The Little Book: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE - The Connectedness of All Things

  1 - Arrival

  2 - No Ordinary Journey

  3 - The Venerable Haze

  4 - Young Vienna

  5 - Wheeler-Dealer Kid

  6 - Going East

  7 - Emily James from Amherst

  8 - A Strong-willed Child

  9 - The Burden Project

  10 - City of Music

  11 - A St. Gregory’s Boy

  12 - The First Shomsky

  13 - Something of Significance

  14 - Berggasse 19

  15 - Last Waltz

  16 - Dilly Burden’s Kid

  17 - An Unexpected Meeting

  PART TWO - The Nature of Our Condition

  18 - Famous for Being Famous

  19 - A Great Weight

  20 - Handsome Karl

  21 - A Highly Complex Delusion

  22 - Duty and Purpose

  23 - Something Like an Eagle

  24 - A Good and Fine Man

  25 - No Ordinary Situation

  26 - The Nature of the Condition

  27 - A Private Matter Between Two Gentlemen

  28 - An Awfully Modern Invitation

  29 - The Enormous Weight of History

  30 - The Illusion of Flight

  31 - A Mesmerizing Spectacle

  32 - Caught Off Balance

  33 - A Feeling of Desperation

  PART THREE - The Last Burden

  34 - Keeping No Secrets

  35 - Rouge Gorge Ne Chantait Pas

  36 - The Preconditions of Cultural Apex

  37 - The Child in Lambach

  38 - First Waltz

  39 - Coming Together

  40 - A Perfect Place for an Assignation

  41 - The Right Place at the Right Time

  42 - Just This Once

  43 - The Gloves Come Off

  44 - Out of the Dark Corners

  45 - Worse Than You Know

  46 - Dancing over the Precipice

  47 - A Magnificent Example

  48 - A Historic Gift

  49 - How Like a Nightmare

  50 - Woman of Substance

  51 - The Legend of Dilly Burden

  52 - What Had to Happen

  53 - The Last Burden

  PART FOUR - Fin de Siècle

  54 - A Powerful Resolve

  55 - A Classic Admiration

  56 - The Jew in Vienna

  57 - San Francisco, 1988

  58 - Esterhazy’s Book

  59 - Feather River, 1988

  60 - The Rise of the Feminine

  61 - Fin de Siècle

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, August 2008

  Copyright © 2008 by Selden Edwards

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Edwards, Selden.

  The little book / Selden Edwards.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-525-95061-5

  1. Rock musicians—Fiction. 2. Time travel—Fiction. 3. Vienna (Austria)—Fiction.

  4. Austria—History—1867-1918—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3605.D8985F56 2008

  813’.6—dc22 2007045785

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For Gaby

  This is the story of how, through a dislocation in time, my son, Frank Standish Burden III, the famous American rock-and-roll star of the 1970s, found himself in Vienna in the fall of 1897. It is a complicated story, full of extraordinary characters and wild improbabilities. Rather than dwell on those improbabilities or the parts that require more thought and explanation, I will simply tell you what I know exactly as I know it and let you sort out the pieces for yourself, forgiving a ninety-year-old woman her various lapses of memory. As an aged poet once said, “I do not remember all the details, but what I remember, I do remember perfectly.” And you will forgive this very subjective narrator her need to describe herself in the third person, as just another character in this remarkable tale. It is, after all, my son who is the center of this narrative. The world, of course, knew him as Wheeler, a name he acquired in the early 1950s, playing boys’ baseball in the Sacramento Valley of California, exactly how we will come to later. So Wheeler it will be, as I reconstruct for you his story.

  Flora Zimmerman Burden

  Feather River, California, 2005

  PART ONE

  The Connectedness of All Things

  1

  Arrival

  Wheeler Burden did not think of visiting Berggasse 19 until the third day in Vienna, or at least there is no mention of it in the journal he kept with meticulous care from almost the moment of his arrival. The first days he spent adjusting, you might say, to the elation of newness and the spectacle of this city he knew so well in theory but had never actually visited. Then the practicalities settled on him, followed by a deep feeling of displacement. Wheeler was a long way from home with no means of either identification or support. But before the gravity of the situation set in, he was almost able to enjoy himself. Much of the first day, of course, he was busy marveling at his mere presence in such a magnificent and imperial city. It was 1897 Vienna, after all. The first hour, we learn from the journal, he spent clearing the fog from his mind and pulling himself painfully back to full awareness, emerging from the miasma of what seemed like a long uneasy sleep, and from the catastrophic precipitating event he was nowhere near ready to remember.

  In the first mome
nts Wheeler could only stare vacantly at the handsome men in dark coats and top hats, finely adorned women in long dresses with tightly corseted waists and well-defined poitrines, military officers in ornate and colorful regalia, workers carrying lunch boxes. Everywhere there were horse-drawn carriages of all sorts, and tall, elegant marble façades of the grand buildings for which Vienna at the end of the century had become renowned.

  You do need to know that Wheeler Burden had never been to Vienna per se but had traveled there many times before in his mind. He could speak German as a result of a natural fluency with languages, and he had a general grasp of the manner in which a young man in fin de siècle Vienna was expected to carry himself, both a result of what now seemed like careful training in the hands of his wise old mentor, the Venerable Haze, whom we will encounter momentarily. In fact, after some reflection, you might conclude that, as with so many heroes who are invited on extraordinary journeys, Wheeler’s way had been prepared.

  Some time after his mysterious arrival, in pulling together his initial impressions, Wheeler would detail in his journal his first moments on the Ringstrasse, the broad and magnificent boulevard that encircled the city, as awaking from a great sleep, floating between oblivion and consciousness. Anesthesia was an experience he had been through twice—once having his tonsils removed as a child and once in adulthood in 1969, during surgery to repair a spleen ruptured by an angry Hell’s Angel at a well-publicized rock-concert riot. This time he was not lying inertly in a hospital room blinking at sterile walls and unfamiliar nurses, but rather coming to his senses walking along a magnificent, wide boulevard, gaping at finely dressed passersby and massive, grandly detailed buildings.

  His first recollections were ones of ambling aimlessly, smiling, gazing absently at these spectacular edifices with awe and elation, as if the mechanism that had delivered him to this fabulous place had carried with it, like anesthesia, the complete dismantling of any worldly concern.

  He must have entered, he figured later, somewhere near the Danube Canal and circled half the old city before enough consciousness descended to demand a verification of place and time. Wheeler found himself drawn to a newsstand, where he picked up his first newspaper. It was then that he realized there was no other city it could have been, really. All of the impressions that led to this inevitable conclusion were rooted in the Haze’s vivid descriptions of the time and place, preserved in his famous “Random Notes,” but of course Wheeler was at the moment much more concerned with practical matters than he was with the peculiar coincidence of winding up in exactly the time and place that he had heard described so often.

  First, he had to do something about his clothes. He was staring at the Viennese, predictable given his circumstance, but they were staring back, which, again given his circumstance as a stranger in a strange land, was not good. People staring, you might know, was certainly nothing new to my son. With his long hair and Wild Bill Hickok mustache, Wheeler Burden was on People magazine’s ten most recognizable list five years running in the mid 1970s, and, in the words of one of his grammar school teachers, had been “something of a spectacle” all his life. The Viennese focused their suspicious attention on him as he passed, not recognizing him specifically, as strollers in the 1970s would have, but simply wondering what a man in his late forties of his appearance, dressed as he was, was doing on the Ringstrasse. The style of the times and the crisp morning air made being out in shirtsleeves inappropriate, not to mention uncomfortable. This attention was giving him a deep sense of foreboding.

  Since strangeness, not notoriety, was drawing the unwanted attention in this situation, one in which anonymity above all was to be wished, at least until he had his bearings, he decided that doing something about appearance was his first priority.

  No matter how much a more cautious person—his mother, say—might have advised looking before leaping, he felt he had to act. So, just as he had made his way around the Ring to the area of the opera house, he was drawn into his first action, a fateful one, one that set in motion everything that was to follow and established him indelibly as the central character in this story.

  Across from the opera house, near the grand entrance of the Hotel Imperial, Wheeler was stopped by the sight of a small serving man struggling to remove a heavy steamer trunk from a curbside carriage under the unsympathetic supervision of the trunk’s owner, a stern and athletic-looking young man in his early twenties. The young man drew Wheeler’s attention immediately, first because of his offensive manner and only secondarily because he was a fitter, more compact, and younger version of himself, almost exactly Wheeler’s size and build.

  Oblivious to Wheeler’s attention, focused singularly on the unloading of his possessions, the young man burst out, “Hurry up, for god’s sake. I haven’t all day, you know.” His accent was clearly American. He thrust some bills at the struggling man and a note onto which he had written some large numbers. “Here. Have it delivered to four thirty-three,” he said with a contempt that made him immediately unlikable. “I’ve an hour’s worth of business at the American consulate,” he said under his breath, intending not to be understood. “That ought to give even you enough time.”

  Wheeler was not sure if it was more the man’s abrasiveness or his own desperation that brought on the suddenness and audacity of his next move, one that would solve his immediate problem and—it must be added— create far worse ones. But however it was, he quickly left the scene in front of the Hotel Imperial, found a back entrance to the hotel, and strode confidently up the broad service stairs. An expert at secretive entries and escapes, Wheeler had learned long ago that assertive confidence always masked inappropriate entry.

  On the stairwell, he passed a maid in a white and black uniform. Wheeler saluted her and flashed a confident greeting; then as soon as she disappeared around a corner he picked up a bundle of soiled bed linen and carried it up the stairway. He explored until he found his way to the fourth floor stairwell within eyeshot of room 433 and watched through a crack in the heavy door until the little man with the dolly and trunk arrived.

  He slipped into the room unnoticed and into the large hall closet while the man fussed with the luggage. Suddenly, as he heard the door click behind the exiting servant, Wheeler was alone in the spacious hotel room with the large upright steamer trunk, and—because the young man seemed to have packed for a good long stay—with a large wardrobe to choose from. Remembering the “hour’s worth of business at the American consulate,” he took his time, laying out clothes on the bed. He chose the shoes, trousers, shirt, vest, and coat that seemed the most conventional from his brief walking tour of the Ringstrasse. As he finished dressing and was choosing a tie, he noticed on a trunk shelf a neat pile of five envelopes, each with the name of a country written on the outside. He chose “Austria” and found inside a stack of paper currency, which he began to pocket, then returned respectfully to its place. Wheeler Burden had been known to bend the rules, but he was not a thief.

  Suddenly, a key sounded in the lock, and the door swung open. The young man, seemingly in a hurry, walked in with his head down and was fully into the room before he looked up and saw Wheeler, now well dressed, standing at attention beside the trunk. The young man let out an involuntary grunt of surprise as his steely eyes did a quick appraisal of the situation. The two men stared for what seemed an interminable moment, the younger one’s face reflecting a quick evolution from stunned surprise to unmistakable indignation.

  Had Wheeler known then what he wrote in the journal later, he would have seen in the young man’s eyes a familiar, smoldering intensity too deep for either man to recognize. “And what do we have here?” the young man said, collecting himself, his nostrils flaring, absorbing the very essence of the intruder and sensing something primal that defied words and civility. As his words hung in the air unanswered, the two men remained transfixed, both taking in details of the other.

  Had the younger man been less taken aback, he might have sprung forward and
attacked, but in that instant of surprised paralysis Wheeler seized his advantage. Before the eyes of his startled new adversary, he reached for the Austrian envelope and, deftly snatching it, brushed past him and stepped through the door and out into the hall. The young man paused for an instant, giving the intruder the slight advantage he needed, then, recovering from his momentary paralysis, darted out into the hallway.

  As Wheeler reached the service exit, he swung the door shut with a mighty force, then wedged it closed with a wooden stopper. He descended four flights to the back alley, the sound of the haughty young American banging on the door fading as he went.

  Quickly, he reached the Ringstrasse and adjusted his stride to match that of the average passerby. He crossed the broad boulevard near the opera house into the dark narrow streets in the heart of the old city, past St. Stephen’s Cathedral, well removed from the scene of his crime. He was now comfortably and appropriately dressed, with Austrian currency in his pocket, all but a shave and a haircut away from looking like a Viennese or at least a turn-of-the-century American tourist. He felt quite pleased with himself. After he was settled, with some at least temporary means of support, he would try to find the man and make amends, but for now he had Vienna to think about.

  Wheeler Burden was a new man. He gave little thought to his old twentieth-century clothing, which he had left like so much shed snake’s skin in a pile beside the steamer trunk in the American’s hotel room. He felt such immeasurable relief at being comfortably clothed and in cash, with no one staring, that, for the moment at least, he was able to disregard the fact that he was friendless, still without passport or any means of identifying himself, and that on this, his first day in 1897 Vienna, he had acquired a mortal enemy.

  2

  No Ordinary Journey

  When he instructed the Viennese barber to cut his hair short and shave the Wild Bill Hickok mustache, Wheeler finished the transformation to anonymity that his borrowed clothing had begun. He now looked “shockingly normal,” his long-time friend Joan Quigley would have quipped, had she been able to see him now in Vienna. “Now, you look just like everyone else,” he could hear her saying, disgusted and amused. Joan Quigley, wife of a prominent federal court judge and social power in Pittsburgh, where her husband had grown up before becoming a Harvard football star, had given Wheeler his first sexual experience back in 1959. She had remained his secret and passionate love for fifteen years. “Wheeler Burden is fifty-yard famous,” she had told him one day in San Francisco shortly after his injuries in the Altamont catastrophe, exasperated, referring to him in the third person. They were in Golden Gate Park, outside the de Young Museum, and she was trying for the umpteenth time to have a serious conversation about their future together. “I mean, he’s not first-sighting recognizable like Ringo Starr, say, or Robert Redford, or Mick Jagger, oh no, but definitely in the second tier. After walking fifty yards, in New York or San Francisco or Atlanta, you can bet that someone is going to come up and shake his hand and ask for an autograph or ask about Woodstock or whether Shadow Self will stay together.” This time she was especially peeved. “It gets damned annoying, you know, especially when one is trying to have a serious conversation about the future. And he doesn’t do anything to prevent it. It’s that damned Wild Bill Hickok look,” she continued, knowing Wheeler would never settle for anonymity. “No one would recognize you with a shave and a crew cut.”