The Little Book: A Novel Read online

  “Why don’t you write a letter to The New York Times?” her friend Charlotte Simpson said. Charlotte had grown up in a brownstone in the Harlem section of Manhattan and played the viola in the chamber group to which Weezie was cello. She always seemed—as New York City women often did—so much better informed and more sophisticated than her friends from Boston. Weezie did write a letter, a detailed one, lambasting the hopelessly conservative tastes of the Philharmonic. She laced it with examples of modern music she had heard or read of, including that of Gustav Mahler, who had been in Budapest and had just moved to Vienna.

  “They will never publish it,” Charlotte had said when Weezie had perfected the broadside and read it to the group. “They only publish letters from men.”

  So, painstakingly, Weezie copied her diatribe over in her most masculine cursive, signed it with the man’s name borrowed from the aged janitor at the college’s Hubbard House, gave the home address of her music teacher in Amherst, and mailed it off. Within two weeks, the author had been invited to submit a more lengthy review on the subject for the healthy sum of fifteen dollars. All in all, the man from Amherst, Massachusetts, had since written four musical reviews in The New York Times, all very witty, insightful, progressive, and modern, and all—Weezie thought— completely unbeknownst to people in Boston.

  And now Weezie blushed in her former headmistress’s office, but she could see from Miss Hewens’s expression as she held the collection of newspaper clippings in front of her on the oak desk that she was not unmoved. “The man has great perspicacity and should not be discouraged,” Miss Hewens said with a smile of obvious satisfaction that the all-girl Winsor School could have produced such a man of letters. “I wish we women could write this well.” She paused, smiling. “Fraulein Tatlock in Vienna would serve as both your hostess and chaperone, if asked by certain associates in Boston. I hope you would consider it.”

  Miss Hewens had been the one person who had best understood what it was like for Weezie at the family’s Beacon Hill home. She had known both Weezie’s father and his stern sister, Aunt Prudence, almost from birth. She had known Weezie’s mother in school and had grieved at her passing. She had been Weezie’s guardian spirit, and probably her greatest admirer. At Winsor graduation she had called Weezie “one of the finest and most talented young women ever to have graced the halls of this school.”

  And Miss Hewens had been the one who had suggested Smith College, in Northampton, a considerable distance from Boston, for Weezie’s college years. On the surface, the present suggestion from her former headmistress appeared to be in the name of furthering her study of music, and perhaps furthering the successful and very secret career of the clever man from Amherst. But perhaps Miss Hewens’s real motive could have been better characterized as that of a kindly and wise old mentor stepping in to further free her young protégée from the darkest of secrets.

  Weezie suspected immediately that Miss Hewens knew she was giving Weezie her freedom, that Fraulein Tatlock’s pension on Ebendorfer-Strasse would indeed provide her with the respectable room, board, and counsel that a young woman from Boston needed abroad. In fact, Fraulein Tatlock herself, for all her cheerful goodwill and concern, would probably be described at best as inattentive, and at worst as permissive and libertine.

  From the time of Weezie Putnam’s arrival, Fraulein Tatlock had introduced her to what she would have called at home the music crowd. They were all in one way or another connected to music and musicians. Her principal gift to Weezie was to introduce her to Ernst Felsch, the handsome and progressive son of the director of the Burgtheater.

  Through Ernst Felsch and his family, Weezie developed contacts whom the real journalists back in New York would have envied. She could attend any musical or dramatic events, always in the company of the most interesting and appreciative young enthusiasts, and she could retain her precious independence. Perhaps Miss Hewens had known the circumstance she was creating for Weezie. But, preordained or coincidental, it was unquestionably exactly what a young woman in Weezie’s position needed. It was, she recorded in her own diary entries, a chance to explore the world, to find oneself, and to do a good deal of self-reflection in the process.

  From these self-reflections we can read between the lines and discover much. Weezie’s first eight years in Boston had been, she remembered, close to the perfect childhood. As he would remain for the rest of his life, her father was rector of small St. Andrew’s parish, and was at the time of Weezie’s childhood thought to become the next rector of huge Trinity Church, and eventually perhaps the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts. Her mother was beautiful, scintillating, and warmly welcoming, from an old Boston family. She was a lover of books and ideas, with a flock of admirers who came to her living room, including William and Henry James. It was on her lap before the fire in the parlor of the Beacon Hill house that Weezie learned her appreciation of the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the romantic stories of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Her mother’s death had been sudden, and while not mysterious in cause to anyone in Boston, had for the young daughter always been cloaked in mystery. Without really telling anyone, Weezie had fixed on the idea that her mother had choked while eating.

  In reality, Laura Putnam and her infant son had died of diphtheria. Immediately following the tragic death, the bereft Rev. Josiah Putnam had invited his respected but unmarried older sister Prudence into the home to administer household order and to assist in the raising of his young daughter.

  Prudence was in her fifties, very proper and respectable, well read, polite, and an excellent hostess for Josiah’s various social obligations as rector of a small parish. But Prudence Putnam was cold-hearted and held very certain opinions about how permissively young Weezie had been raised. She knew exactly how the damage could be rectified. “You are a strong-willed child,” she said to Weezie shortly after her arrival, “as was your mother. While I admire strong will in young people, I shall not tolerate either wantonness or willfulness.”

  In spite of her strong views, Aunt Prudence had after all no actual experience with children, and if her treatment of Weezie had been unduly harsh from the start, only the Reverend Putnam could have known. But, of course, his not noticing could be excused on account of the ravaging effects of grief and later by the effects of the anesthetic alcohol. Weezie’s father, unfortunately, was a man of weak will, a fact hidden by his extremely fortunate marriage. His generous and saintly wife gone, he was left with a desperate feeling of hopelessness from which he possessed insufficient imagination to remove himself.

  Eventually, when Weezie was fourteen or fifteen, family and parishioners close to the family saw what was happening to the sprightly and positive young girl who so much favored her mother. They stepped in with what help and guidance they could. That was the time in her life when Miss Hewens appeared as a teacher, advisor, and friend. But when Weezie was between ages eight and fourteen, for six years, everyone assumed that all was upright, proper, and as God intended it on Beacon Hill.

  Prudence Putnam was strict, granted, but she was certain about what a young Christian girl needed in the way of education and nurturing. Weezie would be up at six thirty each morning, with her bed made, her face washed, and down at the breakfast table for porridge. She would not return to her bedroom until nap time, if that was called for, and she would be in her night clothes by seven each evening, and in bed by seven thirty, unless the readings lasted longer. The readings were primarily from the Bible, with occasional levity from passages in Pilgrim’s Progress, which were repeated year in and year out for effect. Although Prudence believed firmly in the effects of family, Weezie was not allowed to visit with her young cousins except on holidays, as Prudence was firm in her belief that the young girl had not yet reached the age when children benefited from playmates. She attended a small school for girls near the parish, but she was instructed to come home early so that her times for prayer and contemplation could have their maximum effect.

  Weezie
was a good girl, and her willfulness, which Prudence claimed to admire, rarely presented a problem that could not be remedied by an evening alone in her room without eating.

  One evening at dinner, a little more than a year after her mother’s death, and long after a child should have adjusted, Prudence concluded, Weezie had made a scurrilous remark. Where it had come from neither the surprised father nor the ever-attentive aunt had any idea. Prudence, the concerned disciplinarian, had dealt with it well, and it had never come up again, for which the father was deeply and eternally grateful.

  An event at her all-girls school led to her undoing. Weezie was nine. The other girls were older, probably twelve or so, and Weezie knew them to be naughty, but the kind of naughty that never was seen by the adults. They seemed harmless, and never intentionally mean to the younger girls. They were coming out of the lavatory on the second floor and stopped against the wall, continuing—once they had seen that the coast was clear—with their giggling. One of the girls held a small paper-covered volume, like a small magazine, to which she pointed. “She quenched his ardor,” Weezie heard very distinctly, and both girls nearly fell on the floor, doubled up by laughing. “Maybe she swallowed his bone,” the other said, and that brought such a convulsion of laughter that it looked as if both girls might expire right then and there. Neither saw Weezie approach.

  “Why are you laughing?” Weezie asked matter-of-factly.

  Both girls stopped immediately and pulled to attention, tight-lipped and straight-faced. “It was nothing,” one said, but Weezie guessed that both girls were about to set off again. “Just some quenched ardor,” said the other, and that did it. They were doubled up.

  Weezie turned to walk away, and one of the girls grabbed her arm. She struggled to control herself. “Wait,” she said, but then realized she was too far gone to talk.

  “She’ll find out soon enough,” the other girl managed to say, and the two turned and staggered between convulsions down the hall.

  Soon enough for Weezie was that night at dinner. They were eating shepherd’s pie with cabbage. She took a big drink of milk and turned to the Reverend Josiah Putnam. “Father,” she said very distinctly, “what is ardor?” The Reverend Putnam was in the middle of a sip of claret and swallowed loudly. He said nothing and looked over at his sister in what might have been interpreted as a state of panic.

  The sister sat with her jaw tight until after her reverend brother had finished eating. Then without a word she rose, walked over to her niece’s chair, took her by the hand, led her to the bathroom, and shut the door securely.

  She poured water from the large china pitcher on the cabinet into the porcelain bowl and then took a bar of soap and dipped it into the water. “You will never use such words,” she said, her voice harsh and tight.

  At first Weezie did not know what her aunt intended with the soap, and then when the strong hands pulled at her jaw to open it, she knew and gave no resistance. The soap tasted awful, harsh and bitter. “Not at the dinner table,” she heard her aunt say, and the soap went in and out. “Not in front of your father. Never.” Weezie began to gag, but fought for control.

  Her aunt put down the soap and grabbed her securely by the shoulders. Weezie fought to clear her mouth of the taste. She could feel the lather in the corners of her lips. “Willfulness and sinfulness are brethren,” she said, pressing on Weezie’s shoulders and rocking her slowly back and forth. “Your mother was willful, and you know what God brought her. Do you want to end up like your mother?” Her aunt looked down at her with piercing intensity. “Is that what you wish?”

  “No,” Weezie said weakly and began to cry.

  “We will have no crying,” her aunt said. “The sinful have no cause for tears.”

  That night Weezie had the dream for the first time. She was in the basement of the house on Beacon Hill and suddenly saw in the corner a woman with large breasts in a white summer dress sitting on a white blanket beside a picnic basket. At that point Weezie spoke. “What is ardor?”

  The woman smiled wonderfully at Weezie and asked her to sit beside her. “Come, precious,” she said, patting her hand in the folds of her dress at her side.

  Only as Weezie approached did she realize that the woman was eating a chicken bone, which she took to her lips, and as she took a small bite of the flesh she began to cough. Suddenly, she was on her back, her hands across the chest of her white dress, and Weezie knew she was dead.

  It was at that moment that she woke up, cold and frightened and alone, and with a bitter taste of soap in her mouth, on that night when she was nine, and on subsequent nights when the dream returned.

  9

  The Burden Project

  Wheeler struggled through his first year at St. Gregory’s, where no one had ever heard the stories from the Sacramento Valley, earning failing grades in most of his courses. By baseball season, it was clear to most of the masters that Frank Standish Burden III, no matter whose son or grandson he was, would not be returning for a second year.

  “Lackluster” had been the word for everything Wheeler tried, lackluster and erratic. “If only the boy would focus,” one master said in exasperation in a faculty meeting, in such a way that it became a litany. Focus, that was it, the boy had no focus. From the beginning, for some mysterious reason, the Haze had been fully committed to the Burden Project, as the St. Greg’s faculty came to call the introduction of the erratic, untrained California boy so late in the academic process. “Second class year is far too late to begin such a breathtaking enterprise” was how one old timer put it, as he saw the younger masters tearing their hair.

  Only the venerable old Haze remained steadfast and patient, relentlessly cajoling and browbeating the young man, when the others could not get the boy to hand in papers on time, or prepare them with care, or when he did show care, write even remotely near the assigned topic. “Lackluster” was the word even for his effort in baseball, and he was immediately relegated to the second team. Nobody in Boston had ever heard of Wheeler Burden and his prongball, and nobody knew that he was holding back, let alone why.

  Prentice Olcott was the main varsity pitcher and had been for three years. “Another Dilly Burden,” a few optimistic alumni had called Olcott after seeing him pitch against Dover on Graduates’ Day in his third class year. Another Dilly Burden. Over the years, a lot of St. Greg’s students had said that hopefully about a lot of promising prep school athletes, but in their hearts they knew there was no comparison, as the old alumni who came back would remind them. “He’s no Dilly Burden” would be the inevitable final result. And then the inevitable, “Who could be?”

  Graduates’ Day was always the Dover game, the big athletic event of the spring. On the annual calendar of nearly every St. Gregory’s Bostonian were two fervent expectations: Harvard would trounce Yale in football and St. Greg’s would do the same to Dover on Graduates’ Day in baseball. Everyone was watching for Pren Olcott, now in his final year, to do something spectacular. Then two days before the Graduates’ Day game, disaster struck. Olcott tore the ligaments in his ankle, sliding into third in a scrimmage. A group of alumni, hearing that Dilly Burden’s son was a second teamer, a pitcher even, asked the headmaster if they might have a chance to look at the young man. “No chip off the old block,” Headmaster Wiggins said sadly, announcing Coach Storer’s decision not to play Burden against Dover. He would dress for the game, giving the old guard a chance at least to see the son of Dilly Burden in a St. Greg’s uniform. “Fair enough,” said the president of the Graduates Association, thinking privately that dressing was the first step toward playing.

  Prentice Olcott’s roommate, also a first classman, was the second line pitcher. And he did well for five innings or so, escaping with his scalp in the fifth, with St. Greg’s still ahead, four to nothing. Then in the sixth he lost all semblance of control, walking the first two batters and delivering a home run ball to the third. So, with his pitcher shot, no outs, two innings from the finish line and a meager one-
run lead, Coach Storer looked down his bench at his depleted pitching staff. The old grads held their breath, knowing not to intrude, but hoping against hope. There was simply no fresh arm to put in. A palpable hush fell over the St. Gregory’s diamond. “Burden,” Coach Storer said in little more than a whisper, and three generations of St. Greg’s boys released a corporate sigh of joy and relief, not caring—at least for a moment—that the kid from California was no chip off the heroic block. Winning be damned, the son of Dilly Burden would pitch against Dover.

  If Wheeler knew anything of the enormity that rode on Coach Storer’s desperate decision, he showed nothing. He jumped up off the end of the bench and picked up his father’s thirty-year-old glove, giving it a few hurried slaps with his fist. “Get us out of this damn mess” was Coach Storer’s gravelly whisper to the untested second-teamer, his voice betraying suspicions of utter hopelessness. At least the boy could throw strikes, some of the time. “Focus, son,” the old coach said.

  Wheeler had made virtually no impression on the athletic program at his new school. He cared little for any sport but baseball, and he had not thrown the prongball since arriving. It was not that he had been unimpressed with the school and that he did not think them worthy of seeing it; it was just that as second-team pitcher he had never really thrown the ball very hard at all, coming up against few boys who could hit even his slow pitches, and it did not seem fair to the younger boys to throw anything they couldn’t hit.

  “How about strikeouts?” Wheeler said with a characteristic wildness in his eyes, popping his fist into his antique glove.

  “Steady, lad,” Coach Storer said without much enthusiasm. “Nothing fancy. Just get the thing over the plate.” A few miraculous catches deep in the outfield, he was thinking, and we’ll be out of this.

  Wheeler was not sure if the umpire would watch the ball. Sacramento Valley teams had pretty much gotten wind of his doctorings and asked for new balls regularly. It was always disappointing to start on a new ball, especially with all eyes on his between-pitches moves. Of course, he could throw the pitch middling well, as Bucky said, without the goop on it, but it never felt as satisfying as with a ball he had had a chance to personalize. Wheeler had learned to wet his finger immediately after the pitch, when the whole world was watching the batter, not before, when all eyes were on the pitcher’s mound.