The Little Book: A Novel Page 5

  6

  Going East

  The idea of Wheeler’s going east for his last two years of high school had been something of an armistice between his mother and his Boston grandmother. The grandmother had wanted young Standish to come board at St. Gregory’s, where his father and grandfather, her husband, had gone. Wheeler was, after all, the last male to bear the Burden name, and he ought to get some sense of the family tradition. But the grandmother seemed to accept Flora’s argument that selfishly, perhaps, she wanted her son and only child near her during the impressionable years of adolescence. Actually, Flora wanted her young son to have nothing to do with the Burden family as long as the cruel and bigoted old grandfather was around.

  Wheeler’s mother had never liked the Burdens, St. Greg’s, Harvard, or Boston, for that matter, knowing very little about them except for their influence on her husband, who—in spite of the fact that she had loved him desperately—had been very poorly served, she thought, by the combination. In fact, she had thought the whole business of schoolboy heroics, preserving tradition, and rigid sense of duty a dreadful influence that had probably contributed to his heroic and totally unnecessary death. All that duty and honor had taken a perfectly nice and bright young man and convinced him that he had to give his life for some cause. She did not like it, did not want her son to have any of it, and she put up stolid resistance.

  But when the stern old grandfather Frank Burden died in 1956, during Wheeler’s freshman year in high school, Flora changed her mind about her son’s receiving the benefits of a cultured education in Boston. And when it came right down to it, she had always found Mrs. Burden thoughtful and considerate, and—very much like Flora herself—a generally no-nonsense sort of woman. It was just the thought of her being married to that awful man that soured Flora’s every impression. Now, the specter of him out of the way, the proper Mrs. Burden wanted Wheeler to learn Latin and German and wanted him to get some European history. She had always wanted him to be near her, a thought she had been expressing delicately and faithfully every month in letters. Flora, a woman famous for her resolve—sometimes thought of as stubbornness—finally relented. “There is only so much a single mother and a small farming town can do,” she said to Wheeler in putting forward the plan. “And there is more to education than reading all of Victor Hugo and throwing the baseball.”

  Wheeler, who had suddenly and surprisingly added popular music to his narrow range of passions, had agreed to the plan not because he wanted to learn German and Latin, or because, as the last Burden, he wanted to be closer to his New England roots, but for the simple reason that he thought he would be near his new hero.

  It was in the fall of his sophomore year, at a dance in the Feather River Union High School gymnasium, when he’d had another one of those life-altering experiences. The band, brought in from out of town, was playing music Wheeler had never heard before: country-and-western music with a rock-and-roll rhythm. Wheeler listened for two hours, barely able to concentrate on anything but the lead singer’s twang and the skip in his voice and the way he wiggled around as he sang. After the dance, he told Bucky Hannigan that the singer was a pure original and a genius. Bucky laughed and looked at him cross-eyed. “He’s just copying Tex-Mex,” he said. “Sucker’s just a poor fella’s Buddy Holly.”

  It was the fall of 1956, when most of the world was going wild over Elvis Presley and had never heard Holly’s name. Bucky had family in Lubbock, Texas, and had heard the local star three times. He took Wheeler to the local radio station where the DJ had a tape of Tex-Mex groups and let Wheeler hear the real thing. Wheeler immediately retrieved his father’s old Martin guitar from its dusty case in the attic and began learning chords and picking out what he could remember of the songs.

  In the spring of that school year when two Buddy Holly songs had made it to the Valley radio and to the national pop charts, he knew that Holly had traveled from Texas to New York City. Having an undeveloped sense of geography and how prep school students spend their time, Wheeler thought a Boston prep school would become a good launching pad for meeting his hero.

  Frank Standish Burden III was out of place at St. Greg’s. In the words of his dorm master, a hockey player from Bowdoin College, “His classical training is flawed, he can only barely write a coherent sentence, and he has read next to nothing. Would that he could master more than the Frisbee. ”

  The Frisbee remark derived from one of Wheeler’s great discoveries upon arriving at St. Gregory’s. From the moment he saw a group of the younger boys throwing the brightly colored plastic disks on the school’s broad green athletic fields his first weekend, he was captivated. “This must be something of the gods!” he exclaimed famously as his first disk came floating toward him. He did indeed master the skills of throwing and catching almost immediately, eventually earning the name “The Frisbee King,” one that stuck with him, especially among those original younger boys, throughout his time at the school.

  But the strange young man from California developed nothing else of distinction in those first months, and he would have been asked to leave by Christmas had he not been the only son of Dilly Burden, the greatest hero ever to attend the school, and had he not been befriended by the Haze, the beloved history master, who grabbed hold of Wheeler the moment he set foot on campus as if it had been a sacred assignment.

  Shortly after Wheeler’s arrival at St. Gregory’s, one of the younger boys came to get him in his dormitory room. “The Haze wants to see you,” the boy said cheerily. “He’s Mr. Esterhazy and he’s German or something and he’s lived in the dorm forever, but everyone calls him the Haze, although never to his face.” Then he paused with a quizzical look. “But I think he already knows you. He says he taught your father and that he knows your family and he is calling you the tabula rasa from California.” Wheeler had no idea what the Latin meant, but he sought out the old man anyway.

  Wheeler still did not know the Latin an hour or so later when the old man fixed his watery blue gaze on him at the end of their first visit and intoned, “So, Herr Burden, you are here at last, and we begin scratches on your persona, the tabula rasa.”

  Arnauld Esterhazy seemed to know everything about Wheeler, about the California provinces and small-town public education. Strangely, he also knew about the difficult transition to what his Brahmin grandmother was calling “the classical period” of his education. In fact, it was uncanny how the old man had picked him out and immediately knew all about his Boston grandmother, his hero father, his English mother, the rough details of his boyhood on the Sacramento Valley farm, even his prowess in throwing the baseball. From the moment the Haze sought him out on the first day and reached out his fine-boned hand, Wheeler felt an indefinable kinship and comfort with the old history master, something he had not felt before or later with anyone, regardless of age. It was, he realized much later, the feeling of complete understanding and unconditional acceptance.

  The Haze’s apartment—his “rooms,” the old man called them—was a beautiful oak-paneled arrangement filled with knickknacks, small art treasures, and antiques, at the end of a dormitory corridor. “It’s a museum,” the boy who delivered Wheeler had said. “He’s lived there since he came during the time of Paul Revere,” all the boys said. It seemed foreordained that the Haze was taking the young Californian unquestioningly under his wing, and that was that.

  “He’s always in a tie or ascot, and you’ll never see his bare arms,” an old boy told Wheeler in his first week. Even though he was near eighty and supposedly retired, Wheeler got the impression that the way the Haze looked and smelled now was the way he had looked and smelled even when he himself was a schoolboy in Vienna.

  The boys told scattered tales of his background, most of them filled with grand myths about his having been a spy during World War I, how he had never married because of a long and secret love affair with a prominent Bostonian married woman, about how one of his St. Gregory’s boys years ago had actually been his son. But from th
e broad strokes, Wheeler pieced together the fine realities: how he came to St. Greg’s from turn-of-the -century Vienna in the first decade of the century and left mysteriously during the Great War. It was never clear exactly what he did except that sometime after the war’s end, he returned to the school, where he had to recuperate—from gassing, some said—for two years before taking on a full load again.

  He had hit his stride during the late 1920s and never left, not returning to Europe, even in the summers, except for one ill-fated return in the midfifties, some years after Wheeler’s father was killed in Nazi-occupied France. He had never married and had never even been seen alone with a woman, it was said, although he was considered very social and invited to all the proper homes and parties. On rare occasions, over the years, it was said that he had told one group or another that he held the great Renaissance poet Dante as his model.

  Dante had written his monumental Divine Comedy on the inspiration of a most beautiful Florentine woman named Beatrice, whom he had kept constantly before him as a vision but whom he had never married, never touched, even, and yet to whom he had remained indelibly faithful. “I am like Dante,” the Haze said on those rare occasions. “I have my own Beatrice. ”

  He rowed a single skull on the Charles River during the warm months and skated with the boys or alone in the winter. Through the school’s long association with Harvard College, he had full use of Widener Library, where he did research for the writings in his “Random Notes.” He was an honored member of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and he loved and knew intimately all the European masterpieces found there.

  “Life is rich and good, if you study history,” he told Wheeler, as he had been telling St. Gregory’s boys for almost fifty years, fixing each of them in the affectionate blue fire of those legendary cobalt eyes—Klimt’s blue, he himself pointed out. “You know history from your reading of Victor Hugo.” Somehow, he knew before Wheeler’s arrival that the young man had read all the novels of the great French writer, and Ninety-Three more than once. “I know history—” He paused for theatrical effect. “—because I lived it.” And he parceled out his truth in staccato bursts. Litanies of historical detail as it had really been, history from the yellowed pages of the black binder he seemed to have with him always and that Wheeler, his most notorious pupil, would eventually have published. “My ‘Random Notes,’ it is called, although it was not really very random. I’ve worked on it over the years. The world according to Mr. Esterhazy, I’ve heard some boys call it.”

  Wheeler’s father, Dilly Burden, like his own father before him, had attended St. Gregory’s, he from 1926 until 1932, the period Arnauld Esterhazy called his Golden Years. The Haze never hid his admiration of Dilly, but with Wheeler he was purely and simply emotive. “So many people make much of your father’s prowess on the athletic field—he taught me to skate, by the way—but it was the acuteness of his mind that we all should memorialize. He was a truly remarkable boy.” He paused, obviously calling up images of time past. “A truly remarkable mind.”

  Also like his father before him and Wheeler after him, Dilly’s given name had been Frank Standish Burden, the Standish inherited from the great Puritan leader. Where the Dilly came from no one fully remembered, except that “it’s a dilly” was his favorite boyhood expression.

  Dilly had sat through the word from the Haze’s “Random Notes” as now Wheeler was sitting through it. At Arnauld Esterhazy’s funeral in 1965, Dilly’s famous maxim had been quoted liberally: “St. Greg’s boys will carry the Haze inside forever.”

  And the sixteen-year-old Wheeler adapted to those classical lessons immediately, in a theoretical way at first, thinking they sounded to him like Victor Hugo plots. “Consider the empire,” the Haze would say, and Wheeler became fascinated by its complexity. Once, he even memorized the names of the various Austria-Hungarian nationalities and could rattle them off rapid-fire: “Germans, Ruthenes, Italians, Slovaks, Rumanians, Czechs, Poles, Magyars, Slovenes, Croats, Transylvanian Saxons, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Slavs.”

  “That’s capital, Standish,” the old man said with glee, hearing the staccato recitation and laughing. “And the citizens of the multi-empire paraded through the city,” the old man would say, “each conversing as he passed in languages and dialects as picturesque as the city itself. They couldn’t fight worth a hoot, but they looked simply dashing.” And the old man told Wheeler with moist eyes, becoming lost in the thought, “Oh my, how I wish you could see it all for yourself!” And then he would become quiet. “Some day, perhaps.”

  “I haven’t traveled much,” Wheeler would say.

  “You will,” he had said confidently. “It is part of your heritage. Your father traveled to Vienna during his college days. He wrote me wonderful letters. He saw how it was grand and dashing. He grasped the full sense of the old days, of the splendor. And that was it, wasn’t it?” He would look at Wheeler as if looking at his own son, someone who understood all that he understood.

  “You are the last Burden. We shall have to educate you as to what that means. I taught your father. It will be my job to get you through St. Greg’s.” His charge, the old man called it: to get this young naïf “up to speed.” And quite a charge it was. Wheeler’s mind was undisciplined and rangy, his study habits abysmal. “It would help if you could focus,” the old man said once in near exasperation. And, to add to the problem, Wheeler seemed to care nothing about conventional success.

  In a Boston prep school, one earned the right to be eccentric by coming up through the ranks. Few students joined the school as upperclassmen, and when they did they had to be careful about learning the ropes, and learning ropes had never been even remotely an instinct of Wheeler’s. He had no interest in being broken in. To the seniors, St. Greg’s first classmen, he was a constant irritant. Wheeler was unconventional and irreverent, with no respect for the time-honored pecking order, qualities hard enough to abide in an old timer let alone an upstart from California.

  Wheeler’s chief antagonist was a first classman named Prentice Olcott, the school’s best athlete and head monitor. In spite of the exterior he showed to the majority of the world, Olcott was to Wheeler mean-spirited and cruel. Their first run-in came at the dinner table, where Olcott was presiding in place of one of the masters. After the first course, Olcott instructed a younger boy, a fourth classman, one of the Frisbee boys, to clear the soup dishes because he did not know the year the school was founded. “I’ll help him,” Wheeler said good-naturedly. “I didn’t know either.”

  After the meal Olcott came up to him and pushed his index finger into Wheeler’s chest. “Listen, pal. You stay out of my business. When I tell an underclassman to do something, it gets done.”

  “You were picking on the little kid.”

  Olcott looked furious. “I’m a first classman.”

  “You’re a student here, like the rest of us,” Wheeler said to the older boy. Olcott stared hard at him, incredulous that he had been spoken to in that tone.

  “You don’t get the picture, do you, pal?”

  “What picture?” Wheeler said without even a modicum of the expected deference.

  That was when the work details started. Whenever work assignments were made, Wheeler’s name was on the list. His response to the persecution was simply not to show up. “It’s that Prentice Olcott,” he told the Haze.

  “Don’t let him bother you,” the old man said, his eyes showing an understanding patience. “His father was imperious, and he is imperious. He’s just trying to get your goat. But you had better start performing your assigned chores, and doing what the older boys say. It is just the way things work.”

  One day in the hall Olcott said, “I’m going to have you out of here by Easter.” Then he laughed and snarled. “And your old Viennese faggot won’t be able to save your ass. We’ll have one less Jew at St. Greg’s.”

  Wheeler eyed him coolly. “Is that it, Olcott? You don’t like me because I’m Jewish?” The thought of being Jewish h
ad never really occurred to Wheeler. His mother, whose parents had been Zionists and Marxist socialists in London, gone before Wheeler was born, rarely mentioned her heritage or her family, and they had certainly never practiced any religion together. Growing up in Feather River, Wheeler gave little thought to religion, one way or another. It was only around Boston, where people knew the Dilly Burden legend, that anyone knew or cared that Dilly had married a Jewish girl in London before the war. And it had never occurred to Wheeler that the Haze might be homosexual.

  Olcott sneered. “I don’t like you, Burden. Because you are an uncouth boor. And because you have no self-control. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re a hebe, or a spick or a ginni, or even another faggot. You don’t belong in this school, and you won’t be around for baseball season. That’s a promise.”

  7

  Emily James from Amherst

  His first evening in Vienna, aware of his limited resources, Wheeler dined alone at a small rustic but clean restaurant off the Ring, near the center of the old city. The proprietor was a tall cadaverous man with a pockmarked face. He seemed polite but in no way inquisitive. Wheeler asked him for a stein of beer and the plate of beef cuts and sauerkraut he saw at the table beside his. He would wait until later for the delights the Haze had glorified for him and the other St. Gregory’s boys, the veal schnitzel and fine wine, polished off with a rich Sacher torte and coffee, both “mitt schlagg, always mitt schlagg,” the obligatory and fabled sweet whipped cream. Finding himself in no rush, he ordered a second stein of beer and ate slowly, soaking up the juices with the thick brown bread.