean restaurant off the Ring, near the center of the old city. The proprietor was a tall cadaverous man with a pockmarked face. He seemed polite but in no way inquisitive. Wheeler asked him for a stein of beer and the plate of beef cuts and sauerkraut he saw at the table beside his. He would wait until later for the delights the Haze had glorified for him and the other St. Gregory’s boys, the veal schnitzel and fine wine, polished off with a rich Sacher torte and coffee, both “
mitt schlagg
, always
mitt schlagg
,” the obligatory and fabled sweet whipped cream. Finding himself in no rush, he ordered a second stein of beer and ate slowly, soaking up the juices with the thick brown bread.

After his meal, he took advantage of the light and the clean table and began writing in the journal he had found at a bookseller’s stall that afternoon. It was bound in new red leather, with gilded edges, and would have cost a good deal had the first few pages not already been written in. As he paid for it, he asked the bookseller to remove the defiled pages with his penknife. Over the next few weeks he would wonder why he wrote with such care in this handsome book-size volume that he would carry everywhere. He concluded that in his state of disconnection the careful writing gave him a feeling of attachment, as if by detailing the events of his new life he was rooting himself to the place. Perhaps someone in a later time would pick up his journal and know what he had gone through. That thought made him feel not so alone and unhinged.

When he finished writing, he left the restaurant to find an inexpensive hotel even deeper within the old city, in an area where no well-dressed gentleman would venture except for sordid purposes and where no one saw anything out of the ordinary in his lack of identification or baggage. On the way, he wandered the crooked winding streets, some still surfaced in the medieval cobblestones. This was Vienna’s shadowy underworld, but to a stranger very much out of place somehow it seemed more enveloping and protecting than the broad, grandly lighted Ringstrasse.

Vienna was and had long been, as the Haze described it, a community of contrasts in which the privations and squalor of the proletarian mass contradicted the splendors of an affluent minority. He understood the reasons for the contrast. In the expansive liberal period in the second half of the nineteenth century, Vienna, like other European cities, had accepted the bounty of industrialization without taking care of its lower classes. The housing situation, like all the living conditions for wageworkers, was intolerably bad. Fewer than one flat in ten boasted a bathroom, and only about one in five had an inside toilet. A quarter of the households sublet sections of their cramped apartments or rented beds only to lodgers, sometimes more than one to a bed. The city’s progressive make-over brought on by Karl Lueger and his Christian Socialists had not yet begun. The gas supply for the inner city was still sporadic. The beginnings of a municipally owned electricity works had been erected, but the delivery was still located primarily in the outer Ring area. Costs of utilities to consumers were exorbitant, service intermittent, and the use of electricity in homes was pretty much restricted to the wealthy.

Wheeler’s room was small and dark but clean, the bed short, but it did not matter. He fell into a deathlike sleep, wondering if he might emerge from it back in San Francisco, where he belonged. The day had passed and still Wheeler did not remember the event that had launched him on his journey.

He did not awaken until well into the morning. He lay in bed for a time, collecting himself, recalling his entry on the Ringstrasse the day before, adjusting once again to the peculiarity of his situation. At first, he had given little thought to how he had gotten to Vienna; his was not to question, he had figured. But now the questions began to inundate him, and he began wondering. Having no idea how he had arrived, he had no idea how long he was staying, nor when or how he might be yanked back. And most immediately, he had no idea how he was going to support himself in turn-of-the-century Vienna once his money ran out. A number of ideas came and went, some of them simple, some bizarre, but none seeming to have much practicality or appeal. None, save the Frisbee idea.

The previous day, he had passed a cabinetmaker’s shop and stepped in and watched, fascinated, the man turning wood with great skill on a primitive foot-powered lathe, and the idea occurred to him. That second morning, Wheeler spent an hour or so on some rough drawings, re-creating as accurately as he could on paper the aerodynamic qualities of the plastic disk with which he had a more than passing familiarity. He took the drawings to a cabinetmaker in the center of the city and asked if the disk could be crafted out of some hard wood. If the wood could be finely enough lathed, then the strength built up with successive coats of lacquer, Wheeler explained, the Frisbee’s lightness and aerodynamics could be replicated. The cabinetmaker seemed quite amused, but took the drawings and agreed to take a shot at the desired product. An agreement was struck that Wheeler would return over the next few days and view drafts of the object, until the thickness and shape were right. It was a very satisfying meeting.

It had been such a satisfying meeting, in fact, that as soon as Wheeler stepped back onto the Ringstrasse, his care seemed to vanish. Vienna, the Venerable Haze had told his students, was a city in which people loved to walk and watch people. It was after all an atmosphere that had gained a reputation for nearly half a century of abolishing concerns about hunger, cold, and impermanence.

Somewhat absentmindedly he entered one of the numerous small parks that adjoined the broad Ringstrasse and sat on a bench, content to watch the Viennese, continuing to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. He became fascinated by the faces of the people. What a broad spectrum of humanity they represented. What a rich collection of dialects and languages they spoke. What a simple and gracious elegance they carried with them. He sat by himself in the park for a time and then rose and walked slowly toward the Café Central.

Inside, he noticed that the
Jung Wien
table was empty, so he sat down and picked up the morning’s
Neue Freie Presse
and began reading. “Ah, Herr Truman,” he heard behind him. “I see you have returned to our men’s club.” He looked up to see Ernst Kleist smiling as he walked toward the table. They shook hands and Kleist joined him and ordered two coffees. “It seems the others are late to arrive.”