The Little Book: A Novel Page 9

  Wheeler looked at him empathetically. “And that’s where you and your friends are?”

  “Exactly,” Claus said. “We’re watching the first signs of the unraveling of what our fathers still believe in—the rational rule of science and order—and we have no faith.”

  “The city can’t take care of its own problems.”

  “In Vienna, we follow the imperial example and pretend they are not there,” Claus said with an ironic little smile.

  “How long can that go on?”

  Claus kept his smile and gestured to a passing waiter for more coffee. He looked deep into Wheeler’s eyes. “Till the Apocalypse,” he said in both resignation and great wisdom. “And that may well be around the corner.”

  Back on the street, Wheeler was growing desperate. Alone, in the wretched quarter of the city, with the thoughts of his new Viennese friends’ quips about poverty fresh in his mind, Wheeler had a practical problem. He needed to find a way of insuring himself room and board for the duration of his stay in this foreign city. The idea, wild and impulsive as it was, came in a flash and stayed with him through his humble dinner of sausage and cabbage in a grubby little café deep inside the old city where he had laid down his last marks for a room.

  So in the morning of the third day, dispirited and drained of energy, nearly out of money and tired of his rumpled clothes, Wheeler Burden asked directions to the address he had learned from the Haze in his eleventh-grade year in prep school. “The modern age began at Berggasse Nineteen,” the Haze had said more than once, with that flair he had for pronouncement, and each of his boys was expected to know exactly what the pronouncement meant.

  It was an unimpressive façade, the large front door opening onto a vaulted throughway large enough for a carriage. The stone stairs climbed to the second floor, where Wheeler stopped and waited a long apprehensive moment before knocking, driven to this monumental intrusion into destiny by practical necessity. Simply put, he needed support and a place to stay.

  The sign on the door read, “Prof. Dr. Freud.”

  11

  A St. Gregory’s Boy

  After the Dover game things turned around for Wheeler at St. Greg’s. In his solitary moment of athletic glory, an entire school seemed suddenly about to change its impression of the Burden Project. “In the eyes of the beholder,” the Haze said. What had been beheld previously as the California boy’s unregenerate reluctance to fit in now became charming eccentricity. “Something we can work with,” one of the faculty old-timers said. Teachers began to see in Wheeler a fascinating if peculiar mind. One day in English class his teacher asked loudly, “Good lord, Burden, have you read all of Victor Hugo?” He meant it facetiously.

  “Only the seven novels,” Wheeler answered matter-of-factly. “But Ninety-Three twice.” The exchange became widely quoted among the students.

  The headmaster, Mr. Wiggins, had been at St. Greg’s since before the war. He had cut quite a heroic swath in football and hockey at Harvard himself, a little before Wheeler’s father, and had known Dilly only obliquely. He taught French and then had been named headmaster in 1947. In many ways, Wiggins, whose craggy features looked as if they had been chiseled in granite, was the embodiment of the values of the school and the whole Bostonian way of life. It was largely because of his stirring talks before the boys twice each year, on the opening day of baseball season in the spring and on Armistice Day in the fall, that Dilly Burden’s memory remained alive and current. He was formal and gruff on the outside, but displayed a soft inside on those special days as he explained what everyone already knew, that the words he was about to read had been composed by the legendary Dilly Burden as his graduation speech in 1932, the words that were inscribed on a plaque in the main corridor of the schoolhouse. Then he would call up Dilly’s spirit with a kind of Barrymorian eloquence and always a tear in his eye. “I am a St. Gregory’s boy,” he would begin to the hushed all-school audience. “I win without bragging and can lose without whimpering; I am too brave to lie and too generous to cheat. Pride will not let me loaf and I will always insist on doing my share of the work in any capacity. I ask only to share equally with every boy, the sturdy or the weak, the talented or the humble, the wealthy or the poor, those blessings which God has showered upon all of us. All this because I am, above all else, today, tomorrow, and forever, a St. Gregory’s boy.” When he finished, there was rarely a dry eye in the auditorium, boy or man.

  Even in the moments of darkest faculty despair over the Burden Project, the rough-hewn boy from California seemed to appeal to Mr. Wiggins’s soft side, and in these moments the headmaster would often throw his head back and give an understanding laugh, the rare sign of endorsement that lent the project the little hope it held. Most everyone knew that taking the chance on the rough lad from California had been mostly Headmaster Wiggins’s idea in the first place, out of reverence for the memory of his famous father and the widespread respect he and everyone else had for Wheeler’s grandmother, one of the school’s greatest benefactors, it turned out. “Your grandmother is quite a woman,” Mr. Wiggins told Wheeler at their first meeting. “I think few people in this school—” Then he thought on it for a moment. “Few people in this city realize what a significant person she is.”

  Later, when Wheeler asked the Haze if the headmaster might not be exaggerating just a bit, the old man became a little teary himself. “Oh my, no,” he said. “She is quite a remarkable woman.” Then he too lost himself a moment in something like reverie. “Quite a remarkable woman.”

  So it was not incidental that Wheeler’s coming to St. Gregory’s, in this radical departure from tradition, had been suggested and perhaps engineered by his grandmother. And, considering that initial influence, it was not coincidental that Mr. Wiggins became the idea’s dominant and enthusiastic proponent. An admitted admirer of the small bursts of informality that sprang up in the daily life of a school, especially from the younger boys, Mr. Wiggins had been from the start one of the keenest observers of Wheeler’s eccentricities and one of their greatest supporters. It was he who took Mr. Esterhazy aside and assigned him mentorship of the project. It was said that privately the headmaster thought that the young man’s eccentricities might be good for some of the stuffier and more staid elements in the school. He seemed to take Wheeler’s miserable academic performance in stride along with his unrestrained conversations. If Mr. Wiggins found what he called a special spark in a boy, his security was insured. And for certain, his reverence for the grandmother aside, Mr. Wiggins found in Dilly Burden’s son that special spark.

  One of the few St. Gregory’s supporters who had not been at the Dover game was Wheeler’s grandmother, Eleanor Burden, widow of the prominent Boston banker Frank Standish Burden Senior and mother of Frank Standish Burden Junior, the famous Dilly Burden. Her heart was not strong, so she no longer visited the school. But it was she who had engineered and financed the Burden Project. When she received the headmaster’s phone call directly after The Game, as it was now being called, she expressed immediate joy, not out of a love of baseball but for the effect it would have on her grandson’s success, something that had seemed unlikely a few months before. She loved her grandson unconditionally and wanted the transplant to take hold, although she seemed always to have an ironclad confidence that it would.

  “Young Burden has quite a head on his shoulders,” the headmaster would observe in faculty meetings. He would then tell in a good-natured manner how, on more than one occasion, Wheeler had called the headmaster’s house and discussed with Mrs. Wiggins at some length the deeper meaning of his address in morning chapel or an item he had read on the Boston Globe editorial page, a practice the headmaster’s wife and consequently the headmaster chose to view as charming. “He seems to enjoy a good dialogue” was the understatement Mr. Wiggins chose to describe the boy’s eccentricity.

  In physics class, Wheeler recouped from a year of failing work by writing a final paper of some distinction. The editors of the school’s l
iterary magazine chose to view the piece as “poetic” and published it in their final issue. Mr. Warner, the physics teacher, known by even the young boys as Zoof, submitted it to a high school writing contest sponsored by the Scientific American. The paper was an eloquent description of why the curveball seemed to break. “In the world according to Burden,” Zoof said without warning one day in class, “he was able to strike out six Dover batters because the speed of the ball for the first two-thirds of its flight overpowers the effect of the spin on the ball. It’s quite simple. When the ball slows down in the last third of flight, the spin dominates and makes the ball arc suddenly.” Anyone who could understand that concept and explain it so eloquently and simply deserved to pass the course for the year, something that had seemed impossible in Wheeler’s inauspicious beginnings as a physicist. It helped that Zoof had been a St. Greg’s classmate of Dilly Burden, and as a huge Boston Red Sox fan had himself always wondered why a breaking curveball broke. When asked by the editor of the Gregorian how he came up with such an elegant explanation, Wheeler said simply, “Bucky Hannigan.”

  Things went well even with Prentice Olcott, or at least the older boy stayed away from Wheeler, knowing when he had been licked.

  As unlikely as it had seemed at the outset of the Burden Project, Frank Standish Burden III, like his famous father and grandfather before him, was suddenly and triumphantly a St. Gregory’s boy. He was invited back for his first class year. Wheeler, like his father and grandfather, would graduate from St. Greg’s. That first class year would go by relatively uneventfully, with Wheeler becoming more conventional and Mr. Esterhazy continuing to fill in the empty portions of his slate.

  If the pitching performance against Dover served to turn the St. Gregory’s faculty, it also set in motion Wheeler Burden’s acceptance to Harvard College. Mr. Wiggins, it was said, now gave his endorsement. Harvard, like St. Gregory’s, was more than willing to accept the son of its legend Dilly Burden, Harvard Class of 1936—provided he was not going to be an embarrassment to the admissions process. By fortunate coincidence, the director of admissions was a St. Gregory’s man and had been in attendance at the fateful Dover game. By winter of his second St. Gregory’s year, his first class year, there was a groundswell to send the boy on to Harvard. Wheeler went along with the idea largely to please his grandmother, for whom he cared a great deal and of whom he had grown more admiring and more fond.

  It was not until after Christmas of that first class year at St. Greg’s that Wheeler went to New York to find Buddy Holly. Most of his weekends had been tied up with detentions and work details, and he had no idea how to find the man. He had written a handful of letters to Holly and had received nothing in return so decided to go to New York and see what he could do about meeting his idol.

  He told the school he was going in to Boston to stay with his grandmother, and he hitched a ride with a Boston University student who lived on the Lower East Side. He got a room at the YMCA, and the next morning went to the office of Coral Records, where he asked everyone he saw who looked even remotely like a musician where Holly was living. Finally a man with a Cockney accent told him an address in Greenwich Village. Wheeler went to the apartment and got no answer at the door. It was a terrible Saturday night, raining and cold. He kept going away and coming back. Around one in the morning, miserable and shivering, he was standing in the doorway when a cab pulled up and a man covered by a dark brown slicker got out and began struggling with two large equipment cases. Wheeler stepped out to help. “Thanks much,” the man said and led him into the alcove of the apartment and opened the door with his key. “Perhaps you can help up the stairs,” he said, as he turned to Wheeler. “You look wetter’n a muskrat. Better come up and have something warm.” Wheeler was halfway up the stairway to the garret apartment before he realized that the man was Buddy Holly.

  Holly was born Charles Hardin Holley, in Lubbock, Texas, in 1936, five years before Wheeler Burden was born in London. He grew up in a musical family and learned the violin and piano before developing a love for country music and beginning to play the guitar in elementary school. During his high school years, when he was in a rock band, he tried to take the songs he wrote to other musicians. In 1955 Elvis Presley came to Lubbock, and that sealed Holly’s fate. He and his band traveled to Nashville in an attempt to make records. But it was not until 1957, when he was out of school and playing music full-time, that he tied up with a music promoter named Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico. He recorded with his band, the Crickets, his song called “That’ll Be the Day” and the phenomenon that changed Wheeler’s life was launched. A year later, restless to write and sing on his own, Holly split from his Texas colleagues and moved to New York City, where he was beginning to take his music in new directions. He was living in a Greenwich Village apartment with his new wife, Maria Elena, when totally by coincidence, he offered refuge from the wintry blast to a scrawny, misplaced prep-school kid from Boston, who probably reminded him very much of himself a few years earlier.

  Wheeler sat in Buddy’s apartment for five hours, until dawn. They talked and played guitars, and Wheeler watched while Holly recorded a song on his tape machine, asking his guest to join in. Then he walked over to his record player. “Listen to this,” he said. “It’s Haydn.” The strains of a classical piece filled the room. “I’m working on something new,” he said with a smile when he lifted the needle from the record, and then he picked up his guitar. “Listen,” and he began a chord pattern and sang a first line. Wheeler listened, mesmerized, having no idea how important that moment would be in his life. “It’s my new direction,” Holly said.

  “That’s beautiful,” came from Wheeler in little more than a whisper.

  “Think it’s got promise?” the rock-and-roll icon asked, and Wheeler only nodded. Then the mentor ran the pupil through the chord progressions until the two of them were playing together, and Holly began the uh-uh-ohs of the undeveloped chorus. “Here,” he said. “You do the melody and I’ll sing a third above you.” And their two voices fell into that territory of flow so that Wheeler could not hear where his began and his great hero’s ended. Holly beamed. “Whoooeee!” he said. “That’s what I call promise.” And thus began the seed of what two decades later would be called the definitive song for an entire age.

  When they stopped it was nearly morning. “Better get some sleep on that couch,” Buddy said.

  At around ten, Wheeler awoke, embarrassed to discover how soundly he had slept, and found himself alone in the New York apartment. As he was leaving a note on the kitchen table, he discovered a package wrapped in plain white paper and rubber bands. It had “Kid” scrawled on it. “This is so you’ll remember. Keep playing.” He opened it and found the tape they had made, which he placed in his suitcase before he headed back to Boston. No one at St. Greg’s ever knew about his trip to New York City or his early-morning music session with a legend.

  About a week later, the morning of February 4, 1959, Wheeler was sitting sleepy-eyed at school breakfast when a younger boarder approached him with a sick look. “Sorry” was all he said and dropped the front section of the Boston Globe onto Wheeler’s table. Wheeler stared down at the paper, at first in disbelief. The headline read: “Holly and two singers killed in Iowa Plane Crash.”

  The only black clothing Wheeler had was a dinner jacket that had belonged to his father. He wore it with a black shirt and black string tie the whole day.

  12

  The First Shomsky

  On weekends while at Harvard, Wheeler would come into Boston and spend time with his grandmother at the family house on the narrow cobbled street where she had spent house on the narrow cobbled street where she had spent her childhood and had raised Wheeler’s father. Eleanor Burden was in her eighties and in spite of her weak heart was sharp, alert, and witty. He had always loved visiting the house the few times when he and his mother traveled east. Now that he was on his own, and a man more or less, he and his grandmother had a growing friendship.<
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  “You know, Standish,” she said to him the first week of classes, “the men at Harvard are very restrained. They will think you a bit outgoing.” Outgoing was the term she had used with him since his visits in his childhood. Wheeler figured it was her way of encouraging him to start cautiously. He had already survived the St. Gregory’s campaign, so he knew a thing or two about Boston formality.

  “I know, Grandmother. I think I already have a reputation as a wild bull on the pampas.”

  “They will ask you to join the Porcellian, your grandfather’s and father’s club. It’s a pretty stuffy bunch, in fact probably the stuffiest of the stuffy bunches. But I hope you will consider their offer.” As she finished, he saw her looking at him appraisingly. Wheeler knew she was crazy about him. “You will do them good,” she said with a wry smile.

  One visit in particular stood out in Wheeler’s mind. One of his St. Gregory’s classmates who had also come over to Harvard met him in the Yard one day and told him of an antique travel book he had found in Widener Library with what appeared to be his grandfather’s name in it. Wheeler had gone to check it out and had found that, yes indeed, there was a travel guide, a Baedeker’s Guide for Austria, 1896, with “F. S. Burden, Jr.” inscribed on the front page. Wheeler thought it peculiar because he had not realized that his grandfather had been a junior. He took it to his grandmother and expressed his puzzlement. “Wasn’t Father the junior? ” he asked. His grandmother held the small red book for a long time without speaking.

  “You are right. It was your father,” she said softly, bringing the book to her breast and holding it there for a long time, closing her eyes. When she opened them, Wheeler could see that they were filled with tears. “He loved old books,” she said. “He must have bought this one and inscribed it when he traveled to Europe in college with Brod Walker.”