The Little Book: A Novel Page 6

After his meal, he took advantage of the light and the clean table and began writing in the journal he had found at a bookseller’s stall that afternoon. It was bound in new red leather, with gilded edges, and would have cost a good deal had the first few pages not already been written in. As he paid for it, he asked the bookseller to remove the defiled pages with his penknife. Over the next few weeks he would wonder why he wrote with such care in this handsome book-size volume that he would carry everywhere. He concluded that in his state of disconnection the careful writing gave him a feeling of attachment, as if by detailing the events of his new life he was rooting himself to the place. Perhaps someone in a later time would pick up his journal and know what he had gone through. That thought made him feel not so alone and unhinged.

  When he finished writing, he left the restaurant to find an inexpensive hotel even deeper within the old city, in an area where no well-dressed gentleman would venture except for sordid purposes and where no one saw anything out of the ordinary in his lack of identification or baggage. On the way, he wandered the crooked winding streets, some still surfaced in the medieval cobblestones. This was Vienna’s shadowy underworld, but to a stranger very much out of place somehow it seemed more enveloping and protecting than the broad, grandly lighted Ringstrasse.

  Vienna was and had long been, as the Haze described it, a community of contrasts in which the privations and squalor of the proletarian mass contradicted the splendors of an affluent minority. He understood the reasons for the contrast. In the expansive liberal period in the second half of the nineteenth century, Vienna, like other European cities, had accepted the bounty of industrialization without taking care of its lower classes. The housing situation, like all the living conditions for wageworkers, was intolerably bad. Fewer than one flat in ten boasted a bathroom, and only about one in five had an inside toilet. A quarter of the households sublet sections of their cramped apartments or rented beds only to lodgers, sometimes more than one to a bed. The city’s progressive make-over brought on by Karl Lueger and his Christian Socialists had not yet begun. The gas supply for the inner city was still sporadic. The beginnings of a municipally owned electricity works had been erected, but the delivery was still located primarily in the outer Ring area. Costs of utilities to consumers were exorbitant, service intermittent, and the use of electricity in homes was pretty much restricted to the wealthy.

  Wheeler’s room was small and dark but clean, the bed short, but it did not matter. He fell into a deathlike sleep, wondering if he might emerge from it back in San Francisco, where he belonged. The day had passed and still Wheeler did not remember the event that had launched him on his journey.

  He did not awaken until well into the morning. He lay in bed for a time, collecting himself, recalling his entry on the Ringstrasse the day before, adjusting once again to the peculiarity of his situation. At first, he had given little thought to how he had gotten to Vienna; his was not to question, he had figured. But now the questions began to inundate him, and he began wondering. Having no idea how he had arrived, he had no idea how long he was staying, nor when or how he might be yanked back. And most immediately, he had no idea how he was going to support himself in turn-of-the-century Vienna once his money ran out. A number of ideas came and went, some of them simple, some bizarre, but none seeming to have much practicality or appeal. None, save the Frisbee idea.

  The previous day, he had passed a cabinetmaker’s shop and stepped in and watched, fascinated, the man turning wood with great skill on a primitive foot-powered lathe, and the idea occurred to him. That second morning, Wheeler spent an hour or so on some rough drawings, re-creating as accurately as he could on paper the aerodynamic qualities of the plastic disk with which he had a more than passing familiarity. He took the drawings to a cabinetmaker in the center of the city and asked if the disk could be crafted out of some hard wood. If the wood could be finely enough lathed, then the strength built up with successive coats of lacquer, Wheeler explained, the Frisbee’s lightness and aerodynamics could be replicated. The cabinetmaker seemed quite amused, but took the drawings and agreed to take a shot at the desired product. An agreement was struck that Wheeler would return over the next few days and view drafts of the object, until the thickness and shape were right. It was a very satisfying meeting.

  It had been such a satisfying meeting, in fact, that as soon as Wheeler stepped back onto the Ringstrasse, his care seemed to vanish. Vienna, the Venerable Haze had told his students, was a city in which people loved to walk and watch people. It was after all an atmosphere that had gained a reputation for nearly half a century of abolishing concerns about hunger, cold, and impermanence.

  Somewhat absentmindedly he entered one of the numerous small parks that adjoined the broad Ringstrasse and sat on a bench, content to watch the Viennese, continuing to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. He became fascinated by the faces of the people. What a broad spectrum of humanity they represented. What a rich collection of dialects and languages they spoke. What a simple and gracious elegance they carried with them. He sat by himself in the park for a time and then rose and walked slowly toward the Café Central.

  Inside, he noticed that the Jung Wien table was empty, so he sat down and picked up the morning’s Neue Freie Presse and began reading. “Ah, Herr Truman,” he heard behind him. “I see you have returned to our men’s club.” He looked up to see Ernst Kleist smiling as he walked toward the table. They shook hands and Kleist joined him and ordered two coffees. “It seems the others are late to arrive.”

  Wheeler’s attention drifted to the table across the marble floor where he saw the same well-dressed older man who had been the previous day’s companion of the stern young man whose clothes Wheeler had stolen. “Who is that?” he said to Kleist. “He looks very important.”

  “Oh my, yes,” said Kleist. “That is the most prominent man in Vienna, our mayor Karl Lueger. You have heard of him, no doubt.”

  “Some,” said Wheeler, “but tell me.”

  “He is surely one of the most remarkable Viennese, the most popular mayor we have ever had. He’s called ‘Handsome Karl’ because of his splendid presence and charisma. His forebears were peasants and artisans, his father a school custodian. He earned a doctorate in law and was elected to the city council as a Liberal twenty years ago, becoming from the start an outspoken foe of big, moneyed interests, uniting with the working classes to found the Christian Socialist party.”

  “He sounds like quite a force,” Wheeler said.

  “A force, yes,” Kleist continued. “The only drawback is that he’s using extreme anti-Semitism as a political force. A powerful and disruptive one.”

  Wheeler cringed. “I have heard that. It’s not good.”

  “But it has been extremely effective. And it is a temporary phase, you know. It won’t go anywhere. Viennese are extremely good-natured, and we know that things will settle down soon. There are just too many Jews in high places.”

  “I don’t know,” Wheeler said glumly. “It doesn’t sound good to me. Maybe the mayor knows what he’s doing, but someone is going to come along and take all this in a very bad direction.” He repressed a shudder.

  Even Wheeler did not understand the immediacy of his prediction. He had no way of knowing that the stern young American he had seen with Mayor Lueger had come to Vienna on a mission of which yesterday’s meeting in this very café was the first step.

  Wheeler left the Café Central in the early afternoon and had strolled back through one of the parks along the Ringstrasse. His focus drifted to a group of young people—wealthy young literati, he figured from their dress, in their early twenties, the kind who frequented coffeehouses and lived the now-legendary lives of sensitive artists. There were three men and four women in animated conversation, meeting in the park before launching some excursion.

  One of them, a young woman, caught his attention immediately. She was standing with the group but closest to an artistic young man who seemed at first glance to be dotin
g on her. She stood out from her effete peers as the epitome of the fabled Viennese beauty who had come to life in his Haze-inspired prep school dreams. She was not large framed and Germanically earthy, but full bosomed and small waisted and a touch more delicate than Wheeler’s impression of Arnauld Esterhazy’s ideal “sweet girl,” a true Viennese beauty nonetheless, one worthy of the best gilded canvas of Gustav Klimt. Her skin was pale, and she wore just a trace of natural rouge on her cheeks and lips. There was something about her that struck Wheeler immediately, fatefully, something about the way her eyes sparkled as she spoke the gentle Viennese German that riveted his attention with the compulsion to eavesdrop on every euphonic syllable she spoke. An indescribable attraction radiated from her, something overpowering, the innocent and unattainable sexuality that the Haze’s stories had given life in the adolescent fantasies of his oversexed prep school following.

  Well-born Viennese women, said the Haze, were compelled to stay aloof and chaste until marriage, repressing whatever fires of passion flared up inside, either acknowledged or subliminal. No matter how libertine or free-thinking their artistic friends, there was a dimension they could neither express nor act upon until after the sanctification of marriage. This fabled repression, needless to say, gave the great Dr. Sigmund Freud and his colleagues most of their practice and the field for their remarkable insights. But it gave the young unmarried women of the Viennese bourgeoisie an irresistible appeal, the Haze told the boys, a subtle and unattainable sensuality.

  Well-born Viennese men, on the other hand, compelled in an opposite direction, were encouraged to seek sexual exercise outside their class, despite the threat of dreaded venereal disease from the city’s myriad prostitutes, or, more safely, as Arthur Schnitzler had made so public in his fiction, in the warm and easy embrace of a working-class “sweet girl,” with whom he tallied up his plentiful sexual encounters, but whom he never considered marrying.

  Wheeler had trouble keeping his eyes off her, and once she looked his way, she caught him in one of his enraptured stares. In the instant their eyes met, she did not look furtively away as one might expect from an innocent and pretty Viennese girl being ogled by a stranger in the park. In fact, that very moment when she might have looked away was the moment that she gave him the smile, one of the most remarkable Wheeler, even with all his experience, had ever had directed at him.

  It was a Botticelli smile, gone almost before he could look away, at once filled with naïve openness and—far beneath the surface—an astute knowledge of how the world worked. It was the kind of smile that could stay etched on one’s mind forever and the kind that made Wheeler know he would be compelled to approach this beautiful Viennese, with some hastily contrived introductory remark, before leaving the park.

  “Can you direct me to the Imperial Hotel?” was what he chose, in his most elegant German.

  She looked surprised and appraised him quickly with her startling blue eyes. “You sound like an American.” Up close, her Viennese dialect sounded even more mellifluous and captivating than it had from the safe remove of the park bench.

  “And I thought my German was so good,” Wheeler said with the light charm that accounted for much of his comfort with women he had not formally met.

  “Your German is perfectly sufficient,” she said matter-of-factly, stepping away from her friends. “Your accent just gives you away as an American. That’s all.”

  “I didn’t realize Viennese women were trained at spotting Americans. ”

  “I should not dare speak for Viennese women,” she said, suddenly in perfect English, throwing her head back in a way that chided gently, you silly goose. “I too am an American, like you.” She held her hand out forthrightly to Wheeler, who struggled to keep his composure. “I am Emily James, from Amherst, Massachusetts.”

  Normally, Wheeler would have retorted with something clever like pleased to meet you, Emily James from Amherst, Massachusetts, or my, how like a character in a Jane Austen novel, but in his embarrassed surprise he could only stammer, struggling awkwardly to imitate a nineteenth-century style he knew only from novels. “Truman,” he said, taking her hand awkwardly. “Harry Truman, from San Francisco.”

  “Well, I am charmed to make your acquaintance, Mr. Truman from San Francisco.” She shook his hand with a gentle firmness that may have conveyed an immediate attraction to him. She gave him the smile again before pulling back to join her friends who were walking toward a carriage. “How do you explain your good German?”

  “I had an eccentric old Viennese as my teacher.”

  “Was that on the East Coast, Mr. Truman?” Her interest seemed immediately genuine.

  Wheeler hesitated, discomforted by his own instinct to be deceptive in the presence of such disarming openness and beauty. “No, in San Francisco, ” he lied.

  “What a shame that we New Englanders travel to Europe, but do not travel west.”

  “When you do, I hope you will add San Francisco to your itinerary. We are quite civilized there, you might not have heard.” At this point, he was thinking this might be the most disarmingly attractive woman he had ever met in his life. He was trying desperately to keep her interest.

  “I know that,” she said with a twinkle, “from reading Mark Twain.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “My friends and I have met here to ride out to Schonbrunn Palace. I am sure they would not mind if you joined us.” She gestured toward the group she had left, at the edge of which was the young aesthete, who, Wheeler could see at close range, could not have been more than eighteen. He was handsome and refined, dressed neatly, with an unmistakable artistic flair, and very obviously intent on the young woman’s every move.

  Still stunned, Wheeler answered without thinking. “I’m afraid I’m busy for the afternoon,” which, of course, was neither true nor anywhere near in accord with what he really desired.

  “We shall, I hope, have further opportunity,” she said with a new smile. “Are you in Vienna long?”

  “Indefinitely,” Wheeler said. “I seem to be between projects.”

  “Good reason to join us on our excursions. We as a group seem to be between projects,” she said, with an obvious appreciation of the phrase and the idea.

  The artistic young man moved back near them and hung on the edge obtrusively, obviously wanting to be introduced to Wheeler, not because of anything about a new man in the park, but because of his fascination, it seemed, with anything connected with her. The young woman disregarded him at first, then added as an afterthought, “I would enjoy introducing you to my friend.”

  The young man, caught in the act of fawning, looked sheepish, then approached Wheeler. “Arnauld, this is Mr. Truman,” she said graciously. “From San Francisco.” The young man held out his hand and looked up earnestly. His grip was more solid than Wheeler expected. “This is my Viennese friend,” she said, “Arnauld Esterhazy.”

  8

  A Strong-willed Child

  We know from her own diary entries that exist from the time that Weezie Putnam had been taken by the older American immediately, in an alarming, and certainly a disarming, manner. There was something in his eyes, she wrote later, an intensity and kindness, that brought a flushed warmth to her face from almost the moment she had seen him walking toward her across the park. And when he approached and took her hand in formal salutation, she felt a rush of emotion that she could not explain. Perhaps that is why she came up so quickly with the invented name.

  It was not new. She had used the fabrication Emily James a number of times over the past few years, whenever she felt the slightest bit daring and wild, or a need for anonymity. And she certainly could not use her other more public pseudonym, her nom de plume, her Smith College friends called it, her George Sand, her George Eliot. Nor did she wish to explain to this man she had hardly met how that assumed masculine identity was responsible for bringing her from Boston to Vienna in the first place.

  Any such reflection as to why she was here brought her inevitably to th
e fateful meeting with Miss Hewens, her former headmistress at the Winsor School for Girls in Boston, who had invited her into her oak-paneled office during Easter time of her senior year in college and suggested rather pointedly that Weezie think of travel.

  Miss Hewens knew her family well and knew Weezie well, knew many of the family secrets, and—we can conclude—had not made the suggestion lightly. “Weezie, dear, you really ought to think of going abroad after graduation. With your love of music, you must journey to the source. Perhaps we could find you a pension in Paris or Vienna.” When Miss Hewens spoke, her girls listened. She was much more than a headmistress to each of them. She was their senior European history teacher, a mentor, a friend, a confidante, and in Weezie’s case, a trusted advisor. For Weezie, Miss Hewens was a substitute for the mother who had died when she was eight, the wise and patient grandmother she had wished for, the close friend who could see beyond the superficial to the essence of being twenty-two, optimistic, and full of energy to do something special with life, even something radical. Miss Hewens eyed her carefully on that afternoon and as always chose her words with unmistakable care. “We would all like to see if perhaps a young woman using a certain pseudonym mightn’t be able to write something of significance.”

  The sudden mention of the pseudonym made Weezie blush. Until that moment, she had thought, naïvely so, that no one at home in Boston—let alone her former headmistress and someone so close to her family—had known of his existence or, more importantly, his identity.

  The idea of a masculine pseudonym had come to life one giddy evening in a Smith College sitting room. “I think it is stuffy rubbish,” Weezie had declared. “With all the venturesome modern music being written, why do they insist on playing nothing but soupy old Schubert and Liszt?” She had just returned from an overnight train trip to New York City to hear the Philharmonic. She had not minded the program, actually, but she was feeling rebellious.