The Little Book: A Novel Page 11

  When Wheeler read the article he called the MIT student. “Your machine’s not wrong,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” the MIT student said.

  “I’m the one. Your machine does not lie.” The student set the radar machine back up and, sure enough, same results. A writer for the university newspaper, the Crimson, did a feature on Wheeler.

  “If you have that kind of speed,” the Crimson reporter asked incredulously, “why don’t you use it?,” pointing out that Wheeler did not see much action even in freshman games.

  “I’ve grown sort of bored with fastballs,” Wheeler responded, without explaining his interest in giving batters pitches they had a chance of hitting.

  The Crimson article was facetious, titled, “Kid with Major League Arm Bored with Fastballs.” Shomsky read it. What Wheeler did not know about his former philosophy section man was that he was an incurable baseball fanatic, the kind who as a twelve-year-old kid had known the name and batting average of every left-hander in the majors. “You didn’t tell me you had a no-hit game in prep school, Burden.” For Shomsky, that changed everything.

  “You said I have no honor.”

  “What’d it feel like?” Shomsky, it turned out, would trade honor for a no-hitter any day.

  “Okay,” Wheeler said flatly. The no-hit game had come in his last year at St. Gregory’s, but it had meant little and added little to Wheeler’s reputation because it was against Charles River Country Day, and everyone knew that Charles River boys were athletically hapless. And Shomsky’s question came to him in the days when the life and music of the coffeehouses was filling his mind, and besides that he was having trouble concentrating on much other than his hand in Joan Quigley’s pants. “It was a highlight,” he said glibly. “For sure.”

  “I would have given anything for a no-hit game.” Fielding Shomsky would have given anything to have thrown just one pitch in a real game. What Bucky Hannigan missed out on through an accident with a blasting cap, Shomsky missed out on by an accident of birth.

  The next freshman game Wheeler was scheduled to start, and in the front row of the bleachers, big as life, was the first Shomsky.

  That week also Wheeler received his invitation to join the Porcellian. “A bunch of stuffy pricks,” Joan Quigley called them, but it meant a lot to his grandmother, so he joined.

  By sophomore year Wheeler was playing guitar every day. Shadow Self had a standing engagement at a Brattle Street coffeehouse. And everyone seemed to know about the black market record.

  He wrote home to his mother that his passions of the moment were music, philosophy, baseball, and a girl named Joan Quigley, in no particular order. He got so he could keep up with his courses, and he made the varsity baseball team by the skin of his teeth.

  From time to time he would meet Joan Quigley secretly in someone or other’s apartment because no one could know. That was the year she was absorbing Proust. “Tonight,” she would say, “you are either getting into the honey jar or hearing five pages of Swann’s Way.” She paused. “Or both.” Somehow it usually ended up as both.

  Once, on one of the “both” nights, in the middle of wild and naked abandon, Joan Quigley stopped and sat up. “There’s something I don’t get,” she said flatly. “Why’s a guy with your talent wasting his time with college?”

  13

  Something of Significance

  Once in Vienna, Weezie had experienced a rush of new vitality. The city itself was teeming with culture, energy, and life, and even though she had expected to find a richness of art and music, she was still overwhelmed by the abundance that the city offered. Every afternoon, in concert halls, cafés, parks, private salons, and sidewalks, music abounded. Choices for the evening included dance hall orchestras, operettas in large and small theaters, chamber music, and formal orchestras. From classical to popular to comic to the schlagg of waltzes, music poured from the city, most of it almost totally devoid of any seriousness. She had never seen such a joyous effluence, and at once it made Boston feel narrow, restrained, and puritanical. “How does one ever return home,” she said to one of her new Viennese friends, “after such stimulation?”

  Within the first two months, she had already mailed one exuberant article to The New York Times about the city’s music in general, about her fascination with how Viennese children from the earliest years were given music lessons and encouraged to appreciate and play, and the phenomenon of whole Viennese families playing music in the home, though few were able to afford pianos. Orchestras for dancing and concerts in public parks were everywhere; folk tunes, waltzes, and marches were played by quartets of violinists, who were often joined by a guitar, clarinet, or an accordion. Even hurdy-gurdies in Vienna, she observed, ground out melodies of operas along with the ever-present folk songs that seemed to delight all classes.

  And she had been collecting copious notes for a second article, a subject that seemed on the minds and in the gossip of every young music enthusiast she found herself traveling with: the bursting onto the scene of one indelible, charismatic personality, Gustav Mahler. That subject, she was beginning to realize, was also material for what her old headmistress Miss Hewens called “something of significance,” a book perhaps on this fascinating character and the direction he seemed to be taking modern classical music. To Weezie, it seemed indeed a significant direction.

  She had known about Gustav Mahler before coming to Vienna, of course. It was, after all, her excitement upon reading about his performance of his Second Symphony in Berlin two years before in 1895 that had inspired her original pseudonymous diatribe in the Times. Mahler too had just arrived in Vienna, in his case a return as the newly appointed director of the Vienna Opera, from Hamburg and Budapest, where he had already written three symphonies. But it was through his conducting and directing that he had developed a riveting popularity and a reputation for both inspiration and a fiery disposition. He had not yet received acceptance of his music or acquired the fascinating, beautiful wife who would outlive him by forty years and become the wife and consort to some of the most brilliant and artistic men in Europe.

  Mahler was more than a musician—in a way a misfit—in this city that had spawned Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and many more but had also developed an obsessive passion for bubbly sweetness. Mahler was driven to speak of things to come and was not always accepted for that drive. He was a personality with flamboyant energy and passion, the son of a large and poor family some hundred miles from Vienna, halfway to Prague. His restlessness, complexity, and brilliance came from a number of influences, not the least of which was his awful experience with death. Of his twelve brothers and sisters, six died in childhood, and his beloved younger brother Otto committed suicide in 1895. Mahler himself was to die in 1911 of a heart ailment at fifty-one, only a few years after the death from scarlet fever of his young daughter, Maria. From its earliest, his music carried a profound emotional range. He had studied for many years in the conservatory in Vienna and knew well the music of lightness that made the city famous, but he also had immersed himself in Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven. His early fame came from his songs, the cornerstones to his symphonies. But his years in Budapest as director of the opera allowed him to reinterpret Mozart and introduce Wagner, and he did it with such passion and zeal that his reputation was cemented in his late twenties. Now, at age thirty-seven, he had been invited to the pinnacle, to direct the Vienna Opera. Anyone who met him for the first time commented on his magnetic intensity. Musicians who worked for him were at once offended by his rigorous demands and enthralled by his breathless talent and a charismatic appeal that had led, in gossip at least, to numerous affairs with famous singers he had worked with. For Weezie, meeting him was not only her secret goal in choosing to come to Vienna in the first place, over Paris, say, or Rome, but the experience of a lifetime.

  She began to realize that the “something of significance” from her time in Vienna was going to be about this remarkable man, and she had already begun collectin
g stories about him that abounded within the music circle and throughout the city. In an attempt to avoid Vienna’s growing anti-Semitism, he had converted to Christianity for the occasion of his triumphant return. He had been appointed through politics. One of Weezie’s favorite stories was that toward the end of his time in Budapest in 1891, Johannes Brahms attended Mahler’s conducting of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, claiming famously beforehand, “Nobody can interpret Don Giovanni for me! That is music which I can enjoy only if I sit down and read the score.” But afterward he was swept away. “That is just the way it ought to be done!” Brahms said to Mahler backstage, taking him by the shoulders and shaking him heartily. “That was the best Don Giovanni I’ve ever heard. Not even the Imperial Opera in Vienna can rival it.”

  Weezie wanted to know all she could about this remarkable man, to attend as many of his performances as possible, and she busied herself reading about his style and his influences, finding interviews where she could. Then out of the blue, Ernst Felsch said, almost in passing, one morning in the Café Central, “Well, Papa will have you meet Mahler in his studio in his home.”

  Immediately, her heart fluttered. “That would be thrilling,” she said, anticipating a meeting that would become one of the inspirations and one of the great embarrassments of her brief time in Vienna.

  She was surprised in being met at the door by a very plain-looking maid, a girl of no more than eighteen. She had imagined the great center of so much of her attention being surrounded by people of exotic and exquisite beauty. “Herr Mahler will see you in his studio,” she said and led the way.

  The room was high ceilinged and spacious, with large windows and a good deal of daylight spilling in from the garden outside. Beside the piano was a disorderly array of boxes, in various stages of being unpacked. “Fraulein Putnam,” she heard and turned to find Gustav Mahler, of average height, in a plain dark suit, vest, and bow tie, with wire-rimmed glasses. His receding hairline and high forehead gave his eyes added prominence. He was beside her with outstretched hand before she could catch her breath. “You will have to excuse the unpacking. It is the sad plight of the eternal homeless musician,” he said, taking her hand and pulling gently. “I am sure you will want a seat.”

  She was in the high-backed wooden chair beside the piano before she had taken her first full breath. “Thank you for seeing me,” she got out. “I know you are a very busy—”

  “These visits,” he interrupted, stepping quickly toward the piano, “they add the piment to my life.” He looked over the top of his glasses. “You know piment, Fraulein Putnam? It is French. I believe spice is the English word.” We can surmise purely from his reputation that the great musician had already surveyed his guest thoroughly and decided, on account of her disarming and totally unself-conscious attractiveness, that he would enjoy spending some time with this interview. “Herr Felsch has told me that you write musical feuilletons for the Boston newspaper.”

  She did not know exactly what Herr Felsch had said, and she did not know how much Ernst had told his father in order to obtain this extraordinary audience with the master. “It is a New York paper, actually,” she heard her voice saying. “I live in Boston, but I send the articles to The New York Times.”

  “All the better,” he said and stepped closer to her, allowing little space between them. “Even in the far outposts of Europe, we have heard of The New York Times,” he said enthusiastically. “It is quite well respected.”

  Her face felt flushed, and she had little control over her words. “I write with the pseudonym of a man,” she blurted out. Immediately, she wished she had not been so forthcoming.

  Mahler looked at her curiously. “Ah,” he said with a smile. “You can say as a man what would never be accepted from a woman.” Obviously, he liked the presumptuousness of a woman speaking out.

  She was regretting already that she had revealed so much. “It just happened, ” she said, sounding little-girlish. “I wrote one article and it was published.” She was surprised that he seemed interested.

  “You write about modern music, I gather.”

  “That is how it started. I observed that the New York Philharmonic seemed to be avoiding modern music. Actually, I suggested they perform one of your symphonies.”

  The great musician paused and looked her over. “Heresy,” he said, with a flair. He nodded as if immediately seeing the whole fabric of her dilemma. “In New York City and Boston, I am sure, people are very conservative and cautious. It would be hard to espouse successfully the music of a European renegade such as I.” He paused and eyed her again with a smile. “And be a woman at the same time.”

  “Precisely.” She was further surprised with how quickly he understood.

  “It is not unlike being a Jew,” he said. “You must learn to intrude yourself, if you expect to get anywhere. One cannot always be concerned with being polite and proper, if one is going to achieve anything.” He was arranging a group of papers on the top of the piano. “Come, let me show you my work in Vienna.” She rose and joined him, feeling both stimulated and light-headed.

  “You have heard my symphonies?”

  “I have not,” she said too quickly. “That was my point. I have not, nor has anyone else in America. But I have read the scores.”

  The great musician looked surprised. “I am impressed.”

  “But I must admit that I read incompletely. I hear music imperfectly through the cello, the strings.”

  “And what would be better?”

  “For your music, Herr Mahler?”

  “For my music, yes.”

  She looked at him appraisingly for an instant, to see if he was perhaps belittling her. “Are you testing me?”

  He suddenly looked concerned. “No, no,” he protested quickly. “Far from it, Fraulein Putnam. I am deeply interested.”

  “Why, the horns,” she burst out. “It is the horns, Herr Mahler, that distinguish your second symphony. That is what I want to hear in full symphony.”

  “An excellent point,” he said with a wry smile. “I am impressed. And that is what you wrote in your feuilletons?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking a little sheepish. “I am afraid I came off a little pretentious.”

  “And the prestigious New York Times published it.”

  “That,” she said apologetically, “and others.”

  “I am flattered that you came to my defense.”

  “How could I not?” she said.

  Perhaps she was too agitated to perceive that Mahler was liking her conversation very much.

  He guided her attention to the sheets of music spread out on the piano top. “These are the songs, my ‘Lieder Eindes Fahrended Gesellen,’ the songs of a traveling journeyman, I think you would say. They have made quite a splash.” He ran his hands over the manuscripts of musical notations.

  “We have not had the honor of hearing these either,” she said quickly.

  “My time in America has not yet come, I think you would have to admit. But with your help, it sounds as if it might come sooner, rather than later.”

  “That is my hope,” she said, and he could not have helped hearing her earnestness.

  He looked into her eyes with a vibrancy she found both attractive and disquieting. “They are really my most original work. The symphonies are more conventional, but the songs express—” He closed his eyes and placed his fingertips on his forehead. “Express my true—” He closed his eyes again, tapping something even deeper. “My deep inner feelings.” His eyes were on hers again. They had a hypnotic appeal, pulling her toward him. “Take one,” he said and handed her a number of the sheets. As he did, his hand brushed hers. He had picked up a baton from the piano and used it as a pointer. “These passages in here, written for voices, have become without tone, almost disharmonious.” The baton brushed against her hand. She saw the point of the baton gliding across the ink scribblings. The images began to swim in her head. He had moved closer and she could feel the touch of his lapel agai
nst her shoulder. “Always I need to restrain myself, always I need to remember what an audience is willing to tolerate. Always—”

  She was aware of his hands moving and suddenly his voice began to fade away and her vision blurred. Later she recalled the room spinning and the feeling of falling. Then blackness.

  “You dropped like a sack of turnips, Fraulein Putnam,” Herr Mahler said to her after she had come back to earth, lying on the couch beside the piano. He had been gracious and stayed with her until she had fully awakened. Before the maid showed her to the door he asked that she come back, “sometime when you have had a full meal,” he said with a charming smile, supplying a reason for her collapse. But she had not returned. She had been to see him direct at the opera, and she had written much of the article.

  But she had been too embarrassed to return.

  14

  Berggasse 19

  Berggasse 19, where Sigmund Freud lived for nearly half a century, was an unpretentious apartment house on a respectable residential street. When he moved there in the summer of 1891, Freud was a promising but unknown young neurologist with unorthodox ideas and an uncertain future; when he left the house and Nazi-occupied Austria for London in June 1938, “to die in freedom,” he was a world-famous old man, “an explorer as significant as Copernicus or Columbus or Charles Darwin,” the Haze used to say.