He had not heard his mother climb up the stairs. “What are you doing? ” she said. Her voice was stern.
“I found this glove.”
“You were told not to come up here.” Wheeler could see his mother standing above him. In the dim light of the attic her look was cold and disoriented. He was filled with the most horrible feeling. He knew he was seeing something forbidden.
“I was looking at the black widows.” It was a stupid thing to say. He had come up with the sole purpose of exploring and had found exactly what he was looking for. How he wished in that moment that he had never come up to the attic.
His mother looked down at the opened trunk and the scattered contents. “You have made a mess.” There was an unfamiliar brittleness to her voice. Her eyes were fixed on the uniform on the floor beside Wheeler. “You know better—” she began, but her voice cracked and she stopped, letting out a soft moan. Slowly, she dropped to her knees beside him. He could feel the folds of her dress and her leg. She said nothing, but reached out and fingered one of the medals. Then her hand moved to the dark navy uniform jacket, and slowly she opened her fingers and ran them along the cloth beneath the lapel. Slowly, her head moved from side to side, and breath came out as a soft sigh.
Wheeler watched her face. It carried an expression unlike anything he had seen there before, one of terrible longing. “Such a fine man,” she whispered, but clearly not to him. “Such a good and fine man.”
Perhaps it was a moment. Perhaps it was an hour. Wheeler scarcely dared breathe. He just could only watch his mother’s gentle fingers stroking the material of the navy jacket, fingering the edge of the lapel.
When she rose, she did it slowly, the folds of her dress touching Wheeler lightly. Then she stood and looked down at the contents of the trunk. “You will put everything back as you found it? Carefully?” Wheeler nodded, relieved that she no longer sounded angry with him.
She walked back toward the attic stairs, where she paused and turned. She appeared in silhouette with the light from the far window surrounding her in such a way that he could not see her eyes. “Why don’t you keep the baseball thing,” she said, her voice having taken on a mystical softness.
She was in her bedroom with the door closed for the rest of the afternoon. This is how Wheeler acquired his trademark ancient glove, and in so doing, long before he realized the fact, picked up the heroic mantle of Dilly Burden.
25
No Ordinary Situation
An obligation to keep to oneself,” Dilly said with a staunch certitude for which he was famous, assuming as he often did that everyone with even a modest sense of propriety would be in agreement. “That is what the situation requires, and that is what we shall follow.” Dilly and Wheeler, father and son, were finishing their morning coffee at a café near the Imperial Art History Museum. “That is the most difficult challenge in this whole business. We must not intervene in any way. Even the slightest conversation could have a disastrous effect on—” He paused, weighing the gravity of his own words. “One slip could ruin everything. One errant word could do irreparable ruin to the future we need to be born into.” He buttered his bread and added a small portion of strawberry preserve.
“It’s a little staggering,” Wheeler said, obviously deciding to withhold information about the conversations he had already participated in, with a variety of people, Sigmund Freud being the most significant.
“We can say nothing to anyone.” He savored again a bite of croissant.
“Between ourselves, of course, the pressure’s off,” Wheeler said jovially. “We cannot change each other’s history.”
And even that dimension Dilly gave a moment’s pause. “Indeed,” he said finally. “That is a relief.”
“It is a relief to have someone to talk to.”
Dilly nodded. “And you still don’t remember how you got here?”
“Something traumatic, I’m pretty sure of that. Some sinister images have come back, but it is pretty much total amnesia, I am embarrassed to say. I just can’t remember.”
“Well, I can,” Dilly said, repressing a shudder. “I was lying on a cold cement floor, hoping and praying that it would end. I had been trying to reconstruct Vienna; it was a mental game. I’d been here in college, you know. I drifted.” He looked deadly serious for a moment, then shuddered again. “That’s how it works, I’m pretty sure. As you are going out of one world, you drift. In my case, I drifted here. And you—”
“I just can’t remember. I remember the drifting in, the morning I arrived here. I just don’t remember from where.”
“You had just finished the Haze’s book. Your head was full of Vienna. That’s it.”
“My head was full of Vienna, for sure. I was giving book talks all over the country. I just don’t remember the last few hours.” He paused. “Except for the man in my doorway—”
“It will come to you.”
“What caused yours?” Wheeler said. “You must have really wanted to be here.”
Dilly looked away, as if he might be hiding something. “I just picked a place,” he said a little too quickly. “Something I could reconstruct in my mind. That’s what you need to do in those torture situations; I studied up on it. You know, preparing for the adventure and all that. Have a vivid picture, you know. When you are in the position I was in, you grab at anything. I grabbed Vienna.”
Wheeler could have pressed: Why Vienna? Why 1897? But he let it drop. In a way both men were adjusting to the shock of being together in this strange and wonderful city, getting to know each other, adjusting to the enormity of it all.
“But I am still in something of a shocked state. When I left your mother, it was 1944, and she was thirty. When you left her, it was 1988, and she was seventy-four. When I last saw you, just a few weeks ago, you were three. Now you are old enough to be my father.”
“It is sort of hard to fathom,” Wheeler said, looking away, then bringing his focus back to Dilly’s eyes. “This has been more than I ever could have hoped for.”
Dilly did not look away and for a moment remained speechless, his famous staunchness falling away for just an instant. “Other than meeting your mother,” he said, tears coming to his eyes, “I simply cannot imagine—” Then he caught himself. “It is just bully,” he said, dropping coins on the table beside his coffee, leaping to his feet. “We’d better get out there into the morning.” They had decided earlier to do the one thing they both wished for, spending the day as ordinary tourists. Dilly had bought a Baedeker’s guidebook in English for the purpose and was prepared. He wrote his name boldly on the inside cover: Frank Standish Burden, Jr. “Remember,” he said, “I’m still not in tip-top shape, thanks to our friends the Gestapo.” He shuddered again. “You might have to wait for me from time to time.”
But it turned out to be quite the opposite. And Dilly, probably not ordinary at anything, was certainly not an ordinary tourist. Wheeler found that he was the one struggling to keep up, and that his father was not a walking history lesson as much as a cultural experience, one who appeared to be of boundless energy.
After lightning attacks on three museums, they found themselves at the cathedral of St. Stephen’s, looking up at the tower. “Just look at the majesty, ” he said, pointing up. “This one is not among the finest examples of Gothic magnificence, but still one of the marvels of medieval Europe.” The serrated silhouette of the slender Gothic spire rose out of a bundle of light buttresses and pointed arches. “It was in its day a modern-day Tower of Babel, bringing together a mass of cultural influences. This cathedral has been vandalized and restored so many times since the 1100s that it’s like an architectural history lesson. Look—” He pointed to various places on the cathedral edifice. “There is Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, not to mention some nineteenth-century tampering thrown in.”
Dilly paid the twenty-kreuzer admission charge for both of them at the sacristan’s office and led the way up the more than five hundred steps to the top, whi
ch he seemed to reach without stopping. “That’s some climb,” Wheeler said, catching his breath. Dilly seemed unaffected, exhilarated rather by the brisk climb.
Dilly was standing at the stone railing, his eyes closed, breathing in the Viennese morning air. “Isn’t it thrilling,” he said, looking out over the countryside. “In the fourteenth century people came from all around just to climb those steps and see this view.” They were facing west, out toward the foothills, where the Vienna Woods rose in a gentle slope off into the mountains. He pointed out beyond the Ringstrasse. “It makes you realize why this was such a valuable piece of landscape. A flat plane between two worlds—Europe out there beyond the Alps and”—he turned and swung his hand behind them—“the east with all its riches out there beyond the Hungarian steppes. In the thirties, people who rode the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul called it the last Western city before the plunge into the Balkans. It is such a beautiful combination of mountains, river, and the plain. And it has been fiercely fought over. Out there, just outside where the great wall used to be is where the fierce Turks camped during their devastating siege that was raised in 1683, driving the infidels back home for the last time, leaving their coffee behind. There, on that plane, are the great battlefields of Essling—where Napoleon in 1809 was driven back across the Danube—and Wagram, in which he united with the Italians at the Lobau and drove back, to become master of Vienna. For ten thousand years people have fought for control of this lovely fortress city on the bend of the Danube. Metternich said that Asia began just east of his palace. Incredible wealth and treasure passed through here when this cathedral was being built.” He gave the railing in front of him a hearty slap.
Back at ground level, in the nave of the great cathedral, Dilly took care to point out each exquisite detail. “A Gothic cathedral is like a book, and the stained glass the pages. The people of the time couldn’t read, so they built themselves the stories, instead of writing them. They intended them to last forever. The stories taught how to live good lives and how to ensure entry into the kingdom of God.” He pointed across the great vaulted space. “You see, over there on the sunless northern wall are Old Testament stories and biblical characters depicting the world before the Messiah. And here, on the south wall, where the sun shines, we have the New Testament stories of Christ and the saints. Very clever and very geometrical.” He paused and looked squarely at Wheeler. “That’s what I love about the Middle Ages. Everything is so rational and logical. I would have loved to live then.”
“Don’t you find it a little confining?” Wheeler asked. “Rules had a pretty tight grip on things.”
“No, don’t you see? It was the inner life that mattered.” He touched his temple. “The life of the mind. It was so pure and clean. The material world was transitory. Look around. Do you realize how many man-hours it took to design, carve out, and place each one of these stones?” He reached out and touched the rough wall in front of him, drawing its history into his fingers. “Whole villages devoted their entire working lives to the projects. And the masons who worked on this level knew they wouldn’t finish in their lifetimes. Imagine being comfortable with that thought. They took hundreds of years to complete. For us in our rushed lives that is unfathomable.”
Dilly paused and furrowed his brow. Wheeler was familiar enough with his father’s history to know what was coming next. “And your mother and I saw firsthand how quickly it can all be destroyed.” He cringed. “We walked through the rubble of Coventry Cathedral the day after the bombing. Timbers, stones, shards of glass everywhere. The work of centuries destroyed in an instant by a couple of maliciously placed two-hundred-pound bombs. The people who destroyed that shrine in a moment had no idea what they were doing, had no idea what an irreplaceable treasure they were obliterating forever. What if—” He stopped and closed his eyes, shaking his head slowly. “What if the people of fourteenth-century Coventry had known to what end their work would come? Would they have labored painstakingly to hew each beam, lay in each piece of glass, carve so precisely each stone?” He repressed an involuntary shiver. “It was the most horrifying thing I have ever seen.”
“I know. Mother told me.”
Dilly paused for a moment and reached inside to regain his exuberance. “A cathedral is a stupendous technological achievement.” Dilly closed his eyes again, this time to breathe the rich and musty air of centuries. “They are the highest point in civilization.”
“Better than the great catch?” Wheeler said, out of nowhere.
Dilly looked surprised and then eyed Wheeler for a moment. “You have your mother’s sense of humor,” he said. Then he turned silent and fell for a moment into deep, troubling thought. “How is she?” he asked, as if finally mustering the strength to get the question out.
“She did fine. You would be proud of her. You know, your family gave her the Feather River ranch in 1946, and she became a farmer. A good one. She never went back to England.”
“A farmer,” Dilly said, shaking his head. “That woman—” A flood of memories showed on Dilly’s face, and he smiled savoring them. “A farmer. How was she with the books?”
“Ferocious like a tiger. She had a legendary style,” Wheeler said with the same sort of smile. “And great with the workers. She has a reputation as a great bargainer.”
“Last time I saw her she was quite the pacifist.” Dilly smiled even more warmly. “You know, that isn’t easy when there is war raging all around you . . . and your husband goes off to sacrifice himself to the cause.”
“Mother never seemed to do anything that was easy.”
Dilly looked down at his feet. “Including team up with me.”
“Are you kidding? She always said it was the best thing that ever happened to her. She said you were repressed and an incredible overachiever, and it gave her a whole new way of looking at the world.”
Dilly laughed soulfully. “She had a hard time with my sense of duty,” he said. “I’m pretty singleminded on that score, I guess.”
“She said it was your father in you.”
Dilly grew serious. “My father was a stern man, the consummate banker, very forthright and prominent. He had been an athletic star, you know. Three sports at St. Greg’s, football and baseball at Harvard, the first modern Olympic games.”
“That was true, then?”
“Oh yes. In 1896, when the Olympics were formed in Greece, he and some athletes from Princeton and Yale formed a team and paid their own way. Father went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and built a discus from the sculpture. It was quite a project, and he won the event. I think he did it to prove the superiority of Anglo-Saxon bloodlines. I suppose he was an influence.” Dilly paused and fell into thought, then wished to change the subject. “So your mother thought I was too duty bound?”
“She used to say you had an overdeveloped superego.”
Dilly laughed again. “Your mother had a wonderful way of taking a few hundred years of excellent New England Puritan heritage and making it sound like a nervous disorder.” There was deep affection in his voice, but he stopped and looked up again at the Old Testament stained glass across the nave. His eyes filled with tears. “My goodness, I loved that woman.”
They had an elegant lunch at the Hotel Imperial. “If this is going to be a grand tour,” Dilly said, “we will not short-change the grandesse. That is the word a favorite teacher of mine at St. Gregory’s School used to describe this hotel.”
Wheeler smiled. “You wouldn’t be referring to our Venerable Haze, would you?”
Dilly returned the delighted smile. “I would indeed,” he said with a flair. “Our great Arnauld Esterhazy. I forgot for a moment that you too were one of his boys.”
“I was indeed,” Wheeler said proudly.
“What a joy we both shared him.”
“Me, for only two years, unfortunately.”
“His world must have been quite a change from a California farm.”
“You might say.”
Dil
ly looked wistful. “And Esterhazy was still in form?”
“Still around, and probably even a greater character.”
“He was like a father to me.”
“I know. He used to tell us how great you were. Sort of worshipped what you were, they said.”
“Did he still call his select gathering of students Jung Wien?”
“He did indeed.”
“And their essays feuilletons?”
“Still did. Right to the end.”
“Oh my,” Dilly said, swept away by a feeling of nostalgia. “What a force he was! And what a luxury to have those Hazings in our schoolings.”
“That’s how we know about all this.” Wheeler’s hand swept out as if from the cathedral railing to the magnificent city below.
“To the Haze, then,” Dilly said, tearing up, raising his glass of young white wine.
“To the Haze.” Wheeler tasted the wine and gave a satisfactory smile. Then he paused and looked square into Dilly’s eyes. “He’s here, you know.”
Dilly looked puzzled. “The Haze is here?”
“Of course. He’s in Vienna right now, and he should be about eighteen years old, if I figure right.”
The new thought stunned Dilly. Dilly who thought of everything had not thought of that. “You know, you are right.” An impish smile came onto his lips. “We could go pay him a call.”
“I wonder what he is like,” Wheeler said, not letting on that he had actually seen him. “Probably a prissy little guy.”
“You don’t suppose it would interfere with his history if we just took a little peak at him. I mean, we wouldn’t want him to end up at Dover.” He frowned as if having bitten into a sour fruit.
“Maybe we could borrow some money from his father,” Wheeler said, looking into his wineglass. “I was beginning to wonder how we were going to pay for all this grandesse?”
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