“I’ve got to warn you,” he said. “I think I am something of an eagle. I mate for life.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Are you sure you have never taken a girl to a hotel before? You are awfully good at it.”
And at that moment a waiter found him with the telegram. He took it, read it, and looked into her eyes, grim faced. “Sweet Jesus,” he said. “We’ve got to head back to London. Hitler’s invaded Denmark.”
The proposal for his trip to France came at the end of October, after the terrible spring and summer. The Germans kept going after Denmark and swept into France in May, cornering 300,000 British troops at Dunkirk from the end of May till June fourth, when the miraculous evacuation was completed. The bombings started in August, by which time Dilly was working day and night on the defense agreement that would lend the British Navy destroyers to fight the German submarines, in return for ninety-nine-year leases of military bases in places like Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the Bahamas.
By the fall of 1940 the air war over London and the southern cities was ferocious.
The top-secret proposal to Dilly was simple. In his role as a Canadian French scholar, an expert on stained glass, he would gain access through Marseilles and would pass north, then set himself up at Chartres. From there, using French papers, he would travel through northern France for two months. The trip was dangerous, but it was not on the surface military. He would do nothing but observe, then come back to London. He was not certain that this was the turn he wanted for his military service even before he told Flora.
She was incensed, filled with worry and rage. “I thought you were not a warrior,” she said, following him back to his apartment. “I thought you were just a lawyer working out agreements.”
“They have a need, or they wouldn’t have asked.”
“And if you get caught?”
“I would be seen as a spy.”
“You would be a spy. The Germans torture and kill spies.”
“I wouldn’t have any information. It’s designed that way. I wouldn’t know anything. They just want to know what it is like in France—”
Frustration now filled her eyes with tears. “You know what they are doing, don’t you? They are trying you out. If you survive it, you pass the test. If you survive it, you also will know your way around northern France.” She struggled to get through to him. “They are trying to recruit you, and you are an excellent candidate—so staunch, so full of duty and purpose. ”
“What does that mean?”
“They are looking for someone they can use for the war machine.”
“Flora, you don’t have to be so cynical.”
“They are looking for a war hero.”
“There is a need.”
Flora had a look of desperation. “I very, very majorly do not believe in war, and now I am making the biggest sacrifice of my life for what I don’t believe in.”
It was not just Flora’s desperate reaction that decided him. He really did want to make his contribution in a more academic way, as a negotiator and an international lawmaker. There, he told himself, his parents, and Flora, was the chance to work toward securing something hopeful. He did not want to stray too far from the olive branch.
He told the Admiralty no.
It was the night of November fourteenth that the Luftwaffe pounded away at Coventry. Military analysts were as weary and bone-tired as everyone in those first awful months of the bombings, but they were able to see the patterns. The German high command was using the bombings indiscriminately, attempting to break civilian morale, going after the industrial cities, but not just the industrial targets.
On the evening of the fifteenth he got the first report that the Coventry Cathedral had received a direct hit. Two days later he borrowed a car and drove with Flora into the gutted parts of the city.
They stood together at the entrance to the great nave and looked out at the enormous pile of smoldering rubble, each stone hand-carved by medieval masons. The lofty vaulted ceiling was gone completely. Only the short apse side walls stood upright. The stained glass was gone. It gave the appearance of a vast rubble-strewn marketplace.
Dilly was trembling, the tears streaming down his face when he turned to Flora, who was pale with shock. He tried to speak, but the words would not form in his throat.
“I must go,” he said finally.
23
Something Like an Eagle
Dilly had a friend in the Admiralty office named Rory Stuart, whom he had known at Oxford, and with whom he and Flora had spent many evenings. She was sure that young Captain Stuart wished Dilly had not told her as much as he did, and wondered in his darkest moments where her pacifist leanings would take her with the information. Out of friendship to Dilly, he had a pint with her from time to time.
“I am not asking you where he is or what he is doing, Rory. You know that,” she whispered at him across the table in the crowded pub. “I just want to know when he is expected out.”
“Flora, you push too damn hard. Why can’t you just do your patriotic duty and wait patiently?”
“Because—” she said, giving the rhetorical question some thought. “Because, first, I am simply not the kind who can wait. And, second, I am very much in love and I am very, very worried.”
Rory had dropped his intense national-security look, and smiled. “You’re a piece of work, Flora. If we could get your kind of intensity working on the war effort, the whole bloody thing’d be over by Easter.”
“Will you tell me, then?”
He reached out and touched her cheek. “I’ll let you know, dear girl.” His tired eyes looked into hers. “And don’t worry. The Yank can look after himself.”
She felt absolutely awful about the way they had parted. She just had not been able to think about how he felt in those few days. They had one last evening together in SoHo. He had looked very wistful as he raised his glass of claret toward her.
“You will take care of yourself,” he said, trying to get her out of her pout.
“Of course I will take care of myself. It’s you we need to worry about.”
“I’ll be okay. I’m good under pressure.”
She felt like telling him that this was not some American college game, but resisted. Something had been eating at him all night, and he looked as if he might be about to say it. “Flora—” He stopped and looked uncomfortable. “When I get back, would you consider marrying me?”
It was probably because she had been completely unprepared. How she wished she had taken some time to think. He needed something to take with him, to help him through tight spots and sleepless nights, something good to come home to, something that might increase—even slightly—the chances of his coming home safely.
But taking time to think had never been one of her strengths. She shook her head. “I can’t marry you, Dilly.”
He looked stunned. “Why?”
“There are lots of reasons. We’ve only known each other six months. I am a pacifist, and you are a warrior—”
He interrupted, “I love you, Flora.”
“I’m Jewish. I’m English. I’m radical, for god’s sake, maybe even a communist.”
This was not the conversation he wished to have on the brink of his departure into the war zone. “Whatever happened to love conquering all?” He sounded dispirited and deflated.
“I’m serious.” Things were turning south fast. “Well, there just are some things it can’t conquer, and we have between us enough for a roomful of people. You have sex for the first time, and now—”
“I can’t accept this, Flo,” Dilly interrupted. “We’ve had so much—” He stopped, his eyes filled with tears, frustration, and sadness.
She wasn’t backing off. “Here’s what it is, Dilly. It’s your bloody sense of duty again. You’ve slept with the lady, and now you have to marry her. That’s just not what I want.”
“That’s very much not what it is. Not anywhere near.” But there was no conviction in his
voice, absolutely none of his famous bravado. Dilly had looked tired coming into the evening; now he looked sad and tired. And now in January, two months after the awful evening, she realized it was not just sad, not just tired, but heartbroken. She had caused it, she who had always tried not to hurt another person.
She didn’t go with him to the airstrip, and she didn’t think of him with his head down, heading out into the dark of the Channel. That night she went out with old friends and drank too much and did something absolutely stupid with an American officer, an ambassador’s son from Boston who had been after her for a long time. She woke up the next morning, feeling desperately guilty, with a deathly headache and an aching in her heart and soul. That only got stronger as the time of Dilly’s unmentionable stay in France dragged on interminably, with no word whatsoever, even when she called and pleaded with Rory Stuart for just a crumb of information. Twenty-four hours after Dilly Burden boarded the plane for his entry into France, her one night’s awful mistake totally behind her, Flora had known in the deepest recesses of her English Jewish pacifist and maybe even communist heart that he was indelibly, profoundly, and totally the love of her life.
Rory called her in late January. “He’s out” was all he said. “He’ll have a few days of debriefing, you know. Ghastly lot. And sorry about the no news, old girl. The nature of the business, you know.”
She waited in the freezing rain outside the officers’ club at an airfield outside London for what seemed like hours. Pilots kept passing by offering her an escort inside. She smiled them off and waited with her arms folded. Finally, she took one offer, moved inside, and accepted a cup of coffee. Then a large burly Scotsman came in a side door and tapped her on the shoulder. “This one’s it, missy,” he said, motioning to the small transport plane that had just taxied to a spot of runway nearby. “Come along, dearie, ” he said, and she followed him, heart in throat, to where the folding steps descended from the airplane fuselage. Suddenly a man in a dry raincoat was standing in front of her. She could see his face in the dim runway lights. She knew he did not know she would be there. He looked into her face, speechless, then held out his arms and she fell into them.
“I will,” she said, before he could speak and let her know if the offer was still on or not, and then repeated it over and over. “I will. I will. I will,” she blurted out.
In the backseat of the car going back to London he asked if she wasn’t soaked through to the bone. “I would have stood for thirty hours,” she whispered. “In sleet and gales.”
In the light from the passing headlights his face looked drawn, but he smiled. “Why the sudden change of heart?”
“It’s not sudden. I changed about thirty seconds after you left,” fudging a bit on the timing. “But I couldn’t telephone, or write, or Morse code, or anything. I couldn’t get through to you in any way. ‘Nature of the business, ’ your friend Rory said. I realized this after I had made a total ass out of myself and after I hurt you, I’m afraid, very, very much. And besides—” She had opened her raincoat and laid her hand on her belly. “We wouldn’t want the little bastard to be a little bastard.”
The spark came into Dilly’s eyes slowly. At first, he didn’t say anything, but just nodded and smiled that wonderful world-winning smile of his. “What is this?” he said. “A guy gets you pregnant, so you think you have to marry him?”
She turned in the seat to pull away and face Dilly. “That’s very much not what it is. Not anywhere near,” she said with all her famous conviction, recognizing his ironic humor but considering the moment too serious for sport. “I am marrying the guy because I love him very, very, very much.” It was her eyes that were now filled with tears of relief and joy. “But I’ve got to warn you. I’m something like an eagle.”
24
A Good and Fine Man
Wheeler would have known that there were no limits on what was appropriate to reveal about his own past. With Sigmund Freud there were no inappropriate or irrelevant details and no coincidences. “I need to tell you about my father,” Wheeler said. Anyone knowing anything about Dr. Freud in 1897, the year after his own father’s death, would know one could not sustain his interest for long without talking about one’s own father. And Wheeler knew his own absent war-hero father’s story would serve to keep that interest alive. In Wheeler’s case it was also convenient that he was not one to exhibit much self-control; once stirred up, the memories would come pouring out in a stream of consciousness. And they did.
Freud would have been amused that this patient saw Freud himself as a hero, and one of considerable proportion. The doctor found it flattering that his patient saw psychoanalysis itself becoming accepted worldwide. Much as in Freud’s observation that young female patients transfer their strong emotions and sexual urges to their therapist, this patient had transferred to Freud the necessity of seeing his own father as a global hero.
This fascinated Freud. So too did the unusually complex historical epic the patient had created in order to give his father sufficient weight as a hero, a man who quite literally had been given the responsibility of saving the world. Perhaps it was not interest in the patient or his father that fascinated the great doctor, but the epic tale. It was an absorbing and fantastic view of the future.
According to the patient’s structuring of the future there would be a great war shortly after the dawn of the twentieth century, a first world war, the man called it. Following this would come a worldwide financial depression that had as its consequence, as well as the collapse of the Hapsburg empire (which happened almost in passing), two significant consequences: a worldwide military-industrial build-up and the rise of Germany under an evil dictator.
Another great world war was to ensue, with Germany taking over and occupying virtually all of central Europe (Austria and Vienna, again almost in passing). The first half of the 1940s would be consumed by the epic struggle that pitted America and Britain, with their heroic leader Winston Churchill, against the evil German empire. At one point it would even be called the Crusade in Europe.
Freud noted from the beginning the enormity of the struggle the patient needed to fashion in order to provide a sufficiently heroic stage for his father.
To a degree it was a fantasy with which Freud himself had some familiarity. As a boy he had identified closely with a hero of no smaller proportions than the great Carthagenian Hannibal in his own gallant struggle against the Romans. He had seen his own father as Hamilcar, a Semite general who had defended Sicily against the Romans in the First Punic War. It was a fitting heroic example for a son as well as for a father. Of course Freud was a boy at the time and not a forty-seven-year-old man.
Wheeler’s father had been a legendary schoolboy and college athlete, a ranking scholar in medieval history, and a superb musician, talented enough to play with a famous American band Freud would have equated with Johann Strauss. He studied law and became a navy officer who played a major role in the great war of the time, falling in love with the beautiful Jewish girl who became Wheeler’s mother. He served his nation gallantly as a spy, bringing great notoriety to himself posthumously because of accounts of his extreme bravery in the hands of the evil enemy. And the fact that his wife, after hearing reports of his capture by the enemy, entered the newly liberated war zone in search of him, dragging her young son along with her, only added to his legend. His death was mourned and his heroism celebrated by three nations.
Wheeler did not remember his father in more than photographs and family stories, but in 1952, at age eleven, he traveled with his mother to Paris where a plaque to his father’s memory was dedicated in a square in the heart of the city. By this time Wheeler and his mother had been living on the farm in California. She did not like war heroics in general, and the heroics of her husband in particular. She thought the former helped perpetuate the folly of war, and that the latter had deprived unnecessarily the world, and her, of a great and decent man.
Freud would have noted that Wheeler spoke with no r
esentment of his father, in fact he seemed to hold him in great affection and recounted a number of stories from his time growing up with his mother in which the memory of his absent father was an issue. And the doctor would have found most significant an incident when the patient found a trunk full of his father’s possessions in the attic of the California house.
That was when Wheeler found his father’s old baseball glove. He was ten.
His mother had asked him to stay out of the attic. She had always said it was dusty, there was no light, and it was filled with black widow spiders. Although all that gave the place a certain mysterious appeal, the black widow part kept him away.
One afternoon when Wheeler thought he was alone in the house and when his sense of adventure seemed high, he climbed the stairs to the attic and let himself in with the key from the old cookie tin in the pantry.
The spacious attic was lighted only from the small windows at either end. It was indeed dusty and there were cobwebs in the corners. He found the old rocking horse he had given up at age six, his mother’s dress mannequin, a number of cloth-draped chairs, a stack of large-framed paintings, and an old guitar case. In the center of an assortment of book boxes was an old steamer trunk, which creaked loudly when Wheeler opened it.
Packed inside was a clean, pressed navy uniform and officer’s cap. Sitting on top of them was a collection of medals, some of them inscribed in foreign languages, and a photograph of Dilly in the uniform, and a packet of letters, tied with a ribbon. In the next layer Wheeler found a clarinet, a crimson track jersey with a white H on it, and a college yearbook. It was in this layer that he found the baseball glove. It was the flat kind of five-fingered glove that Wheeler associated with the olden days, with shiny worn leather. He slipped his fingers into the holes. At first it felt stiff and cold, but as he opened and closed his hand and struck it with his fist, it seemed to warm to his hand. He lifted it over his head and caught a high pop-up, then, still on his knees, popped an imaginary ball in it and chucked it toward the bright afternoon light streaming in through the window.
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