The Little Book: A Novel Read online

  But people noticing Wheeler on the street had started a long time before the Wild Bill hair and before Joan Quigley had rolled him in the hay at Harvard in 1959. It had been somehow a natural consequence, Wheeler’s mother, Flora Burden, always figured, of having a famous father and an eccentric, no-nonsense mother. That and the fact, incomprehensible to Flora’s English sensibilities, that at age twelve or so their small Sacramento Valley town discovered that this young man could throw a baseball faster than anyone they had ever seen. So it was that his mother became pretty accustomed to having people point and stare as they walked down the street and then come up and want to talk about his future plans.

  Whenever Wheeler thought back on his life and its extraordinary trajectory and looked for causes, he inevitably credited being the son of a famously heroic father or perhaps just being generally blessed by benevolent gods. Whatever it was, he could pretty much pinpoint the moment it all started—his epiphany day, he called it—that day at age ten when he pasted the sparrow hawk with the rock. At least that was when it became clear about the throwing-arm part.

  In the fall of 1951, Wheeler Burden—then known as Stan—was ten, a fifth grader, walking with his mother in the bottom forty acres near the Feather River, the part of their farm inside the levees that flooded nearly every winter and was suitable only for row crops. Flora loved the bottomland, with its large open bean fields and thick stands of cottonwoods and isolated pothole lakes where you could scare up wild ducks and pretend you were lost and alone. There was a calm wildness to it that was like nothing she had known growing up in London. In the long tormented days when she first arrived after the war, the walks with her son were her salvation.

  This one afternoon, he was giving her, as was the custom on those walks, a detail-rich and seamless version of the latest chapters of Ninety-Three , the Victor Hugo novel he was reading, or rereading. For young Stan Burden, his mother always conjectured, talking was discovery, so she would just let him ramble as she lost herself in figures from the recent prune harvest. She knew he was eccentric, flamboyant even, and she liked that. His free flow of ideas kept her good company, and she figured the outpouring was good for releasing all the pent-up male energy of growing up without a father.

  She walked and listened as he recounted all the vivid details of Hugo’s heroine, a mother hauling her children through the ravages of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Wheeler had no idea of the events that she had worked to keep secret: that when he was very young his own mother had made a very similar odyssey hauling her own infant son through newly-liberated northern France after the invasion, searching for her Resistance-hero husband, the boy’s father, the legendary Dilly Burden.

  As Wheeler told the Victor Hugo plot, he noticed with ten-year-old fascination a sparrow hawk hovering at about a one-hundred-foot distance. Without thinking, and definitely without breaking stride in his narrative, he picked up a smooth stone and winged it straight at the bird, striking it squarely in the chest. The bird fell like an overripe peach and hit the ground with a thud.

  Wheeler’s story stopped midsentence, his jaw dropped, and boy and mother stood watching the fallen bird as first it lay inert on the bottomland’s rich alluvial dust, then struggled to raise itself, shaking the cobwebs out of its tiny brain.

  “Look what you have done,” his mother said without a trace of either awe or humor, after it was clear that the bird was not dead and might in fact revive. “And for no reason.”

  Wheeler’s mother had a well-earned reputation as a no-nonsense pacifist. Five years earlier, in 1946, her husband already dead in the war, she had made the unlikely move with her five-year-old son from their bombed-out London neighborhood to the small family farm in far-off California. Wheeler’s father’s family, the Boston Burdens, had given it to Wheeler’s mother outright. It was a way to buy her off, to get her out of the way, a recompense for what she had been through, and a place to raise the family’s only grandson, the last of the Burden line. Wheeler’s mother, ravaged by war herself, had been glad to leave the gloom of her own and her country’s loss, and the Boston Burdens had been glad to have her out of sight. The family, at least Wheeler’s grandfather, had never accepted Flora. Regardless of how desperately she had loved his son and how she had left England to search for him almost as soon as the Allies landed in Normandy, it was clear to Flora that to the old patriarch Frank Burden she was little more than that English Jewess his son had gotten pregnant.

  What may have appeared to the world and even perhaps to Flora Burden as exile was for a London-born American boy a dream come true, the ideal surroundings for an upbringing. From his earliest years, Wheeler roamed the bottomlands with his friends, carefree and uncomplicated.

  Now, watching the wounded bird fluttering on the ground beside his mother, who understood little of what it was to be a ten-year-old rural California boy, Wheeler could only stammer. He thought of explaining to Flora the entire history of boys and rocks and incredible long shots, but for once in his short life he was speechless and even at the age of ten realized the futility of some tasks. “It was far away—” he began, still feeling the magic of the stone leaving his hand. “I never thought I’d even come close.” The sparrow hawk stretched out its wings.

  “You were trying to hit it.”

  “Well, yes,” Wheeler stammered. How do you ever explain to your English mother how an American boy throws rocks at just about everything, not really expecting to hit anything? And this English mother, Flora Burden, was about the most uncompromising woman Wheeler would meet in his life. She drove a hard bargain in buying goods for the ranch. She knew exactly whom she wanted as friends and whom she did not. She was single, celibate, self-assured, and intended to stay that way. She was a beautiful woman, granted, but her commitments ran too deep. “I’m an eagle,” she would say to Wheeler. “When I chose your father I mated for life.” And her commitment to pacifism also ran deep. She had been a lifelong disciple of Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and, most important, Sigmund Freud, whose seminal works she had embraced early and whom, at the end of his life, she spent time with when he emigrated from his Vienna home to London in 1938. She certainly did not want to be raising a young warrior, and, perhaps most important in this case, she knew nothing about ten-year-old arms and throwing range except that what began with throwing rocks ended with mighty armies going at each other.

  “I didn’t think I’d actually hit anything,” he stammered again, still amazed at what he had accomplished.

  “Well, now you know,” she said, her way of pointing out what she hoped would be a life lesson for Wheeler, that such tiny and thoughtless acts of violence were exactly what eventually caused the huge consequences of global war. She never forced him to promise anything. She had complete faith in her son’s rational powers, and saw no reason to explain or ask for an explanation. “Well, now you know” was for her all that was necessary. She had the utmost confidence that he would hear it, absorb it, and make the necessary attitude changes.

  The sparrow hawk collected itself one last time, flapped its wings, then rose haltingly and flew to a nearby stand of cottonwood trees. Wheeler watched silently and recalled again the sensation in his right arm as the stone had left his hand. His fingers seemed to follow the trajectory of the stone to the fluttering target in one beautifully unified motion. Wheeler looked down at his hand, opening and closing it. He looked up at the position in the sky where the hawk had been hovering; then he looked back at his hand, then up to the cottonwood where the bird was regrouping. It was hard to explain, but something began to dawn on the boy in that moment. He had felt for just an instant the connectedness of all things.

  It was, you would have to say, a life-altering moment. Wheeler’s was going to be no ordinary journey.

  3

  The Venerable Haze

  When asked the most important influences in his life in the now-classic 1969 interview in Rolling Stone magazine, just after the disastrous Altamont concert when
he was nearly killed by a pool-cue-wielding Hell’s Angel, Wheeler Burden gave three: Victor Hugo, whose seven novels he had read for the first time by age thirteen; Buddy Holly, whose music he first heard in the Sacramento Valley when he was fifteen; and his Boston private school history teacher and mentor, Arnauld Esterhazy, indeed a most central player in my son’s remarkable story, whom three generations of boys had called the Venerable Haze. Esterhazy, the Haze, had taught history to the boys at St. Gregory’s School, Boston, for more than forty years before Wheeler’s arrival, naïve and impressionable, at age sixteen in 1957 for his high school junior year, what St. Greg’s called the second class.

  Esterhazy had grown up and spent his early adulthood in Vienna at the turn of the century, and while recovering from shattered nerves and injuries in the Great War had settled at St. Greg’s, where he became a legend. The two unlikely characters, the undisciplined boy from the California provinces and the old Viennese aristocrat, met in 1957 and formed a cohesive bond when family peculiarities brought them together. The relationship became a most formative one, even for the old man. Somehow, almost magically, the two—old master and young student—had liked each other from the start. “We have much to learn from you, Herr Burden, ” the old man had said in their first meeting, then pausing for effect, “as we begin writing on your tabula rasa.” In his first week in the strange environment of his new school, the sixteen-year-old boy had written home about the eighty-year-old man, “Mr. Esterhazy and I seem to have known each other all our lives.”

  The Haze had taught and been close to Wheeler’s war-hero father Dilly Burden in the 1930s, the reason why, everyone assumed, the old man had fixed such fierce attention on the boy from the moment he arrived. The old man did indeed begin a two-year process of filling the blank slate. It was the Haze, then nearly eighty, who so affected Wheeler’s psyche that all other influences paled in comparison. That period from 1957 to 1959 was—Wheeler said later in that famous Rolling Stone interview—when two of his most important influences, Esterhazy and Holly, coincided, although the two never met nor for that matter knew each other existed.

  Holly, himself a mid-twentieth-century American music icon, had spent his boyhood in Texas with no connection to Vienna. The Haze, a St. Gregory’s icon, had never been to Texas, but had spent his boyhood in Vienna, witness to a most extraordinary pinnacle of culture and, simultaneously, the decline and fall of just about all the essentials necessary to preserve it.

  The Haze was tall, thin, and indelibly cultured. His eyes burned with a blue intensity that when fixed on his young impressionable male audience lent the kind of urgency to his classroom observations about history that stuck in the minds of his students. He spoke with an accent more civilized and theatrical than Germanic. His dress was elegant and simple, all his clothes tailored wool and the finest cottons, having taken on that worn comfortable look of a prep school master, with a scent of a rich old talcum. “He smells like old Europe,” an old boy told Wheeler.

  And there was little doubt that it was the old man’s kindly gentility that made Wheeler’s otherwise disastrous transition to St. Gregory’s bearable. As the young man from a farm in California sat in his totally unfamiliar blazer and tie among sophisticated boys in their totally familiar blazers and ties, he focused on his fascinating teacher instead of on his feeling of displacement. As Wheeler listened to the elegant descriptions of historic Europe, he focused on their compelling charm rather than his own deplorable lack of sophistication and classical education. And the daunting task of initiating the young man from the California farmlands was one with which the old man seemed strangely comfortable.

  As a young man himself, Arnauld Esterhazy, descendant of one of the Hapsburg Empire’s most prominent and aristocratic families, had received a superb education, had been part of the rich intellectual life of the Viennese coffeehouses, and had himself published a few feuilletons, the tight little highly personal essays in Vienna’s famous liberal newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse. He had considered careers in both journalism and academia before being lured to America in the early 1900s, recruited by an anonymous admirer and St. Gregory’s patron, to teach European history and academic German to prep school boys, which he did—at least according to legend—with immediate flamboyance and eventual popularity. Actually, his initiation had not been easy, his refined Viennese manner being perceived as haughty and arrogant, and it was not until he returned to Vienna at the start of the Great War and then came back in 1920, humbled by injury and nearly wrecked by the harrowing experience, that he began to work his way into school legend.

  Then, in 1957, the old man’s history lessons, those rich historical vignettes—“Hazings” the St. Greg’s boys called them, “the world according to the Haze”—had an unexplainable appeal and did indeed begin filling the young Herr Burden’s blank slate.

  More than a teacher, the Haze was like an evangelist in his prime, delivering the good news. He was a one-man cultural force in St. Greg’s boys’ educational lives, three generations of them, who knew their European history cold, especially his proprietary corner of that history. Essays in his classes were called feuilletons, and the group of the most talented students who gathered about him perpetually he called, with a flourish, Jung Wien, after the artists and intellectuals who gathered in the cafés of his beloved city. Those talented young protégés went on to Harvard mostly, and then to distinguished lives of business and service. St. Greg’s boys knew their European history, for sure, but most of all they knew about Vienna. Too many eminent Bostonians to number credited those Hazings as the primary inspiration for their luminous careers: one former governor of Massachusetts, a former U.S. senator, a museum director, a former Massachusetts attorney general and state supreme court justice, a novelist, countless Boston financiers, and many university scholars, to mention a few. The relationship with this charismatic old man accounted for the beginnings of Wheeler’s knowledge of Vienna and, one might say, for his yearning to travel there, his desire—matched by hundreds of St. Greg’s boys—to see for himself. “It was a time of delusive splendor,” the Haze would say alluringly, “a whole glorious way of life teetering on the edge of the abyss, totally oblivious to its own nearness to extinction. But what splendor!”

  Every St. Gregory’s boy knew cold the gospel according to the Haze. And Wheeler was no exception. In his early days in 1897 Vienna, we know from his journal entries, Wheeler felt strangely well prepared for this bizarre experience, the lectures echoing in his mind as if his beloved mentor walked the Ringstrasse alongside him, narrating. He found himself so able to identify dress styles, buildings, parks, and landmarks that he knew exactly where he was, and exactly when, well before actually stopping at a kiosk in front of the opera house to read the title Neue Freie Presse and the day’s date on one of the myriad newspapers.

  The Haze’s version went like this. In the 1850s, in a burst of civic liberalism, the Viennese, under the leadership of Emperor Franz Joseph, had decided to tear down the fortifying walls that had totally encircled the inner city since the early Middle Ages. And in place of the ancient barriers they constructed a broad and majestic boulevard, giving the city the burst of vitality and life that defined the end of the century. The resplendent Ringstrasse, one of the wonders of Europe, a monument to science, industrial superiority, and rational order, opened officially in 1865. The magnificent surrounding buildings, unmatched anywhere in the world, were begun and completed by the 1880s.

  The wealthy industrial middle class came to power and established a constitutional regime identified with capitalism, industrialists, and Jews, who streamed into the city, finding release from the oppression they had endured elsewhere, as well as equality, opportunity, and aesthetic stimulation. The wealthy bourgeois city fathers shared their power gracefully with the aristocracy and the imperial bureaucracy.

  The expansive magnificence, lined with plane trees, glorious in all directions, was too broad to be plagued by the crowded bustling of other European
cities. “The Ringstrasse,” the Haze would exclaim. “Here paraded indeed a most astounding variety of elegant humanity. Riding in carriages, bustling or strolling casually, brightly dressed military officers in an endless variety of colorful uniforms, handsome men in silk top hats, and women, the beauty of whom legend had not exaggerated.” And St. Greg’s boys had no trouble imagining such a scene. All because of their Venerable Haze.