“But some cases are legitimate abuse. You must account for those.”
Freud looked troubled. “In some cases, yes,” he said. “But it cannot be the universal I once thought.”
“And for you it is no good if it is not the universal, the absolute? Can’t it be both?”
Freud thought for a long painful moment, knocking the ash off the stubby end of his cigar. “If it is not universal, how can it be of any use?”
Aha, wrote Wheeler in his journal, if it is not universal, it is of no use. That is the problem: all-or-nothing black-and-white thinking.
“It is a matter of degrees, Dr. Freud,” Wheeler said. “In the Anna O case, you argued that Bertha Pappenheim’s neurosis came from the actual fact that she had been sexually abused as a child, and you attributed that to all victims of hysteria. That assertion is what brought to you so much attention and disdain of your 1896 speech. P. T. Barnum, by the way, said that there is no bad publicity. For almost two years you pursued doggedly the notion that sexual abuse, ‘seduction,’ you called it, was the root cause of all hysteria, a brilliant piece of deductive science.”
“You are being facetious, Herr Burden.”
“No, not at all. You examined the evidence in ways no one else was willing to do. Brilliant. Then you went to the next logical step in analyzing yourself, and you concluded that you had hysteric symptoms and that your own father must have abused his children. Science led you there. Logic. But then the absurdity of that logic hit you. If not carefully checked, pure science can lead to ridiculous and harmful conclusions, you deduced. Suddenly the story of Oedipus caught your attention, and the literal cause of abuse evolved into the metaphoric one. Children secretly wish sex and violence, you concluded. Again brilliant, but again the stuff of castigation and controversy.”
“It is not an easy message for the average Viennese to hear.”
“And so here you are now,” Wheeler continued, “upending all that you deduced before: the conclusion that the sexual assault actually happened gave way to the symbolic or metaphoric act—the assault happened only in the patient’s mind. That is going to be even harder for the proper bourgeoisie to accept.”
“It has to be symbolic,” Freud said, protesting too much. “The imagined assaults cannot be real. I am now certain of that. It has to be a sexual impulse in the child, what I have found in the Oedipus myth, not the real act of father on child.”
“But your Oedipus theory says that every child wants to have sex and commit murder. It lays the blame on the child.”
“It is metaphoric,” Freud said, now purely defensive. “And accurate. The guilt felt by the child over wanting no rival for the parent’s attentions, and the fear of being punished for it are powerful forces, long into adulthood. ”
Wheeler looked at him with a wildness in his eyes. “That is your flaw,” he said, pulling back from his exasperation, then going quiet for a moment, looking into the great doctor’s eyes. “That is the brilliance of your next move,” he said. “Seeing in a few patients the general human condition, moving from the local and finding the universal. But this new Oedipus view is too extreme. It is just too narrow.”
“My conclusions are already dismissible, preposterous to the medical establishment of this city.”
“You got their attention,” Wheeler said.
“And you think that I seek attention?”
“That’s a starting point. You need notoriety to get where you wish to go.”
“And you think I will now shift the focus to the Oedipus myth to get that notoriety.”
“Your express train is heading down that track,” Wheeler said coolly.
“I don’t think you have any choice.”
35
Rouge Gorge Ne Chantait Pas
Wheeler did not share with Dilly any of his great devastation: the double blow of losing the woman to whom he had become viscerally attached and the discovery that that Emily James was in fact his own grandmother. His own grandmother! He kept it to himself and suffered in silence, convincing himself after the initial shock that no grave harm had been done and that Eleanor Putnam’s return to Boston was how it was supposed to be. He had just sped the eventuality along, or perhaps even supplied the catalyst for what was inevitable. This too will pass, he had learned to say about debilitating loss. But how, how? How had he not seen what was happening? How had he missed the clues? He knew that his grandmother had been the one who brought Arnauld Esterhazy to St. Gregory’s in the first place. Of course, she had met him in Vienna: how else? She should have been the first person he looked for when he arrived. How could he not have recognized her? Had she changed so very much in sixty years? However it was, he had dodged a disaster, and she was gone from Vienna now and headed home. No damage done. The unspeakable averted. And yet, he had this awful aching in his heart.
He knew Dilly was working up to something of his own and would surely not notice any despondency in someone else. But Dilly had little practice at beating around the bush. “You look awful,” Dilly said to him when they met.
“A sense of loss,” Wheeler said. “Sometimes it creeps up.”
“It is difficult to adjust to the fact that our former life seems to be over,” Dilly said, reflective for a moment.
“That’s it. You alone can understand.”
But Dilly’s mind was elsewhere. “There are certain nagging questions,” he said finally. He needed to take advantage of Wheeler’s knowledge of what was for him the future. He was hiding something.
“Go ahead and ask,” Wheeler said openly, aware that telling what happened between 1944 and 1988 to Dilly, who had life behind him, was a whole different matter than telling Sigmund Freud, who still had life out in front of him.
“My run-in with the Gestapo was, I gather—” He paused awkwardly, searching for the word: “—decisive,” he said.
“It was terminal,” Wheeler said sadly, adding the word his father was stumbling over. Wheeler had forgotten that his father would not know about his own heroic end. “You died just about the time of the invasion. ”
Dilly did not seem shocked by the news, but Wheeler could see disappointment in his eyes. “I gathered,” he said. “Things weren’t going too well. I guess anyone could see that. Still—” He paused again and looked up at Wheeler. “One always hopes.”
“They wanted your information,” Wheeler took over. “And they were people with powerful means. I guess they pulled out all the stops, tried to wear you down till you talked, but you never did, and that’s what made Rouge Gorge such a big hero to the French, and for a couple of generations of St. Gregory’s boys. When I was a boy I went back to Paris with Mother to the dedication of the plaque on Rue des Americains. It has your name on it and then it says ‘Rouge Gorge ne chantait pas,’ which I guess became sort of a code phrase, sort of a rallying cry in the last days of the Resistance.”
Dilly shifted his weight uncomfortably in his chair. “You know about the last days,” he said.
“The war with Germany ended in May of 1945, after the invasion in June 1944.”
“That’s ‘present time’ for me, you forget.”
“Right. I did forget. The Allies pushed into Germany from the west, General Patton leading the charge, and the Russians came in from the east. Hitler shot himself in his bunker with his girlfriend, Eva Braun, and that was that, except it took a long time to rebuild the mess. Berlin and all of Germany were pretty much devastated. Democratic Germany grew up from the ashes to be one of the modern industrial powers, along with Japan. Sort of ironic.”
Dilly was still fishing for more. “How about the invasion? How did things work out?”
“It wasn’t easy, I guess, but it worked. It started in early June and the Allies had captured Paris by August, although I guess it was pretty hard fought. There were lots of deaths.”
Still Dilly circled around for something more specific. “Did the Germans know?” he said painfully. “I mean did they seem to know?” Then he came right
out with it. “With the invasion, I mean. Did they know where and when?”
Wheeler gave it some thought. “I’m not much of a military historian. I’m not the greatest authority. It was a long time ago.” Then he added, “I’m sure they could guess. I mean there was only so much coastline, and the Allies weren’t going to wait forever to make their move. But I think the Germans were caught pretty much by surprise.”
Dilly looked off in the distance, struggling to dig down into painful memories. “I did know time and place,” he said seriously. “When I met with Winston Churchill just before I went back into occupied France that last time, the Admiralty high command briefed me on the whole plan, Operation Overlord they called it. It was sort of a huge deal. I was one of only a few men who was to know the details. It was my job to coordinate the Resistance in the northern area, to take out some key communications installations, destroy railroads, stymie troop movements and the like. I had worked over there behind the lines before. Churchill knew I would handle the information properly, and that—”
“You wouldn’t talk.”
Dilly nodded sadly. “If caught. Exactly. I had the cyanide pill. I just never thought I’d be caught. I’d been in France before, you know, and operated with ease. I had a lot of confidence in my ability to blend in, to make myself inconspicuous. I could look, and sound, very French, they said. It had worked so well before.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Your mother had a premonition, I guess. She didn’t want me to go back, and I had promised I wouldn’t. But this was a unique situation. The prime minister himself recruited me for it. He showed me the huge army of invasion preparing in England and told me details of how it would come. Thousands gave their lives. It was that important. It just seemed bigger than my promise to your mother. Mr. Churchill himself met with your mother to explain, you know.”
“I know. She told me.”
“Do you think I was foolhardy? Did I have an overblown sense of duty?”
“Those were monumental times,” Wheeler said. “Everyone knew that.”
“Did she forgive me?”
Wheeler smiled. “I think she just missed you. Sort of desperately. Mother figured you were as much a slave to your sense of duty as she was to her own convictions.”
The thought brought a brief smile to Dilly. “I hope so. I felt terrible about betraying her trust. She was such a committed pacifist. But it seemed so very important,” he said, serious again. “We had so much at stake, and there was an obvious need for someone to coordinate things from the inside. I knew the territory.”
He shook his head, slowly and painfully. “Then they caught me. I hadn’t been in France for more than a few days, and they picked me up outside of Lille. It was fast and certain. They seemed to know exactly whom they had. It was as if—” He stopped and shook his head. “I had a pill, and I broke it open and swallowed it, but it didn’t work. It made me pretty much violently ill, which was not the best way to go into what they had in mind for me.”
He paused for a breath. “Then they started in on me. Those people really know how to work someone over. I’ll spare you the details, but it is pretty grim stuff. I had a lot of things to sustain me and to counteract what they were doing. I thought a lot of your mother.” A gentle smile came to his lips. “I just closed my eyes and thought of her beautiful face and the way she used to tease me about my propriety. And then when the pain got so terribly grinding, and I needed something even stronger, I developed the Vienna plot. It was like creating a three-dimensional novel in my head, filled with all this—” He gestured around him. “Music and coffeehouses and your grandmother and ... you. I didn’t know about you being here: that’s a bonus. I created it all in my head, gave it all texture and life. Painstakingly, I worked out each detail, creating colors and words and shapes.
“I convinced myself that if I created it in enough vivid detail, I would travel there. So I worked and worked and shut out more and more of the awful Gestapo headquarters and the awful grinding pain—” He paused again. “The pain. The nausea, the sleep deprivation, and the repetition and the pain. It was a science for them. I never understood how it would wear one down. I really thought I could withstand it, you know, perseverance, stiff upper lip, mind over matter, and all the rest.” He stopped and looked into Wheeler’s eyes, his own filling with tears. “I had never before in my whole life—ever!—come up against a challenge I couldn’t meet.”
He continued looking intently at Wheeler, wanting very much to make him understand. “I think I was a challenge to them. So much had been said about Rouge Gorge and about how he would not talk. The Nazis with their tremendous respect for Aryan willpower wanted to see how far they could push. They put their best men on it, convinced that they could make Rouge Gorge sing, and knowing somehow that I had deep inside me the most valuable information of the war. Not just the names of key Resistance workers, but the actual kernel of information: under all the layers, I knew the exact time and place of the invasion. I should have died with the secret inside me.” He stopped, now looking physically ill.
“They set out to break me. And I dug in to thwart them. Pretty much a battle of wills, you know. Only thing was, it was no contest. This wasn’t Dover or Yale; it was the major leagues. I was a bush leaguer in Yankee Stadium. They searched for the way to get me, and finally—after hours and hours—they found it: drowning!” His eyes were piercing now. “I have this awful uncontrollable fear of drowning. And that was it!”
He had to stop. His head was down, moving slowly from side to side, recalling the grueling struggle and all the horrible pain it brought with it. “I got away. My Vienna strategy worked. I created such a believable place in my mind that I slipped away from them into it. Here I am, with you. But before I went, when the pain was at its worst and the terror began. I was so very tired—” He paused for a long moment. “That’s what you don’t count on,” he said wearily. “Being so worn down it gets to the point where all you want is for it to be over. Head held down in the tub of water. And you know there is only one way to get there.” When he looked up finally, his eyes were filled now with tears. He shook his head.
“I have always succeeded in everything all my life,” he said. “I have never failed. I have never let anyone down.” There was now a wild desperation in his eyes, and he was struggling with words and a long dark pause, the darkest. “I talked, Stan,” he said finally. He closed his eyes and continued to shake his head, holding back things that had weighed on his soul for so long. And then for the first time in his life Dilly Burden began to sob. “The great legendary Rouge Gorge chantait,” he cried out between sobs. “I sang. I spilled my guts and told them everything I knew.”
Wheeler just looked at his father, shocked and speechless. This just never occurred to him, not to him or to hundreds of other St. Gregory’s boys.
“Not possible,” Wheeler stammered involuntarily.
“I’m afraid so,” Dilly gasped. And he just kept shaking his head, spewing out the agony. “And then they just left me lying there. Alone with my shame for hours and hours, waiting for death, the only thing I wanted then. That’s when it started,” he said. “That’s when the plan kicked in and started to actually work.” Then he stopped abruptly.
“What plan?” Wheeler said.
Dilly went silent, shaking his head. “Escaping to Vienna,” he said finally, but Wheeler had a feeling there was more to the story.
Wheeler looked at his father. “Why Vienna?” he said. “Why here?”
“It is such a relief to know that the invasion was successful. I have been feeling that I caused the failure single-handedly. Imagine knowing something that important.”
“You think they believed you?” Wheeler said.
“They knew they had the truth. They kept going out and checking. They knew they had the plan all right.” Dilly’s quick mind was working now. “That’s why they started the rumor that I didn’t talk. They didn’t want anyone to know they knew. All the names I mentioned were safe, I�
��ll bet you’ll find. They didn’t want anyone to know that I’d told everything. They didn’t want anyone to know what they knew. All because of me.”
“As I said, I’m not a historian, but as far as I know the Germans were caught by surprise, as if they were expecting the invasion somewhere else,” Wheeler said in his most reassuring voice. “Whatever you are afraid of didn’t make much difference.”
“You are just trying to console me, and I appreciate that. It was a terrible betrayal. I’m just glad it didn’t ruin the whole thing,” he said soberly. “What I spilled to them was too specific. And I knew when I said it, it was going to cost thousands and thousands of lives, and cause the invasion to fail, but I was just too run-down—afraid of more drowning, don’t you know? They won, and they knew it. And it would wipe out the advantage of the Normandy Feint. I knew it all, but I just couldn’t hold back any more.” He shook his head slowly; his face looked drained, all the famous Dilly Burden spunk gone. “You get so tired, too tired, and don’t want any more. You just want to die in peace.” He looked up, struggling with the memory. “You don’t know what it is like,” he closed his eyes again and said slowly.
Wheeler was still back on something his father had said. “Normandy Feint,” he repeated, slowly recalling the article he had been forced to read in his Harvard days in The Cambridge Voice. “What is the Normandy Feint?”
“You know, that the invasion on the Normandy beaches was going to look like the big one. Hitler would move all his forces to Normandy. Then Patton would hit with the real big one: one million men storming in at Calais.”
Slowly it was all coming back to Wheeler. “A bigger one was coming a few days later somewhere else, right?”
“Of course. You know, Calais, where it happened,” Dilly said matter-of -factly, looking at his son as if to say, boy, you really aren’t much of a historian. “Patton’s army, waiting for the killer blow. Across from Dover Beach, the logical and obvious place where the Channel is the narrowest. And the Krauts knew it because of me.” He stopped again and looked away. “Damn!”
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