The Little Book: A Novel

by Edwards, Selden

  “We’ll just have to invent the airplane, and sell the patent,” Dilly said, lifting his wineglass toward his son and his elder.

  “Too late. It’s already been invented, I think.”

  “Well then, the automobile.”

  “That too.”

  “Then something.”

  “The Frisbee,” Wheeler said quickly.

  “The what?”

  Wheeler gave Dilly a long look. “Right. You wouldn’t know about that,” he said, not bothering to explain that he had already had a beautiful prototype lathed by a Viennese cabinetmaker.

  “How about the ball-point pen.”

  Wheeler lifted his wineglass and returned the toast. “To the ball-point pen.” As Wheeler looked at Dilly, the younger man’s face blanched.

  “Oh lord,” he said, suddenly, aghast, his eyes darting as if looking around for an escape route. “Here he comes.”

  Wheeler turned around behind him and to his horror saw walking toward them across the dining room the stern young man from whom he had stolen the clothes. He turned back quickly and buried his head. “Let’s not let him see us. He’s walking right this way,” Dilly said. Then with great relief: “He is turning.” Dilly’s eyes followed the man as he left the ornate and spacious dining room, then looked at Wheeler.

  “You look pale,” Wheeler said, regaining his own composure.

  “I didn’t mean to alarm you, but I very much do not want to run into that young man.”

  “You’ve made that very clear.” Wheeler did not dare look up.

  “Well, it is not what you would call an ordinary situation,” Dilly said, collecting himself. “That young man is Frank Burden, my father.”

  26

  The Nature of the Condition

  For some reason Wheeler had not told Dilly that the stern young American both of them were now assiduously avoiding was the very man he had robbed in his first hours in Vienna. “It is Frank Burden?” Wheeler asked uneasily. “He’s from Boston, the 1896 Olympics and everything. You’re absolutely positive?”

  “Absolutely positive,” Dilly said. “I ought to know my own father, even if he is younger than I am. But I wanted to make very sure, so I followed him into the hotel and asked the clerk at the desk, and sure enough, he said it was Mr. Burden from Boston, and he was in Vienna for ‘an indefinite stay.’ ”

  “What’s he doing in Vienna?” Wheeler said abruptly.

  “That, I don’t know. I realize he was in Germany after the Olympics, a year at the university in Berlin, studying international banking. He became quite the expert. But I’m not sure about Vienna. Some position with the department of state, studying the Austrian currency exchange, I think.”

  “Well, he doesn’t look any too friendly,” Wheeler said.

  “Friendly?” Dilly repeated, reflecting. “No, not friendly.” He paused again and looked up at Wheeler. “There are some things I want to tell you about my father. He was a serious and stern man. Mother was bright and cheery, the one who brought culture and warmth, and Father provided the discipline.” Dilly stopped again and smiled. “I get confused with tenses. I don’t know whether to say is, was, or will be.”

  Wheeler laughed. “It’s the nature of our condition,” he said.

  Dilly returned to seriousness. “Father was something of an autocrat, a black-and-white kind of fellow. One thing I can guarantee you: he is always absolutely certain that the way he sees things is the right way.”

  “You can sort of see it in his face.”

  “Well, don’t get in his way when he wants something. I know that.” Dilly’s voice was cold and had lost its enthusiasm.

  “That sounds a bit harsh.” Wheeler was fishing for more information. “And what of the rumor?”

  “What rumor?”

  “When I was at Harvard, I read an article in an underground newspaper. It was pretty hard on the Burden legend, you included, and it said that Frank Burden had killed a man in Europe, a Jew, and it got covered up.”

  Dilly frowned. “I did hear something like that a couple of times, I’ll admit. But I didn’t take much stock in it. There was that and—” Dilly suppressed a shudder and fell silent. “There are things I don’t wish to talk about. Maybe later.”

  “I don’t know much about him,” Wheeler said. “I knew Grandmother pretty well. We spent time together when I was at St. Greg’s and Harvard, but he was gone by the time I got there. I knew Mother didn’t like him, but I never really knew why.”

  “He never accepted her,” Dilly said coldly.

  “There is a part you don’t know,” Wheeler said suddenly. “He took your death the hardest of all. People said in Boston that he never got over it. He was terribly proud of your accomplishments, and he had great plans for you after the war, ‘the hope for a new world,’ he called you.”

  Dilly shuddered again. “I find that very hard to believe.”

  “It is true. Mother said that when you died, the life went out of him. You were his pride and joy, his main reason for creating the life he created, but I guess he didn’t express it very well.”

  “You could say that,” Dilly said with a rare cynicism.

  Wheeler shook his head. “I didn’t know him at all.”

  “I can tell you about him,” Dilly said, the color returning to his face.

  Frank Burden’s roots went back to colonial days, back to Miles Standish, and he was a well-educated man. He had gone to St. Gregory’s, a fine new Episcopalian day and boarding school outside Boston, and to Harvard, the oldest and finest college in the country. He had studied European economics and politics with the finest of academic minds. He had traveled to the continent a number of times, the most recent as a victorious member of the first American Olympic team.

  Then he stayed in Europe for the academic year, studying international economics at the university in Berlin. Now, in 1897, he had been sent by a consortium of Northeastern bankers to Vienna, to coincide with a personal mission. He formed a perspective that the greatness of his country was being eroded by immigration, a perspective that was perhaps not unique among his American peers, but one that gave him the feeling of being a prophet for his times. He saw his own country on the brink of disaster and decline. He spent a good deal of his time in Europe searching for answers.

  While in Berlin, he heard stories about Vienna and its charismatic mayor, Karl Lueger, and he began to see a possible solution there, so he planned a visit to the Hapsburg capital to meet the man he had studied and admired. Lueger, a longtime member of Parliament, and a former liberal, had created the Christian Social Party and had been elected mayor by a popular majority. So controversial had been his election that the emperor, who despised what the man stood for, had waited a year and a half to ratify the election. Now, in full triumph, Lueger and his policies were firmly entrenched in the seat of power for Vienna and for much of the empire, no matter what forces raged against him.

  It was unusual for a young man from Boston, a young man in the heroic mold himself, to find as one of his own heroes a little-known leader well out of the first tier of European powers. Part of what attracted young Frank Burden to Lueger was his dapper good looks—“die shone Karl,” he was called popularly, Handsome Karl—and his political acumen, but at a distance of five thousand miles those qualities made little difference. What Frank Burden liked about Lueger was his simple use of one issue to gain political power. In 1897, after nearly a full century of falling away from aristocratic power and the rise of an industry-based bourgeoisie, Karl Lueger was the first major figure in European politics to rise based on anti-Semitism.

  The enemy philosophically was liberalism and reform, of which the northeastern United States had had its share, although not as much—nor had it needed as much—as England and France. Social reforms of all kinds had swept in to protect the lower classes from exploitation by those in financial and social power. Frank Burden found no fault with many of those reforms. Certainly child labor laws, uniform health regulations, a
nd minimum wage considerations were justified and effective. Even the extension of voting rights made a certain practical sense. In fact, the rise of a powerful and wealthy middle class was all in all a good thing for capitalism.

  What Frank Burden could not understand or abide was the way many of his St. Gregory’s and Harvard classmates—especially those preparing for teaching and the ministry—seemed bound and determined to undermine and give up their advantage. These classmates, by supporting sweeping reforms and the lower classes, seemed to be using their inherited social and economic power to erode the very foundations of their own class. He thought of these people not so much as traitors but as fools. It was important to keep financial and political control in the hands of those best equipped to handle them judiciously, and that meant the real Americans, those like himself. If Frank Burden learned one thing from the Olympic games in Athens in 1896, it was the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon American boys. Not only were they stronger and more athletic, they were also mentally more agile. It was their northern European heritage that made them so. In the early days of American settlement, the hardy and strong-willed chose the long ship ride across the Atlantic to the new world. That trip was a far cry from that of the poor eastern Europeans who now, cowed and huddled in the holds of steamers, made their way to Ellis Island.

  It was through the almost pathetic attitudes and performances of the athletes from those eastern European countries that Frank Burden first realized his superiority. And it was in Athens that he first realized the threat of the Jews. As the natural values of America became more and more watered down by liberalism and reform from the top and by the huge influx of low-quality immigrants from the bottom, the Jews would only gain leverage.

  Jews, he reasoned, had an unhealthy advantage in capitalism. They were cohesive, well focused, and good at manipulating profits. They were not held back by some of the principles that restrained Christians, and they were vastly more talented than other European immigrant minorities. There were, for instance, in Boston, enough Irish to form a serious economic and political force, but the natural Irish ineptitude in business eliminated them as any kind of threat. The same could be said for immigrants from Poland and the Slavic countries. There were actually few immigrants of any kind in financial power in Boston and New York, but Frank Burden looked to Europe for trends, and he did not like what he saw. Jews, who were very good with money, flourished and rose to control of the banks. That was just what happened.

  In turn-of-the-century Vienna, 80 percent of the money and 80 percent of the banks were controlled by Jews. Liberalizing of social and political rules had allowed them to rise unfettered. Vienna, because of the extreme cultural diversity of the empire, was a melting pot, and in that way was very much like the northeastern United States. And Jews did very well in melting pots.

  Frank Burden saw in Karl Lueger’s vastly successful strategies a new and successful style of politics. The ingredients were essentially these: appeal to the masses, heavy use of propaganda and slogans, and—perhaps most important—a strong emphasis on personality. For the first time in modern politics, the followers of Mayor Lueger were overtly encouraged to act on their prejudices. Lueger was a genius at exploiting the discontent, weaknesses, and desires of his fellow citizens. It was as if he had stripped away the illusions, and after pulling off layer after layer had seen the kernel at the center. It seemed that Karl Lueger had found what really mattered.

  To Frank Burden, Karl Lueger was a leader ahead of his time. A shrewd young man could learn a great deal from him and, in recognizing all this, Frank Burden thought himself, by association, ahead of his own time.

  He had been in Vienna only a few days, and he was beginning to feel comfortable. He had attended a few political meetings and had made an appointment to meet with Mayor Lueger himself. He had also been collecting as much political literature as he could. And he was getting over the terribly unsettling incident at his arrival. He had just moved into his room at the Hotel Imperial when he found himself victimized by a common thief, a man who entered his room blatantly and stole money and a suit of his clothes.

  He caught the thief in the act and was so startled that he allowed the man to escape untouched. Frank Burden had always thought of himself as able to defend himself in any circumstance, and the memory of his allowing the man to leave unapprehended was the source of great embarrassment. For one of the only times in his life Frank had been bested by a man who was now somewhere in Vienna causing him daily humiliation by wearing his clothes. That ate at him and became an extreme embarrassment that Frank could not get out of his head. It would have been bad enough to be bested by a peer, in open competition, but this was an act of deceit and treachery.

  And Frank Burden strongly suspected that the man was a Jew.

  27

  A Private Matter Between Two Gentlemen

  Your mother did not want me to go back to France,” Dilly said, his face grim. “I promised her I wouldn’t.” Wheeler and Dilly had finished their tour of the old city close enough to five o’clock to arrive at Gerstner’s in time for jause, the afternoon ritual the Haze brought alive to all his students. Anyone lucky enough to have been in his thrall knew exactly what to order: coffee with sweet whipped cream and a pastry.

  “She was opposed to my going with all the facets of her being. And we are speaking of a woman with many facets. She was, you know, a committed pacifist and thought badly of all activities of war, she thought it horribly dangerous—which it was—and she did not see any merit in national defense, let alone espionage. Men playing men’s games, she called it. But above all, I think, she thought I was grandstanding.” He had scooped most of the whipped cream onto a side dish and was drinking the coffee in small sips. “Oh, I don’t mean showing off, but doing the whole thing because I wanted to do my wartime duty in the grandest possible way. She said I was incapable of sitting out the war in the Admiralty office. And, in a way I guess she was right.

  “I had been in occupied France two times in all. The first was when you were on the way.” He cleared his throat. “Before we were married. The second time I was flown in to a drop spot in the north. I did have a few weeks of training, courtesy of the British, in Scotland. I learned to parachute and to fend for myself, to look for escape routes, to handle a pistol, and to think of the hands as lethal weapons—a sharp blow to the Adam’s apple, you know. But all that was pretty silly. The secret was to avoid getting caught. Once you were caught, the only recourse was the pill, and we learned to have that with us, on the ready, all the time. That was the grim part, the part I never told your mother. Of course, I was most assuredly not going to get caught. I knew my way around.” He paused and took a sip of his sweet coffee. “It was those times that we used the code name ‘Rouge Gorge.’ The first two visits went without incident, pretty much, with a couple of close calls. I had good papers, and I could speak French well enough. There was a Resistance network that helped me with what I needed and usually it was just information collecting. Pretty routine. But this last time was very different. It seemed doomed from the start.”

  When Dilly came out for the second time, in September of 1943, Flora had been beside herself with worry the whole time. She tried to be a good sport about his trips behind the enemy lines, but since she did not believe in it in the first place, and since it was obviously so terribly dangerous, her good intentions wore away to practically nothing. “Think of Stan,” she said. “He’s already out-of-wedlock. Let’s not make him fatherless.”

  Their friend Rory Stuart, now up close to the admirals, had seen the strain on Flora during Dilly’s last trip and saw how it continued after his return. “You ought to leave London for a while,” he said to Dilly. “You can be home for Christmas for a month or two and there will still be plenty of war when you get back. We’ll muddle through without you.” Dilly said he could not do it, that he had to be with the ship as long as the war was going on. “I must stay and do my part,” Dilly said.

  But Rory insi
sted. “Listen, old man, you’re still exhausted from your last stint abroad. Go home to Boston and get some rest.” He even got some of the admirals to back up his point. Dilly was no good to anybody burned out.

  The idea cheered Flora up so that he agreed to accept passage on the Queen Mary, returning to New York for new troops. And even though it was winter and a little “roughish,” as he called it, the crossing was one of the most wonderful times of their marriage. Nothing to do but read and talk and play with Stan.

  The two-week stay on Beacon Hill, including Christmas, was a joy that ended badly. Flora, aware that she was the English Jewish girl who had stolen away the favorite son, was at her absolute most charming, never mentioning politics or liberal ideas, and letting Dilly’s mother take her to museums and shops and luncheons with old family friends. And to all the places she knew from Dilly’s stories. Since Dilly had not been home for more than three years it was a time for visits and the refueling of memories. And for long sessions in the living room with his mother. Being separated from him for the war years had been hard on her, and she and Dilly sat for hours and talked and read aloud, and sometimes just looked at each other.

  Diametrically opposite in temperament, Dilly and his father, Frank Burden, had always kept a distance between them. Dilly had performed as a son in a way that made his father proud, and Dilly had excelled at St. Gregory’s and Harvard, Frank’s old schools, which was very satisfying. But there was no close bond between the two. Dilly was aware that his father had not approved of Flora from the start, but there seemed to be no more coldness in his greeting of her than there had been when he had brought any young woman into the house. “Your father doesn’t show much emotion, ” his mother said. “But he is glad to see you.”

  When the trouble came, it was a private matter, between two gentlemen. Neither talked about it. It was in the father’s study, with the thick oak door closed, so no one heard anything. They only saw Dilly’s face as he left the room. His lips were drawn together tightly and his brow furled. He went for a long walk by himself. His father did not come out until suppertime. Nothing was said, to Dilly’s mother or his wife.