The Little Book: A Novel Read online

  Trip Thornton, the catcher, knew nothing of the prongball and gave Wheeler a queer look when he tried to warn him. “Ball’s going to jump around a little,” Wheeler said in a businesslike voice no one at St. Greg’s had ever heard.

  “You worry about pitching,” Thornton said curtly, intending to put the upstart in his place. “I’ll worry about catching.” Thornton, a nine-letter man himself, but somewhat in the shadow of Prentice Olcott, knew only that—Dilly Burden’s son or not—no one liked the brash Californian who certainly did not know his place. Thornton could not help wondering why Coach Storer had taken leave of his senses at such an important moment in St. Greg’s history, with Dover men hitting the balls all over the place. But then again, who else was there?

  “Just put it over the plate,” Thornton, the catcher, growled, looking forlornly over to the bench as he slapped the ball into Wheeler’s glove and walked back to his crouch behind home plate.

  Wheeler blinked lizardlike at Thornton, as if to confirm his hopeless weirdness. During warm-ups he had laid some good wet ones on his finger and transferred them to the spot between the label and the stitching till it was slick, just the way he wanted it. The practice pitches snapped into Thornton’s glove, giving little warning of what was about to follow.

  Before the first pitch to a Dover batter, the first Burden varsity pitch at St. Greg’s in twenty-five years, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He let his mind go, as he had done many, many times before. Back in the Feather River bottomland with his mother. He felt the smooth stone in his hand. He thought of his arm throwing the stone in the direction of the sparrow hawk. He felt the connectedness. He then opened his eyes and stared at Thornton’s glove, pronging his fingers just so between the label and the stitch. He paused to hear Bucky Hannigan’s litany: “How to chuck, wheeler-dealer. How to chuck-fire, wheeler-dealer kid.”

  The crowd seemed to wait through this ritual with a heavy expectant silence. Then slowly he raised his left leg, rocked backward with his upper body, swung forward, brought his arm over his head in a looping arch, and came down with everything he had. As his wrist snapped downward, the ball squirted out from between his fingers and sped toward Thornton’s glove, right to the center of the strike zone. The batter, the Dover short-stop, a feisty little scholarship boy, a grocer’s son from Swampscott, took a mighty rip. The ball, heading straight, took a two-foot drop about five feet from the plate and flew past the batter and Trip Thornton and clanked against the baseboard of the backstop. In one motion, the umpire, the catcher, and the grocer’s son from Swampscott swung around and stared at the pitcher’s mound where Wheeler was standing slapping his famous father’s ancient glove. “Holy shit,” the Dover kid said, shaking his head, looking back at Trip Thornton. “What in Jesus’s name was that?”

  The first classman catcher only stared back and said, “Beats hell out of me.”

  Whatever it was, it came back again and then again, both for strikes and then for two more batters. In Wheeler Burden’s part of that next-to-last inning the Dover boys went three up and three down, leaving the bases empty and St. Greg’s up by one run.

  The baselines were now packed with teachers, students, and alumni. Almost as soon as Coach Storer had contemplated the pitching change, word had spread around the campus: Get over to the varsity diamond. Dilly Burden’s boy is going in.

  All eyes watched in awed silence as Wheeler slapped his fist into his glove one last time and headed back to the bench. The gravelly voice of an old grad came from over by third base. “Burden, rah—” it began, the way it had so many times before, a quarter of a century ago. “Burden, rah—” came the sound again, this time picking up ten or more other old voices. Then the pause, an entire school community searching into its mythic past, everyone—even those not born then—recalling memories of the great Dilly Burden, the school’s one true and enduring hero. One voice rose this time, one voice from the throats of every St. Greg’s boy past, present, and future. “Burden, rah,” it boomed. “Burden, rah. Burden, rah, rah.”

  The seventh and last inning went quickly. There was no need to add anything to the ball. It was exactly the way Wheeler liked it. The prongball dipped and hopped and danced. Two Dover batsmen came up, took their swings, and went down. One, two—The third batter fared no better on the first two pitches, chasing two low outsiders. Strike two.

  The last pitch. Wheeler thought of his Feather River bottomland walks with his mother. He saw the sparrow hawk, he felt the stone in his hand, he looked in at Thornton’s target, and heard the “How to chuck-fire wheeler-dealer kid!” from his one true friend in the world. He thought of Buddy Holly, lost in the chords and the rhythm and the skip of the Tex-Mex voice he had first heard mimicked in the old Feather River Union High gym. For the first time since coming east, he was beginning to feel the “flow,” as his mother called it, the connectedness of all things.

  The crowd took a corporate breath, and Wheeler gripped the ball between the two fingers of his right hand, kicked up his left leg, brought it down, and fired. The ball did not dip or sink. It flew straight and true and snapped into Thornton’s glove, past the last violent and hapless swing of the last Dover batter. It was a pure straight fastball, maybe the fastest, straightest, purest pitch anyone there that day had ever seen. “Steee-rike!” yelled the umpire. Strike three. The day was St. Gregory’s.

  The crowd exploded from the sidelines out to the raised pitcher’s mound, where Wheeler’s grandfather, Frank Burden, and his father, Dilly, had stood, and Wheeler slapped his fist one last time into his thirty-year -old glove. They hoisted Wheeler onto their shoulders.

  From his perch atop the swarm Wheeler looked back at the emptied bench. Only Prentice Olcott, the disabled captain, stared out at him with a mixture of joy and outrage. Wheeler blinked at him, his best lizard look, then he looked into the emptied stands. There stood the solitary remaining spectator, the Venerable Haze. Wheeler realized something in that moment, and he carried it with him for the next twenty-five years, for the rest of his life. It was love the old man held for his father, Dilly Burden, a love based on something more than his athletic heroics or his near-mythic turn as the Resistance hero Rouge Gorge. The Haze was now seeing two Burdens out on the St. Greg’s mound, hoisted on the shoulders of the Dover game crowd, son and father, 1958 and 1932. Wheeler understood that in the tumultuous moment. Steadying himself on his rough ride, he looked the old man square in the eye and touched the bill of his cap, as if to doff it. It was then Wheeler noticed the tears soaking the old man’s cheeks.

  10

  City of Music

  Wheeler found himself wandering out on the Ringstrasse. Still shocked by the discovery earlier in the day that the Viennese in the park was his mentor, Arnauld Esterhazy, he needed time to sort things all out. He kept his appointment at the cabinetmaker’s shop and viewed the near-finished version of the wooden Frisbee, making a few last corrections, then found his way back onto the boulevard. When he came to the Imperial Art History Museum he walked up the steps, paid his fifty kreuzer admission fee and began wandering through the high-ceilinged rooms, all the time preoccupied by the strangeness of his predicament. He was standing in front of a collection of sixteenth-century paintings, lost in a flood of thoughts, when a voice came from behind him.

  “You have an interest in the finer arts, I see, Mr. Truman.” He turned and looked into the bright smiling face of the captivating young American woman, Emily James. He pulled himself back from his reverie.

  “Miss James, isn’t it?” he said. “From Amherst, Massachusetts.”

  She looked pleased that he had remembered her name, and nodded. “You are good with names, I see,” she said. “And places.”

  How could I not remember? he felt like saying. “I love the quiet of museums, ” he said. “They quiet the restless soul.” He was quoting one of the Haze’s favorite remarks.

  “Quiet the restless soul,” she repeated with a smile. “That is Byron, I believe.”

>   “Actually, I was quoting a beloved old mentor,” Wheeler said, still not fully recovered from the surprise of running into her. He had nearly forgotten how disarming he found this young woman’s manner of looking one straight in the eye, the way her blue eyes gained intensity as she spoke to him, and the flush that came to her cheeks. “But I don’t know where he got it,” he said, musing on the words. He paused. “I thought you were on your way to Schonbrunn Palace with your friends.”

  “Group indecision,” she said quickly. “It was a short trip. We turned around almost as soon as we got there. And I decided to come here by myself, to have time for contemplation.”

  “I am sorry to disturb that.”

  “Oh no, Mr. Truman,” she said enthusiastically. “It was I who broke into your contemplation.” Wheeler noted that she was blushing.

  “I am glad for it,” he said. “Either way. Is this your first time in this museum?”

  “I have come here a lot, alone,” she said. “I too find museums very restful and a chance to collect myself. This one is very good. It was the emperors’ and made public only in the middle of this century.” She looked at the collection of watercolors in front of Wheeler. “I find these exquisite,” she said. “They were a gift for the collection of watercolors and drawings by Austrian artists given to Rudolf and his bride, the Princess Stephanie, on their marriage sixteen years ago. You see the two of them pictured there—” She pointed. “And there.” She pointed to one entitled Defregger, a charmingly colorful work of Rudolf and Stephanie in a rustic cabin. “I find it absolutely exhilarating that the arts abound so in this country.”

  “They really are quite exquisite,” Wheeler said, leaning down to examine the watercolors more closely.

  “They are,” she said, seized by an involuntary frown. “But it reminds one of the awful tragedy of Mayerling. I suppose we will never know the full story.”

  The Haze told all of his boys the facts of the Mayerling tragedy each year, on January 30, the day in 1889, that in the grand bedroom of the royal hunting lodge, in the village of Mayerling, Crown Prince Rudolf, only son and male heir of the emperor, the hope of the future, took his own life and the life of a seventeen-year-old courtesan. “Rudolf shot the light-headed baroness first,” Wheeler remembered his mentor intoning, “then he went downstairs for drink and companionship, then six or eight hours later returned to the upstairs room and shot himself in the head.”

  “I suppose not, Miss James,” Wheeler said.

  A look of great sadness came onto her face. “It was absolutely devastating for this lighthearted country. Just imagine the heir to the throne, the very future of the empire doing this—” She paused without being able to say the word. Then she shook her head. “I keep thinking of his mother, the great and beautiful empress. To lose a son this way—” She paused again, overcome by the gravity. “To lose a son any way at all. Simply awful.”

  A silence fell between them. “I suppose that is the reason for museums, ” Wheeler said lightly, to change the mood. “They allow us to relive poignant moments.”

  “Do you have museums out in California?” She smiled this time to restore levity.

  Wheeler smiled back. “It’s not the Wild West, you know.” He gestured to the broad open room. “But nothing like this.”

  “I told you, my geography is terrible west of the Hudson River,” she said.

  “You’re going to visit, remember?”

  She looked genuinely pleased with the invitation. “I’m still absorbing Vienna. I don’t know if I will ever leave here.”

  “What is it you find so compelling?”

  “I’m really here for the music.”

  “Any music in particular? This city seems alive with it, reverberating in every nook and cranny,” he said, quoting from the Haze’s revered City of Music, the “Little Book” by Mr. Jonathan Trumpp that he always read from with such loving care. “Echoing, you might say, off every grand marble exterior.”

  “Oh my,” she said, impressed. “You have a way with words, Mr. Truman. ”

  “No,” he said. “Not my words. I am just quoting again, this time from one of my favorite works, referred to often by the mentor I told you about.”

  She paused and assessed him for a moment. “Actually, I’m writing,” she said. “But nothing as grand as your mentor’s favorite work. Mine is just a humble series of articles on the new composers.” She was amazed that she had said it. “But it’s sort of confidential, and I wish no one to know. I am using a pseudonym.”

  “I have no one to tell,” Wheeler said. “I’m in Vienna alone.” If she only knew, he thought.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply.” She stopped. “I just saw you meeting Arnauld and his friends.”

  “Secret’s good with me, ma’am,” he said, and it made her laugh.

  “You have a very different manner, Mr. Truman. I must say, I like it.” Wheeler suspected that she was blushing again.

  “Well, perhaps we can hear some Viennese music together.”

  “I would like that very much,” she said with a sudden rush of candor. “Now, I must go. I’m expected back at my pension.” She held out her hand, and Wheeler took it and felt its soft warmth, then she turned and walked away, but then turned back before she had left the room. “Mr. Truman,” she said, framed against the baroque molding of the expansive doorway to the next room. “You have remarkably kind eyes.”

  Wheeler watched her turn again and disappear around the corner, his heart feeling an incredible lightness. What a striking woman, he thought.

  That evening in Vienna, distracted by the limits of his circumstance, Wheeler again ate modestly and moved even deeper into the old city to find an even cheaper room. His clothes were beginning to feel rumpled, and he longed for a shower. His money was nearly gone.

  At the end of the second day, he began seeing in his new neighborhood a part of the Imperial City he would not have imagined. There was more of the poverty and wretchedness than he had seen before, the stench of crowded and abject conditions. As Wheeler walked deeper and deeper into the city he became even more aware of people asleep in the streets, uncared for, unwashed, crowded, and miserable, a homelessness and depression that had simply not come through in the Haze’s stirring descriptions. There were prostitutes everywhere. Wherever he walked women of all ages, as old as sixty and as young as twelve, as comely and as haglike as one could imagine, approached and offered company and specific services. Some of the more aggressive actually took his arm and walked a few paces with him until it became clear he was not a prospect.

  Later in the day, in the clean, well-lighted comfort of the Café Central, he would ask Kleist about the wretched conditions. He was sitting at the usual table with the usual Jung Wien group. “It is not a problem if one does not see it,” the young Kleist said cheerfully. “There are not enough jobs and not enough homes. That is one reason coffeehouses like this one proliferate. People need a place for comfort. I know it might come as a surprise to you, but some of the gentlemen at these tables have no other warm place to sit and read.” He gestured around at the marble-topped tables, nearly all filled with people reading quietly or engaged in animated discussions with groups of friends. “A surprising number of their families at home are hungry and cold.”

  “Is nothing being done about it?”

  “You have found our vulnerable underbelly, Mr. Truman,” von Tscharner, the architect, said.

  “The conditions are deplorable.” Wheeler raised his hands in frustration in the direction of the Danube Canal and the old city beyond. “There is filth and disease everywhere. And many of the prostitutes look no older than twelve or thirteen.”

  “It is not the Vienna of the Strausses father and son, is it?” Claus, the writer and cynic, said.

  “There seem to be thousands of people living in storm drains and culverts out there.” Wheeler could barely contain his exasperation. He stared across the marble tabletop at these well-educated young men with obvious libera
l views who had become his hosts.

  Kleist shrugged. “The famous liberalism of our fathers,” he added. “It built the Ringstrasse, but it had no sense of responsibility for the under-classes, did it? If one of the major functions of culture is to shield its members from chaos, and to reassure them that they live at the center of the universe, then our fathers have failed.”

  “What’s to be done?” von Tscharner chipped in. “It’s a hopeless situation. ”

  “You were expecting waltzes and gaiety, Herr Truman?” Claus said.

  “Much is made of Vienna’s splendor,” Wheeler said. “It’s only natural to expect—”

  “Ah, yes, splendor,” he said. “Splendor and schlagg.” Claus lifted a spoonful of whipped cream from his cup. “Splendor before the fall.” He dropped the dollop back into the cup. “It is a false sense of well-being.”

  “A sense of well-being, oh no,” Kleist said. “Look out, here comes Claus’s false-sense-of-well-being speech.”

  “The death spasms of a culture,” Claus said. “Dancing toward the Apocalypse.”

  “Look out,” Kleist said. “Here comes the dancing speech.”

  “And that’s where you see Vienna?” Wheeler asked.

  “It’s cultural hubris,” Claus said. “It’s an overweening presumption of aristocracy in a world basically insensitive to human needs, and it can only lead to a rude awakening.”

  “And what’s that awakening?”

  “I have no idea,” Claus said gloomily. “But when people start believing that progress is inevitable and life easy, they abandon faith in the culture of their fathers and flounder.” He paused and looked vacantly across the café.