Dilly lit up. “Did you know Benny?”
“Everybody knows about Benny Goodman.”
“I played with him one summer.”
“Everybody knows that too. It’s part of the Dilly Burden legend.”
Dilly came down to earth. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was a bit much, I guess.”
“I’m not saying we were as good as Miller or Goodman. I’m just giving you an idea of the context.” Then Wheeler laughed, the thought of comparing a swing band to full-blown sixties acid rock amused him. “We were popular. And the crowds were pretty big. Fifty, a hundred thousand, easy.”
Dilly looked impressed. “Holy cow!” he said, in what had been a trademark.
“Oh yes. Sound amplification got sort of out of hand. Bands were loud and raucous. I don’t think you would have liked the music. Or the way we looked. You had to have seen it, but we had hair down to our shoulders, played loud electrified instruments, with bright lights flashing most of the time—strobe lights, they were called—and we wore wild cowboy clothes. Not exactly what you looked like with Benny Goodman.”
“People liked that?”
“Well, it was kids mostly, sixteen, eighteen, around in there. The same sort of thing as with Frank Sinatra.”
“What happened with the woman?”
“Well, in 1973, she wrote me. I got the letter in Fairbanks, Alaska. She said she had something pretty major to tell me and was sort of depressed. I got on a plane that afternoon and showed up in Pittsburgh. She was more glad than usual to see me.” Wheeler looked off into the woods. “I was sort of the love of her life, I guess you would say. She liked me because I was unconventional, and her life was very much the opposite. It seemed to be her destiny she couldn’t escape, she said, at the same time she told me how ill she was.”
“She died?”
“A year later. She had a congenital blood disease and it caught up with her. It was her death—it took about a year—that changed things. There was a concert in Berkeley, at the football stadium, tens of thousands of people. I wrote a song for her and sang it alone on the stage. I was playing your old Martin guitar, which became sort of my trademark. No one had ever heard this song before, and I never sang it again. It was called ‘Coming Together,’ and it became, some said, the most famous song of the 1970s. I sang it that night alone on the stage in front of forty thousand people and then walked off and never came back. I became sort of a legendary recluse, I guess you’d say. It all created sort of a mystique. It was all for Joan Quigley.” There was a long silence as Wheeler looked off into the distance. “I never really got over her.”
“How about your mother?”
“The year Joan was dying, she came out to the ranch and lived with me in the guest house from time to time, until she was too weak to travel. Mother loved it.”
Wheeler looked over at Dilly. He was sitting with his hands locked in front of his shins, letting his mind drift. “I guess I told you she never remarried or had any male company to speak of. She was sort of a one-man woman.”
Dilly’s eyes were closed, and he let go a deep sigh. “She was some kind of woman, Stan. I guess it goes without saying that I was pretty naïve physically when I met her. We did not have a sexual revolution going on in my time. She knocked my socks and everything else off. I know it sounds corny, but I never even came close to knowing what love was until I met her. I was all tied up in knots, and she untied them one by one. She had no constraints.”
Wheeler laughed. “That’s what a lot of people say about me.”
“When I grew up in Boston things were reserved. I mean people were guarded about expressing anything. I didn’t think about it because that’s the way it had always been. You kept things pretty much to yourself. Not Flora. She hit me like a whirlwind. She unwound my clock, she used to say.” Dilly was still looking off in the distance. “She was a great follower of Sigmund Freud. You know he came to London to live in his last year. The Nazis drove him out of Vienna, and your mother was part of the group that prepared the way for him and found him a home. She said he would have loved to get a hold of me, that I was a textbook case of repressed sexual desires.”
“Overdeveloped superego,” Wheeler added.
“She said that?” Dilly said, smiling proudly as if it was a compliment or a reminder of special moments.
“She said it once.”
Dilly laughed. “Look,” he said, “I hope I won’t embarrass you. I mean it’s not the sort of thing a father is supposed to tell his son, but your mother did a lot to unsuppress me. She took it on as her life project, I think.” Dilly’s eyes were closed, his smile suggesting the deliciousness of his thoughts. “And she was on her way to being very successful when I accepted that last mission in France—” His voice dwindled away.
“She was always so proud of you,” Dilly said. “She said you were going to be the first liberated Burden. She said you certainly were not going to get involved in all that silly schoolboy hero business, but that you were going to have a proper combination of family virtues.” Suddenly Dilly snapped around and looked at Wheeler for a long moment, perhaps realizing for the first time that the small son he had left in London only a few months ago was now a middle-aged man, older than his father, beside him. “How did you do?” was Dilly’s curious question.
“Well, let’s put it this way. I don’t think anyone would have called me repressed. In fact, Boston and St. Greg’s and Harvard tried to have the opposite effect of Flora on you. They tried to get me to wind my clock. I did save the Dover game and get carried off the field.”
Dilly looked genuinely impressed. “You did?”
“Yep. They all said it reminded them of you. I was just about flunking out. The Haze was working overtime to get me to be conventional, and I did it. I had this pitch I learned in Feather River called the prongball.” He held up his pitching hand. “You wet the inside of your middle finger and apply it to one spot near the stitches, like this.” Wheeler held up an imaginary ball between two forked fingers. His father was delighted. “And when it’s goopy, the ball pops out from between these two fingers like a watermelon seed. It makes the ball jump around, if you throw it hard enough. It worked against Dover, and it worked against Yale.”
“What’d you do against Yale?” Dilly’s face was full of interest.
“I came one pitch short of a perfect game. In my sophomore year. It was the prongball and it was jumping all over the place, and the Yale batters couldn’t hit anywhere near it. I got two strikes against the last batter.” Wheeler paused, sinking into the memory. “There was this bigoted jerk from St. Greg’s named Prentice Olcott, about everything I despised in stuck-up Bostonians—”
Dilly interrupted suddenly, “Prentice Olcott. No kidding?”
“No kidding. But you couldn’t have heard of him.”
“His father went to St. Greg’s with me. He tried to be student body president and captain of everything that I was, and was insanely jealous. If your mother thought I was repressed, she would have had a field day on Prentice Olcott.” Dilly smiled broadly. “He was—” Dilly restrained himself.
“His son was a real asshole,” Wheeler said without reserve.
“So was his father.” Dilly had started to laugh. “He was a real—” Laughter was getting the best of him. “I’ve never said that word. You see, people didn’t talk this way in my day.”
Wheeler had begun to laugh. “They didn’t in mine either.”
“But you did.”
“Most of the time.” Wheeler looked over at Dilly. “You can too, you know.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Give it a try,” Wheeler said, and waited.
Dilly’s eyes were watering now, but he still had trouble with the word. “Prentice Olcott was a racist and a bigot,” he said. “And a real—” His sides were splitting, and he rolled onto the blanket. “He was a real and roaring asshole.”
“It must have been genetic,” Wheeler managed to get
out, himself rolling backward, off the blanket onto the grass.
“Like father,” Dilly said, still convulsed, “like son. Asshole father. Asshole son.” Dilly sat up and wiped his eyes, shaking his head. “Whew. I hadn’t thought of Prentice Olcott in a long time.” He looked over at Wheeler, who was lying on his back, gazing up at the Austrian sky. “Maybe you didn’t know this, but when I made that catch against Yale that you say became so famous, there was a lot more riding on it than just a game.” The thought stopped him for a moment before he continued. “There was a little kid in the fourth class at St. Greg’s when we were first classmen named Silver, Maury Silver, and one day I saw Prentice rubbing his nose in the snow, and I stopped him. Little Maury Silver looked up at me and said thank you with his deep brown eyes. I’ll never forget it. The little guy was truly humiliated. Prentice looked back at me as he was leaving and said ‘I didn’t know you were a Jew lover.’ Well, Maury Silver was about ninety pounds, but he loved the Red Sox and knew about everything there was to know about them. Later that spring Maury Silver got hit by a car. His parents buried him in his Red Sox cap. When we were in that game against Yale, it was spring of our senior year. We were ahead three to two, when that batter came to the plate. I thought of Maury Silver and what it must have felt like to have a big first classman hero rubbing your face in the snow, and I thought of those awful words, ‘Jew lover,’ and I remember thinking I was going to catch that ball if he hit it all the way back to New Haven. You know who the batter was?”
“Oh Jesus,” Wheeler said, sitting up.
“Right. Prentice Olcott.”
They had folded up the picnic blanket and were back in the open space, now yards apart, throwing the Frisbee. “I forgot to ask what happened, ” Dilly yelled out across the space.
“To what?” Wheeler said, barely moving to catch the long soaring throw from his father.
“What happened to the pitch.”
“Which one?” Wheeler launched a long soaring throw back.
“Your perfect game against Yale.”
“I walked off,” Wheeler said matter-of-factly.
“You walked off?” Dilly stopped and stared and let the disk drop quietly beside him. “You were one pitch away from a perfect game against Yale, and you walked off?”
“I got to the last pitch and I put down the ball and my glove—it was actually your glove—and took off my Harvard uniform item by item, right there on the mound, picked up your glove, and walked off.”
Dilly looked at Wheeler for a long time, at first in astonishment before he picked up the Frisbee beside him, and then as his mind drifted back to thoughts of his brief and happy life with Wheeler’s mother, to understanding and respect. “Your mother’s son” was all he said.
Dilly picked up the Frisbee and with a quick flick of the wrist sent it soaring across the open space with an absolutely perfect throw. As it hovered over Wheeler’s head, about to descend to the exact spot where he stood, the son looked across at his father and saw a smile of absolute satisfaction.
“That’s it!” Wheeler called across their special plot of the Vienna Woods.
On the ride back to the inner city, Dilly sat with the hardwood Frisbee in his lap, picking it up and feeling the smooth surface from time to time, his mind reconstructing the beautiful disk in flight. He said nothing, but smiled contentedly. Wheeler interrupted his reverie. “You know, your words became famous,” he said. “Your graduation speech is on a plaque in the main hall of the school, and every St. Greg’s boy knows it by heart.” And Wheeler drifted into part of it, the part that went “too proud to cheat, too brave to lie.” And then he closed dramatically, “For I am a St. Gregory’s boy!”
“Good lord,” Dilly burst out. “That saccharine thing!”
“The headmaster, Mr. Wiggins, quoted it each spring, on the opening day of the baseball season.”
“Charlie Wiggins?” Dilly said with surprise and Wheeler nodded. “You didn’t tell me Charlie became headmaster. We used to play on teams together at Harvard.”
“Oh, didn’t we all know that. He used to tell the whole story of how heroic and self-effacing you were, ‘always looking out for the other fellow,’ he’d say, usually with tears in his eyes. Then he would recite your speech. There wasn’t a dry eye in the study hall, especially with the older people. ”
“They weren’t my words,” Dilly said curtly.
“Weren’t your words?” Wheeler sounded shocked.
“I explained that at the time, but I guess it got lost in the retelling. I found them in an old book in mother’s private bookshelf where no one was supposed to be. I was snooping. The words that caught my eye were handwritten and entitled ‘A Gentleman.’ I adapted it by plugging in the ‘St. Gregory’s boy’ part, and it made quite an impression when I read it at graduation. Funny—” He paused and reflected. “Mother never commented on it.”
“Not your words?” Wheeler said, shaking his head. “Well, let’s not tell the two generations of St. Greg’s boys who had to memorize it.”
Dilly too shook his head. “It is peculiar being a legend. There is much to adjust to, so much that gets embellished.” He looked back at the hardwood disk in his lap and gave it a slight flip, then went silent again.
That evening back in his room at Frau Bauer’s Wheeler opened his journal to a fresh page and tested his memory by writing out the words he had memorized years ago as his heroic father’s graduation speech, only this time substituting “a gentleman” every time he came to “a St. Gregory’s boy.” He found that he remembered the whole thing, word for word.
40
A Perfect Place for an Assignation
The perfect place for an assignation,” Kleist had said with a wink as he led Wheeler through his friend’s studio near the Stephans-Platz. When Wheeler had mentioned he was looking for a place to be alone, his artist friend was more than a little enthusiastic. “Einhorn will be gone for four months, to Paris, and would be offended if you did not use it.” Kleist laid the key in Wheeler’s hand. “I have to apologize ahead of time. It’s a little cluttered. Our Secessionist group is using it for storage.”
“A place for a little well-deserved privacy,” he said to Weezie as he unlocked the door and ushered her in. “Perfect, except that it smells a bit of turpentine and linseed oil.”
She walked in and looked around at the loft apartment lit by a large overhead skylight and cluttered with sheet-draped easels, stacks of draped paintings, and the painter’s velvet couch in the corner. “This is perfect,” she said, taking in a big breath. “It smells like creativity.” When she looked back at Wheeler and gave him that smile full of resignation and joy, he could see she was blushing.
“This embarrasses you?”
She put on her courageous face. “I would wish to stay here forever,” she said. “It is a place to let one’s hair down, to be freed from one’s constraints. ”
“And to quiet one’s stern disapproving voice.”
Weezie smiled and sighed. “One’s aunt Prudence’s voice perhaps?”
“Precisely,” Wheeler said, offering her his arm gallantly and ushering her over to the couch where he sat beside her. There was a rosy glow about her, and she leaned toward him with just a suggestion of the release from her Boston propriety for which he had been the catalyst.
“I thought you would prefer this to a perpetual series of cab rides.”
“That was very romantic,” she said. “A lovely risqué overture. But you are right in assuming that the following movements deserve something more stationary, say like a faded velvet couch in a rustic painter’s studio. A place where a proper Boston girl would never consent to meet.”
Her freshness made him laugh. As he looked into her eyes, he felt more rich and fulfilled than ever before in his life. Here it was at last, the feeling of oneness he only hoped for. “This is more the way it is supposed to be,” he said, and he encouraged her to stay sitting beside him. “A place to settle and be comfortable.”
<
br /> “Oh, I am comfortable,” she said. “That I am so comfortable with all this is an amazement to me. I cannot decide if I am losing or gaining strength.”
“I would vote for gaining,” Wheeler said lightly.
“I have totally compromised my principles, totally given myself up to lust and desire,” she said, frowning and closing her eyes. “And yet, I feel so unafraid. I feel like one of those women in the paintings. I cannot explain it, but for the first time in my life I feel the warring parties have quieted.”
“The Puritan side has been vanquished by the sybarite side, I think.”
“You make it sound light,” Weezie said, smiling cautiously. “I think that is so. Totally vanquished. I am completely grateful to you. I have found rapturous pleasure, that is for sure, but I also have a strong feeling of independence.”
“That is my rapturous pleasure, seeing you grow in strength.”
“I so hope that pleases you.” Then she looked at him quizzically. “Has your ardor been quenched?”
He laughed again. “What a delightful turn of phrase,” he said. “Where ever did you find it?”
“It is out of my past,” she said, allowing an expectant pause. “Well, has it?”
“Quenched it has been,” he said, meeting her eyes. “And so much more.”
“I think it is good for the soul when the body’s needs are quenched.” She said that last word with a look of total contentment, as if just finishing a difficult puzzle. Then she smiled even more broadly. “I had no idea what it all meant,” she said, suddenly becoming serious. “I guess you would say that I was pathetically naïve, or innocent, or worse. Now, I cannot believe how quickly I have adapted to the role of sybarite. There must be a term for needing to experience something before knowing how to describe it.”
“Aren’t you being a little overly analytical?”
“I feel I have to analyze it to describe it.”
“And to convince yourself that you have not fallen from grace.”
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