The Little Book: A Novel Page 10

  That first year at Harvard, Wheeler took a philosophy course from Professor Broderick Walker, “your father’s dearest friend,” his grandmother said. She was touched and amused. “Standish, you in a philosophy course will be a source of wonder. I hope they are ready for you.” She had always loved the way he roamed through ideas. She would sit in her Beacon Hill living room and listen to him for hours, always encouraging him to digress and embellish.

  As his grandmother predicted, the philosophy course was the highlight of the year, as was Joan Quigley. He learned far more than he expected from the philosophy course and from a Radcliffe girl. His grandmother had no way of predicting the Joan Quigley part.

  As you have no doubt realized by now, my son, Wheeler, was something of an obsessive, and while at Harvard College he became obsessive about music. That is the only way to account for what was to follow. When he first got to Harvard he had asked around about guitar players. He bought a used Fender Stratocaster electric guitar to accompany his father’s old acoustic Martin and began daily practice, and was beginning to sound like his rockabilly mentor. He wanted to learn more licks and maybe join a band. A friend took him to Brattle Street, where he played a little and listened a lot. That was the other part of the coffeehouses that compelled him, the seemingly endless supply of musicians, most all of them guitar players. Cambridge and the area around Harvard Square radiated an infectious excitement in the early 1960s, and he found himself in the middle of it. Wheeler thought he was in Wonderland full of beatniks, long-hairs, radical thinkers, unconventional poets, and even a few naïfs like himself. It was a world that could not have been more different from the Sacramento Valley where he had come from. “One thing for sure,” Wheeler observed later, “they were all people who had never heard of Dilly Burden. And that was a great relief.”

  He loved being around the coffeehouse scene; it drew him like a siren song. The Brattle Street cafés were filled with people reading papers, dressed in dark and simple clothes. But it wasn’t just the new licks on the guitar that sent him back to his room to practice, it was also the wild ideas. There was always someone willing to sit and digress, always willing to listen and take seriously his ideas, and nothing stopping where he took them. There were always more to add, more references to pile on, more books to peruse after a late-night session. It was even better than conversing with the governor of California or Chet Huntley. “You’re in heaven, pal,” his friend Bucky Hannigan would say if he could see him now. Wheeler had never been around people who were willing to accept his wild questioning of things and to hear his views about politics and society, about the world as it should be.

  The coffeehouse musicians were interested mostly in folk music, but as time passed it became clearer and clearer to him that it was rock and roll that fascinated him.

  The Buddy Holly tape gained him a certain notoriety. He had shown it to no one at St. Gregory’s, but when he played it for the coffeehouse group he soon became known as a kid who could play. A group of students from Boston University had formed a small band that specialized in imitations of top-forty rock bands. They called themselves The Shadow Self, and their leader was a guitarist named Hitzie, who could pick about as fast as anyone Wheeler had ever seen, lightning fast. He seemed to like Wheeler’s hanging around and picking up guitar licks, but when the group heard the tape of the kid from California singing that song with the Buddy Holly soundalike, all of them took a different kind of notice.

  “It’s not a soundalike,” Wheeler said, but no one believed him.

  “What’s on the rest of the tape?” Hitzie asked Wheeler one night in their practice room.

  “I don’t know,” Wheeler said. He had rarely played the song after Holly’s death, and he had never gone past the blank space at the end of the song.

  “I think we’d better listen,” another said, and they sat in stunned amazement as they discovered the remainder of the forty-five-minute reel. It was the master working of six new songs, never heard by the world, never recorded in any other form. Without knowing it, a few days before his death, Buddy Holly had given the young man in his apartment a gold mine.

  “No one’s ever heard any of these,” Hitzie said, ecstatic. “Like King Tut’s tomb.” They all looked at one another in wonder, and instantly agreed in that moment that Wheeler Burden was now a full-fledged member of The Shadow Self.

  In that same week, he sat near Joan Quigley at a group table on Brattle Street. “Who is that band you hang around with?” she asked.

  Joan Quigley was just about the most beautiful girl Wheeler had ever seen. She was there a lot, one of the peripheral members of the scene, an actress more than a singer, who was willing to fill in when someone needed a female voice. “The ice princess,” they called her. She was a year ahead of him at Radcliffe and had a football player as a steady boyfriend. Wheeler had kept his eye on her from the first time he saw her. She had been sitting by herself in a corner of a Harvard Square bookstore, dressed in a dark purple turtleneck, and smoking a cigarette. He had noticed her immediately, he figured, not just because she was about the most beautiful girl he had ever seen—a knockout, as Bucky Hannigan would say—but also because she was reading a copy of Persephone Rising by Flora Standish.

  “The Shadow Self,” Wheeler answered.

  “That’s Jung,” Joan Quigley said.

  “Who’s Jung?” Wheeler asked.

  “You know, Freud’s disciple.”

  “Now, Freud I know. He is in my heritage.”

  That was when Joan Quigley first gave Wheeler significant notice. “You are something of an idiot savant, aren’t you?” she said, using the French, which to Wheeler sounded like eee-deee-oh savah.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Oh, brother,” she said, taking a deep breath. She stared at him for a long moment, probably deciding then and there whether to drop him like a stone or make of him a project. Luckily or unluckily for Wheeler, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen chose the latter.

  “I’m a refugee from Miss Porter’s, and I thought I was protected.” She took his hand. “Come on,” she said calmly. “We’re taking you to the Coop bookstore. If you’re going to hang around anarchists, you might as well know what they are talking about,” she said with no particular flourish. “And you’ll need a guide.”

  Joan Quigley’s family had been around Boston almost as long as the Burdens, and Wheeler’s grandmother spoke of them with respect. “More than their share of bohemians,” she said in a tone halfway between admiration and envy. Joan showed none of the Brahmin in her dress. As her coffeehouse self, she wore nothing but Levi’s jeans and turtlenecks, “undoing the damage of four years of prep school,” she said. Wheeler loved the crisp witty way she talked, and it wasn’t long before he realized he had developed an enormous crush on her.

  “Forget it,” Hitzie said. “She’d freeze your balls if you ever got them anywhere near her passage.”

  But Joan kept coming back to him, watching over him, it seemed. “Fortunately for you,” she said late one night at the coffeehouse, “I find innocence an aphrodisiac.”

  “What’s an aphrodisiac?” Wheeler said, and Joan Quigley, who was a tough one to impress, only stared in amazement.

  It was Joan’s idea to embellish the Buddy Holly tapes. “Why not?” she said. “He’s dead, and no one knows the songs exist. Besides, it’s what he would have done.” A friend of her father had a recording studio where they could work at two and three in the morning. After two months, The Shadow Self had added guitars, drums, and harmonies to six Holly songs, with the legend’s voice in the lead. Wheeler had most of the ideas. “A vision, ” Joan Quigley observed. “You seem to have this picture of how it should turn out.” They finalized them on a stereo tape with a collection of their own songs. “It’s brilliant,” Joan Quigley said as they were walking back to her dorm one night. “Of course you can’t do anything with it, since it’s all illegal.” What happened was that the tapes got around and create
d an instant and huge black market hit. The band was nameless, faceless, and incredibly famous. In their appearances at the coffeehouses, when Shadow Self—“Drop the The,” Joan Quigley had insisted—burst into one of their familiar songs, the packed house went wild.

  It was still in his freshman year, after a session in the sound studio at two in the morning, when Joan had asked Wheeler to stay behind to help her close up. She had been paying closer attention to him than usual the last week of studio work, obviously impressed by the way Wheeler had learned to use the recording equipment. “You have legendary concentration, ” she said as he worked to fit a guitar track in with the voices. “That’s the savant side.”

  Wheeler laughed. “I guess I sort of lose myself in things.”

  “Well, it’s sort of your best quality,” she said, leaning against his arm. Wheeler could smell fresh New England sea breezes in her hair and tried not to acknowledge the tingle up and down his back from her touch. They were standing by the piano in the main recording room, looking for the light switch. “I’m taken, you know,” she said.

  “I know,” Wheeler said. “Your football hero.”

  “That’s why nobody can know,” she said and flipped him a smile and a small packet. “Ever seen one of these?” she said. He had seen a number of them before, but never at such close range. The most beautiful girl he had ever seen had just flipped Wheeler his first Trojan and, he judged from the smile, there was more. She took his hand and, lifting the bottom of her turtleneck, placed it on the warmth of her belly, holding it there. “I have a gift for you.” She slid his hand under the band of her jeans. The Ice Princess looked up languidly into his eyes. “Men have conquered empires for this,” she said, leaning forward, pressing his hand downward. “And you’re getting it without even asking.”

  “I was afraid you might turn me down,” she said, sitting up on the studio couch.

  Are you kidding? he felt like saying to the girl of his dreams who was just now pulling on her turtleneck. “Because I was a prude?” he said.

  “Because you wouldn’t know what it was.”

  “Like the drugs?” he said. Wheeler turned down the psychedelic drugs that had begun to appear in the coffeehouses, through the influence of some Harvard professors. “He don’t need to get any wilder,” Bucky Hannigan would have said. “Wheeler doesn’t need drugs” was Joan Quigley’s famous quip to Hitzie. “He is drugs.”

  “That was really something,” Wheeler said, sounding stupid as they found the light switch.

  “I’m glad you think so,” Joan Quigley said, leaning into him and pulling the door closed behind her. “We’ll have to try it again sometime. But you’ll have to earn it.”

  The trouble came about the same time, and it was Professor Walker, his father’s old friend, who saved his fat from the fire. It all began with a paper Wheeler wrote for the freshman philosophy course. He called it “The Great Catch: The Highest Point in Civilization,” in which he reasoned that Willie Mays’s catch off Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series was the highest point in civilization because of the preconditions. The ideas he had distilled from the lessons of the Haze. The nation needs to be at peace; the boundaries secure; people need leisure time and enough money to organize theater, sports, and the like; you need stadiums, uniforms, and a division race; and you need people with the aesthetic sense to know it is important. He put some time in on the outline, dashed it off longhand, and handed it in to his section leader, an intense young department youngster named Fielding Shomsky.

  The following day Shomsky saw him going into the men’s room in Widener Library and followed him in. From the neighboring stall, he delivered his diatribe to Wheeler. “This is damn good, Burden, but you show no pride. It could be a brilliant paper, and yet you hand it in like so much flotsam. Take it back, polish it, get it typed, and have it back to me by week’s end.” He shoved it in under the stall divider, and he was gone.

  Wheeler did as Shomsky asked. He did polish it and think more about it. This time the typed manuscript was entitled “The Preconditions of a Cultural Apex.” A few days later Shomsky told him he was submitting it to the department as a prize paper. Wheeler thought no more about it. The following week he was summoned to the dean’s office. When he arrived, there sat the dean, Fielding Shomsky, and Professor Broderick Walker, head of the philosophy department and the foremost authority on Viennese philosopher Egon Wickstein.

  The dean was an aristocratic-looking man who wore tweed jackets and had a long row of pipes on his desk. “We have a problem here, Mr. Burden. Your section leader Dr. Shomsky here—” He gestured to the young professor who glowered at Wheeler. “He has found a marked similarity between your philosophy paper and an original by Egon Wickstein.” Wheeler could only stare in disbelief. The dean held up two papers, one by Wheeler, the other by Egon Wickstein. “Both bear remarkably similar titles involving the phrase ‘Cultural Apex,’ and each bears an uncanny resemblance to the other.” Shomsky continued to glower, and Professor Walker looked concerned. The dean took a deep breath. “Do you understand the basic rules of plagiarism?”

  Wheeler nodded dumbly. “I didn’t copy that essay, sir,” he said finally.

  “This is a highly unusual situation. With Dr. Shomsky’s consent, we will turn the whole situation over to Professor Walker for a judgment,” the dean said, looking over to the young section leader, who gave a reluctant nod of agreement. “Fine,” the dean finished and handed the evidence to his elder colleague.

  In his meeting with Professor Walker that afternoon Wheeler explained that he had written the paper and had even submitted it in draft form. Professor Walker, a scholarly-looking man with kind dark eyes and huge black eyebrows, explained that Mr. Shomsky was furious and wanted blood. It was not until he submitted it as a prize paper that it was pointed out to him by a senior colleague how much it resembled an early and obscure work by Wickstein, a writer every department member should know completely and cold. “You, Standish, found a piece of writing Mr. Shomsky had never heard of. He thinks you duped him and that he looked bad in the department.”

  “I didn’t find it,” Wheeler said. “I’ve never seen anything by Egon Wickstein. I—”

  Professor Walker interrupted and eyed Wheeler wistfully. “You are the last Burden, the last of your distinguished family to carry the name—as was your father, my good and dear friend, and as was his father before him. Much responsibility rests on the shoulders of the last member of a family. But Fielding is the first Shomsky, and he too feels certain responsibilities. You can understand, I am sure. He was not, shall we say, to the manner born.”

  “I didn’t copy that essay,” Wheeler tried again.

  “Your father was my dearest friend. I don’t know if you know that. My, he was a specimen. I was never much the athlete. Your father—” There was a longing in his eyes. “He was like an antelope. He had the grace of a dancer. And, oh my, he had a scholar’s mind. In fact, it was he who first introduced me to Egon Wickstein. It was the summer we traveled to Europe together. Your father played his famous clarinet in the dance band on the ship, over and back, and I had plenty of time to read. Your father gave me his books. I was so taken by Wickstein’s writing that when we got to England I looked him up at Cambridge University. Then years later, after he died in the concentration camp, I got hold of his papers and studied him in depth in London. That is how I ended up back here at Harvard. ” It was widely recognized that Professor Walker’s great biography of Wickstein brought him to his position of preeminence in modern philosophy. “All because of this.” Professor Walker held up an ancient manuscript. “A charming little essay I read on shipboard with your father entitled ‘The Preconditions of Cultural Apex.’ ”

  Wheeler shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I don’t know what happened, ” he said. “But I didn’t see that paper. I didn’t copy it.”

  Professor Walker, overcome with kindness, seemed totally uninterested in whether Wheeler had or had not seen the Wickstein piece. T
he rest of the session was spent talking about Dilly Burden.

  After that the subject of the plagiarism never again came up, except from Fielding Shomsky, who continued to be furious. “You are from a famous family,” he said, glaring at Wheeler with his dark eyes that seemed more menacing than the situation merited. “You plagiarized a paper and got away with it. You don’t belong at Harvard. You have no sense of honor.”

  Wheeler stared back. “I did not plagiarize that paper, sir.” His voice was calm and emphatic. “I don’t know what happened, but I wrote that essay myself. You saw the draft.” But Shomsky would have none of it. Reality to him was the reality he saw. There was no explanation other than his own.

  He was worked up to a lather. “And your family isn’t all it is said to be either. Read this—” He slapped a copy of The Cambridge Voice into Wheeler’s hand. “This will settle a few things for you.”

  Wheeler read the article in the underground newspaper and kept it. It was an old copy of a 1954 edition, with a cover story about Dilly Burden, and it was obviously a negative one, and pretty nasty, debunking the legend. According to the story, Dilly Burden, with an abnormal need to be a hero, had been duped and betrayed by his own people and had not lived up to the “ne chantait pas” legend. He had talked; everyone tortured by the Gestapo talked. And Dilly’s father, Frank Burden, the prominent Boston banker, had been a fierce anti-Semite and a heavy investor in Nazi Germany, and had actually killed a man, a Jew, in Europe, at the turn of the century, an event covered up by his family connections. In short, he was not the heroic character his appearance in the 1896 Olympics made him out to be. The article, which Joan Quigley told him to discount as sensationalist yellow journalism, was not at all a flattering portrait of the Boston Burdens.

  After a week or so Shomsky had settled down. It was not until that May, when Wheeler was on the freshman baseball team as a reserve pitcher, that his arm came back into the spotlight, in two rather eccentric ways. The first was in a game in which he came in to throw just one pitch to end a tumultuous inning, and his teammates began calling him “One and Out.” Then the second came when an MIT student was working on a radar device for measuring the speed of small objects, and he decided to test it on baseball pitchers. He had been to a Red Sox warm-up and then had come to Harvard, where a number of pitchers including Wheeler threw for him. That week there was an article in the Boston Globe about the device. The MIT student was quoted as saying: “There are a few bugs in it. I got a Harvard freshman substitute pitcher throwing as fast as half the Red Sox staff.”