The Little Book: A Novel Page 4

  As Wheeler got to the door of the Café Central, apparently unnoticed, he paused for a moment and looked back to see his young adversary joined by a handsome, well-dressed man in his fifties. The two chatted familiarly, then sat down together and began what appeared to be a comfortable continuance of a conversation. The threat of being noticed by his new enemy and the unexpected excitement of meeting Egon Wickstein were too much on his mind for Wheeler to pay much attention to the meeting of the two men, a fateful one.

  5

  Wheeler-Dealer Kid

  Boys’ organized baseball, called Little League, was just starting up in the rural Sacramento Valley in 1953, the year that Wheeler turned twelve in sixth grade. Walter Hefley, who owned the Standard station on B Street and who sold Wheeler’s mother the gas and oil for the ranch, was coaching one of the inaugural teams, the Indians they were to be called, and talked her into letting Wheeler play. “Hear the boy has a pretty darn good arm,” he said, as he showed her the oil level on her dipstick. “I’ll drive the lad home after the practices on days you can’t.” Fair enough, she decided, but not without taking the opportunity to remind her son, realizing that it would be totally lost on the very literal Walter Hefley, that after the brutalizing the American settlers had done to the native inhabitants in the last century, Indians did not seem an appropriate name for a group of impressionable American boys.

  “Only a game, Mrs. Burden,” Hefley said when she asked, reinserting the dipstick.

  “It’s only a game, Mother,” Wheeler reiterated back home, preoccupied with loosening up his father’s old glove, which he had found among some military clothes and mementoes in a trunk in the attic. “Did Father have a pretty good fastball?” he asked.

  Wheeler’s mother had no idea what a fastball was, let alone if her late husband had possessed one. She had met Wheeler’s father before the war in London. Fresh out of Harvard Law School, he was recruited by the U.S. Navy as a representative to the early version of Lend-Lease, before American entry. That had been after he was a prep school and college sports hero and before he was the legendary Rouge Gorge, hero of the French Resistance, who had preserved the secrets of the Allied invasion and inspired a generation with his heroic death at the hands of the Gestapo.

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  Flora Burden was shameless in her ignorance of American culture and sports. “Is it something important?”

  “A fastball? For an American boy,” Wheeler said patiently, “it is.”

  “Well then, I am sure he had one. Your father was splendid at everything. ”

  That was good enough for Wheeler. “My father had a great fastball,” he would say convincingly, as if he had seen it himself. “I will have one too.”

  Before the season Frank Standish Burden III had been Standish to his mother, Stan at school. That first season with the Little League Indians was when he got his name, and when he first learned to throw the prongball. Bucky Hannigan, who would become his great friend, was the catcher. Bucky would have been pitcher, but he had lost one finger and part of a second on his right hand playing with blasting caps in fifth grade. The day before the first game Walter Hefley said to a group of boys, “Who’s going to pitch for us?” And Bucky said that the skinny English kid could throw the ball pretty damn hard. “Let’s watch our language,” Walter Hefley had said, and wrote down “Mrs. Burden’s lad” in the starting lineup. Coach Hefley wasn’t much with names.

  The first pitch Wheeler ever threw in a game was the next day. It left his small slender hand opportunely, you might say, and flew over the heads of the batter, the catcher, and the umpire, who showed his inexperience behind the plate by yelling, “Look out!” as the ball whizzed past them. The last pitch Wheeler Burden ever threw, eight years later, was legend and many say it was one of the finest pitches ever thrown, regardless of age group and league. That last one, it is said, traveled at more than ninety miles an hour, headed for the upper inside corner of the strike zone, then dropped two to three feet and caught the lower outside corner. “Willie Mays would have had a hard time with it,” a baseball writer for the Boston Globe would write. Such baseball history was not foretold, however, by Wheeler’s second life pitch, nor his third, both of which sailed, similar to the first, far from the intended target and ended up at the backstop. The third errant pitch caused Coach Hefley to take the first walk of his life to the pitcher’s mound.

  “This is new to all of us, son,” Walter said with the ball in his large hand. “You might want to rein it in just a bit.” He was aware of the large responsibility he had laid on a twelve-year-old boy’s shoulders, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it. And he placed the ball back in Stan Burden’s small preadolescent hand. Walter had never coached a team before, and had barely played the game himself. He had no son of his own. He was a widower who spent most of his time at the gas station, where he had to haggle mercilessly with Wheeler’s mother over the bulk price of his product every year when the ranch’s gasoline and diesel contract came due.

  By contrast, Bucky Hannigan seemed to know exactly what to do. Baseball was new to everyone, it seemed, except Bucky, who now imagined himself a major league catcher, Roy Campanella of the Brooklyn Dodgers being his inspiration and model. Bucky knew his job was to settle down his pitcher. He was in his crouch behind the plate, waiting for the pitch. He spat on the ground, rubbed his crotch, and called out in a nasal twang that Stan’s mother figured was a tradition for American boys. “Chuck to me, wheeler-dealer,” Bucky Hannigan called out, since he too had not yet learned the skinny English boy’s Christian name. “Chuck-fire, kid. Chuck fire, wheeler-dealer kid.” And the English boy focused on the mitt with hawklike eyes, pulling himself in from wherever it was he had traveled. Concentrate, he said to himself. When he threw the ball this time, it was with sufficient accuracy and hardness that it made a popping sound in Bucky’s catcher’s mitt. Walter Hefley smiled and nodded in the direction of the boy’s mother.

  The more Bucky would call out his “chuck-fire, wheeler-dealer” litany, the more Stan would throw the ball to the center of the mitt. “I think we’ve got ourselves a pitcher here, Mrs. Burden,” Walter Hefley said after the game, with a broad contented smile. Flora Burden was still wondering if the team couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate name.

  On the way home in the car Stan Burden had a hard time containing himself to the front seat. “That’s the answer,” he said, as if his mouthful of a three-part Boston Brahmin family name had been the question for him for a long time. “Wheeler-Dealer Kid. That’s my new name, all right.” And he looked over at his mother in the way an early Christian saint might have looked when he was receiving the stigmata. “From now on I will be called Wheeler.” And so it was.

  Although totally unfamiliar with this strange American sport of baseball in general and the new youth version of it in particular, Flora could recognize immediately the enchantment in her son’s eyes as he played, and she loved it. She adjusted quickly to watching him throw the baseball, the fastball, she concluded, and imagined her son’s father as a boy in Boston doing the same thing.

  The other thing that stuck besides her son’s name was the prongball. He learned it late in the season from Bucky Hannigan, who had always imagined himself throwing it and would have, had it not been for the misfortune with the blasting cap. “Hold the ball like so,” Bucky had said, making a fork with the two good fingers of his left hand. “Lay some good wet ones on the spot just between the label and the stitching. Here.” He dropped a huge gob of spit onto the ball. “You keep working that spot, if the ump don’t catch you, which he won’t ’cause you’re just a kid. When it’s good and slick, the ball pops out between the two fingers like a watermelon seed, with no spin.” He squeezed his fingers and let the ball pop out. “With your speed and no spin, the ball’ll hop all over the damn place. No one’ll ever hit you.”

  “Let’s watch our language,” Wheeler said.

  The first game he tried it, he walked ten batter
s. Bucky, whose job it was to catch the erratic pitches, was ecstatic. “You see that thing jump around?” he exclaimed as Wheeler was coming off the mound after a wild inning.

  Seeing the erratic trajectories and thinking the boy had lost his stuff, Coach Hefley moved Wheeler to the outfield and put in Robert Collins, who gave up three home runs on five pitches. That was the last game of the season, and the Indians lost to the Pirates twenty-three to three.

  “Now what’d you go and show him that for?” Coach Hefley said to Bucky after the game, when he heard about the new pitch. “Here’s a kid who can throw the ball straighter an’ faster’n anyone’s ever seen, and now he’ll be experimenting all the time.” He paused, scratching his head. “You know the way he is.”

  “A historic day,” Wheeler declared on the way home, his head still full of impressions of the ball snapping out like a watermelon seed between his two slathered fingers. “Didja see that thing move?”

  His mother looked back at him blankly, her own head still full of the incongruity of pirates playing baseball against Indians and wondering suddenly if perhaps Dilly’s old friend Winston Churchill would have known what on earth her son was talking about.

  Winston Churchill, son of an American mother and genuine admirer of many things American, most definitely would have.

  Wheeler, his remarkable pitching arm, and his ancient glove gained notoriety in the Sacramento Valley during the next few years, a notoriety that would persist through Wheeler’s sophomore year at Feather River Union High School.

  Walter Hefley, who retired from coaching after that first year of Little League, usually mentioned Wheeler when he pumped Flora’s gas. “The boy’s a wonder, Mrs. Burden,” he would say, and then she knew what was coming next. “If he could just be a little more conventional.”

  But being conventional, she knew, was just not in her son’s makeup, a fact she rather relished. When he was in that same sixth grade year, he decided he was going to call the governor of California to give him his opinion on capital punishment. He asked the local operator to put him through to Governor Earl Warren, but she got only as far as the lieutenant governor’s office. At that point, Wheeler began speaking for himself, and he got through to the lieutenant governor, a man named Goodwin Knight. The two of them had a long series of conversations about politics that stretched over the next ten years until long after Earl Warren had moved to the Supreme Court and Goodwin Knight had become governor of California himself. “You’re the only kid I know,” said Bucky Hannigan, “who if he don’t like what’s going on, he calls the goddam gov’ner.”

  “Let’s watch our language,” Wheeler said.

  Sometimes in the middle of a ball game, Wheeler would tap his glove and walk over to first base and ask the opposing player how he had hit his pitch. Or he’d stop by third base at the end of an inning to ask an opposing coach what he thought about taxation or birth control or the role of religion in Western history. Most people were amused by him, and nearly all marveled at his ability to throw the baseball. That single and extraordinary talent gave young Wheeler Burden a lot of leeway.

  “He’s got lots to say” was his high school coach’s way of explaining why Wheeler couldn’t just pitch and keep his mouth shut. “Nobody cares about all those ideas, son,” he’d say. “They just want you to throw the ball.”

  Once, when he was on a road trip to Bakersfield with a summer all-star team, he placed a call to Chet Huntley, the famous newsman, after an evening Huntley-Brinkley Report, talked his way through the switchboard, and conversed for almost an hour, running up a whopping bill for his hotel room. When his coach asked him about the call the next day, Wheeler said, “I thought he was wrong about Venezuela oil.”

  Wheeler made the all-county baseball team his sophomore year in high school, the first Feather River boy to do that since Ray Webster, who ended up with the real Indians in the major leagues. Now the most famous kid in town due to his fastball and a few minutes’ illicit instruction from Bucky Hannigan, Wheeler’s way in life seemed assured. No one in the town understood what happened next.

  “His mom—she was English, you know—come up with sending him off to that fancy school in the east. Wanted him to go to Harvard,” his best friend and catcher Bucky Hannigan said years later when asked to explain to the Rolling Stone reporter what had happened to Wheeler’s world-class fastball and major league promise.

  “Sometimes, God’s gifts go to the wrong people,” said his old high school coach in the same article. “It was all that mythology and Victor Hugo crap that ruined the boy. Wheeler Burden was always a first-class flake. But, jeezus, could he throw hard.”

  It was right about that time that his mother’s extraordinary book was born. On one of their long walks in the bottomland, Wheeler began talking mythology, one of his favorite subjects at age twelve. His grandmother in Boston had given him a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology for his ninth birthday with a note: “My dear Stan, I think you will find this according to your tastes,” and of course he had devoured it, in between Victor Hugo novels, and for a time, he could not have a conversation, see a movie, or read a newspaper article without referring to one Greek myth or another. One day, in the middle of one of their walks, he said, “Why doesn’t anyone think of Persephone’s side of the story?” His mother, long accustomed to the stream of thoughts that came from her son if she simply asked a prompting question or two, said, “What exactly is Persephone’s side of the story?” and out came a most remarkable string of thoughts that Flora went home and immediately wrote down in her notebook, not realizing at first the conversation’s critical role in her own life.

  The young mythologist’s point was essentially that Persephone, the beautiful young daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, when forcefully abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, and taken away to his dark kingdom, is put in an awful fix. When her mother goes into mourning, the world is thrown into dark infertility, perpetual winter. Zeus gets involved and strikes a deal. Persephone can return to her mother for part of the year but will stay in the underworld as queen for part of the time. “She’s in a very bad position,” Wheeler said. “She has to be a little girl for her mother half the time and a big queen for her husband half the time. I don’t think anyone has been too interested in her side of the story.”

  Over the course of the next few walks, Wheeler and his mother explored the subject in more depth. On each return to the house Flora wrote more and more in her notebook, until she and her son had pretty much exhausted Persephone’s point of view.

  One day, not long after, Flora Burden had one of the strangest visits of her life. She was sitting in the ranch office, working on the books, when a man in a dark suit and tie came in asking for her. He introduced himself as Smallwood or Woodcock, or some such, and said he represented a small academic press on the East Coast. He had heard that she had been a student of Sigmund Freud in London and asked if she might wish to write a book derived from the experience. Flora explained that she had not actually been a student of Freud’s per se, but that she had been a psychiatry student in general, had been an admirer of Freud’s work, and had been in the inner circle of Londoners who had arranged for his move there in 1938.

  “Did you actually meet him?” the man asked.

  “Of course,” Flora answered a little dismissively, and she could see a look of genuine admiration on the man’s face. “I would not have missed that.”

  “Well then, would you consider writing a book for us?”

  At first, Flora insisted that there was not a book in her future. “I’m not that sort,” she said. “Thank you very much.” But then she saw the fat Persephone notes sitting on her desk. “There’s just this,” she said quickly, and handed it to Mr. Smallwood or Woodcock or whomever, who was staying the night at a local motel.

  He came back the next day with a wild look in his eye. “This is it,” he said. “This is the book we were hoping for.”

  And so Flora Burden worked for
a year refining the ideas in her notes that Persephone represented the plight of the modern woman, raised by a patriarchal society to be the dutiful daughter, but expected by the responsibilities of the changing world to be the independent sovereign of her own life. “The counterweight to Freud’s Oedipus complex,” a reviewer in The New Yorker would say, “modern woman taking charge of her own destiny.” After much struggle with herself and further conversations with her son, Persephone Rising was born, published in 1955 in a thin volume under a pseudonym. It was Flora’s first literary effort, and it established her, a few years later, as one of the first voices, along with Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, in the American feminist movement. More than forty years later the book was still read on college campuses, and the pseudonymous Flora Standish was still getting speaking invitations, most of which she turned down, at places like Berkeley and Northampton, Massachusetts, and Montreal. In all the times she appeared to talk about her book, as an act of motherly protection, she never really credited her main source, a somewhat erratic and hyperkinetic twelve-year-old boy who did little to control the stream of ideas that came when walking with his mother in the Sacramento Valley bottomlands. And she never talked about or explained the book’s dedication: “For Dilly.”